Why does nerve gas cause ecological damage?

[Dis]

Originally posted by Blake
... unless it's a scenerio where raise/lower land is disabled. heh.

I'm trying to determine how the gas works, playing as pyscotic Data Angels and gassing everyone off the face of planet.

Heres how it seems to work:
You gas up to a bit over 1000 turns of sanctions, not one pf these attacks causes ED.
Then ALL the factions declare Vendetta on you.
At this point, Planet decides to start taking it personally also, each gas attack now reduces clean minerals by 1.

So please yourself if you decide it's game balance, or Planet empathicly picking up the overwhelming hate for your faction.

edit: Err nope, seems to be a MAJOR atrocity with every gassing, meaning -5 Clean Minerals, my Angels are going to be harvesting planetpearls for eons....

yeah that's the point it got bad. when everyone declared war on me. I forgot everyone was at war. No one was close, so it was no biggie. But planet is always close

thanks for the testing. If I had been more prepared for planet uprising, I could have gotten all that cash. But instead they overran my weakly defended bases and I could not rush defenders. So I lost every base but one.

[Blake]

For me an emergency switch to green and changing all my production to empath rovers allowed me to survive quite easily. But it would be very hard without Cent.Empathy.

[Blake]

Check this out, at the beginning of the next turn I complete the Pholus Mutagen, and it appears it DOUBLES my ecodamage. I go back, and replace the PM with another SP, and my ED remains normal.

Prehaps the ED reducer SP's actually increase atrocity induced ED? And I mean, as in DOUBLES the clean mineral reduction, like if I have -50 clean minerals from atrocities, that changes to -100, meaning every bases with 0 production can be pumping out ED in the hundreds, under Green. It's something like that anyway. And get this, adding Cent. Preserves or Temple of Planet doesn't help, in fact it further INCREASES ED.

When I reload the previous turn, and add a CP to a base, ED massively INCREASES.

So those ED reducing facilities, BACKFIRE massively when you've been having fun with nervegas and tossing PB's around like confetti. Thankfully the ++ planet still works! It's going to be something of a miracle if I can survive this game.

*** I'm also pleased I didn't try to figure out atrocity ED back when doing the whole ED formula thing, this is HEAVY stuff and probably requires atleast as much investigation as the mineral-based ED.

[Blake]

The save.

edit: You might notice I decided to load the save in the Scenerio Editor, Pact all the AI's together and give them each 30/30/30 orbitals. That was done about 5 turns ago. I thought they might offer more resistence that way...

[Dis]

There's much I need to learn . I'm still a newbie.

I take it you have mineral based ED and I guess the other is based off of atrocities. But atrocities lower the clean mineral limit. How does the clean mineral limit work exactly?

[Blake]

Read the column on the original findings, thats all true. Note that most the experimenting/testing (ie drudging through games taking notes) was done by yours truly, Fitz did some of the technical/mathematical stuff. Ned wrote the column and made it happen. I guess we all worked on the terminolgy and bounced ideas back and forth. At one point I joked I'm the only person who ever actually tests stuff.... Heh. Guess it wasn't a joke


The Original ED thread, mainly locking horns with MariOne. Theres stuff I knew in that thread that I've forgotten now

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7628

The Main "Guts of ED" thread, where Ned, Fitz and Myself hammer away at the problem until ED yields it's secrets...

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7907

2001 really was the year of SMAC discovery, great times, great times.

[smacksim]

Hey Blake, thanks for posting those old links. They were the days of discovery here at 'poly. I was newer than you all to the game and had a great time trying to learn from the masters and do experiments of my own.

Ever hear from Ned? He was a great theorist, especially about the AI and pacifist setting, etc...

I just downloaded this game. I fear the worms!

-Smack

[smacksim]

Not that 666 meter searises are enough. Someone wants craters too...there were about 12 pops on that turn, with maybe 40 or so worms and sporelaunchers showing up for the party. Have you thought maybe there is some variable that might be getting multiplied by -1 accidentally? Those hybrid forests did nothing for me on first inspection.

[Blake]

I've already lobbed 2 Planetbusters ...err.. I mean Freedom Bombs!!!*, one to take out Dawn of Planet and 2 other cult bases, another at some Gaian bases that kept sending airraids.

It's possible theres some negative factor somewhere. But heres something interesting, adjusting "Major Atrocities" in faction diplomacy (shift-F9 with Scenerio editor activated) directely changes ecodamage, this could have some interesting applications for scenerios.

* (run a mile screaming if Bush ever announces a new weapon with "Freedom" or "Liberty" in it's name)

[smacksim]

That should make it somewhat easier to narrow down atrocity effects on ED. Another consideration is that it might take 2 turns for ED to be updated due to using a PB; One for the PB, 1 for the faction's reaction to bounce back onto the PB'er in terms of ecodamage.

As Dave Letterman said a couple of months ago after making a years worth of Bush jokes: 'Gosh, I'm going to miss that guy.'

-S

[Whoha]

Re: Why does nerve gas cause ecological damage?

Originally posted by Dissident
You are damage humans nervous systems, not Planet.

To tell you the truth, I had forgotten they caused ecological damage. Well when I performed 2900 years worth of sanctions of nerve gassing, I was in for a nasty surprise. I knew there was another drawback, I just couldn't remember (yes I could check the in game help, but I get lazy). Well I was anally raped by aliens after that. What can I say. But at least I took out the hive who had attack 4 weapons and plasma steel defense, and I only had lasers . but I lost the game due to losing all my bases to aliens. (except the last which was taken by the believers who picked on my last base). but it's kind of fun losing sometimes. Well maybe not. It's something I never allow happen usually. But just for the hell of it, I continued playing.

well I was going to give you all a screenshot, but all the land comes up black in my picture viewer/program. you can only see the unit shields, and city names. oh well.

I suppose they did this for game balance. Nerve gas would be too tempting to use otherwise. As sanctions aren't that big a deal. I could deal with 2900 years of sanctions . well actually when I play peaceful factions, sanctions were the sole reason I did not use never gas.

It isn't environmental damage so much as planet's reaction to the event. The mind worms get uppity if you build a road, so its not a stretch that gassing a fairly large area would anger them.

If you take the appropriate measures(building and selling off preserves, building large quantities of troops) you can mitigate or eliminate this.

[Dis]

Originally posted by Blake
Read the column on the original findings, thats all true. Note that most the experimenting/testing (ie drudging through games taking notes) was done by yours truly, Fitz did some of the technical/mathematical stuff. Ned wrote the column and made it happen. I guess we all worked on the terminolgy and bounced ideas back and forth. At one point I joked I'm the only person who ever actually tests stuff.... Heh. Guess it wasn't a joke


The Original ED thread, mainly locking horns with MariOne. Theres stuff I knew in that thread that I've forgotten now

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7628

The Main "Guts of ED" thread, where Ned, Fitz and Myself hammer away at the problem until ED yields it's secrets...

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7907

2001 really was the year of SMAC discovery, great times, great times.

cool. Thanks

[Lazerus]

I think each normal atrocity decreases your clean mins limit by one, increasing the likelihood of ecodamage, which causes global warming. Gassing the aliens is not an atrocity and does not cause this. Atrocities while the UN Charter is repealed also do not cause this. I don't know if sunspots would have this effect.

It might be that killing a unit with gas gives -1 clean minerals, and attacking a base gives -5.

From looking through my saves, it seems the ED for the gassings expires after 10 turns.

So those ED reducing facilities, BACKFIRE massively when you've been having fun with nervegas and tossing PB's around like confetti. Thankfully the ++ planet still works! It's going to be something of a miracle if I can survive this game.

Aahhh !!! lovely valuable information. No wonder i have a base with 2 minerals doing 50 eco damage, though it is curious why i have some bases with more minerals doing less and why when i work a square that is just producing 2 nutrients and 1 energy it increases the eco damage ?
Also, despite the fact my entire empire now averages out at about 100 eco damage per base i've suffered relatively little in the way of pops and only 1 333m sea rise so far. Have i achieved some sort of rollover or am i going to load my next turn and be dead ?
-1 clean mineral per atrocity .. im at 8000 years of sanctions so thats something along the lines of a clean mineral limit of -150 ? ...

One more question if anyone is still around from this discussion, say i commit two atrocities 5 years apart. Do they both go 10 years after the last atrocity or 10 years from when they're committed so that i get a gradual decline in eco damage?

phew ! at finding out about the pholus mutagen thing doubling the effect of the eco damage from atrocities

[Blake]

I never did quite get down into the guts of atrocity eco damage, you could always take notes.

One more question if anyone is still around from this discussion, say i commit two atrocities 5 years apart. Do they both go 10 years after the last atrocity or 10 years from when they're committed so that i get a gradual decline in eco damage?

You do get a gradual decline, but since I was constantly commiting new atrocities I'm not entirely sure how that decline works.

*Remembers the Freedom Bomb*. Definitely one of my more inspired unit names .

[Lazerus]

Think i'm probably too deep into all the numbers for me to figure out whats been happening though, committed literally hundreds of staples, plenty of gassings and such so i've no idea what my atrocities are like in the minor/major category and when they were committed for watching for any decrease (while at the same time i am still at war with all bar one faction on planet so plenty more gassings to come)