I remember in the first Civ that there was a notion of pollution that started kicking in once you had built factories. The only way to clean it up was to dedicated Settler units to go around and clean it up.
Convenient way to strangle enemies though, nuke their cities and they have a very hard time rising back up because they can't produce.
Even Civ 1 had global warming.
Oh, and the orange patches, the god damned orange patches. This thread brought back some really funny memories. It's almost as if I can still feel my frustration at that time.
For those wondering what the orange patches looked like in an older version:
http://i380.photobucket.com/albums/oo247/Vuldacon/Pollution....
If I remember correctly they started to turn deserted if overused like the yellow patches here:
https://www.civfanatics.com/images/civ3/industrialagesnumber...
And of course a quick search had me in laughter for a while:
"An option to turn off the %$!&! pollution"
"This has been mentioned before, but I'm bringing it up again anyway. In Civ2 the interface worked much quicker, and the city worker wasn't taken off the tile. Dump some engineers on it and bam! - problem solved. In Civ3 it goes something like this: spend a bunch of time hunting down some free workers on the slower map screen. Figure out how many it takes to clean up the square, move them there, and order them one by one to clean it up. Then, open your city screen. Put the laborer back on the tile (unless another city has taken over the tile at the start of the next turn - then it gets even more complicated). If you're using your workers on automatic (clean up pollution only) you still have to look at every city every turn, and if you have alot of pollution that turn, they may not clean it up in the order you like, causing the loss of shields, perhaps even delaying the production of something important for a turn. This is why I always have some free workers to pile on by hand anyway, even though it takes longer."
And finally, a future techy enters the stage:
"I agree that it becomes tiresome to chase pollution.
Edited my game so that pollution takes less workers to clean up. :mischief:"
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/an-option-to-turn-off...
I really loved that game! Though, it definitely was the reason for me not being ready on time for school :mischief:.