Pollution Issue

[Spac3y]

Pollution like any city is an issue, however, even when you move the pollution out to the farthest away from the city, it makes no differrence, and in my mind it should, otherwise this will always be a quality of life issue and hit your ranking. Pollution should be an issue of course but the further away from the city it should improve the rating

Polution beofre. Quality of life rating Zero

enviroment before.png (2.47 MiB) Viewed 2721 times

Heres after I moved the 68 factories out from the city to the corner. As you can see the pollution is quite abit away from the city itself, but no improvement at all to quality of life ?

cant do anything else.png (2.96 MiB) Viewed 2721 times

I cant do anything else to sort the pollution, the citys will need factories so something me thinks may need tweaked !

[eleaza]

I cant do anything else to sort the pollution, the citys will need factories so something me thinks may need tweaked !

Factories not just need to be away from high land price area (like nearby civic buildings) and residentials (mansions included), but also need to be a bit apart from each other. From my experiences, like 3 to 5 tiles (diagonal distance as well) apart from each other. The general guideline I found is that they need to be far apart enough, so there won't be overlapping "red area" showing on the minimap, keep the pollution area color as least orange brown or lighter. Mines/Oil well/Logging camps also follow similar rule, and they need to be even further away (they are like super giant factories), and since natural resource might pop-up later randomly near the edge of the city, don't spread out the downtown area too far and wide from the center of the map.

Factories pollution spreadout.jpg (828.77 KiB) Viewed 2711 times

And since warehouses and farms don't generate pollution, they can become buffer zone between the city itself and the industrial area. (but warehouse need to be located inside industrial area, hence better manually designated warehouse foundation right before building them). Some civic buildings have very long range of influence, so they need to be even further away from the pollution generated area.

For a very late game city, like my 2 million+ city, I usually just lock down the whole map not-for-sale, only leaving the center of the town buildable with commercial and residence. And then manually "draw" the industry tiles within the not-for-sale land plot, so AIs can build factories with the proper distance apart.

Industry land plot spreadout.jpg (619.23 KiB) Viewed 2711 times

Although it's not likely to reach full environment (I believe even the lightest pollution has certain small impact), but I could still masking it good enough with other criterias to reach 100% QoL. The more difficult (or simply annoying) part is to make sure AI built mansions or media/real estate don't spread out into unwanted area, and some default high land price area need to be designated not-for-sale from the beginning (so AIs won't build near it), like around airports, and ports, even around resources (since natural resource firms have higher pollution potential, factories need to be further away from them). The only thing not that easy to control is the overlapping between resource firms (since they pop up randomly, and two nearby natural resource firms generate quite a lot of pollution together within their overlapping area).

pollution control for quality of life.jpg (306.61 KiB) Viewed 2711 times

[Spac3y]

Thanks for the reply Eleazza but I dont thing we should have to micro manage factories to withing x amount of sqaures of each other.

Pollution rating , in my mind should apply to x amount of squares away from the city. Factories close enough to commercial / residental buildings should indded affect the rating, but when you have everything for my example in a corner, over the water well away from the main city and dwellings, this should have a far better rating on pollution than having the factories in the same corner but spaced out by x amount of squares by x amount of squares.

[eleaza]

Thanks for the reply Eleazza but I dont thing we should have to micro manage factories to withing x amount of sqaures of each other.

I agree current pollution calculation is a little bit of harsh, and micromanagement intense. Just sharing what we can do to alleviate it with current pollution mechanics, so at least we can grow a city faster (especially important when aiming for the 3 million population goal, I spent a lot of time experimenting to understand how to control it, and still haven't figure out what's the optimal range between pollution sources).

I'd say perhaps the overlapping range can change depending on the land price. The lower the price, the closer pollution sources can stay closer. This way we can have high density factory area away from the city, as well as keeping them away from the "downtown". I feel a lot of issues right now with pollution is related to factories raise land price themselves, hence close by factories are like a "mini downtown", feedback into the pollution generation issue.

[eleaza]

Pollution rating , in my mind should apply to x amount of squares away from the city. Factories close enough to commercial / residental buildings should indded affect the rating, but when you have everything for my example in a corner, over the water well away from the main city and dwellings, this should have a far better rating on pollution than having the factories in the same corner but spaced out by x amount of squares by x amount of squares.

I have to add though, There's a little flaw in this, since there's no "city area" by default, and players even AIs can build wherever they want, hence how can the game decides how far away from the city factories are? What happened if the city is spread out into several small towns, or completely spread out to the whole map buildings to buildings? Limiting a city's commercials/residentials clumped together in the center and industries on the outside just feel unnecessary and affecting the sandbox gameplay (like what if I want a city with industries in the center and residentials on the outskirts?).

I feel we need some kind of buffer zoning automatically, or like green zones where trees/parks reduce and contain pollution from source firms, even a city wide policy to tax or fine heavy pollution industries (so AIs will either move out of the city, or be too expensive to operate if players decide this is a "green city"). Even introduce technologies to reduce pollution, with increased overhead, or "clean energy technologies" that DECREASE the pollution throughout the city. A lot more pollution related mechanics can be added. Global pollution and environmental is a serious issue we are facing in the real world, so raising the awareness is a good addition to the game I feel. We just need to be smart about how to design the mechanic, so it has depth but not tedious (perhaps some kind of automation for micromanagement).

[Spac3y]

City area in general is densly populated/commercial areas. Pollution should apply as x amount of spaces from one of these as buildings, I dont think that would be too hard to do.

The closer a polluter to an apartment / commercial / retail area, the more the pollution effect should apply.

[eleaza]

City area in general is densly populated/commercial areas. Pollution should apply as x amount of spaces from one of these as buildings, I dont think that would be too hard to do.

The closer a polluter to an apartment / commercial / retail area, the more the pollution effect should apply.

Yes it won't be hard to calculate, but this would create ridiculous situation, where 10 "populated buildings" build around a factory "access" the same pollution amount as to 1 building surrounded by 10 factories. Since a "city" doesn't have to be "dense", apartments/commercials can spread out, don't need to be compacted in "one center". The implementation of such simple calculation will force each city to have the same layout and kill the sandbox gameplay. A default city built that way by AIs, don't mean human players have to follow.

[David]

The algorithm for this has been improved in the patch v4.2.12.

[Spac3y]

The very nature of poluation density pretty much means all cities are classed as this, hence they are cities and not towns.

I did however did some jiggery pockery with what you described as the spacing Eleazza and manage to tweak to this

pollution after some spacing.png (1.73 MiB) Viewed 2675 times

As we would expect, the larger factories need spaced out more or mixed and matched between small and mediums. I managed to get the QOL rating up to 70 from a big fat zero.

Was a pain in the rear mindu moving 68 factories and getting them spaced.

Any tweak is greatly appreciated so will give it a whirl in the 4.12

[eleaza]

The very nature of poluation density pretty much means all cities are classed as this, hence they are cities and not towns.

There are cities like Vancouver, or New Orleans, where residentials are spread out. And what's wrong with towns? a newly formed "city" by player is essentially a town, and we can choose not to grow its population into city level. What I was saying is we shouldn't limit what players should and could play a game, that would make CES DLC boring and repetitive.



The pollution control required before 4.2.10 is actually a limitation forced players to space out factories, so it is also a limit. But a similar bad mechanism forced players to squeeze factories in corners is also a limitation. Equally bad in limiting sandbox gameplay.