Pollution

[Parmenion]

Does anyone have any strategy on how to best combat that nasty orange plague that is pollution? Is there some sort of balance between buiding railroads before hospitals/factories? Or maybe simply have a horde of workers? Whatever, I always seem to be worrying about pollution and can't seem to set workers to automatically clean it up.
Does the AI have to worry about pollution for it's Civs, as I never see any orange blobs on their land?
Also, why do hospitals produce pollution? I mean they're hardly the smog-belching, 'satanic mills' that are factories and coal plants are they?

 

[enelrad]

The hospitals don't cause pollution - they allow your population to get so large and they then cause the pollution.

In my current game - the other civs have lots of pollution and they are not so quick about cleaning it up. (Of course I have tons of Indian workers -- since india doesn't need them anymore)

If you really want to beat the pollution -- don't build anything that causes a problem until you have the mass transit and recycling centers. It won't stop but it is reduced.

 

[Parmenion]

Do you tend to delay hospital building until you have railroads to all the big cities though? I wondered whether this was a feasible option given that some cities can boom after a hospital is built thus causing pollution. Also, is there any sort of standard approach when it comes to building railroads. I know it's silly to build them all the way up to the gates of the enemy but is it worth while covering your entire landmass in the stuff?

 

[Salvor]

It's not silly to build railroads all the way up to the gates of your enemy. It's essential for logistics when you go to war.

Whenever I invade an enemy, I bring in a ton of workers to extend my railroads as far as possible so I can keep up my blitzkrieg tactics. I think of them as combat engineers.

And any square with irrigation or a mine will benefit from railroads. But since those will increase food and shields (which is good), it will also increase the potential for pollution (which can be a nuisance).

 

[Parmenion]

Yes, but the reverse is true - if you build railroads into enemy territory then that one rogue cavalryman you didn't see might jump aboard and catch a train to your least defended city.

How does a railroad increase the likelyhood of pollution? Does it have a set value for pollution depending on how many squares you have laid tracks in? I thought only population and certain improvements could cause polution.

 

[Salvor]

The enemy can't use your rail (or roads) unless you give him an ROP. This is a great defensive improvement from Civ2, and I think it's a good change. It reminds me of the gauge differences that caused logistical problems in WW1 (and other wars too).

RRs don't directly increase pollution. Pollution is caused in two ways: by overpopulation and by excess shields. The effects can be directly modified by certain improvements (like power plants, recycling centers, and mass transit). RRs contribute indirectly in that they increase shield production of mines and food production of irrigation (which leads to population growth).

 

[Dinorius R.]

Parmenion,

Perhaps one tactic is to go ahead and build all the railroads and hospitals etc that you want, but reserve enough workers for pollution clean-up duties. It seems to keep global warming mostly under control, but not totally (at least for me).

When a new round of pollution strikes, use the Shift-P hotkey combination to assign some workers to auto-clean the orange slime. You must Shift-P each individual worker that you want assigned to pollution (what a drag).

Once every polluted tile has a quota of 2 workers, hitting Shift-P will no longer send more workers to those tiles (for patched version 1.16f). However, you can manually put as many guys on a tile as you like, in order to speed up their reclamation work.

Dinorius Redundicus
Caesar III Refugee

 

[connor]

Can you turn pollution off in the editor? I liked that feature in Call to Power. The whole global warming and pollution thing just bug me for the game. To me it adds nothing more than an annoyance.