ENERGY DLC

[choum]

Hello,

I already red some idées on utilities.
As i see things there should be many different way to exploit energy.
1) electricity :
- can be used in some factories to build things, nearly everything in fact. SO i could be used as an intrant (1 of the 9 boxes) , or as a hidden intrant like manpower
- can be used in town/houses, appartements, commercial buildings for light, heating, computers, house appliances etc. So here can can modelize 2 ways. 1st as a retail service sold in business center or someting. 2nd as for telecom (maybe better).
- and of course energy has to be produced! from coal+water, oil+water, gaz+water, solar, wind. So maybe in factories or in farms with specific technologies. And rendement sgould increase with tech level and factory level. For exemple 1 tech point could reduce cost of power production or increase production with better cells for solar pannels, hugh efficiency turbines, etc
- it should be accessible for first ones like tiny coal generators (but produce expensive power), and very expensive for fusion reactors (and produce nearly free power)
- there should be a lot of competition as everybody needs energy
- there should be researchs dependency like for digital ages (i like this system).

2) heat
- the same with heat that can be used in some factories to produce cement, to heat houses and towns, etc

So here i talk about a new ecosystem in the game with a lot of dependencies and a lot of code revork héhé

[David]

When an electricity company shuts down power plants, how will the firms that rely on it be affected? Will their operations be completely halted until they can find another electricity supplier?

[choum]

yes! no power = no production

to avoid it in early game, maybe allow firms or mayors to build small unefficient solar power plants or something? or something that depel like a mine. Let's say a woodpit power plant :p

[David]

Any suggestions for maintaining the gameplay balance when the energy supplier can abruptly stop the supply? If the government has to always keep a surpass of energy supply in response to the energy shortage caused by deliberate actions by an energy supplier, how can the government's energy firms achieve profitability ?

[mdemircan2]

Any suggestions for maintaining the gameplay balance when the energy supplier can abruptly stop the supply? If the government has to always keep a surpass of energy supply in response to the energy shortage caused by deliberate action by an energy supplier, how can the government's energy firms achieve profitability ?

Can we think of this situation as an energy crisis?

[Zeke_Bohansen]

One solution to player owned energy companies going bankrupt and paralyzing cites is to have a National Grid.
This off map suppler would automatically make up any shortfall.

The game would start with 2 or 3 local government energy companies that could become available for sale in the same way media companies do.

The national electricity grid would always be supplying power to your cities, player owned energy companies would
compete for a share of that market, the same way all the other products work in Cap lab.

[cantdownloadit]

More things to build can be a concern, the maps get very full and crowded already.

And if your going utilities then surely water/sewerage and gas would also be included.

The UK national grid for example is essentially just the transmission system, so if a major power company did go bust they would have to try find the energy from somewhere, as its not feasible to just build a power station and have it start working instantly like happens in capitalism lab, its also a public company not government owned.

[Djohaal]

Ressurecting the energy DLC idea, here's some of my thoughts:

Justification:

The energy segment (both on fuels and electricty) contains some of the biggest corporations around such as big oil, and also many startups dedicated to clean power.

Proposed game loop:

Cities have an electricity demand which is the sum of all buildings + non self powered firms, that'd be the target "Market"
Power in cities is provided either by city hall owned powerplants (which can be sold), or if not enough power is produced, it can be bought at a higher expense from the "Grid" (an abstracted national power grid)
Players build power plants which require either fuel products, or for renewables a small input of maintenance goods (replacement solar panels and windmill blades?), and of course a base maintenance for salaries and the such.
At the power plant the player can set the price per MW/h produced, and also toggle if the power plant should prioritize supplying their own industries in the same map - a toggle on the power producers instead of factories is a good Ux choice as it minimizes micromanagement.
City hall will automatically buy the power starting from the cheapest firm and working its way up to more expensive alternatives until all its demand is satisfied, or if not, it'll buy the missing power from the Grid. The pooled average cost of the power for the city hall (+ an government-adjustable % subsidy or extra tax) is used as the calculation of the energy bill for firms, which sends the money back to the city hall.
Some mechanic could also be made in place to either sell power to the "grid" or transfer power between cities.

Renewables, energy storage and energy "quality"
A "quality" factor to energy produced could be introduced to spice up renewables. Since the game time increments is in days and not hours, Instead of oscillating the output of renewables every day to simulate the production of power, they could produce an average amount (or slightly oscillating) of power, but it'd have a quality factor tied to it, which means how stable the output is. Solar power would have a 50 quality rating for instance, as half the day its not producing power. While a nuclear, hydro or oil plant would have a flat 100 quality as they are always on, The quality factor would also weigh into the city hall's decision of where to buy power from.
Quality factor of all renewables can be improved by constructing special power storage facilities, they'd link up with all renewables and raise their quality rating up to 100% if you have enough energy storage for dampening all your renewable production.

Emissions and City Hall
Cities can also prioritize cleaner or dirty energy per a mayor decision slider. Over time cities would prefer cleaner energy sources, but a corporation that controls a city can offset that. Allows for some very shady business.

Energy consumption, factories and internet companies
I think Factories would have energy consumption rates based on what goods they are manufacturing. Purifying aluminum is radically different from baking cupcakes. To emulate that some goods are more energy intensive than others, the energy consumption factor could be added into the manufacturing.dbt for every recipe in KW/h per manufacturing operation. A simpler alternative would be a flat consumption on every factory.
A good synergy with the digital age DLC would be power-hungry data centers for internet companies. Data centers could be built and give the corporation a global "pool" of data resources (give it some arbitrary unit such as TeraFLOPs, GB/s, whatever), and internet companies would require that computing power based on their type and amount of users. Perhaps some game element where corporations can sell each other computing power (like amazon does) could also be made. Data centers are a huge energy and finance drain on IRL internet companies, so emulating that would be interesting.

Types of powerplant

Nonrenewables:
Coal, Oil, Natural gas - simple, 24/7 production, polluting, no output oscillation
Nuclear power - Clean, extremely expensive setup, expensive fuel, no output oscillation, perhaps a risk of PR issues?

Renewables:
Biomass - not so dirty, fuel can be an abstracted waste % of the corporation's farm production, a good side business for agriculture focused corps.
Geothermal - no downtime, few spots on map, expensive setup.
Hydro dam - colossal setup cost, high production and low cost, only one site per city with river. Would require adjusted map generation for valid sites and very challenging to develop from a code and art point of view...
Wind and solar: Cheap, require very slow upkeep with new solar panels and blades which could be manufactured by the parent company as a side business. Oscillating output/low quality power. Require more land footprint. Perhaps analogous to the farm module feature in the beta version, their base building could have "fields" of generators added around it.
Fusion power - would have to be researched somehow, only available after the 2030's. Or perhaps something better left for a certain mod.

Fuels
I didn't come up with complex mechanics for fuels, I think the game's product archetype fits well with this case as some mods have demonstrated (Realworld comes to mind and even my own futureworld), it'd involve only some new product types, a store and category.

I think this could allow for some interesting gaming approaches such as massive corporations specialized in the energy market, internet companies investing in renewables for their hungry data centers, or smaller corporations looking to offset their production costs.

[cantdownloadit]

I wouldnt want the AI building power plants in the middle of cities, pollution is bad enough from building all the mines right in the middle of the city.

[Stylesjl]

I wouldnt want the AI building power plants in the middle of cities, pollution is bad enough from building all the mines right in the middle of the city.

Yes, but that's what zoning is for, right?

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Cities have an electricity demand which is the sum of all buildings + non self powered firms, that'd be the target "Market"
Yes, but this should also include non-company buildings as well (i.e demand should be also very largely determined by population.

Power in cities is provided either by city hall owned powerplants (which can be sold), or if not enough power is produced, it can be bought at a higher expense from the "Grid" (an abstracted national power grid)

Yes, the rule is that there must always be a power grid running, even if it bankrupts a city (often true in real life as well).

Players build power plants which require either fuel products, or for renewables a small input of maintenance goods (replacement solar panels and windmill blades?), and of course a base maintenance for salaries and the such.

Yes, start with Fossil Fuel heavy plants and supply raw materials like Coal and Gas to them.

At the power plant the player can set the price per MW/h produced, and also toggle if the power plant should prioritize supplying their own industries in the same map - a toggle on the power producers instead of factories is a good Ux choice as it minimizes micromanagement.

Not sure if I like this. Gives I think too much leeway to disrupt the normal business of a city by withholding power from competitors.

City hall will automatically buy the power starting from the cheapest firm and working its way up to more expensive alternatives until all its demand is satisfied, or if not, it'll buy the missing power from the Grid. The pooled average cost of the power for the city hall (+ an government-adjustable % subsidy or extra tax) is used as the calculation of the energy bill for firms, which sends the money back to the city hall.

Yes, I like this. Perhaps the average power cost could be controlled by a difficulty setting.

Some mechanic could also be made in place to either sell power to the "grid" or transfer power between cities.

Power export - this is is also a cool idea. But perhaps just export to the national grid. In fact an import/export to the national grid could be an interesting idea.

Renewables, energy storage and energy "quality"
A "quality" factor to energy produced could be introduced to spice up renewables. Since the game time increments is in days and not hours, Instead of oscillating the output of renewables every day to simulate the production of power, they could produce an average amount (or slightly oscillating) of power, but it'd have a quality factor tied to it, which means how stable the output is. Solar power would have a 50 quality rating for instance, as half the day its not producing power. While a nuclear, hydro or oil plant would have a flat 100 quality as they are always on, The quality factor would also weigh into the city hall's decision of where to buy power from.

Yes, I think this is a good plan.

Quality factor of all renewables can be improved by constructing special power storage facilities, they'd link up with all renewables and raise their quality rating up to 100% if you have enough energy storage for dampening all your renewable production.

This is also a good idea, it helps to simulate the increasing importance of renewables with advancing technology.

Emissions and City Hall
Cities can also prioritize cleaner or dirty energy per a mayor decision slider. Over time cities would prefer cleaner energy sources, but a corporation that controls a city can offset that. Allows for some very shady business.

Yes, this would definitely be an interesting mayor option.

Energy consumption, factories and internet companies
I think Factories would have energy consumption rates based on what goods they are manufacturing. Purifying aluminum is radically different from baking cupcakes. To emulate that some goods are more energy intensive than others, the energy consumption factor could be added into the manufacturing.dbt for every recipe in KW/h per manufacturing operation. A simpler alternative would be a flat consumption on every factory.
A good synergy with the digital age DLC would be power-hungry data centers for internet companies. Data centers could be built and give the corporation a global "pool" of data resources (give it some arbitrary unit such as TeraFLOPs, GB/s, whatever), and internet companies would require that computing power based on their type and amount of users. Perhaps some game element where corporations can sell each other computing power (like amazon does) could also be made. Data centers are a huge energy and finance drain on IRL internet companies, so emulating that would be interesting.

Not sure about the data resources part. This seems a bit complicated, but maybe it could work.

Types of powerplant

Nonrenewables:
Coal, Oil, Natural gas - simple, 24/7 production, polluting, no output oscillation
Nuclear power - Clean, extremely expensive setup, expensive fuel, no output oscillation, perhaps a risk of PR issues?

Yes, would require Natural Gas and Uranium as new resources. Also Uranium is actually very cheap compared to the power output, a Nuclear Power Plant would just be very expensive to build.

Renewables:
Biomass - not so dirty, fuel can be an abstracted waste % of the corporation's farm production, a good side business for agriculture focused corps.
Geothermal - no downtime, few spots on map, expensive setup.
Hydro dam - colossal setup cost, high production and low cost, only one site per city with river. Would require adjusted map generation for valid sites and very challenging to develop from a code and art point of view...
Wind and solar: Cheap, require very slow upkeep with new solar panels and blades which could be manufactured by the parent company as a side business. Oscillating output/low quality power. Require more land footprint. Perhaps analogous to the farm module feature in the beta version, their base building could have "fields" of generators added around it.
Fusion power - would have to be researched somehow, only available after the 2030's. Or perhaps something better left for a certain mod.

All are good ideas, although some like the Hydro plant may require map changes to simulate an elevated river or something like that (rather than the totally flat map that currently exists).

Fuels
I didn't come up with complex mechanics for fuels, I think the game's product archetype fits well with this case as some mods have demonstrated (Realworld comes to mind and even my own futureworld), it'd involve only some new product types, a store and category.

Yes, maybe stuff like selling Natural Gas Bottles, Home Solar Panels, Propane (and Propane Accessories) or Charcoal at stores.