A question to marketeers

[Leon Trotsky]

Inspired by some comments in these forums, I decided to play a game as Morgan and run Free Market from turn five to the very end, and I came across a serious problem. Drones? Meh, a 20% psych compensates for the lack of police, and the monetary benefits still are astounding. Mindworms? All my bases have trance garrisons, and the most polluting include trained scout patrols (later, empath rovers). No problem with that. What is making the game almost impossible to play (actually it's my second try) is the rise of sea levels. Sure, I have an army of formers constantly terraforming up, but all those wages might have been spent in an energy park or any fancy advanced terraforming. Besides, I have lost many good landmarks by doing so (uranium flats, manifold nexus). I have also lost many bases to washing (perhaps I should stop drilling for aquifers when playing marketeer). How do you evil capitalists manage to hold the waves? I begin to think that wealth+morgan/golden age is a much better way to get +2 economy.

Before you ask, no, I haven't commited a single atrocity in those experiments.

[Chaos Theory]

You must learn the way of clean minerals.

[Leon Trotsky]

Aren't crawler minerals clean? Because most of my income in my heavy polluting bases (which soon became the only polluting bases at all, thanks to pop booms) is crawled. I even took advice from a friend who crawls boreholes... I know that's wrong, but I was desperate! Even building Tree Farms in every base didn't seem to help (don't worry, every base was working at least three forest tiles). I ended working kelp farms with tidal harnesses instead of boreholes...

Anyway, I started a game with Yang and probe raped Morgan dry as a vengance. Something I did in this last game was turning the polluting switch off as soon as sea levels began to rise, changing my workers to specialists in my HQ (the industry heavier base) and crawling its boreholes for energy. I thought I'd never live to see the day environmental damage planning was an important part of my strategy... would that be a sign that I am becoming, like, less a bad player?

[dmm1285]

Morgan doesn't start with any worse green rating than anyone else, and the green rating doesn't affect pollution that much anywyas, so I'm not sure why you're having such big eco damage. If anything, I'd think you'd tend to have less, with Morgan's tendancy to smaller bases. The major limitation of Morgan that I DO find annoying is hab complex limit, that's a pain.

[Leon Trotsky]

I didn't mean that Morgan was the cause of my problems, it is just a coincidence that I decided to play my first 100% Free Market game with that faction.

[Petek]

Originally posted by Leon Trotsky
Aren't crawler minerals clean?

No! You need to reduce your ecodamage by building Tree Farms and Centauri Preserves (and later Hybrid Forests and Temples of Planet), but only after the first >pop<. If you've built these in every base, but still have ecodamage, you can disband the Centauri Preserves and rebuild them. See Ned's article for details.

[CEO Aaron]

Yep, Ned's article is the key to your defeating planet. However, you needn't read it all to find the fix, I'll just tell you:

Use mineral crawlers to force one fungal pop before you build any tree farms. That's it. Without the fungal pop, your clean mineral count is static, and the only effect of building eco-facilities is to reduce the amount of eco-damage by a (tiny) percentage.

Once you get that first pop event, however, Planet becomes aware of your presence, and credits you one free mineral per base, per Tree Farm, Centauri Preserve and Temple of Planet you build.

So, if you have an empire of 30 bases and build tree farms in all of them before your first fungal pop, every mineral after the 12th or so will inevitably cause _some_ eco-damage. If, on the other hand, you force the fungal pop before your tree farms are built, your clean mineral limit will vault to 42 or so.

[Leon Trotsky]

Originally posted by Petek
No! You need to reduce your ecodamage by building Tree Farms and Centauri Preserves (and later Hybrid Forests and Temples of Planet), but only after the first >pop<. If you've built these in every base, but still have ecodamage, you can disband the Centauri Preserves and rebuild them. See Ned's article for details.

But I DID force my first pop boom! I think I even held building my first tree farms until then... and Centauri Preserves were quite distant when the floods started.

[Mart]

It all moves the ecodamage limit, still does not remove it completely. Having a lot of energy, you often buy (hurry) things, not having many minerals. it is good to have though limit of 10 (or any other, that doubles hurry cost).

[Darrell01]

Whoah, whoah, whoah. >pop< is not the same thing as Pop Boom. Population Boom is +1 citizen in a city if it has +2 nutrients or more. >pop< is a fungal pop in the city. Now, how I've heard it explained elsewhere is you keep your cities below the ecodamage limit, exept for one city. This city has a couple 1-3tres sentinels (resonance 3 armor and hypnotic trance and possibly trained if you can do it.) and 6eres-1 infantry and/or rovers. This city is constantly at 40 ecodamage per turn or so. Every time the city experiences a fungal pop because of the mineral production or population pollution, the number of clean minerals you can produce increases by one. (++clean_minerals) Now, this starts out at 15, the first pop, you can increase it. The second one, it ups to 16. Any more than that will increase it *and* pop the mind worms. Now if you only have one city doing this and your clean mineral production is increasing, all the rest of your cities will produce less ecodamage (check them every turn, expecially if you are in population boom) and your sea levels will not rise. I've imagined the formula to determine whether the sea levels rise has to do with the added total of ecodamage per turn in all cities on Planet. This total is increased with all the ecodamage. I also imagine that there is some subtraction to this total, so it can run back down to zero. Now doing the ecodamage in one city and not 16, will allow the Planet to absorb the pollution and process it without having to raise the sea levels. Hope this helps.

[CEO Aaron]

Originally posted by Leon Trotsky

But I DID force my first pop boom! I think I even held building my first tree farms until then... and Centauri Preserves were quite distant when the floods started.

Fungal Pop, not Population Boom. You know, the event you wound up seeing later, where your improvements on a tile would explode and get replaced with fungus and a pile of mindworms? That's what we're talking about.

[Leon Trotsky]

I'm sorry, that's the one I meant. I mistook the term, but trust me that I meant fungal pop. I should only post here sober...

[Sikander]

It's a mystery, I've never had that problem in hundreds of games. I usually don't have more than two pops in a game unless I'm courting them. Perhaps the other factions were causing sea level rises?

[Leon Trotsky]

No more thant two pops? At some point, I had one every other turn... perhaps I should have stopped working those boreholes and just crawled their energy.

[Mart]

I remember, the most polluting faction is named when a message informing about sea level is displayed. If you have a save on that, you can check if it was you or not.