Water and Air Pollution Revisited

[raxo2222]

I suppose through that argument there could be a bit of crime and ed penalty at lvl 3. It does make a bit of sense.

So there is a base of 1 per turn per population in all cities. That's it, no modifier for handicap is what you're saying? There is a scaling up for crime but it was never done for Disease? I take it Crime's base is also defined as 1 per turn per pop and then its just scaled up with handicaps then? I had always thought that Handicap infos defined the base. I didn't realize that in PropertyInfos there were PropertySource entries that setup the base. Interesting. It's the sort of thing I haven't interacted with much and when I did AI Andy was around to help guide the process. With so little interactive practice with it, I later forgot some things about its base setup. Still, I have to believe that eventually disease would get far easier than crime to manage and they are supposed to be equally tough. That said, I can see why Joseph would want to keep it easier for now because the units aren't quite strong enough with their property control base levels yet to keep cities from having to have too many to support them. If brought under better balance, then it would only make sense to have Disease mirror crime on the difficulty settings. Even that may have to get toned down a little if we do the happiness/healthiness modifiers to crime and disease rates. Your previous suggestion on how to do that was spot on imo.

Yeah, similarly air and water pollution aren't scaled by handicap too.
Same with Tourism too.

Noble players and AI have 2.5 crime per pop and -1.5 education per pop by the way.
Shouldn't be Noble have 1 crime per pop and -1 education per pop?

 

[JosEPh_II]

Noble players and AI have 2.5 crime per pop and -1.5 education per pop by the way.
Shouldn't be Noble have 1 crime per pop and -1 education per pop?

No Crime starts with Settler Handicap at 1 per pop. And Crime is increased by .5 per Handicap level. That is why Noble is 2.5/pop.

Crime is the most extensive property system. Education is rapidly catching up though. Diseases has been the more steady Property because it still adheres to the original design concept of a Property system. Crime and Education were both embellished.

Pollution was a bare bones property at the beginning like Tourism and the Commented out Luxury still are. But Polluttion was being added to by Hydro (or DH?) before Hydro left. Not sure if Mr Azure worked on Pollution or not.

I just went through all regular buildings a few weeks ago looking for buildings that generate disease, and compared to crime, there were only some 12 disease sourcing buildings vs 50+ crime sourcing buildings

@T-brd,
Counting the Regular Buildings of Crime vs Disease giving is a distorted and incomplete view. You do realize that many of the SpecialBuildings where the Individual Crime buildings reside also add disease don't you. That the Pollution buildings of course add Disease as I listed them in the opening posts. And there are other sources as well. And some are very well hidden from my point of view. These listed here are just off the top of my head without doing any digging.

And this Thread is way Off Topic already.

 

[raxo2222]

No Crime starts with Settler Handicap at 1 per pop. And Crime is increased by .5 per Handicap level. That is why Noble is 2.5/pop.

I know, I even made complete list of all handicaps and their property scaling.
There would be rescaling on other handicaps, if you wanted more lenient property scaling for AI.

I guess you are fine with this.
More lenient scaling of properties for AI (Noble with +1 crime/pop and -1 education/pop) would mean less units used on property control by AI though.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I know, I even made complete list of all handicaps and their property scaling.
There would be rescaling on other handicaps, if you wanted more lenient property scaling for AI.

I guess you are fine with this.
More lenient scaling of properties for AI (Noble with +1 crime/pop and -1 education/pop) would mean less units used on property control by AI though.

Care to explain the statement "I guess you are fine with this." Fine with what?

If T-brd really Wants disease to be bone crushingly bad that can be done Without adding Disease to the handicaps. In fact Crime and Pollution can also be done With Out adding anything to the Handicaps.

Quite frankly adding Crime to Handicaps was and still is a Bad Design idea. It's a duplication of the property system in a bad way and an unnecessary one at that. It confuses and confounds the process of Balance. I would rather it be gone off the Handicaps altogether.

And as Education is also applied to Handicaps, that too is unnecessary complication.

By using the Property systems correctly the AI and Player will always have a stable and non shifting base to work with. Handicap additional Property insertions distorts and then you get Your response of "why Noble is at 2.5 crime and -1 Education when Noble should be 1 crime etc.".

 

[raxo2222]

Care to explain the statement "I guess you are fine with this." Fine with what?

With AI having 2.5 crime per pop and -1.5 education per pop, as AI has Noble handicap.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Why would I not be? Since that was the way it was designed by those that did the design? I'm just the caretaker and just prune and fertilize the flowers and bushes when needed.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Yeah, similarly air and water pollution aren't scaled by handicap too.
Same with Tourism too.

I'm ok with those not being scaled by handicap because they work on different numeric scales on how they are addressed. Crime and Disease are mirrors of each other in many respects. This makes each point of one worth roughly the same as a point of the other. Furthermore, I can see why air and water pol and tourism wouldn't be necessarily a difficulty adjusting matter because they are all tuned according to the eras more than as a whole game challenge.

Shouldn't be Noble have 1 crime per pop and -1 education per pop?

As Joseph pointed out, it starts at Settler as a base and there's no reason it shouldn't. The AI still has the fixed amount it works with at Noble level and always will and as long as it can manage its properties sufficiently, there's no problem there.

You do realize that many of the SpecialBuildings where the Individual Crime buildings reside also add disease don't you.

I'd love to see the list at some point. Some of them probably should, sure. I suppose there's not a commensurate number of diseases that add to crime either, at least nowhere near the same amount. Point is that the base should be roughly the same as crime.

The main thing here is, are you having to staff less healers in a city to keep disease under control than you have to staff law enforcement to keep crime under control? I realize you're going to say we have to staff too many law enforcement units, and there's some truth to that. But ultimately the target is for it to be roughly the same amount of each either way. So if Crime is ramping up by difficulty, so too should Disease. Because the control factors are ramping up in numeric parallel as well. Make sense?

And some are very well hidden from my point of view.

What, in modules?

Quite frankly adding Crime to Handicaps was and still is a Bad Design idea. It's a duplication of the property system in a bad way and an unnecessary one at that. It confuses and confounds the process of Balance. I would rather it be gone off the Handicaps altogether.

You have to admit that it does do a lot to make the game harder as the handicap gets more difficult, right? The more ways to make the game harder on the player (it doesn't change for the AI who still gets noble level per population levels on those) as the difficulties are increased, the better imo. It certainly worked with education to make the tougher levels a lot tougher as they go. The goal IS to make Nightmare unwinnable by all imagination to see if someone actually can still beat it somehow. It would be preferable if most, even very good, players find that it's somewhere between Noble and Nightmare that they prefer to play. I don't find crime or education unbeatable at any of those levels, just more and more challenging and taxing on the empire is all. And that's the whole point.

I guess what I'm finding out is that we never did adapt disease to scale with difficulty as well, as we had intended to, figuring we'd leave that for more development work later.

And this Thread is way Off Topic already.

Its related to the discussion on whether or not pollution PDBs should even have disease generating factors, which I say it shouldn't have... much. Raxo made enough of a case to suggest the last layers might warrant some.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Its related to the discussion on whether or not pollution PDBs should even have disease generating factors, which I say it shouldn't have... much. Raxo made enough of a case to suggest the last layers might warrant some.

Hydro apparently thought they should. That is why the Disease levels are so high in the PDBs. Injecting 3 to 30 disease into a city's disease load because of runaway pollution is a Big Pill to swallow. At the same time the City Needs to be reducing Pollution the Disease rate is skyrocketing. Did you consider that? Now the City has 2 heavy weight factors pulling at it to get things under control. What does the city need to do? Build more healers? Build anti pollution buildings or Units If any are available. The player can juggle that fairly well but the AI is now split between 2 extremely important decision making paths. And as I charted out before about Disease, if disease reaches the upper level diseases your production goes down the drain in a hurry. Perhaps you should look up my old thread charting Diseases. Then you might see Why I disagree that Disease is not well represented.

Then you have to factor in the timeframes in terms of gameplay And if there are major wars going on. And the Ren era on is a time of major warfare for many players. many will do esrly wars if pushed into it, but most want to get to the Ren ERa and industrial and so on to start their major pushes. Because they want to use the military units of those times. Not everyone is enamored with Ancient Classical or Medieval war. If your are then you game is usually over before you ever get to the Ren era. All these gameplay styles and scenarios are part of the diversity of the Mod. But if you make these properties too strong too early then what is the point of having the later eras? You have shifted the playfield to early and at most early mid game. Thus making mid late and late era gameplay less relevant. AND2 went thru this same problem for awhile. Or do you want C2C to be called Caveman to Classical? Or Cavman2Medieval? it has been dubbed that in the past and it looks like we are back there again!

 

[Thunderbrd]

Hydro apparently thought they should. That is why the Disease levels are so high in the PDBs. Injecting 3 to 30 disease into a city's disease load because of runaway pollution is a Big Pill to swallow. At the same time the City Needs to be reducing Pollution the Disease rate is skyrocketing. Did you consider that? Now the City has 2 heavy weight factors pulling at it to get things under control. What does the city need to do? Build more healers? Build anti pollution buildings or Units If any are available. The player can juggle that fairly well but the AI is now split between 2 extremely important decision making paths. And as I charted out before about Disease, if disease reaches the upper level diseases your production goes down the drain in a hurry. Perhaps you should look up my old thread charting Diseases. Then you might see Why I disagree that Disease is not well represented.

Well,I'm trying to say I don't think it's all that rational to have so much disease coming from pollution so if we pull it off from there we have more room for more rational sources. I'm not disagreeing that it's a bit of a mean combo, not that that's really so much the issue but you do make a point that it's 2 problems to solve at once. The AI SHOULD be pretty good with that if it has available tools to help with it but that's not the point really. For what you stated and some other reasons, I'd advocate backing disease down on pollutions to a little in the last layers of those pollution PDBs and elminate Disease from them entirely otherwise. I know Hydro wanted them there but that was also when I wasn't as clear on what Disease as a property actually is and how it differs from unhealth itself. We might want MORE unhealth on the PDBs but not yet imo.

Then you have to factor in the timeframes in terms of gameplay And if there are major wars going on. And the Ren era on is a time of major warfare for many players. many will do esrly wars if pushed into it, but most want to get to the Ren ERa and industrial and so on to start their major pushes. Because they want to use the military units of those times. Not everyone is enamored with Ancient Classical or Medieval war. If your are then you game is usually over before you ever get to the Ren era. All these gameplay styles and scenarios are part of the diversity of the Mod. But if you make these properties too strong too early then what is the point of having the later eras? You have shifted the playfield to early and at most early mid game. Thus making mid late and late era gameplay less relevant. AND2 went thru this same problem for awhile. Or do you want C2C to be called Caveman to Classical? Or Cavman2Medieval? it has been dubbed that in the past and it looks like we are back there again!

The values on the control units and buildings are intended to be adjusted, or at least adjustable, to scale to the era's needs. If Crime and Disease are generally setup on similar platforms, then if we have to change the scaling values on one of them, then it means that the same scaling change to the other is equally appropriate. Does that make sense? It simplifies our job a lot to have them operate along similar channels of source generation.

The Medieval was obviously well known for being an era of great disease challenges so it should be that. And obviously, even before that point it was something that medicine had a lot more to catch up to to account for. If Disease (internal challenge) and Crime (Internal Challenge) make it difficult to control while you're trying to field an army and fight a war, it only helps to hold off on how far you can get with early wars. So in a lot of ways I completely agree with what you're saying, except that I think a little more challenge from Disease earlier would not be a bad thing.

The big reason I personally go to war and try to achieve a lot there before gunpowder is because you can get a LOT more XP on units pre-gunpowder than after, at least more easily from Religion (thanks to Asatru). Then later you can compensate with more Generals being settled as Military Trainers. And if I'm going to wait to go to war post-gunpowder, I like to try to skip over early gunpowder because if you hold off you can make a faster and far more powerful city strike force with tanks that aren't slowed by being foot soldiers.

 

[JosEPh_II]

I found my notes on Disease and the Chart I made. See my newest Thread; Diseases Revisited Again!

And now I've posted some of my "supposed evidence" Yudishtira scoffed at. And actually for the 2nd and or 3rd time in the last 4+ years. To bad these charts were never put into the Modder's Documentation thread.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I found my notes on Disease and the Chart I made. See my newest Thread; Diseases Revisited Again!

And now I've posted some of my "supposed evidence" Yudishtira scoffed at. And actually for the 2nd and or 3rd time in the last 4+ years. To bad these charts were never put into the Modder's Documentation thread.

You need to actually ask me to add a link or put them in the thread and then ask me to put a link. I also need to be well and aware

 

[JosEPh_II]

You need to actually ask me to add a link or put them in the thread and then ask me to put a link. I also need to be well and aware

Duly noted and my apology. Get well!

 

[Osk21]

I found my notes on Disease and the Chart I made. See my newest Thread; Diseases Revisited Again!

And now I've posted some of my "supposed evidence" Yudishtira scoffed at. And actually for the 2nd and or 3rd time in the last 4+ years. To bad these charts were never put into the Modder's Documentation thread.

How about Massive AgriChemical use events. I used to sell for Farm Service. Fertilizer, Chemical, Seed, Fuel, Feed and Lawn & Garden.

 

[Yudishtira]

In my save the tech leader AI cities that had airpol in the 2000s are now down to about 1400 max. They have since got Wildlife Conservation, and I see they have built several pollution control ordinances, so I give credit to those (and good job on those changes Raxo ).

I don't like the idea of pollution control being "set and forget". Hopefully it will come back to bite us some more. Otherwise I will have to modmod the autobuild levels down way further.

 

[tmv]

I don't like the idea of pollution control being "set and forget".

That should be tech-dependent. With swarms of nanobots that should be achievable (although the maintenance should be high).

 

[raxo2222]

@JosEPh_II what do you think about replacing yield changes (flat increase/decrease) with yeld modifiers (percentage modifiers)?
I did that to pests, and then you finetuned them.

Now pollution is irrelevant when it comes to stuff in larger cities.
Modifiers especially food modifiers aren't so easily floodable by buildings.

 

[JosEPh_II]

@JosEPh_II what do you think about replacing yield changes (flat increase/decrease) with yeld modifiers (percentage modifiers)?
I did that to pests, and then you finetuned them.

Now pollution is irrelevant when it comes to stuff in larger cities.
Modifiers especially food modifiers aren't so easily floodable by buildings.

I have reservations Because many are tied to Plot Yields, you know the tiles that are Not the main city tile. Land and seas plots do not use % modifiers for their "yields". What the tile produces is then afterwards modified by the city Modifiers in each category of etc. So when a Bad Pollution Event occurs that Plot's yield is reduced by +/- not %. And a Sea plot or Land plot that gives +10 food loses 5 food or 10 food it's Bad. Because the Pollution Event is Bad. Losing that much because of the Poll Event causes starvation. And the more severe the Event the faster the starvation occurs.

Since Pollutions were actually and originally designed to come into serious game play in the late Mid game up until Late game play eras as new attributes, then using YieldModifiers instead of the planned Yields is contrary to design purpose. I would not blindly change them without running test games that are in the Late Medieval/Early Ren Era and beyond. If at all. (This is why I did not like the Range for the Pollution "event" builds being expanded.)

People fussing that pollution should start at game start are confused as to how the Pollutions were designed (actually they are ignorant of the design purpose so they are just hypothesizing about it). Reminder, in vanilla Civ IV did Global warming ever occur in the early and mid game play? No it does not. Pollutions are an extension of the vanilla Civ IV design. It takes thousands of years for pollution to build up because Pollution needs High population world wide. Otherwise Nature regulates it's self on Pollution before High population overrides it (nature).

 

[Faustmouse]

It takes thousands of years for pollution to build up because Pollution needs High population world wide. Otherwise Nature regulates it's self on Pollution before High population overrides it (nature).

That's just so untrue. It requires only a lot of people in a small area with inadequate technology. This can mean millions of people in a shanty town in India today, it can also mean a "big city" in medieval times with no sanitation that pollutes a river.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Sorry Faustmouse but it's not. But perhaps I was a bit too general and not specific enough if you wish to disagree.