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The problem is that the private sector already runs all the coal plants, which are incredibly, amazingly dangeous and constantly toxic: far greater risks than nuclear plants. Like the amazing damage they do and the horrific potential for malfunction they have cannot be understated: if they ran nuclear plants it would not actually be a worse risk, it would, at worst, be a lateral move.
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Aug 7, 2021 13:47
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What I'm getting out of this is that the Anno series has weird politics. Is this what German Greens actually believe or is Anno mocking them from the other side?Alkydere posted:I'm talking about fusion power avoiding the "horrible toxic waste", apologies if I wasn't clear. Coal plants produce more radioactive waste than fission plants. The lesson the fusion guys have taken from this is that the underlying facts of how much radioactive waste is produced is irrelevant in the face of the kind of propaganda campaigns that they'd be throwing themselves into. It may factually produce less, but facts are just a single argument in the political realm. Plus there is the weird but difficult fact that we're almost certainly never going to see a practical civilian use for fusion on earth.
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Aug 7, 2021 14:10
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Well, might as well explain now: Power generation in Anno 2070 is, as far as I can tell, supposed to be a game of tradeoffs in terms of game design. Every source of electrical power has benefits and drawbacks. Wind, the power source we've been using so far, has the benefit that it's completely eco-friendly and doesn't consume any resources to run. However, it's also expensive, has low output, and those exclusion zones you've seen mean you have to spread out immensely to get the most efficiency out of its already low maximum output. With late game research you can mitigate these shortcomings and make wind power efficient, but it's a tough road to hoe until then. We'll unlock a new version before long that mitigates some of the space issues but keeps all the others. Without research, wind power is the single most expensive (in terms of $ per point of power) source of electrical power in the game. Thermal power is an option I actually unlocked this past update but didn't build. I probably never will except maybe in a bonus update to show off random poo poo, because it's bad. Thermal power has the gimmick that its output is based on the number of inhabitants (i.e. houses) in its influence radius. Higher tier houses hold more people, and therefore generate more power for the thermal station. You need a fairly chunky number of people in the area to get much output from a thermal station, and on top of the existing price tag (relatively high) you have to factor in the opportunity cost of building more houses (so more money directly) or other buildings that need to be woven into built up areas. It's bad and I don't like it. Solar power is the ultimate Eco power source, and is far more potent than wind or thermal while also not having any exclusion zone or urban development problems. It also has a gigantic footprint, the largest of any power generator in the game, and while it's more efficient for the price than wind power, it's still remarkably expensive and generates less power than you would think for the price tag and amount of real estate it requires. Tidal power is the basic Tech power generator for the specialized facilities they require, and it's bad. Large real estate commitment, expensive, not a lot of power. You can't even use tidal power to benefit normal settlement areas without some very fancy endgame tech. Hydroelectric power requires extensive Tech research, can only be built on specific islands (despite having a river, Site One can't build a dam), and is expensive to build, but it's probably the best all-around power source in the game. When the time comes for the LP to settle the Techs and Tycoons, the number one factor in where I settle them will be whether the island can support a dam. Geothermal is touted as the ultimate power source, but like hydroelectric power can only be built in specific places and requires extensive research to unlock. It's powerful, but like tidal power has the problem that it takes extra endgame building and research to be applicable to normal settlements. Also it has the risk of triggering massive map-wrecking disasters. So you probably want to research or buy upgrades to reduce that risk. Still, in terms of $ for point of power, it's the most efficient source of power in the game. Just mind the earthquakes. Coal is the Tycoon's basic power source, and they frankly don't need anything else. Coal is cheap, powerful, and only slightly less overall efficient than geothermal. Theoretically it's limited by the ecodamage it inflicts, but the Tycoons don't particularly care about a negative ecobalance in the first place and have powerful tools at their disposal to mitigate that problem anyway. There's also the theoretical shortcoming that coal is technically a limited resource in the game, but coal is available on almost every island, typically in ludicrously large amounts, and it's trivial to restock an island's 'limited' resources later in the game anyway. Nuclear power... is good in theory. Big output, low price tag, runs on a rare resource but consumes it slowly and like coal it's trivial to replenish an island's supply. However, nuclear plants are ludicrously accident prone and have no less than three different kinds of accidents they can suffer, ranging from 'everyone on the island is now mad at you and paying less money' to 'mushroom cloud just vaporized half the island and irradiated the rest.' Your own citizens, Eco or Tycoon, may threaten revolt just for building one of these things, and are guaranteed to if you build more than two or three. Research and upgrades can lower the risk of accidents, but your citizens don't give a hoot about how safe you've made it, and many NPCs you may share a map with will hate you for building just one, and will declare war on you if you keep building them.
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Aug 7, 2021 15:51
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Cythereal posted:Nuclear power... is good in theory. Big output, low price tag, runs on a rare resource but consumes it slowly and like coal it's trivial to replenish an island's supply. However, nuclear plants are ludicrously accident prone and have no less than three different kinds of accidents they can suffer, ranging from 'everyone on the island is now mad at you and paying less money' to 'mushroom cloud just vaporized half the island and irradiated the rest.' Your own citizens, Eco or Tycoon, may threaten revolt just for building one of these things, and are guaranteed to if you build more than two or three. Research and upgrades can lower the risk of accidents, but your citizens don't give a hoot about how safe you've made it, and many NPCs you may share a map with will hate you for building just one, and will declare war on you if you keep building them. Nuclear plants in the older Sim Cities had some similar issues. While not more accident prone like your typical super-dirty coal plant, the unique long-term environmental hazard when one of those things go kaboom, was risky. (Yes, i played with catastrophes on.) The Sims complained, too, and you had special laws to forbid nuclear fission for a mood booster. Here every fission plant seems like a potential Chernobyl 2.0. Kind of wonder how your battleships are powered. Diesel?
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Aug 7, 2021 16:37
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OutofSight posted:Kind of wonder how your battleships are powered. Diesel? Presumably, or maybe hydrogen fuel cells or the like. If I ever build any aircraft (they're only good for warfare, something I'm not keen on), they require kerosene fuel to run, but ships don't require any fuel or power. Oil is an important good in this game that we'll get to - if I'd started with Global Trust, I would have built oil wells already. But aircraft are the only time you use it for fuel.
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Aug 7, 2021 18:45
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Tulip posted:What I'm getting out of this is that the Anno series has weird politics. Is this what German Greens actually believe or is Anno mocking them from the other side? Tulip... I'm trying to agree with you... Why are you constantly nitpicking my statements like we're disagreeing? Honestly, 2070 is a fun game but the choices for power plants and how they're presented are a head scratcher. Up to and including: a deep sea geothermal power plant that causes tsunamis in the DLC. Canonically the tsunamis it causes are a good chunk of the reason it takes until 2205 to unfuck most things Part of this is because 2070 was supposed to be actually a rather bleak game where the player was supposed to be managing disasters...but honestly most people just turned the disasters down and backed away from using the dangerous stuff without items to reduce the danger. The Anno devs dropped most of the bleakness from 2205 and all of it from 1800. Cythereal posted:Oil is an important good in this game that we'll get to - if I'd started with Global Trust, I would have built oil wells already. But aircraft are the only time you use it for fuel. It feels so weird that oil isn't used for power in this game. Especially considering they later use it for power in the 2205 Tundra DLC, and it's the only source of power in 1800 unless you have the Arctic DLC.
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Aug 7, 2021 20:33
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Alkydere posted:Part of this is because 2070 was supposed to be actually a rather bleak game where the player was supposed to be managing disasters...but honestly most people just turned the disasters down and backed away from using the dangerous stuff without items to reduce the danger. The Anno devs dropped most of the bleakness from 2205 and all of it from 1800. Can confirm, this is how I play and will be playing in the LP. Right now I'm thinking I'll just show the nuclear and geothermal plants in a bonus update with random other stuff. I don't build a pretty looking city to risk it becoming undone by a dice roll. You can likewise see, in my opinion, that all three factions are supposed to be jerks. Global Trust are ruthless hyper-capitalists. The Eden Initiative are terrorists. SAAT are mad scientists who trigger a strategic nuclear exchange caused by an evil AI in the campaign. And my stance on "but this is supposed to be a grim, dark setting!" is "gently caress you with a carebear rainbow cannon."
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Aug 7, 2021 21:21
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Cythereal posted:Can confirm, this is how I play and will be playing in the LP. Right now I'm thinking I'll just show the nuclear and geothermal plants in a bonus update with random other stuff. I don't build a pretty looking city to risk it becoming undone by a dice roll.
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Aug 7, 2021 21:36
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Cythereal posted:SAAT are mad scientists who trigger a strategic nuclear exchange caused by an evil AI in the campaign. I disagree: SAAT are incompetent scientists! Literally "Let's shove the virus that makes AIs insane into the giant hyper-advanced AI with no safeguards in place. Oh look, it's rampaging and screaming 'Kill All Humans', how could we have predicted this?". All while everyone else looks at it puttering off over the horizon and going "...Why did you make the giant AI core the size of a building mobile!?" And that really is the best way to play the game. One of the nice things about Anno is you can go full competitive against AIs...or just turn off expanding Anno and have a chill single player expansion/city builder game.* *Note that this doesn't apply to 2205. Cythereal has stated they plan to play it so I'm going to do my best to avoid going into details and just say that it's...different. Not bad, just different. Very good in a few ways, such as finally teaching the devs that the players would absolutely love an in-game calculator of resource production vs consumption instead of either winging it or using 3rd party calculators.
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Aug 8, 2021 00:35
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There's a weird disconnect too between the implied grimdark of the setting and the gameplay. I really expected a more (even though it came out years later) Frostpunk feel to things. It never really feels like you're scraping by on a ravaged planet.
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Aug 8, 2021 02:30
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Alkydere posted:..Why did you make the giant AI core the size of a building mobile!?" AI hubs for rapid deployment of CDN networks in your IoT production chains. It is the future.  I rather ask why didn't they strap a bunch of railguns on it. For self defense in case of critical firewall breach.
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Aug 8, 2021 10:06
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Billy Bob's Last Stand Shorter update today.   Carcosa is growing nicely and meeting my development targets from the Chilean and Argentinian governments. However, after letting a bit of time pass to gauge consumption of consumer goods, I notice that demand is outpacing supply for health food. Time to fix that. I told you my previous layout of vegetable farms on Site One was sloppy. Easy enough to fix, though, and to fit two more vegetable farms in to support another health food chain. As the Aleph is already hauling vegetables, no adjustment to the trade route is necessary. No adjustment will be necessary unless production here outstrips 40 units per trip for the Aleph, which isn't likely anytime soon. Which in turn demanded another wind turbine. In retrospect, I probably should also have upgraded the warehouse at Site One at this point for the extra cargo hauler. Another rice farm and health food factory to match on Carcosa. I have a feeling the positioning of that rice farm is going to bite me on the rear, but I'll deal with that when the time comes to expand to the beach. And no, there are no problems with growing rice straight across the road from smelters and factories. Thank God for modern filters, eh? Billy Bob and his hat approve. Nothing for it now but to keep building houses and upgrading as the option presents itself. Around this time I get bored and go down to Professor Devi, whereupon I blow a large chunk of this operation's savings to pay off SAAT shipping managers until a shipment becomes available with something I'm interested in. These fancy rotor blades will cause every wind turbine to provide an extra point of energy when installed - small, but useful, and they help wind power become that little bit more efficient. In fact, with this upgrade, wind power is no longer the most expensive power source in the game! By an advantage of one tenth of a credit per unit of power over tidal power. I don't have the licenses to buy this right now, but I will once I can afford it. Once the current expansion program on Carcosa completes, I have access to some new toys on Carcosa. First, the production chain for weapons. If you're planning for regular military engagements, this is an important production chain to get started. I'm not, so I leave this be for the moment. Something much more interesting has become available. The Education Network - the Eden Initiative's multimedia empire - is the answer to Billy Bob's need for information that you've all seen. It's expensive, and about to get more so, but it's worth every credit. Just like the concert hall, the education network is a public building that benefits all houses in the radius of effect. This means that a happy Billy Bob lives in the overlapping areas of both buildings, an important consideration. I've taken this into account in planning Carcosa, but as you can see I've slightly miscalculated how much space I need. Fortunately, all the houses along the road highlighted in red are served by roads on the other side of the block. They can live with a slightly longer commute. The education network is by a fair margin the largest building in Carcosa so far, but the arrows have returned, and this time over Billy Bob's house! All of his needs are now being met! We started with Scruffy's need for community (via the city center), food (via the fisheries), drink (via the tea plantations), and activity (via the concert hall). Then we added Billy Bob's new need for food (via health food), and his brand new needs for lifestyle (via the electronics factories) and information (via the education network). Complexity has been building in layers, and as you can imagine the next tier up is going to add new needs. But let's hold off on that for now, there's a few more things I'd like to cover.  By default, the education network plays generic Eden Initiative programming. This does nothing in particular for any settlement beyond satisfying Billy Bob's need for information. However, you can also sponsor other programming. Child & Career programming still satisfies Billy Bob's need, but also leads to faster population growth and leads to happier, more productive citizens - which means more income taxes for you! If an education network is in a built up area, this more than pays for itself, even with the additional stress on the power grid. I switch to this immediately. At this point I start building new depots just so I can build new wind turbines. I will never stop bitching about these until SAAT's help comes online. My wife chooses to call this frustration born out of practical concern for the settlers emigrating to the Tierra del Fuego away from the Drowning. Another weather control station because negative ecobalance offends me and there's more expansion coming. Back to the concept of producing weapons, I do believe it to be inevitable that Carcosa will need to build armed ships. Fortunately, all it takes to build weapons is refined iron, which I'm already producing for tools!  Rather than start a whole new production chain, I simply establish a munitions factory on Carcosa. While it competes with the tools workshops for iron, I'm producing enough that both will be produced at a decent rate, and automatically switch fully to the other when Carcosa hits storage capacity on one. I don't anticipate a great need for weapons, but it doesn't hurt to have one factory humming in the background. But with that last bit of housekeeping done, it's time for Billy Bob to ascend.   Enter Manuel, Eco Engineer. While he only has one new type of need over Billy Bob, he demands both a new kind of food and a new kind of drink. However, something tells me that building in the Tierra del Fuego won't be quite as simple as just building for Manuel's needs and moving on. I'm expecting an important call any time now... Carcosa, population 1,121 Paraiso, no permanent residents
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Aug 8, 2021 12:57
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So, I went ahead and recorded the next update since it's the weekend (probably won't write the update for a few days, though), and I feel that with the benefit of knowing what's coming up I can make a few particular notes here for the benefit of new players: 1. This game, in my experience, often swings wildly between over-producing and under-producing goods, particularly construction materials. Construction and expansion has had a fairly sedate pace so far in the LP, with production easily meeting demand and rarely having to kill time waiting for resource production. This won't be the case in the next update. In particular, I'm producing a lot less wood than I'm going to need. The next update is going to wind up a bit disjointed mostly because I didn't have adequate construction materials stockpiled before reaching Manuel (and I'm going to wind up drastically over-producing a new construction material in the next update because it's easy to set up a big, efficient production center for it). 2. The third tier of citizens, in general, marks where in my opinion the game starts to open up and punch you in the gut more actively. I make do, of course, and I hope prospective and new players learn something from my scrabbling, but I'm saying this now: if you're new to Anno, make sure you're comfortable with how the game works before advancing to a new tier of citizen. 3. Unless people want me to, I'm going to stop making special note of every time I build a new wind turbine or weather control station, often with a depot to go with to expand my build area. Let me know if folks would prefer a detailed blow by blow LP, but unless there's a strong desire for it, I assume y'all understand how that stuff works and that I'm going to try to keep ecobalance from damage levels and keep my power grid in the green.
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Aug 8, 2021 23:21
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That seems reasonable, it should be understood in the genre that you're doing maintenance stuff with respect to certain indica and you don't need to tell us every time.
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Aug 9, 2021 00:59
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Urban Renewal A very short way into ascending Billy Bobs to Manuels, I realize that I've grossly underestimated the scale of the task at hand. Ascending Scruffy to Billy Bob costs 1 tool. Ascending Billy Bob to Manuel costs 2 building modules, 2 tools, and 3 wood. Carcosa is not remotely equipped to support a large expansion of Eco Employees to Eco Engineers, and my work quickly runs to a halt. This is a problem that is likely very familiar to veteran administrators! For the novices, expect this problem. Carcosa's rate of production for construction resources was completely adequate for the pace of development up until this time. During a huge burst of development like this, however, my stockpiles were wholly inadequate and my rate of production simply not up to snuff. This is a problem you have to weigh: is it worth overproducing for normal needs, or will you accept the time delays during major expansion phases like this? To this end, I have some priorities for this phase of expansion.1. Ascend as many Billy Bobs to Manuels as Carcosa's current population will support. 2. Expand and overhaul Carcosa's infrastructure, partly by expanding existing production chains and partly by making use of new options Manuel has provided. 3. Begin production of the new building material Manuel has made available. 4. Meet at least one of Manuel's new needs. Assume throughout this update that I am continually flipping around the map, slowly ascending houses in Carcosa. Also at this time my EVE unit informs me that SAAT has submitted a proposal for joint operations in the Tierra del Fuego, but I elect to not pursue this opportunity at the moment. I've talked before about how useful SAAT is, but they require a substantial investment before they pay dividends and at the moment I have other matters on my plate.  One concession I make to the growing population is establishing a new tea plantation. I will also be expanding the power grid and ecobalance upkeep on Carcosa and Paraiso throughout this update off-camera. You all know how this works by now. Paraiso will soon see extensive new development, so I decide that upgrading the warehouse is in order for the extra cargo loader. Starting with a tree nursery and lumber mill. I don't want to sacrifice the mining slots on Paraiso to manufacture tools locally, but starting local wood production will be helpful. In case anyone was wondering what I was doing with that other space next to Carcosa's city center - I am in fact capable of successfully planning ahead! At a population of this size, the risk of an epidemic among the population is very real. Hospitals are the solution to this disaster, and have an area of effect like the other buildings of this type. Another important development with Eco Engineers: the green boulevard. These roads incorporate advanced electric and magnetic guidance systems underneath the surface of the road, significantly increasing the speed of cargo haulers on the roads. Green boulevards, named for Seamus Green who founded the Eden Initiative, are a subtle but significant improvement to an island's infrastructure. I'll be replacing all current and future roads with green boulevards. You can tell them by the white color, and Yana chimes in to approve. Mr. Thorne pipes up at this point with a quest: a Carcosa resident hit and ran a Global Trust ambassador's automobile. While my sympathies for Trust executives are limited, I have even less for bad drivers who try to duck the law. Found and apprehended. Fortunately, this does not violate my agreement with Yana to cease trading with Thorne, so she is thrilled that I've made a stand out of principle.(These quests are pixel hunts, looking for one or more people or vehicles highlighted in blue somewhere in your settlement. Carcosa is small enough that finding this guy wasn't a chore, but these can be a serious pain in the rear later on.)  All roads in Carcosa have been replaced with green boulevards. Please ignore the red ! mark over one of the tool factories, the problem goes away as soon as I upgrade the nearby depot. Yana offers a quest that I sadly must decline. Cargo liners are useful, but this quest comes with a time limit and cargo liners are very expensive in terms of wood, a resource currently in very high demand. I also will simply not need three cargo liners in the near future. Paraiso is also upgraded with green boulevards. Manuel brings with him the second unique Eco building material: glass. Glass requires sand, which we've already seen, and limestone quarries. Fortunately, Paraiso has plentiful deposits of both. Here is the start of my mistakes with setting up our glass supply. Each chip factory only uses 33% of a sand filter's output. What I should have done here is simply establish a new limestone quarry to use the remaining 33% of the first sand filter. Instead, I build a new sand filter to start a wholly new glass production chain. To the north on Paraiso, I build two limestone quarries and a depot for the pair, showing off what I've said before that depots don't need to be connected to the warehouse. Glass is fairly simple: 33% of one sand filer, and one limestone quarry supports one glassworks.  To the south on Paraiso, I expand the road network. More than just glassworks will go down here. Here's my next mistake: starting shipping glass to Carcosa immediately. The problem here is that while I will need glass in large quantities on Carcosa later, right now I don't need glass there at all. But I will need glass on Paraiso for what's next. Three glassworks, operating from one sand filter and three limestone quarries, provide 100% resource utilization efficiency. It's also ludicrous overkill for the moment. One limestone quarry and one glassworks, piggybacking off the sand filter I built for the communicators chain, would have sufficed for the moment. What is less overkill is building another iron mine, iron smelter, and two tools workshops back on Carcosa. This completes the tool chain to be 100% resource efficient: two iron mines, one coal mine, two iron smelters, four tools workshops. While this will regularly overproduce and hit capacity, this will also regularly use tools as fast as I can make them. Carcosa will, most likely, supply the entire Tierra del Fuego resettlement program with tools.  Another important infrastructure task, building our first cargo liner. We won't have any need for the three Yana wanted in the immediate future, but one will be required for Paraiso's expansion. The cargo liner is the Eden Initiative's primary freighter, and in terms of credit per hauling capacity is the most efficient freighter in the world today. Cargo liners are fast, too. Most importantly for our purposes right now, they have four cargo hold slots over the basic Freight Ship's three. The Aleph has been adequate, but I'm soon going to add a fourth good to ship from Paraiso to Carcosa, and this requires a larger ship.   Replacing the Aleph on the Carcosa Supply trade route is simple: click on the trade route, add the Okeanos as a ship, and remove the Aleph. I'm still keeping the Aleph around, though, before long I'll have a new trade route for that ship. Demographics and ascension rights on Carcosa finally level out. While this has never actually *been* urgent, it can feel very stressful trying to make ends meet with a major expansion program like this! So, the next order of business is meeting one of Manuel's new needs: pasta! I'll be going for 100% resource utilization again, but this time it's not remotely overkill. Back when I targeted Paraiso for settlement I mentioned that the island has a fertility for wheat. Now it's time to put that fertility to use, wheat is the foundation of making pasta. Wheat may still be a staple grain of those who live inland, but for those of us out on the islands it's become something of a luxury. While this is going on, Prof. Devi finally sends a trade ship to Carcosa. This is an ocean glider, a small multipurpose ship that's very fast when unladen but also enjoys a surprisingly large cargo hold at the cost of slowing the vessel down immensely. Yet another mistake here, I needed three wheat farms, not four! Oh well, I guess there are worse mishaps than 'producing a little too much wheat.' It's 2070, and there's still really no better way of turning wheat into flour than a river mill. Yet another reason Paraiso was a terrific find. Three wheat farms supply one flour mill at full capacity. Two more vegetable farms join Paraiso, this time for the pasta production chain. Next to the flour mill in the lower right, you can see the pasta maker facilities. I update the Carcosa Supply trade route with pasta, making use of that fourth cargo slot. Carcosa will now be fully supplied with pasta! One last order of business for the moment. Back on Carcosa, I decide to turn my glut of glass into profits. With the warehouse selected, I click the third tab, Trade. I click the red button to offer goods for sale, and select glass. And by moving the arrow on the icon up and down, you can select the amount of the trade good to never go below - Carcosa is now selling glass, but will never go below a reserve of 40 units. You can trade any good in the game this way, and when ships from other powers on the map - in this case, Thorne, Yana, or Devi - visit, they may choose to pay credits to buy some of Carcosa's surplus glass. Of course, as an Eden Initiative construction material, Yana is the only one likely to actually buy any, but she's likely to also offer a good price for it. Thorne and Devi naturally pay premiums for goods exclusive to their own factions. But hey, we're finally starting to get some use out of them sending their ships to Carcosa! Carcosa, population 1,516 Paraiso, no permanent residents
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Aug 10, 2021 12:07
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To clarify out of character: I knew this problem with ascending citizens was coming. Going from laborers to employees is easy. Every subsequent tier is far more costly, and I was consciously not ramping up production as much as I could have. I probably should have waited to build up a larger stockpile, though. New players, take note. Over-producing glass like I am was a genuine mistake, but this sort of thing is also one reason why I recommend the Ecos as the starting faction for new players. The unique Eco resources, wood and glass, are easy and forgiving to make in large quantities. Concrete and steel, the Tycoon advanced construction materials, are a fair bit more involved to make. I'll most likely get into the Techs in the next update. Eco Engineers don't need anything they provide. Tycoons, on the other hand, benefit more from SAAT's arrival because the Techs offer an alternative (with some trade-offs that I'll explain when we get there, but I feel the Tech solution is superior) way to produce a resource Tycoons need at the Employee tier. If you're paying attention to my income, note that it's probably going to stay relatively low. Increasing your income is all about more houses and more higher-tier citizens, but for the purposes of the LP I'm focusing more on regularly introducing new features.
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Aug 10, 2021 13:55
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Huh, dunno if I missed it but you have you built a thermal station in your eco city? I thought they unlocked by now. I realize they're not the best power generation buildings, but they do help a lot with the "...and now to place more wind turbines" problem Eco early game has.
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Aug 10, 2021 20:53
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Alkydere posted:Huh, dunno if I missed it but you have you built a thermal station in your eco city? I thought they unlocked by now. I noted in the power generation overview that I unlocked them a few updates ago but haven't built one. I've considered the game forcing me to expand my building radius over Carcosa to be a benefit, and the next update will probably include the new kind of wind turbine that unlocked this update. I really don't like thermal stations. They're ridiculously inefficient if you're not placing them inside a developed area. I'm keeping them in mind as an option in case of emergency, but if I do build one I'll note it in the updates. Plan for the next session is bio drinks and probably starting on the Techs.
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Aug 10, 2021 20:57
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In the great clawback of 2070 we're still dependent on Kraft Dinner
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Aug 13, 2021 06:32
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I have never heard of Kraft being served with vegetables.  Next update is probably tomorrow, been making the most of my two free weeks of FF14. If anyone's following along who's never played Anno before, or at least hasn't made a real dent in the games, I'm curious to know if this LP's been informative. I love the Anno games, but they're a bit much to approach cold.
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Aug 13, 2021 18:09
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You definitely got me curious, and on the one hand I'd love to play it, but on the other a lot of it feels like tempting cognitive overload then again, i absolutely adore Caesar 3 and Pharaoh, and Anno seems like the logistical + supply chain side of those games taken to an extreme, which is super interesting. So I'm conflicted mortons stork fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Aug 13, 2021 |
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Aug 13, 2021 20:35
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Cythereal posted:I have never heard of Kraft being served with vegetables. Never played, plan to get now because of LP, lp looks very informative.
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Aug 13, 2021 21:09
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I played an Anno game once, in Germany, a long time ago, as a teenager, in German. I don't speak German, so now I know what I'm looking at. What are thermal powerplants meant to represent? Is it bog standard "we burn a thing and then it does the hot water turbine thing?" I don't really see that squaring with the dependency on built up areas though.
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Aug 13, 2021 22:49
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SIGSEGV posted:What are thermal powerplants meant to represent? Is it bog standard "we burn a thing and then it does the hot water turbine thing?" I don't really see that squaring with the dependency on built up areas though. I think the notion is that thermal plants burn the city's garbage as fuel to generate power.
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Aug 13, 2021 22:52
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Well, that explains the dismal power output then.
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Aug 13, 2021 23:33
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SIGSEGV posted:Well, that explains the dismal power output then. They get better once there's more population around them. But at the start...yeah. They're more expensive upkeep per power than wind mills if they're running at less than 60% power.
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Aug 13, 2021 23:37
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Land of Milk and Kiwis When you see a downward-pointing arrow over a building in your settlement, that means that a resident has a quest for you if you click on the building. More illegal dumping, but the ship responsible is long gone. Billy Bob's union boss just wants the mess cleaned up. I dispatch the Arturo. I notice while doing this that we've unlocked a new paid programming option for the education network. This one isn't useful unless you're seriously strapped for copper and sand, it won't save enough communicators to be worth the expense (again, factoring in the opportunity cost of not having the other program's income bonus). Next order of business, Carcosa needs more fish. But I've run out of space around the warehouse, even with the pier I built. The solution? Building a port authority on another beach. Each island can only have one warehouse, but port authorities fulfill most of the same functions and generate a new coastal building zone. These are also important for maritime traffic, trade routes will intelligently adjust to the warehouse or port authority the closest to them. Like so. The Okeanos automatically changes course to drop off the goods from Paraiso at the new port authority instead of the warehouse because it's a slightly shorter trip. These quests involving flotsam are simple: pick up all the debris with a ship (they share one cargo slot), and return to the requester. You can also see that Yana is indeed buying our surplus glass, and for quite a good price, too!  Even so, I'm still producing such a glut of glass that I decide to pause production on two of the glassworks and their attendant limestone quarries. By clicking the button in the middle of the control panel for a building, where it says 100%, you can set a building to sleep mode. This stops production and halves the building's maintenance and ecobalance costs. Why not simply demolish them? Because when you reactivate a building from idle mode, there's no warm-up time and no additional costs for rebuilding. The next order of business: Manuel's new drink need. Bio drinks need milk and fruit. Milk, while irritating, can be produced anywhere. Cows don't care about island fertility. Fruit, however, does and is a rather rare fertility in general. Paraiso can't grow fruit. We need a new island. The strategic map is a great way to survey your sector for what fertilities islands have. This new island can afford to be small, we'll probably be using it exclusively for bio drink production. As it turns out, there's an island immediately northwest of Carcosa that fits our needs.  I dispatch the Aleph and the Arturo to what I have designated Site Two with a cargo full of construction modules, tools, wood, and glass.  Bio drink production is simple enough: two fruit orchards and one cattle ranch supply one bio factory. Fruit orchards require a whopping eight fields as seen here, though they are at least small. The same cannot be said of cattle ranches. God, I hate these things. Behold one fully functional bio drink production chain.  I assign the Aleph to haul bio drinks from Site Two to Carcosa. This route will never call for anything larger than a humble freight ship.  Back on Carcosa, energy is becoming enough of a problem again that I decide to introduce a new tool: the offshore wind turbine. If you were hoping these would be any more efficient than their land-based cousins, they aren't. Exactly double the price for exactly double the output. They do at least have smaller exclusion zones and offshore real estate is much less contested. I've build a new port authority on the north side of Carcosa and place the new offshore wind turbine there. I did mention Carcosa needs two bio drink chains. I establish a second chain on Site Two, to the north of the landing site. Production is still spinning up, but Manuel is happy. While I'd prefer to finish Manuel's tier of needs, expansion on Carcosa has hit a problem: I'm saving that space north of the education network for a future public needs building, and I've otherwise outgrown the initial city center! I'll need to build a whole new city center to continue expanding Carcosa's settlement! But... later. There are other toys to explore right now. SAAT are eternal busybodies, and any resettlement program that reaches the Engineer stage will attract their attention. This shiny button on the Leviathan agrees to the joint development project with SAAT. I'll spare you the rest of Devi's sales pitch. In short, SAAT - the Scientific Academy for Advanced Technologies - is the world leader in pioneering scientific research and development, a worldwide organization of universities, think tanks, private high-tech corporations, and similar groups. They're also a collective of mad scientists who built an AI that went rogue and launched a nuclear war earlier this year. But, well, you really can't do without their advanced technology, so I agree to their proposal. Yana interrupts me to give me a long-term goal of settling 100 of the top tier of Eco citizens. Yes, Yana, I'll get around to that sooner or later.  Now that we're partners with SAAT, I can buy an ocean glider at the Leviathan and immediately do so, with the new ship coming with the name Nereid. Because the ocean glider isn't just a multipurpose ship. It's a submarine.  I've danced around the subject because I didn't want to get ahead of myself, but the undersea world is vitally important to advanced development in 2070! When your camera is over deep water, simply zoom in and you'll transition to an underwater view. With a submarine, they have a button on their command panel to instruct them to dive or surface. Now we can finally meet the man living in between Carcosa and Paraiso - deep beneath the ocean surface. Doctor Hiro Ebashi is a member of SAAT, but even by their standards he's strange. He and his fellows live in deep sea 'observatories' conducting research in deepest secrecy. In an area as geologically active as the Tierra del Fuego, it isn't a huge surprise to see one of his observatories. Unlike the other visitors in their arks, Ebashi offers no goods for sale, only items. He will, however, buy any surplus submarines of yours, and offers SAAT submarines for sale. This can be handy if you don't want to bother building your own SAAT shipyard.  Immediately of interest beneath the waves, however, are the ruins of old settlements long lost to the Drowning. The Nereid finds something interesting in one of them, though we won't be able to do anything with it for some time yet. Sonar surveys find another one. At best guess, these were Chilean research facilities here at the bottom of the world.(There's usually three of these on a map, but I found these two while killing time earlier. There's a way to get locations for them later if you don't feel like blindly searching the sea floor.)  While the Nereid attends to that, I dispatch the Arturo to Devi to purchase the improved wind turbine blades I mentioned a while back. This will help with Carcosa's power issues. Remember that you can drop off goods and items at port authorities just like you can with warehouses. Now every wind turbine on Carcosa is providing an additional point of power. We can't do anything with the technology prototypes the Nereid found for the time being, so I drop them off at the Leviathan for safekeeping.  Partnering with SAAT isn't simply a matter of them giving you stuff, however. They require infrastructure and settlements of their own - a whole new population class for the Tierra del Fuego! Actually, three. This is the island I've designated for settling them. Truth be told, it's not ideal. The lake with the large green symbol above it means that this island can support a hydroelectric dam, which will be vital - the Techs are intensely power-hungry for their larger projects. However, what I'd really hoped for is an island that can grow both coffee and sugar. No dice there, just coffee on this and the other island that can support a dam. Not ideal, but a solvable problem. Site Three will be our primary settlement area for the Techs. On the main control pane, there's now a new set of tabs on the bottom: Ecos and now Techs. The Techs aren't simply a subset of our existing population, but a whole new faction.   The basics are the same as settling Carcosa was, but just building domiciles for the lab assistants costs three building modules and two tools, and Dexter here has needs that can't be provided for by anywhere we've yet settled. It's time for a new wrinkle in the development plans for the Tierra del Fuego. Carcosa, population 1,702 Paraiso, no permanent residents Site Two, no permanent residents Site Three, population 26Taking suggestions for the names for Site Two and Site Three!
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Aug 14, 2021 14:04
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Site Two can be "Le Fumier" and Site Three can be Therac 26, given SAAT's approach to experimental safety reviews and procedures. E: I am mildly amused that a game about ecology doesn't have you grow crops to feed your cattle as well. SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Aug 14, 2021 |
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Aug 14, 2021 15:53
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SIGSEGV posted:E: I am mildly amused that a game about ecology doesn't have you grow crops to feed your cattle as well. That's in the next game.  Animal farms in 2070 are actually completely immune to ecobalance, good and bad. Cattle ranches are the first example we've seen in this LP, but they and the other animal farming operations will chug merrily away at 100% efficiency no matter whether you're in an apocalyptic dystopia or a new Eden.
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Aug 14, 2021 17:29
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Please for the love of god and all the newbies you hope to attract to Anno 2070, show off the totally optimized lay-outs for Ecos if you ignore the Techs and Tycoons. Not right now, but eventually. As the OP has just demonstrated, the Ecos production chains are severely real estate intensive, and you'll often run out of space if you throw them down willy-nilly. Space can be at a premium in Anno 2070, depending on your map choices and some of the other characters (not appearing in this map) don't share very well. And another "Ecos hate the environment" somehow covering an island with farms, plantations and ranches doesn't negatively effect the eco balance one bit.
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Aug 14, 2021 17:41
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If you do your accounting properly, budget some (considerable) reserve terrain for nature to occupy, set up your fields along the terrain lines with lots of dividers or terraces to limit erosion (bocage is apparently also really good at that), rotate crops and have fields go fallow, you can in fact do farming with only a sizeable impact on the environment. It takes a little extra room though. I guess you can called it baked in in the building footprint, it just doesn't play with the game's aesthetics of big metal circles around fields.
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Aug 14, 2021 17:54
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Actually, farms do negatively impact ecobalance! It's just typically very small: -1 for fruit orchards and -2 for wheat farms, for example. Cattle ranches inflict -4. Klaus88 posted:Please for the love of god and all the newbies you hope to attract to Anno 2070, show off the totally optimized lay-outs for Ecos if you ignore the Techs and Tycoons. Not right now, but eventually. Next update is going to be bedding in the Techs and I intend to start showing off some space optimization assuming I get to their drink needs.  Site Two is really weird to build around thanks to that lake in the middle of the island.
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Aug 14, 2021 18:22
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If you accept name suggestions for ships could you please name a warship Vasa in honor of our proud maritime traditions?  Personally I utterly despise the awful field puzzles in these games as the worst thing they every added to the series.
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Aug 14, 2021 18:50
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Cythereal posted:That's in the next game. Also in the game after grain farms to feed your cattle farms is a mildly game-breaking DLC! Anyways, my suggestions for names for the tech island: -Ground Zero -Minimum Safe Distance -Not A Place of Honor -Loonie Bin -Eureka (there might be a bit of a theme) Poil posted:If you accept name suggestions for ships could you please name a warship Vasa in honor of our proud maritime traditions? If Cyth is gonna name a warship after the Vasa she should wait until she gets an attack submarine from the Techs.
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Aug 14, 2021 19:35
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I'd suggest the Techie settlement be named after Von Braun, simply because they are sorts who care that the rockets go up, but not where the rockets come down since that's not their department.
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Aug 14, 2021 20:57
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Vasa is a go for the warship I'll probably build in the next session. Combat quests at this point will likely require more teeth than the commando ship has.SIGSEGV posted:Site Two can be "Le Fumier" and Site Three can be Therac 26, given SAAT's approach to experimental safety reviews and procedures. Incidentally I have no idea what either of these mean.
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Aug 14, 2021 23:01
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Fumier is the french word for manure and compost based fertilizer, because it's the cow poop island. Therac, now, is another thing, and is there because, well: quote:
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Aug 14, 2021 23:46
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Cythereal posted:Vasa is a go for the warship I'll probably build in the next session. Combat quests at this point will likely require more teeth than the commando ship has. I was suggesting the Vasa be a submarine because the joke is the real Vasa was a Swedish warship that was built and then promptly sunk barely over a kilometer into her maiden voyage. It seems like a rather ill-fated name to give to a surface ship to be honest. At least our Vasa would be able to return to the surface under its own power.
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Aug 15, 2021 00:00
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If you want a cargoship name Götheborg would be an option. It sailed from Göteborg (Gothenburg) on the west coast all the way to China and back. As it entered the harbor it smashed into a well-known reef and sank. They built a full sized replica and sailed a slightly modified version of the original journey (and without the sinking) a decade ago.
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Aug 15, 2021 00:24
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Poil posted:They built a full sized replica and sailed a slightly modified version of the original journey (and without the sinking) a decade ago. And they're going to do the same thing very soon apparently.
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Aug 15, 2021 00:31
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