My friends and coworkers often speak a lot of praises about the survival/industrial game Factorio. In the game, pollution from the player’s generators attract hostile creatures that one has to manage. The player can use renewable energy an option, but it’s not as easily productive or scalable as other sources of power.
I haven’t played the game, but I always thought of the pollution/conflict dynamic and renewables being more safe (but harder to get right) as a statement on environmental policy.
I think the actual game is much harsher than this. You play as the main character and the game is really just about expanding the factory for the sake of expanding the factory. It serves no purpose other than making the factory bigger. You might be able to produce a little less pollution with solar but at the end, the game is about expanding the factory. You will cut down the forests, and pollute the environment, and pave over the beautiful landscape and the remove the homes of the natives that stand in your way. Why? Because it's what you do. It's factorio. It's slightly subtle, but not really. I think everyone realizes this is the backdrop of the game but you just keep building, and paving and polluting, because it's Factorio. It feels like it should be some moral lesson, I'm not sure what it is though. You just keep doing stuff and having fun.
Is this rocket, by any chance, similar to one(s) in Civ II, which gave the basis for Alpha Centauri? Aka “welp, this planet is done for, gonna need us another one.”
I'm a big fan of Factorio, but the pollution mechanic isn't well done. Its mostly an early game mechanic to encourage you to go out an massacre the natives that are inside the polluted areas. With fairly hard difficulty settings, you might start to scale back production in the early game to limit your pollution, but that's about it.
The real benefit of solar in the game is frame rate.
Also, solar is the easiest energy source to get right. Just add solar panels if you brown out during the day, and accumulators if you black out at night (or lookup/compute the solar/accumulator ratio; and lets face it, if you are playing Factorio, you probably already did). Burning fuel for power has all of the logistics problems of keeping your fuel supply saturated (plus boiler/generator/pump ratios). And nuclear can get as complicated as you care to make it.
I did a build where I really saw the positive effect of solar. I teched up to electric furnaces and replaced all of the coal driven ones with electric, including efficiency modules, powered by solar. The steam engines became used only for brown-out protection. As soon as I did that the biter attacks became much more manageable and I could easily wall in with hardly any resistence. This was on death world.
So I wouldn't say the mechanic doesn't work, for me it made a lot of sense.
I haven’t played the game, but I always thought of the pollution/conflict dynamic and renewables being more safe (but harder to get right) as a statement on environmental policy.