Pollution Workaround

[Ed Kolis]

I think Captain Kwok is already doing this in Space Food Empires, but I had an idea for how to implement pollution in a mod, even though SE4 doesn't allow facilities to degrade a planet's conditions!

1. All polluting facilities should cause populations to grow unhappy in addition to "degrading" the conditions of a planet.
2. The pollution control facilities should cause populations to grow happier, as well as improving conditions.

This way, if you have more pollutants than pollution control, the conditions won't degrade, but at least the population will grow unhappy. Of course, if you have too MUCH pollution control, the planet will grow unusually happy in addition to its conditions improving... But that can be worked around by making pollution control facilities much more expensive than happiness facilities or climate control facilities...

[Alneyan]

Why not add reduced mineral/organic/radioactive values? Lowering planet conditions wouldn't be much of a bother under most mods - with the exception of those mods where a *high* reproduction rate actually matters - but lower values would have some form of impact.

[Ed Kolis]

Ooh, good idea

[Captain Kwok]

The main problem is that the values for unhappiness are too large (i.e. at least 1% per facility per turn) so the population gets angry really quickly with even just 2 or 3 facilities. It's not overly burdensome for players to manage, but the AI is bogged down it - even with the appropriate happiness facilities and troops queued up. It ends up that you need to use too much space for happiness facilities and it actually hurts gameplay.

The good news is that SE:V will allow for much finer tweaking and hopefully we can get a good pollution and happiness scheme going that focuses more on minor disruptions to production rather than full blown riots. I have suggested to Aaron that he allow us to use negative values that work for these sorts of things.

[Fyron]

Ed Kolis said:
1. All polluting facilities should cause populations to grow unhappy in addition to "degrading" the conditions of a planet.
2. The pollution control facilities should cause populations to grow happier, as well as improving conditions.

This was the other part of facility management I was adding in Adamant 0.16.00. Workforce dependent facilities raise anger levels, requiring building lots of planetary happiness facilities to pacify them.

You can see an implementation of this system on ModWorks:
Workforce Happiness Concept Mod

Alneyan said:
Why not add reduced mineral/organic/radioactive values? Lowering planet conditions wouldn't be much of a bother under most mods - with the exception of those mods where a *high* reproduction rate actually matters - but lower values would have some form of impact.

This is what Finite Resources play mode is for, no?

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Ed Kolis said:
.....even though SE4 doesn't allow facilities to degrade a planet's conditions!.....

I think you might want to try a negative value in "Planet - Conditions Change" and see if that'll work. Unless, of course, that has already been proven not to work, in which case your idea would be best.

Also, "pollution" might also cause the planet's resource base to decrease, i.e. a negative value change. The effect shouldn't be that much, so a one-facility moon colony won't notice it much, but, say, a Sphereworld built chock-full of polluting facilities would be worth squat in no-time. The larger the planet's industry, and the larger the production, the faster the resources run out without being able to be harvested. Think of it as forests dying because of air pollution, and mineral veins sinking into the magma and dissipating because of tectonic shifts caused by large-scale mining operations.

Whoops, sorry, was ranting I know.

[Captain Kwok]

A negative value will not work. All it will do is count against any positive value facility you might add on the planet.

[Ed Kolis]

How about a negative value change? That works, doesn't it?

[Alneyan]

Ed Kolis said:
How about a negative value change? That works, doesn't it?

It worked last time I tried (testing something for PvK under 1.91).

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

'Swhat I meant. A slight negative value change that slowly but surely erodes the planet's resource base, so no more building 200 monoliths on a Sphereworld and raking in the profits! It's going to be of 0 value before the 100th monolith! You've got to compensate with pollution reduction facilities (i.e. positive value change) if you want to keep extracting res. from your Sphereworld!