Pollution

Grrr · December 12, 2000, 17:28

I think the pollution in Civ II and in Civ CTP could do with an upgrade. In Civ II pollution has no effect, other than global warming. I can just leave my pollution out for 1000years without affect. I like the Civ CTP concept of Dead Tiles. However, Civ CTP citizens don't seem to care about pollution. AI opponents live amongst impossible amounts of filth.
I also think pollution should be able to spread. If there is a polluted tile, and a clean one next to it, there should be a 10% chance of it becoming polluted to. Pollution should also have a 90% chance of traveling down rivers.

QW1020 · December 12, 2000, 21:31

River spreading should be lower

DarkCloud · December 12, 2000, 21:39

Pollution should, if near a city, have a possibly of infecting the inhabitants with disease and killing a certain percentage of them.

Grrr · December 12, 2000, 22:03

What a good idea, Dark Cloud.
As for you QW1020 I believe it should be about this high, as chemicals do spread down rivers speedily, and by the way, this would mean it would only travel 9 tiles every 10 turns

jdlessl · December 12, 2000, 22:39

One thing that Civ and SMAC got wrong was that there are basically two types of pollution to be concerned with. There's normal industrial pollution, which throws out tons of chemicals and nasties which do funky things to the ozone layer and trap heat and cause global warming. On the other hand is large scale particulate (sp?) pollution. This variety is what you get with volcanoes, nukes, and planet busters. The nukes obviously poison the area around them, but all of them throw a large quantity of dirt into the stratosphere. If there's enough of it, it blocks the sun, causing cooling, sometimes very bad. Nuclear winters, the Phillipines eruption a while ago, asteroid impacts, that kind of thing. More than a few ice ages have been caused by this sort of thing. An alternative to the dino-killing comet was this truly massive series of eruptions in India that put out several orders of magnitude more dust than a normal eruption.

With Civ the discrepancy wasn't too bad, but with SMAC it got kind of annoying that no matter what you did, you'd end up with rising water levels.

--
Jared Lessl

Diablo, Bro. of Mephisto · December 12, 2000, 22:43

I do agree that pollution from civ2 should be upgraded, but I consider it a very minor problem, so I will bother my self with more major problems, Diplomacy, AI, units, etc.

Grumbold · December 13, 2000, 11:54

I agree there should be different types of pollution. If it is going to be handled at all then I prefer the Civ2 method to CtP. The period between the dawn of the industrial revolution and the latter half of this century was one of almost unbelievable grime. This pollution dirtied buildings, killed or sickened people forced to breathe it daily and harmed crop production. It did not, however, destroy tiles and tile improvements like railways. Civ2 modelled that kind of pollution quite well although the small limit of pollutable tiles before global warming set in made it difficult to have a real industrial revolution without racing headfirst towards the technologies needed to clean it up. Using engineers to keep it in check seems quite acceptable to me, particularly if the rate it is produced is increased to allow for that real 19th century coal-powered industrial smog feel without causing ecological disaster immediately. The 20th century pollution is subtly different in that it is less visibly dirty but is causing greater long term problems.

The really nasty stuff is the nuclear and biological pollution that really can destroy tiles for good and be almost impossible to clean up. I don't understand why these should be aiding global warming though. Tiles that are not just awkward but positively hazaardous to enter would seem to be penalty enough.

Dauphin · December 13, 2000, 12:57

quote:

There's normal industrial pollution, which throws out tons of chemicals and nasties which do funky things to the ozone layer and trap heat and cause global warming

If you want, this category could be subdivided into greenhouse gases and ozone depleting gases. Chemicals that cause global warming (Primarily C02 and believe it or not H2O) do not affect the ozone layer. Similarly Ozone depleting gases (CFCs etc) do little to affect global warming.

airdrik · December 13, 2000, 14:26

How about a new tile:
Deadlands: 1 food, 0 sheilds/trade. irrigate: +1 food. Mine: +1 sheild. Transform: flatland- (flatland -1 food, -1 trade, transform: flatland)
Movement penalty: non, non-engineer units take 5 hp/round they stay in a Deadlands, or 2 hp in passing.

Deadlands is caused by such things as nuclear attacks, volcanos, (actually, the ground around a volcano, after it erupts is fairly fertle ground, and would cause Deadlands+ :2 food, 0 shld/trade), large battles (not sure how to decide if a battle is a large one or a small one, but if battle sizes are represented then that would be one cause)

Industrial pollution would be represented as it was in civ 2, except that it would require more pollution to start global warming, maybe 2x.

Diablo, Bro. of Mephisto · December 13, 2000, 15:25

Ive thought about the 'deadlands' tile myself, and I think its a great idea.

I would like to add to airdiks idea, how about, if a town is nuked, the surrounding tiles become deadlands, and they CANNOT be re-used.

airdrik · December 15, 2000, 01:27

As in the tile where the city was and the four tiles adjacent to it (become deadlands-:0 food, transform: deadlands)

There is also the effects on the atmosphere that we need to worry about. Durring the cold war between the US and Russia, we practically created the Van Allan (not totaly sure on his name) radiation belts: three belts around the Earth that trap massive amounts of radiation and require all passing ships to have radiation protection or all passengers get radiation poisoning. There were other consequences to these belts, but I can't remember them, that was a whole year ago in my physics class and like I am going to remember that.
[This message has been edited by airdrik (edited December 14, 2000).]

Dauphin · December 15, 2000, 11:52

quote:

There is also the effects on the atmosphere that we need to worry about. Durring the cold war between the US and Russia, we practically created the Van Allan (not totaly sure on his name) radiation belts:

The Van Allen Belt has always been there and is due to the interaction of the Solar wind with the Earths Magnetosphere. Nuclear Weapons did nothing....

airdrik · December 15, 2000, 15:46

quote:

Originally posted by Big Crunch on 12-15-2000 10:52 AM
The Van Allen Belt has always been there and is due to the interaction of the Solar wind with the Earths Magnetosphere. Nuclear Weapons did nothing....

Actually, I was wrong that we 'created' them, we nearly increased the amounts of radiation in them by like 10x, or something.

Dauphin · December 15, 2000, 21:37

The effects were only shortlived and had no permanent effect. The upper atmosphere has and always will be full of highly energetic particles and radiation. All the Nukes did was provide an extra few lights for a few weeks - equivalent to the Aurora Borealis. Even the Really Big Bombs only lasted about a year. Don't foget that these bombs were deliberately detonated in space to see if they could create these belts!

Basically what I'm saying is that ground based detonations will not cause radiation in space.

DrFell · December 15, 2000, 23:40

they detonated nukes in space???

i never knew this!! i thought theyd only been detonated 'on the ground'. surely they didnt do that just to test out the effects on the van allen belts (quite vital in keeping out deadly solar radiation along with the atmosphere...).

Dauphin · December 16, 2000, 15:15

quote:

quite vital in keeping out deadly solar radiation

The Van Allen Belt is not vital. The Earth's Magnetosphere is what is vital.

The VAB is basically a load of charged particles caught in a "crevice" in space - equivalent to the stuff that gets caught in the gap between sofa cushions.

The "crevice" is caused by the Earth's Magnetic field interacting with the Solar Wind. The Belt is about as useful as the crap stuffed down the back of your sofa.

Look up the Argus Experiments - designed to make an artificial belt before the VAB was discovered.

I think I should write an essay on the topic.

Laszlo · August 9, 2001, 02:36

Quote:

Originally posted by Grumbold

The really nasty stuff is the nuclear and biological pollution that really can destroy tiles for good and be almost impossible to clean up. I don't understand why these should be aiding global warming though.

I picked this up from a FAQ on theEffects of Nuclear Explosions .

5.2.2.1 Harm to the Ozone Layer

The high temperatures of the nuclear fireball, followed by rapid expansion and cooling, cause large amounts of nitrogen oxides to form from the oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere (very similar to what happens in combustion engines). Each megaton of yield will produce some 5000 tons of nitrogen oxides. The rising fireball of a high kiloton or megaton range warhead will carry these nitric oxides well up into the stratosphere, where they can reach the ozone layer. A series of large atmospheric explosions could significantly deplete the ozone layer.

The high yield tests in the fifties and sixties probably did cause significant depletion, but the ozone measurements made at the time were too limited to pick up the expected changes out of natural variations.

I hope this helps, though I agree that there should be types of
pollution, and that residual nuclear radiation should not contribute to global warming as the game does.

Urban Ranger · August 9, 2001, 05:40

I can't recall N₂O₃ or NO being ozone depleting.

SerapisIV · August 9, 2001, 11:18

Yup, NOx is bad stuff (NO, NO2 are the main components) It's being heavily researched for reduction methods and being regulated by agencies like the EPA.

Some effects of NOx are causing acid rain at ground levels and being a precursor for ground level ozone. Ozone high in the atmosphere is good, in cities its very bad

Dauphin · August 9, 2001, 15:14

I would have thought that lightning would have had a more substantial effect on the production of NO_x than nuclear detonations.

BTW, Laszlo where did you resurrect this thread from. Page 130 or something?

SerapisIV · August 9, 2001, 15:20

Never heard of nuke NOx production. The largest producers of NOx I know of is automotive and powerplants. My lab at Univ. of Mich actually does a lot of research on trying to better understand NOx formation too.

Laszlo · August 10, 2001, 00:44

Quote:

Originally posted by Big Crunch
I would have thought that lightning would have had a more substantial effect on the production of NO_x than nuclear detonations.

BTW, Laszlo where did you resurrect this thread from. Page 130 or something?

Big Crunch, I would imagine that the amount of NO_x produced from nuclear explosions would seem seriously belittled when juxtaposed with lightning. And it would seem even more insignificant after you looked at the massive amounts released from human activities such as burning of fossil fuels and application of chemical fertilizers.

But because nuclear explosions are so huge, the nasty stuff gets injected right into the stratosphere and troposphere. There it gets to work eating up the ozone layer and causing global warming, though I read an article saying that NO_x could actually have a long-term cooling effect.

It doesn't seem that those scientists are going to settle the global warming debate anytime soon.

PS - Big Crunch, I think that I dredged it up from not more than 60 pages ago, though it was 8 months since you gave its last post.