10-09-2004 00:25									#1
	Environment & Agriculture Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGREDATION

"Awww, I don't want to worry about that! I just want to build stuff and fight!"

Bahhh! Historical civilizations have been done in by environmental changes and depletion of farmland. _Civilization_ should reflect this.

Step 1:

Double food production and food consumption, to allow a finer graduation of food production.

Step 2:

Every terrain square should have a exploitation counter. When a city actively uses a square, the counter decrements. In some cases irrigation would make make it decrement faster (salt intrusion).

If left fallow, the land recovers and the counter increments a bit.

When the counter reaches a certain negative value, it degrades. A crop or cattle bonus might go away. Grassland might become plains, plains become desert, and flood plains desert or marsh. Forests would disappear. Severe degredation might be represented by pollution (salt crust.)

New Tech advances -- Artificial Fertilizer, Ecology, a late-medieval Civ Advance called "Agronomy," an early industrial advance Botany -- would effect degredation and recovery.

Volcanos currently create pollution. They should also enrich the soil, ratcheting up the exploitation counter of nearby squares. Once you clean up, you can get bumper crops!

FOOD RATIONING

Running a bit short of munchies? Autocratic governments might allow you to cut back food consumption from four to three per person. Generates an unhappy face, and the population doesn't grow, but this might get you through some tough times.

You might also encourage consumption. The "bread" in bread and cicuses. Food use goes from four to five. An unhappy face or two becomes content.

FOOD TRADING

Civ II's wonderful food shipment system went away with Caravans. There should be some way to reinstate this important and realistic feature.

If there's a road between two cities, you should be able to move food along it. Perhaps at a loss (50%, 20%, or nothing, depending on whether you have pottery or electricity (refrigeration) ), perhaps at a cost (1 gold per 10 food moved between cities). An enemy army or barbarians on a road would block it entirely.

ENVIRONMENTAL WONDERS, SCORING

Anyone out there play SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD? The wonderful Dan / Dani Bunten game for the C64 and Atari that let you explore and colonize the New World?

7COG was an inspiration for Mier's _Colonization_, and there was something in it that I would like to see in Civ IV: Environmental wonders.

These would be randomly scattered great natural places. The could be taken from the real world (Victoria Falls, Grand Canyon, Great Barrier Reef) or be randomly generated. You could exploit the square its in, but there's a chance it would eventually degrade. Simply having it in your Civ's borders, however, would earn you tourist money and some culture points.

Then there's environmental grading. Essentially, you'd get victory points for *not* developing a square. A square that has *never* been exploited would be worth more; a Forest or Jungle that has never had so much as a road pushed through would be worth a lot. There might be a bonus for having contiguous wilderness squares.

Wilderness might generate some tourism and culture points.

	10-09-2004 07:28									#2
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Wouldn't this make crop rotating a prime strategy? Sounds like pointless MM. Bleh

	13-09-2004 20:27									#3
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That model does, IMO, seem to beat having to deal with irreversible desertification.

	14-09-2004 00:57									#4
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I'd like to see a simple one-time addition of food from cleared jungle. Burning it and using the ashes to grow food faster.

	15-09-2004 09:20									#5
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If I may, the only problem with this model is that any real-world civilization never (Please correct; I suspect I may be wrong) knowingly degrades its farmland/fisheries/irrigation. In every case I can think of, environmental degradation occurs because it was assumed the land would be able to recover or adapt, or the consequences were not known. Introducing this would be realistic in its effects, but not in its predictability, which ultimately defeats the point of making civs more attached to their environmental impact.

Even if the exploitation counter was invisible, or if it was randomly set before use, it would not be long before intelligent, inquisitive players were able to manipulate the system.

Edit: Not to say I dislike the idea; I've always hoped for something to that effect. I just think this would be easily defeated.

	15-09-2004 16:38									#6
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quote: Originally posted by 0bsidi0n If I may, the only problem with this model is that any real-world civilization never (Please correct; I suspect I may be wrong) knowingly degrades its farmland/fisheries/irrigation. In every case I can think of, environmental degradation occurs because it was assumed the land would be able to recover or adapt, or the consequences were not known. Introducing this would be realistic in its effects, but not in its predictability, which ultimately defeats the point of making civs more attached to their environmental impact. Even if the exploitation counter was invisible, or if it was randomly set before use, it would not be long before intelligent, inquisitive players were able to manipulate the system.

This is true, but you could say the same about a lot of variables in the game (e.g. you always know exactly how many citizens are unhappy, how many "shields of production" the city makes so you know when whatever you're building will be done). There's always some sort of predictability that needs to be there even if it makes the game unrealistic.

Still, any civilization would notice when the harverst from a set of fields has steadily gone down year by year and realise something is wrong. So even if the counter itself was invisible, there can be some indication made to the player that fertility is decreasing - and there can be techs that would allow you to gauge the counter more accurately.

I think it's a good idea, but needs more fleshing out to find out what can be made "fun" out of it; I mean, it adds realism, but gameplaywise, it's just another hurdle you have to overcome with new techs.

	16-09-2004 02:09									#7
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Gameplay wise, it encourages people to shuffle theri worker units around between their available farming tiles every turn. This is bad. It is called MM.

Something similar to Master of Magic or CTP2 (they used the same system here) where you did not assign citizens to specific tiles would be good. Instead, your workforce produced an averaged output based on all the tiles in the city radius. CTP2 was slightly more advanced, in that output was weighted towards what the closer tiles produced (especially with low population cities), and you could make the weighting focus on sprecific kinds of production. But the specific tiles being worked was invisible to the player as un-necessary MM.