Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters - Dev Diary 3: Thunder and Lightning and Fire

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Co_Karoliina

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Oct 1, 2010
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www.colossalorder.fi
Now that more disasters have been revealed, it’s time to look at them more closely in the upcoming dev diaries for Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters. This time around we’ll introduce the Thunderstorm! It is about very bad weather that happens on an area approximately the size of one map tile. The main challenge with a Thunderstorm are the lightnings. They can start fires, both in the city and in forests.

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While the Thunderstorm is a disaster in itself, the effects it causes can also appear as separate disasters. Fires now spread in the city a lot easier than before, so having a lightning hit a building and set it on fire is a much bigger deal than previously. Fires spreading more easily will be part of the free update, so all users will experience some new challenges in their cities.

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As a wholly new thing, forest fires can also happen. They can start independently, but also be started by lightnings of a Thunderstorm. A forest fire may not pose a threat to the city, but the fire spreads in the woods also, and upon reaching the city, can also spread to buildings.

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The Fire Fighting Helicopters are important for both building fires and forest fires. Helicopters can reach buildings even when there’s no road connection, and can help the fire brigade get faster to distant locations or past traffic jams. There’s a new city policy that can be used to have areas where emergency road vehicles will not travel, so you can have helicopter only areas in the city. Smart use of helicopter only policies can help you to for example reserve the center of the city only for helicopter emergency vehicles, so citizens can get help fast and your roads will still be free of fire trucks and ambulances. Medical helicopters still need a Hospital to take the patients to, but because the Hospital is a separate building, you can have it in the middle of the city and place your Medical Helicopter Bases further out where they are out of way.

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Helicopters also handle forest fires. They can easily fly over a burning forest, empty their water buckets, and then return to a water source for more. The limiting thing is that forest fires need to be quite close to the city to be noticed by the Fire Brigade. To help with this, you can place rustic looking Firewatch Towers. These towers house tireless heroes who are always on the lookout for fires. Each tower has an operating range, affected a bit by the landscape (even heroes cannot see through mountains), and if within that range a forest fire starts, they immediately alert the Fire Brigade. Ideally, any forest areas next to the city should be covered by Firewatch Towers, so forest fires cannot reach to city unnoticed. Firewatch Towers are a small investment to keep the city safe, lest a roaring wall of fire suddenly appear from the forest and spreads to city buildings.

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The Thunderstorm itself can feel quite harmless, but the results of one striking when you are unprepared can be drastic. So Firewatch Towers help with forest fires, what about the buildings then? A policy comes to help! By setting a policy that it is mandatory for tall buildings to have Lightning Rods, you can significantly lessen the chance of buildings catching fire as a result of a lightning strike. There is an upkeep cost, but keeping citizens safe from fire is important.

Disasters can spawn other disasters, but your city can be prepared to meet the challenge. Or you can just watch the world burn, that can be fun too!
 
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Wow! That sounds awesome! But, I want to know (as a poor student for who every cent counts :D)
1) How much will the DLC probably cost?
2)When it will be probably released? Thanks!

1) The price will be similar to After Dark expansion.
2) We'll get this released by the end of the year :)
 
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A fire lookout tower! Would be cool to have a sort of national park near the city. Also, that lightning looks very cool.
 
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How about a city policy where you can mandate fire sprinklers in certain building styles. Maybe even broken up by building types like all buildings, all industry, all tall buildings, all multifamily buildings, etc. Could have other policies like this like earthquake construction requirements could be all buildings, all tall buildings, etc. That way you could determine what's important where to cut cost compared with safety.
 
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I have a general question concerning the disasters DLC...
it might sounds a bit cynical, lol, but how the Cims react to the disasters ? Do they sream and try to escape like in the movies (or the game Jurassic park operation genesis). Or do they not react at all. In the current version, if the city is flooded, Cims just disapears. However, it would make it so realistic to have people running around and caring about the disaster ;)
 
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All good. But even now fires happens too often. After this dlc, it seems like it's going to be one total hell.
Can you make fires, crimes and stuff happens less often? At least like in Sim City?
So it would be more realistic, and real deal. Not like it is now....
 
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doesn't activation the smoke alarm policy reduce the number of fires already?
 
Just a few ideas: Thunderstorms should also cause distrubance in electricity, and when a lighting really hit a powerplant this one should cause a massive black out to the whole city. My last thought about that, that it is basically a storm, and on the pictures I can see rain, what if due to the heavy rain the cars on the roads needed to drive slower (too much water on the roads; because in the game there is no sewer system so it worked as like when a road condition is bad due to the low costs of road maintance, just this one should have bit more negativ impact on the traffic than the potholes to make it more harder and more helicopter dependent ;) ).

Sorry for my english :)
 
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I have a general question concerning the disasters DLC...
it might sounds a bit cynical, lol, but how the Cims react to the disasters ? Do they sream and try to escape like in the movies (or the game Jurassic park operation genesis). Or do they not react at all. In the current version, if the city is flooded, Cims just disapears. However, it would make it so realistic to have people running around and caring about the disaster ;)

The cims need to react to the disaster, running, screaming, watching and chirping actually if a building is on fire the cims doesn't evacuate the building and the cims in the sidewalk doesn't surprise the fire.
 
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Thanks for posting more detailed information regarding content, price and release date- all very interesting and helpful. The promo shots look great. I agree with previous posts suggesting the need for cims to react when disaster is about to strike and the power outages when lightning hits power cables- also some damage to buildings too- set alight, damaged roofs/masonry.
 
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Thank you all for the feedback!

I have a general question concerning the disasters DLC...
it might sounds a bit cynical, lol, but how the Cims react to the disasters ? Do they sream and try to escape like in the movies (or the game Jurassic park operation genesis). Or do they not react at all. In the current version, if the city is flooded, Cims just disapears. However, it would make it so realistic to have people running around and caring about the disaster ;)

I'm afraid this is out of scope for us, so the citizens will accept their fate calm and collected. Though I must say it would be cool, however not possible at this time :(

Awesome!

Will the disasters you listed in the "word of the week" journal be the only disasters in the game or will you add more later on?

The ones listed in the last word of the week are the disasters in the expansion. We're implementing the last ones of those now and try to get the expansion ready for release this year still, so unfortunately there's not going to be more disasters than already announced.
 
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I really like the Idea of the trees catching fire and spreading to the town.. Will wind direction be a factor in which way the fire will spread, and also will the modders who made all those beautiful trees need to update their assets to accommodate them catching fire.
 
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I live in an area that receives a lot of lightnings. A lot, compared to the whole world. And the biggest problem we have is not fire, its energy interruption. I would really appreciate if that would be in the game because thunderstorm do a lot more to energy sources than fire. First because most thunderstorm comes with rain, hence no fire. Keep the fire but please add energy problems.

The energy plant could turn off and need a cool down time to be back on. Or if the lighting hits a power cable the area around could be without energy till someone goes to fix it. That is what happens here.

When lighting hits the city I never worry about fire, I worry about removing from the energy socket/plug all electronic devices, otherwise they will burn.
 
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