Does anyone ever make Nuclear Power Plants?

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by snoopy369
I suspect the reason for meltdowns being so significant ... is that it makes for better gameplay. Nuke power plants have to have a drawback that is significant enough to make the choice between coal and nuclear power a true choice. If it's a minor drawback, like a few unhappy or unhealthy people, then it would have to be incredibly frequent (which then you'd all complain about just as much). Making a nuclear meltdown both rare and minor makes it entirely pointless - and makes the choice between coal and nuclear power plants no choice at all.

Have you looked at the hammer cost? This isn't Civ2. It does not make for better gameplay, trust me as it is now even less useful than the vanilla colosseum, since the unhealthiness goes away with the recycling center.

[zeace]

The trade-off is that you had to wait until fission before you could build the nuke plant. Saying that there should still be a decision between coal and nukes is like saying there should still be a decision between Ironclads and Battleships. Generally in this game the later tech enables something that is dramatically better and a bit more expensive. In the case of nuke plants the tech enables something which is slightly better (+2 health) but won't be better soon (recycling center) and which has a huge negative (meltdown) for significantly more cost.

I have very rarely built one:
1. I capture a large city (I don't like to risk a meltdown in my core cities)
2. The city has health problems (usually because of lots of floodplains)
3. But the city is not actually on a river (so no hydroplant)
4. I've already researched fission for other reasons
5. And I don't have (and won't soon have) 3GD on this continent.

If all 5 of those are true, then the nuke plant sounds great. But finding a city with even the the first three conditions is unusual.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Originally posted by zeace
Saying that there should still be a decision between coal and nukes is like saying there should still be a decision between Ironclads and Battleships.

Ironclads vs. Battleship=Coal plants vs. Nuclear plants


It's really a no brainier with global warming... but oh wait global warming isn't caused by the use of fossil fuels it’s caused by a nuclear strike or two (like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 1500+ nuclear tests that have been preformed since then) or Chernobyl.

Oh, and according to civ, if you recycle you can:

1. still waste electricity
2. eat pesticides
3. work with arsenic
4. drive an SUV

But that’s still healthy and further more environmentally friendly because you have a recycling center.

[vee4473]

Originally posted by AshenPlanet
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This is one of the stupid unrealistic parts of the game trying to preach against nukes.

All the nuclear meltdowns in the world (3mile, chernobyl, etc.), and all the nuclear bombs used in the world (hiroshima/nagasaki, nevada desert, etc.) don't even come remotely close (less than .1%) to the contributions towards global warming that railroads have brought, and the same is true for highways, factories, airports, etc..
Each of those factors have well over 1000 times more contribution to global warming than the meltodowns and several exploded nuclear bombs that have been used.

Well, I agree with what you say about the nukes, but anthropogenic global warming is still only a theory. Let's not represent it as fact please.

[AshenPlanet]

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Well, I agree with what you say about the nukes, but anthropogenic global warming is still only a theory. Let's not represent it as fact please.

That's a good way to take a valid reasonable argument and make it sound like an alien anal probe.
Being a crackpot on one side is as bad as being a crackpot on the other side.

No one is representing global warming as fact, it is merely something understood by everyone reading this forum.
Whether you believe in it or not, or whether it's fact or not is irrellevant.

What is being represented here, is that nukes (explosions and meltdowns together) contribute far less towards global warming than any number of daily things like trains, planes, automobiles, and even aerosol spray cans...

As per game play, there is absolutely no trade off whatsoever between nuke and coal plant.
The coal plant is cheaper, safer, and quicker than the nuke plant with no risk of randomly destroying several squares around the world, and all this for the cheap cost of 2 health.
When there is no decision to be made, when a coal plant is always preferable, then that is bad game play.

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[vee4473]

relax man, you just said you don't represent it as fact, yet you make a statement about how spray cans contribute more to global warming than nukes. I guess you meant the spray can mechanic in civ4.

anyway, i don't know what the heck you're talking about with the alien anal probe comment.

Your earlier posts stated theory as fact and I merely mentioned it.

I personally come here exactly for game discussion, not to be preached to about politcal issues.

Get unglued about it or not as you wish, but my statement stands.

Have fun

[AshenPlanet]

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dude, chill out.

No posts claimed global warming as fact.
It's not needed since everyone knows what is being talked about, and the game mechanics of global warming in civ 4 was at issue here.

Pointing at something that everyone knows about and has ideas about and declaring that it's not fact is being very preachy about political issues.
When someone hears another person talking about his personal anal probe experience with aliens, you'll do the same thing that you do when you read someone saying that global warming isn't fact.
One just figures he's a crackpot, and tunes him out, after all, you can't prove that he wasn't anally probed by aliens...

Everyone should believe what they want to believe in.
Whether global warming is fact, or how important or life threatening it is isn't really important, and certainly doesn't matter here.
How it works in civ4 compared to how it worked in earlier versions of this game is what we've talked about in this thread.

Have fun and peace out!

.

[EvilClam]

Really, though all this talk of global warming is interesting (it happens to be within my field of study), it's also not really the point. The point that seems most relevant here is that nuclear power plants are assigned an unrealistic risk factor. I don't see the inclusion of the chance for any number of other infrastructure installations that are used in Civ cities to suffer disasters - that is, as far as I can tell, no coal plants, factories, recycling plants, libraries, etc. catch fire, explode, have toxic chemical leaks, or otherwise carry any potential for mayhem (accidental or otherwise). In the real world, of course, disasters can & do occur to any one of these & any other installations, so why then in Civ are nuclear power plants singled out? Probably because they produce big, "sexy" disasters that excite the imagination & fears more than a "boring" fire, explosion, chemical leak/oil spill, etc. Nonetheless, I see no gameplay enhancement to it being included, & am tempted to just mod it out of the game.

EDIT: Before anyone says anything, I only just started playing Civ4 & haven't gotten to the modern age yet (I don't have much time to play, so I just take my ease with it in my free time). I just noticed in some other posts that they have coded nuclear power plant accidents to contribute to global warming in-game. Hmm, interesting choice there. In actuality, there is a strong likelihood that a major nuclear catastrophe could lead to a nuclear winter situation rather than a warming event, but I digress...

At any rate, at least now I see why everyone's talking so much about it in this thread. Regardless, I still think this is an unrealistic design choice.

[Dis]

and once you get fusion, there should be 0% chance of meltdown.

cherynobyl is as bad as you'll ever see. And it isn't as bad as the fearmongers will have you believe. Thousands of people did not die as they say. When the death toll was under 100.

Though they are including the premature deaths due to cancer in the coming decades. Which could number in the thousands.

[AshenPlanet]

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...though all this talk of global warming is interesting... it's also not really the point. The point that seems most relevant here is that nuclear power plants are assigned an unrealistic risk factor.

Yes, I agree 100%.
Nuke plants are unrealistically portrayed here.
It's bad gameplay, since it's a meaningless option.

Nuke plants don't just contribute to global warming.
Along with icbms, nuke plants are the only factors that bring about global warming, which makes them next to useless.
Pollution, no matter how much you have, does not bring about any global warming.

As for fusion, while this process won't produce the depleted fissile waste material that current fission and breeder reactors produce and ship to Africa and Nevada for burial, meltdowns could be even worse than fission reactors due to the much higher temperatures required for fusion reaction.
Since there is no health or maintenance cost for fissile disposal for running a nuclear plant, a fusion reactor plant would be the same.
Regardless of that, either meltdown type would not contribute to global warming anywhere near as much as a host of other factors.

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[EvilClam]

Originally posted by AshenPlanet Nuke plants don't just contribute to global warming.
Along with icbms, nuke plants are the only factors that bring about global warming, which makes them next to useless.
Pollution, no matter how much you have, does not bring about any global warming.
.

This is just absurd. There does seem to be some policy advocation at play here on the part of the design staff. Either that, or just plain ignorance of the real debated causes for global climate change.

It's ironic, then, that (in the real world) much consideration is presently being devoted to the potential for nuclear power to offset carbon emissions in the future. France made a policy decision long ago to rely on this technology & they have done so successfully with a high margin of safety. Accidents do occur, like in any other industry, but the level of regulation & high technical expertise applied towards nuclear power generation insures that this factor is kept to a minimum.

The difficulty in making the transition away from coal powered facilities IRL is primarily reflected in the fact that it costs a far greater amount of time & money to build a nuclear power plant than a coal powered plant. Thus the energy companies have a large disincentive to build nuclear plants. For France, this made sense since they have little to no appreciable reserves in fossil fuels, whereas we (in the USA) do. This mechanic is already represented in the game through higher resource & time costs associated with building a nuclear plant (do they also require uranium resources?), thus I see no reason why these should be penalized further.

[zeace]

I think that the current global warming mechanic in Civ IV is an unfortunate result of Firaxis tuning the game. To understand it you need to remember how pollution was portrayed in Civ III, and Civ II, and Civ I. Different buildings and population would produce pollution, and occasionally it would corrupt a square which had to be repaired. The pollution also contributed to a global counter which would trigger "climate change" which turned tiles to deserts.

If you'll recall, near the end of the game you'd have dozens of workers running around cleaning up pollution, and then when it was clean you'd have to go to the city and put a population back to work on the square. In other words there was a ton of micromanagement.

Now nukes (bombs and meltdowns) were tied into the pollution mechanism too. The "fallout" from a nuke was the same as pollution from cities, and also contributed to the global warming counter. This wasn't completely realistic for all the reasons mentioned in this thread, but it worked well enough since most pollution still came from cities.


Now when Firaxis decided to reduce the MM in Civ IV, I'm sure they looked at the pollution mechanism and asked "Does this make the game more fun, or does it make it more work?" The answer was mostly more work. So they removed the pollution mechanism and replaced it with some unhealthy faces. I think this was a good decision.

This left them with the Nuke fallout mechanism. It was easy enough to change the graphic from a general pollution icon to a radioactive icon. And so nukes still follow the old pollution model. The problem now was that the global warming counter wasn't getting as much use since the pollution from cities was gone, so Firaxis scaled it down so that the reduced pollution in the game was still enough to trigger global warming. This unfortunately set up the illogical situation where a Nuclear winter inducing war causes global warming in the game.


Firaxis probably should have removed global warming entirely when they removed pollution in cities, or they should have changed it to a nuclear winter scenario. It's possible they might fix this in an expansion pack, or they might even reintroduce city pollution, although hopefully in a less micromangement inducing way.

I hope it gets changed, and I hope that Nuclear plants end up being useful buildings. Until then I'll continue to ignore them and pretend that all the global warming warnings are actually taking about nuclear winter...

[Common Sensei]

[SIZE=1]Firaxis probably should have removed global warming entirely when they removed pollution in cities, or they should have changed it to a nuclear winter scenario. It's possible they might fix this in an expansion pack, or they might even reintroduce city pollution, although hopefully in a less micromangement inducing way.

I hope it gets changed, and I hope that Nuclear plants end up being useful buildings. Until then I'll continue to ignore them and pretend that all the global warming warnings are actually taking about nuclear winter...

From the Industrial Age on, cities that are a certain size and have more Unhealth than Health should contribute to a Global Warming counter. That could simulate the pollution a metropolis contributes.

If you're the most advanced civ and the undeveloped rivals are building coal plants galore, then building the UN and passing Environmentalism might become more attractive, for example.

[EvilClam]

Originally posted by zeace
... when Firaxis decided to reduce the MM in Civ IV, I'm sure they looked at the pollution mechanism and asked "Does this make the game more fun, or does it make it more work?" The answer was mostly more work. So they removed the pollution mechanism and replaced it with some unhealthy faces...

...Firaxis probably should have removed global warming entirely when they removed pollution in cities, or they should have changed it to a nuclear winter scenario...

I absolutely agree with you here. You made some good points & likely hit it on the nose there. If what the purpose of all this was, as you say, to reduce micromanagement, then it indeed achieved its purpose, albeit clumsily. I'm all for the reduction of MM myself.

Originally posted by zeace
...Until then I'll continue to ignore them...

Though this illustrates precisely why it was poorly implemented, to effectively eliminate the viability of a city improvement for many players. Just remove the meltdown risk & stop pretending to care about climate change except in the case of a nuclear war.

Originally posted by Common Sensei
From the Industrial Age on, cities that are a certain size and have more Unhealth than Health should contribute to a Global Warming counter. That could simulate the pollution a metropolis contributes.

If you're the most advanced civ and the undeveloped rivals are building coal plants galore, then building the UN and passing Environmentalism might become more attractive, for example.

However, if one were to implement more realistic human-induced global climate change in this game, this would be an elegant approach, especially the last part where international accountability could come into play.

[EvilClam]

At any rate, I've modded the meltdown chances out of my game. I'm attaching the modified files here, one for Warlords, one for vanilla Civ, in case anyone else wants the change. Bear in mind there are custom xmls for other scenarios (American Revolution, Greek World, Rhye's and Fall of Civilization are the three I noticed) that will need the same changes made. Specifically the changes deal with:

iNukeExplosionRand 0 /iNukeExplosionRand
- Chance that a nuclear power plant will randomly blow up (default 1 in 1000)

Gleaned from CIV4BuildingInfos - Civ4Wiki

The entries for the two files I attached here were previously set to 2000 for BUILDINGCLASS_NUCLEAR_PLANT. All others are 0 by default & were left untouched.

Unless I'm mistaken (I'm still new here, so please correct me if I'm wrong), you can simply place these files in your ..\My Documents\My Games\Civilization 4\CustomAssets\xml\buildings folder for Civ4, & ..\My Documents\My Games\Warlords\CustomAssets\xml\buildings folder for Warlords.