Slitherine

Alright, here a short preview for the pollution & morale changes that will go live next week:

Our current implementation makes pollution simply too hard to evaluate and design solid counters, the variation of pollution a city can produce is too high and there are too many variables involved.

The first change is that streets, farms, mines and forts no longer cause pollution, features that modify pollution are way more sparse. At the moment only forests and a couple bonus features modify pollution, so we basically reserve it for entities that really have an impact, rather than having everything pollute a little bit. In the future certain buildings might cause pollution as well.

Now the big change: Instead of being based on the total resource output of a city, pollution is calculated from population. Each farmer causes 0.4, each miner 0.6, each worker 0.8, and each scientist 0.2 pollution, which averages to 0.5. This way we can determine exactly how much pollution our buildings should clean up (4 city-intrinsic, then 4, 8, 16), and on top of that a player has the option to remedy pollution with forests. Our previous implication that high tech buildings cause pollution relative to their resource output just didn't make too much sense anyway (and even caused a weird pollution to morale dependency cycle).

Note that we upped the city population cap to 16, with buildings granting +8, +16, +32.

A city has a base morale of +8, and each colonist causes an average morale loss of 0.5 from pollution (= pollution value) and 0.5 from overpopulation. So for every colonist the city loses roughly 1 point of morale. The morale buildings (granting +4, +8, +16 morale) are designed to compensate the morale loss from overpopulation, though they of course work on morale lost from pollution just as well.

In order to give an outline when to worry about morale, its effect is now asymmetric: Each positive point increases resource output by 1% (which is still good since money got devalued due to higher purchase costs), but each negative point decreases output by 2%. That means players should aim for not letting morale go into the negatives.

We will see how all this is gonna play out, but on paper I'm extremely happy with the system. It's possible for players to keep pollution spawns at a minimum or even zero for the entire duration of the game, it allows to compensate the pollution from production and mining heavy cities with forests, and it makes apparent when a player should worry about his city's morale.

Tying population rather than resources to pollution is an improvement IMO.

I don't think it's good though that roads no longer cause pollution. If there's no downside to having lots of roads, you'll eventually end up with roads on every. single. tile. Which is boring and looks ugly. Civ5 finally solved the road spaghetti prevalent in the civ series by letting each road cost 1 gold in maintenance, but letting cities produce extra gold if they were connected by road or harbour to your capital. As a result the player tries to build a single road as short as possible between your cities and capital. So for Pandora I would suggest that roads still cause pollution, and that cities connected by road to your capital have less of a frontier penalty.


On the topic of pollution, I wasn't thrilled to see that terrain plots can become polluted in Pandora, and that you can clean up this pollution with formers. Civ 1 to 3 had that system, but pollution was rightly removed in Civ4 because playing a game of whack-a-mole with your formers is Not Fun. SMAC had fungal blooms, but that mechanic was at least somewhat interesting, because fungal blooms also caused native life units to spawn, adding a military element to the mechanic.

My suggestions would be:

1) simply remove the ability to remove pollution with formers. If you are following a very polluting strategy, this would mean your core territory would gradually become more and more polluted, but with Pandora's system of global pooling of food and minerals this does not have to be a problem. As the game progresses, your core cities would become your science and production centers, and you'd be forced to expand to tap into new food and hammer resources to funnel to your old cities. This idea is foremost in my mind at the moment due to Jon Shafer's upcoming game which features dwindling resources. It would fit perfectly with Pandora's theme of "okay we have a beautiful hospitable, yet alien, planet and humanity comes and ruins it all".

(If you go with this idea, I'd suggest plots with special resources are immune to pollution to preserve the city specialization aspect of the game)

2) Turn the negative concept of 'Pollution' around into the positive concept of "Ecology". Negative ecology would still cause polluted tiles. Positive ecology could be accumulated at the faction level like food and minerals. It could do stuff like
a) remove pollution from a previously polluted tile
b) give a random plot a Xenite Flower or Garden of Eden bonus
c) unlock a variety of ecological policies (similar to civ5 social policies), such as "+1 food on lakes" or "+1 food and mineral for forest".

I think (1) is an interesting pollution suggestion. It would get rid of the random component and turn it into a continuous effect that could change the look more uniformly.

I definitely think changing from pollution working off of production to being based on population assignment will be an improvement. It will make it much easier to predict and reason about. I also like making negative moral more of a penalty than positive moral is a bonus. Changing tile improvements to make them not pollute is good as well. Maniac has a good point about road spam. It makes roads a more interesting strategic choice if there is some cost to having them. Otherwise they do just get built up everywhere. I thought that civ 5 may have priced them a little too high, especially for the early game, but the .25 pollution per road might not be a bad plan. Make sure that roads can be built through forests though.

On the topic of roads, I would really like to see some sort of network connection affects like Maniac talked about. It's strange that totally disconnected cities on the other sides of a planet can trivially share all of their resources.

I think Maniac is bringing up some good improvement ideas. Having long term consequences for pollution would definitely make it feel more meaningful. I would prefer a gradual deterministic breakdown rather than a randomly plopped down pollution tile. I like the idea of being able to have a negative pollution balance, (positive ecology), which would lead to a gradual reversal of the damage done by polluting. That would allow for things to be restored if significant effort is made at a city level, rather than requiring a lot of former cleanup. It should be much easier to cause degradation than it is for restoration. Over time, tech advances and further understanding of the planet could make it easier though.

I strongly oppose adding a global ecology resource that can be used to purchase things like pollution cleanup. It's cheesy and just moves the formers job into an operation. Civ 5 has a few things like that, and they feel strange and disconnected from the rest of the game. (Which makes sense, because they are additional systems tacked on after release to remedy gross design errors...)

Oh, I guess I imagined my own thing when I read the suggestion.

What I meant was changing so that cities continuously pollute territories arround it rather than accumulating pollution and suddenly polluting a tile straight to 0. That does not prevent formers from cleaning up pollution -- it might be weird if they can transform a desert into jungle but can't take care of any pollution. It could come later as part of the terraforming tech however.

I don't think pooling ecology is going to happen, it's one of those gamey things that don't really make sense in my opinion.