That's already in the game, a radius of 3x3 tiles becomes completely unproductive until you clean up the radioactive pollution. But the use of nuclear weapons also increases the frequency of global warming, which targets a totally random tile (independently from where the nuclear weapons were actually used) turning it into desert.

I wouldn't oppose the implementation of this mechanic so much if it worked in another way: affected tiles not being completely random, and not becoming desert instantly (for example, having a plain phase if they started as grassland). I also wish you could transfer food between cities to compensate the loss of good terrain, at the expense of slowing the growth of more fertile cities.

Generally speaking, allergens are natural substances. Usually you don't add them, but some products actually contain gluten as a filler, either directly (i actually found a bag of wheat gluten at a local supermarket) or when wheat is used as a filler. It's not too different from PKU (well, in how some people have to be careful, but most people don't) where you can't properly digest phenylalanine which is found naturally in fish and a few other things, but most commonly will be found in aspartame, and ends up acting as a neurotoxin if i recall correctly, inducing mental illness. I believe overdose (which is possible with the sweeteners) causes the same symptoms, which is probably where the "conspiracy" comes from. I imagine some people have different levels of ability of metabolizing it, as well, just like with gluten.

I stopped paying (much) attention to Civilization after 5 because it was quite frankly horrible, and 4 remains the masterpiece in the series. But what you describe is pretty bonkers, especially if they have excused it with irrefutable science being "controversial".

Sadly, even more reason to continue to ignore what that once-great series are up to in the future.

Good idea. That could even further increase specialization, having agricultural centers, industrial centers, scientific and cultural specialized centers. Of course, one cannot put all the good ideas in a single game. The right balance of complexity, abstraction and realism is often the key to success.

Leaving global warming out because of gameplay reasons is quite possible but to avoid any accusations that it's only a "political" move they should have given a good explanation, kind of a blog post "Why we left out global warming in Civ VI" from a lead designer. That would have gone a long way.

Well, you see, then it would've turned into a hit piece against the media for pointing out their spin. Plus, how do we know they didn't? Does anyone here actually follow the devs?

I'm not so pessimistic. It's better to give an explanation in case you really have one instead of not giving one. Especially if the explanation is any good it will convince some people that there is sense behind the decision. Not giving one is far more suspicious for such a controversial decision.

How we know that they didn't? Well, we don't. I searched and did not find anything really official (and longer than half a sentence) about it. Others searched probably too.

Carradice edited the initial post here with some links to underline the "they just wanted to avoid controversial issues" idea, but I did not find them particularly convincing either.

Of course we can continue to search. However, I guess that if the devs/publisher would have given an explanation, it would have been known even here by now. Being a hit piece by the media doesn't work if nobody knows of it.

Let me put it this way, how could you possibly frame it without saying "yo, these guys took us out of context" or "the reporter's full of it" implicitly if not explicitly? I'm not really sure they want that right now. I don't mean by the media, i mean of the media.

But, yeah, the way that one line is written gives lots of room for plausible deniability (on part of the interviewer) if the devs decided to come out and say something. You, I, and everyone else knows that the author is trying to imply that, but we also don't see direct quotations or anything like that which would imply that's actually what they dev said. It's kind of like "btw, we think this is the reason, and he kinda said it, so we're putting it here, but and you can take it however you want, hint hint."

I mean, we've seen how media interviews go, especially thanks to leaked interviews that show massive editing (including "L cuts") to intentionally take things out of context, before. Therefore, i think it's logical to assume the dev gave a long, long list of reasons, and ended it with the controversy point, or even used the thing about controversy to talk about something else entirely.

As far as I know, in Civ 5 food is not transferred from one city to another, but appears out of thin air when you send a caravan. Anyway, that's not the reason I couldn't get into Civ 5, but other design decisions. I understand that many people enjoy it and that's fine, just not the game for me.

Following the topic of climate change in games, it may be worth mentioning Master of Orion. In MOO2, pollution, if unchecked, could ate up a certain percentage of your production. IIRC production was recovered symmetrically with the diminution. Maybe someone can confirm it (or not).

In the 2016 remake, as pollution increases beyond the absorption rate of the bioma (in singular in the game), food production per tile diminishes increasingly. There is symmetry as per the reduction of pollution increasing agrarian production back.

However, if the pollution meter of the planet fills up completely, the impact on the planet reaches a threshold where there is permanent damage. The bioma of the planet gets downgraded one step in quality, from terran to arid, from arid to desert, etcetera.

So, while the pollution meter is below 100%, the ups and downs are symmetrical, IIRC, which is unrealistic, but this mechanism is complemented by the second, with more lasting effects. It is up to the player to invest on a terraformation project to take the planet back again in the fertility scale, one step at a time.


Edit: hyperlink.

If such a mechanic were to be implemented, I think there should be some mechanic to make it not completely efficient; food spoils as it travels. WIthout such a mechanic, one could end up not worrying at all about the location of new cities, build some in areas that can't produce enough food, and grow the city to rather large sizes, especially if it's receiving food from multiple cities. Also, this food spoilage should increase the longer the distance; giving a new city on the other side of the world a lot of food from established cities doesn't really make much sense to me.

This would also be a realistic limitation; food spoils as it travels. Of course, this is another thing that could be affected by technology; advances in transportation (such as flight) would help here, as would advances such as refrigeration.

One of the problems of the modern era. actually, is food distribution. I've read that the world produces enough food to feed the entire population so that nobody goes starving, but it's just not distributed well.

I posted some time ago my ideas to balance food transportation, and to make it more efficient over time with technology or resources, at the Civilization subforum: https://www.gog.com/forum/sid_meiers_civilization_series/civilization_improvements/post8

(Also in the same post, unrelated: some reasons why I didn't get into Civ 5 or 6).

Some kind of limitation, sure makes sense. There are other ways. Imperialism limited the quantity of food that could be transported at any given time. How? Taking into account the capacity of the existing transport network. Improvements in technology helped as well, making eventually possible to build railroad bridges over rivers or swamps.

The game also echoes the revolution on transports in the XIX, with clippers and steam ships: they help greatly with sea transportation of food.

This limitation stands also for fast movement of troops, as was the case in the XIX in Europe, especially with the development of German railroad being a concern for the rest of European powers at the time, allowing fast movement of troops between the potential Eastern and Western fronts.

By the way. Imperialism had a nice food model that distinguished between cereal, produce, fish and meat.


Another way to make it: Master of Orion 2016 allows for food redistribution among planets. The limitations are: only within the same solar system, only once an interplanetary system government has been built in one of the planets of the system and, of course, reaching the technology that allows said infrastructure to be built, around the middle game. That is, the limitation here happens via infrastructure and technology.

Not necessarily, at all.

Actually the real world largest limitation is transportation cost and infrastructure. Thence the limitation is better modeled via the transport network or incurring in a cost per turn.

Shipping food by air cargo is generally a terrible way of moving food around, beyond emergencies. Only highly-priced perishables can make it cost effective. However, the basis for world food lies with cereals, directly and indirectly. Produce and vegetables are substitutive goods and complementary food. They never make the difference in regards to undernourishment. They can be relevant for malnourishment, in a limited way.

On a side note, in the middle ages, a large part of the European peasant population was able to live on a diet based on wheat almost solely. The protein it contains was enough to survive when other sources were not available, occassionaly mixed with wild vegetables and fruit. For many native peoples in America, easily stored grain such as maize supplemented with beans made the local combo, as it is known.

Returning to the topic of climate change, right now I do not recall whether Civ II-IV took into account the effect of transportation, for example considering the length of track and road built. Probably not? Same with (intensive) agriculture? World population and city sizes? (this one maybe?). If not, that would mean that a part of diffuse sectors would had been out of the ingame mechanism.

By the way, transport is responsible for near the 30% or total emissions of greenhouse effect gases.


Edit: The two examples, Imperialism and MOO16, are next to each other now.

This actually reminds me of a quirk of SimCity. In SimCity, rails can serve the function of roads, but have the advantage of less pollution. It turns out, however, that there's no reason not to replace all your roads with rails once you can afford it; there's no disadvantage to having rails over roads. The thing is, in a game meant to be a simulation, it feels like this isn't realistic; if you look at a typical real world city, you will find lots of roads and not that much visible rails. Hence, having the game mechanics favor having only rails and not roads leads to unrealistic cities among players who realize that fact. (Was this fixed in any later SimCity games?)

Please, I didn't want to post in the thread at all, but I need a picture of Eeyore in the snow please. That picture is old!

And the ponies. Post the mini ponies.