On Power (electrical)

[Epi3B1rD]

BTW, why does the Fusion Power Plant produce 10,000 Production? I'm fine with probably 1000-2000 production, but 10,000 is overkill.

 

[steampunk1880]

Hydro sez it is indicative of how many Megawatts each power plant WOULD be making if his national grid idea was implemented. Point is the fusion power plant would have made an absolutely absurd amount of power, basically removing the need to build any more power plants. For-EV-er!

But yeah we can probably agree it's a bit funny the way it is now.

 

[Praetyre]

I always assumed that Civ IV buildings were (with obvious exceptions for most wonders) representative of a proportional number of these buildings to population (so, a Convenience Store would be only 30 actual buildings in a small town but hundreds of times more than that in a city). This is best exemplified by the +0.x per population benefits gotten from the Hospital and Residential buildings. As such, couldn't you sidestep the whole lengthy process of how much jigawatts you get from a single wind turbine and have it so that all power buildings supply the special Power factor, but their cost-to-population ratio (as well as unhealthiness, unhappiness, what have you) is dramatically different? So, if you build a Coal Power Plant or a Wind Turbine, either way, you get enough power for the city, but the Coal Power Plant might only need 0.2 per population while the Wind Turbine needs 1 , and so on for the other effects.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Hydro sez it is indicative of how many Megawatts each power plant WOULD be making if his national grid idea was implemented. Point is the fusion power plant would have made an absolutely absurd amount of power, basically removing the need to build any more power plants. For-EV-er!

But yeah we can probably agree it's a bit funny the way it is now.

I have though about jut having it give X number of hammers to every city. The question is how many should that be?

 

[steampunk1880]

Neato! That's really awesome, in my humble opinion. I really like it, tying cost, in gold maintenance, unhealthiness etc to the population.

So if i understand what you're saying a size 50 with an Early Coal Power Plant would cost a mere ten gold but generate (i dunno) 75 unhealth.
Early coal--> Coal-->Adv. Coal-->Clean coal
Early oil--> Oil-->Adv Oil--->Clean Oil
specials: Shale like early coal but provides oil products. Biofuel plant is cleaner than advanced oil but requires biofuels

An Early Wind/Solar/Hydolectric/Wave Power Plant (or rather enough early wind/solar/hydro/wave plants to power the city) would have zero unhealth but cost 100 (200?) gold. What renewable resource plants you can build still depends on the land around you.
Early wind farm-->Wind Farm-->Adv. Wind farm-->Vertical Axis Wind Turbines
Solar parabolic Troughs-->Solar Concentration Tower-->Photovoltaic field-->Building Integrated Photovoltaics
Riverside Hydroelectric Mill-->Hydroelectric dam--Adv Hydroelectric dam
Tidal Power Station-->Wave Farm-->Submerged wave farm
specials: three gorges dam - hydroelectric dam but with no maintenance costs. Solar updraft tower - ???

In between a natural gas power plant requiring oil products instead of straight oil. In the vein of Sim City, would generate 40 unhealth at .8 per pop while costing 40 gold at the same rate.
Early Natural Gas Plant--> Natural Gas Plant--> Adv Natural Gas Plant

off to the right is the Gen 1 nuclear power plant generating a flat unhealth from having to deal with the byproducts, costing .5 gold per pop but with the ever-present danger of a meltdown.
Magnox reactor--> Boiling Water Reactor-->Advanced Boiling Water Reactor-->VHT Reactor

Watch out because I'm going into rampant blue sky imagineering and will probably completely disregard how we have things right now.

As we advance in technology we can have replacements. (Advanced solar power plant, Advanced coal plant) that reduce the cost/pollution.

-The holy grail of renewable energy research today is "grid parity" meaning it the most advanced renewable energy plants should have a cost per pop approaching (but most likely not quite reaching) the dirty stuff.

-Meanwhile, if you believe it, clean coal is trying to (but almost certainly will never) become as environmentally friendly as renewable energies meaning the unhealth per pop should start dropping but the price should rise a bit.

-Research in Fission power over the last 50 years has concentrated far less on improving the power generated (the megawatts from a gen 2 reactor is about the same as from a gen 4) and more on improving safety and removing the risk of the potential for nuclear proliferation. The fission reactors they are designing right this very second are physically incapable of melting down. (source: Wikipedia) so more advanced fission reactors should reduce and eventually eliminate the chance for a meltdown while increasing the maintenance cost.

-Then along comes the Fusion reactor which provides power on the cheap for an entire continent. And you can build three!

Changes, some mentioned above:

I would ask that the three gorges dam be changed into what is essentially a hydroelectric power plant with no upkeep cost. I would also ask that while old generation power plants obsolete as new ones become available the top tier should not disappear with fusion power (I'm looking at you coal plant). I would ask that all power plants replace all other power plants so if you decide that coal just isn't working out for you and want to use your fancy glowing rocks then you can build a nuclear plant and watch the dirty polluting smokestacks go buhbye. With the tech that allows you to build fusion plants comes a building called fusion plant substation or something that does nothing and costs nothing but can be built to replace any superfluous power plants in your cities.

gasp. there. I'm done.

 

[Hydromancerx]

@steampunk1880

Not necessary different power plants however we could have techs improve them as different techs were enabled. I would really not like to add more power plants. I think we have a good amount. I am not opposed to other buildings like a Power Substation or Power Transformers.

I also would like to add more Power related things such as Smart Grids, Power Initiatives and even specific techs to unlock different types of power plants. I would also like to put in some "Steampunk" stuff too for alternate timeline electricity production.

 

[Nevets_]

One thing that could be done is to separate power plants into two varieties: baseline and supplementary. Baseline plants are the big ones that provide most or all of the power to the city (oil/coal/hydro/nuclear). Supplementary plants (wind/wave/solar/geothermal) add additional power (hammers/gold/whatever) and reduce the reliance on the baseline plant. You need some kind of baseline plant before you can build a supplementary plant, since the supplementary plants reduce the negative effects of the baseline plants. So a wind farm built in the same city as a coal plant would reduce the needed output of the coal plant, and it would produce less , similar to how mass transit gives you from oil; it's not turning gasoline into aspirin, it's reducing the you already get from it because you are using less.

 

[steampunk1880]

I know, I know. I was going off on a tangent to suggest replacing what we have now with a new system that allows strategic choice between four different families of power plants with different strengths and weaknesses so that I can feel clever when i decide to build a wind farm in the big rich city with lots of other dirty buildings but can get away with a coal plant in a small cleaner city.

I don't really want to step all over your selection of power plants, which are cool too, but unless a system of national energy is implemented, all the different types of plants are kind of superfluous. My rant would get rid of the underutilized system and replace it with a way to strategically use power plants that I think is nearly as interesting gameplaywise as counting megawatts.

 

[Necratoid]

So I send in a spy and bomb the power plant... all the buildings require power and in one fell swoop I oblliterate the city's usefullness into taking dozens of turns to make a new plant. Now the hopital is out of power and so basically none of the nonplumbing bonuses work anymore... and now the population is berserking and breaking stuff. So the population drops like a rock and will take forever to recover.

Then when they finally build the plant and things are starting to recover... so I bomb the power plant... *infinite loop*

Well I guess that is one way to make make me take the off and use it on .

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

So I send in a spy and bomb the power plant... all the buildings require power and in one fell swoop I oblliterate the city's usefullness into taking dozens of turns to make a new plant. Now the hopital is out of power and so basically none of the nonplumbing bonuses work anymore... and now the population is berserking and breaking stuff. So the population drops like a rock and will take forever to recover.

Then when they finally build the plant and things are starting to recover... so I bomb the power plant... *infinite loop*

Well I guess that is one way to make make me take the off and use it on .

That is what the AI tries to do.

 

[ori]

...and a DeLorean. Good luck finding one of those any more! You'll need the time machine for that.

or just wait a bit

 

[Hydromancerx]

Bumping for GiuseppeIII since he apparently cannot use the search button.

 

[GiuseppeIII]

Search button? What's that?

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

Search button? What's that?

Top right of the thread part of the forum.

 

[Galacticat42]

Top right of the thread part of the forum.

That arrow - gee whiz, what a piece of art.

 

[Hydromancerx]

So Faustmouse has been pushing to add Electricity as a new property. So since he offered to help and I have put it off for quite some time I would like to work with him to implement it after the next release.

While the coding is not that hard there is a lot to do so here are the steps needed to implement it an Electricity system.

1. Electricity Property - Add an Electricity Property. This can be done like all the other properties. This will be Faustmouse's task to implement by following the tutorial here ...

How to add a New Property
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=11327747&postcount=58

2. Backward Property - Most properties work where + numbers mean BAD and - numbers mean GOOD. Such as more pollution means BAD and more Disease means BAD. However with power we want more power to be GOOD. I believe AIAndy Koshling already put in code for reversal so the AI knows that more means GOOD. However I do not remember what it is. So that will have to be tracked down.

3. City Growth - We will have to decide how much electricity each pop size will add. This is just a single number set on the property.

4. Power Plant Output - This is something I can do. I already laid it out in my original Power Mod topic for RoM/AND how many MW each power plant should produce.

Power Mod (Original)
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=343423

5. Building Power Consumption - We will need to add an electricity property any and all buildings that require electricity. This is where the most help and discussion need to be done. I have no idea how much each building should consume. This will be Faustmouse's biggest task if he wants this implemented.

6. Era Power Consumption - It has been discussed in the original Power Mod topic that as you progress through the eras that power consumption should increase as you tech up. Mainly because more people are consuming power than when electricity first was invented. This can be done by auto-build buildings that are triggered by new techs on the tree and consume a little bit more power.

7. Electricity to Hammers - Right now each power plant produces a different number of hammers based on 100 MW = +1 So rather than putting it on the Power Plants directly anymore Auto-Build buildings with a +1 would need to be made every +100 Electricity. Note that with the property system +1 Electricity = +1 MW to keep it easy to convert.

8. Electricity Loss - Counterintuitive to what we have had before, power plants will not trigger weather a city has power or not. The first 1MW auto-build +1 building will have a trigger to tell you city if it has power or not. If it goes above you should be fine and its present. If you go under then it will disappear and your city will be without power until you get it back up.

9. Property Diffusion - Properties like Crime, Disease and Pollution defuse over the map however do we need it to do that for Electricity?

10. Improvements - Should improvements on the map such as solar panels, windmills and geothermal plants add to a cities power? If so how to get the property to they city? In addition should other improvements like Factories and Cottages be consuming power?

 

[Koshling]

So Faustmouse has been pushing to add Electricity as a new property. So since he offered to help and I have put it off for quite some time I would like to work with him to implement it after the next release.

While the coding is not that hard there is a lot to do so here are the steps needed to implement it an Electricity system.


2. Backward Property - Most properties work where + numbers mean BAD and - numbers mean GOOD. Such as more pollution means BAD and more Disease means BAD. However with power we want more power to be GOOD. I believe AIAndy already put in code for reversal so the AI knows that more means GOOD. However I do not remember what it is. So that will have to be tracked down.

It was me, and you just need to change the sign of the AIWeight relative to the negative properties. So where crime has:

			<iAIWeight>-100</iAIWeight>
			<AIScaleType>AISCALE_CITY</AIScaleType>
			<iOperationalRangeMin>0</iOperationalRangeMin>
			<iOperationalRangeMax>1000</iOperationalRangeMax>

Electricity will need some positive value for the weight. If buildings that currently provide electricity will now be providing some amount of electricity via the property the exact settings will need fairly careful consideration depending on how things are intended to scale as more electricity becomes available.

 

[Hydromancerx]

Yikes! Sorry Koshling I apologize for mixing you guys up. Please forgive me.

 

[Maxima7]

So for everything except for like wind, wave and tide it is accurate. Note that Fusion tipped the sales in the other direction with an insane amount of hammers (1,000,000 MW).

I always thought this was odd. There's so much other things in the game that give a scant amount in comparison.

Where are you getting your info from? The first commercial fusion reactors will have comparable MW output to current plants from what I've read. How well would MW capacity scale in future designs? I have no idea, but I've read about some saying that 50 MW fusion plants were more feasible than a larger one.

Unlimited energy is already in grasp, too. By the time fusion is around, there would already be immense advancements in solar, and fission reactor designs would have a virtually limitless supply. The thorium and uranium breeder reactor cycles would last for tens of thousands of years.

 

[Thunderbrd]

So Faustmouse has been pushing to add Electricity as a new property. So since he offered to help and I have put it off for quite some time I would like to work with him to implement it after the next release.

Cool. This would be a very good improvement if we do it right.

3. City Growth - We will have to decide how much electricity each pop size will add. This is just a single number set on the property.

and

6. Era Power Consumption - It has been discussed in the original Power Mod topic that as you progress through the eras that power consumption should increase as you tech up. Mainly because more people are consuming power than when electricity first was invented. This can be done by auto-build buildings that are triggered by new techs on the tree and consume a little bit more power.

It might be more important to see it as Electricity property is supply and population would therefore consume. Thus population REDUCES the property locally. As techs increase, sending more and more electrical appliance conveniences out to the public, the population would suck up more and more of the electricity property. Additionally, it would be appropriate that more population eats more electricity in general.

MOST buildings would consume electricity as well and the penalty for not running enough electricity generation would be that said buildings would cease to function if the electricity property goes too low. So you'd have buildings turning off and turning on as brownouts occur since buildings would suck up electricity unless deactivated by not having enough.

Might therefore be important to give additional power plant buildings with prereqs on the previous power plant buildings that would enable a player to build a second, third, fourth power plant of a given type etc...

Electricity property would need to bottom out at 0 I think, not being possible to have less than no power on hand.

Housing buildings that would emerge soon after electricity should be technologically available to the civ would replace and then almost immediately obsolete all predecessor buildings making it possible for a blackout to plunge the city into absolute homeless status - and all the unhappiness that would come with it. In fact, come to think of it, the homelessness 'building' should have an unhappiness/pop level tag implementation rather than a flat value to represent that larger cities would suffer even more greatly if the civ allows this to take place.

5. Building Power Consumption - We will need to add an electricity property any and all buildings that require electricity. This is where the most help and discussion need to be done. I have no idea how much each building should consume. This will be Faustmouse's biggest task if he wants this implemented.

Yup, this will be the bugbear of the system... balancing out supply and demand appropriately. I'd suggest starting with very small numbers. Like -1/pop soon after electricity should be available. -1 for a shop or standard building size then judge size of building and electrical consumption up very gradually from there. Some buildings would also have tech modifiers affect them here as they'd consume more as more techs enable various things. Perhaps they should also thus become more effective in what they 'do' as the power enables them to be. For example, an Intelligence Agency might consume -3 power when it can be first built but after x technologically developed resource is available, such as perhaps electric typewriters or phones, it now consumes -4 power but gains another +1 espionage.

7. Electricity to Hammers - Right now each power plant produces a different number of hammers based on 100 MW = +1 So rather than putting it on the Power Plants directly anymore Auto-Build buildings with a +1 would need to be made every +100 Electricity. Note that with the property system +1 Electricity = +1 MW to keep it easy to convert.

Power itself doesn't do much unless there's a means to convert that power into useful action for industry. I'd have buildings improve with techs/resources/further power consumption as noted above rather than having power have any direct effect.

I also think we should eventually make the system more difficult for players by capping a maximum energy held (excess goes to waste as its harmlessly grounded out.) Some buildings opening up through further tech progress could increase the cap, which really just enables a larger margin to store the ever important energy property resource. The more time goes on, the more crushing the effect is on a city when the power goes out so it becomes a bigger and bigger concern for the advanced era players.

In short, we shouldn't need to shortcut and make energy directly become a mysterious source of production itself. Instead, make factories more valuable the more they develop ways to USE the electricity. This proposal will make all those seemingly superfluous 'goods' resources we're using in this game a lot more meaningful when access to them and power makes a building more valuable but also makes the building consume more.

8. Electricity Loss - Counterintuitive to what we have had before, power plants will not trigger weather a city has power or not. The first 1MW auto-build +1 building will have a trigger to tell you city if it has power or not. If it goes above you should be fine and its present. If you go under then it will disappear and your city will be without power until you get it back up.

Excellent. Yes, you have power or no you don't. Make it a boolean on a greater than 0 or 0 on the property value level in the city.

9. Property Diffusion - Properties like Crime, Disease and Pollution defuse over the map however do we need it to do that for Electricity?

10. Improvements - Should improvements on the map such as solar panels, windmills and geothermal plants add to a cities power? If so how to get the property to they city? In addition should other improvements like Factories and Cottages be consuming power?

hmm... perhaps yes. #9 would be an initial answer as to how to go about #10 but the property would diffuse from one plot to another quickly rather than slowly as crime and disease do. The math would be a lot more fluid than it is for crime. For example, a solar panels improvement could increase power and then that diffuses across the tiles back to the city or to the improvements around it that are also reliant on and drawing power. (The reliance on a property for the functioning of an improvement is probably going to take more programming but would be a good reflection of reality... a Town is going to suck up quite a bit of electricity.)

Mind... I wish we could have a 'second route' type here - power lines - that would enable this diffusal of energy across tiles and as varying qualities of powerlines are developed and implemented could determine how quickly and seemlessly that power diffuses. We may well be able to do this somehow already but It would probably take use of the multi-feature 'feature' and some tricksy xml work. It doesn't need to be graphically displayed but the tile does need to note the 'second' feature... I might be able to assist with that if AIAndy can't be summoned for this small task.

However, though I know the property system CAN do all of this coolness, I'm not sure on HOW exactly to make it do it all so it'd take some serious consideration, research and planning to make it all work properly I think.

These are just my thoughts on the subject. This project would be easily as massive as any of the worst parts of the combat mod but may not need a whole lot of programming and be able to utilize existing methods. It's just going to take a thorough understanding of how to apply all the generic factors we can toggle in the property system... more thorough an understanding than I alone can offer.