The climate change and flood barriers.

[Starwars]

Does anyone else have a lot of trouble "keeping up" with getting the flood barriers built? In my games, once the climate change starts happening it really tends to skyrocket. In my first game, I didn't even get to flood barriers tech before the climate meter had maxed out.

In my current game I started building them around the time the changes started happening. But the buildtime is so slow that the climate change by far outpaces it.

Does anyone else have this problem or am I missing something or gotten unlucky in my games?

 

[DemonMaster]

I got some areas flooded in my last game and I built the barriers (to late) and then I could repair the district (I wasn't allow to do that before I built the barriers). So even though the barrier comes late, it allows you to do some repairs. I guess if it is to far gone, then it is to late.

 

[CaptainUnknown]

I agree with the OP here. In my first game the stages of climate change happened every 8 turns like clock work, however, the game calculated ~40 turns to build the barriers. These were good cities too. The worst part is the recalculation would happen every stage of flooding (due to losing production tiles). In the end, i didn't build any barriers because I reached max climate level with a mere 24 turns left on the barrier. I should note, I didn't get to barrier tech until stage 3-4.

 

[kaspergm]

I agree very much with OP. Climate change seems to go WAY too fast for the meter to get to max. In my current game, we were 3 civs doing CO2 output (out of 8 on a normal size map). I had 2 Industrial zones with Coal plants updated to Oil asap. and updated to Uranium asap. Considering I was running a big empire with 20 cities or more, I felt this was pretty restrained. My CO2 out was comparable to Greece and Germany, so it was not like either of us were running (imo.) overly massive industry. Yet the meter very quickly reached maximum level. I was a bit disappointed by this, because I actually wanted to try to do what I felt was a balanced approach, and I felt the game didn't allow that at all.

Also, production cost of flood barriers pretty quickly skyrocket, which is rather frustrating because it's so symptomatic of what has plagued late game since vanilla, plus the game is not very helpful in telling you when your flood barriers will not actually do nothing, I had cities building flood barriers for 30+ turns when meter had reached maximum, which was obviously a stupid noob thing to do, but it was my first game, so I didn't realize the full mechanics.

 

[AriochIV]

You really need to start building the flood barriers before sea level rise starts, because once it starts you probably won't be able to keep up. Fortunately, prior to sea level rise, they're pretty cheap. But once it starts, a flood barrier that initially took 4 or 5 turns to build will take 20-30, and you just don't have that much time, with each level of sea rise occurring every ~9 turns or so.

This is not remotely realistic, but as long as you're proactive it's manageable in game terms. Also, the number of tiles affected is small, and you can see which ones will be affected (and in what order) right from the start of the game.

 

[Archon_Wing]

It's way too expensive too

 

[kaspergm]

You really need to start building the flood barriers before sea level rise starts, because once it starts you probably won't be able to keep up. Fortunately, prior to sea level rise, they're pretty cheap. But once it starts, a flood barrier that initially took 4 or 5 turns to build will take 20-30, and you just don't have that much time, with each level of sea rise occurring every ~9 turns or so.

This is not remotely realistic, but as long as you're proactive it's manageable in game terms. Also, the number of tiles affected is small, and you can see which ones will be affected (and in what order) right from the start of the game.

I'm glad to hear it's more manageable if you're ahead of it. I obviously was not aware at all in my game how fast it was going to be, so I was way late.

My opinion still stands on the rate with which the meter increases, however. I do think it's going way too fast, it's not going to be a lot of fun if it just maxes out every time if just a few players build a couple of power plants.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

The best way to avoid climate change increasing too quickly is to delay building any power plants (coal or oil). Coal plants especially will cause a lot of climate change. You'll take a hit to your production but not much. Build nuclear plants instead. Also, you can build the solar farms and wind farm tiles improvements for clean production boost in your tiles. The AI won't cause a lot of climate change so if you delay building power plants, you'll get very little climate change.

 

[Starwars]

Maybe I just need to play better but yeah, in the games I've done I'm severely behind on getting them up. In my current game I didn't get coal nor oil plants for this purpose but by the time I get to Computers there is already plenty of climage change going on. The AI is most definitely contributing a lot to that in my game.
I dunno, the balance has felt really out of whack in the games I've done so far.

Even keeping that in mind though, I agree with kaspergm that climate change could be slowed down a lot. Not just about the flood barriers but I find it reaches max level waaaay before games wrap up. It could be slowed down I think and there would still be time to experience the game post sea level rise. I think it really feels too quick.

But yeah, maybe I'm just unlucky or bad but in the games I've done I have not been able to be proactive about the barriers because the climate change outpaces me. This is on Immortal difficulty and level 3 disaster setting. No idea if that impacts it in any way.

 

[AriochIV]

I suggest playing on level 2. There are still lots of disasters and sea level rise happens plenty fast.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I suggest playing on level 2. There are still lots of disasters and sea level rise happens plenty fast.

I agree. My first game was setting 3 and it was a bit crazy. I was getting hit by natural disasters constantly and by turn 300, climate change was at level 7. My second game was on setting 2 and I get some natural disasters but it was manageable and climate change was slower.

 

[Victoria]

Does anyone else have a lot of trouble "keeping up" with getting the flood barriers built?

Yes, grrr, the extra gold you make from a harbour now goes on buying a barrier, we were conned.
Coastal civ’s pah!

 

[iammaxhailme]

Yeah, in most of my GS games so far, I was getting severe flooding by the mid/late industrial era. I realize years don't exactly match up but global warming was certainly not causing coastal floods in the years 1880-1910 or so

 

[baronjutter]

I'm new to civ6 and just got the DLC and it feels like climate change isn't working right and if it is working right then the design isn't very good.

-Does climate change take game speed into account? I play on epic and sea levels rose extremely quickly and shockingly early.
-I had a huge tech lead, was the only person capable of building coal plants or coal-powered units. I built 2 coal plants and a couple battleships and next thing you know I'm losing a bunch of my stage-1 flooding tiles. It's 1700, the industrial revolution is barely starting, and climate range is already so rampant the seas are rising.
-I could not turn off or disable my coal plants, this is extremely unfair game design.
-Sea levels already rose before I even had the tech for oil plants let alone nuclear. I had more than enough hydro power though for my empire but I still could not demolish my coal plants.
-Your units climate impact is insane. A nation's fleet is not a meaningful contributor of greenhouse gases. A couple battleships isn't going to destroy the climate, this is silly.

I've never modded the game before, but is there any guide that could point me in the right direction? I'd love to play with the climate change track and generally slow it down and make it so tile-loss from flooding only even starts to happen near the very end of the track. Climate change is supposed to slowly sneak up on the world starting with worse weather, bigger storms, suffering agriculture and finally in the end leading to real loss of land from permanent flooding. Having permanent flooding right at the start is really not fun and also quite unrealistic. 1800's england did not suddenly lose a ton of its coast to seal level rise 10 years after they built their first coal fired boiler.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

-I could not turn off or disable my coal plants, this is extremely unfair game design.

You can do a city project to convert coal plants into oil or nuclear plants for less CO2.

But I recommend not building coal plants at all. They are not really worth it right now. You get a some production but massive climate change. It's better to skip coal plants and build nuclear plants instead or oil plants if you absolutely need the mid game production.

 

[Lord Lakely]

You really need to start building the flood barriers before sea level rise starts, because once it starts you probably won't be able to keep up. Fortunately, prior to sea level rise, they're pretty cheap. But once it starts, a flood barrier that initially took 4 or 5 turns to build will take 20-30, and you just don't have that much time, with each level of sea rise occurring every ~9 turns or so.

This is not remotely realistic, but as long as you're proactive it's manageable in game terms. Also, the number of tiles affected is small, and you can see which ones will be affected (and in what order) right from the start of the game.

Yeah, I beelined Computers and got them for roughtly 1-3 turns worth of production in all of my coastal cities before levels rose. Worked like a charm.

 

[DemonMaster]

In my latest game I built coal plant, but not everywhere (they have radius). There are some resolutions for this as well. But if course if you build industrial districts everywhere and coal plants in them as well (even though the city can get electricity from another nearby city). This is a new system. Live and learn.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Climate Change is kinda gamey. Realistically, climate change should be really slow where it takes 200-300 turns or so to see some effects. But to implement it that way, you would need the game to run much more into the future. It was added for purely gameplay reasons. It adds a ticking clock to put pressure on the player to win. It also forces the player to make some choices because increasing production now comes with some negatives. So the player needs to weight, do they build coal plants and get better production and suffer some negatives or do they abstain from buffing production on order to avoid the problems. Building coal plants is no longer an automatic must build.

 

[AriochIV]

Climate Change is kinda gamey. Realistically, climate change should be really slow where it takes 200-300 turns or so to see some effects. But to implement it that way, you would need the game to run much more into the future. It was added for purely gameplay reasons. It adds a ticking clock to put pressure on the player to win. It also forces the player to make some choices because increasing production now comes with some negatives. So the player needs to weight, do they build coal plants and get better production and suffer some negatives or do they abstain from buffing production on order to avoid the problems. Building coal plants is no longer an automatic must build.

The thing is, though... unless you happen to be settling on islands where a lot of your territory will be affected by sea level rise, you can almost completely ignore it. Just don't build critical districts on the danger tiles, and you can pump out all the CO2 you like with essentially no downside. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's really not much of a trade-off in game terms.

 

[Tuvok694]

The exploding production costs for flood barriers are beyond ridiculous. This has to be the first thing that needs to be patched.
They did play their own game before releasing it, right?? Why on earth did they not notice that there's something very very wrong??