Help - plastics but can't build 3 Gorges Dam!

[Simon Appleton]

I'm playing my first post-patch game and have discovered plastics, but none of my cities have the option to build the 3 gorges dam - there is no icon for it in the build menus, not even greyed out. No other civ has the dam (according to the info screen). At first, I thought it was because cities required fresh water, but that does not seem to be it - I have some big cities with fresh water.

Are there any preconditions for the 3 gorges wonder other than plastics? The civopedia does not say so, but then it did not say clearly that the space elevator needed to be within a certain distance of the equator.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[beestar]

I believe the 3.G.D. city has to be located on a river, not just adjacent to a fresh water lake.

 

[AngryPants]

I believe the 3.G.D. city has to be located on a river, not just adjacent to a fresh water lake.

That is your answer right there.

 

[RandomInsanity]

isnt civ delightfully realistic?

 

[robaughjr]

isnt civ delightfully realistic?

Except that once built you get a hydro plant in cities that aren't anywhere near any kind of water source.

 

[Meffy]

Sort of -- you get the effect of a hydro plant, thanks to the miracle of loooong copper wires. Works in RL too.

 

[Bushface]

Building a real dam uses vast quantities of concrete and steel, and sometimes large lumps of rock, but surely does not contain a large percentage of plastics. How much plastic went into the Hoover Dam, for example ?
In-game realism be blowed, though to be fair both Hydro Plants and the 3 Gorges can indeed only be built in a riverside city. Don't know if this is explicitly stated in hte manual or 'pedia.

 

[Meffy]

I think the plastics tie-in is like some other non-obvious ones -- a game-play hook, not literal but implemented just to have a wonder become available at about the right stretch of the time sequence, when the overall tech level "feels right."

 

[Abdomination]

Except that once built you get a hydro plant in cities that aren't anywhere near any kind of water source.

Isn't it you get power, which is different from getting a hydro plant. This is true since the hyrdo plants on Niagra Falls supply 90% of of Lower Ontario's power and a great deal of Upstate New York's

 

[rev063]

Isn't it you get power, which is different from getting a hydro plant.

That's exactly what happens -- every city on the continent gets the power symbol. Note that unlike Stonehenge, where you will see Obelisk listed in each city's building list (until it's obsoleted, anyway), a Hydro Plant does not appear in each city when you build 3GD. But factories do get their 50% production bonus, and coal plants lose their unhealthiness.

 

[KingTux]

Building a real dam uses vast quantities of concrete and steel, and sometimes large lumps of rock, but surely does not contain a large percentage of plastics. How much plastic went into the Hoover Dam, for example ?
In-game realism be blowed, though to be fair both Hydro Plants and the 3 Gorges can indeed only be built in a riverside city. Don't know if this is explicitly stated in hte manual or 'pedia.

The three gorges dam and the Hoover dam aren't the same. You can read about it here.

 

[BCLG100]

isnt civ delightfully realistic?

and that one little fella can represent a few thousand people.

 

[Ranos]

The three gorges dam and the Hoover dam aren't the same. You can read about it here.

As far as I know, their consturction is basically the same. Concrete and steel make up the majority of the structures of both. The only diffences are that one was built almost 70 years ago and one was just finished, one is in the US and the other is in China and one is bigger than the other.

 

[Bushface]

I did not, repeat not, say or imply that the Three Gorges and Hoover dams were the same, the differences and constructional similarities havving been pointed out by Ranos, above. My point is that dams do not depend on plastics, which are lighter than concrete: this would be a grave disadvantage to their use, since dams depend largely on their weight for stability.
And similarly I find it strange that in the game you need Fibre Optics to build The Internet but get a production bonus if you have access to copper, with which fibre optics compete in the real world as a means of transferring information. There are quite a lot of such peculiarities in the game, and I don't understand how they were allowed to slide in.

 

[Helmling]

I think the implication is that the Three Gorges Dam is a project on an entire order of magnitude greater than the Hoover Dam (hell, Hoover Dam's not even the biggest US dam) and so there are greater technological requirements, which are implied by the higher prerequisite technology--in this case, plastics, which must be required for the um, well...the big...anyway, yeah.

 

[calyth]

And similarly I find it strange that in the game you need Fibre Optics to build The Internet but get a production bonus if you have access to copper, with which fibre optics compete in the real world as a means of transferring information. There are quite a lot of such peculiarities in the game, and I don't understand how they were allowed to slide in.

We don't network office computers with fiber yet simply because they're expensive, and prone to damage (I don't think you can put the weight of your desk, or having people stomping on them day in day out). Copper would certainly help in building the Internet. ARPANET started at around the late 60's - early 70's, which AFAIK fiber isn't commercially used yet.