Power Supply Problems

[zebulon_stonehenge 135]

On 3/15/2019 at 2:12 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

Maybe some mods or plopped lots were bugged with improperly modded properties, and their residual effects got saved in the tile.

Aye, I've seen similar behavior. (See thread "Destroying Ashland Station" here in Simtropolis, in which I had a Cecila's Poison Taco Stand, that had been contaminated by a nearby "immortal" Ashland Station. I did manage to get rid of the station finally (by building an airport on top of it, then demolishing the airport), but the taco stand was poisoned: if I destroyed the taco stand, or failed to mark it "Historical" so that it re-developed, the game would crash, either immediately or on next save. So, city files can get corrupted in very weird ways due to one bad structure.

On the other hand, I seem to recall reading somewhere than windmills have a power-distribution distance limit of a few km. Maybe I'm just remembering wrong, but that's what I seem to recall. The problem windmill being 3/4 of the way around the loop from the brownout area seems suspicious to me ("power fade" effect, like you'd eventually have with real power lines, if you made them thousands of miles long).

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 9/30/2019 at 12:21 AM, zebulon_stonehenge said:

I seem to recall reading somewhere than windmills have a power-distribution distance limit

I've just run into this myself. Since @tails2489 started each new city by conducting power around the edges, the power grid got confuzzled by the distance. In my city, I wasn't even using a wind generator (I had a neighbor connection instead). The power could travel about 2.5 sides of a large sector (maybe 640 cells). I completed the loop so the power never had to travel more than two sides (~500 cells), and the dead zone cleared up.

@CorinaMarieThis power transmission limit should be easy to demonstrate to yourself my creating one large power source and then zoning / building transmission lines around the edge of a large map until the power just refuses to go any further (it'll even stop in the middle of the span of a transmission line).

[CorinaMarie 29,868]

@jeffryfisher

Yes, indeed. I just did a couple of tests with the last one having little farms and residential around the border and we do still hit a limit for how far the power can be transmitted. I did this particular test with 8 windmills and then added a coal power plant next to them. That did not extend the distance the power would go.

Then the weird thing is I added windmills along this chain of distribution fully expecting that would extend the power by the same distance, but it did not. So, it seems like once the bug is triggered it's locked into that part of the city tile.

 

Even adding one right nearby after the bug is triggered does not help:

[Naomi57 2,985]

On 25/03/2019 at 3:39 AM, jeffryfisher said:

Lookin' good. With my traffic settings in TSCT, my rule of thumb is that I can zone commercial when morning traffic approaches 1000. In my traffic display, that shows up as a yellowish green.

What surprises me is that freeway traffic suffices! I can zone commercial facing a sleepy street/road but with an active freeway behind the lots, and the noise from the freeway somehow gives the businesses plenty of customers as drivers zoom past. That little bit of weirdness guides some of my city-design, as I now reserve the cells along freeways for eventual commercial development.

Yes, I do that, too.  

It helps my sense of realism that this kind of "back door facing the highway" arrangement is actually not unusual in Australia, accompanied by large advertising signs on the highway side of buildings, or signs on the highway approaches/exits themselves.  I presume that happens elsewhere, too?

    

    

 

[Propfam 2,297]

On 23/3/2019 at 4:21 AM, CorinaMarie said:

Ofc, this is not in isolation. You may recall I created a random region and imported your city into a large tile. Then after playing to see if there were any save problems I noticed how I could grow things very easily due to The Plopmatic 9000 mod/lot. Peeking inside with Reader, that actually sets all the demands to 50k each. (They didn't update the graph to display more than 6,000.)

It looks like it's designed for CAM, before the mod even exist yet. That's an insane forward looking decision.