Do coal plants get 'cancelled out' by hydro plants/three gorges dam?

[dylanmeditates]

If I build a coal plant in a city, and then later on build three gorges dam or a hydro plant, does the unhealthiness get cancelled out too, or am i better off never building the coal plant?

thanks for any help.

 

[lymond]

Yes

For 3GD it is only on the some landmass though, so keep that in mind.

Things to note:

1) 3GD is very expensive and probably only worth it if you have at least 1 GE to spare (it takes 2) to speed it up.

2) You have to look at hammer cost to benefit. If your main land mass is rather small then 3GD is not worth it for only a few HPs. For instance, most likely worthless on an Archipelago map and some of the more watery type maps.

3) Coal Plants come quite a bit earlier than HPs. While the health benefit of HPs is nice, you may not want to wait that long for the hammer boost. At the same time, you may not need coal plants everywhere but in your high hammers cities at first, so if you have a large continent full of cites then 3GD might certainly pay dividends.

4) There's no UB Hydro, so note those civs with Coal Plant UBs like Japan and *derp*. Shale Plant is quite nice so you don't want to obsolete it.

Overall, in general, I find it more worthwhile to get coal plants up quickly. Whether I go to Hydros is situational.

 

[Dr.Null]

4) There's no UB Hydro, so note those civs with Coal Plant UBs like Japan and Germany. Shale Plant is quite nice so you don't want to obsolete it.

Germany has "Assembly Plant" which replaces Factory.

Also, there's a random event (for those who leave those on) which gives Coal Plants +4 , and nothing comparable for other power sources.

 

[lymond]

fixed

 

[neilmeister]

Masterful use of the *derp*

 

[Archon_Wing]

Hammers now are worth more than hammers later. Build Coal Plants and put yourself in a winning situation, and deal with 3GD when the time comes.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Another question: If I build both a Coal and a Nuclear Plant in the same city, do they cancel out each other or do I still have one drawback?

 

[lymond]

Another question: If I build both a Coal and a Nuclear Plant in the same city, do they cancel out each other or do I still have one drawback?

The better question here is "why would you build a Coal Plant and Nuclear Plant in the same city?"

Nuclear Plants are a last resort in a city if your empire has no coal and the city is not on a river. It adds nothing to a city with another power source. I never ever build them.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

Nuclear Plants are a last resort in a city if your empire has no coal and the city is not on a river. It adds nothing to a city with another power source. I never ever build them.

So if I build a Nuclear Plant in a city that already has a Coal Plant, does the Unhealthiness remain but I don´t get the chance of a meltdown?

 

[lymond]

If you have a Nuclear Plant in any city, regardless of any prior plants built you would have a meltdown chance. The Nuclear Plant should supercede the coal plant in every regard - power/unhealtiness/etc. Again, there would be no point to building one if you have a coal plant.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

I´m not asking because I plan to do it, just out of curiosity about the technical details.
So if I understand you correctly Coal gets canceled out by Nuclear gets canceled out by Hydro, right?

 

[Mec AntiKythera]

You could build a nuclear plant in a city you plan are gifting to someone else. Other than that, can't think of a reason.

 

[Imperator Knoedel]

You could build a nuclear plant in a city you plan are gifting to someone else. Other than that, can't think of a reason.

Again. I don´t care about any possible reasons you could have for that, I just want to know about the technical details.

 

[King Kalmah]

You could build a nuclear plant in a city you plan are gifting to someone else. Other than that, can't think of a reason.

Here is a good reason.

Lets say you just had your only coal resource stolen by the invading civ.You have uranium and need power in the city that had a coal plant because it is your military city(HE,Globe,Pentagon).You start building the nuke plant only to see that the city with coal is lightly defended.You take back the city after a few turns of siege only to finish the nuclear plant.

The question is now what benefit do you receive in your military city?

I believe as mentioned above that the Nuke plant takes over as the main provider of power.If there are no random events and no coal then nuclear plants make fine options,but I do believe the unhealthy is removed with the nuclear power plant.

I live within the shadow of a nuclear power plant so I find the random event with the nuclear plants reasonable since it does seem every 30 years or so there is a nuclear emergency/event....

 

[Pomphis]

I live within the shadow of a nuclear power plant so I find the random event with the nuclear plants reasonable since it does seem every 30 years or so there is a nuclear emergency/event....

Does anybody know the actual statistical risk in Civ4 ? I have build several nuclear power plants on not very valuable isolated islands and run them a lot longer than 30 years simply to see what happens, but I have so far never seen a meltdown.

 

[God-Emperor]

The standard BtS chance for a meltdown is 1 in 2000. That is per turn for each of them. It is not done through the random event system so it can still happen even if you have random events turned off.

With 5 of them for 30 turns you have under an 8% chance of having at least one have a meltdown - it is just under 92.8% to not have any. If you have 6 for 35 turns the odds of no meltdown go down to just a hair over 90%. If you put them in more cities (or have them for longer) it gets worse: with 20 cities for 30 turns the odds are only a bit over 74% that you will not have at least one meltdown in that time. The same 20 cities for twice as long, 60 turns, drops the odds of no meltdowns to under 55% and if you and 25 instead of 20 then it is below 50% (about 47.2%) for no meltdown.

The odds are low, but the consequences are devastating. It is identical to having a nuke dropped on the city. Nuking your own city is not a good plan. It will destroy many buildings, reduce the population, spread some fallout around the city, damage every unit in the city (possibly killing some). It would not be a surprise of it takes 50 turns to get the city back to where it was just from the time it takes to rebuild all the buildings. If you don't already have the tech to scrub fallout, it is that much worse since you'll be rebuilding without the possibility of using some of the city's plots.

A small number of nuclear plans in minor cities is not likely to be much of a problem (having some tundra city built just to claim a resource have a meltdown is not much of a problem). Putting them in your major cities and/or a lot of cities is just asking for trouble.

Coal comes first, which is itself an advantage. If built in the same city, nuclear replaces coal and removes the 2 extra unhealth but adds the chance of a meltdown. Hydro will replaces coal and/or nuclear removing both the unhealth from the coal and the meltdown chance from the nuclear. Hydro is the best, but it comes later and requires the city to be on a river. Nuclear is the worst - the only advantage over coal is two less unhealth which may let you have one more population in the city, as long as you don't mind killing them up later when the thing melts down...

 

[Pikkis]

Slightly off the topic, but I think many of the posts in this thread are.

I was wondering whether Coal Plant + Recycling Center (definitely Shale Plant + Recycling Center) would be a worthy alternative to a Hydro Plant (especially to replacing a Coal Plant with a Hydro Plant). I'm just not sure whether Coal adds unhealthiness to Coal Plant or vice versa. I'd assume the former (which would implicate benefit from the combination), but after quite a long break from CivIV I'm not even sure of this kind of fundamentals.

 

[lindsay40k]

Hmm, knowing that Hydro plants disable the unhealth from Coal makes me think about using a CP to generate extra hammers to build 3GD on big continents with scarce GE's.

If you get the +4 hammer/CP event, how do Hydro and Nuke tie in? Do they disable the unhealth AND the hammers, or what?

 

[Pikkis]

Hmm, knowing that Hydro plants disable the unhealth from Coal makes me think about using a CP to generate extra hammers to build 3GD on big continents with scarce GE's.

If you get the +4 hammer/CP event, how do Hydro and Nuke tie in? Do they disable the unhealth AND the hammers, or what?

With random events it seems that these questions become quite problematic. Would be much easier if all power plants came with an on/off-button. Maybe someone could mod that in (or maybe someone already has)? Although it would probably be an addition to the list of micromanagement I (and I presume many others) always forget to do.

 

[lindsay40k]

Sure it'd be fine if it automated as is, and only time you'll bother with micro is if you get the coal event.

Even then, assuming you've spread fairly coastal, there's things to be said for taking +2 hammers on Drydocks and using the relative health benefit to run another Specialist instead.