Weather wars?

[Darkstar]

SMAC had weather wars. You could cause your neighbors food resources to worsen by raising your land, causing more rain to fall on your land and creating a rain "shadow" behind your land (if you were "upwind). A common phenomena in SMAC, and actually a unique and fun element.

If Civ4 includes the same level of basic wind/rain modelling that SMAC used, then you could have rain wars.

[realpolitic]

Changing rainfall sounds good to me, it should be done secretly without causing war, like privateers. It has the potential of being a devastating technology that is useful soon before preparations for the spaceship [or other tech] victory.

[Switch]

Given our current technological abilities and the time scale of Civilization, I don't think it even minutely realistic for this to be included. SMAC 2 (oh how I wish), then yes, but not in Civilization.

Moreover, I hope we never see weather wars, or for that matter any sort of weather control, in real life. We have no idea what side effects this would ammount to, such as aquatic or shoreline wildlife, weather patterns throughout the world, and so on. Rather than wasting resources trying to control the weather (Which I sincerely doubt we could do anyway), we should be focusing our resources on making risk zones sustainable, much like they've done with earthquake zones.


But I digress, and that's a discussion for another topic in another forum.

[joncnunn]

Re: Weather wars?

The key paragraph on why it didn't work is on page two of the article.

The Stormfury results were ambiguous at best. Meteorologists today do not expect this particular application of cloud seeding to be effective in hurricanes because, contrary to the early beliefs, the storms contain little supercooled water vapor.

Originally posted by realpolitic
Here's the Scientific American article. Let's face it the military gets everything first. They'll have tremdous power at their disposal, and be able to attack covertly. Scares the crap out of me, but we might as well use it in civ4.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000593AE-704B-1151-B57F83414B7F0000

[joncnunn]

Bombing a dam has been done in war time and did cause flooding, mostly to civilians.

One commander during the Korean war after China had intervened did propose using high explosive devices on the river between China and North Korea to melt the river that was frozen over, which if successful would force the Chinese reinforcements to use the bridges until the river refroze.

alternating huricades : likely to remain science fiction for decades

lighting storms : At the micro-level we've been adjusting those for a little over a century now. (Lightning rod)

volcano flows : I'm not aware of anyone intentioning doing this, but digging a channel flow in advance of a volcano errupting is plausabible if the inital lava pressure isn't too great. (A strong lava presure may tear out another hole in the mountain that is now an easier path than the intended one)

A slow, thin lava flow (such as in Hawaii) can be stopped in its tracks by spraying down with water. This isn't particularly effective against a fast, thick lava flow.

Atlanta is one of many examples of US city designs that makes severe weather more likely to occur locally. (Extra heat due to concreate + indown town all those sky scrappers forcing up the air)

Some of the largest man made lakes in the US are probably big enough to have minimal local weather affects.

Originally posted by petermarkab
Not so sure about sending artificially created hurricanes, lightning storms and volcanic lava flows towards my enemies (a la Populus), but I would say that water wars are a significant possibility in the near future and the availability of water is determined largely by global weather patterns but also by human infrastructure.
A player could build something akin to the Condenser in SMAC yielding lusher terrain for themselves while causing desertification in an opponent's territory, or he could bomb a hydro-electric dam causing catastrophic flooding downriver.

[TechWins]

Where's the ****** as **** option?



The first word doesn't need to be commented out, but I don't want to blatantly insult anyone or anyone's idea.







I voted no.