[GS] Flood Barriers

[FenrisWolf456]

- Build floor barriers one tile at a time, instead of the entire flood barrier for a city being calculated and built at once. This allows you to prioritize which tiles to save, and you can also completely finish one and then move to another if you have time. Currently, you're trying to build the entire thing and losing your 1m tiles while your 3m tiles aren't even being threatened yet. This compounds if your 1m tile happens to be a hammer tile, and once you lose it it pushes out the finish time of the flood barrier even further.

This would be my ideal implementation. Rather than the one-time all or nothing we have now, I would very much prefer to have to make a choice of which tiles I attempt to save, one at a time. This would mean you are still racing again the rising water levels, but you can save at least some of your key infrastructure. Which could lead to some tough decisions if you know you can only save one of multiple tiles before the levels rise. It would also tone down the Valetta bonus to not be so outrageous.

Plus it would mean you would have a continual worry if levels continued to rise and you then later needed to try and save your 2m and 3m tiles. I don't think I've been able to save coast when it's been more than 2 tiles for a city.

If it continues as is, I will likely not even bother with trying to save larger stretches of coast.

 

[Victoria]

@Victoria, I'm assuming that's the East Coast? Since I live in the Panhandle of Florida, on a mountain about 20 meters tall [one of highest spots in town!], I'm trusting I'll survive to play more civ games.

Aaah, I just read up on wiki... the program was from 2000 and apparently when it reaches you would only be 10m or so so you should be fine

 

[Disgustipated]

I just found out you can swap tiles between cities to negate the need for a flood barrier. Nice. It was especially annoying since I went through each city looking for cities that needed flood barriers, and this one wasn't on it. But then it gained a tile, and suddenly needed a flood barrier.

And I tried my hardest to get Valletta, and was able to do so for a couple of turns. Max promoting Amani seems like the only way. I'm not generating a lot of faith anyways, but I had enough for 2 flood barriers for low production cities.

 

[Infixo]

Let’s see the flood barrier for that!

Ofc it is not possible but it also not the purpose of the flood barriers.
They should protect from constant, predictable rise of the sea level and in fact we are talking about tens of meters. If all ice melts, then the estimate is 65-70 m. So, I'd like to think about the game's Flood Barriers are 30m high actually, not 3m (3m doesn't even protect from normal waves in Hawaii).

 

[Troy Bruckner]

Just played a game where I purposely tried to melt the ice caps. Apparently Indonesia is not very good at that, but I eventually got the CO2 flowing. My plan was to get barriers up on all my cities and flood all the computer players. I got the barrier tech and even on my small lower production cities it was easy to finish barriers, but then after I had about 25 barriers built they became severely difficult to build and even a city with around 140 production was taking over 30 turns to build.

On a side note the game lets you found a city on a flooded tile, but it won't let you build any base city improvements including flood barriers. Ironically the name of the city I experimented with was new Orleans (got American names after I ran out of Indonesian ones).

 

[HermannLombard]

On a side note I saw a program the other day that was saying that a volcano in the canaries could collapse anytime in the next 200 years and cause a 350 meter Megatsunami 30 km wide that would aim straight for the American coast.
Let’s see the flood barrier for that!

Just stand on the shore and hold an umbrella sideways.

Oh, you say there's a problem with that?

 

[Victoria]

Oh, you say there's a problem with that?

Hell no, that’s the way to go!

 

[Karmah]

Yes well... that may also be just because you're a max/min player at heart.

Myself, I like to build all useful improvement in my cities that I can... not useless ones, no, but I will pay significant production to build it if I can ans it's useful.

So Dams and Flood Barriers are great I think... But I do agree about the timing of flood barriers... honestly, when they come, I build them in cities already flooded... should have had the chance to build them before that imho

I kind of disagree , kind of , because :

1. Basically if you play 'fair with the environnement' and 'invest on slowing ennemies' ,you get a bit slowed down yourself but you get the barriers still far before any rising sea level. So I see it , it is just a matter of adjusting your gameplay. That's very true at immortal level. I might have had a couple of flooded tiles in four games. But the game goes far beyond the number of turns I'm used too. Basically , if I rush to the finish I trigger sea level. (I know you fanatics finishes earlier with VC but I still don't master the new feature enough , and the old ones probably too) .

2. But ... when I play on deity ,I don't manage this strat fast enough , they are enough civs that starts investing in CO2 producing boosts that in this very case I do get sea level rising too fast , before I can invest on the barrier.

So my impression are still conflicting there. But if it is impairement (even a little one ) to the rush to finish (which I don't say it definitely is, just my very early impression so far) , I think it is neat.

 

[Forster]

One tile should be expensive, but not prohibitive. Multiple tiles should cost, a lot. Someone mentioned the space program. Try and picture the cost to protect Florida, and the additional cost if the neighbor countries don't build, so Florida would have to build inland to protect the wall that is built on the coast. I think that might exceed the space program. Sea walls should be available earlier. The Dutch have been using them for a while now.

 

[Spartacus73]

So sea levels are done rising and are at 3.5 meters, and Madrid, which is on a 3m tile, is still there. Nothing is damaged, it doesn't even say it's flooded, so no impact. Is that because it's a city, or specifically an original capital city? Or are all cities immune to the sea level impact?

 

[Victoria]

Correct, city centres are not affected
Settle on a .5 m island and see what it looks like at the end

 

[kaspergm]

One tile should be expensive, but not prohibitive. Multiple tiles should cost, a lot. Someone mentioned the space program. Try and picture the cost to protect Florida, and the additional cost if the neighbor countries don't build, so Florida would have to build inland to protect the wall that is built on the coast. I think that might exceed the space program. Sea walls should be available earlier. The Dutch have been using them for a while now.

I kind of agree, my main gripe is not so much with the cost of the flood barriers, but rather the speed with which the cost (sea levels) go up.

The current design and balance of the numbers is nonsensical from a gameplay point of view because once sea levels start to go up, your city will basically be building flood barriers non-stop for the rest of the game without ever getting any benefit from them, because cost will rise faster than your production can keep up. So basically, once levels start to rise, there's not point AT ALL in starting to build the barriers. If that's the way they wanted it to be, they should have made it so that barriers can't be build once a tile gets submerged. That would have been a perfectly reasonable game design.

Another point where the current system doesn't make sense is that if you bee-line Computers, you can build flood barriers very cheaply, yet they will protect your city all the way up, no matter how high the sea rises - while if you start the barriers after the sea rises, you'll have to pay thousands of hammers to achieve the same effect. That doesn't make any sense from a logical point of view. If this system should be meaningful, the barriers should come in stages: So you build a 1 m barrier at low cost, then subsequently upgrade to 2 m barrier at intermediate cost, and then finally a 3 m barrier at high cost. This would mean that the person who rushes computers has to pay the same cost. If they wanted to give that person an advantage, they could make it so that draining the land if barriers are build after the sea starts to rise costs and additional cost as a project, and/or they could increase production cost by something like 50 % if tile has been flooded, but still make it come in stages, so you can actually get to build the 1 m wall before sea level increases, etc.

 

[Onii-chan]

Climate change should be a legitimate concern that you need to address, but yes flood barriers are way too production-intensive as is considering how late they come into play. Their cost increase per added climate change level is sometimes higher than the actual production output of the city you're building it in, making them literally never finish construction until all the tiles are already lost. They should rebalance things so that 1) flood barriers become easier to get up in time, and 2) make climate change be a danger in other areas than just rising sea levels instead. How about making it cause amenity or loyalty issues due to pollution, maybe be able to initiate riots in your cities, putting one of your governors under political pressure and causing them harm or something. There are plenty of things that could be done but right now it's all in the rising sea levels basket, and it's not very well balanced as a result

 

[Victoria]

It may be that Ed wants people to build them early and will not change them. If that is the case then computers is a bit too late unless you are rushing science a bit.

 

[kb27787]

huh... I completely ignore science (almost t200 before I get computers) and still flood barriers only take a handful of turns to build.... (5-10... 3 if high production).

Are we playing the same game here? Mind you at this point flooding hasn't begun yet so maybe that's why...

 

[Halcyan2]

My main issue is the price is a touch too steep.
Dams are also a dam waste of time.
If they want something to chew up production and keep you busy, there are better alternatives.

I view Dams as an intermediate housing district slotted after Aqueducts but before Neighborhoods.

While their placement is extremely limited, at that point in the game I found the +3 Housing to actually be quite nice. Access to hydroelectric power, protection from floods, and +1 appeal to neighboring tiles are just minor bonuses in addition to the Housing.

 

[Disgustipated]

Are we playing the same game here

difficulty? I find on King I have time to get them all up. At emperor you start running into problems of ai's polutting before you can get computers tech. Unless you beeline and ignore things like economics for big ben.

 

[Spartacus73]

difficulty? I find on King I have time to get them all up. At emperor you start running into problems of ai's polutting before you can get computers tech. Unless you beeline and ignore things like economics for big ben.

I'm usually on Immortal+ and other civs are right there on tech. Maybe on easier difficulties where you're ahead it's not an issue?

 

[Chocolate Pi]

I mean, real talk: all the numbers involving Climate Change are bonkers and certain to be changed in a patch, probably within a week or two. Chances are playing with any of the multiple simple mods on this topic will probably give you behavior closer to what the final game will actually feature.

I don't mean to come across as "this discussion is pointless", but it's entirely centered on dynamics we all expect to change rather soon.