Stopping at Cities With Pollution

[MysteryX]

There must be a setting to accomplish what I want.

The most annoying thing about pollution is that the pollutions messages fly by so quickly that I have trouble remembering all the cities hit by pollution (if I even see them all). Is there a setting so that, when a city is hit by pollution, I get a the city pop-up immediately before going to the next city?

 

[ChaosArbiter]

Not that I know of, but MapStat has a Pollution tab that tells you which cities have Polluted tiles in their workable areas and how many. CivAssist 2 might have something similar, although I don't have that so I don't know.

 

[Raliuven]

Finding polluted tiles is usually pretty easy - though it can be a little annoying on huge maps. They should all be in your core unless you are doing some interesting (useless) factory building or have a metro city in the boonies for some reason. I don't use assistants when I play, so I just quickly scroll through my core (on the map, not the city displays) or zoom out for a glance (though that can be hard depending on your eyes and terrain - mountains can be deceptively orange . . .).

Otherwise just automate workers to clean them up. They will just stop working if there are no more polluted tiles around. Automation does run the risk of landing workers near a war-time boarder. This is usually not a problem for me because by the time of pollution, my core is well protected - and that is where all the pollution will be found.

One other thought - many cities do not need pollution creating advancements. So if you only build them in select cities, you will know where to look for the pollution. You can also rename cities that have a polution concern - something like AA#1, AA#2 - then when you scroll through the city views they will all be stacked together at the top of the list and will be much easier to find. I don't do that, but it will work.

 

[Skullsplitter]

Otherwise just automate workers to clean them up. They will just stop working if there are no more polluted tiles around.

I've found this to be the most useful, too. If you see pollution, go to some stack of idle workers, wake 'em up, tell each to clean pollution until you run out of pollution to clean. Put the rest of 'em back to sleep. Next turn, either put the stacks of cleaners to sleep where they are or bring 'em back to the core, whatever trips your trigger. The hotkey for capitol (H, I think, or maybe F... heck, I have to look it up every game) and "J" for move stack makes this a whole lot easier than it sounds.

 

[MysteryX]

The problem with finding the pollution is not so much about sending the workers, but about putting workers back on squares that the pollution knocked them off.

 

[GamezRule]

Civ Assist 2 will take you to each polluted tile if you use one of the alert screens.

 

[CommandoBob]

Volcanos create pollution, too. And automated workers will only see pollution, not what caused it. This could lead to cleanup efforts near unfriendly borders.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Using Ctrl+Shift+N and M can be used to hide everything except pollution, zoom out and it is easy to find.

Automate workers is not very efficient, determine the number of workers to clear a Plains/Grassland tile then double it for Hills and triple it for Mountains. If you have enough workers you can usually keep up with the pollution. If not and the pollution is taking away from the enjoyment of the game, the work to stop generating pollution.

[PTW] In my current game only my Capital and Forbidden Palace exceed 12 population and I even waited until I had Mass Transit before building a Hospital. Waiting for Recycling before building Factories and pollution is next to nothing.

 

[GamezRule]

Double for trees also, although by the time pollution sets in, you shouldn't have any, at least in metros.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

, although by the time pollution sets in, you shouldn't have any, at least in metros.

Have any what? pollution???

 

[ChaosArbiter]

Forests.

Edit: His full post means that you'd have to double the number of Workers in a Plains/Grasslands stack in order to clear Pollution on a Forest Tile in one turn, but that by the time Pollution starts occurring, you shouldn't have any Forests in the cities that are getting pollution (particularly metropolises).

 

[GamezRule]

Yes, because forests don't get any bonus from rails, and they are harder to rail, and they can put shields towards a city project after they are chopped. For example, in a 20k game, you might forest some grassland that is not bonus, so it can get 2 shields, but then it only gets one food, but when you get rails, you can mine a regular grassland and put a rail on it, and is gets 2 shields and 2 food also, so it gets a higher output.

 

[WhiteRabbit]

With pollution and a large empire, I agree, it can be difficult or tedious to locate the newest outbreaks of pollution.

I tend to keep my workers standing by in teams of 4 for just that purpose (using "j" to send the whole team to a pollution tile.

Alternatively, one can click on one worker and press Shift-p. That sends that worker to any pollution tiles. If nothing else, it does help to find the hidden pollution tiles!

Some turns I just hit shift-p on a worker to see if I've missed seeing any new pollution.

 

[Skullsplitter]

Oh, yeah, MysteryX I see what you are getting at now. You mean putting citizens back to work, not workers back to work. That can be a real pain. Clicking on the city tile and cursor through all your towns indiscriminately doesn't really help since it puts the remainder back to work and to tax collectors or jokers, even if you had them as scientists (or whatever) before.

As I recall, MapStats retains the red highlights for pollution unless you reload for some reason. As it does with towns that grew. A while back when I relied heavily on it, I'd start the turn with clean pollution until there was nothing left to clean, then Alt-Tab to MapStats, get the name of the first city that had pollution, go back to Civ and fix that town's citizen assignments, Alt-Tab to MapStats, lather, rinse, repeat. Problem is that after 100 cities or so, the name of the city doesn't help much -- scanning the list of city names takes forever, and on huge maps, zooming out isn't a whole lot better.

Probably not the best way to do it, but anymore my end of turn routine is always to hit F1 and wheel-mouse through the list for trouble -- more sad than happy and shrinking food production. Doesn't catch a town that was still growing, to be sure, but it will find at least 3/4 of the towns that were polluted at that stage in the game, and that's enough for me. The rest I'll catch when the pop goes up again.

 

[CKS]

When looking for places with pollution, sort the F1 list by food surplus and check the low-food end of the list. It doesn't help with mountain pollution, but I'm more concerned with getting people back to eating than getting any extra shields at this stage of the game.

 

[CommandoBob]

If you are using MapStat, just manually saving the game can force it to reload.

I have discovered that if I point MapStat to a folder, it will open whichever .sav I select and then reload itself with the most recent save. I keep my games (a lot of SGs) in seperate folders, so this is rather handy.

Free Advice
For SGs and HOF attempts, each of which are stored in their own folders, I save at the start and end of each turn, 'coz sometimes my PC gets flakey and shuts down on its own. I'll name the save something like 'SG01_1800_AD_Beg.sav' and 'SG01_1800_AD_End.sav'. If I have mutiple saves I just add a number identifier (End03 or Beg02).

This worked until I wanted a mid turn save. And since I wanted the saves in order, I named my midturn saves 'Cut01'. I used 'Cut' because it started with the letter 'C', which put it between 'B' and 'E', it was a three letter word (Beg and End) and it communicated (to me) a cutoff point.

Anyway, anytime I save the game in that folder MapStat will reload and update the data it shows. So, when I save at the start of the turn, I find out which cities are cranky and where the pollution is. I'll fix the cities and then save again, to make sure that I got them all.