Factories and Pollution

[erronius]

Preface: I am really new at Civ3 (used to play Civ1 in 2000 BC). For factories and plants I find that the civilopedia is woefully under-descriptive. Does anyone have any specifics on any of these questions?

1. For a regular old factory, how much pollution does it produce? Is it proportional to the shield increase (i.e. the more use you're getting out of it, the more pollution it produces?)

2. Same question for coal plants.

3. For nuclear plants, what is the chance of a meltdown? 1% per turn? 5%?

P.S.: Sort of unrelated but I am playing as the Ottomans (who are supposedly scientific) but I don't seem to be getting the free tech I am supposed to get from an age advance. Does anyone know if this is bugged, or something? I seem to remember it working when I was the Byzantines (also scientific).

Thanks very much for any help or advice!

 

[tjs282]

Preface: I am really new at Civ3 (used to play Civ1 in 2000 BC). For factories and plants I find that the civilopedia is woefully under-descriptive. Does anyone have any specifics on any of these questions?
1. For a regular old factory, how much pollution does it produce? Is it proportional to the shield increase (i.e. the more use you're getting out of it, the more pollution it produces?)
2. Same question for coal plants.

According to my cheat-sheet (downloaded from here), each of these improvements adds 2 pollution units per turn to the town. This is moddable, IIRC.

3. For nuclear plants, what is the chance of a meltdown? 1% per turn? 5%?

If I remember right, provided the city is happy, the probability is zero. Meltdowns can only happen if a NukePlant-owning town riots for ≥2 turns, but I have to admit that I don't know what the actual percentage is -- although I'm pretty sure it's less than 5%.

P.S.: Sort of unrelated but I am playing as the Ottomans (who are supposedly scientific) but I don't seem to be getting the free tech I am supposed to get from an age advance. Does anyone know if this is bugged, or something? I seem to remember it working when I was the Byzantines (also scientific).

You don't get the standard 'Our wise men have discovered...' notification for the freebie-tech, it just magically appears in your inventory. When you get the 'new era' notification, you can use 'What's the big picture?' to check the Science Advisor (F6) screen, and you should see that one of the first-tier techs has already gone blue -- that's your freebie. If you want to convert it into some gold/ income/ other techs, you can actually trade the freebie immediately, i.e. before the end of your interturn, by moving directly from the Science Advisor to the Foreign Advisor (F4) screen.

If you're at or near the front of the tech-race, I've read about (but never executed) a trick whereby, as soon as you get the notification that you've acquired the last 'required' tech of an era, you gift up all the other SCI-civs into the new era as well, then buy/trade for their first-tier freebies. With enough SCI-civs on the map, and some smart trading, there's then a good chance of acquiring all the first-tier techs of the new era, before you get your own freebie (on ≤Standard maps, all opponents can be specified as SCI-Civs -- but I usually Randomise my map-settings). So once you exit the Foreign Advisor screen, you get a second-tier tech as your freebie instead!

 

[justanick]

I suspect that chances of a meltdown are the same as losing a building due to riots. It does not happen without riot and riots need to last at least 2 turns for destruction to commence. At least in Civ3 nuclear power is somewhat safe.

 

[erronius]

Thanks for the help once again!

 

[Theov]

About factories: be aware that power plants (solar/nuke/coal/hydro) increase factory output, and you can have only one per city. So one factory + one plant.
Then you can also add a manufacturing plant on top of these. They will increase shield production like an extra factory.

 

[CKS]

It isn't quite true that you can have only one power plant per city, because if you build Hoover Dam, you get a free hydro plant which remains if you build another one. Nuclear plants give more shields than the other plants, so you may build one in a town with a free hydro plant, and then it will have both.

More importantly, if you build a plant over another plant, the old one will automatically be sold. However, the free hydro plants don't remove the old coal plant (at least in the city that builds Hoover, which is the only city I build coal plants in). You need to manually sell the coal plant to get rid of its pollution. I usually forget to do this until I get hit by pollution.

 

[justanick]

Still you can have only the positive effect from one plant. Nuclear plant and the free hydry plant are not better than nuclear plant only.

 

[Theov]

It isn't quite true that you can have only one power plant per city, because if you build Hoover Dam, you get a free hydro plant which remains if you build another one. Nuclear plants give more shields than the other plants, so you may build one in a town with a free hydro plant, and then it will have both.

More importantly, if you build a plant over another plant, the old one will automatically be sold. However, the free hydro plants don't remove the old coal plant (at least in the city that builds Hoover, which is the only city I build coal plants in). You need to manually sell the coal plant to get rid of its pollution. I usually forget to do this until I get hit by pollution.

Did you check the shield output?

 

[CKS]

Oh, definitely, you only get the benefit of the nuclear plant. The hydro plant does not give you more shields than the nuclear plant alone. It just doesn't go away.

If you have a hydro plant and a coal plant, you don't get extra shields, you just get extra pollution.