On wind, geothermal, and nuclear energy sources.

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Planck Constant

Private
Sep 30, 2014
17
0
I have been viewing this game for a while and you definitely have me sold on the concept of a city builder with an building area in excess of 2 km squared, and it the models for the power-plants are some of the greatest I have seen in an vediogame. However, I do have some concerns, primarily regarding wind, geothermal, and nuclear energy.

Wind
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First, please do not tell me that those wind turbines in the foreground power the entire city in the background, as wind turbines tend to only output 4mw peak each, therefore you would need more wind turbines than that, much more. The wind turbines should also be intermittent and therefore require energy storage, unlike the wind turbines in every other city builder where they run all the time, in real life the highest capacity factor for a wind farm is approximately 59%. The addition of energy storage would be good as it would allow players to plan for risk as the wind turbines could be out for longer than your batteries can hold out. This would also open up backup fossil fuel energy generation.

Geothermal
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Geothermal is an often overlooked power source in games and it would be unfortunate if I couldn't build geothermal plants throughout zones that can use it. Geothermal should be cheaper than wind, but more expensive than nuclear (but without the public opinion penalties) and only be able to be built on special hotspots, thus preventing spam as the best energy source.

Nuclear
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Considering the nuclear power plant in the first trailer seems to be based upon it, I believe a photo of the SC4 nuclear power plant was appropriate. The nuclear power plants hopefully will come in an expensive and an cheap version. The expensive version will not expeirnce a radioactive materials release in the event of a meltdown or other such accident, however the cheap one (hopefully modeled after the Chernobyl nuclear power station) will expel radioactive materials from the reactor in the event of a meltdown. Both will become useless after a meltdown (however the cheap one cannot be bulldozed) and they both will significantly effect population happiness in the event of a meltdown. The probability of a meltdown should be constant between both reactors, but be low enough that the cheap reactor can be constructed. The reactors should also not negatively effect population health while running. Lastly, like in real life the should be expensive to build (three times the cost of coal) but be cheap to run (less than coal).

Please, take my advice and add an more advanced energy management side to the game.