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< 9 Your Battle Mine | Index | 11 Policy > 10 Your Land
While your battle mine serves as a treasure chest for your accomplishments, it is your land that provides the means to fill that chest. Buildings constructed to increase your abilities are part of the land, as well as outposts, diabolical machines, and undesirables such as pollution and fallout. Some of these complex game concepts have their own sections, others will be discussed here.
To add to the flavour of your empire, you give your land a name when you join the game. Don't get too attached however, for it is possible you will not spend your whole stay on the same bit of earth. Those giant tank-treads are not just for show. See Land Exchange for more details. 10.1 Base ResourceYour land's base resource is what you mine out of the ground. Base resource is readily detectable by colour on the map. Base resources have different mining durations and yields (see Mining). They dictate what refining you can do (see Refining). Sand, bauxite and uranium ore bases affect your ability to grow plants (see Growth). The following is a table describing the pros and cons of each land type.
10.1.1 TerraformingTerraforming allows you to change the base resource your land produces. At your command, technicians from the academy release an armada of nanobots into the earth itself, altering its chemical composition.The terraforming ability is not immediately available, it is a technology that must be researched in the academy. The cost is one of each refined material: Aluminum, steel, glass, diamond, and enriched uranium. Unlike tech research, this cost may be paid using base materials. Terraforming your land will destroy underground buildings, you may want to scrap trees for food first.. A list of underground buildings can be found in the Building Attributes section. Crops, with their shallow root structure, are not harmed, and instantly mutate into a more appropriate species. So complete is the change that even materials currently being processed in refineries will morph to the newly chosen resource. Mercifully, objects in your inventory remain unaffected. 
10.2 PollutionPollution is a byproduct of heavy industry and power-hungry technology. It can also come from random events, highly polluted neighbours, and general wastefulness. It has an extremely negative effect on production and growth.Pollution changes hourly, according to the following formula: Industry directly impacts pollution by deciding how quickly it dissipates. Neutral industries reduce pollution by 40% each hour, laissez-faire and green industries by 35% and 45% respectively (all rounding up). The purifier powersink will double this value. As an example, let's consider the pollution levels of an empire that starts at zero, then builds an academy, two refineries and a factory with no other mitigating factors for a total of five power. The theoretical empire's industry is laissez-faire, for a 35% reduction after power increase. This chart demonstrates the gradual change in pollution levels (assuming no outside interference):
As we can see, after six hours pollution has stabilized at a new level. The maximum level pollution can reach is 100. Outside of this hourly assessment, pollution can come from several other sources. Every object lost to overflow adds one pollution. Every food that rots adds one pollution. Every tree that is felled adds one pollution. Heavily industrialized neighbours may also leak pollution into your land, this is called spillover. The negative impact of pollution is a serious concern. It deducts directly from players' growth and production modifiers. To mitigate this, laissez-faire industries specially seal their work environments to ward off 5 PM's worth of damage. Uranium miners are so ridiculously hardy from strolling around in the sieverts all day that they simply shrug off the first twenty pollution to hit their production modifier. If you are troubled by pollution, a dome will halve the effects of both it and fallout on your growth and production modifiers, insulating you from the horrors beyond the glass wall. A purifier doubles your industry's natural pollution drain, causing levels to plummet in a matter of hours. Most dangerously, in the event of acid rain, pollution can cause degradation of your battle mine's hull. (See the Pale Horseman for more details.) 10.2.1 SpilloverWhile spreading less virulently than fallout, pollution in large quantities can leach into neighbouring territories. Be careful that you don't arouse somebody's ire, it may be tempting to take out some of those dirty production buildings with a little cannon fire. Spillover is not to be confused with overflow, the loss of inventory due to wet weather.Players will spill over one pollution to any neighbour with at least ten pollution less than them, after pollution is adjusted hourly. The exact source of spillover cannot be determined until the requisite detection technology is researched. Constructing a dome completely eliminates any spillover pollution. 
10.3 FalloutFallout, like pollution, is another detrimental land attribute. Rather than being caused by smog belching chimneys and poorly calibrated septic systems however, fallout arises when battlers start playing around with the good old atomic hellfire.Unlike pollution, which you mostly bring upon yourself, fallout tends to come from other players. The fun begins after a nuclear war with your neighbour: For every enriched uranium that hits a player, fallout increases by one. Every ICBM impact increases fallout by three. Harvesting a refinery for enriched uranium also has a 25% chance of causing one fallout. It gets worse, as fallout tends to spread more quickly than pollution. The algorithm, run every two hours, works like this:
The result is that as soon as one player starts glowing red-hot, his neighbours will quickly catch up, before everyone gradually simmers down together. Consider this table, depicting fallout levels of a player and his neighbour, who engages in some unfortunate ICBM exchange.
Random events may also cause fallout, and a destroyed reactor will add two fallout. Doomsday devices result in plenty of fallout. Like pollution, fallout caps at 100. You can't see your neighbour’s fallout until you research the required detection technology. Fallout does not affect production modifier, but it does double damage to growth modifier. This effect can be halved by building a dome. Fallout may also cause hull erosion in the event of acid rain. See the Pale Horseman section for more details. Fallout also deducts from the attacker's accuracy in combat, as waves of radiation sickness reduce the population's aggression. 10.4 Land WeightThe weight of your land is increased by building very heavy things. Land weight is important as it factors directly into heft, discussed in the Land Push section.The following elements compose land weight:
Land weight is of course measured in metric teratons. < 9 Your Battle Mine | Index | 11 Policy > |
