My experience with Bad Tides.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

So I decided to try out the experimental to test the new features coming and I just didn't really have a good time with it.
I was hoping that the new patch would add something new or interesting to the game, but the only thing I did see got added (aside from bad water related things) was the large pump, which I think is a cool idea and something i've wished we had a long time, but it requires treated planks so it is a firmly end game thing. At, from my perspective, that makes it rather useless, because by the time i'm thinking about making these pumps, i'm already producing mechabeavers so it isn't like the extra jobs you save is worth it or even important at that point. By that point in the game, i've already invested a lot into building the standard pumps in such quantity that it would be more hassle than it is worth to rip them out and replace them. At least when you replace baby windmills with daddy windmills, there is a tangible benefit for it but replacing little pumps with big pumps doesn't provide enough to make it worth doing IMO.

Aside from that, the only changes I recall notice are the Bad Tides and Bad Water and objects relating to them, and I gotta say, I really don't like bad tides.

The Bad Water deposits across the map are fine because you can just avoid them or reroute them or whatever, it's not a big deal at all. Just sort of an environmental hazard and I don't mind that they exist. However, I do have to say I was profoundly disappointed that they stop pouring out water during droughts. I thought I read somewhere that they would keep producing bad water even during droughts, unlike regular clean water that stops. Unfortunately, ALL of it stops, so you can't even rely on bad water deposits for water powered industry, which is really disappointing to me. All in all though, I don't mind them.

The Bad Tides though are a really, really annoying feature and I don't like them at all. They completely and fundamentally change the way I play the game to design around them and I don't really like that. I enjoyed having my cities exist on the sides of rivers and swimming through the fresh water and all that. But now that bad tides are a thing, there are only 3 ways i've found to deal with them.

Method 1: Don't build near water ever again. This is perhaps the easiest one past the early game, but simply relocating EVERYTHING to further inland away from all water, then using levees and water dumps to Greenify the land so you can grow plants and trees makes you immune to bad tides altogether so they are treated more like regular droughts. I really don't like doing this though because I feel it isn't very Beaver-like to simply live away from water.

Method 2: Build floodgate systems to divert the river on demand. This one is a little more time consuming because you generally have to build so far away from your village center and resource depots, but most maps offer a place where you can just build floodgates so that when a bad tide is coming, you raise them to stop all water flow, then let it flood off the edges of the map somewhere else. This turns the whole ordeal into functioning like a standard drought, but prevents the tremendous downsides of have a bad tide come into your town. The biggest issue I have with this is a lack of automation. Sometimes I just don't notice seasons changing or don't realize a bad tide has started until it's too late. If I watch it like a hawk and remain paranoid about it, it works, but if I ever relax too much and don't think about it, I get a bad tide and it sucks. I play this game mostly to relax, so I don't like this. Another downside to this is that when good water comes back, and you open the flood gates again, usually a little bad water gets pushed downstream anyway. Sometimes its not enough to matter, but its still annoying.

Method 3: Engineering. This is is the hardest, most time consuming, and resource intensive method of all, but if you suffer through setting it up, it makes bad floods a nonissue that you no longer have to think about anymore. It basically involves setting up a big dam that prevents ANY river water from going to your town ever again and instead setting up mechanical pumps lining the dam to move clean water from the dammed water source to the other side. Doing this has the advantage of it being completely automated, because you never have to worry about forgetting to deal with floodgates and never have to worry about any drop of bad water making it to your town again. However, if you were getting your drinking water from the river, you will need a LOT of these mechanical pumps to offset the amount you're taking out from the drinking water pumps. The quantity mechanical pumps move was nerfed into oblivion to prevent you from creating perpetual motion power generators, which was futile because people still do that anyway, but the pumps are so bad that it'll be next to impossible to get any power from your river again and you'll have to build a LOT of pumps + windmills to make the whole thing work. I don't even know what the Iron Beavers would do at all.

But bad tides are AWFUL. They kill all your trees, all your crops, everything. Normal droughts you can weather easily by just creating a dam across the river and letting the water sit there. As long as your drought is less than say 10 days or so, you can still grow crops and trees the whole time with no worries. And even when a drought lasts longer and that water dries up, you can still harvest your plants before they wither, and trees realistically aren't going to dry up and die when unwatered, it just slows growth. But a bad tide kills EVERYTHING nearly instantly. All that food gone. And worse, all the trees die out, so even if your oak tree that took 25 days to get 90% finished growing gets hit by a bad tide, it produces no wood and you gotta start over.

Another issue I have with "bad water" is that it spreads and infects clean water crazy fast, but the opposite is not true. If you have a little inlet full of water that doesn't have the river flow "through" it, infected water will IMMEDIATELY rush up in there and infect the whole area. Just instantly. But then when bad tide ends and the clean water comes, it wont just rush in there and clean it away. You have to intentionally design things in linear fashion so it always PUSHES bad water out because the speed it disappears from inlets is incredibly slow and sometimes non-existent. I just don't understand why the two fluids don't behave the same way. Why does Bad Water push its way around corners and fill in all water it touches so fast, but clean water won't do this? As an experiment you can see a great example of this for yourself. Create a 1 tile wide channel that goes far inland, whether for irigation for crops or just greenifying the land so it looks nicer for your beaver community. When a bad tide comes, that water goes from blue to red instantly. It creeps up that channel like its alive. Then when clear water comes, it will NEVER clear that bad water out. Never. It stays 100% infected and has to be pumped out or flushed out in some way shape or form. And maybe, MAYBE evaporation plays some role on it, but it works so slowly that you're going to have another bad tide hit before its gone, or gone long enough to do anywthing with.

Bad tides are so much worse than droughts.
I suppose some basic automation for floodgate control would make it better for me. But failing that, my best option is to completely abandon the beaver lifestyle and just no longer build or live around water, which to me seems silly.

[rezzenonne]

This is the best review on the new update.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

I decided to play Iron Beavers and see how they cope with all this, and wow, it's awful
My folktails never had to get in the river because I usually go for wind power pretty quick, but because Iron beavers only have water power to work with until they get steel production going, so I had a bunch of them going in the river a lot.

First 3 cycles I had droughts, but on Cycle 4, which is still pretty early in the game, I had a bad tide. Lots of my beavers got infected trying to build stuff. And this presents another problem... The only way to STOP them from going into bad water to keep attempting to build is either manually pausing every single individual construction project that would send them in there, OR destroying roads so they lose access to it. And that all feels very... Bad. Again, maybe i'm different than most people, but I like to play this game to just relax and have chill time with beavers, it is not relaxing at all to be stuck deleting and relaying roads every bad time or having to pause my many construction projects one by one (this game really needs a way to multi-select buildings to pause/unpause or change priority for all at once too by the way). It is tedious, annoying, and it feels rather poorly designed that these are the only ways to prevent your beavers from exposing themselves to bad water.

But boy, if they DO get exposed, and you are iron beavers, you are in for a BAD time.
It doesn't seem to go away naturally on its own at all unlike injuries that do heal without medical beds, they just do so slower. I assumed contaminated water would be the same, but nope! You are stuck with it until you CURE it. And how exactly do you cure it?

Well... First, you must spend 250 research to get Bad Water pumps, which then cost 20 logs, 10 gears, and 5 steel to build. Then you must spend 600 research to unlock the centrifuge, which you must then build for 60 planks, 40 gears, and 30 steel. THEN you must unlock Decontamination beds for 400 science, and build one for 20 planks, 5 steel, and 5 of the extract.

Thats right. The only way to fix a beaver that accidentally touched bad water is to spend 1,250 research points, 20 logs, 80 planks, 50 gears, and 40 steel, to get everything you need to start fixing them. And I did not happen to have 40 steel by cycle 5.
That is way too harsh of a penalty for something that you have to go really out of your way to prevent. I don't think destroying roads or stairs every bad tide then rebuilding them should be part of intended game design.

Folktails need 1600 research to get everything THEY need, but at least they don't require steel. Just some gears and 5 treated planks, which isn't great, but can be obtained pre-steel and you only need 5 total. But in my folktails playthrough, I never even had a contaminated beaver because I never had need to send them into the river except very VERY early game.

All this bad water stuff just doesn't sit right with me.

[brown29knight]

You can build water wheels from the banks. You do not need to enter the river for anything but picking aquatic plants.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

Originally posted by brown29knight:

You can build water wheels from the banks. You do not need to enter the river for anything but picking aquatic plants.

You don't industry as iron beavers I see.
Basically, the large water wheel has to be placed 3 tiles off the ground. To really get the most bang for your buck, you have to go into the river and put down levies 2 tall to then build a wheel on top of that. You "can" just place them right off the shore in some instances, but if you aren't building a corresponding wheel on the other side of the river, you aren't utilizing your space efficiently. And Unless the river is exactly 4 tiles wide and exists in a perfect rectangle with no bends, you can't do that without actually going INTO the water and building levees to build them on as well as to shape the water to flow down your 4 tile wide path. You gotta maximize that industry, no true Iron Tooth beaver is going to just half ass it that way.

Furthermore, you seem to imply the solution is "never go in the river" which, again, this is Timberborn. A game about beavers. Saying the gameplay solution is to AVOID THE RIVER is beyond ridiculous.

Bad Water is fine, but Bad Tides need to go, or at least we need better tools for dealing with them without fundamentally changing the nature of the game. Otherwise, we might as well drop the Beavers and start playing Rats or something if we're not about building dams and going in the river anymore.

[brown29knight]

Originally posted by Shas'o O'Kais:

Originally posted by brown29knight:

You can build water wheels from the banks. You do not need to enter the river for anything but picking aquatic plants.

You don't industry as iron beavers I see.
Basically, the large water wheel has to be placed 3 tiles off the ground. To really get the most bang for your buck, you have to go into the river and put down levies 2 tall to then build a wheel on top of that. You "can" just place them right off the shore in some instances, but if you aren't building a corresponding wheel on the other side of the river, you aren't utilizing your space efficiently. And Unless the river is exactly 4 tiles wide and exists in a perfect rectangle with no bends, you can't do that without actually going INTO the water and building levees to build them on as well as to shape the water to flow down your 4 tile wide path. You gotta maximize that industry, no true Iron Tooth beaver is going to just half ass it that way.

Furthermore, you seem to imply the solution is "never go in the river" which, again, this is Timberborn. A game about beavers. Saying the gameplay solution is to AVOID THE RIVER is beyond ridiculous.

Bad Water is fine, but Bad Tides need to go, or at least we need better tools for dealing with them without fundamentally changing the nature of the game. Otherwise, we might as well drop the Beavers and start playing Rats or something if we're not about building dams and going in the river anymore.

Lol. I am mostly an Ironteeth player. You use platforms to build out a row of levee blocks in the middle line between the two waterwheels, then build the waterwheels from front to back in order, using the very levee in the middle as your platform to build them from. This is the easiest way to do it, even with out badwater, because otherwise you are going down into the river, then building up to the waterwheels, which, as you said, need to be 3 blocks off the riverbed, so you would need to be constantly building stairs to get there. Working from above, with both banks and the levee in the middle as your platforms, you are always working downwards, and so can dynamite or levee as needed to get that perfect 2 wide channel, one row of levee, and 2 wide channel that allows perfect running of side by side large waterwheels.

Agreed, no true ironteeth is going to half ass it by not terraforming every last tile to be the optimal shape for all water needs.

As to never going in the river, Ironteeth are the masters of diverting and pumping deep water. They can go in the river all day... just as soon as the river has been redirected away, pumped out, separated into bad and good waters, and only the good water dumped back into the river, ensuring perfectly clean water all day. (Which you refer to as method #3, engineering, in your first post.)

As to how the ironteeth get power for that, they use waterwheels upstream of it, and also use water wheels in the badwater streams, after using badwater discharges to make the badwater flow even during droughts.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3099357799 This is a small portion of one of the setups I did. The power wheels on each side are set in badwater streams fed by badwater discharges. The main dam here is actually beyond my colony, at the back of the map, and is pumped into my colony's waterway to ensure 100% water level at all times. Badtides are diverted well upstream, and the badwater is harvested or sent off map. Meanwhile, the good water is allowed to flow past my colony in to this giant, 3 square deep reservoir, and pumped back into my colony as needed. This way my mangroves are always in clean water, and my swimming pools are always open.

[Wuik]

Hello,
i am more a patient and pragmatic player than an esthete and aleas not a physicien in the fluids mechanics ^^ But an old diver ...
So my cities and industries are more a merry mess ( i am not sure about the traduction of the expression ?!?^^) than beautifuls and well ordonned ...
That's said ,i have finished three maps since the new and my goals were always the same: Best well-being and end of micro-management of the floodgates (except for the badtides, of course !!^^)..
Two with the folktails and one with the Iron teeth..
i am a little sad than i don' have yet found the solution for "The Helix" map ...
And about this one i have made severals tries of "reservoirs" which were almost totally useless , i admit than i made often somes littles "mistakes" and my wife heard me sometimes complaining behind my PC ^^

Passed the first bad surprise, i have enought quickly understood how to "control" the badtides..
After the first update where droughts affect too the bad waters sources, i may admit than playing with the Folktails don't change anything , just you must to put much more windmills than before...
But Playing with the Iron Teeths was a good surprise this time..I was able to control the pods but i can't explain it ^^

Also i will think than an option must be possible to don't have to play with in every difficulties mode of the game...Just for the replayability of the game ?!?
Because i have often play somes goods maps made by others and i will think than that was more hard to make it with the badtides inclued..
And for the future of the game , not really a "campaing" but somes differents scenarii will apport a real fun and challenge....

[Wuik]

@bronn29knight..
You wrote more quickly than me ^^ but you have me remember about the mechanicals pumps than they stopped at 0.90...
i have totally forgot that ... thanks for the "tip" ^^

[jamiechi]

I always play Custom and I set the Bad Tides to 3333 cycles. No longer an issue.

[Wuik]

Originally posted by jamiechi:

I always play Custom and I set the Bad Tides to 3333 cycles. No longer an issue.

You mean than you put 3333 instead 3 in "Cycles without water infected" and there is no more badtides?
In this cas why not 9999?^^
Anyways that is a very good workaround ++
I am justly on the custom set, that made a long time than i have opend it ..
Have you tried simply to put :0% in possibilities of badtides ?!?

[jamiechi]

Originally posted by Wuik:

Originally posted by jamiechi:

I always play Custom and I set the Bad Tides to 3333 cycles. No longer an issue.

You mean than you put 3333 instead 3 in "Cycles without water infected" and there is no more badtides?
In this cas why not 9999?^^
Anyways that is a very good workaround ++

Yes. I am not sure what the max value that works for this. And I don't believe I have played a game longer than a few hundred cycles. I always use Custom settings, and each cycle not counting droughts is set to 28 days. So the total cycle is between 28 and 31 days just like the days in our month.

[Wuik]

I have just modified my last post ...and will test it with 0% ^^

[Peppermint]

Personally I like the new mechanic a lot. It's caused me to change my game play.
Now at the edge of rivers I only plant fast growing crops like sunflowers. I make sure I store PLENTY of water and I irrigate dryland using water dumps.

Basically I've moved inland until I can deal with the tide. I have started works to divert the main river on my current map in the event of a bad tide so I can keep my water supply fresh.

When badtides first came out the badwater streams did run throughout a drought but now they don't which is disappointing. It DID make power for the folktails during a drought VERY easy and maybe the devs did not want that for balance, it would make windmills redundant.

[Harris]

Originally posted by Shas'o O'Kais:

the large pump, which I think is a cool idea and something i've wished we had a long time, but it requires treated planks so it is a firmly end game thing. At, from my perspective, that makes it rather useless, because by the time i'm thinking about making these pumps, i'm already producing mechabeavers

You don't need metal for the large pump, and treated planks are pretty rush-able, you can get to work on it right after the initial dam and then the floodwall.

Everything else is spot on though. Badtides really dictate your playstyle and exist as a way to challenge/punish the player rather than anything else.

[llmage]

I simply got to explosives and blasted a channel by the source to the edge of the map and when there's a bad tide open one gate and close the other and the bad tide leaves the map as soon as it appears.

The bad water source blocks became power and just used water wheels to capture their power and since they didn't stop i never had to worry about power.

[Peppermint]

Originally posted by llmage:

I simply got to explosives and blasted a channel by the source to the edge of the map and when there's a bad tide open one gate and close the other and the bad tide leaves the map as soon as it appears.

The bad water source blocks became power and just used water wheels to capture their power and since they didn't stop i never had to worry about power.

Sadly, the infinite power has been patched in the latest patch at least - they run dry at the same frequency and phase as normal water blocks now.