How the heck do you get water to drain?

[Unoperator]

I've spent a stupid amount of time just trying to get water to drain off of an area. I put down some land in a patch of ocean so I could build a big international airport, but I can't place it because of there being water. Does it just evaporate or should I just write this off as a lost cause?

[Lunchbox486]

you don't, you have to bulldoze everything around that area, use the flatner tool to flatten the terrain, after you made that area nice and flat, save and then load your game before placing your roads and zones back..

the game doesn't recognize that you just removed water, until you reload your game, but the graphics and the in game effects apply...

..iBulldoze, level, save, load, rebuild and enjoy.....its a bug

:edit: water i believe no longer has physics like the 1st one, another downgrade

[warbeetle]

Basicly water takes Ages to respond to terraforming. Depending on water sources and streaming directions it will change surrounding waterlevels.
Put on the heightlines to check the height you are choosing.
Make sure you start terraforming a lot higher than the sourrounding water.
start slow and work in very small chunks - surrounding waterlevels may rise if the water has nowhere to go to - watch the streaminglines of the water and the heightprofile on the surrounding coastlines. Its an easy way to flood your entire city after 30 game minues if you do it too fast.
pray that there is no watersource in the area where you build.
If you are able to get a stable coastline after 10-20+ gameminutes you can use the plateautool to lower the ground again to just above sealevel. I recommend a height difference of 3-5 lines if you want to avoid flooding later. If there is water still on the platea make sure to have flat slopes of land instead of flat ground so that the water has a path to flow down over time - may take again up to an hour if small portions of water have to travel over larger distances.
Sounds fiddly but until the mapeditor releases water will be hard to form properly in larger scale if you do not use the workaraound with savegames that Lunchbox mentioned above.

[Unoperator]

Okay, yeah that makes sense. That savegame workaround definitely helped but I had to change the area I was building in as there totally was a source there.

[wolfern]

i think city service does it automatic just need the building in your city