Average Temperature sim is almost insignificant

Maybe average temperature from CO2 emissions should be scaled by year or something else?

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This is one simulation value where an accumulator would be really good. CO2 emissions presumably is how much you add on top each year. So average temperature should keep rising so long as that value isn’t very low. (I’m guessing there would technically be some low-CO2 threshold where our emission becomes all but dwarfed by what natural phenomena do, and so it basically doesn’t matter anymore unless we do insane levels of active carbon capture, but anyway)
It makes no sense that it flattens out. That’s very much not how average temperature irl works.
And also, the negative effects are far too small. It should, for instance, massively contribute to water shortage, and the rate of some bad weather effects or semi-natural catastrophes such wildfires. - Even bring some countries over the threshold to suddenly have them have hurricanes or tornadoes when they normally wouldn’t.
Floods and droughts alike, and everything that results from those, should be a big deal.
Floods will destroy land, making it unlivable (housing market prices explode, business can also run less efficiently, food is destroyed, sicknesses may spread from unsanitary dirty water contanimating everything…)
Whereas droughts may cause, yes obviously also food price increase, but also increased energy- (A/Cs), water-, and health care demands, and may damage the ground, making it shrink, forming large cracks that can actually threaten buildings above, etc.

These events are huge and become more common at an alarming rate and I feel like the game does way too little to emphasise this as of right now.

In D3, average temperature was increased by year, as did many of the other environmental situations. The problem with this was that it followed a linear formula rather than one with exponential decay. This meant that it was completely impossible to ever mitigate them in the long run. I think people would have much fewer problems with them being in the game if they increased over time but not to infinity. Accumulators would also work really well for these.

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I agree I feel like it is too easy to fix temperature and that changes to temperature happen too quickly. To me it seems like it should be a major relatively unsolvable problem that appears in the late game 8-10 years UNLESS you setup environmental protection long ahead of time. I think it should be possible to deal with climate change but if your only doing it as an after thought you will be more mitigating some of the really bad effects then actually solving the problem.

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This is why I’d argue for an accumulator rather than the currently omnipresent “year” hack. Temperature would not increase at a constant rate, but at a rate dependent on how much CO2 the world pumps into the atmosphere, which could be approximated through a combination of your own CO2 emissions and your foreign relations. And you could make it slow down and possibly even reverse. It’s not simply linked to Year.

I guess an alternate implementation could be that the “Average Temperature” actually represents the long run temperature. Like, at maximum it’d mean global temperatures will raise by like 3°C more or less irreversibly. At minimum we manage to limit it to like 1°C (which is rather optimistic by today’s projections I think)
And then the Year variable is used to determine how strongly the effects of climate change would be. Some of them should always be present (It’d take absolutely insane amounts of carbon capture to prevent this) but at 1°C the worst of it would be prevented whereas at 3°C it should very nearly result in an automatic long-term catastrophic failure as everything goes to crap.
That version could be free of such an accumulator. It’d simply scale each climate effect based on both Year and this limit temperature.

But if that were used, it’d require a renaming to be clearer I think. It’d not be the current average, but the long run effect.

I think this is already the case now with Rare Earth Crisis (wasn’t in an earlier version)

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I know this has needed fixing for ages, its been on trello a while as this item:

I’m looking at this now in the context of cyclones just never triggering, because they are triggered purely by average temperature, and average temperature is affected purely by CO2 emissions.

The only input the player cannot control is the CO2 emissions coming from ‘year’
0+(0.006*x)

Which is pretty meek. in twenty years, this pushes up CO2 by 0.12
so after 20 years that pushes up AverageTemperature by 0.04 (the link between them is 0.25+(0.25*x)

So I’m thinking there are two problems here, (without thinking about accumulators, which is a simulation-change at a core level that scares me in stability terms)

Problem A)
The year never ends, so there is an unstoppable end game where climate change is at a maximum regardless of the players actions

Problem B)
Despite this, the impact on average temperature is too pathetic to really impact anything, especially cyclones, which currently never trigger.

(Actually… the max value for year is set to 50. so after 50 years it should stop growing, with a CO2 impact of 0.3)

So some proposed changes:

  • I change the equation that links year to CO2 so that it rises rpaidly, then slowly to an eventual peak, rather than a linear line that just stops weirdly after 50 years.
  • I vastly boost the impact of CO2 on Average Temperature so that cyclones actually kick in, assuming no other changes, at around the 18-20 year mark.

Thoughts?

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What about the second thing I suggested, which wouldn’t rely on an accumulator mechanic? Change what Average Temperature represents - namely to what the eventual Average Temperature increase would be in x years/decades given current CO2 output. (And modify how it affects things accordingly)

I don’t think CO2 output should even increase by year at all, although the current effect really is rather minimal.
Encoding this in a year mechanic suggests we can’t do anything about it. Which just isn’t true. We absolutely could, in principle, introduce more efficient tech and change our electric grid and our cars and all that to be very nearly or even entirely carbon neutral.
So instead of fiddling with that, fiddle with other stuff like reimagining what this value represents in the first place.

Boosting CO2 effect on average temperature would make sense. But also, add in a Foreign Relations effect which should effectively boost how much your own CO2 matters relative to the entire world’s. The US is a huge climate sinner of course. But even if, somehow, the US were to become entirely carbon neutral over night, the rest of the world combined still causes more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere and it wouldn’t be enough to stop climate change from happening.
And that’s even more true for smaller countries.
So Foreign Relations should be an important factor. If you are a solid example for the world for combating climate change, and you also are well liked by the world, you’ll perhaps have an outsized effect on the world committing to clean energy and such things.

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So some proposed changes:
I change the equation that links year to CO2 so that it rises rpaidly, then slowly to an eventual peak, rather than a linear line that just stops weirdly after 50 years.
I vastly boost the impact of CO2 on Average Temperature so that cyclones actually kick in, assuming no other changes, at around the 18-20 year mark.
Thoughts?

Sounds cool, year link connected to CO2 will be easily counterable, since lowering CO2 emissions is very easy.
Maybe when maxed out it should be exactly 100% - those could be global emissions.

Also that CO2 → Average Temperature should have huge inertia.
50 turns would be 12.5 years.
It is easy to zero CO2 emissions and then max it out later.

Year affects following situations and simulations:
Simulations: Terrorism, Industrial Automation, Cryptocurrency, Lifespan, Oil Supply. CO2 Emissions (this one is separated in overrides).
Situations: Rare Earth Crisis, Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, Water Shortage, Mineral Wealth, Oil Wealth.

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I think the boost to CO2 impact would be the way to go. Unless a way is added to track global CO2 levels, I don’t think it makes much sense to have a logarithmic function like that tied to an uncontrollable variable. From a gameplay perspective, I don’t know that it would be satisfying to reduce my CO2 levels to near zero only to have cyclones and other climate change impacts as an inevitability.

Otherwise if you are interested in adding a worldwide CO2 level, I think tying that to the year’s increasing of CO2 would be great. Maybe a chance to add some foreign policy bits to the game convincing other nations to transition away from carbon-based economies?

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Accumulators Cliff. Accumulators.

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From my point of view the biggest problem is that environmental and temperature related sims are far to quick to change. From a gameplay point of view climate change should be something that you need to plan ahead for or suffer big consequences (maybe you could even add some events where environmentalists warn new players about the looming disaster).

I think merely by adding extreme inertia to CO2->Temp (as @raxo2222 noted) and many of the policies that affect the environment you can greatly mitigate the game play issue of having it be too easy to quickly fix climate change. Having your policies take a very long time to take effect may not be the “correct” solution but it would get the game pretty close.

If it isn’t so easy to fix the environment quickly more players will run into environmental problems as they ignore environmental policies until after bad things start happening (just like real life). By that time these policies will take a long time to bring the curve back down and you will still have issues. Cyclones may need to have their thresholds lower but I think the functional solution is necessarily down the path of having temperature change per year but rather through nerfing the effects of policies.

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These times scales are why climate change is such a problem. The consequence of any CO2 you emit now are 50-100 years down the line. We are already experiencing climate change impacts you should have climate disaster impacts in the game, but they should not be consequences of climate action or inaction. I think the “climate change adaption fund” is the perfect political response you have in game. You should be able to mitigate some of the effects and consequences of climate change.

My solution would be to have the climate disasters strike from the early game but have good adaptation policies that ameliorate the effects.

As for having consequences for large CO2 emissions those should be strictly political. Negative international effects, negative for youth and negative for greens but otherwise you go unpunished. Make a doom future generations award.

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Indeed!
(One way to make changes more gradual is to have accumulators as they can smear out changes)

I like this idea, its more realistic than trying to force immediate consequences. The consequences will be political.

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I understand why you cant have accumulators tied into the network but if they are just counters and triggers there should not be a problem. Imagine just having a counter that counts how many turns one of your nodes are over a certain value, then have it trigger at a certain point. Or, for CO2 you could accumulate the node amounts every turn (ie. .2 +.2 + .4 …). Use the accumulated amount to calculate the amount if CO2 total. Accumulators should be fine as long as you use them as triggers and dont feed the amount back into the network.

Ok, I’m making some changes to this today, (the ones I mentioned), plus I need to look into how best to use this climate change adaption fund. It could maybe had a noticeable effect on reducing the effects of natural disasters!

I know this part of the game has been pretty unbalanced, and it will likely take quite afew iterations of me changing things and looking at the impacts, because the inter-relationships of the whole system mean thast even small chanbges in one areas, like this, can dramatically upset other areas of the game, like the economic or popularity model.

Expect changes to be seen in 1.129.

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Actually implementing this made me realize this made more sense:

This way we can separate out the foreign affairs part of influencing CO2. Actually would be possible to scale each countries impact differently too in theory.
Global emissions are a new thing, in that they are not on the main UI, but show up on this screen.
Still balancing this…

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Ok this is an excellent and much better solution! Global CO2 Emission could be partially scaled by Foreign Relations but it could generally increase, whereas your own CO2 emissions are entirely dependent on your own doing.
And if you’re the US, your own CO2 emissions would matter more than if you’re some tiny country, so scaling would depend on what country.

First off, I love Democracy and really appreciate your effort and time!

Having Global and National CO2 Emissions is an excellent idea. Is there a value for global CO2 Emissions?

Idea could be: a value “total global co2 emissions”, comprised of the largest nations (and all playable nations) with a steady rise according to current forecasts.

Then the nations Co2 Emissions that influence (in a small) part the actual global rise (good illustration of how little impact smaller nations have and the tragedy of the commons in this context).

This could lead to some possible policies on the international level (Climate Change coordination etc.) and maybe even good bonuses (the green one, e.g. “Climate Leadership” with Opinion Bonuses from Environmentalists and maybe Youth?)

By the way, currently I feel rising Temperatures or Climate Change have very little real impact on the gameplay. Maybe add an additional opinion modifier for enivormentalists on temperature change (i know its already on CO2 Emissions, but still), maybe some negative impact on stability?

Another thing about Foreign Relations come to think of it:
Arguably, setting, and actually committing to, aggressive climate policies should generally boost Foreign Relations somewhat.
Like, some countries are scheduled to literally disappear over the effects of climate change (due to rising oceans). And a lot of others are already being hit quite badly, and set to have it a lot worse in the future.
So those countries should like it quite a bit if you show commitment to better climate change.

In effect, your local emissions should inversely boost foreign relations, and foreign relations should inversely boost global emissions.

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