Skallagrimson
Deity
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2006
- Messages
- 2,043
Charles, I guess the bottom line is: don't play that long! 
Self-plundering?
- Thread starter vormuir
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Charles 22
King
Charles, I guess the bottom line is: don't play that long!
You're telling me
. Yes, it's a majorly flawed addition to the game to let you play as long as you want, but to make it totally worthless. The longer you play the game, the more what you built will be destroyed. Basically the longer game is the Civ we're so familiar with, working in reverse.
You're telling me
so basically, here is the message hidden in the very late game :
in a few years, the earth will start deacaying, and there is nothing you can do about it...
Charles 22
King
No, it's not really the earth that is decaying, but as the game works that the sun will start nuking the map. What's really dumb too, since the sun seems bent on some revenge there is no evidence for (IOW, IRL, it's slight variations of weather, etc), it decides to ignore the cities and the waters. How is it a sun burst nuke can destroy both your woodmill, the forest, and the ground below it (turning it to desert) and yet totally ignnore the cities? Actually if they took away the tile destruction, and instead had it destroying buildings within the cities I would find it more pleasing, because you can at least still build the buildings again in many cases, despite that idea still being a farce.
Another funny aspect of this is to compare it to nuking within the game. A nuke can strike your city and there's a pretty good chance it doesn't destroy all the little cross's tiles. Some get radiated and turn to plains, while others seem to destroy the improvement and leave the terrain alone (although perhaps radiating it as well). The only thing that leaves the sun nukes more pleasing to the player, compared to the real game nukes, is that as far as I know the sun nukes don't destroy or damage units, but that may not be a correct observation, as I have so many of my units within cities and the sun nukes can be difficult to keep up with at times, that it may destroy a unit and I never catch it.
Anyway, it really is pathetic that you can play this game for so long and then have it go into destruct phase. The worst of it is that I bet a lot of this is brought on by the AI civs no longer having any qualms about using nukes, and if they are at war they will use them; quite a lot of change from before 2.08. Perhaps if you played with the political victory on (I do not) then perhaps the former reluctance to use nukes would re-surface, but all I know is before 2.08 I was playing it the same non-political way and the nukes pretty much weren't flying (and I wasn't sending any either).
As many options as there are for this game, there is none more game-breaking than to not have a way to dismantle or at least greatly reduce this damned sun nuking. It would also be interesting if there were also an option to dismantle nukes ever being discovered, but at least the UN can effectively take them out of the game if the political game is allowed.
Skallagrimson
Deity
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2006
- Messages
- 2,043
Again, Sid just doesn't want you to play that long. He wants you to get it over with: conquer the world, colonize space, do something decisive and either win or let the AIs win. If you drag it out he will destroy your game, tile by tile.
DaviddesJ
Deity
This doesn't make any sense. Global warming will destroy arable terrain, so that's a perfectly reasonable thing for it to do in the game. It won't destroy buildings or kill people directly, so that would be a nonsense thing for it to do in the game.
It's trivial to eliminate global warming from Civ4. In GlobalDefines.xml, just set the value of GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB to 0.
Global warming makes cyclons, tornadoes, floods,... more likely. So it WILL destroy buildings and kill people.
think Catherina
Charles 22
King
DaviddeJ:
Other than the Biblical story of Divine Power onto Sodom, where do you recall like 5% of a city (if we can call the fat cross the entire city) being destroyed down to a desert? That essentially is what this game is doing. And I'm not talking about some region that took 20-30 years or more to become arid, since this does it either instantaneously or within the scope of a year, depending on how you look at it. Even so, since these nukes do nothing to water, just how is it that something which is already adjacent to water, and already was desert in the case of flood plains, gets turned into useless desert as though the water connection disappeared? The whole reason it's arable in the first place is it's connection to the river, and these nukes do nothing to rivers or oceans and yet something adjoining rivers is nuked just as badly as grasslands not adjoining rivers or oceans?
That's good to hear. So if you set it to 5 what would happen? Knowing the rate it has and how that works is quite essential if you really don't want to eliminate it altogether, as I don't.
Other than the Biblical story of Divine Power onto Sodom, where do you recall like 5% of a city (if we can call the fat cross the entire city) being destroyed down to a desert? That essentially is what this game is doing. And I'm not talking about some region that took 20-30 years or more to become arid, since this does it either instantaneously or within the scope of a year, depending on how you look at it. Even so, since these nukes do nothing to water, just how is it that something which is already adjacent to water, and already was desert in the case of flood plains, gets turned into useless desert as though the water connection disappeared? The whole reason it's arable in the first place is it's connection to the river, and these nukes do nothing to rivers or oceans and yet something adjoining rivers is nuked just as badly as grasslands not adjoining rivers or oceans?
That's good to hear. So if you set it to 5 what would happen? Knowing the rate it has and how that works is quite essential if you really don't want to eliminate it altogether, as I don't.
DaviddesJ
Deity
No, the game is surely modeling processes that take place over a time scale longer than a single year. But the Civ4 model doesn't contain any way to represent "18% desert" or "43% desert" or "77% desert", for a single tile. It is just desert or not desert. So the game has to use a system where there is an arbitrary abstraction, some threshold at which the tile changes from grassland to desert. It is just an abstraction and this is hardly the only one in the game.
You want a higher level of realism than it is reasonable to expect. Nothing else in this game is that realistic.
I think you just get 1/4 of the standard rate.
Once Global Warming isenabled (Nukes fired) there is a GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB/100 chance each turn global warming occurs...
Edit: Shouldn't leave the computer - DaviddesJ was much quicker
Charles 22
King
DaviddesJ:
Not really. How difficult would it be to make something that is already a desert, that adjoins a river, not affected by the GW nuke? I mean, afterall, a lot of tiles get gold from adjoining a river, so what would be so hard about making those floodplains immune to it so to speak? Like I said, oceans and rivers already are immune to it, as they don't even strike there. Another way to achieve that would be to have nukes not hit everything that it already doesn't hit, like cities, and add floodplains to the list. It's not whether it's too realistic that is the obstacle, but in this case whether people are willing to reason this out. Sure there's other things that are unreasonable, the larger issue of GW for a start, but naturally they have to decide where to pick up some of the issues and leave others alone. The mere fact that GW is in hyper-drive, apart from changing the ratings as you suggested, therefore destroying the fabric of the entire purpose of the game (unless the purpose of the game was to kiss up to Algore), is reason enough to think some things through which may be very minor adjustments indeed, such as making floodplains added to the do not strike list. Also, it's just blatantly silly that GW woudl destroy tile improvements, but in one sense it makes sense, since formerly the tile could contain a mine for example, but since deserts don't have mines and the nuke changes all to a desert, therefore there can't be a mine anymore.
Not really. How difficult would it be to make something that is already a desert, that adjoins a river, not affected by the GW nuke? I mean, afterall, a lot of tiles get gold from adjoining a river, so what would be so hard about making those floodplains immune to it so to speak? Like I said, oceans and rivers already are immune to it, as they don't even strike there. Another way to achieve that would be to have nukes not hit everything that it already doesn't hit, like cities, and add floodplains to the list. It's not whether it's too realistic that is the obstacle, but in this case whether people are willing to reason this out. Sure there's other things that are unreasonable, the larger issue of GW for a start, but naturally they have to decide where to pick up some of the issues and leave others alone. The mere fact that GW is in hyper-drive, apart from changing the ratings as you suggested, therefore destroying the fabric of the entire purpose of the game (unless the purpose of the game was to kiss up to Algore), is reason enough to think some things through which may be very minor adjustments indeed, such as making floodplains added to the do not strike list. Also, it's just blatantly silly that GW woudl destroy tile improvements, but in one sense it makes sense, since formerly the tile could contain a mine for example, but since deserts don't have mines and the nuke changes all to a desert, therefore there can't be a mine anymore.
DaviddesJ
Deity
It would be easy. Go do it. That's why Firaxis made the game easy to mod, and released the SDK.
The reason it doesn't work that way is not that it is hard. The reason is that the level of "realism" you are asking for is not a design goal of Civ4.
But it's clear your motivations for all of this whining have little to do with the game, and more to do with your dislike for the facts we face in the real world. I can't help you with that.
Charles 22
King
Once Global Warming isenabled (Nukes fired) there is a GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB/100 chance each turn global warming occurs...
Edit: Shouldn't leave the computer - DaviddesJ was much quicker
Ah, perfect explanation then. Now I only wonder for curiousity's sake, since I don't have the game in front of me, just what that default rate is. I would also wonder if that rate was the rate for each and every tile that is eligible for each civ or what? Obviously if you quarter the default rate you will quarter it's annoyance, but it would be nice to know just what that percentage is affecting, the whole board, each civ's territory, each city's fat cross, or what.
Charles 22
King
Yeah sure. I'm still waiting for those examples of GW nukes that you keep saying happens IRL. I provided Sodom, which wasn't due to GW, and Greenland due to cooling, and yet you have no examples of GW even slightly related to this game or Algore. Yeah, sure. It's nothing but false prophetic nonsense.
Besides David, if I were some kind of programmer, which is where this ease of adjusting these things comes from, which means about at least 95% of the buyers can't adjust such things, then it's quite possible I wouldn't mention it at all and adjust it myself, but seeing as how some people might object to it and wish it to be changed, just like anything else may wish to be changed I whine so they might consider it - thank you.
DaviddesJ
Deity
Desertification on a comparable scale to Civ4 tiles has happened, and is happening, all over the world. Much of Madagascar has become desert, for example. And it is happening at a rapid pace in the Sahel and in China.
Of course, current desertification isn't due to global warming, which has hardly started yet. You can't complain that Civ4's treatment of a future phenomenon is inaccurate because it hasn't happened yet in the real world. (That's why it's called the "future".) But wait until global temperatures rise another 3-4 degrees C, and you'll certainly see some deserts created.
the chance is 20/100 per turn after Global warming is enabled that one random tile on the map experiences Global warming...
Charles 22
King
I just don't see how you can tell me that it's happened in history, and then now tell me it hasn't. IOW, what you're telling me is there are a bunch of influential bozos peddling it and therefore it sort of becomes fact, right? Because it's en vogue, right? That doesn't qualify as history to me. I have no problem admitting that a hotter sun could well produce problems here, in fact many would say the way the dinosaurs had it, allegedly, would qualify as something like that (though more likely having to do with global formation more than something the sun did to it).
I can see how you're coming up with this history angle though, because you're building it on the vapors of the future. Problem is, this game isn't about the future. Ah, now I'm wrong aren't I? No, not really. See any future units in the game? The game timewise can easily go into the future (despite the fact that the nukes are often falling way before then) but when your only glimpse of the future is future tech, which is just a happiness and health bonus, you are basically just playing the last unit and the last building advances for eterinity. Sort of a timelock on the present. So if no GW nukes have not been seen to this present day, how can the game technically represent them? Oh, just to be a bit nitpicky, and I know they don't have time or should they bother with such nitpickiness, but there have been two nukes, so to speak, dropped in history, in fact far more than that when you count all the testing that has gone on particularly by the USSR and USA, and where is the GW? You said it yourself. So, despite the nitpickiness, notice how dropping literally hundreds of nukes hasn't changed the climate and yet in the game the GW nukes start with the first missile going off. There's of course plenty of reasons to object to using or making mukes, but GW isn't one of them.
Man, I'm glad you got me into this discussion, because history backs how nukes don't cause GW (anything else is speculation, such as auto exhaust). For all the talk I have heard about GW, I have never heard anybody make the point of the literally hundreds of nukes that have gone off, particularly in the 40's-70's and the weather was predicted as going through GC (global cooling) if anything, which of course hasn't happened either. there's periods of cooling and periods of heating, all of which seems completely unaffected by nukes.
Charles 22
King
Maybe that chance is based on a per missile nuke basis? Because otherwise how could you personally get three in one turn as I did often enough? I was playing the default setting. Perhaps as time progresses it gets worse, either respective or irrespective of the number of nukes going off?
Charles 22
King
You are right, I ignored this part:
Code:
for (iI = 0; iI < getNukesExploded(); iI++)so per default there is a 20/100 chance for one random tile per nuke fired per turn. The whole GlobalWarming code is in the spoiler tags.
Spoiler :
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