Once my cities started to produce pollution and reached the low pollution point, the game became unplayable with the flat minus 15 stability to the city. It forces you to downsize cities and cities with large district counts become completely unviable. Am I missing something or is the game punishing me for having big cities. 

I don't know what you're doing to have a -15 stability hit be a problem. My guess is you get to the point where your cities are just the size of your territories lol.

Legendtyler0102 wrote:

Quick question why do you not seem to have any luxury resources? Or rather why are you not getting stab from the ones that give it like saffron I belive hives 2 per pop

I should have nearly every one, am I not receiving benefits for some odd reason?

While I love this game, Pollution needs a complete rework. After a couple of games I say:

a) Lack of Information. You don't know how much pollution round or total will have which negative effects on your territory. 

b) Lack of balance. Every game! when i build any of the pollution city upgrades I and haveing a stability hundreds in the plus, after two/three rounds I'm total in the negative, whole territory polluted, -700 food, everything stalled, no chance to recover. Deadlock, new game

c) Lack of counter. The only thing besides not building pollution producing upgrades seems to be trees. They seem to have nearly zero affect and even when cover the whole remaining tiles of the continent with them, it just delays the deadlock by 1-2 rounds

d) The only way to deal with pollution is:

1. Never ever build food upgrades with pollution because there is no technolgy or upgrade which lowers it

2. Skip the entire industry upgrades which polution (era 5) and research every industrial pollution reducing upgrade in era 6 including fusion rector (last line of techs). And then you can start building the upgrades

I like the idea of pollution in general but the current implementation seems totally untested. Please rework how it works, and give the player better information which effects he can expect. At the moment there is either zero pollution or total deadlock of everything.

Drullo321 wrote:

While I love this game, Pollution needs a complete rework. After a couple of games I say:

a) Lack of Information. You don't know how much pollution round or total will have which negative effects on your territory. 

b) Lack of balance. Every game! when i build any of the pollution city upgrades I and haveing a stability hundreds in the plus, after two/three rounds I'm total in the negative, whole territory polluted, -700 food, everything stalled, no chance to recover. Deadlock, new game

c) Lack of counter. The only thing besides not building pollution producing upgrades seems to be trees. They seem to have nearly zero affect and even when cover the whole remaining tiles of the continent with them, it just delays the deadlock by 1-2 rounds

d) The only way to deal with pollution is:

1. Never ever build food upgrades with pollution because there is no technolgy or upgrade which lowers it

2. Skip the entire industry upgrades which polution (era 5) and research every industrial pollution reducing upgrade in era 6 including fusion rector (last line of techs). And then you can start building the upgrades

I like the idea of pollution in general but the current implementation seems totally untested. Please rework how it works, and give the player better information which effects he can expect. At the moment there is either zero pollution or total deadlock of everything.

I completely agree with you. With how pollution is implemented indusial nations like Germany and the Soviets are completely unplayable especially in cities with large districts, unless you just ignore their special district. I think a much better way of implementing the pollution is by proximity to the pollution source. That would reflect the direct undesirability of living near the heavy industry while not rendering it unusable. 

Omg, yes. System of pollution doesn't make any sense in its current state. I love this game with all my heart but late game is unplayable. I played as australians and I have built one mine and one train station. I've got instant -600 stability and my city became useless. This needs to be changed.

Is there anyways to reduce pollution permanently? It feels like if you pick a culture with a district that produces a lot of pollution (Japan & Australia) you have no way of really counteracting it effectively, despite the benefits they bring.

I've had the same issue, I picked the Australians and happily popped down my strip mines. The next thing I know, I've got a total societal collapse on my hands.

Where I got to at the start of the contemporary era felt more appropriate for an apocalyptic scenario. The scaling is way too severe.

I think the games forest tiles should be summed up to create a negative pollution number that offsets all the civilizations emissions. That way things will be stable until you get greedy for production and start deforesting or over building.

The joke is on you, I just made the world uninhabitable before stability became an issue.

Mausklickmoerder wrote:

The joke is on you, I just made the world uninhabitable before stability became an issue.

Even if you complete the tech tree, just building the two pollution related food improvements is enough to let your whole system collapse. That is total nonsense in my opinion. I wonder how this was overseen because it basically happens every game without exception. 

Drullo321 wrote:

Mausklickmoerder wrote:

The joke is on you, I just made the world uninhabitable before stability became an issue.

Even if you complete the tech tree, just building the two pollution related food improvements is enough to let your whole system collapse. That is total nonsense in my opinion. I wonder how this was overseen because it basically happens every game without exception. 

i believe when you build an improvement that creates pollution that +1 or +2 applies to each relevant district so if you have 10 farmers quarters and its +2 thats +20 so unless you have the score to win you should avoid the pollution improvements in bigger cities

The most stupid thing is that low level of pollution is enough to completely fuck up the city with all available buildings busting stability inside.

I think pollution should slowly poison the environment in a region level reducing the food produced from tiles of that region by steps and when it reaches maximum pollution the region just can't sustain food production and you might also get a negative impact on stability at some point. The pollution should also spread to bordering regions, something like if a region has 100 pollution (Absolute, not per turn) then the bordering regions would get 10 pollution per turn and the pollution in the 100p region would also decrease in 10 per turn per bordering region (To kind of simulate distribution).

Forest should also play a more important roll in stopping pollution, for this I think that every forest should provide -2 pollution per turn and each woodland -1 pollution per turn. Or something like that, so you can offset you industry with forests, however if pollution reaches a certain level it should start killing forests one at a time, and that's when you know you are in big trouble, haha.

So basically preventing your regions from growing practically any food will eventually lead to the end of human life, but this way is far more interesting than just slamming a "Humans can no longer live in this planet despite the fact that two turns ago there were people being happy and having children in literally every city of the planet" message and finishing the game. This would make players fight for the less poluted parts of the world so that they can keep on living and force wars for natural resources (food).

And I know pollution doesn't work that way, but punishing in a harshier way those who pollute more seems like a good game mechanic to me 

i went germans into soviets and had to spam out commons quarters for many turns just to keep my citizens from rioting until the world became uninhabitable

such an annoying mechanic

i hope they fix it, maybe in the future they could do rising sea levels?

Apparently there is also a "World Ending Pollution" level, which seems to be "easier" to handle than the "Low Pollution" levels, as it only adds -100 stability and that's it.

Low Pollution gives -15 for EACH DISTRICT you have, which instantly kills your stability.

There is an issue with it.

Either it low pollution shouldn't affect you on each district or world ending one should be for each district too.

the -100 stability of world ending pollution is a global debuff, regardless of the pollution in the city

the -15 district is local pollution being high.

I had some troubles with stability, but everything went back to 100 when I started shoving neural implants on everyone

My game ended because the world was too dirty. But that didn't come from me. The stupid thing is that the culture that was the biggest polluter won. I was only a few fame (is it called so in english?) points behind. For me, this means that if I am leading in fame, I should pollute the world as quickly as possible to finish the game and take home the victory, even though I have wrecked the world. The degree of pollution that a culture contributes should give a malus on the fame or something like that.