Civilization II Hints

Pollution

• There are two types of pollution in Civilization II: population pollution and industrial pollution. Both types have the same effect on any terrain square; pollution cause all resources (food, trade, and shields) to be produced at 50% of their  clean' amount.   Population pollution is related to the size of your city, that is, the larger the city, the greater the chance of pollution occurring.  However, this is only the case after the discovery of Industrialization.  The amount of population pollution increases with the discovery of certain advances: Automobile, Mass Production, Plastics, or if Sanitation has not been discovered.  The discovery of Environmentalism lessens the population pollution as does the presence of a Solar Plant in the city (this improvement also helps with industrial pollution).  The only way to control population pollution is to build the Mass Transit improvement in large cities.
  
  The other type of pollution is industrial pollution.  This type is dependent on the number of shields a city is producing (the shields used for support are not included in figuring pollution). The Hydro Plant and Nuclear Plant improvements cut the amount of shield pollution in half.  It is important to note that a city can have only one type of power plant of the four types offered: Hydro Plants, Nuclear Plants, Solar Plants, and Power Plants.  Power Plants are usually available before the others, but should be avoided if possible because they cause more pollution and do nothing to help lessen its impact.  Wait for Hydro Plants, they are usually not far behind (or consider the Hoover Dam wonder, giving you a Hydro Plant in every city).
  
  A little way down the technology road you may discover Recycling, allowing you to build a Recycling Plant which cuts a city's industrial pollution by two thirds.  This is usually enough, in conjunction with Mass Transit, to control most pollution problems.  However, for those who want to stop the problem all together, the construction of a Solar Plant should be considered.  This improvement reduces industrial pollution to zero.  It also has a few other positive points: as mentioned earlier, it helps a little bit in reducing population pollution and it changes the way the computer totals the number of polluted squares on the map.  Every solar plant your civilization builds takes one half of a square off of the computer's pollution count.
  
  The total of the pollution icons from both population and industrial represents the possibility of pollution occurring each turn.  This is not a percent based on one hundred shields being the max, but instead just part of a complex formula that the computer uses to determine if a random square in the city radius is polluted during any particular turn.  Higher difficulty level and the number of advances discovered (regardless of what they are) also increase the chance of pollution as figured by this formula.
  
  Pollution also causes another problem besides simply reducing the resources produced in a square; it can also cause global warming.  For those of you who have never seen the effects of global warming in Civ2, try very hard to keep it that way.  It is much, much worse than in the original Civilization.  Now it is actually a major problem, not just a nuisance as it was in the previous game.  Global warming has a chance of occurring if at least eight or nine squares are polluted at any one time; this value increases with each successive incident of this type.  This count only includes polluted squares within the radii of your cities, so pollution around your rivals' cities doesn't hurt you.  This count can also be lowered, as mentioned above, by the building of solar plants.
  

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