Cold scales not spreading

[Kamiyama]

I'm playing an underwater nation and I have cold 3 and luck 3. I see my luck scales spreading but not the cold scales.

Is this a bug or is it to prevent underwater nations from hiding underneath the ice? For the record I think it would be lame to change the rules in order to stop players from taking advantage over environmental conditions.

[Zonk]

Regular water provinces cannot be colder/hotter than 1, while deep water will always be neutral temperature.

[Kamiyama]

So they just disabled temperature for UW nations. Figures.

What the dev thinks is imbalance, I think is skillfully thinking outside the box.

It should result in a dominion spreading war to change the temperature or the casting of second sun to increase heat scales worldwide and melt the oceans. Or just deal with it and cast teleport.

[Eldritch Gentleman]

Sea of Ice will do that.

[Draken]

I mean, it has a certain logic to it.
Deep underwater the seasons do not really have any influence on the water temperature.
Cold 3 is also not "freezes saltwater" level of cold. Nevermind a big moving body of water being a lot more difficult to freeze.

For the game itself it does mean that underwater nations can get away with taking more extreme temperature scales, but those scales will then apply once they try to go on land.
It also means they can't benefit from temperature based effects as much. Taking cold 3 and cold aura isn't going to do much in the deep ocean.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Draken:

Cold 3 is also not "freezes saltwater" level of cold.

The freezing point of seawater at STP is only about 28 or 29 F (-2 or -3 C), so I would be very surprised if Cold 1 - let alone Cold 3 - wasn't "'freezes saltwater' level of cold." The big issues with freezing large bodies of water - particularly all the way through, as would be necessary for most of the water volume to drop below the freezing point - are flow and the sheer thermal mass of a large volume of water.

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

So they just disabled temperature for UW nations. Figures.

What the dev thinks is imbalance, I think is skillfully thinking outside the box.

It should result in a dominion spreading war to change the temperature or the casting of second sun to increase heat scales worldwide and melt the oceans. Or just deal with it and cast teleport.

What you regard as "skillfully thinking outside the box," I consider an unmerited additional handicap for UW nations. Seriously, Cold X inhibiting the movement of armies between land and sea basically allows any nation that can tolerate Cold X to lock UW nations out of the game, and considering how difficult it already is for land nations to militarily challenge an UW nation under the sea - most can't even get into the water without using indies, summons, or magic items - it's not like UW nations would get any real benefit from that.

Also, I seriously doubt that balance had much of anything to do with the developers' decision to make water/sea provinces largely unaffected by temperature scales - liquid water can't be colder than its freezing point, and outside of shallow water most of the water column is basically unaffected by whatever's going on at the surface.

[Kamiyama]

So cold 3 nations get cold enough to freeze and change color to show snow, but the surface of the ocean stays water because reasons.

Meanwhile at the north pole:
https://youtu.be/xVqNFtGN_SQ

"But Kamiyama cold 3 nations don't get THAT cold! They just get slightly cold! A gentle cool breeze in the fall cold!"

[Draken]

Originally posted by joeball123:

Originally posted by Draken:

Cold 3 is also not "freezes saltwater" level of cold.

The freezing point of seawater at STP is only about 28 or 29 F (-2 or -3 C), so I would be very surprised if Cold 1 - let alone Cold 3 - wasn't "'freezes saltwater' level of cold." The big issues with freezing large bodies of water - particularly all the way through, as would be necessary for most of the water volume to drop below the freezing point - are flow and the sheer thermal mass of a large volume of water.

Ah, you are right. I must have mixed the temperature up with some more concentrated salt fluids.

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

So cold 3 nations get cold enough to freeze and change color to show snow, but the surface of the ocean stays water because reasons.

Meanwhile at the north pole:
https://youtu.be/xVqNFtGN_SQ

"But Kamiyama cold 3 nations don't get THAT cold! They just get slightly cold! A gentle cool breeze in the fall cold!"

Let's say it gets a stable -5 degree Celsius or 23 degree Fahrenheit in winter. That is cold enough to have a nice snow sheet and an good thick ice over most small bodies of water. But the oceans will remain pretty much ice free as the water gets heavier when it cools down, sinking deeper into the ocean, and gets replaced by warmer water.

Meanwhile at the North Pole it gets down to -40 degrees, both Fahrenheit and Celsius.
And even that level of could wouldn't really affect an underwater civilisation much. By the time the ice reaches an underwater civilisation the rest of the world has already become a lifeless husk of ice.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

So cold 3 nations get cold enough to freeze and change color to show snow, but the surface of the ocean stays water because reasons.

Meanwhile at the north pole:

Liquid water is necessarily at or above the freezing point, and even at the North Pole there is a substantial volume of liquid water beneath the ice sheet. UW provinces having populations of amphibious or acquatic species who are strongly implied to live in or at the bottom of the water column rather than at the surface of the sea and battles in sea provinces taking place underwater (on the seafloor, in fact, if the in-game depictions are taken literally), it strikes me as highly unlikely that they - and particularly the 'deep sea' provinces - would be significantly affected by surface conditions.

Also, if I had to pick a real-world region to model the climate of the game's Cold 3, I'd be more inclined to go with something like Alaska, Canada, or Norway than either of the poles - Cold 3 doesn't kill populations in terrestrial provinces, or even substantially reduce their economic output for Cold-preference nations, so if we're drawing real-world parallels we're probably talking about a climate where reasonably large human populations can survive without requiring advanced technology or significant imports of basic necessities.