if you have built a coal plant in a city and you build hoover dam or just a dam (or even a nuclear plant which i never do anymore) does it cancels it ? cancel the +2 green faces...

No, the 2 :yuck: do not disappear.
Guess, a nuclear plant can still cause a meltdown.
(After 1 nuclear meltdown in my capital once :mad: , I've never built
any of those plants again.)

No, the 2 :yuck: do not disappear.
Guess, a nuclear plant can still cause a meltdown.
(After 1 nuclear meltdown in my capital once :mad: , I've never built
any of those plants again.)

same here...I think i have a rate of 25% of nuclear lant having a meltdown...

What does a meltdown do?

I think I read someplace that the 2 :sick: are gone once you build a damn or something to replace the Coal plant.

It should be easy to check in a WB test.

What does a meltdown do?

I think I read someplace that the 2 :sick: are gone once you build a damn or something to replace the Coal plant.

It should be easy to check in a WB test.

well it 1:33 am so i'm going to bed...

as for the meltdown it reduces your population by something like the half...destroy half the improvements and creates a radioactive cloud you need to clean. The worst thing is that sometimes you beelined for fission and when the meltdown occurs you understand you have to research Biology and then Ecology which will take 40 turns before you even start cleaning the place. so during 40 turns the population will decrease even more...then you're in the hole...

No, the 2 :yuck: do not disappear.
Guess, a nuclear plant can still cause a meltdown.
(After 1 nuclear meltdown in my capital once :mad: , I've never built
any of those plants again.)

You are wrong.
If you have a Hydro Plant or the Three Gorges Dam the :yuck: disappears.
I am just wondering if this is also true for the shale plant...

the meltdown thing is bogus and bears no relation real world probablities, anyway I tend to have a ridiculously tough time getting that stupid Three Gorges Dam built, takes forever and come usually towards the end of my game when it means less :(

You are wrong.
I checked this in one of my last games and those 2 :yuck:
were there in the city screen health/happy summary.
(But, I'll check this again in my current game. ;) )

Also, a nuclear meltdown will also destroy National wonders.
I lost Wall Street this way, so I remember it very well.

i've never seen a nuclear meltdown happen, altho i don't generally build nuke plants either.

my husband saw it exactly once. he was on a huge map and during late game was at war with gandhi. he took over one of the indian cities. while it was in revolt, it had a nuclear meltdown (and my husband just about blew a fuse).

it made him SOOOOOOOOOOO mad since there wasn't a darn thing he could do about it :gripe: gandhi chose to build the nuke plant, not hubby, and hubby couldn't do anything to prevent it from melting down, since in this game you can't destroy buildings. he was ranting "what am i supposed to do? save up great artists all game to bring one along to every late-game city capture just in case it has a nuke plant? raze every single city, even the ones with multiple wonders?" he never did go back to finish that game.

we thought at that time that civ4 was like civ3, in that meltdowns could only happen if cities are in revolt/rebellion. but of course in civ4 your cities don't rebel any more so that wouldn't make any sense, so it has to be a random chance even with no revolt. perhaps the chance is higher if is the city is in revolt, don't know if that was programming or just happenstance that they coincided. i guess i've just been very lucky with the few plants i have built.

i generally end up building recycling centers in my big cities when the game goes that long, even if i have 3 gorges dam (i still call it hoover tho, and isn't the picture still hoover?), since they have enough unhealthiness to irritate me anyway. that would make the ill effects of the coal plant go away, if your game does go that far.

with Civ 3 and 4 I used to not build one single coal plant and wait for the hoover dam...but I just understood i was losing 60 years of electricity and production and it was very late in the game and I had to construct the space ship at that time not the hoover dam. so I started building nuclear plants but after a few meltdowns I now build coal plants everywhere. So in my last game I didnt know if it was giving me something to build the Dam...

you may as well just suck up the miasma and build the coal plants, if you get Three Gorges/Hoover then at least you got the production boos which you otherwise would have missed (and getting that dam is no longer that easy imo). Nukes are ok except for the frequent meltdowns. Besides other than lower life expectancy what is -2 sick really going to do to your game?

you may as well just suck up the miasma and build the coal plants, if you get Three Gorges/Hoover then at least you got the production boos which you otherwise would have missed (and getting that dam is no longer that easy imo). Nukes are ok except for the frequent meltdowns. Besides other than lower life expectancy what is -2 sick really going to do to your game?

yeah I dont even know what the green faces do in a city...I'm guessing they lower the number of worked tiles ? but then again if I have electricity i'll still have more productivity.

You lose 1 food for each green face over the health limit.

I checked this in one of my last games and those 2 :yuck:
were there in the city screen health/happy summary.
(But, I'll check this again in my current game. ;) )

Also, a nuclear meltdown will also destroy National wonders.
I lost Wall Street this way, so I remember it very well.

If you place the cursor over the health symbol it will show +x:yuck: from population, buildings and +2 :yuck: from power.
The latter disappears after you have a cleaner power plant. I am certain it was this way the last few times I checked, but this was before the 2.08 patch. Might be a new bug.

well it 1:33 am so i'm going to bed...

..

yes go to bed

i always gun for the hoover dam

Ok the minus the food thing per sick face does kind of make sense now, thanks

If you place the cursor over the health symbol it will show +x:yuck: from population, buildings and +2 :yuck: from power.
The latter disappears after you have a cleaner power plant. I am certain it was this way the last few times I checked, but this was before the 2.08 patch. Might be a new bug.

I have checked several times in the past and this has always been the case.

I tend to have a ridiculously tough time getting that stupid Three Gorges Dam built, takes forever Yes, I try save two or three Great Engineers in storage until I have learned Plastics and then I burn them to rush its completion.

Yes, I try save two or three Great Engineers in storage until I have learned Plastics and then I burn them to rush its completion.

this was exactly my strategy for civ 3 and c4 vanilla...3 games ago I went to the coal plant...I prefer using them for ironworks. The game is already decided usually at the time you have plastics.


and I guess loosing 2 foods after biology isnt bad at all for my productivity

The latter disappears after you have a cleaner power plant. I am certain it was this way the last few times I checked, but this was before the 2.08 patch. Might be a new bug.
You're absolutely right. I checked it, a Hydro and Nuclear plant versus
the Coal plant and the Three Gorges Dam verus the Coal plant in all
situations the 2 :yuck: have disappeared. So, I was wrong.
(Maybe, I saw it in the vanilla SGs I've played.)

Does anyone know how to modify the game to eliminate meltdowns? The environmental wackos obviously had final control of this game. I have been able to eliminate "Global Warming".

I would think meltdowns are caused by the iNukeExplosionRand setting found for each building in this file:

CIV4BuildingInfos.xml

which can be found for Vanilla CIV4 here:

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Assets\XML\Buildings

or for Warlords here:

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Warlords\Assets\XML\Buildings

Change the iNukeExplosionRand setting for a nuclear power plant from 2000 to 0 and that should eliminate meltdowns. Note that you should copy the CIV4BuildingInfos.xml file to your custom assets folder first before editing it.

Does anyone know how to modify the game to eliminate meltdowns? The environmental wackos obviously had final control of this game.

The rate of nuclear accidents with major radiation release in Civ4 seems approximately comparable to the rate in real life (1 in the past 50 years).

I have been able to eliminate "Global Warming".
You know, there's whole governments out there (I'm guessing not your own, mind) that would be very interested to hear how that one was managed. They've probably been asking you, except you can't hear them because evidently you have your fingers in your ears.

So that makes the probablities of a meltdown...?

Coal plants are sadly vital since they come so much earlier than everything else. I personally build nuke plants. Haven't had any trouble..... yet.

Nuke plants are, in my opinion, the worst/most useless building in civ. The only time in which they are useful is if you have no coal, can't build hydro dam, and have uranium. Even then, they cost more than either of the other plants, and can destroy your city and leave it a mess for a long time. I would much rather take the 2 unhealthy from coal plant, even if I had to wage war or pay through the nose for a source of coal (which you need for railroads anyways).

At least in Civ3 they gave you a benefit of extra production in exchange for the risk of meltdown (which was also much smaller risk in Civ3)

well it 1:33 am so i'm going to bed...

as for the meltdown it reduces your population by something like the half...destroy half the improvements and creates a radioactive cloud you need to clean. The worst thing is that sometimes you beelined for fission and when the meltdown occurs you understand you have to research Biology and then Ecology which will take 40 turns before you even start cleaning the place. so during 40 turns the population will decrease even more...then you're in the hole...

Dare I suggest that if at that stage of the game, it's taking you 40 turns to research biology and ecology, there's probably something amiss with your science strategy... (though 40 turns might just be plausible on marathon)

I agree though, that nuclear plants seem pretty useless in civ. I've never built one. Stupid thing is that in Civ they can cause global warming through meltdowns, but in the real world, nuclear plants are actually more likely to slow down global warming, compared to building a coal plant.

Well, the 'global warming' from nuke plant meltdown could just be a simulation of the effects of radiation on agricultural land. As it kills the plant life, terrain turns from grassland->plains->desert

Dare I suggest that if at that stage of the game, it's taking you 40 turns to research biology and ecology, there's probably something amiss with your science strategy... (though 40 turns might just be plausible on marathon)

I agree though, that nuclear plants seem pretty useless in civ. I've never built one. Stupid thing is that in Civ they can cause global warming through meltdowns, but in the real world, nuclear plants are actually more likely to slow down global warming, compared to building a coal plant.

Radioactive waste does nothing to slow down global warming.

Nuclear winter, an entirely different issue, is the theorical threat of inducing an artificial ice age from making the atmosphere opaque as result of tons of dust and ashes released into the air. The atmosphere would be opaque, sunlight wouldn't penetrate the atmosphere and everything would be really cold.

Radioactive waste is just contamination as in toxicity. It's not going to produce global warming but it will, sure as hell, kill or wound anyone exposed to it. (And radioactivity therapy IS ABOUT killing/wounding diseased body cells).

I would like to see an actual statistic showing the number of Nuclear Power plants that have reached the end of their usable life WITHOUT a meltdown compared to the amount that have suffered a meltdown. Not that the Chernobyl incident should mean anything to that statistic because it was the result of truly reckless operation, it's not the way normal real world power plants are made or operated. A similar incident was deliberately produced in the US as part of an experiment after the Chernobyl incident in a much smaller scale, I can't remember the name of the experiment but it ended up in resulting in an estimate that in order to produce the eco-impact of Chernobyl an American power plant would have to suffer something like 40 years of forced unattended meltdown or something equally obscene (I don't remember the exact result of the experiment either).

For any other purpose the real world threat of nuclear power plants is the risk of release of radioactive materials, it's a serious threat but it isn't any more dangerous than a strong concentration of any ordinary viral agent escaping a medical research lab.

I just experienced my first meltdown. Once I had fission I spammed nuclear plants like there was no tomorrow (foregoing coal plants). I had just finished the Space Elevator when the plant exploded. Couldn't have happened at a worse time. This was my number 1 hammer production city and I was planning on building the SS engine here. Fortunately, it was a coastal city, and my hammer producing mines were outside the contamination zone, so my hammer output actually did not decrease dramatically. Also fortunate was that I had researched ecology for some reason before fission, and I had literally 20 workers doing nothing, so I was able to scrub the fallout in one turn. However, two grassland tiles turned to desert due to global warming.

Radioactive waste does nothing to slow down global warming.

Nuclear winter, an entirely different issue, is the theorical threat of inducing an artificial ice age from making the atmosphere opaque as result of tons of dust and ashes released into the air. The atmosphere would be opaque, sunlight wouldn't penetrate the atmosphere and everything would be really cold.


Sorry, I didn't express myself clearly. What I meant is that it seems silly/unrealistic that in Civ4, nuclear power plants can contribute to global warming [whereas coal plants don't]. In the real world, nuclear plants contribute I believe a small amount towards global warming, but far less than coal/oil/etc. - to the extent that some people argue for building nuclear plants specifically in order to slow global warming (because by doing so, we burn less fossil fuels).

Civ4 seems to have put in the opposite situation to the real world.

Sorry, I didn't express myself clearly. What I meant is that it seems silly/unrealistic that in Civ4, nuclear power plants can contribute to global warming [whereas coal plants don't]. In the real world, nuclear plants contribute I believe a small amount towards global warming, but far less than coal/oil/etc. - to the extent that some people argue for building nuclear plants specifically in order to slow global warming (because by doing so, we burn less fossil fuels).

Civ4 seems to have put in the opposite situation to the real world.

Yes, well, Nuclear generators don't release hibernation gases into the atmosphere. They're basically pretty much "steam power" in that aspect. Coal plants release tons of gases and waste into the air, some of the gases pollute the atmosphere increasing the planet's hibernation effect. I think most of the global warming comes from the sun itself, the gases don't heat the world they just trap heat waves into the planet for a longer span than they should last.

Nuclear plants do produce about as much contamination as any other kind of power plant, except that nuclear waste is usually disposed in special underground installations while Coal power residuals are released into the air. I think this "global warming" thing is just the result of Firaxis exaggerating the ecological impact of radioactive waste the same way they seem to be exaggerating the risk of meltdown. Maybe they think all nuclear plants are Chernobyl. :lol:

The additional transport and storage issues with nuclear plants, combined with the risk of large-scale terrorism/rogue nuclear states, still contribute a significant amount to global warming, since all of that requires its own power, lots of petrol etc. They probably ARE greener than coal or gas plants, but not by as much as you might initially suppose.

I would like to see an actual statistic showing the number of Nuclear Power plants that have reached the end of their usable life WITHOUT a meltdown compared to the amount that have suffered a meltdown. Not that the Chernobyl incident should mean anything to that statistic because it was the result of truly reckless operation, it's not the way normal real world power plants are made or operated.

Chernobyl is just as much a part of the "normal real world" as New York is.

Why do you suppose that nuclear plants in Civ4 should all be operated like plants in the US, and never like plants in the Soviet Union? Why shouldn't there be a variety of operators and practices and mistakes in the game, just as there is in real life?

Chernobyl is just as much a part of the "normal real world" as New York is.

Why do you suppose that nuclear plants in Civ4 should all be operated like plants in the US, and never like plants in the Soviet Union? Why shouldn't there be a variety of operators and practices and mistakes in the game, just as there is in real life?

I just don't see why the Civ4 model should be based on an anomaly rather than the norm. :goodjob:

I haven't used nuke plants in Civ 4 but from what I read it seems that in a span of 100 turns a single nuke plant is almost certain to meltdown. So if you build 10 then probability would suggest an average of 1 meltdown every 10 turns. Even including Chernobyl into the statistic it's far from being a model that reflects real life nuke plants.

I haven't used nuke plants in Civ 4 but from what I read it seems that in a span of 100 turns a single nuke plant is almost certain to meltdown.

Then it seems that you're reading some sort of bizarre fiction. Perhaps your comments would be more useful if they weren't based on such wild misinformation.

Nuclear Plant has iNukeExplosionRand of 2000, meaning each turn there's 1/2000 chance of meltdown. That means 1999/2000 chance of no meltdown. For 100 Nuclear Reactor Turns (meaning 100 turns with a single reactor, or 10 turns with 10 reactors), the chance of no meltdowns at all is 95% (thus 5% chance of one or more meltdowns).

The value was originally 1000, which would give is 90% chance of no meltdowns in 100 NR turns.

Considering that a meltdown in cIV is a Chernobyl -type catastrophe, and that there are hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world, the value seems a bit on the high side compared to the real world. Maybe it should be 5000 instead of 2000.

Maybe they are taking into account that you aren't going to build hundreds in the game. I don't think I usually end up with as many cities as there are in the real world at the end of a game even on a huge map.

Considering that a meltdown in cIV is a Chernobyl -type catastrophe, and that there are hundreds of nuclear power plants in the world, the value seems a bit on the high side compared to the real world. Maybe it should be 5000 instead of 2000.

More than that, it seems a rather bad thing to have in the game at all: It amounts to a small risk of something extremely bad happening to your game, where there is nothing you can do (once you have the plant) to control the risk. Those kinds of risks generally detract from the fun of playing. If the risk could only result from you doing something stupid, then it'd make a lot more sense. Also, it makes nuclear plants virtually useless from a game POV - why am I going to build something that gives me that risk when the thing I'm building confers no benefits that I couldn't easily get from other means?

ISTM a better way would have been something something like, nuclear plants work like coal plants but give you +1 unhappy face instead of the +2 unhealthy ones.

FWIW I also think the global warming thing is broken because although it's a minor penalty, it affects all civs equally and there's really no in-game incentive to avoid global warming. I think the Civ3 model where it was based on city size, production, and global-warming-causing buildings, and you could build other buildings to alleviate the effects, was a lot more realistic.

Personally I'd prefer to see a return to the Civ3 model, but without the unfun random pollution tiles. And with diplomatic penalties: Something like, as soon as any one civ discovers ecology, all civs know who is causing the most global warming, and the civs causing the most pollution get -2 diplomatic penalties from the AIs causing the least. (Probably better though if ecology/whatever tech invokes the knowledge didn't come so late in the tech tree though). You could make it even more interesting if some later tech revealed (accurate) scientific predictions of which tiles would get desertified by a round of global warming - focussing the diplo penalties from the most affected AIs as well as giving an interesting strategic impact to global warming :mischief:

Sorry I seem to be contributing to a thread hijack :crazyeye:

Chernobyl is just as much a part of the "normal real world" as New York is.

Why do you suppose that nuclear plants in Civ4 should all be operated like plants in the US, and never like plants in the Soviet Union? Why shouldn't there be a variety of operators and practices and mistakes in the game, just as there is in real life?

Because there's no option in the game to choose whether you are going to run your cities like the Soviet Union or like the USA, that works in any way that might impact nuclear plants. If such an option were present, and you could do something that ran things like the Soviet Union (presumably for some advantage, like holding vassal states by force more easily) but carried a small risk of a nuclear meltdown, thus enabling players to choose whether to take the risk in return for the benefits, then having meltdowns in the game would make a lot more sense (from a playability POV; I'm thinking playability rather then realism here).

Of course I think it would also make more sense from a realism POV if meltdowns didn't cause global warming, since I'm fairly sure they don't in real life (maybe someone with better knowledge there can correct me).

I agree on that I don't like having a completely random event like nuclear meltdown in my games. Random event like losing a 98% battle is a different thing - I can prepare for the possibility by having more units. But there's nothing I can do about meltdowns. So, I don't build nuclear plants.

I'm not completely sure about the unhappiness for nuclear plants either. There have been protests about everything you can think of, as people generally fear the new things they don't understand. What might be closer to truth would be that you need gold to run a nuclear plant. If you set it to run without funding, it has a meltdown risk. If you pay some small maintenance cost (some small gpt figure), then it doesn't have meltdown risk.

Coal plants should indeed be a cause for global warming (actually also for global cooling). For now, they cause unhealthiness, which isn't that far off the mark either.

Overall, the global warming issue in civ is a hard one. It's quite hard to figure out a method for global warming that would be reasonably balanced. Diplomatic effects should indeed be part of the whole, but that's pretty recent issue.. Global warming would affect the game only post-industrial age anyway, probably only in the modern age (during industrial age the pollution wasn't even on the same scale as during modern age), and considering that diplomatic effects are a very late development ('90s at earliest, maybe could say that not really even then) the late techs for understanding global warming are quite justified.

More than that, it seems a rather bad thing to have in the game at all: It amounts to a small risk of something extremely bad happening to your game, where there is nothing you can do (once you have the plant) to control the risk. Those kinds of risks generally detract from the fun of playing.

That's a matter of taste. I like random events.

I do agree that the benefits of nuclear plants seem too small for their costs. Actually, that would be true even if there were zero chance of meltdown. The problem, I think, is that the cost of unhealth in the late game is too low, and also that, once you've built coal plants everywhere, there's a reduced incentive to build nuclear plants. In the "real world" there is a continuing need for new power plants, so the choice is between building more coal plants or building nuclear plants. Not between keeping the existing coal plants or making them redundant by building nuclear plants, as in Civ4.

I do agree that the benefits of nuclear plants seem too small for their costs. Actually, that would be true even if there were zero chance of meltdown. The problem, I think, is that the cost of unhealth in the late game is too low, and also that, once you've built coal plants everywhere, there's a reduced incentive to build nuclear plants. In the "real world" there is a continuing need for new power plants, so the choice is between building more coal plants or building nuclear plants. Not between keeping the existing coal plants or making them redundant by building nuclear plants, as in Civ4.

Agreed. I guess that's a sympton of the wider issue of the simplistic Civ economic model in which one of something is enough to supply everyone (one building supplies an entire city, no matter how big it gets, one medic, or hospital can heal unlimited numbers of units simultaneously, one oil well can supply an entire empire, etc. etc.)

Certainly the simple economic model causes some issues that feel out of place. However, a complex economic model that would better handle all special cases might not suit civ so well. Civ is, afterall, a fairly simple game when it comes to mechanics. I think that's one of the strong points here - simple mechanics that allow for a complex game to develop.

I think that's one of the strong points here - simple mechanics that allow for a complex game to develop.

I think so, too. But, if the design leads to options that never get used (like the nuclear plant), then maybe it should be tweaked.

Well, I guess then it pretty much means Nuclear plants were made into to game to not be built.

Coal - 150 cost. 2 sick.

Hydro - 200 cost. Only on cities with river tiles. The extra construction turns don't seem worth the effort. Prefer coal.

Nuclear - 250 cost. Puts a nuclear timebomb on your city. That's even more extra construction turns, and risk of city destruction. Prefer coal.

As coal comes first, my main production cities will definitelly get coal plants.
Nuclear I skip. I don't want the risk it brings.
When Hydro becomes available, I may have a shot at Three Gorges Dam. Depending on the size of my empire, and the number of second tier production cities (to which I would build factories but not coal plants) this may or may not be a good option. Hydro plants I build only in case I have serious health issues in some riverside city that has a coal plant - Ironworks city if riverside comes to mind as a potential target.

Factories I might actually consider in cities that have very low production but lots of food. Like the 1 tile triple-fish island. Reasoning there is that food allows for specialists, and factories allow for engineers, thus food can be turned into engineered hammers. It can make quite a big difference.