[GS] Flood Barriers should be finetuned

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Feb 13, 2017
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Ukraine
In my current game as Mali I have the luck to have the Valetta city-state on the map and it has clearly saved my districts from drowning. The climate change is happening very fast and it seems impossible to finish building the flood barriers in most of my cities, as the production rises with each climate change phase. So I easily bought them with faith being the suzerain of Valetta (City Center buildings and Encampment district buildings can be bought with Faith. Cost of purchasing Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Walls is reduced, but they can only be bought with Faith).
As I was trying to build them, I had -30% production (Mali's feature) but at the same time +100% production from a World Congress resolution. But this overall 70% production boost didn't help speed the process much.

While I think it should not be possible to buy the Flood Barriers with faith, because it's overpowered, there also should be more possible to build them, to begin with.
 
I agree 100%. Once Global Warming begins, the cost of Flood Barriers increases exponentially with each each GW increase. Given the speed at which GW increases, building Flood Barriers after Phase II is utterly impossible.

In real life, a flood barrier could be built in 2-5 years, max. If anything, engineers should be able to expend a charge to complete 20% of the construction the way they can with dams, with no limit, or up to 80% complete, ow many times they can do it. That could solve the problem (without addressing the problem of GW expanding so rapidly, or that the effects mostly only affect coastal lowlands, but not reducing fertility of interior tiles or other non-sea level effects).
 
In real life, a flood barrier could be built in 2-5 years, max.

And in real life the limiting factor is cost, not construction ability.
 
i agree, they are way far in the tech tree and cost way too much!

And why are they connected to computers at all? That has never made sense. Do I need an electronic gizmo to tell me how to pour concrete? That never stopped my engineers in 3000 BC from putting up walls to keep out barbarians! Is water that much harder?

And in real life the limiting factor is cost, not construction ability.

You should be able to spend gold to hurry projects, like you could in 4. The cost would go down the more hard production has already been spent. So you shouldn't pay full price to rush buy something that's 50% complete. But now you can buy everything with gold, if you can afford it. I miss that.
 
I agree. Also there's some odd things happening with flooded areas. For example, when building flood barriers, the game doesn't take into account that some tiles are already flooded and a barrier is no longer relevant for those tiles, because the production cost stays the same. Maybe it would be nice if it were possible to build flood barriers for some tiles and not for others. At the moment it's all or nothing.

Once I also built Golden Gate bridge onto a tile that flooded during production. I could still finish it and move units onto it despite it not being connected to land anymore.
 
...Once I also built Golden Gate bridge onto a tile that flooded during production. I could still finish it and move units onto it despite it not being connected to land anymore.

Yeah but you can't use flooded tiles to count as meeting the requirement of water tiles on both sides of the bridge, which is lame. I had a game where I only had one place in my whole empire the bridge could have gone, once sealevel rise flooded away some tiles. But did the game count those flooded tiles as water? Nope. No bridge for you!
 
And in real life the limiting factor is cost, not construction ability.

IRL time scales vs civ's bork the comparison too much (not unique to GW, this is also true for things like troop movement vs production times). From a gameplay perspective it's poorly balanced right now though.
 
And why are they connected to computers at all? That has never made sense. Do I need an electronic gizmo to tell me how to pour concrete? That never stopped my engineers in 3000 BC from putting up walls to keep out barbarians! Is water that much harder?.

I believe the devs were going more for the modern flood barriers that are computer (or at mechanically) controlled such as the Delta Works, as opposed to just a large cement wall in the bay. Plus one could reasonably stretch that you would be using computer modelling to predict rising tides and where to build your barriers to best protect your coast.


You should be able to spend gold to hurry projects, like you could in 4. The cost would go down the more hard production has already been spent. So you shouldn't pay full price to rush buy something that's 50% complete. But now you can buy everything with gold, if you can afford it. I miss that.

I don't agree with this. Gold is already become too powerful in that you can find ways to buy everything. You can buy buildings and units, districts, the bulk of diplomatic trading is gold base. About the only things left untouched are projects and faith-based units. I would prefer there be some things that you actually have to have production for and that will actually take time so that choices are a bit more meaningful. Hasn't the high end gaming amongst the top players already devolved to running projects over actually producing things?


As to the actual flood barrier issue, I had mentioned in another thread that my ideal solution would be that you build the flood barrier tile by tile, so that you could only work to protecting one tile at a time. This would allow to at least more reasonably save some of your coastline, and could make for some tough decisions on which tiles to save before the land is lost. It would also mean that flooding would be a more continual threat, as you would need to build more later on as the waters rose to 2 and 3 metres.

This could be done either as it is now, producing a city 'building', or perhaps by using Engineers (I was actually pretty surprised by this, as I had assumed we would use Engineers to build barriers, since each city's needs would be different and would require specific tile placement). I mean they're already building 10-tile long tunnels and complex missile silos; a flood barrier seems well within their purview.
 
I believe the devs were going more for the modern flood barriers that are computer (or at mechanically) controlled such as the Delta Works, as opposed to just a large cement wall in the bay. Plus one could reasonably stretch that you would be using computer modelling to predict rising tides and where to build your barriers to best protect your coast...

This is the most logical explanation I've heard about the reasoning for its placement.
 
I am half tempted to mod in Valetta as a permanent CS. It is the only way you can get a flood barrier in when you are conquering new cities. Waiting 84 turns to get one in place on a newly conquered city is stupid.


*on a side not I was reading Tyrog's signature block and whoever wrote the quotes in Alpha Centauri was a genius.
 
The problem is since you know which tiles are going to flood, you don't build districts or wonder on these tiles. Just let them flood, and spend the hammers on other stuff. Late game coast tiles are pretty good anyway, so if you plan ahead you don't even have to worry about it. Of course, if flood barriers were easier to build and came earlier in the tech tree you'd might be tempted to use them more. But as it's now I've not had one single instance where it was worth it. Maybe if I conquer a really good city with a lot of potential flood tiles I'd build it, but it really is a marginal option atm.
 
The balance is definitely off by quite a bit at the moment, both in terms of the cost acceleration and in terms of the pace of the clock you're racing against. That said, I definitely wouldn't want the balance to go too far in the other direction. This isn't a localized barrier, it's a massive infrastructure project protecting an empire's entire coastline (if completed in every city) from flooding. I'd go so far as to say that the base cost should actually be increased (or perhaps there should be more options/gradation in terms of how much land to protect against how much flooding).
 
I think complaints about difficulty of getting Flood Barriers up in time stem more from ineptitude than poor game balance. From my experience it's not hard to get them up in time even in low-production cities on Deity as long as you go for Computers early.

The problem is that the game kind of forces you to either take those early precautions, or you're screwed. Flood Barriers should not come any earlier or be easier to build, but climate change needs to accelerate at a slower pace, so that you can still recover after being partially flooded.
 
I agree that flood barriers need work. They come late, they take too long to build, the cost increase per climate change to build is way to high, because climate change isn't scaled well they can only be built before/at the start as it happens. Using ME to boost production makes sense to me. While i can agree it is somewhat realistic that the civs that are behind in tech would be punished the most by rising seas, from a gameplay pov, its not fun.
 
I think complaints about difficulty of getting Flood Barriers up in time stem more from ineptitude than poor game balance. From my experience it's not hard to get them up in time even in low-production cities on Deity as long as you go for Computers early.
/QUOTE]

Once Global Warming begins, it becomes infinitely more difficult to erect the flood barriers with each level. Since each level usually increases every 10 turns, and the increasing flood barrier costs take longer than 10 turns to produce, your only shot is to beeline Computers before the AI starts burning coal.

It may be ineptitude on my part, but I don't see how it's possible on the higher levels to be so far ahead in tech that you can get to Computers before the AI reaches the Industrial Era.

Also, how is it fun in which every game you play requires you to research a very specific path each and every time, just to keep your valuable coastal tiles?
 
Yeah but you can't use flooded tiles to count as meeting the requirement of water tiles on both sides of the bridge, which is lame. I had a game where I only had one place in my whole empire the bridge could have gone, once sealevel rise flooded away some tiles. But did the game count those flooded tiles as water? Nope. No bridge for you!

Not so in one previous game i was lucky enough to pull it off... right after a level 2 flood where the missing right side tile (it was a submerged level 1) became available.
This whole trick was explained & illustrated in "Achievements Saves" thread. Hold on .. .. ..

Here's the link to that proof!
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...files-for-civ-vi.603705/page-16#post-15383849
 
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