On Power (electrical)

[Thunderbrd]

1) A "min value" for properties, in case of electricity: 0.

Yes we do need this unless I somehow find its already there somehow.

2) A modifier/change on techs so we can say: "with the discovery of electronics, every 3 pop consume 1 Electricity." "With computers, every 2 pop consume 1 electricity" and "with Tech X total energie consumed is increased / reduced by x %"

I'm pretty sure PropertyManipulators cover this. It's likely to need to go on technologies but here's an example from traits:

<PropertyManipulators>
  				<PropertySource>
   					<PropertySourceType>PROPERTYSOURCE_CONSTANT</PropertySourceType>
						<PropertyType>PROPERTY_CRIME</PropertyType>
						<GameObjectType>GAMEOBJECT_CITY</GameObjectType>
						<RelationType>RELATION_ASSOCIATED</RelationType>
						<iAmountPerTurn>9</iAmountPerTurn>
						<Active>
							<Greater>
								<PropertyType>PROPERTY_CRIME</PropertyType>
								<Constant>200</Constant>
							</Greater>
						</Active>
				</PropertySource>
			</PropertyManipulators>

It's saying +9 crime per round in any city that has a crime value of more than 200. You can do a LOT with this tag and it probably accounts for an ability to do most of what still needs to be done.

3) A "with power" tag like the "Factory" has. For example: "The Building gives 3 , 2 ; +3 with power" I'm not sure if we can use the tag on the factory or if we need another one. Works probably best similar to the
"TechCommerceChange" and the respective modifier and YieldChange/Modifier.

imo, buildings that require power should continue to just require power to function at all. Then have them improve AND require more power as tech advancements come along. Again PropertyManipulators, hopefully on the building definition, can most likely account for the amount of power the building consumes and can be made to alter how much the building consumes as techs grow. Then Tech Commerce and Yield changes and modifiers can be triggered on the same techs that expand the building's consumption of power.

aka: this one is already all possible I believe.

4) A "iPriority" tag. If the city has not enough Power to support all buildings, this tag is used to decide what buildings has the highest priority to get power. The highest priority Buildings would be Hospitals, Waterpumps and Airports while
Accelerators would have a very low priority. If to buildings have the same priority, the building that is build earlier would get the power access.

The city either generates enough to meet demand to have power or not and if not all buildings that require power go down for that round. This cannot be done gradually.
The reason is the order of processing. The city will calculate generation - demand all at once. To change this to a system like what you're suggesting here would mean introducing some kind of delayed calculation where it steps through each building and I don't think players would appreciate the enormous turn time delay this would introduce.

5) A "only works with power tag" (boolean). If it is "1" and the city has not enough power to maintain this building, the same thing happen that happens now when you lost access to power in your city. I don't know if this will actually REMOVE the building that requires power and autobuild it when power is restored...

Aren't there already buildings that require power? They shut down when there's no power off that boolean setting already so all we have to do here is make the condition that requires 'power' base off of the property value of power in the city being at a positive. This is easy. Have the generators provide the property based power and have an autobuilding that is added to the city when power is at 1 or higher. THAT building actually adds the power to the city. Call the building 'Charged Powerlines' or something to that extent. No further programming is needed here.

6) A tag that allows us to give a building: "+2, -3 Power with tech X." Maybe also for resources.

PropertyManipulators is already ready to go to fill these needs... just need to figure out how to work with them properly. Koshling, SgtSlick, AIAndy or DH may all be capable of that. Certainly AIAndy would if and when he stops in for a visit.

7) A Civic modifier that allows "total energy consumed is increased / decreased by x% with civic X.

Again... PropertyManipulators covers this too.

8) A tag for improvements so they will produce less or more yield depending if it has energy or not. (Or is this too complex?)

I'd rather have them just turn off if not supplied with power. That would probably take some programming yes. I'm not sure though... it may be possible that PropertyManipulators might be able to achieve something along these lines already but I doubt it.

9) A tag that allows buildings to store the property. Right now, 90% of energy not used in a city will be wasted since you can't really store it. But you could build a giant battery complex that would allow you to store 200 Energy for example.

Hmm... that's where we get back to the absolute maximum and absolute minimum tags again. If it's necessary to add those then it's necessary to add modifying factors such as would come from buildings too. Thus enabling a building to add to the storage capacity for the city.

10) A way to transfer energy from your offshore powerplants to your cites.

Try an improvement 'Undersea Powerlines' or something - yeah this might be a little tough - I'd like to use routes but not enable any travel modifications on them - and may as well use some kind of modified tunnel graphic for it.

11) A mechanism to keep the electricity property inside your own boarders but will also allow you to trade it to your friends.

Certainly a last step here but I know what you mean. It may be possible to keep each property values on a given property specific to a given player - if that's the case then we have a good start to use that method. I'm hoping we do because that means we'd be closer to doing Morale as a property too. One way or another it would need to be implemented this way.

Then trade... that would be really quite interesting to plan out from a programming perspective is all I can say right now. I'm certain AIAndy would have the best answer for that.

 

[Azurian]

Electricity can be one of the new "currencies"., especially with the tags you mentioned.

Biology Lab
+1 science - 1Power with Computers Networks
+1 science - 1Power with Digitization.

This adds a new strategy layer, you can't just go snowballing in the tech tree without harm.

If Power buildings cost matinence, this would consume your gold so you won't have as much money.

Reminds me so much of SimCity.

Also it would get interesting with
Controlled Plasma, Internal Shockwave Engine, Wireless Electricity and Electromagnetic Voltage Techs.

They would be the Transhuman techs that would increase electrical demand and have new power plants types.


EMP weapons can lower power and be used as the new Seige weapons.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Electricity can be one of the new "currencies"., especially with the tags you mentioned.

Biology Lab
+1 science - 1Power with Computers Networks
+1 science - 1Power with Digitization.

This adds a new strategy layer, you can't just go snowballing in the tech tree without harm.

If Power buildings cost matinence, this would consume your gold so you won't have as much money.

Reminds me so much of SimCity.

Also it would get interesting with
Controlled Plasma, Internal Shockwave Engine, Wireless Electricity and Electromagnetic Voltage Techs.

They would be the Transhuman techs that would increase electrical demand and have new power plants types.


EMP weapons can lower power and be used as the new Seige weapons.

Exactly. However, I had not thought of the EMP weapons use yet... oddly enough. Cool concept... drop the shields by running them out of power! Wouldn't work on ALL defense forms but for many it would be the necessary appropriate countermeasure.

One problem though... this would mean that said shielding methods would be terribly vulnerable to nuclear blasts wouldn't they? You'd think given that nukes put out the strongest EMP pulse we can trigger right now that any effective Arcology shielding would be able to repel an EMP blast right?

 

[Azurian]

Exactly. However, I had not thought of the EMP weapons use yet... oddly enough. Cool concept... drop the shields by running them out of power! Wouldn't work on ALL defense forms but for many it would be the necessary appropriate countermeasure.

One problem though... this would mean that said shielding methods would be terribly vulnerable to nuclear blasts wouldn't they? You'd think given that nukes put out the strongest EMP pulse we can trigger right now that any effective Arcology shielding would be able to repel an EMP blast right?

Well we can have EMP have different categories and strengths.

Red EMP
Green EMP
Blue EMP
Purple EMP
Black EMP

Arcology shielding can deflect Red, Green, and Blue.

Advanced Shielding can deflect red, green, blue, and purple.

Black will be astronomically expensive to produce but can knock our the shielding.

Red EMP at Controlled Plasma
Green EMP at Advanced Germination
Blue EMP at Electromagnetic Voltage
Purple EMP at Synergetics

Black EMP somewhere in Galactic.

Green EMP at Advanced Germination because plants absorb certain wavelengths, and I'm sure with Shockwave Engine we can think of something to create Green.

 

[Azurian]

Red EMP Shielding
TECH :Advanced Germination
Requires Green EMP Battery
Requires Shockwave Engine
-75 percent damage from Red EMP

Green EMP Shielding
Technology : Electromagnetic Voltage
Requires Blue EMP Battery
Requires Antigrav Generator
-75 percent damage from Green EMP
-99 percent damage from Red EMP

 

[Hydromancerx]

Arcology shielding would be able to repel an EMP blast right?

If not that, then Advanced Shielding would.

Plus we could develop even more advanced types of shielding depending upon the weapons types.

 

[Faustmouse]

The city either generates enough to meet demand to have power or not and if not all buildings that require power go down for that round. This cannot be done gradually.
The reason is the order of processing. The city will calculate generation - demand all at once. To change this to a system like what you're suggesting here would mean introducing some kind of delayed calculation where it steps through each building and I don't think players would appreciate the enormous turn time delay this would introduce.

This seems just plain wrong. If you build a new Nutella Factory and then have not enough energy, you wouldn't have a blackout in the whole city for several years. You would just shut off the new factory to support more needed buildings.

But cool that so many things are already covered by other tags

 

[Thunderbrd]

This seems just plain wrong. If you build a new Nutella Factory and then have not enough energy, you wouldn't have a blackout in the whole city for several years. You would just shut off the new factory to support more needed buildings.

But cool that so many things are already covered by other tags

It's not quite as wrong as it seems. Power wouldn't go down for 'years'. What would happen is since ALL buildings that require power go down for the round (which is yes an oversimplification but would fairly well represent a brownout period and all the problems those can create) the buildings would ALSO cease, while disabled, to cost the city power. Thus, the city will get a massive overage the next round from such a small grid overdraft. That overage would usually be saved up and would then cause the next many rounds to go just fine even though the city is running at a net loss. Thus the one round blackout is the warning shot that lets the player know they are developing a problem with power output and need to pick it up lest they end up with another blackout round soon (once all the margin is eaten up.)

Mathematically it's like this:
City produces +50.
City population consumes 25.
City buildings consume 25
City has 1 power reserve left over from the round before.

This situation would have the city remain indefinitely at 1 power. However, as soon as you build the Nutella factory that consumes say, another 1 power, you cause the city to enter a blackout the round that the city has consumed 25 from pop and 26 from buildings. (50 produced +1 reserve - 51 consumed = 0)

Then the next round you have:
City produces +50.
City population consumes 25.
City buildings that consume are all inactive so buildings consume 0.
City has 0 reserve this round thus no power is supplied this round to buildings.

That round the city charges up and the next round buildings are active again because 50 Produced - 25 consumed = 25 now goes into energy storage.

The next round:
City produces +50.
City population consumes 25.
City buildings consume 26.
Energy reserve is 25.

50+25 = 75 produced
51 consumed
75-51 = 24 goes into reserve for the next round.

And so on.

Obviously this is a VERY simplified mathematical mechanic that isn't yet taking into account the transference of energy from the city to surrounding tiles and vice versa.

As you can see, you'd have to run a very serious deficit to have long periods of city blackouts. And through transference, a neighboring city can help to supply a city that's not producing much electricity for itself in a pinch.

 

[Faustmouse]

Ah ok I haven't thought of that! (And nice example)

BUT:
Energy Storage is a big problem nowadays. So energy that is not consumed will be wasted/transported to other cities instead of beeing stored. We could have some storing mechanism like spinning a giant object that can be used to generate power if needed, or pumping water on a hill that can be released and produce power when running down again.
So the Blackouts would be longer (and even 2 Rounds is half a year in late game). And then I think the Goverment take care of giving important buildings energy first.

Maybe we can just add bPriority? So you would have 2 classes of buildings in your city. If you don't have energy for all, you can at least power all priority buildings. All no priority buildings are shut down. If you can't maintain all priority buildings, all of them are shut down, too. Not that realistic again, but less complex.

We could have Emergency Generators that provide some power if needed but pollute the enviroment and give high flameablility so you don't really want them to be active (or they simply disappear after X rounds in use)

We also can make the amount of power a building consumes as prereq.
If your city has 1 net energy overflow, you can't build buildings that would consume 2. Only buildings that has 1 or no energy consumed will be buildable.
This avoid the "Nutella Factory Scenario" but you'd still have troubles if your city grows or if a powerplant is destroyed.

 

[Thunderbrd]

To make this not so nightmarish from a programmer's angle I'd not worry further on the matter and let the system be as it can with the tools we have. The 'is Power' status in a city is well defined in code and would have to be changed from a simple boolean to an integer to achieve something like what you're saying then we'd layer the results a bit. At 1 power in the city you'd have iProvidesPower (rather than bProvidesPower) at 1 and then add another at 2 power and so on then have the buildings require various power levels to create the hierarchy you're talking about.

This may or may not be all that bad with coding but you know that little power symbol you get on cities that 'Have Power' in the game now? Would you have that symbol differ on the various energy levels in the city? It's the easiest way aside from tracking your messages right now for a player to know if he's got a problem or not.

Also, Energy Storage would be a matter of manipulating the absolute maximum value allowed on the power property in the city. Easily represented and yes, could 'cap out' quite low at first which indeed would potentially cut into the overages that can be saved up leaving less room for error but moreso during a time when there's not nearly as much consumption and thus danger of creating such situations too.

 

[Faustmouse]

Not what I wanted the Powermod to be, but sounds absolutely right. It is much easier that way and can later still be changed if we want to.

So how would you code the storage problem?

 

[Thunderbrd]

By making cities and plots have an absolute minimum (which we'd assign at 0) and an absolute maximum power value limit. Then give a tag for buildings to increase or decrease the absolute maximum for the city and give the routes an ability to add to the maximum on plots. Both would have a default of 0 and would grow as you enable power to be stored or exist in the city and on the routes (extended grid.)

These tags would need to be developed and added to the property system and may take some time to think through how to best approach.

The system of transmitting power from the city to surrounding plots and from one plot to another would be something like a 95% sharing with a very high, like 10 tile radius from source, so it becomes a fairly smooth pool of power across the grid with very little loss or resistance along the way.

 

[Yudishtira]

Don't forget about generators. They can provide backup power for hospital life-support and critical industries (well really any industries - if power is unreliable most medium-sized businesses will get them 'off their own bat').

 

[Thunderbrd]

I'm not 100% sure how we could work those... I'll try to think of something...

 

[Faustmouse]

I thought about emergency generators and propose this:

They should be buildable like normal builings: Emergency Generators (off)
When you'd get a Blackout, there should be an autobuilding:
Emergency Generators (on), requires and replace Emergency Generators (off), less then 1 Energy.
These produce some energy, but also consume Oil Products (not a big deal now, but maybe later if stockpiling resources is in), produce flameability and air pollution.

After a few rounds, or if the energy is higher then 100, they would be replaced by the Emergency Generators (off) again.

 

[Faustmouse]

You could make a building consume "2 energy with Tech X", right? Because IE Bakery is traditionally heated with fire, but I think nowadays it uses electrical power.

 

[Faustmouse]

Just some statistics I found to see how energy consumption should be.

Germany, 80 mio inhabitants: Total Production: ~610.000.000 MWh, Consumption 600.000.000 MWH. You see, this is a VERY high property value if we do it 1 MW = 1 PP


Industry: 46,6 % (249,6 TWh)
Houses: 25,5 % (136,6 TWh)
Trade & Commerce: 14,3 % (76,5 TWh)
Public Institutions: 8,8 % (46,9 TWh)
Traffic: 3,1 % (16,6 TWh)
Agriculture: 1,7 % (9,0 TWh)


1 Person House: 2 MW
2 Person House: 3 MW
3 Person House: 4 MW
4 Person House: 5 MW
5 Person House: 6 MW

In Finland, the consumption per Person is twice as high while in Poland it's only 50%.



15 MW per metric ton raw Aluminium produced. How much should the Aluminium Smelter produce them?

 

[intlidave]

Be careful not to confuse MegaWatt with MegaWatthour. Like in:

15 MW per metric ton raw Aluminium produced.

Should probably be 15MWh per metric ton.

Anyway. 610TWh per year is about 68500 MW production. A decent number, but in late modern/early transhuman that's about 30-40 (developed) cities' worth of

 

[Faustmouse]

Be careful not to confuse MegaWatt with MegaWatthour. Like in:

Should probably be 15MWh per metric ton.

Anyway. 610TWh per year is about 68500 MW production. A decent number, but in late modern/early transhuman that's about 30-40 (developed) cities' worth of

Ah ok. So you have to divide the TWh through (365*24), right?

I started to fill in powerconsumption on the google doc, but I really have trouble finding tables about that. I can only guess, which is probably a very bad idea, since I have almost no idea about MW and such. Any recommended literature?

 

[intlidave]

Yes. Exactly.
I'd recommend
http://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Engineering-101-Third-Edition/dp/0123860016
, but almost any beginner-level textbook about electricity (or physics) should contain enough info for game design purposes.
If you don't want to buy paper books, you can start here: http://www.electricalengineeringschools.org/electricity-101/