Water/Sewage Network - Time to drop a feature

[City Builder]

I don't know... I'm just thinking that maybe they'll build onto it later on. For example, no matter how much maintenance you are willing to pay or (overpay as the case might be) after xxxx amount of years it simply starts to deteriorate and then you have to relay entire sections of water and sewage pipes which are then more expensive due to inflation for the past 500 years of your city so what was originally something like 540C then turns out to be 540,000C to lay the new pipe that is having issues with bursting pipes etc.

Or perhaps they might add something that makes the player upgrade their pipe system to accomodate a higher capacity of water and or sewage for a higher population and if you don't then your homes all start to suffer from backed up sewage or lack of water. Brownouts of the water system so to speak.

It seems they do need to take that further or perhaps they're simply thinking that modders will take it further, but as it is now from what I've seen it's one of those silly game mechanics where you "set it and forget it", i.e. you lay the pipes and don't ever worry about it again, which does not make for an interesting feature at all.

 

[Shroomblaze]

Where I live we have dozens of water main breaks every year. I wonder what it would look like if bad maintenance caused a water main to break in the game and water to shoot out of the ground like a geyser until your city works employees can patch it up. And in the mean time, water would not be available in that area until the break is fixed.

This sounds like a great idea to add to a water pressure mod! I want to see this, Maybe also add fire hydrants to the game to decrease fires in certain areas.

 

[Greygor69]

simcity did better in this area. I just wish we could build buildings BEFORE roads.

Or placing a building away from a road, placed a road you could connect to. I include parks with this.

 

[Tim Bo]

Speaking of pointless gameplay elements, what does water pollution actually do? You want to make sure you don't suck up sewage into your water pumps, but if you understand how rivers work that's a pretty trivial puzzle to solve (spoilers: put the sewage downstream of the pumps). There seems to be little benefit of using water treatment plants other than a small bit of water at the edge of the map looking cleaner.

Seems trivial, doesn't it?

Until it actually goes wrong, unintentionally, and the game catches you out.

Followed the fundamental, trivial, rule of placing sewerage outlets downstream of water pumps, at the start of one particular city of mine; note however that this particular city has numerous inter-twining rivers and lagoons and aquatic 'deadzones'.

All good, city expands, continue to place sewerage downstream of water pumps.

All good, city continues to expand. Place a dam for hydro electricity.

All good, city continues to expand.

People start to get sick. Increasingly sick. Eh? Ebola has reached my city? An outbreak of bubonic plague? The Chinese military secretly releasing viruses into the atmosphere to undermine my capitalist, hedonistic society?

A puzzle!

I check one of my many poorly, vomiting, dystopic (not to mention dysentric) residents to see just what is plaguing her. Water pollution! What? But I have followed the fundamental, trivial rule of placing sewerage downstream of my water pumps, haven't I? How can this be!?

So I don the aquatic equivalent of Holmes's deerstalker, and set about sniffing out the smelly problem.

The woes of my diseased denizens it would seem lay within the rather marvelous (yet goshdarned sneaky) aquadynamic fluid-flow system Skylines has in its veins. Turns out that installing the hydro dam backed up all the water upstream, as dams are wont to do. This, it was revealed upon further nautical investigation, altered the flow, ever so subtly, of my rivers throughout the map. Hmmm ... could it be? Surely not. I zoomed in on my sewerage outlets. Still flowing, albeit at reduced pace, downstream .. all good.

Or was it? A little tail had appeared off the side of my effluent, fanning out and eddying in one of my deadzones, and then, just the slightest discoloured hint of polluted water eventually cycling back upstream of my water pumps. AHA! Not the Chinese then. I retreated from DefCon 5 and stood down my missiles.

Reconfigured my water pumps well away from the lazy cycling and eddying of effluent on one side of the map and placed them on a clean tributary on the other side, where I'd just unlocked a new sector.

Phew! Vomit-gate subsided.

~

Just another pleasing little discovery of this excellent game.

The water and sewerage systems are trivial and boring and dull and repetitive and wall head brick on almost all occasions, yet the nuanced complexity of certain game elements can throw up (pun intended) little oddball scenarios like the one I've just described. Left me shaking my head slowly in grinning wonder.

I'll leave water and sewerage just as they are in my games, thanks.