Today I’ve been looking at these areas and just wanted to let people know they will be changing.
I had not realized that water shortage was still being linked to year (which makes it very tough to avoid). We have added water meters and desalination plants to help fight it, but I’m also re-doing this simulation so that there is no direct annual link to water shortage, and its triggered mostly by average temperature.
Average temperature itself is impacted partly by CO2Emissions and partly by GlobalCO2Emissions, which we assumed do rise slightly each year.
To make things more interesting, the extent to which GlobalCO2Emissions rise each year is being tied slightly to how well the player is winning, to give it some nice challenge for players who have totally beaten the game later on, and to not crsuh players who are having a tough time.
I think its probably fair to generally tie GlobalCO2Emissions to year, as the data shows that global CO2 levels are basically still rising reliably each year
We still give a non-trivial input for the player from the domestic emissions. Obviously as with all things this will require a lot of playtesting, but I’m hoping 1.22 will be better balanced when it comes to Water Shortages and Cyclones.
I don’t like relying on inevitable _year usage in multiple places, and I think tying it a bit to game difficulty is an improvement. Feedback welcome!
Or if you have very high international trade + immigration + energy efficiency, this could be construed as sharing energy-efficient technology abroad to help reduce foreign emissions?
The problem with that is that we do not explicitly show this (yet) in game. We don’t have a metric to represent that this is happening. (although the data does clearly exist, theoretically I could have some super-hardcore UI that would let you pick any subset of groups and I could show you the voters in the resulting venn diagram )
While we’re on the topic, we might need to address the ease with which a player can de-carbonize their nation’s economy. If it were as easy as it is in game, I’m pretty sure we would have done it in the real world by now. By my second term, if not earlier, my carbon and petrol taxes are producing zero because there is no carbon emission in my country.
You mentioned modelling how foreign aid could effect immigration not long ago either. Perhaps a global stability simulation, partly influenced by global economy, could affect global emissions, maybe even leading to global neutrality at extreme levels in the late game.
(Though perhaps that ought to be attached to some very high cost, slow burning policies)
Given what’s happening in the US in Texas right now… a Dilemma for nations that do not have the climate change research/preparedness policy passed, and have a weak energy industry / not heavily-funded state energy company, could face what’s happening in Texas right now.
Over 4 million Texans are without power. This article details that climate change is partly to blame, and policymakers in Texas are facing a simple choice - pay more money to “insure” that the state is protected from future storms like this, or don’t? It then details the ways that the state could act to protect its power grid from future incidents, all of which are expensive.
This is a good point. In theory the solution to stuff like this is a widely distributed power base, so everyone has solar panels, and communities have wind turbines, so even when big interconnectors fail, there are lots of small local power sources. In the very worst case, people can huddle together in the 1 house in each street that has solar panels…
The game is ideally set up to support this already, because we have distinctly different policies for microgeneration, and renewable energy in general, so you could prioritize renewable energy & resilience versus large scale renewables.
Also in theory electric cars work as the perfect grid balancing and emergency power stores:
…which means EV transition could also work to mitigate the impact of power grid disruption…
Could be a great event!
yeah, and the nice part is it could work the same way for heat waves too, presumably. The natural gas won’t freeze in the ground, but systems might overheat & demand would spike. So it could work for any country that could have a polar vortex and/or a heat wave… which is probably every country in the world TBH!
See this is a problem with a game that’s tied to the real world. I haven’t had time to include the GameStop mania into the game yet and we are already needing a sudden freeze event!
There’s so many different things that could crop up from global warming, too many to model. Permafrost melt changing Alaska and similar regions into marshland, desertification, sea level rise, wildfires, quakes. I don’t know if all those individual things in the game is wise mechanically, as realistic as they are, since the big climate adaptation policy would likely suppress most.
Has anyone seen the energy policy expansion mod? It needs work, but it’s really cool to see energy demand simulated as your technologically advancing country struggles to transition off of fossil fuels. You can’t do it without rebuilding your energy infrastructure, importing power, and developing gen 4 nuclear technology, and even then it’s tight.
Yeah, it’s a neat mod. It’s policy-heavy (IE it bloats the screen) but it definitely adds in depth to power generation.
For base-game, simplifying the polar vortex disaster into an event that reads something like this would probably work:
Cataclysmic Weather Disaster
Cumbersome power grids, unprepared central power generators, and a lack of failsafes has caused a rare weather event to deprive millions of your citizens of power. Scientists blame climate change and unprepared power grids for the disaster. They point out that your government could have prepared the country’s power grid for this and prevented this disaster, whether that be by reducing carbon emissions, diversifying power sources, or weatherizing the power grid.
Millions can’t go to work, dozens have died, and GDP has suffered as a result. The public blames you for this disaster.
Lowered GDP for 1 turn, like a stock market flash-crash
Temporarily increase cost of state energy power, maybe, and food? So far many livestock have died at factory farms, and presumably crops have died too.
Increase membership in environmentalists?
Temporary increase in foreign aid / charity?
Lowered opinion from poor (who appear to have been hit hardest by the Texas event)
Lowered opinion from farmers (who generally are also hit quite hard by natural disasters - see California wildfires, Australia bushfires, monsoons in India, tornadoes in central US, etc)
By framing it as a weather event & climate event, you can avoid having to write different variations of the event for different countries’ climates. A polar vortex probably wouldn’t affect the UK very much, for example, since all of its power generation is presumably already weatherized & protected from it, but a heat wave might affect it badly. Keeping it general saves you from writing different events for different climate(s).
That’s terrific @Darkmark8910, I think something like that would be perfect for the very contemporary setting of the game.
Cyclones keep being brought up as a policy that isn’t being triggered enough, but I think the framing of this concept–that the fault in part lies with unprepared infrastructure and power/water distribution makes it a lot more appropriate.
I agree with the bump. I still get annoyed with “year” as an input, as though something is somehow ultimately unavoidable. Rare earth crisis is a bugger, and the .5% per month makes it too difficult to get rid of once it’s in effect.