Power Plant Question

[SorvinoBackhand]

I don't think the game differentiates among power plants enough. Both the manual & civilopedia are throughly unhelpful here.

If Coal or Hydro or Nulcear Plants ALL have the same effect, why wait for Hydro or Nuclear plants techs - other than the -2 health penalty for coal plants, why wait ? Is there something I am missing ?

[Blake]

Not really. Just build coals.

You do need coal to get the power out of them. Otherwise the +50% hammers more than makes up for the health hit.

[Son of David]

If you have a solid tech lead, beeline to plastics and build the Three Gorges in one of your cities.

I prefer to do this, leaving my cities unpowered for a while longer and using the extra time to build other things like airports and hospitals.

[Blake]

Tis' worth noting that rushbuying doesn't benefit from forges/factory/power/ironworks, so if cottage spam and universal suffrage are integral parts of your strategy you don't need powerplants at all, except in one or two spaceship building cities.

[rjwoer]

Originally posted by Son of David
If you have a solid tech lead, beeline to plastics and build the Three Gorges in one of your cities.

I prefer to do this, leaving my cities unpowered for a while longer and using the extra time to build other things like airports and hospitals.

Ditto. I almost always go this route. It's worth waiting a bit longer to build the Three Gorges Dam and take care of providing power to cities in one fell swoop. It's usually not a problem to do on the average difficulty levels.

[Nugog]

Originally posted by rjwoer


Ditto. I almost always go this route. It's worth waiting a bit longer to build the Three Gorges Dam and take care of providing power to cities in one fell swoop. It's usually not a problem to do on the average difficulty levels.

Same here.

And for cities not on my main continent, then I always build coal. Hydro and nuclear just don't seem worth the wait.