Thoughts on pollution

fortydayweekend

Warlord
Joined
Nov 20, 2009
Messages
239
Obviously the global pollution system is totally broken. The rumours that it was just rushed through prior to release with no testing seem plausible. I haven't played through to try to "stop" a pollution ending but it seems like the only strategy would be to invade and destroy the polluting AI cities, possibly with nukes, and either leave them as scorched earth or resettle without building any modern infrastructures.

But what would a better system look like? I think it would need a few features -
1) It should have some puzzle-like elements. A lot of the rest of the game is like a series of mini-puzzles - district placement, tactical combat, worker placement - where you're given the ability to get ahead by finding a good solution. (Or you can just place districts where they're suggested, auto-resolve combat, and use a preset worker combo if you just like hitting the End Turn button).

2) It shouldn't just be a matter of "discover techs". In the real world we have all the technology we need to solve climate change but we don't use it, and it would also be a very boring game if all you had to do was build research quarters and beeline a few key techs.

3) Cleaning up / reducing pollution should have big opportunity costs for your economy / industry / stability / research choices

4) There should be some collective action involved - players/AI should want to reduce global pollution but be heavily motivated to pay the least possible for it themselves. It shouldn't be simple to get everyone to agree to the required reductions but it should be possible for the player to do so with a combination of mutual reductions, bribery, threats, etc.

5) There should be some ability for players/AI to reduce others' pollution

In terms of making it a puzzle, a very simple way would be to tie pollution-reducing buildings into the district placement game, e.g. with adjacencies. So a hydro dam on a river could reduce pollution in neighbouring Maker's Quarters, but might be replacing a Farmers Quarter and so reducing food production. A solar panel field might be very expensive to build, need Desert or Mediterranean biome, but it reduces pollution in the whole territory. Wind might require flat or coastal land. This would make discovering clean energy techs and then implementing them more interesting, and give the opportunity to do it more or less efficiently with placements. You could also give the ability to "invest" in building clean energy buildings in allied territory, so you could help reduce the AI pollution too. Plus, it would look cool to have hydro dams and wind & solar farms.

Clean energy buildings should be very expensive and a real opportunity cost, you should feel that you're giving up building new research quarters in order to hydro dam all your rivers. If you're at war it should feel very difficult to prioritise a new solar farm instead of building more troops or coal-powered industry.

I'm not sure how to make the collective action / diplomacy part into a game. On a simple level you could have treaties where cultures bilaterally commit to pollution reductions, using the existing diplomacy system, and generate grievances/demands if they're not met. But it probably needs more than that. I like how the grievances/demands system creates a crisis->escalation->war (or crisis->submit/defuse) dynamic and there's probably a way to do something similar. Where the player and AI can mutually agree to reduce pollution, then there are shocks (e.g. the AI is at war and fails to meet their targets), which can then be "forgiven" and try again - with the risk of not reducing pollution enough to prevent the end of the game. Or it could lead to an escalation of demands and cancellation of treaties and maybe require an invasion to fix.

Industrial infrastructure also needs a rework, currently there's no real reason to build any of the pollution-producing infrastructure unless you've built a megacity (which itself isn't necessary or efficient). You can get to Mars without discovering Craftmanship, let alone building factories. So at the moment there's no tradeoff between polluting and not polluting, so obviously this needs to change. The meta should be that industrialising is essential if you want to keep up with Industry/Research/Military in Contemporary, and then adding clean energy should be essential in Contemporary to stop the world ending.

At any rate the changes they need to make are so extensive that I think they should take global pollution out completely in the meantime so that you can actually play into Contemporary and try nuclear war against equals instead of having to pick on pre-Industrial cultures because the game would end from pollution as soon as they build a few factories.
 
Agreed that the only real solution seems to be to remove pollution, or remove the pollution endgame trigger. I’m fine with burning up the planet making regions yield less food, but we don’t just wake up one day and the world is uninhabitable. So even a well working system should be more subtle.

But with little in contemporary working (though all a few small fixes away I think) pollution is mostly just covering for the lack of endgame.
 
There are some number tweaks in the new beta update that makes it more manageable:

https://www.games2gether.com/amplit...s/45385-humankind-patch-beta-1-0-3-248?page=1

The systems needs a re-work, IMO.

Right now, pollution is something you avoid by not building, instead of a challenge to solve by building. And I emphasize the avoidance, as for things like aerodromes or airports, their benefit is occasional and the drawback is permanent. And instead of being a fun moment of "Let's build lots of aerodromes and place airplanes", it's more like "Nah, can't afford to pollute". And same for the infrastructures. I build them to stress the system, but their bonuses aren't critical, so I could just afford not to build them as well. The benefit for the things that pollute are very small.

Basically, this system kills the forward momentum. You are discovering things, building them, and then, pollution effects are on the infrastructures and transport quarters, and you just avoid them. That totally kills the joy of the moment you got all those trains tracks to place when you reach the industrial, and all I could see was that I would be generating pollution, and the blame was on me by the merit of building them. My personal take would be to make the gameplay around pollution as a challenge to solve by building stuff, by tying the pollution effects to the technologies, instead of the infrastructures/buildings, and making them more global. Then give tools to the player to try to fight back the effects. Make it challenge that the player can win, instead of a punishment for doing what he was doing the whole game, building stuff.

I think it would be good if the system at some point did electricity like Civ VI, in which you have to place power plants in each territory to supply energy (and then with power lines a single territory can supply the neighboring ones). And some way to "dismantle" quarters. It would be great to have the powerplants as late-game quarters, and have things like not having electricity in cities bring a minor stability malus once it should be commonplace. Anyway, the gist of it is giving the player a challenge to overcome, with pollution being almost inevitable with tech advancement, but giving him the chance to create a sustainable, carbon neutral country.
 
I played through to Contemporary and went through a full industrialisation and clean energy building phase, under the old pre-patch rules. I had 9 cities over 50 territories with industry around 1500-2000 in the old world cities pre-industrialisation, which went to over 3000 afterwards. I built all the Industrial infrastructures, even the ones with very long payoff times like factories.

I only built "necessary" rail (I.e. from cities to Old World port, then from New World main port to the 2 borders. I didn't build any aeroports or farm infrastructures yet.

My industry almost doubled and pollution maxed out at 500/turn. I hit local pollution in a couple of territories so had to build over a couple of Makers Quarters.

From the player point of view, that's not actually a bad system. To massively increase my industry I built a load of pollution-increasing infrastructure, but was able to limit the amount by beelining clean energy and building all of those (which also increase industry even more). I was able to do it while coming nowhere near to any global pollution limits, and while I hit some local limits I could fix it by removing a couple of districts.

I could have achieved the same industry by building more pollution-free MQs instead of infrastructures, but I was feeling that space was limited and I wanted room for more markets and research.

The only problem is - what was the point? There's no need to have that much industry in the game currently - you can get to Mars or all the techs by spamming research quarters from Early Modern. I haven't tried but I assume I had much more industry than I would need to conquer the world (my unit production could outpace my population growth). And while there was one AI with similar exponential pop growth (Siptah's Harrapan->Brazilians) their industry was like 1/10th of mine. Any victory goal that relies on industry would be trivial to win.

With the new patch changes I'm actually pretty optimistic that pollution won't be as bad as it first seems and the industrialise/clean up loop might be ok roughly as it is. The problem is that there's just no real need for that much industry late game, but if they can make the AI build its own industry more so a non-industrialised empire is vulnerable, or maybe make the Mars project much, much more expensive to build, then it could work.
 
With the new patch changes I'm actually pretty optimistic that pollution won't be as bad as it first seems and the industrialise/clean up loop might be ok roughly as it is. The problem is that there's just no real need for that much industry late game, but if they can make the AI build its own industry more so a non-industrialised empire is vulnerable, or maybe make the Mars project much, much more expensive to build, then it could work.

Mars Project definitely needs to be much more expensive to build, say 100,000 with a 2,500 reduction per Contemporary Era Technology
The Final Tech should be more expensive as well, rather than ~20k when the previous techs are 17k, the Final Techs should be ~50k
 
Definitely if the AI picked builder cultures and built more makers quarters it would be a much more competitive game!

I’d add if the AI actually built units at the rate their industry allowed, and then learned to fight on multiple fronts, we would have a noticeable increase in difficulty, as this would ensure that even with mediocre tactics the AI could meet the player in some favorable battles.

The few times I’ve split the AI’s force in late game to force them two fight on multiple fronts, I’ve had my smaller forces caught outnumbered/gunned to exciting effect.
 
just play more aggressive and slow down global research so that pollution never becomes an issue.
 
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