Confessions of a former eco-wimp

[Earwicker]

Originally posted by Ironwood
Probably the greatest amount of ecodamage I ever ran was when I was playing Alien Crossfire and I built that project that ups the take from fungus squares according to your green rating (I was running a Green Cyber-Democracy, persuing Wealth as Morgan, I believe). I quickly found that those squares were more productive than any other, had all the factories going, so I simply allowed fungal blooms to take over entirely, and raked in the planetpearls!

Yes, the Manifold "Drown the World" Harmonics. Sends late-game eco-damage through the roof the higher your planet rating. Ironic: the less terraforming/ more fungus bases which are most planet-friendly are the ones with the best production and hence the worst damage. Go figure. I was playing as Cha, with +7 Planet, and the world sudenly went nuts. Luckily, I was nearly to Transcend before the sea levels started drowning all my little tree-huggers.

I haven't tried building this since discovering that pops were vaccinations against Ecodamage (I went back to SMAC the last couple of months).

[knowhow2]

I pick the second choice from top. Seems to be the most common choice among players.

Fungal is irritating but industry is important enough. So a balance is optimal.

[TeknoMerc]

I also chose B, but like Blake and others, I do at least 1-2 boreholes/base. since I always play TORTURE MOD (crawlerless, tech stag), I tend to forest much more and beeline for restriction lift and satellites.

[Spathi]

What is the eco-damage equation? From your comments I assume it isn't the one in the game Datalinks, since IIRC it doesn't factor in fungal blooms at all.

[Spathi]

Equation

What is the eco-damage equation? From your comments I assume it isn't the one in the game Datalinks, since IIRC it doesn't factor in fungal blooms at all.

[Avenoct]

The ecodamage formula in-game is incomplete. The formula referred to was uncovered by Ned, Blake, and Fitz. It was top-ed in this forum for awhile, and certainly should always be. Yet, do a search on 'Ecodamage Formula Revised' with the author's names and it should pop (hehe) up right quick.

I chose the no-ecodamage position because the poll makes the silly dichotomy between No-Ecodamage -VS- Lots of Minerals. As others have noted, One Uses:
Lots of minerals to get to a little ecodamage,
which you use to eliminate ecodamage (building tree farms, etc, after the first pop),
which you take advantage of by having lots of clean minerals and,
No ecodamage.

-S-

[DilithiumDad]

What I was TRYING to get at with the poll was whether people are pursuing the strategy of deliberately causing eco-damage in order to reduce eco-damage. It seems that just about everyone on these forums has grasped and accepted this paradox, but that's not reflected in the poll results.

[MariOne]

Spathi, if you read the Datalinks formula, where it talks of "# of damages" that's the point where it refers to what you call "fungal blooms". It's maybe rather obscure, but it DOES factor them in.
Apart a couple of minor details (the Planet factor can't get below 1, and eco-reducing facilities also dampen atrocities effects), the fromula in the datalinks DOES report the functioning of EcoDamage pretty well.

The only significant finding of Ned, Fitz & Blake over what you can read in the datalinks, is the effect of the building of TreeFarms and other eco-related facilities after the first pop, in rasing the parameter of "up to 16" that you can read in the formula.

[SITS]

Re: Equation

Originally posted by Spathi
What is the eco-damage equation? From your comments I assume it isn't the one in the game Datalinks, since IIRC it doesn't factor in fungal blooms at all.

If you go to the front page of 'Poly and look for Newsletter #175 you will find a very good article about it. Alternatively you can buy Vel's SMAC/X guide which is very very good and also has details about the game.

If you can't find them then give me a shout...