06-04-2004 16:28									#1
	Pollution Sucks big time!!!!! Browse Apolyton AD-FREE

I'm not all gifted in the drawing dept, but I would really appreciate it if someone would make some 'smog' like pollution instead of that orange 'stuff' that doesn't look like any kind of pollution I ever saw...

	06-04-2004 17:04									#2
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Agreed, it's annoying and poorly implemented. One can reduce it, but never get rid of it. It's one of the numerous late game annoyances.

I wouldn't give a damn about the graphics though. Get a mod. Or a life. Or both.

	06-04-2004 17:22									#3
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The way it works is crappy too.
I don't have any suggestions at the moment, but it should definately be different to how it is at the moment

	06-04-2004 18:01									#4
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There are plenty of mods out there for the graphics.

	07-04-2004 02:13									#5
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have they ever fixed pollution? I don't know as my games never go into the modern age.

They should have done it like Civ2. Civ2 allows your workers to continue working the polluted squares, but at reduced capacity (50 percent less resources I think). Civ3 polluted squares net 0 resources and you can't continue working on them.

so after you clean up pollution, you have to manually reassigne workers to those squares or your city will starve down in population

Unless they changed that with one of the expansions or patches. That's my only annoyance. Other than that, I have no problem with pollution.

	07-04-2004 02:23									#6
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I guess the main problem is that it is an annoyance that never has enough of an effect on anything for it to matter at all.

Mostly, I have enough workers to clean it up as soon as it appears and if you set the governors to take care of food, shields and trade in all of your cities, it doesn't even physically inconvenience you... it just makes the game take longer to play.

	07-04-2004 03:45									#7
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quote: Originally posted by Dissident have they ever fixed pollution? I don't know as my games never go into the modern age. They should have done it like Civ2. Civ2 allows your workers to continue working the polluted squares, but at reduced capacity (50 percent less resources I think). Civ3 polluted squares net 0 resources and you can't continue working on them. so after you clean up pollution, you have to manually reassigne workers to those squares or your city will starve down in population Unless they changed that with one of the expansions or patches. That's my only annoyance. Other than that, I have no problem with pollution.

I will ignore the part about not playing to modern ages as it does not convey much, but pollution can occur before then. Build factories and coal plants and find out.

Anyway citizens do not work polluted tiles in CivIII. If you have insufficient food without that tile being work, you do get starvation.

Once the tile is cleaned, either the gov will reassign someone or you have to do it manually, depending on your settings. Until then the tile is not producing anything.

I may have this wrong, but IIRC in CivII pollution could reduce the tile improvements over time, if not removed. This does not happen in CivIII, only global warming will do that.

	07-04-2004 06:23									#8
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quote: Originally posted by Redeyed Rooster I guess the main problem is that it is an annoyance that never has enough of an effect on anything for it to matter at all.

Try playing a whole game without ever cleaning up any pollution. I would respectfully suggest it would have a substantial effect on your population, commerce and productivity.

	07-04-2004 14:27									#9
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In Civ2 you didn't have to reassign your workers, since the tile's output was not reduced to zero. This adds insult to injury since not only do you have to move a gang of workers over and push Shift-c lots of times, you also have to go and sort out your city which has been screwed up.

	07-04-2004 18:21									#10
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quote: Originally posted by vmxa1 I may have this wrong, but IIRC in CivII pollution could reduce the tile improvements over time, if not removed. This does not happen in CivIII, only global warming will do that.

In Civ3 a tile that is not cleaned up for a certain amount of time will degrade as if global had occured on that tile.

	07-04-2004 23:14									#11
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It vaguely bothers me that lava from a volcano is treated as pollution. I don’t build cities near volcanoes, but at some point they fall within my borders. In the earlier portions of the game when every worker is needed, I hate to expend the turns to clean it up. I would prefer it if lava, was not treated like regular pollution and just cooled after a few years turning into volcanic rock. It should not need to be cleaned.

	07-04-2004 23:18									#12
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Does anyone think pollution adds to the fun of the game? Or do we all agree that the game would be more fun if it were removed completely? I certainly feel that way; to me, pollution is nothing but a royal pain.

	07-04-2004 23:26									#13
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Well it's supposed to be.

I'd favour keeping it with a slightly less micro inducing implementation.

	07-04-2004 23:32									#14
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[Pedantic]I find it fun. I get to laugh at the AI for staving to death, since it can not get rid of the pollution.[/pedantic]

	08-04-2004 00:33									#15
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I think it should stay too, just not how it is now. Maybe it could be a reason for civil disorder or something. Also, why doesn't it affect the sea? Surely it wouldn't be hard to add the 'clean pollution' function to a ship...

	08-04-2004 00:38									#16
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quote: Originally posted by DrSpike Well it's supposed to be. I'd favour keeping it with a slightly less micro inducing implementation.

I'm curious: why?

	08-04-2004 00:48									#17
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I don’t have a problem with pollution per se, but I have a problem with the way it is implemented. As it is now, it is just a Sisyphusian task of endlessly cleaning blotches. I think I saw a thread somewhere where it was described as “whack a mole”. Since you have to clean it or suffer consequences this makes it a mindlessly repetitive task. Mindlessly repetitive tasks are not fun to me.

	08-04-2004 00:48									#18
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I like to have pollution in the game, too. Good feature

	08-04-2004 00:53									#19
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quote: Originally posted by TheArsenal I don’t have a problem with pollution per se, but I have a problem with the way it is implemented. As it is now, it is just a Sisyphusian task of endlessly cleaning blotches. I think I saw a thread somewhere where it was described as “whack a mole”. Since you have to clean it or suffer consequences this makes it a mindlessly repetitive task. Mindlessly repetitive tasks are not fun to me.

Yeah, I saw that too. I feel the same way, that's what I meant when I said it has 'no effect' because as long as you hav enough workers by the time each city is pumping out badly drawn orange blotches by the dozen, you can keep on with your coal and manufacturing plants and you can concentrate on building military units instead of bothering with mass transits which take a while to build in smaller cities and are expensive to maintain

	08-04-2004 01:06									#20
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Just to be clear, if Civ 4 can find a way to make pollution genuinely add to the game's fun, I'm all for its being included. One possibility would be to have pollution have an adverse impact on happiness rather than damaging tiles, in which case pollution-reducing improvements would bring back the happiness lost to pollution. It's the way pollution is currently implemented that I view as detrimental, not the concept of pollution per se, and TheArsenal summed up my reasons very nicely.

	08-04-2004 01:12									#21
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quote: Originally posted by Redeyed Rooster instead of bothering with mass transits which take a while to build in smaller cities and are expensive to maintain

Mass Transit Systems affect only pollution due to population, not pollution due to factories and such, and therefore are only relevant to metropolises size 13 and over. They ae totally irrelevant to smaller cities, at least assuming the Civilopedia and the flag in the editor reflect things correctly. Building them can still be problematical in metropolises that have mostly water rather than land tiles, of course, but a lot of the cities that can't build them in a reasonable amount of time don't need them anyhow.

	08-04-2004 02:44									#22
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quote: Originally posted by nbarclay I'm curious: why?

Well as you know I sided with you before on some of the realism debates. However, pollution is something that occurs, and more importantly it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility to implement in such a way that there are strategic trade-offs involved with dealing with it. Right now by far the best way of dealing with pollution is having mass stacks of workers to yawningly clear it.........but perhaps it needn't be that way.

	08-04-2004 04:18									#23
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quote: Originally posted by nbarclay Does anyone think pollution adds to the fun of the game?

If one considers it as fun to move workers around (who have admittedly nothing else to do), to have his carefully crafted and balanced build queues ruined on a random basis, to swap city laborers around and to have thriving cities suddenly starving, there's a lot of it in Civ3. But then, who is that masochistic?

quote: Or do we all agree that the game would be more fun if it were removed completely? I certainly feel that way; to me, pollution is nothing but a royal pain.

Away with it, and good riddance!

	08-04-2004 06:46									#24
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I've always thought pollution should have a significant impact on happiness. From a realism perspective, pollution doesn't really affect production per se. Perhaps it should also cause disease and kill citizens (which would then affect production of course), but on a more regular and annoying basis than floodplains/jungles.

	08-04-2004 07:33									#25
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Re: "Whack a mole"

This was posted both at CFC and in the Civilization Games General/Future forum here:

quote: Civilization fans may be eager to know that Soren Johnson of Firaxis games made a few comments about Civilization IV in his talk on game franchises at the Game Developer's Conference. All the features under consideration are tentative, and given the game's long development schedule may or may not make it into the final version. Still, the focus of Johnson's talk was on removing "unfun" aspects of games to create sufficient conceptual room for improvements. Some of the features under consideration are: Improved interface and help screens Replacing game concepts such as pollution, rioting and corruption with more entertaining concepts that maintain game balance (he described the current pollution model as "playing whack-a-mole"). Adding concepts of religion and civics Introducing more sophisticated concepts of unit experience and upgrades. Johnson emphasized that the game is still a long way off, and is being coded from scratch to produce a better final experience. He also mentioned that the team is paying attention to a list of suggestions submitted by fans that is longer than the New Testament. He didn't say how long it took the Firaxis team to slog through it.

So it looks like they're aware of how tedious it can be. Personally I can't stand playing with pollution and much prefer CTP2, where it's an option that you can turn off.

	08-04-2004 07:57									#26
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quote: Originally posted by nbarclay Just to be clear, if Civ 4 can find a way to make pollution genuinely add to the game's fun, I'm all for its being included. One possibility would be to have pollution have an adverse impact on happiness rather than damaging tiles, in which case pollution-reducing improvements would bring back the happiness lost to pollution. It's the way pollution is currently implemented that I view as detrimental, not the concept of pollution per se, and TheArsenal summed up my reasons very nicely.

Sounds like a CTP concept to me...and it works very nicely, I might add.

	08-04-2004 11:58									#27
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I support eliminated pollution from tiles. I think it's stupid.

In my city parts of the mojave desert don't become unusable because of pollution in my city (las vegas). That's preposterous. The only effect pollution has on my city is air quality.

Sure land contamination does occur sometimes. But for the most part, air pollution is the type of pollution america suffers the worst of.

One exception would be nukes. These should contaminate the land as usual. And cleanup should take much longer.

But I'd like to see air pollution in this game. Not shown on the map.

So what effects does air pollution actually have. Well not much . Many studies show it can cause asthma and other allergies. How could you represent that? Also studies have shown it can cause cancer. So you could represent that in slower population growth, decreased commerce (due to traffic congestion), and more unhappiness.

my 2 cents.

	09-04-2004 08:09									#28
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I agree with Dissident on this topic. If pollution was as bad in real life as it is in this game, we'd all be drowning in a sea of orange goo.

The occasional polluted tile is OK. However, several tiles getting polluted each and every turn...

Nuclear contamination should be separate from 'regular' pollution. Its effects should be harsher than normal pollution. And it should take longer to clean up.

Air pollution should be implemented in Civ 4 with effects on happiness and health (i.e. increased death rates). There could be other effects such as increased emigration from cities with high air pollution. The above effects (other than happiness) would have to be implemented into the game first, of course.

	13-04-2004 02:50									#29
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They should have an option to turn pollution and disasters off in Civ 4...that's just my opinion

	13-04-2004 02:55									#30
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Global Warming seems to be much less of a factor in conquests than in classic civ 3.

Civ II had less global warming events, but when it occured, lots & lots of tiles were affected, especally grassland tiles along the coast sudenly become swapland.