The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 9, 2006

Official News - page 2

CONTROLLING YOUR ATMOSPHERE AND DEALING WITH POLLUTION

People do mess things up. There's a nice virgin planet, newly terraformed, the eco-system in balance, the animals and plants existing in their own little niches of the food chain, and then along come intelligent life-forms to build housing, plough up fields and plant crops, kill the wildlife for food or for pleasure, dig stuff out of the ground and burn it, and generally make a huge mess of things. As a result, you get all kinds of nasty side-effects, including pollution.

Nobody likes to live in a polluted environment, so the populace tends to get very unhappy if nothing is done about the pollution - never mind that it was their life-styles that caused it in the first place!

So a planet-owner needs to keep on top things, dealing with pollution and other ecological problems before the restless inhabitants get too fractious. Actually, owners of agricultural worlds don't really have to worry because the problem doesn't get too serious until you start mining, which produces horrendous spoil-heaps.

That's where the latest infrastructure builds come in. Atmospheric control is the first of the ecology builds, and it takes care of the basic pollution caused by the day-to-day activities of the inhabitants. The higher the economic level, the more you need to invest in atmospheric control. The second ecology build is pollution control, which clears up the more serious pollution caused by mining or by industrial activities.

The good news for all POs is that agricultural planets don't need any atmospheric or pollution control. So you won't need to know that the command to build an atmospheric control module is 'BUILD ATMOS', nor that all the details are in the Idiot's Guide. That information won't be needed until your planet advances to the next economic level: for each level above agri, your planet needs to have two points of atmospheric control (for example, resource planets need two, industrial need four, and so on). Failure to build enough modules will cause disaffection - a 5% increase for each missing point.

Nor do you need to know that it's 'BUILD POLLUTION' to build a pollution control facility and that you can read about it in the Guide, because agricultural planets don't need to control pollution. At resource level, two points of pollution control are required, and at higher levels even more, and just like atmospheric control, each required point that you fail to buy results in disaffection rising by 5%.

Pollution control will also be needed to offset the rather nasty side-effects of some of the energy builds, but since you can't do energy builds at agri level, once again this is something you don't need to know about yet.

You can build atmospheric control and pollution control modules at any time so if you have spare cash now and want to keep it out of the hands of the taxman, you could invest in the infrastructure so you have it ready for when your planet promotes. Or you could spend the cash on riotous living and let the future take care of itself!

The builds that actually have an effect on agricultural level planets are all complete now. There are still two builds left that you -can- build at agri - biodiversity projects and dole allocations (that's unemployment pay) - but like the two ecology builds, they don't do anything until your planet advances to resource level. However, since once you do promote, failure to build them will have horrible effects, the best strategy will probably be to do all the necessary builds just before you promote - unless you want to see your population rioting in the streets right after you advance to resource level!


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