Borehole eco-damage

[lbores]

What is the best strategy to minimize eco-damage from boreholes? Like how many forest squares/hole?

Should boreholes be driven inside a base perimeter or between several bases and then serviced by crawlers?

How many boreholes/base? Or how many max in your territory?

If you have the borehole complex within your territory, do you build a base in the center of the complex?

Same question for Uranium fields as the preceeding.

[Aredhran]

I usually have one, sometimes two boreholes within base radius. To reduce pollution, build Centauri Preserve, Tree Farms and Hybrid Forests. Planting forest does *not* reduce your ecodamage.

It is better to have the boreholes within base radius and have a worker on it, because they take such a long time to build, it would be a waste to only harvest 50% of the ressources they can provide with a crawler.

For the borehole cluster, I usually share it between two bases.

The uranium flats, it really depends. But usually only one base uses it, with a bunch of crawlers for maximized energy input. Great location for a science city.

Aredhran

[lbores]

quote: Originally posted by Aredhran on 02-18-2001 11:16 AM Planting forest does *not* reduce your ecodamage.

Really? Run that by your average tree hugger.

I'm confused here, however. What I've gleaned from this section is that planting forests is good since it reduces eco-damage.

Newbie cries for help! I'm being repressed (or something)!

[Dimension]

For the real formula for eco damage, look in the datalinks under Ecology in Advanced Concepts.

Every kind of terraforming in a base's radius--even roads--gives you eco damage. Boreholes give you 8 eco damage. This damage is reduced by 1 for each forest in the base's radius. BUT, this eco damage is cut in half by the presence of a Tree Farm and completely eliminated by the presence of a Hybrid Forest in the base.

Early in the game, your cities usually aren't producing enough minerals to cause much damage, and later in the game you should have a Hybrid Forest to negate that, anyway.

So, what you really have to worry about is the number of minerals being produced by a city. The only thing that determines eco damage once you have a Hybrid Forest is your planet rating and your mineral production.

Again, look at the formula in the datalinks. A forest reduces damage from terraforming by 1. Tree Farms reduce damage from terraforming by 50%. Hybrid Forests remove all damage from terraforming. The rest of the damage is from mineral production. Centauri Preserves, Temples of Planet and Nanoreplicators each cumulatively reduce the remaining eco damage (from mineral production) by 50%, 67%, and then 75%.

Eventually you're going to want all your bases to have Hybrid Forests. Whenever one of your major production centers grows, builds a damage reducing facility, builds a mineral enhancing facility, or starts crawling more minerals, you should check your city screen. If you've started causing eco damage, you should probably either (a) re-assign a mineral crawler to get energy instead or (b) pull back a worker and make him an Engineer/Thinker/Transcend.

One common mistake is to think that drilling boreholes is going to really screw things up as far as eco damage. Not true. It's very easy to run a city with two or three boreholes without any eco damage. If your formers have nothing better to do, you can run a base with six boreholes and not have much to worry about if you've got a Hybrid Forest.

I did think that base population factored into the amount of minerals you could produce before causing damage, but the formula in the datalinks doesn't say that. Of course, it's still pretty vague about what you do with your "Ecology%" after you get it, and what the threshold is before causing damage.

It's really not a good idea to run a city with eco damage, especially once you're into the 2300's. You can often run a city with eco damage for a single turn and you'll lose a forest and the road that was on it to fungus. Even if you really don't mind having to re-terraform all the time (which is dumb, because you're losing production while you rebuild), you have to consider where your crawlers are. You may have a big stack of beefy trance garrisons in the city, but the mindworms that popped up will probably go for your crawlers first. If you're going to run with eco damage, you'll want some pretty serious stuff in the city that can kill big stacks of mindworms in one turn before they go for your crawlers, like at least a couple Elite Empath Resonance Bolt choppers. They'll have to be able to get about 10 worms at a time with the fungus bonus.

[cbn]

The only real answer to most of your questions on this one is " it depends". If you go through the older threads you will find some good discussion on what goes into calculating ecodamage for the base.

Planet rating seems to be huge. Toy with this sometime once you have a fair bit of terraforming done. Switch from green to FM and watch the eco danmage numbers skyrocket. So how much terraforming you can do before Planet starts reacting vigourously depends on how planet friendly you are.

The other reason "it depends" is because differnet players run very different strategies when it comes to ecodamage. I can think of a few (note that these are not really discrete but merely examples across the range of possibilities

1. Eco-friendly-- this player hates the ideas of searises and fungal blooms destroying terraforming and takes all necessary steps to avoid ecodamage -- probably only 1 borehole a base and is very careful to build ecofriendly facilities

2. Ordinary Joe -- Just like in real life I suspect most players are in the range that will accept small amounts of ecodamage in order to maximize production-- probably 1-2 boreholes per base with eco-friendly facilities or switching workers when eco-damage starts to get too high.

3 Selective polluter-- This strat is to have a base that is designed to have high ecodamage. There would likely be 4 boreholes and a lot of mined rocky squares with NO eco-friendly facilities. The high production from this base is a beneficial side effect since the main idea is to ATTRACT lots of worms/locusts. The base is stacked with resonance/trance defenders and resonance empath attackers. You would be amazed at how much cash you can gain.

4. The polluter/terraformer -- The idea here is to maximize production and pearl hunting. There are boreholes and mines and terraforming everywhere and the fact that there are going to be sea rises is a given. This strategy requires a lot of formers to keep out of the water. The idea is to get as much production as possible and live with the fact that you are going to be terraforming up constantly to stay out of the water. Fungicidal Formers are also necessary for clearing back fungal blooms. Empath and trance troops are also required here for the inevitable cash bonanza from worm hunting. I've done this type of strategy a few times in SP and it can work (kind of fun to sink the AI into the sea). However it is very slow to do since you need a lot of terraformers to keep pace with the damage and a lot of units for killing worms. Turns got kind of long.

All of the above is kind of a long way to say "it depends". Some specifics on your other questions

Boreholes are better worked than crawled since they yield both 6 min and 6e and the crawler can only take 1 type of production. That said most of my bases get 1 borehole (maybe 2) that are worked. The bulk of the remaining boreholes are crawled back to a super science city so the energy can go through the effects of the best infrastructure and Secret Projects. Other boreholes(the minerals) are crawled back to production centres to attain desired production levels. I like to have as many bases as I can that can pump out a crawler a turn, or a needle a turn etc.

I have no maximim number of boreholes and tend to build them every second square along the coast. Depending on the surrounding terrain I usually build the bases such that 3 bases can take advantage of 1-2 of thos boreholes in the Borehole Complex each. I did plop a base in the middle once but it takes a long while for the base to be able to use all three (ie to have enough nuts coming in to keep the base population up while 3 workers provide an aggregate of 0 nutrients.

Uranium flats-- This area doesn't affect my base spacing much and I wouldn't go out of my way to ensure there was one base in the center. I usually end up with 2-4 bases that can use some of the squares. I do find the UF as a great place for boreholes and also rivers (they seem to meander through a lot of squares).

[Neuromancer]

quote: Originally posted by cbn on 02-18-2001 12:00 PM Planet rating seems to be huge. Toy with this sometime once you have a fair bit of terraforming done. Switch from green to FM and watch the eco danmage numbers skyrocket. So how much terraforming you can do before Planet starts reacting vigourously depends on how planet friendly you are.

It's huge up to +3. Beyond that, it doesn't help any further. The formula in the datalinks has a term "3-Planet" that it multiples by several other terms to get your final rating, which I thought algebraically might produce a zero final rating if you had a 3 or higher Planet rating. But it doesn't. (Actually, I'm not sure there is even a difference between +2 and +3, since at a 3 or higher rating it seems to use a 1 for that term in the equation.)

Under desperate mind worm siege, I also rush built the Pholus Mutagen, which seemed to have no impact at all. I couldn't find anywhere in the datalinks or the manual what exactly it was supposed to do.

[MariOne]

We suppose that anyone interested enough to ask about how EcoDamage actually works has already studied the datalinks formula.

We *know* that it *says* that each forested square reduce the ED by one.

What probably Aredhran wanted to intend, is that the Datalikns state how the ED formula is *supposed* to work.
How it *actually* works, has been the matter of *many* debates here at Apolyton, most of them I must have missed .

Some say that the formula reported in the datalinks is completely unrelated to the actual mechanism.
In my experience so far I have to say that probably it is not exact till the last digit, but I pretty much found out that the stated principles are grossly reflected in the figures I obtain.
It's still a bit obscure to me the exact meaning of sentences like "reduce by up to...".
You can verify tho that:
- increasing production has an effect on the ED
- sometimes with low figure I found out that homing an additional unit to the base, reducing the NET minerals, "can" reduce a bit the ED (probably depending on how it's rounded up)
- if you obtain the same number of minerals with a different amount of terraforming in the base, the ED is different
- even shifting workers between tiles yelding the same minerals, can show a variation in ED (e.g. from a mineral bouns forest to a mine)
- try having many forests, some with roads and some without. You can see that if you place your workers on the forets with roads, your ED will be higher than on forests without roads, the rest unchanged.
- with the Mutagen, I experienced a strange effect: while beofre my ED could increase by small numbers, with it it increased in big leaps. That is I could add even 4 minerals to my production before it jumped from 5 to 10.

Of course parameters with a heavy impact, like the difficulty and lifeforms levels (fixed within a game), or the Planet Rating, will lower on enhance the sensitivity to other variables like production and terraforming, making your observations more or less awkward to determine.

I don't have the Prima Guide, but IIRC those who have it reported that ther a more detailed formula can be found. One I know who has it is Googlie.

[Sikander]

Ecodamage is one of the most complex formulae, and I have yet to hear a definitive explanation of it's various aspects. There seem to be at least two types of ecodamage, and possibly three: terraforming damage, total (empire-wide) mineral output damage, and base total mineral output ecodamage.

As stated above terraforming ecodamage is no trouble at all. I terraform about as much as is possible (roads and mag tubes on every square, boreholes, Farm/condensor/soil enrichers, kelp/tidal harness etc.) I never seem to have any trouble from the game regarding this as long as I build tree farms and eventually hybrid forests. I only harvest from between 10 and 15 squares per base, and a vast majority of that is crawler production.

Total mineral production formulae are given in the datalinks as well as the prima guide, but there is enough ambiguity in the terminology as well as unexplained effects that what is written should be taken as generally correct but not complete.

I never have any but the slightest ecodamage because I don't produce obnoxious amounts of minerals until:

1) I can build a few temple of planets and centauri preserves (which are standard in well-developed bases).The total number of these facilities is used as a divisor (according to the datalinks / prima) of the gross mineral production number, so building the first one has a large effect. Building them in all of your big bases allows a great deal more mineral production without ecodamage.

2) I can get my minerals from space via the nessus mining stations.

Previous to that I run around 15 to 20 minerals (whatever gives me no to very little ecodamage) This is enough to do what I need in the game, which is build facilities halfway (and then complete them by buying them), and building trained unit shells (and upgrading them), and of course building crawlers. I substitute money for minerals to avoid ecodamage, and I get my money from food (food = engineers = money) rather than energy, although the game doesn't really seem to penalize either energy or food production.

As my ecodamage free mineral production capability increases, I increase my mineral production to meet it by building the various factory type facilities rather than increasing my raw mineral production. This happens in the mid game to late game. When satelite production is available I don't hardly ever build mines or boreholes anymore (perhaps one or two in a new base to get it started), just satelites and farm/condensor/soil enrichers (with the Cloning Vats or SE selections for perpetual pop boom). Every two food produces 1 Min, 1 Energy and 1 food, as well as a large amount of Labs / Econ / Psych from the Transendent or Engineer. Every land square is a gold mine at this point, because it can be made into a 6 food producing square. It produces better than late game fungus or boreholes.

[Blake]

Boreholes, I build lots of them, at the maximum density possible, and I plan my city layout so they never fall where a borehole eventually gets placed, if the land is sloped I lower it then build the borehole.

The eco-damage formula is indeed complex, and atleast in part the one in the datalinks is not correct either.

But I have noticed the following things, and can support them from the formula.

Cent. Preserves do NOT help you achieve zero ecodamage, building a preserve does NOT let you produce more eco-damage free minerals. How it works is building a preserve HALVES ecodamage, so if you produced 60 before, after your produce 30. If you produced 2 before, after building you produced 1 (wahoo, from building a preserve you decreased ecodamage by 1!!!!) Cent.Preserves and the like ONLY work in the base they are built in.

Ditto for planet, it acts to multiply the effect of ecodamage, switching to green from FM never allows you to produce more eco-damage free minerals.

The only things you should build to help you have 0 ecodamage are:
Forests
Tree Farms
Hybrid Forest (Interestingly the HF means you can replace all of your forest with "dirty" terraforming, at no penalty).

And that's it.

The other things you can do to increase your free mineral threshold is cause ecodamage, the more planet attacks you the more tolerant it gets, in fact if the (part of the) formula is correct then it should equate to +1 free mineral for each attack. So once you have hybrid forest you can't increase your mineral production and remain ecodamage free until you increase your ecodamage and have planet attack you. I'm sure theres a third factor, possibly to do with tech, but I know for sure simply researching cent. meditation does NOT let you produce more eco-damage free minerals. I'm 90% sure the worm attack effect is why some players have had bases producing hundreds of minerals with no ecodamage.

But it holds that if your base produces 0 ecodamage, and you intend to keep it that way then don't bother with a preserve, they don't let you increase your production, they only reduce the chance of an attack.

Minerals from orbits are completely clean ASSUMING you DON'T put them through a +50% mineral facilty. So if you want to keep 0 ecodamage don't build such facilities.

Now it's all different if you want to say, never have ecodamage above 15 in your bases. But I prefer to have NO chance of ecodamage, remembering that even a base with 2 ecodamage can and most likely will spawn a dozen worms someplace bad at a bad time. That or I accept ecodamage, and expect it to happen, in which case I'm worm farming and want to maximise ecodamage to maximise profit.

The final factor is the Voice Of Planet, it seems this SP completely eliminates the chance of fungal growth, so once you've built it fear mindworms no longer.

So the result is I almost never build preserves, in short, they are worthless for a cash based strategy (not quite worthless, you still get the +1 lifecycle, but at expense of 2 credits per turn).

[Aredhran]

quote: Originally posted by Blake on 02-19-2001 10:55 PM Cent.Preserves and the like ONLY work in the base they are built in.

That is absolutely wrong. Check it.

[Walt]

quote: Originally posted by Aredhran on 02-20-2001 07:30 AM That is absolutely wrong. Check it.

So...where else would it have an effect? Sorry if that's a dumb question, but I've not been in on the previous iterations of this discussion either.

[Blake]

I would like to see proof that preserves act globally (This COULD be a version thing...) because I have fairly conclusive proof they DON'T act globablly.

I'm not sure about global ecodamage, I'm not sure what global ecodamage is considered, sea level rises and chance of volcano activity prehaps. But I'm talking about the the per base ecodamage here.

Building a preserve in one base, does NOT reduce ecodamage in another base.

Anyway, here was my test.

I started a game as Roze (neutral faction) and using the scenerio editor gave all tech and set up four identical bases as follows:
Size 9
Terraforming, lots of forest, 3 boreholes being worked.

Facilities
Tree Farm, Hybrid Forest, Robotic plant, Quantum Convertor, drone control. This ensures ecodamage is well over 100 and fungus should grow every turn.

I also set up a controlled fungal growth areas, so the fungus never changes which square a worker works.

I save it as this setup.
1st test: I play for 5 turns, removing fungus and worms using editor.

2nd test: I add a cent preserve to two bases

3rd Test: I then play for 5 turns.

4th test, I delete the bases preserves from 3rd test (to see if preserves reduce ecodamage for each turn they exist)

Here is a table of ecodamage for each of my 4 bases
2100 1 Preserve 2 preserves
382 191 191
382 382 382
382 382 191
382 382 382

2105 2 Preserves Preserves scraped
249 125 249
249 249 249
249 125 249
249 249 249

That would seem conclusive to me that preserves only reduce ecodamage in the base they are built, and only while they exist.

Now, I'll try to explain why the ecodamage went down.
Each time planet "attacks" your ecodamage goes down in all bases. Planet attacked me 20 times, which is why ecodamage went down. This is my point, every time planet attacks you ecodamage goes down. If planet has attacked you hundreds of times you can produce hundreds of minerals without creating ecodamage.

THIS IS SUPPORTED BY THE ECODAMAGE FORMULA

Anyway, I'd still like to see that evidence for preserves acting globally.

Edit: I'm trying to work out this concept of "global" ecodamage, The only ecodamage induced events which depend on some form of global ecodamage is sea level rise, and volcano erupt (possibly other random events too), which effect all factions. There is no formula for global ecodamage in the datalinks. So I assume (possibly incorrectly) that global ecodamage is simply the sum of every bases individual ecodamage. Preserves definetly reduce the ecodamage in one base, and therfore that base adds a reduced amount to global ecodamage, that is the only possible sense a preserve could reduce global ecodamage, atleast assuming most of the ecodamage formula is correct, and the base display screen is correct.
[This message has been edited by Blake (edited February 20, 2001).]

[Aredhran]

I'm at work and don't have access to the datalinks to give you the exact formula, but preserves and temples GLOBALLY reduce ecodamage, not for the base that builds it.

[Skanderbeg]

I don't know if there is an exact formula, but after my knowledge, there are three "elements" of ecodamage:

1. base ecodamage, caused by terraforming and mineral production.

2. faction ecodamage, which is sum of base ecodamage + ecodamage by atrocities

for my experience and knowledge, tree farms and hybrid forest influence only base ecodamage, but centaury preserves and temple of planets influence both faction ecodamage AND base ecodamage. So, building a centaury preserve in one of your bases, no matter which base, will help You in every base.

3. global ecodamage, which is sum of faction ecodamagages

global ecodamage influences the sea level changes.

[Fitz]

quote: Originally posted by Skanderbeg on 02-21-2001 10:41 AM I don't know if there is an exact formula, but after my knowledge, there are three "elements" of ecodamage: 2. faction ecodamage, which is sum of base ecodamage + ecodamage by atrocities for my experience and knowledge, tree farms and hybrid forest influence only base ecodamage, but centaury preserves and temple of planets influence both faction ecodamage AND base ecodamage. So, building a centaury preserve in one of your bases, no matter which base, will help You in every base.

What the hell is faction eco-damage, and what does it affect.

I'm sorry, but I've heard this Global eco-damage and building Cent Preserve heps every base thing for ever, but I've never seen any proof. I agree with Blake. Building a Centauri Preserve only helps you in the base you build it in as regarding base eco-damage. It will, of course, be a global factor as regarding sea levels and volcanos.

I think this false assumption that Cent Preserves and Temple o Planets have an affect beyond the base they are in comes from a misreading of the eco-damage formula. It is possible (vaguely) to interpret the line of the formul that says something like 'add one for every Cent Preserve, Nano replicator, & Temple' as everyone in ALL your bases, but what it means is everyone in THAT base, out of those three items.

In other words, the first gives you 50% damage relief, the second 67%, and the third 75%.

Blake, thank you very much for that test. I've been planning to do it for a while, to clear up this misreading of the formula.

Mari: I disagree that the formula is incorrect (out side of the Planet rating thing). In my experience, it works fine. Every point you listed is covered by an aspect of the formula.

[This message has been edited by Fitz (edited February 21, 2001).]