Factories and early powerplants

[raxo2222]

There are 4 powerplants unlocked at electricity: Coal, Oil, Natural Gas and Biomass powered. Do you build them all in your cities? Or pick one least polluting?

Also there is steampunk dynamos, that are polluting like coal power plant.

There is like 20 factories unlocked as you build power plant in your city. They are bit polluting.
Do you build one kind of it in each city?

 

[Thunderbrd]

I have a plan to address the factories at least.

 

[Mag Co]

Yep, I always build them all, even the solar, eolic and hydropower ones.
It's basically buying hammers using gold of maintenance, some civics and the nasty nasty Metropolitan Administration (+50% maintenance) could really really screw my plans. However, I usually ended having a lot of gold thanks to the IMF and the Global Bank which gives you a high interest on gold (around 4%/5% every turn I think???), I almost ended burning it in rushing production, which causes a lot, and I mean A LOT, of inflation.
When I got some hundreds of hours I always have fear of reaching the nasty nasty limit on gold of the 32-bit so I don't miss it when I throw it away.
It's quite interesting the late game, huh?

 

[irishhombre]

I wait to build the factories and the power plants. I only build what my civilization needs at first, then later on when I discover technologies to lower air and water pollution I start building them slowly. Also the first power plant I build is the Three Gorge Dam, no pollution and most of my cities are powered up. Any city not powered by that I build the natural gas power plant, least amount of pollution. Then once I discover solar power I scrap the natural gas and switch to solar power.

 

[Faustmouse]

Never build them, I beeline straight into Hydropower and grab the Three Gorges Dam.
For Factories I have two strategies: Either I dump them all in one city, so I can see what I have build and can build the national park etc there.
The other strategy was to build 1 or 2 different factories per city and continue from there, choosing the most unpolluted factory as I go.
Both work equally well, however, when I tried to handle it over to AI Goverment in 1 city, I built all factories, ramping up to 3000 Air Pollution quickly.
IMO most factories were just generally copy/pasted in (I know cuz I did the coding for many of them ) thus there is few difference between them. A Match Factory in the early 1900 would be equally dangerous and unhealthy to work in as a modern computer factory...
It's a "boring" task, but we have the tools to give factories "+10 Air Pollution with Industrialism"; "-5 Flammabilty with Globalization" etc etc if we would like. This would be possibly interesting as it would allow factories to become cleaner over time, or getting worse during the early industrial era.

 

[Noriad2]

Pollution depends heavily on laws. It is cheaper to dump waste chemicals in the local river than to reprocess them. In China for example, there is a real problem with leather tanning using Chromium baths. The waste water is dumped in the local rivers and as Chromium salts can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems, it leads to widespread disease in China.

http://gizmodo.com/how-leather-is-slowly-killing-the-people-and-places-tha-1572678618

There is a reverse correlation between profits and pollution. Perhaps in the game this can be handled via injunctions, either produce environment-friendly and lower profits/productivity, or maximize profits and sacrifice the health of your citizens.

 

[raxo2222]

I have a plan to address the factories at least.

Will be they autobuild, or they will be national wonders? You need only one of them to have resources.

Also it would be nice to see which resources I could produce, but isn't present in my empire yet.
Edit: you can actually see them in domestic advisor window by customizing them, but only 32 entries fit in one row.
I guess if I divided them by era, then they would barely fit here

 

[Thunderbrd]

Will be they autobuild, or they will be national wonders? You need only one of them to have resources.

Neither. I'll explain the plan soon. It's still coming together.

Also it would be nice to see which resources I could produce, but isn't present in my empire yet.
Edit: you can actually see them in domestic advisor window by customizing them, but only 32 entries fit in one row.
I guess if I divided them by era, then they would barely fit her

I'm not all that good with screens.

 

[tmv]

Perhaps in the game this can be handled via injunctions, either produce environment-friendly and lower profits/productivity, or maximize profits and sacrifice the health of your citizens.

That might be true today, but at the start of Industrial the economy would be far less robust. What is a little loss of profits today could destroy the early industrial entrepreneurs with far less financial backing than what is possible today. So the first option would be "Don't produce at all."

 

[Thunderbrd]

Ok, I figured I'd explain how I have in mind to address both of these factors:

1) Power - we really need to make this a property. I had been thinking of it as something we can't allow to go negative BUT AIAndy illuminated me to the idea that we could have brownout buildings beginning at 0 and then at some point a complete blackout where power doesn't exist. I like this approach. But it's going to take some work to plan and implement.

2) Factories - There's a bigger problem with factories than just factories themselves. The problem is wrapped up in manufactured resources as a whole. And the problem is most exacerbated when you look at corporations and how they work with resources. The volume of manufactured resources is out of balance tremendously and that's across the board. For manufactured resources to have much real value, they need to be a bit tougher to generate, more limited as a whole category. But how do we do that when it's common buildings that make these resources?

In some cases we don't worry about it. Charcoal, for example, is going to be found everywhere we find a fire pit. BUT, maybe not industrial grade charcoal, which we may include as a more limited commodity later on in the tech tree than common charcoal or clay is in the early game.

But for many craft or industrial manufactured resources, we need to make them a bit more special to come by, a little more strategic.

So what my 'coming soon' project is here is zoning regions represented by buildings and production buildings that must qualify by having available zones to fill.

The way it would work is that the city gains zoning slots by gaining population. You then build Zone buildings, such as Manufacturing Zone I, II, III, IV, V, VI and so on, Agricultural Zone I, II, III etc... and so on. These don't accomplish anything but to provide the city with particular zoned TYPE slots, and every so often employ another citizen.

Then the only way you can build one of many categorized building types would be to have an open Zone slot of that type, such as, say, a Jeweler, which would require a Commercial Zone slot. That will limit how many buildings you can build in a city at all, and in particular limit how many manufactured resources can be built. It will invite the specialization of your cities and enhance the strategery of trying to provide for your nation all the needed manufactured resources you can get.

 

[Mag Co]

There's a catch now guilds and corporations will employ resourses made by factorians and artisans. There's a well known problem with that Thunderbrd. Wonka and McDowells employ salt which can be easily obtained on the cities turning them OP. We should be careful to not repeat it and balance it correctly.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...rework-initiative.527551/page-2#post-13262387

 

[Thunderbrd]

That's the whole idea is to make it more limited to have sources of these manufactured resources. A city cannot build all the buildings that create a manufactured resources so it will be more limited. If you wish to focus on providing as much of a resource for your corps as you can, great, but it's going to cost you with all you AREN'T generating.

 

[Mag Co]

Oh boy, v.38 is gonna be fantastic

 

[pepper2000]

One relative straightforward solution might be to make speciality factories require multiple base factory buildings. For example, the Water Bottle Factory requires a Factory and three Factories throughout the empire. That way, at most a third of cities could build Water Bottle Factories. The AI governors seem to avoid buildings that have this tag for whatever reason, so that will help players who use the AI governors not get buried in pollution.

 

[Thunderbrd]

One relative straightforward solution might be to make speciality factories require multiple base factory buildings. For example, the Water Bottle Factory requires a Factory and three Factories throughout the empire. That way, at most a third of cities could build Water Bottle Factories. The AI governors seem to avoid buildings that have this tag for whatever reason, so that will help players who use the AI governors not get buried in pollution.

But then you still get an equal amount of all specialty factories being available. AKA, once you unlock one specialty building, you've unlocked one of each of them. You HAVE limited how many times they can be built based on a city count. Therefore, such a solution weights more value to wide (more cities) rather than tall (larger cities) development. With what I plan, both tall and wide strategies can equally open up more slots to build specialty 'factories' (since we're referring to factories here). And just because you've opened up a number of slots, doesn't mean every specialty resource can be provided still. Furthermore, this concept applies equally to all eras, not just industrial.

 

[irishhombre]

I love this idea, that is one thing that has always bothered me.

 

[tmv]

From the last time I got into TH I remember that some buildings had an insane number of preconditions (like the Gamma Assembler). Either that list should be shortened then, or you should get really powerful zones.

 

[Thunderbrd]

From the last time I got into TH I remember that some buildings had an insane number of preconditions (like the Gamma Assembler). Either that list should be shortened then, or you should get really powerful zones.

Zones would be wide net categories. I'm still considering some of the details on this so that it doesn't tend to hide what potential you have so much, nor over-restrict. Not all buildings would even require a zone slot.

I'm also thinking that worked plots could provide a free available zone count towards a type based on what kind of improvement the plot has. Thus if you work a farm plot, you get a free Agricultural Zone slot. These could make it so you don't have to try too hard to get the zones you'll need in most cases but could really make the city itself naturally specialized. And could guide some further strategies on how you improve your plots around a city.

(We've really got to rebalance the town type improvements - lately they just aren't good enough.)

 

[Rmi]

That would be so amazing. All my cities have lamost every single building they can build. Half of them simply to get them out of the list. But if i had building slots i'd had to pick between a saddler and a cobbler. And not hoard every religion and build 12 temples everywhere. Please don't touch animal farm slots. I LOVE LOVE LOOOOVVVEEE hoarding every animal in every city. Gotta catch 'm all.