SC4 trees should have full city anti pollution radius

[mayorgreener 37]

Hi,

SC4 trees should have full city anti pollution radius. 

 

I am only using the default Maxis trees and they work only in 4-6 tiles.... but in real life a tree contributes to total global city wide air purification effect...

 

Any mods? :/

 

Thank you

[Lost Realist 762]

They should not, because that would essentially render pollution meaningless as a gameplay aspect and a single tree is not able to cause a notable effect on air quality in a 16sqkm area.

[mayorgreener 37]

hmmm.

[rsc204 21,836]

Agree with Lost Realist here, such a mod would technically work more like a cheat than anything else, sure in the real world trees aren't limited to affecting small areas, but in SC4 we are trying to simulate this not replicate it. Due to the mechanics of a videogame it works better to have each one affect a small area, as you plant trees in different locations the entire city becomes nicer as the air quality is improved in many localised spots. However to simulate this on a city-wide scale would simply be a waste of resources since it would have minimal benefit for the player compared to the cost in terms of effort to implement and taking valuable CPU time from other parts of the simulation, worse still it would cause undesirable side effects. 

 

For example if the computer had an air quality rating of say 200 and each tree made this increase by an increment of .1 once you had plopped 2,000 trees the air would be perfect city wide, not a single spot of pollution anywhere. That's the problem what what you describe, such a system is too simplistic to account for things like highways and industrial areas, having thousands of trees surrounding a coal power plant doesn't make the power plant clean suddenly any more than having one tree only affect a 4-5 tile radius. However the later system allows the simulation to account for both localised areas of pollution and good air quality regardless of the total amount of plopped trees, in that sense it's a much more flexible system.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Well, is it really the tree that has such an unlimited range? Isn't the fact that, for example, a rainforest in Brazil helps counteract pollution generated in China on a global scale, more related to climate, wind, and sea?

 

I reckon if SimCity had a fully developed climate/weather model, where wind would pick up the smoke from a coal power plant, and the pollution might settle back down two or three maps further, trees would have an effect that's closer to what you would prefer, closer to real life.

 

However, SimCity lacks such a climate/weather, and pollution itself is dealt with in a simplified way. It's a simple matter of a circular radius and effect strength. Guess that's why they had to do pretty much the same for pollution-reducing effects.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Actually the algae blooms in the ocean off the Brazilian coast absorb more carbon than the rain forest.