Give pollution some inertia to reinforce long-term planning

[ThePiachu]

During one of the 0.9 beta servers we had some fun run-in with over-polluting the planet with too much CO2 when everyone unlocked oil mining and they decided to refine too much at the same time. However, it was pretty easy to counter it - just turn off CO2 production for a day with a law and give nature some time to recover. Perhaps it would be a bit neater if there was a bit of inertia to the CO2 pollution to make the recovery a bit harder.

Basically, take inspiration from "death spirals" from games like Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or especially Banished:

• In Factorio if you run power on coal and get a brown-out, your coal drills start drilling slower, meaning you get less coal, meaning you get less power, meaning you get less coal, etc.
• In ONI, you have to plan a bit ahead with food production - it takes awhile to grow food, process it, etc. If you produce a bit less than you consume, you can run out before you can ramp up the production.
• In Banished, there are a lot of ways you can get into a death spiral. You might have a stagnant population that ages and dies off because younger people didn't have houses of their own, meaning you don't have enough people to harvest food, meaning you will starve and more people will die, etc.

What all those have in common is the cause and effect are separated by time and not that easy to fix if you don't catch it early. In ECO, this could take a form of a mechanic like this:

• Whatever CO2 you produce, the game keeps a count of it, but doesn't release it into the atmosphere to count for the global CO2 level. It's basically like pumping CO2 into a large tank
• Instead, the game releases CO2 from that count into the atmosphere proportionally to the difference of what it is to what it should be. It's like releasing the CO2 from the large tank into the atmosphere
• If you spike the production of CO2, you will fill in the large tank quite a lot, but you won't notice the CO2 rise for a day or two due to the way the flow works
• However, once the CO2 in the atmosphere catches up, it will continue climbing for awhile even if you shut everything off. Then it will take more time to settle into lower levels. This is the inertia - the CO2 was produced earlier and is polluting you now.

Or something like that, it could just be simplified to "whatever CO2 you produce you will see released into the world 1-2 days later".

What this would do is it would make the impact of CO2 spikes a lot more dangerous. If a massive production boom caused global warming and sea level rise that would last you 3-4 days before it clears out, rather than being able to tackle it in 1 day, it would rise the tension of the game a bit and reinforce that you need to plan ahead. It might also be long enough to actually feel like it's a disaster - with this amount of time you can see some areas lose their natural plants, some hit to wildlife, crops, etc.

[Engimage]

I guess the first step here should be actually make the impact relevant. In its current state you can think of how to complicate it more, but IMO the basic part of it should start working.