is hoover dam or dam cancels coal plant?

[VandyBob]

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".

 

[Diamond]

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.

 

[DaviddesJ]

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).

 

[BeefontheBone]

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.

 

[Point13]

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.

 

[Canadian Bacon]

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)

 

[DynamicSpirit]

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.

 

[Canadian Bacon]

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

 

[Duende]

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.

 

[Idiodyssey]

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.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

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.

 

[Duende]

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.

 

[BeefontheBone]

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.

 

[DaviddesJ]

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?

 

[Duende]

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.

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.

 

[DaviddesJ]

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.

 

[Elandal]

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.

 

[Welnic]

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.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

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

Sorry I seem to be contributing to a thread hijack

 

[DynamicSpirit]

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).