Windmills/solar plants seem too efficient

[Blanc]

I'm seriously considering buying this game, as it seems absolutely perfect except for a few issues, this being one of them.

The fact that windmills can reliably generate a specific amount of power all the time, without fail is bugging me. Wind farms in real life are reliant on wind speeds, which fluctuate greatly over time and frequently isn't enough to power things 100% of the time, with the same thing applying to solar plants. It would make more sense were they to function more as an auxiliary power source, supplementing primary sources such as the coal plant or oil-based generators. (I think I saw one of those in a video, they're in-game right?)

The addition of hydroelectric dams looks awesome though.

Geothermal plants would have made more sense late-game instead of solar plants, too.

[SdcDev]

but a starting city needs to be low cost & low running cost compared to growing one. it needs to simulate the buildup somehow, thats why they are a little too reliable. They are the primary source for each starting city.

[Ξ ＮＹＯ]

Yes, That is a source of irritation for me too as in real life those sources of energy are more expensive than coal or oil. What is even more outragous is that the solar plant is the cheapest. In real life it is exactly the oppisite. Thankfully the game is easily moddible and that can be changed by merely rewriting a few lines of code in the files or using the ingame editor and deleting the offending files.

To be honest it removes all of the tough decisions real life city planners have to make between the different sources of energy and paints renewables as some sort of cure all, which they are not,

[Peter Pan]

Yes there is just no reason to get a polluting power plant. It pollutes, and it is also not as efficient.

I think the problem is wind is slightly too abundant on certain maps.

I am playing on the 2nd map now, and putting down wind power plants in the windy area made it less windy. So on that map, it is actually harder to power my city with wind power plants alone.
The wind turbine that you can only build on water was also not as efficient on that map, most of the water zones don't have wind.

However it is still cheaper to go wind for me. It is supposed to be price vs pollution, the polluting power plants are supposed to be cheaper and more efficient. In this game, the least polluting power plant is also the more efficient.

Pollution in general is just easier to manage in this game. It is supposed to be harder, making people make the decision on whether to sacrifice your people's health for the sake of money.

[Freedom]

This is the 1st city builder game where I have yet to build any dirty power, ever!!

[Mansen]

Yep - Power needs a rebalance. :)

[Cat]

I agree that the way it is now, windmills are the way to go, but I also don't see it working any other way considering how expensive other sources are and how you need to invest a lot to increase capacity from there on.

[Gelaktronikz]

Windmills work best when placed on rivers or water bodies (the land one works fine as well, depending on your terrain)

Considering the fact that 4 water windmills produce twice more power than a coal power plant, with lower or on-par weekly costs, yeah they're efficient.

I'm still sticking with solar though. 160MW, clean, no ground pollution and excellent cost-power ratio.

[boxman]

Originally posted by Night Cat:

I agree that the way it is now, windmills are the way to go, but I also don't see it working any other way considering how expensive other sources are and how you need to invest a lot to increase capacity from there on.

And that is why it needs rebalancing since in real world the opposite is true. Also in real world it is not even possible to power a city using windmills as the variation in power output will destabilize the entire grid if you have too many of them.

[Brakxel]

Yes, it bugs me, too. Things like this in the game show it is not a simulation game but a toy. I'm not saying it is all bad. I like toys, too. Turn a crank here and watch it light up over there. As a toy, C:S is a great one. I'm enjoying it now and look forward to many more hours of fun. I'm getting my money's worth. If you expect it to be a simulation game, however, you will be slightly disappointed.

You don't make game decisions based on real life experience (dirty power = cheap, clean power = expensive). Instead, you learn how the developers wanted you to play and go from there. It seems the designers want a clean world utopia and put in the mechanics for that.

The saving grace will be the mods. Someone will make a realistic mod and turn this toy into a simulation.

[Cat]

I would put forward a better solution really, let us buy electricity at a steep price from other towns. Shouldn't need to put up an entire coal burning plant for a handful of residences. Let us skip that and once we get to a higher population, get a loan and invest in a plant.
Hell, give us a special grant or something towards electricity plants, and perhaps do that even more for green energy if it's nerfed, it should feature some grant, or perhaps lower interest loans to buy them.

[Brakxel]

Originally posted by Night Cat:

I would put forward a better solution really, let us buy electricity at a steep price from other towns. Shouldn't need to put up an entire coal burning plant for a handful of residences. Let us skip that and once we get to a higher population, get a loan and invest in a plant.
Hell, give us a special grant or something towards electricity plants, and perhaps do that even more for green energy if it's nerfed, it should feature some grant, or perhaps lower interest loans to buy them.

Love the idea. Didn't SimCity 4 have something like this? Can't remember. Anyway, each map have roads we connect to for Cims to travel. Let us connect to other towns for other utilities. I would love to dump my sewage into another town. :-)

SimCity: The Online Failure had that nice feature that (when it worked) you could build a dirty city to power (and other utilities) your other cities in the region. The concept was great. Failed to work but I liked the idea of making a crap town do the dirty work for my utopia town.

[Cat]

It did yeah.Though with buying and selling of utilties, gotta be careful not to make it profitable to do either else it encourages having many times the facilties you need, because you make a profit on what you sell over. That's not realistic and not city planning. The deals and trade of electricity (and other things) should only be used to:
1. Cushion against weather changes affecting green energy
2. Allow to take a small benefit, at least, from weather being very favorable for green energy, not enough to justify setting up more plants for that purpose but enough to cover for some running costs.
3. To fill in where your city is still lacking, as an expensive way of doing things it would be temporary.

[Vimpster]

Originally posted by Brakxel:

SimCity: The Online Failure had that nice feature that (when it worked) you could build a dirty city to power (and other utilities) your other cities in the region. The concept was great. Failed to work but I liked the idea of making a crap town do the dirty work for my utopia town.

I know people tend to think of that kind of feature as a good thing that Simcity had over this game, but in fact it is a limitation of Simcity that this game does away with. In this game, because of the larger maps, you can have that dirty town supplying utilities to your utopia town only you no longer have to exit one map to enter the other since the map is large enough to have them both on the same loaded map.

[Kunibert]

Dam (most efficent building place I found):
Output: 1600MW
Price : around 180k

Who needs windmills or solar plants? :p

[ba12348]

Windmills do seem awfully OP, my city of 50k is powered entirely by advanced windmills and incinerators, but with dams being broken the way they are, i feel this is an acceptable tradeoff until they are fixed.