Support for bringing back the Irrigation Tower?

[Colix Naia]

So, I know a lot of people who play games in this genre are used to higher difficulty in building their civilisations up. Personally, I am not so inclined to higher difficulty, but I still enjoy this genre when possible. I don't know about anyone else, but I've really enjoyed Timberborn for its more manageable and understandable systems, and for the regularity and predictability of its difficulty curves and spikes.

For me, even mid game, I used Irrigation Towers rather frequently. Terraforming, Water Dumps, etc take a lot more time and micromanaging to use as irrigation methods, and the much more controlled and automated nature of the Irrigation Towers was a godsend for someone like me desiring a chill city builder. Now the devs think the "other irrigation-related tools" are enough to completely remove the Towers, which breaks all my big farms, my entire way of colonising in this game, and my ease-of-access to inland (or cycle-round) farming and tree-planting. I'm honestly really disappointed at this change, and I think that it makes the game more frustrating early on without adding anything positive.

The other new things like badwater and extract seem really interesting, but I'm getting really hung up on the loss of a simple and automated Irrigation method that didn't require terraforming. If anyone has a mod to re-add something like the Irrigation Towers, or if there's some way for me to get them back without having to revert my game version, I'd really appreciate any responses other players can give. Advice helps, too, since I'm moderately new to the game.

(But I already know about the Water Dump trick, literally only because of how many people are talking about it now. I genuinely didn't know about or use that trick before, and would prefer not to have to now >.<)

[hthought]

I never liked the water dump trick, too hacky and frankly annoying. I am personally glad they removed the tower. It's actually fairly simple to irrigate pretty much through 10 day+ droughts frankly. The only thing you need is a 2 level small patch of water (the bigger the better). This evaporates relatively slow and automatically gets refilled when the drought ends. No need to micromanage anything other than the floodgates preventing the badtide from entering it.

Once you get to dynamite, which should be soon since it's much easier now, just use them on that to make it a 3 levels deep patch. This basically doesn't dry up ever in a normal game. If you go hard mode you may want to make it even deeper or make the river larger.

But frankly, you don't need irrigation towers at all.

[Detective Costeau]

Yeah, this feels like a case of swatting flies with a sledgehammer. The solution to the irrigation tower being a crappy meme building that led people to use the water dump trick was to make the Irrigation Tower good, not just toss it out entirely. It serves a useful purpose, it was just balanced badly.

[hthought]

Originally posted by Detective Costeau:

Yeah, this feels like a case of swatting flies with a sledgehammer. The solution to the irrigation tower being a crappy meme building that led people to use the water dump trick was to make the Irrigation Tower good, not just toss it out entirely. It serves a useful purpose, it was just balanced badly.

They could definitely do that but it kinda kills the purpose of manipulating the water. If you have irrigation towers everywhere what is the water around for :)

That said, a more involved system where you can maybe draw pipes from the water and use it so that the water around you makes more sense would be an interesting idea for sure. But it would be nice if it wasn't super easy to setup, like maybe have it require metal blocks or so and maybe even power.

[mightymuffin]

I do find it odd they basically gave farming a triple whammy of removing water dumps, making small irrigation ditch lines less effective with higher small body evaporation, and removed irrigation towers.

On a diorama I've found there's not much choice but to eat the evaporation loss and use ditches radiating off of my main canal, though I can make them deeper to slow the loss. On a map like islands where I've dried out a large chunk land I'm finding my large canals (4 wide 3-6 deep depending) make enough green space right next to them to handle my growing needs while having high enough volume to avoid the evaporation issues.

[hthought]

Yeah you definitely need deep pockets of water to sustain the evaporation. I haven't played Diorama yet on the new patch but I suspect it may be an issue indeed. I played waterfalls so far and it was very easy to control evaporation, but i will be testing new maps soon

[mightymuffin]

Originally posted by hthought:

Yeah you definitely need deep pockets of water to sustain the evaporation. I haven't played Diorama yet on the new patch but I suspect it may be an issue indeed. I played waterfalls so far and it was very easy to control evaporation, but i will be testing new maps soon

For context I play on normal with iron teeth. It's not too horrible but I did have to delay scaling up my pop count to when I took more full control of the water...which in itself takes a bit due to how slow lumber gains are. The loss is really an early game issue that I brute forced away in mid game using a 6 deep canal.

Switching to a larger map has felt quite weird with several hundred lumber at my disposal at all times and islands basically reverses the problem challenges diorama poses, evaporation is a joke but badwater is a huge obstacle before you get scaled up to control it.

I'm at cycle 19 on islands right now and am well past the point where I feel I could lose so it's mostly been some experimenting with how to handle farming.

[Lead_Hammer]

Yeah I'd bring it back. I thought the point of this update would be to make the game more complex, and make the inefficient irrigation tower more relevant, but all I find myself doing is putting up more levees with a handful of beavers. It's really lame and boring. The whole irrigation rework in general feels extremely poor.

[Colix Naia]

Originally posted by hthought:

The only thing you need is a 2 level small patch of water (the bigger the better). This evaporates relatively slow and automatically gets refilled when the drought ends. No need to micromanage anything other than the floodgates preventing the badtide from entering it.

See, this was exactly what I was saying, though. Doing that requires floodgates (not an early-game thing, needs a good deal of material and SP for early game) or terraformation. Regardless of what you *can* do, I'm now seeing my growth get majorly stalled early game where I didn't before. I didn't need to rip the land apart before for canals, nor did I need to spam floodgates. I could just find a good spot, plop down a couple Irrigation Towers and a Forester, and I would soon have decent wood production or farm production.

And that would have been very interesting to manage now, with badwater killing land nearer to rivers. You'd *have* to place farms and irrigation further away from canals and rivers until you could block the bad groundwater. Managing that in conflict with managing distance to a district centre could have made for really interesting emergent gameplay in my mind.

But now I am practically tied to water sources until I can terraform, or mass-dump water in a manmade (beavermade?) ditch. It kinda kills the entire early building and resource gathering stages for me, and slows growth for much longer, thereby making the early game way more of a slog for a slower, chiller builder like me.

[stonelock99]

I prefer the tower.

[hthought]

Originally posted by Colix Naia:

Originally posted by hthought:

See, this was exactly what I was saying, though. Doing that requires floodgates (not an early-game thing, needs a good deal of material and SP for early game) or terraformation. Regardless of what you *can* do, I'm now seeing my growth get majorly stalled early game where I didn't before. I didn't need to rip the land apart before for canals, nor did I need to spam floodgates. I could just find a good spot, plop down a couple Irrigation Towers and a Forester, and I would soon have decent wood production or farm production.

Floodgates are a very early game thing, it only requires planks and logs. You have quite a lot of time before the first badtide is in. It's super simple to make a few floodgates.

It's not about what you *can* do, you NEED floodgates. Then badtide becomes a joke. It's super easy to handle but somehow people have trouble building a simple floodgates wall and keep whining. Makes no sense.

I am telling you, it's extremely easy to make floodgates and super early game too.

[CMDR Shven]

There are things that can be done to replace the tower more efficiently using more pieces, but the tower was simple and easy to manage. I don't really understand removing options for players. There's no downside to leaving it in game.

[Sholomar]

That water transfer pump that is 700 power to operate is so weak it couldn't even keep a small irrigation area filled with water....it goes slower than a bot operating a water dump....in it's current form it should be removed from the game. Worthless.

[Beautiful Rain (m)]

u bad @ game. Really.

[mightymuffin]

Originally posted by Sholomar:

That water transfer pump that is 700 power to operate is so weak it couldn't even keep a small irrigation area filled with water....it goes slower than a bot operating a water dump....in it's current form it should be removed from the game. Worthless.

It's weak for a reason, people could use it for infinite power otherwise. Bots may feel free cost wise because they don't eat or drink but they have a very high upfront cost in both hp and materials. Which if you add it up is...oh look 700hp...in cost for 3 factories and the assembler, not to mention the costs of refining the gears, planks, metal and costs of maintaining the pops that are operating all of that stuff. it only makes sense that that a dump and a pumping station are faster really.

I suspect they opted to remove the irrigation tower and nerfed the way dumps work is simply because the dump had/has other functions beyond cheesing farms. The nerf made it more costly with the evaporation changes to use dumps but a 3x3 pool has the same effect as the old version so it still works and is probably still easier than the irrigation tower which means people will still use that over the tower. So what's the point in having the tower?

It feels like this is an open admission that the dump is now the intended solution if you don't wan't irrigation ditches and it was nerfed to bring it in line with the cost that the irrigation tower was meant to have.

[stonelock99]

I want it back. I used them a lot.