eco damage

[Googlie]

Yes they did - to what DD said (used to be it halved the cost), the patch corrected it to doubling the minerals when building orbitals - hence the over-the-top eco damage.

the readme.txt file says:

The Space Elevator now correctly doubles mineral production when building satellites

G.

[Aredhran]

I'm saying this off the top of my head, but didn't they fix that in some patch or another (being at work I can't check)

[Sikander]

Wow, I was wondering about that crazy production I was getting. So it's the Space Elevator. What a pain. So now I will have to activate the mineral crawlers of bases building satelites to avoid a real mess. What a pain.

Transcend,

So let me see if I have this straight. Terraforming ecodamage is basically easily eliminated by Treefarm / Hybrid Forest combo, or high planet rating.

Atrocity ecodamage is up to your own behavior.

Mineral production ecodamage is free up to a certain point, and can be limited up to 75% by Centauri Preserves, Temples, The Pholus Mutagen. (What about the Nanoreplicators?) Is this ecodamage reduction a local or an aggregate effect?

[Gothar]

I think you've just gotta live with it. I got mass eco damage in my other game too. I was playing the gains and using green. Once you get 5 or 6 bases producing 70+ minerals a turn no number of preserves and tree farms will save you from global warming
[This message has been edited by Gothar (edited December 07, 2000).]

[mark13]

Yeah, I suppose it would be unreasonable to suggest that a number of Preserves/projects will spare you from eco-damage althogether. You will inevitably get it if you are producing 60+ mins/turn. The best advice is just to limit industrial capacity, IMO - until later in the game, that is, when you can cope with the worms (and even profit from them ).

[Fitz]

quote: Originally posted by Sikander on 12-05-2000 12:22 AM What exactly do the Centauri Preserves etc. do? I read somewhere that they have no effect on the base level per se, but effect the overall effect of your pollution on planet. If this is true, then the number in step 8 would be the total number of these facilities in all of your bases. Is this correct? This would allow an enormous amount of production in large empires, which seems suspect. If this is not true (ie these facilities in fact are factored into only the local base equation) then these facilities would allow for the pollution free production of up to 4 times normal. Neither of these things seem quite right. Can someone explain this part of the equation to me?

I have been contending this point for a while. Conventional wisdom around here (apparently continued from .owo) is that Centauri Preserves/Temples of Planet have a global affect on eco-damage, not a local (base specific) affect. This is due to one possible interpretation of the line (8) Divide minerals by 1 plus # of Centauri Preserve, Temple of Planet, Nanoreplicator. That the value is 1 + total facilities of these types in all your bases.

Now I, on the other hand, have always interpreted this to mean 1, add one if a Centauri Preserve in that base, add another 1 if a Temple of Planet in that base, and add a final one if a Nanoreplicator in that base. In other words, the value of step 8 varies from 1 to 4.

I've been planning to test this theory for months, but have never gotten around to it.

[Blake]

I was trying some stuff on a sea map with deep sea bases powered by orbital, I was using the scenerio editor and the bases had all the facilities and I had heaps of orbitals (as in enough that a deep sea base size will never outgrow the number of orbitals). Anyway the bases produced about 60 minerals per year and had ecodamage of about 30, as I genned turns and the waves of worms washed up against my garrisons I noticed something interesting - the ecodamage was going down over time, eventually it reached 0, despite the fact that I hadn't made any changes to my bases - there is a variable in the calculation involving number of previous attacks

^(5) Divide this value by 8, and reduce by up to 16 plus # of previous damages. Set this number aside.

although as I understand the value should only apply to the terraforming ecodamage, NOT the mineral ecodamage, otoh there shouldn't really be any ecodamage seeing my bases mineral production all came from space and there was no terraforming at all. So my guess is that each mindworm attack reduces ecodamage.

A side note - is there any way to add orbital improvments in the scenerio editor without building them?

Blake

[Fitz]

Eco damage will go down over time because it is affected by the technologies you have. The more, the lower your ecodamage rating. It may also be affected by the 'previous damages' caused by planet on you as well. I remember claims that global release of damage (sea level rises, new volcanos) bled off the eco-damage rating as well, but I don't know if I believed it.

I'm pretty damn sure there is a base to global eco-damage flow, but not so sure there is a global to base vector in the calculation.

In other words, I think that global eco-damage is directly calculated in some way from the bases of all factions, but that the base calculation in no way reflaects the global level. Furthermore, it's my personal belief (with nothing to back it up) that there is NOT a seperate global level calculation, that it ONLY calculated from base eco-damages. If that is true, things like boreholes outside of base radii would have zero affect on the global damages.

[MariOne]

just adding .02$

In my experience, in point 6) you have to consider the base NET mineral production.
I verified many times that homing a unit (needing to be supported) to the base with ecodamage shows a decrease in the ED value.

[mark13]

MariOne - that is very strange, because the other day I saw an AI base (Morgan)with 11 minerals, every one of them being used to support a unit (that's the AI for you ). It had 3 eco-damage

[MariOne]

well, I verified it too many times to think now that I dreamt.
NOTE, you won't see that decrease ALWAYS.
The algorythm reported in the datalinks is nto allegedly exact.
I am sure that homing a unit DOES "often" decrase the ED, maybe it's not a linear function of the NET minerals, it could be a mixed value (?).
There are times when, because of rounding, removing a worker from an unterrefaormed 1-mineral tile doesn't change your eco-damage.
You ALL surely know that the AI cheats (never saw 4-cells Nutrient rows? or 3-cell mineral rows?), maybe the ED formula too is screwed for them.
Finally, also terraforming is a component of ED, how was that base?

[mark13]

quote: The algorythm reported in the datalinks is not allegedly exact

Aren't we all surprised

I know forests don't create terraforming eco-damage, so the principal reason the AI builds forests is because they seldom use forests. Predictably, it hadn't in this particular base. But it sounds to me like a non-linear equation - there are clearly several causes for eco-damage, maybe it varies from type to type. Or something like that, anyway. Still, I wouldn't put it past Firaxis....
[This message has been edited by mark13 (edited December 14, 2000).]

[Fitz]

Mari: You do know that the AI gets a +2 Growth/Industry bonus on Transcend level don't you? That could account for some of the cells missing in the nuts tanks/production rows. besides, even a human player has 4 cell nut tank rows when popbooming (+6 growth).

To play with the industry number, Hive +1, Planned +1, Wealth +1, AI Transcend +2 = +5. If they were running Eudomania, that would be your +7, but I can't see you ever letting the AI get that far in a game .

[mark13]

Fitz,
The AI gets a number from 4-8 mineral rows depending on its position in the game. Same with nutrient rows - the technologies are also at cut-price. Industry bonuses on top of that, of course, and you have very few minerals expended....

[MariOne]

(personal note: Mari has a somewhat feminine slant by us, not that I care, but a more appropriate ID abbreviation would be Mario - my actual name btw)

Fitz:
I admit that I am not an expert of all the quirks of the AIs, as I usually don't concentrate all my attention on them.
What I meant is that, despite the alleged "non-cheating AI" claims made by this game developers, we know that the last attempt to make'em a match brought to the same old pattern: give them advantages in the higher levels.
I was suggesting that the AI *might* use corrected formulas for several aspects of the game as well, including EcoDamage, and that all that tinkering by the programmers *might* have sorted sometimes the opposite effect. I was just making a conjecture, I have no clue about it.

But then.
Fitz:"besides, even a human player has 4 cell nut tank rows when popbooming (+6 growth)."
Are you positive about that? Do you talk out of personal experience? Did you actually go and count the row cells under the said condition, or do you "assume" it's like that, out of understandable common sense?
Because we must have been playing a different game in the last two years.
The step from Growth+5 to Growth+6 does NOT furtherly decrease the nutrient rows by one cell!
It ONLY "triggers" PopBooming!!!
NO faction played by a human will ever get below 5 cells in their nutrients row.
As I usually say, I *invite* you to not believe me: go and check for yourself! And if you find out that I'm wrong, I'll be GLAD to stand corrected - AFTER I see the evidences you brought.


About Industry, I admit I never thought to check if a human faction could get below the maximum decrease reported in the datalinks (-50%). I know that for Economy you get ever highr bonuses also past the reported table, it could well be the same for Industry.
What I obviously (I thought) meant, was that the AI had shorter rows length that they could possibly have with the techs the knew at the time.
That was not an issue: I was suggesting that the screwed AI engine could be the cause for the odd EcoDamage, so I cited a well known fact to strengthen the reference to the well known AI cheating.
---
Nothing personal, and sorry for the nitpicking.
This thread was about EcoDamage anyway

[final, funny, tension relieving notation about nut rows length: to be 200% sure, I just tested it in a test scenario. I set up a Gaian base in Golden Age, with Creche, Demo/Planned/Eud = Growth+10 (locally). Place you bets: did it have ZERO-length nut rows?]