atrocity prohibitions and eco-damage?

[bvanevery]

If atrocity prohibitions have been lifted, do chemical weapons do eco-damage?

It is a proven fact that if you're a human attacking a human, and you use chemical weapons, and the atrocity prohibitions are in effect, then you will do eco-damage!  In fact, 20 to 30 chemical attacks in, Planet's retalliation is truly horrifying.  If you start early in the game when chemical weapons first become available, I think your fledgling civilization has almost no chance of surviving the onslaught that ensues.  It would take some more advanced capabilities, like say Fusion Power, R-Lasers, the Neural Amplifier, and maybe a Genejack Factory driven manufacturing base.  Otherwise, Planet spams harder than you can likely keep up with.

I did a fairly extensive writeup testing that whole thing, with the Pirates, so I was already prepared for the Global Warming and drowning that occurs.  I ended up quitting the game because Planet was spamming me so hard, relentlessly, every turn.  Even if you could survive it all, it's a very dull way to play the game, I think.  You basically can't do anything else, it's almost a Denial Of Service attack on your gameplay. 

So, I have no desire to go through that crap again.  But something interesting happened in my current game, playing my own SMACX AI Growth mod version 1.15.  Lal, of all people, voted to repeal the atrocity prohibitions!  Way to keep things civilized Lal.  Well I went along with it, and it passed.  I figured, I might not use them, but I wanted to see if the AIs would use them on each other and get really pissed.  Also whether they'd make any effective use of them.

So far, I don't really know.  I'm playing as the University and totally stomping everyone on Secret Projects.  Still, I haven't discovered Fusion Power or Genejack Factories yet, so we're still pretty solidly in just midgame.  The Drones took the Monsoon Jungle from the Morganites, crushed Morgan (my erstwhile ally), and proceeded to try to bother me on my borders.  I wiped out everything with the mindworms I'd picked up, built up stuff, then took all of the territory the Drones took south of the Monsoon Jungle.  That included 3 Secret Projects that Morgan originally built, putting me in possession of everything except the Weather Paradigm.  Yep, I'm stomping.  Now I'm just filling in my territory, terraforming the land I already took, building more SPs, and waiting until I have some kind of production surplus to do another round of munging Domai.

In short, I'm doing just fine and don't want to mess anything up with Planet's moral outrage.  So, what's the answer?

[Antoniaz]

Regardless of where you put this knowledge in place, publish it in this forum.

[bvanevery]

I never did find out in that game.  Don't really need chemical weapons in my current game either.  I'm about to wipe out the Usurpers, and I haven't committed any atrocities against them.  I think I will utterly wipe them out, so that I can do Diplomatic Victory later.  As long as an Alien is in the game, you can't.

So... one of these days I'll remember to find out.