Custom Map #2002: Earth Day - April 22. By: Tyler

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This topic is for discussion of map #2002: Earth Day - April 22


Author: Tyler
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IMPORTANT: check 'Do not show game event notification tags' in MENU/MISC, otherwise you might experience lag. -- This map is the follow-up of Hoover Dam, but the concept is the opposite: if you want to get more energy, you'll eventually increase Creeper. The map is scientifically wildly inaccurate. If you are interested in learning about these inaccuracies, or you want to check the walkthrough or simply to leave comment on the map, please visit the forum! Enjoy! -- #CRPL #realWorld #Earth #runner #nospore

[Tyler21]

What was the most interesting fact that you learned from this map? Feel free to post it in a comment!

(Apart from the fact that there are no penguins in Madagascar :) )




Credits

The city and power plants images are borrowed from the OpenTTD project ("Transport Tycoon Deluxe)



General tips

• Terrain can be terraformed under cities. Since Creeper flows quite fast, the overall Creeper level will increase relatively slowly. Cities in mountains (level 7+ terrain) will survive for a very long time, even if the Arctic has melted.
  
  


• The easiest way to nullify emitters is to create a 'corridor' of terraformed terrain to them or to use the singularity weapon (if you have plenty of Aether). The two freeze artifacts can also help you a lot if you use them wisely (you have to collect them with guppies). If you rely exclusivey on the standard Creeper damaging strategy, you will find yourself in a long and desperate battle because there is a LOT of Creeper in the oceans and Creeper flows quickly.
  
  


• Don't build more units than the minimum that is necessary for your current goal. Destroy unecessary buildings and units. Every unit counts and they reduce the efficiency of forests. Plan your relay network wisely, and rebuild them on new locations if needed. Forest can dissolve a huge amount of CO2 if you have a low total unit count.
  
  


• Collectors are the least efficient way to generate energy because of their cost and the uneven terrain. Moreover, they reduce forests' efficiency as any other building or unit. Build Collectors only if you have reached the maximum number of reactors an you have plenty of space to 'cover'.
  
  


• The most enviromentally friendly way to deal with runners is to put 1-2 blasters at the river source that is supporting their nest. Snipers are only a waste of energy / unit capacity so I don't recommend to use them at all. Without digitalis, they will die quickly and you can nullify the nest easily. An easier but less environmentally friendly way is to simply nullify the river source, but this is not really consistent with the main theme of the map :)
  
  


• There are five runner nests that you can nullify and five reactors that you can build. This is not merely a coincidence. Put blasters at the river sources that will block digitalis growth and build reactors in PZs.
  
  



• Don't waste Aether on energy generation / energy storage upgrades (well, maybe if you have really nothing else to upgrade). The single most important upgrade is the build speed. The earlier you have your reactors, the less CO2 you have to emit via power plants. Once you have your reactors running consider upgrading fire rate and packet speed, but it is also a wise choice to keep your Aether for the singularity weapon. Fire range and unit speed are almost completely useless on this map.
  
  



• Seizing the Amazon rainforest is an essential part of the game regardless of your starting position. Not only because it is a good vantage point for taking out the most powerful emitter in the Pacifics but because the only totem lies there and you won't be able to use the singularity weapon without it.
  
  



• Although at first it might seem crazy because of the low Creeper levels and fast flowing speed, building some Berthas might be actually a viable strategy to destroy massive amounts of Creeper in the oceans if you combine Berthas with the singularity weapon.
  
  


• Ignoring cities and letting most of them be flooded is an easy but quite evil way to win. You will reduce CO2 emission drastically, but you will be also responsible for wiping out billions of people (which, translated to gameplay means that you will receive much less score in the end).
  Is it worth?
  
  


• Don't be afraid of a small increase in the global temperature. A minimal increase in the global temperature is unavoidable in the beginning since you must rely exclusively on power plants. A few degrees won't cause rapid melting, but don't forget that it's quite difficult to decrease CO2 levels. Once you can rely on reactors and collectors, and maintain a low unit count, you can keep CO2 emission in a reasonable range, and eventually turn the CO2 balance into a negative number. Global temperature will then decrease and if it reaches 0, you managed to stop global warming completely (Congratulations!) and the Arctic will slowly regain its original size (will release AC). But that's really challenging, almost impossible to achieve (without having cities destroyed).
  Normally you can win this map by having a positive but modest CO2 balance throughout the whole gameplay.

Starting location guide

Sahara (easy): the best choice to start because you can expand quickly to Europe, Asia and Africa, protect most of the cities that are in extreme danger (like London and New York), and you have to nullify only one runner nest on the Nile. It's somewhat challenging to protect cities in SE Asia from this location, but they are still in a reasonable distance.

Autralia (medium): it's a peaceful place to start since there are no runners in the area and you can  immediately start using the power plant that has a very efficient energy / CO2 ratio. However, most cities are very far away, so you will be unable to protect them (especially in the Americas) in the beginning.  The other disadvantage is that you can only expand to one direction (SE Asia).

Siberia (medium): there are three power plants close to the landing zone, but all of them emit a lot of CO2, so you will increase global temperature quickly. Moreover, two of them are blocked by runners, so you have to deal with the runners first.

Canada (difficult): You can easily reach two power plants in the beginning and nullifying that runner nest is relatively easy. However, most cities are far away from here, and it's really challenging to protect them from here (you have to rely on guppies first). The only direction where you can expand to is Southern America but that contintent has a very uneven terrain and a nasty runner nest in the Amazon rainforest so it's not so easy to set a foothold there. To expand to other continents you must use terps.



Scientific inaccuracies

The map is geographically as accurate as the game allows. The number of possible terrain levels and the grid limit the geography of course - for instance oceans in reality are much deeper than in the game.
So I will not list geographic inaccuracies except for the most obvious ones:

• There is no Antarctica. I decided to omit it because the gameplay balance would be totally messed up. Antarctica is really huge and contains several times more water than the Arctic. On the other hand, it has land beneath most of its area, and it's deeply frozen. The result is that the ice in the Antarctica melts much slower than the Arctic icefields. I wanted to keep the map as simple as possible and I did not want to include two additional sources of Creeper that have a different melting rate on top.
  
  


• The Arctic is reduced to Greenland. There is a similar underlying reason for this: I wanted to keep the map as simple as possible. I wanted to create a single 'source' of additional Creeper that represents the melting that Greenland seemed a fair choice for that. According to reality the top region along the whole mapwidth should be frozen (roughly about 10 cells, not counting the permafrost areas in Canada and Siberia).
  
  

And then, you can find a bunch of non-obvious, but still highly inaccurate implementations (you are welcome to send inaccuracies that you have discovered in this map!):

• In reality not only forests can dissolve CO2. Actually, oceans dissolve about the same amount as forests. You can read more on this in this Nat Geo article.
  
  
• In reality there no such thing as absolutely clean 'green' technology that has no impact on CO2 levels. Even solar panels and wind turbines have an impact on CO2 emission: factories emit CO2 while they produce these panels. Of course, the overall CO2 emission of these technologies is much smaller than of regular, fossil-based power plants.
  
  
• The CO2 emission of a particular city does not only depend on its size and the current season. The per capita CO2 emission varies greatly across countires, see the below image:
  
  
  
  You can access more data and read scientific papers on this topic here.
  
  
• Not only CO2 is responsible for global warming. Actually, methane can take up 100 times more heat than CO2! Methane is not only emitted by the industry but also from livestocks. Here you can read a nice summary on this topic.
  
  
• The actual relation between the level of 'greenhouse gases' (such as CO2 and methane) and the global temperature is not that obvious as in the map and many other factors influence it - that's why many people want to deny the phenomenon of global warmth. However, in recent years the climate scientists reached a consensus: evidence clearly supports that the human activity is responsible for the global warming (http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/).
  
  
• In reality it's neither New York nor London that would be flooded first, but the Maldives. I did not want to include currents in world oceans that would make the map incredibly laggy and complicated so in the game the closest cities sink first.
  
  
• 
  The rise of sea levels is much slower in reality than in the game. In reality this is measured in mm/year, so you can imagine that it's a very slow process. However, it is still a real risk for the following decades that has to be handled. Because of this is a slow process, the rise of sea levels won't reduce population directly: people would have enough time to move towards the continental areas. However, it will eventually create geopolitical and immigrational issues that could easily escalate to poverty, famine or even military conflicts.
  
  

p.s. I know that the map is 2 days  late, I just required more time for testing & balancing.

[Tyler21]

I am glad to see that two people already rated this map 1. It would be interesting to know why as I don't think it's difficult at all.

[metalsiagon]

Wow dude... This is freaking awesome!  ;D
This is a very neat mechanism for playing a map, I'll be playing this one several times messing around with melting the ice caps. I don't know why anyone would give this a 1 like some instant beater or something, but way to one up the Hoover Dam map.

My only gripe is that it seems too small for everything that is going on, but its at the max width. If you were going to do a series it would be cool to see maps of single continents (that have ice in glaciers). Other wise congrats on making a dope map.  ;D

[D0m0nik]

Amazing work, great message and really interesting map.

Don't worry about the 1 scores, you will never please everyone. This is a great map and I expect the scores will average out quite high, not everyone likes a challenge or something new though, strange as that may be!

[RealAndy]

Absolutely brilliant, I'd give it more than 10 if I could. Love how all the extra global warming issues have been included, well above what I'd expect from a map. I've just taught a unit on this at school and I love the detail.

I'm in Australia and I think our emissions have just overtaken US's on a per capita basis.

I'd be guessing the 1's would be for a variety of reasons - Looks too educational, too hard to understand or even climate changes denialists, if they still exist.

Great work, I really enjoyed the Hoover Dam one as well, so keep them coming.

Oh, and I think I've found the solution to rising sea levels, just terraform everything to height 10!

[Telanir]

Amazing map as usual Tyler, I only just got the chance to try this map out and I'm glad I did.

Apart from what appears to be an inevitable melting of the Arctic (must have done something wrong lol), creeper flow from map edge to edge was not smooth enough to provide a challenge, I just sort of blocked off the map at the center after starting off in Siberia and it didn't come. Here's what my victory looked like:



Shields and terps made victory inevitable (and as usual #StrafersOP), I wasn't ever in any real danger but it was fun as hell. Therefore, a definite 10/10 from me, well done! ^-^

[Tyler21]

Thanks Telanir, but OH MY GOD, what did you do to our planet?  :o Now it resembles Venus or Mars more than Earth.
No forests, no rivers, no Arctic, no oceans, and it looks like that most cities didn't survive... so this is  typical case of a Pyrrhic victory :)

Try again if you have some time, you can do much better than this  ;)
Hint: use terps and the singularity more.

[Asbestos]

I won the game with 100% Arctic ice, -43 CO²/day, two factories running, and like twelve cities. Also, 200 energy cap, filled to the max. Very easy to save the environment if you manage things correctly, and also ruin humanity.

[Telanir]

Hahahaha I totally went the "might makes right" path, did not see another way at the beginning when I did it initially. :D

[Vanguard]

5,3 Billion left. Planet constists completely out of CO2 though. :I

You Sir, are an evil genius.

Also: I did not know that Canada had 30,000 lakes! Damn you Canada! Stop stealing my lakes!

[tanminecraft2]

there is an inaccuracy about the transportation if sea flood the road then no road to go cars need to travel longer and face more traffic jam

[tanminecraft2]

also when ice melt there will be more water to absorb heat and less ice to reflect light ozone is hardly recoverable and this make this world receive more heat when I play this there is nothing more than that melt to make you feel dangerous about it after some times I gathered enough energy when it's start to melt again but I just seal it up and temperature increase over time I just defense until Greenland is out of ice then I feel free to make all fossil reactors active there is nothing more than this it's too easy

[tanminecraft2]

and also I like this map style requiring a high cost energy like this maybe next time you may add a sleeper you don't need to modify or making good terrain for it it'll has 4-5 difficulty by itself
or maybe you may nerf the sleeper making it more scare of player build slower or something like that maybe next time about economic about some planet that you have to invest energy for economic and find place that sell cheap energy for you

[Tyler21]

tanminecraft2: thank you for your comments. Indeed, the real climate is much more complex.
I did not intend to create a challenging map here (for that matter, check the rest of my maps, especially the "you won't beat the map" series), I just wanted to create something unique and fun. If you are looking for a sleeper inspired map that I made, check #2079.