Hydro plant broken? [DEVS help]

[totte1015]

http://i.imgur.com/aoygEpw.jpg
I have been letting the game run at max speed for a long while now, yet its not producing ANY power. It predicted it at max, which was like 1600MW or something...
At first it did veeeery good, then it just stopped the production, and been like this for a long time now, why!?

ADD:

I also tried rebuilding it in the other direction, did not work anyway

 

[JerkyJerry]

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?846345-Ross-s-Skylines-Tutorials

This will help you
There are other vids out there as well that get into dam building

Good Luck!

 

[enael]

You have to build a larger hydro plant. it's an issue i think.

 

[JerkyJerry]

Having a second look
Is this dam at the mouth of a lake? Or some other no/low flowing body of water?
Are there any arrows (water flow) behind the dam? Did the flow stop?

If it just stopped producing power then one of the above may be true

 

[Dwight_js]

Having a second look
Is this dam at the mouth of a lake? Or some other no/low flowing body of water?
Are there any arrows (water flow) behind the dam? Did the flow stop?

If it just stopped producing power then one of the above may be true

If the hydro-dams require flowing water to operate, then they are unrealistic. It's the height-difference in water levels that determines the power output of a damn, not the flow in the water-body below it. There are lots of hydro plants that take water from an elevated lake and expel it in a lower-lying lake. Like the Walchensee-Kraftwerk in Bavaria:

 

[Japamala]

Hydro plants only start working once the water reaches a certain level behind it. Think of it as the water inlet for the turbines being where the wall goes from being vertical to sloping. If the dam is at or above the level of the water source, the water will never reach there.

 

[ellindsey]

I had a similar problem. I placed a hydro dam in a location where the water backing up behind it started spilling over its banks and flowing across land to another body of water. Meanwhile the river downstream of the dam went completely dry, and the dam never produced any power. I had to demolish it and then build a new one slightly lower down the river. This is a clear bug, a hydro dam should not require the water to rise to the top before it starts producing power.

 

[MaxxPower]

Does the river behind your dam connect to an other city?
Because then it can happen, that all the water flows to the other city instead through the dam.
I had the same problem once.

It's important to know, that there is never any water flowing in from neighboring cities. (or if it is, i didn't find that option in the map editor)
There is only sea level water, and water sources within your map.

So a dam only works if the only way from the water source to sea level is through the dam.

 

[simonmd]

I have been playing around alot with this feature and had to actually re-do my London map to accommodate it's mechanics. In the original post above, you can clearly see the water behind the dam is higher, which should be enough. However, this is not how the game works in this case.

What you MUST have for any hydro plant to work is the water source / spawner to be higher than the level of the dam. The way the water spawners work is they keep producing water until it reaches a certain level. Once it hits that, it stops producing water. Think of the stopvalve float in your toilet cystern, same principle. If it reaches this level, the spawner stops producing water and the flow stops. The game only detects whether the water is flowing or not and if it stops, then the hydro wont function. In the picture above, whats happened is the game is reading the water behind the dam as a stagnant pond with no flow.

The only way to make them work is to place your dam in a place thats lower than the water source, flow and width are secondary considerations.

 

[Turjan]

So a dam only works if the only way from the water source to sea level is through the dam.

Yup, this is somewhat unfortunate. If you put a hydro dam on one of the rivers in the "Great Plains" map, the river in front of it will dry out, the water level behind it will rise very high - and you get 0 MW electricity, because the water in the river starts flowing backwards. The same happens if you raise the water level too high in the other branch, but the dam will work a few hundred meters down the river.

 

[Mr Maison]

I think the system makes sense given the way water behaves in the game. In the map editor, I sometimes struggle to get the water going in the direction I want it to. In my last map, I ended up raising the river bed at the edge of the map to keep the flow from going backwards and emptying over the edge. Otherwise I wasn't getting enough water to fill the river even with 4 water sources. The river bed height and smooth condition matters a lot too. It's like the water system is a mini game in itself.

 

[Stargatemunky]

I have been letting the game run at max speed for a long while now, yet its not producing ANY power. It predicted it at max, which was like 1600MW or something...
At first it did veeeery good, then it just stopped the production, and been like this for a long time now, why!?

ADD:

I also tried rebuilding it in the other direction, did not work anyway[/QUOTE]

The general problem that I seem to have found is that because the global water level takes time to settle your initial dam level will actually be at the wrong level.

Usually rebuilding it afterwards fixes the problem.

I'm hoping to make a video about the water physics in general soon to explain. But essentially the engine calculates the ENTIRE maps water as one whole so it will literally take the water to level on the entire map before you know the true level for your dam.

 

[simonmd]

I think the system makes sense given the way water behaves in the game. In the map editor, I sometimes struggle to get the water going in the direction I want it to. In my last map, I ended up raising the river bed at the edge of the map to keep the flow from going backwards and emptying over the edge. Otherwise I wasn't getting enough water to fill the river even with 4 water sources. The river bed height and smooth condition matters a lot too. It's like the water system is a mini game in itself.

One thing that is an easy mistake to make when creating your own maps is the source of the river should be sealed off from the edge of the map. If you have the starting end of the river open to the edge then most of the water produced will litteraly just fall off the side of the map instead of flowing along the river's course, hence your need for 4 water spawners. In my London map, I have only used one spawner for each of the two rivers in it and they produce more than enough water.