Too many meltdowns!

[Xerxes712]

Maybe do as the other post. Kills 75% the people but leaves buildings. then you must use 'Clean up Fall out' with workers before the city can get back up running.

A meltdown spreads radioactivity, not blow up a city!

I hope that can be changed with the SDK.

Answer me this one, I did nuke a city with several cavlery and riflemen within one square, and they all lived? Only maybe damaged? It would seem a nuke ICBM has no power at all in this game.

It should completely destroy half the city depending upon size....and kill any units within range to a point...

A nuclear Meltdown is WORST than getting hit by a ICBM

[KoBushi]

Originally posted by Blake
I suspect this is a case of a statistical principle at work (dunno if it has a fancy name)

When you get thousands of players playing a game, statistically unlikely things happening to a few are INEVITABLE, and these anomalies are much more noteworthy.

Firaxis did try to reduce the impact of this though, through mechanisms like how Great People are generated. You are guaranteed to get a Great Person when you put work into it, but the randomness is in which one(s) you get. I generally support this principle and it would be a good idea to for example make it so you can't have more than one meltdown in a game, or that each meltdown makes subsequent meltdowns much less likely (ie your engineers learn from their mistakes).

I've had games where Barbarians just win every single fight, even REALLY unlikely ones. I sometimes think it'd be good to have a "Luckbar" in a game, and that it fills up when unlucky things happen, and the more full it is, the luckier you get. Done right, it would even out the bumps and as a bonus make players really superstitious and/or paranoid, it would be absolutely hilarious to deny the existence of any such luck system, especially when people start prattling about "statistical anomalies"

I thought that as well... But even if that is the case it shouldn't be happening game after game after game for me.

So far I have experianced about 15 nuclear meltdowns.

Also i agree that thier damange is a bit too much, it should have LESS explosive effect than a nuclear warhead does, but more radiolagoical spread.

So, it'd be a less powerful nuclear explosion, but would spread fallou futher than the nuke head... and not destroy all the buildings.

[Kassiopeia]

Originally posted by snoopy369


3MI wasn't exactly a walk in the park, although it certainly wasn't chernobyl...

I haven't yet built a nuclear plant though, so i have no clue

Right, Three Mile Island. I'll concede that it was a meltdown (which it was), but I don't think it would quite qualify as the sort of meltdown you have in Civ4, as far as results are concerned.

[Drakan]

I only built one to try it out. Half an hour later I had a meltdown in that city and I wasn't at war nor was the city rioting or anything. It just happened.

[Xerxes712]

Half hour in a turn base game means nothing. How many turns was it?

The XML script has for RNDNUCLEAR whatever set for 1000. A person could try changing that number. It is in the Building script XML folder BuildingUnitinfo.xml.

Until Ironworks is fixed, I had no way to delete the building, so I placed in a 0 for -2 health effect, and removed all other plus or minus effects.

Maybe if you want no meltdown, put a "0" in there instead of a 1000? It is the only building with it.

I increased the power (to 80) of the ICBM, it is set for 40 default and each until must pass a regular combat action against it. Setting to 80 was more better, but no enemy units were ever destroyed, but reduced quite low in health.

Also, I did not see hardly any destruction of improvements around the city as it says in manual. There was fallout.

ICBM needs to be fixed too.

[Blake]

I had an evil idea.

Have nukes cause an "Irradated" demotion on all units that are hit, causes reduce combat effectiveness and maybe health loss.

[Jethro83]

Wow, the last game I played (and won by space race as Qin Shi Huang), I built nuclear plants in every city, and never had a single meltdown. Of course, I was playing on Noble, so that might have something to do with it, correct me if I'm wrong.

[Shogun Gunner]

Last night, I reopened a conquest win on Noble and "played a few more turns". During this time, I built nuclear power plants in everyone one of my 20 or so cities. I had four nuke melt downs in 20-25 turns.

It seems that the probability is set higher in cIV for this to occur.

[Brutus66]

The OP is right, I have had so many meltdowns I just don't build nuclear power plants anymore.

[Adagio]

I've only built nuclear power plants 4-5 times for all my games, but I've never had a meltdown

[laurentius]

I have built nuclear plant in about 20 cities in my latest game and have had 7-9(lost count) meltdowns in 60-70? turns. Its quite annoying for sure considering I'm discovering my 26th future tech now. This on emperor level.

[Xerxes712]

Well, for two sets of rough data.

20 citys for 25 turns gives 4 meltdowns.

20 citys for 65 turns gives 8 meltdowns.

This is roughly the same rate of 1144) chance per nuclear power plant per turn. Assume each turn is a year, not 5 years. Each turn in the earlier years is more years than later turns in modern at 1 turn = year. I assume you built these plants after 1960 or so?

The XML data I saw was RNDMELTDOWN set for 1000.

It would seem it should not be that far off, unless only the unluck ones post. chance for something to be off by 1000/140 = 7 time greater. It depends upon the spread if it is the normal probablilty function of a bell curve.

What was it, 63% is within one standard deviation? so the standar deviation is either very sloppy in game or you are in the 3% minority at 7 standard deviation taking a guess for a somewhat normal distribution.

If it is just plain linear RND number between 0 to 1000, then your luck is 14% chance for this to happen over that time period. If this is persistent for more games, then something is odd.

If it was calculated on a per city basis, then this sample of 20 nuclear power plants is large enough. I know some time periods jump 10 years per turn, to 5 years per turn, 2 years per turn, to 1 year per turn. At least on Epic.

No way to know without more data, then we can see what it is.

Are you building these plants when the turns are 1 turn = 1 year? or early in 1900?

at 60 -70 turn and future tech, I assume it is late in game, so I would try to change the 1000 to 7000 to make it more in line with reality. We have hundreds of nuclear power plants across the world and there is no way close to that many meltdowns. It is more like 1:100000

[Bill3000]

Yeesh. I guess I shouldn't build nuclear power plants when I can build them, then. It's sad, as nuclear power is MUCH safer in real life.

[Shr3dZ]

I wonder if you get more meltdowns the higher the difficulty.

In my first game, low difficulty, I built LOTS of nuclear power plants and none of them ever had a meltdown.

[Josquius]

Never had them in 4 or back on 3 (were they even in that...). I only remember having 1 once on 2.