Keep in mind that the pollution system was never tested in the OpenDev, so this will most certainly change at some point.

Dang.

This sounds broken. I haven't made it to that Era yet, so I have no experience with it, and can't speak to the FIMSI debuff.

Stability seemed like a runaway train though in the Beta industrial era, so I'm not surprised there's an increase in Stability costs later in the game.

When do you get the upgrades on Luxuries, cause that looks like it's gonna be worth several hundred Stability on each city. Is that not enough to counteract the -15 per district?

Bankipriel wrote:

Dang.

This sounds broken. I haven't made it to that Era yet, so I have no experience with it, and can't speak to the FIMSI debuff.

Stability seemed like a runaway train though in the Beta industrial era, so I'm not surprised there's an increase in Stability costs later in the game.

When do you get the upgrades on Luxuries, cause that looks like it's gonna be worth several hundred Stability on each city. Is that not enough to counteract the -15 per district?

It might be, I haven't gotten it yet, and it won't counteract the -50% food, which essentially starves to death all of your cities.

They where adding this like what 2 weeks before launch...

Zero amount of testing is my guess, hell the game seems to balanced so that you'd never make it to last eras

Resand wrote:

They where adding this like what 2 weeks before launch...

Zero amount of testing is my guess, hell the game seems to balanced so that you'd never make it to last eras

That seems to be the case. I can build virtually anything in a turn in my capital, except wonders, due to the ridiculous production I can accumulate. Same for the later stages of religion, it seems to be implied that you're supposed to go to Secularism or atheism, but you lose all of your tenets and other religious bonuses, which are worth so much more than what you get, even with a low tier religion, that being a bunch of neolithic-era shamans is literally better than a secular state in the early modern age.

I just finished my second game, where I got to the end where polution was a factor...
And honestly? not that big of a deal in my game :P

Yeah, Honestly pollution kinda remove the enjoyment of the game once I arrive to the Early Modern Era. The way it is implemented right now is just not fun. You don't have a lot of way to counter it. You can feel it was rushed to the game before release. I would have preferred if they took their time to implement it in a way that is enjoyable, why not inside a DLC with multiple impact beside it, similar to the way they introduced weather in Endless Legends with the Shifters or Inferno DLC.

My first game ended due to pollution around turn 190, normal settings, empire.  Just as I was about to invade the other continent I get the popup "Your game will end shortly due to polution".

Felt a very short amount of time between being in "low polution" to the end of the human race levels of polution.  I'd built a sawmill/factory in 2 or 3 cities, also hydro and nuclear plants, an airport and tested the bomb ready to try out some nukes, then that was it, apparently nothing I could do to reverse it at that point.

Something weird. I think Pollution scales with either map size or game pace, because in my slow paced biggest map game I have cities with 50+ pollution and they are still Very Low Pollution.

They should have 5 levels (6 counting no pollution)

0: no penalties

1: -10% food, -2 Stability per district

2: -30% food, -5 stability per district

3: -50% food, -10 stability per district

4: -70% food, -15 stability per district

5:-100% food (game over)

Indicate the current level of pollution, and have a slow natural decay at each level, that can bring it down to the next level 

the pollution mecanic is so annoying my stability would randomly shoot to zero and id have to spam out commons quarters and garrisons for a couple turns

A sound idea crudely and destructively implemented.

I'd advocate just removing it until a suitable way of implementing it can be agreed because it's a very anti-fun way to play the game as it stands.

waven wrote:

Something weird. I think Pollution scales with either map size or game pace, because in my slow paced biggest map game I have cities with 50+ pollution and they are still Very Low Pollution.

I have the same thought. I finished a game by researching all the technologies, and my pollution always remained "very low pollution", and never caused any problems. I played this on a 10 player huge map, with slow speed. 

I'm going to try out a smaller map - fewer players - normal speed setting to test this. I've read that player size and game speed also causes problems for civics not triggering properly, and can confirm this as well: half of my civics remained unlocked / hidden at turn 410 something. 

I really hope they are going to fix this issue, playing on large maps with lots of players and at slower speed is usually my way to go for a 4X game (and I'm probably not alone).

This is weird. I played a 300 turn game and by the end of it we had 8000 pollution, was still stage 0 with no effects. How much did y'all have?

I caused a snowballing pollution problem in my game because I had smashed out era stars and reached the contemporary era before even researching steam engine and the ability to utilise all that nasty nasty coal. I decided to become Australia and immediately proceeded to build strip mines everywhere given the production boosts I could get from this district where like 3 or 4 times greater than a vanilla makers quarter. Upon building as many strip mines as the game would let me I first got a warning about low pollution than a few turns later high pollution, than I had about ten turns where to keep my stability under control I had to build nothing but commons quarters (like somehow an abundance of theatres is supposed to make the population no longer care about pollution). Then the game was over because the planet war beyond saving and I had only just got around to researching Fission tech to start getting pollution under control by building nuclear plants. I will mention that none of the other computers had made any pollution whatsoever at this point in time and I was running about 8 cities. 

So yes, pollution is broken because it seems like by the time you realise its a problem there is nothing you can do about it any more and that even building a few polluting structures spells certain doom for Earth. If Earth in real life worked on Humankind rules the planet would have died some time around 1800 after we had the audacity to build a few steam trains.

I will note that I watched the IGN review for this game and they complained pollution did nothing no matter how much you produced, so it seems like the effect of pollution was added at last minute (after the release of review copies) without any balancing. Hopefully pollution is fixed with time.

The pollution mechanic killed enjoyment of my first game to the point that I don't really want to play anymore, which is a shame as I really enjoyed it sans this one point. I will admit that it makes a great sense "for the story" the game is telling but nevertheless this is a game and the enjoyment of the game and its mechanics should take precedence over everything else. I feel that until it is properly balanced we should get an option to disable pollution. If not as a mechanic itself then at least as a game end trigger.