Making the environment part of caplab world.

[tosh]

Right now there's no meaning for the environment in the game.
A city with 40+ factories and 10 mines is just as clean as a city with no factories or mines.
Why not making the environment part of the deal?
maybe
(sum of factories*2+sum of mines*3+sum of logging camps*3+sum of oil wells*3 + sum of medium farms*1.5 + sum of big farms*2)
will give a number that will affect how attractive is the city for immigration and quality of living.
plus, a city with high quality food, drugs and so on will be a boost to its attractiveness.

that way the fact that you are selling high quality product will be more than just a way to get bigger.

[David]

A preview screenshot of the Pollution map mode.

Pollution will negatively affect the Environment rating, which is a component of a city's Quality of Life rating.

[counting]

Why is the population (I assumed dark spots on mini-map) so sparsely separated like dots all over the place, shouldn't they live mostly near CBD, more like current land value map with continuous blocks?

And orange will be population coming from factories source in unpopulated area? Will pollution be localized effect or a city wide aggregated over-all effect? Will there be different types of pollution (like water/air/etc pollution) or just a generalized pollution index like traffic index?

[David]

Why is the population (I assumed dark spots on mini-map) so sparsely separated like dots all over the place, shouldn't they live mostly near CBD, more like current land value map with continuous blocks?

We have improved the algorithm for generating apartments. The result, as seen in the attached screenshot, is a more realistic distribution of population in the city.

[David]

And orange will be population coming from factories source in unpopulated area?

Yes, like what is shown in the attached screenshot.

Will pollution be localized effect or a city wide aggregated over-all effect?

It will be a city wide aggregated over-all effect, which affects the "Environment rating", which is a component of the overall "Quality of Life" rating.

Will there be different types of pollution (like water/air/etc pollution) or just a generalized pollution index like traffic index?

There will be just a generalized pollution index.

[counting]

This looks nice and interesting Can't wait to see how population and pollution actually effect in game and the interactions with other factors.

It's interesting though, in actual game mechanics wise, such dense "apartments" near CBD will actually make building retail stores in early stage challenging, since fewer free high traffic index land slots are available for larger stores. This might change the opening of the game drastically, and the effectiveness of retailing will be more tightly linking to newly developed real estate. This might be a good thing though for city dynamics, if AIs have algorithm to identify the lack of prime real estate land in a tightly packed CBD city and try to develop/expand outward. Or there could be a mechanism for buildings to "re-struct", like moving to new spots automatically, or been torn down when they have prolong deficit in rent income and low residency rate.

One thing though, residential (population) packed area in modern cities are mostly not the same as commercial centers. But some cities do mix residential with commerce area, with others clearly separate them (still mostly concentrated, just in different regions). Some metropolis "cities" evolved over time, when the original center of population became downtown area for commerce, and residences moved out to satellite cities or like in some cities of the US spread out to suburban area (although in recent year, it seems more population moved back to urbanized area). It would be great to see if this kind of evolution over time can happen in Capitalism lab. Since currently those existing residential/commercial buildings generated by default, would sit on the original spots for the entirety of the game (they are hardly on sale, even AI corporation owned ones).

[David]

One thing though, residential (population) packed area in modern cities are mostly not the same as commercial centers. But some cities do mix residential with commerce area, with others clearly separate them (still mostly concentrated, just in different regions). Some metropolis "cities" evolved over time, when the original center of population became downtown area for commerce, and residences moved out to satellite cities or like in some cities of the US spread out to suburban area (although in recent year, it seems more population moved back to urbanized area). It would be great to see if this kind of evolution over time can happen in Capitalism lab. Since currently those existing residential/commercial buildings generated by default, would sit on the original spots for the entirety of the game (they are hardly on sale, even AI corporation owned ones).

There will be new cities which you can plan from scratch and you can use the zoning tools (described in this post:
http://www.capitalismlab.com/forum/view ... t=10#p8933) to shape the development of cities the way you prefer, including some of those you described in your post above.

[counting]

Ya, it's one way of looking at this issue, by "outsourcing" design problem to human planning.

Although I would be interesting to see how cities evolve organically due to the pollution or current population graph or human players/AI intentionally planning an area, and new buildings evolved around them, like a bacteria colony grows in a petri dish where you can drop neutrino in it. Sort of fitting the game's name with "lab" in it.