I Hate Natural Disasters

[Matthias King 348]

I hate Natural Disasters.

I don't even have the DLC, but now if I terraform and get flooding, every building collapses. Basically it destroys my city. I didn't want ND, that's why I didn't buy it, yet I still have to deal with the effects of the DLC.

My question is this: is there any way to disable all effects of ND?

[Sparks44 92]

Yup, looks like we need a new mod! 'waterproof buildings '

[Matthias King 348]

Also, I have the 'No Fires' mod, yet one of my buildings caught on fire.

I hope there's a way to turn off all DLC features.

[Lost Gecko 481]

Never experienced it yet because I haven't played much since the update but now that terraforming is an in-game feature, you could indeed reasonably expect to use it on shorelines without negative consequence. Right now shoreline terraforming is not viable, which is very unfortunate.

[mutton noir 170]

I bought the ND DLC and played a couple of times building a vanilla city. It was a real chore and hi-lighted just how far the community has been responsible for taking the game to a whole new level since launch. The two vanilla games were enough- as I expected the novelty soon wore off. I enjoy the USP of the game- the ability to CREATE cities. CO seem to react to a small but very vocal minority of the community and become easily distracted by "bright shiny things" that sees them veer off course and disappear down rabbit holes creating idiosyncratic "solutions" to niche "problems"- think eternal winter in Snowfall, undeveloped canal systems that add little if anything to the game, football stadiums and the crazy "match day" mechanic, pointless radio stations featuring 3rd rate re recorded versions of 60s hits and that bl**dy annoying Chirpy bird. Individually you could say that each of these projects doesn't amount to much but taken together it becomes a fair amount of development time and human resources/skills that could be put (in my opinion) to better use. Even with ND switched off the number of fires that break out continually are a real pain.  I for one would love to see some key mods integrated with the base game and have a range of bridges added to the kit of parts along with basic parking lots and possibly even expand the public park system/canals- all pretty basic stuff. I know that many fans would like to see an overhaul of the traffic mechanics. I love this game and I'm keen to support CO but they seem to lack an overall strategy/routemap as to how the game will develop. I really do hope that CO get back to the more practical elements of the game and address these core issues

[R3V0 909]

1 hour ago, mutton noir said:

I bought the ND DLC and played a couple of times building a vanilla city. It was a real chore and hi-lighted just how far the community has been responsible for taking the game to a whole new level since launch. The two vanilla games were enough- as I expected the novelty soon wore off. I enjoy the USP of the game- the ability to CREATE cities. CO seem to react to a small but very vocal minority of the community and become easily distracted by "bright shiny things" that sees them veer off course and disappear down rabbit holes creating idiosyncratic "solutions" to niche "problems"- think eternal winter in Snowfall, undeveloped canal systems that add little if anything to the game, football stadiums and the crazy "match day" mechanic, pointless radio stations featuring 3rd rate re recorded versions of 60s hits and that bl**dy annoying Chirpy bird. Individually you could say that each of these projects doesn't amount to much but taken together it becomes a fair amount of development time and human resources/skills that could be put (in my opinion) to better use. Even with ND switched off the number of fires that break out continually are a real pain.  I for one would love to see some key mods integrated with the base game and have a range of bridges added to the kit of parts along with basic parking lots and possibly even expand the public park system/canals- all pretty basic stuff. I know that many fans would like to see an overhaul of the traffic mechanics. I love this game and I'm keen to support CO but they seem to lack an overall strategy/routemap as to how the game will develop. I really do hope that CO get back to the more practical elements of the game and address these core issues

 

Add network extension ? Nope. 

Add ability to select bridge themes ? Nope. 

Add ability to arrange the range of service buildings indivually vs. costs ? Nope. 

Vary metro connections ? Nope. 

Add monorail ? Nope. 

Unshackle object limit like tress ? Nope. 

Dynamic weather ? Nope. 

Improved Traffic AI ? Nope. 

Improved Sub buildings ? Nope. 

Illuminate props ? Nope. 

Hey, let's add some radio stations no one ever listens... Oh let's make terraforming into something that it becomes practically useless and sell it as a "feature". 

 

 

[Matthias King 348]

I can't really progress on the city I'm building until this is resolved.

I had to dump a few hours of progress after I started terraforming, expecting the typical flooding, but then I saw the water was destroying my entire city. I had to quit to main menu and lose everything I'd worked on since my last save. I would have saved before terraforming, but I had no reason to. I had no idea about the new ND mechanics, especially since I don't even HAVE Natural Disasters. I didn't want it, specifically because I have no desire to see the city I'm building get randomly destroyed.

Why is this even happening in my game without the DLC?

[Robban040 1,091]

5 minutes ago, Matthias King said:

I can't really progress on the city I'm building until this is resolved.

I had to dump a few hours of progress after I started terraforming, expecting the typical flooding, but then I saw the water was destroying my entire city. I had to quit to main menu and lose everything I'd worked on since my last save. I would have saved before terraforming, but I had no reason to. I had no idea about the new ND mechanics, especially since I don't even HAVE Natural Disasters. I didn't want it, specifically because I have no desire to see the city I'm building get randomly destroyed.

Why is this even happening in my game without the DLC?

I have the same problem. I solved it for the moment with plopping down alot of fire stations. When I terraform the water i just do it small steps at a time. Sucks and is VERY time consuming, but thats all we can do at this time i guess :/

[R3V0 909]

10 minutes ago, Matthias King said:

I can't really progress on the city I'm building until this is resolved.

I had to dump a few hours of progress after I started terraforming, expecting the typical flooding, but then I saw the water was destroying my entire city. I had to quit to main menu and lose everything I'd worked on since my last save. I would have saved before terraforming, but I had no reason to. I had no idea about the new ND mechanics, especially since I don't even HAVE Natural Disasters. I didn't want it, specifically because I have no desire to see the city I'm building get randomly destroyed.

Why is this even happening in my game without the DLC?

I don't think it is going to be solved.

It might be even a feature. As it stands it doesnt allow you to plan your station THEN terraform nearby. You have to terraform first and build your thing as it works in the reality. If you want to terraform well you have to destroy the district do terraform and proceed.

If you want to build canals and terraforming for this, you don't hve to! CS has completely useful canals that you can use.

Now of course if you terraform somewhere on the other edge of the map, you shouldn't have those issues. But even then, you might have some flood and this brings a bit fun to the game ! 

Also terraforming should be used only in map creation, players have to adapt their cities according to the map, not the other way round.

See it's a feature.

 

/irony 

[Sparks44 92]

I agree, it probably wont be fixed at all. We need a mod ASAP!

[Matthias King 348]

2 hours ago, R3V0 said:

I don't think it is going to be solved.

It might be even a feature. As it stands it doesnt allow you to plan your station THEN terraform nearby. You have to terraform first and build your thing as it works in the reality. If you want to terraform well you have to destroy the district do terraform and proceed.

If you want to build canals and terraforming for this, you don't hve to! CS has completely useful canals that you can use.

Now of course if you terraform somewhere on the other edge of the map, you shouldn't have those issues. But even then, you might have some flood and this brings a bit fun to the game ! 

Also terraforming should be used only in map creation, players have to adapt their cities according to the map, not the other way round.

See it's a feature.

 

/irony 

I'm just looking to terraform the coastlines, but that causes massive floods. That was fine before, but now, thanks to ND, it's literally a disaster.

I hate this. The last thing I need is MORE mods. Plus, the 'No Fires' mod apparently isn't working because, as I said, I had a fire with that mod installed. It worked great before ND.

[Judazzz 1,936]

Isn't the mod you talk about supposed to stop the spread of fire, rather than fires starting in the first place? I subbed to a mod to get rid of those huge forest fires that kept spontaneously erupting, but it doesn't stop fires altogether. It also has a bunch of sliders in its settings panel that allow you to define the measure of fire spread, from normal (vanilla) to no spread at all, and lastly it can disable fire completely.

[whiteshark365 563]

I cant say I have come across this before; then again I usually keep the water lines unmodified when I work on a map, other then modifying them for harbors and other "small" changes that typically do not alter the water levels significantly.

One suggestion I could offer however, is to modify the water level before making major coast-line changes. Such as damming off the area you want to modify with the terrain tools with a narrow strip of land no more than 1 grid space across and then drain or significantly lower the water level within it. After you are finished then fill it back up to the normal water level and remove the temporary land dam after you reach the desired water level.

If anyone is maybe working on a mod for this, perhaps create one that disables the code that causes a building to collapse when flooded.

[Matthias King 348]

As far as I know, the 'No Fires' mod just disabled buildings catching on fire in general. After I started using it, no buildings ever caught on fire again. Not until this most recent time.

I started using it so I could just put down fire stations where they made sense instead of a fire headquarters every other block to prevent everything from burning down.

Certain buildings in an old save kept burning down, despite having a fire station literally right around the block, so I got the No Fires mod and that took care of it.

Not anymore, though.

@whiteshark365 I hope someone is working on something like that. Something that just disables the ND 'features' and stops buildings from collapsing in general.

I have the 'No Abandonment' and 'No Fires' mods. If they come out with 'No Collapse' mod, that would work I think. It would be nice if they combined the fires and collapse into one mod, since the 'No Fires' mod apparently no longer works post-ND.

[Matthias King 348]

Is anyone currently working on any mods to counteract the ND game mechanics?

[knighthawk75 56]

On 12/31/2016 at 11:21 AM, Matthias King said:

I'm just looking to terraform the coastlines, but that causes massive floods. That was fine before, but now, thanks to ND, it's literally a disaster.

I hate this. The last thing I need is MORE mods. Plus, the 'No Fires' mod apparently isn't working because, as I said, I had a fire with that mod installed. It worked great before ND.

Matthias,

If you mean the ones that just flip the Building Manager m_firesDisabled bit to true, yeah it's not going to stop disaster invoked fires, but it *should still stop* normal random fires. From what I saw they changed the system such that all fires from what I can tell are now a 'disasters' the only question is if the fire is actually tied to a 'real disaster', or not (ie normal fire).  I found this out while making the Tree Fire control mod (you can find it in the workshop), though that is very specific to just tree fires\spreading and doesn't touch buildings.  BTW for what it's worth I have ND and flipping m_firesDisabled seems to still work fine so long as you don't manually start structure fires (via disasters tools and have random disasters turned off) from what I've noticed anyway - it's possible it's happened and I've missed it though. The code in CommonBuildingAI HandleFires was rewritten between 1.4 and 1.6 but the check for the above mentioned flag is still there, so it shouldn't be a issue for you, but I suppose there are other places rewritten or new that might be missing the check.

PS - Not entirely related but fyi radio masts placed outside a road area once catching fire in 1.6.2, can't actually be put out, either the fire choppers don't know how, or the mast ai doesn't register themselves such that they'll be acted on. I imagine that will be fixed in the next update though.  

re:Terraform flooding and CollapseIfFlooded, this is something I think might be hard to solve, they can add a check if ND is owned (like they do for some things but don't for that), but in cases where those that do own ND that don't want that behavior I'm not sure the best way to address it since I don't think the water can be tied to a specific disaster, maybe just an options toggle peeps can turn on during major terraforming activities.

[Matthias King 348]

11 hours ago, knighthawk75 said:

Matthias,

If you mean the ones that just flip the Building Manager m_firesDisabled bit to true, yeah it's not going to stop disaster invoked fires, but it *should still stop* normal random fires. From what I saw they changed the system such that all fires from what I can tell are now a 'disasters' the only question is if the fire is actually tied to a 'real disaster', or not (ie normal fire).  I found this out while making the Tree Fire control mod (you can find it in the workshop), though that is very specific to just tree fires\spreading and doesn't touch buildings.  BTW for what it's worth I have ND and flipping m_firesDisabled seems to still work fine so long as you don't manually start structure fires (via disasters tools and have random disasters turned off) from what I've noticed anyway - it's possible it's happened and I've missed it though. The code in CommonBuildingAI HandleFires was rewritten between 1.4 and 1.6 but the check for the above mentioned flag is still there, so it shouldn't be a issue for you, but I suppose there are other places rewritten or new that might be missing the check.

PS - Not entirely related but fyi radio masts placed outside a road area once catching fire in 1.6.2, can't actually be put out, either the fire choppers don't know how, or the mast ai doesn't register themselves such that they'll be acted on. I imagine that will be fixed in the next update though.  

re:Terraform flooding and CollapseIfFlooded, this is something I think might be hard to solve, they can add a check if ND is owned (like they do for some things but don't for that), but in cases where those that do own ND that don't want that behavior I'm not sure the best way to address it since I don't think the water can be tied to a specific disaster, maybe just an options toggle peeps can turn on during major terraforming activities.

Thanks. I hope someone can figure out a solution for this, because until they do, I can't do anything with my city. I need to reform the land to continue, but I can do that without destroying all of what I've already built. So hopefully someone figures out a 'Disable ND' mod or something like that.

I can't tell you how irritating this is, given that I don't even OWN Natural Disasters. I avoided buying it specifically because of something like this. I figured if I had it, the game would randomly destroy things in my city, and I didn't want that. I'm a city painter. I don't care about gameplay. So I skipped ND entirely.

But surprise! I get that anyway.

[Judazzz 1,936]

The reason you get that is that DLC's only add assets, services etc. Any underlying mechanics (both new and changed) are part of the accompanying game update (in this case 1.6), never of the DLC itself, which means every player gets those mechanics whether they buy the DLC or not.
Admittedly, this can be annoying or frustrating, but it makes sense from the developer's point of view, because this is the only way they have a guarantee every player has the same version of the base game. And trust me (speaking from experience), as a developer you don't want to support several versions/iterations of your product - something that applies to modders as well: if I had to support several different versions of my mods for several different versions of the base game, I'd never have gotten into it (and I doubt I would be the only one).

[Avanya 2,605]

I think what makes it feel the worst is the fact that it didn't used to be like this. If water had always destroyed buildings (perhaps just despawned), then we would have been used to working around it. I totally get the frustration - I had out of control fires at the start (part of the DLC, but still there with disasters turned off) killing my framerate and all the detailing I'd done. Personally I avoid doing much if any landscaping around shorelines once I start building. I've flooded my cities too much and even if they weren't destroy it still caused massive issues and abandonment for me. And while it's put you (and prob others) in a crappy situation atm I think it makes sense to keep water as a destructive force - I just kinda wish it had been like that from the start.

Hopefully we can get a mod to make everything indestructable for those situations, where you need to flood a part of the city to get what you want. One thing that might work until then (depending on the map and how the water flow is done) is to use Extra Landscaping Tools to lower the sea level while landscaping. 

[Matthias King 348]

I'm hoping someone just comes out with a mod like what you said @Avanya to disable collapsing buildings. I have 'No Abandonment' and 'No Fires' now I need 'No Collapsing.'

[Judazzz 1,936]

I guess it's time for a God Mod^TM    

[xesolor 1]

I apologise if this would be reviving a dead thread, but had to dig out my old account just to say this - I God damn hate the collapsing. Biggest annoyance - I have to terraform the coast to manually plot all the beautiful curves of a seawall, lower the terrain, flood ensues, and voila! All the f**king seawall pieces I meticulously angled by hand, gone! 

If plopping anywhere else fine, but how the hell would they expect us to plop seawalls without terraforming the flipping coast?! I subscribe to dozens of community mods without which the game would be unplayable for me, I hope I'm not being ungrateful by pleading for some genius smarter than I to come up with a "no collapse" mod, you would be my hero. P.s. No water collapse coupled with no water check would allow things like creating offshore flooded cities from films like Ghost in the Shell, wouldn't that be cool! 

[Matthias King 348]

Agree 100%.