Question on Coal Plants, Hydro Plants, Nuke Plants

[kamex]

Correct me if i'm wrong but i was looking at the tech tree the other day and understood it to be possible to build power plants without discovering electricity! :O

Bit weird?

 

[r_rolo1]

No ...

Because power in the game sense is not necessarily electrical power ( yes , I know of the lightning symbol and all of that ) . It can easily be seen as simple mechanical power, given that no other building besides the factories use power in civ IV... thus the power plants can easily be direcly connected via mechanical means to the factories , like it was done in XIX century with coal plants IRL.

 

[logarithm64]

Industrialism (coal plants) and fission (nuclear plants) require electricity, and plastics (hydro plants) requires industrialism.

 

[r_rolo1]

Industrialism (coal plants) and fission (nuclear plants) require electricity, and plastics (hydro plants) requires industrialism.

Coal plants don't come with Industrialism , but with Assembly line ( that ,as you surely know , do not require Electricity )... hence my previous comments on RL XIX century Coal plants

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Coal plants are easily the best option in 90% of games where you have coal. The health hit doesn't hurt nearly as much as waiting for the hammers. Later on one can consider building another plant, but it's usually easier just to find another way to get health, like more resources, medicine for hospitals, genetics, etc.

If nuke plants were balanced they'd be an alternative. If you can't trade for coal, then you have no choice but to go w/o power (generally not a good idea) or to build them in your hammer cities...or make a play at three gorges dam if tech can support it.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Well if its a 2% chance every turn (which I seem to remember from somewhere) it is extremely probable that you will have a meltdown within 50 turns. What I would like to see is for nuke plants to become fully safe after discovering fusion.

No! It's nowhere near 2% per turn.
I forget off the top of my head whether it's 1 in 1000 or 1 in 2000 but it is one of those. The latter might be what I changed it to in PIG mod.

However, because the chance is per turn per plant, having significantly more than one plant obviously increases the overall chance per turn pretty worryingly, and the magnitude of the event is in most cases more serious than losing a 99.9% battle.

 

[Disgustipated]

I believe the 2%. One city having it isn't a big deal, but as you said having more than 1 city with one greatly increases the likelihood. You WILL get one if you have more than 3 cities with one. This effect is more pronounced on marathon games of course.

And its a huge pet peeve of mine. Having worked nuke plants in the navy. Yes I know, gameplay trumps realism. But I fail to see how gameplay is improved by having a useless building. This meltdown thing is a silly thing from civ2 that needs to be scrapped. The balance for nuke plants is tech cost and building cost and how late they come in the game.

 

[PieceOfMind]

It's in the XML:

<iNukeExplosionRand>2000</iNukeExplosionRand>

In CvCity.cpp:

if (GC.getGameINLINE().getSorenRandNum(GC.getBuildingInfo((BuildingTypes)iI).getNukeExplosionRand(), "Meltdown!!!") == 0)
				{

i.e. check whether a 2000-sided die with nubmers 0 to 1999 on it equals 0.

 

[r_rolo1]

For nuke plants <iNukeExplosionRand> is set as default for 2000, so it is 1/2000 per plant per turn.

EDIT: bah, beaten

 

[PieceOfMind]

By the way, with 3 plants, on average you will go 666 turns without a meltdown. That's on any speed I believe.

Maybe Murphy's Law is interfering somewhere.

 

[r_rolo1]

The issue is that there is rarely only 3 nuke plants in the game If the AI leaders get fission and have uranium, they will change all of their plants to nuke plants sooner or later ( and normally this is sooner, by the way the AI values health ). A far more normal number of nuke plants in game on a standart fractal map would probably be of 20 to 30 ... ok , that leaves you with 40 -70 turns between meltdowns in average, but in this conditions seeing 2 or 3 blowing per game is not unusual

 

[Silu]

By the way, with 3 plants, on average you will go 666 turns without a meltdown. That's on any speed I believe.

How did you get that figure? If the chance of a meltdown is 1/2000, by my reckoning the amount of turn-plants where the meltdown chance goes above 50% is (1999/2000)^x < 0.5 <=> x > 1386 turn-plants, which would be 462 turns with 3 plants. 50% of the time a meltdown (possibly multiple) happen(s) before this, 50% of the time after.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Silu, you're noticing one of the weird things about the geometric distribution. Well, actually it's not that weird. In general, the median (what you're finding) is not the same as the mean (what I found).

The mean of a geometric distribution with parameter p is just (1-p)/p. I set p=3/2000 (an approximation but a reasonable one in this case).

@rolo, I mentioned 3 plants because Disgustipated used it as an example. (actually, he said more than 3 plants...)

 

[WolfHound22]

Is global warming only caused by nuclear weapons and nuclear plants in this game? I heard it was from unhealthy buildings too, but I've never seen this. I had one game where it happened without nukes being used and I thought "Aha, it must be being caused by all those factories and coal plants." Then I got in a war with Asoka and down in his land I found he had built nuclear plants and one of his cities had the telltale fallout around it.

 

[r_rolo1]

After 3.17 GW is partly caused by the global unhealthiness production and partly countered by the forestal ( forest + jungle ) world cover. See here for more details