Why does nerve gas cause ecological damage?

[CEO Aaron]

Actually, the fact that Atrocities reduce your free mineral cap I'm fine with, it's the fact that repealing the charter makes planet not care that really stymies me. Does Planetmind get a seat on the council or something?

[Commy]

It doesn't make sense. If you launch like 20 Planet Busters, the sea levels rise. Right? So then why is it called a nuclear winter?

[Chaos Theory]

Planet Busters aren't nukes. What nuke takes out an 800 km radius, lowering it into the sea?

[Blake]

Planet has an autoimmune response against "The Planet Death Disease" - Planetmind isn't in full control of this response, but if Planetmind is relatively happy it wont happen. Planetmind is empathic and can feel the pain of humans, prehaps it learns about council through conversations with humans. Prehaps the colonists are just less angry when gassed when the Charter is repeal, like some of them will be thinking "Well we bought this on ourselves" and planetmind might pick that up.

Hard to say why planet doesn't care if you gas aliens, planet probably just doesn't like them. After all, from Planets perspective both the Ursupers and Caretakers have less than noble intentions. (see the humans will help Planet through the flowering, thats AtT, the Caretakers won't. The Ursupers just want to control Planet and become Gods)

[Chaos Theory]

But the planet also doesn't care when the Aliens gas anyone (I presume).

[Commy]

In all truth, it is to emphasize the consequences of nerve gas. It is not realistic that it causes eco damgage only when nerve gassing is illegal and atrocious. The Planetmind, in real life wouldn't know, or care why the nerve-gas is there or why it is being used or under what conditions it is being used. The nerve gas just simply causes eco-damage, it doesn't make the planet mad or go crazy, it justs simply harms it, like pollution and PBs, unleashing disturbed mindworms. And what I really don't get, is why pollution ATTRACTS fungus and causes fungus pops. I mean, obviously Firaxis isn't going to make eco-damage make fungus go away, but it just doesn't make sense...

[smacksim]

Pollution doesn't attract fungus, like fungus was a plant or some other non sentient. Pollution enrages planet, who goes after the source. An equivalent would be if all the seahorses in the coral reef got together and formed a volvox-like mega sphere that went and ate ships that were dumping crud into the sea.

I dont' know why, but this thread is really cracking me up

-S

[Blake]

Planet is sentient and so large and complex and tied in with every living thing on it's surface that it's intentions and reasons are sometimes impossible to entirely fathom

[Enigma_Nova]

As of right now, I'm beleiving the 'game balance' theory. :/
No way planet could have all these exceptions in its logical structure. You make it sound like an earth government.

[Blake]

Pfft game balance is inconsistent and often nonexisitent - rather difficult to believe in.

As for the exact ecodamage effects of nervegas, they were never quite pinned down. I can say it's nothing trivial, like every gas incident giving -1 clean minerals. I suspect how it works, is after so many gas attacks (that may be a variable amount) your faction gets a "major atrocity" worth of clean mineral reduction. It's also possible you can gas unpenalized for a while (to somewhere around 1000 turns of sanctions) then start wracking up clean mineral reductions with each attack. There is definitely some sort of random factor, or an "unknown" factor, like how a >pop< triggers the clean mineral increase ability for treefarms & friends.

[Enigma_Nova]

If you gas 30 things you should have no clean minerals, right?
I suppose it has to become a major thing, but I don't see what separates 1 gassing from 100...

[GeoModder]

Another thing: Does gassing lower your clean minerals, and precipitate a sealevel rise during sunspots, or isn't it 'spotted' by Planetmind then? Reason for asking is that in the last ACDG the CyCon continuisly nervestapled all it's bases, extensively used Xgas Choppers and even gassed and obliterated a few bases to death during sunspot activity. But nothing happened whatsoever in the area of fungal pops and sealevel rises.

[Enigma_Nova]

That question is best answered with
"Do you get Sanctions while Sunspots are active?"
If not, then it isn't processed in the game mechanics.

[Chaos Theory]

Alpha Centauri is a quirky game, and many things have effects you wouldn't expect. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if atrocities that don't cause sanctions still lower your clean minerals. Just think of the airdrop bug, or the demon boil bug, to see what I mean by "quirky".

[smacksim]

Originally posted by Blake
Pfft game balance is inconsistent and often nonexisitent - rather difficult to believe in.

Let's go ask Firaxis. I think there's a good case either way. My vote is for game balance, or rather, for play balance to make penalties for choosing the 'easy road'. There is every reason to do this.

My question is, did the penalties for Nerve Gas come before the clean-mineral penalties? It seems to me that the Gas was added later, probably when someone decided that mere sanctions were not enough. It seems to tap into the ecodamage and global warming system, rather than define it.

Terraforming --> Global warming: Game philosophy rather than balance.

Heavy Minerals Production --> Fungus attacks: Game balance in nature, tacked onto the story.

Gas --> Mad Planet: Definately game balance. Tacked onto the previous two.

Here's my long argument about the above. It's really two things. First, that terraforming/mineral 'Pop!'s and ecodamage were not expected until the mid-game by the designers, and then in small amounts. Secondly, that the 'Green' strategy is much more inconsistent than the play-balancing aspects of ecodamage. These things lead me to suspect that mineral based ecodamage is really a game balancing thing in origin, to try to distract the player who is pulling ahead.

About minerals in the mid-game. It's pretty clear that none of the playtesters used a crawler-heavy strategy. Best evidence is that they are really unbalancing. Secondly, that crawlers are so easy to get to in tech. Third, that they are so cheap (free). Fourth, the AI doesn't use them very much (see below).

Imagine the playtesters.....In the mid-game, one or two players are pulling ahead, often because they were lucky with getting SP's because they had a lot of minerals. Or perhaps they just discovered mineral-duplicating facilities and have the luxury of building them. So now the game throws some distractions at the leaders. Hey, Meteor!. Hey, Planetblight!. Hey, ecodamage at your military mecca! There are many things that seem to point to 'Attack the leading faction' in Smac. Perhaps ecodamage is a small part of that, or was supposed to be.

Crawlers. Without crawlers, when is a faction likely to get a mineral pop? Often, looking at the AI, it's when they build their first mineral producing facility, or in a huge city in the jungle. Sometimes there is ecodamage in an AI city running FM and trying to go to war (painful to watch). The point is, the first 'Pop!' is in the mid-game when mineral-multiplying facilities, satellites, and base-sizes become a factor.

The AI and crawlers: I know what you're thinking: 'The AI stinks at so many things, it's no surprise they don't know how to use crawlers' Yeah, but I think the AI could do it. Just look at how their formers work. They are not that smart, but they get things done nonetheless. The AI knows how to go after special resources and landmarks. There is no reason why it couldn't build a mineral park or energy park. But it doesn't. If the game designers really knew how exploited the crawler would be, they definately would have done something about it. I think it's possible they might have tried to get the AI to use them, which would have required them to rethink ecodamage.

Ecodamage as storyline or game atmosphere/philosophy. Sure, it does add to these things, but it's wildly inconsistent. I was just writing about this in the ACDG gaian pages.
Terraforming is bad: Planet doesn't like it, leads to mad planet.
Terraforming is good: Forests, The Weather Paradigm, the XE dome allowing faster fungal removal?
Trees are good for planet: Tree Farms and Hybrids reducing damage?
Trees are bad for planet: Grow over fungus, which attacks them with pops, rather than just attacking boreholes, etc..
And on and on. It's especially noticible if you play a 'Green' faction and try to think about what they would do, in character, and how planet would react.

Enough rambling.

-Smack

Edit: Forgot to tie this back in with Nerve Gas....

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
Alpha Centauri is a quirky game, and many things have effects you wouldn't expect. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if atrocities that don't cause sanctions still lower your clean minerals. Just think of the airdrop bug, or the demon boil bug, to see what I mean by "quirky".

There are really two kinds of quirky in my opinion. One are those mechanical oddities, like you mention, and then there are the Storyline oddities, like 'Green' philosophy in Smac, which is terribly oversimplified and inconsistent. I think both come from the game not being as thoroughly tested as it could have been. As to ecodamage and nerve gas and 'Green', I think these things were tacked on piecemeal as the game was rebalanced: 'Hey Brian, don't you think we should punish the Nerve Gas users?' 'Yeah, make it make planet angry too...', with little overarching story consistency in mind.

Nerve Gas has little to do with planet. I'm in that camp.

-S