hello, I am working on the gameplay part of my RTS and have decided to implement a power grid so that the user must have power sources for all buildings/units... In real life, if say more power is trying to be pulled from a system than it can handel what happens? does the whole plant go down and thus no one gets power? do only people far away lose power while the rest of the people use up all of the power the plant is putting out? How does this work in real life? What would be the best method in respect to the gameplay? Thanx Dwiel

i don''t know for sure, but i reckon it the plant would stop working. You could implement a sweet little situation where if you make a building and attach it to the grid, then if it overloads the plant/s then they all suffer a large amount of damage, due to things blowing up etc...and the amount of power they can provide is proportional to their damage. thus you would have to repair them, and build another one to sustain the grid.

So you think that if say, you try to pull 100 megawatts, but the plant can only handel 95, the plant would partially blow up... and then stop suppling energy? Or would it just say for a short while before it heats up, only supply energy to certain buildings? which buildings would it stop giving energy to?

Thanx!

Dwiel

Er.. actually, if you''re talking about creating a semi-realistic scenario, the power plant would literally just not be able to supply enough power. What happens in the real world is typically known as Brown Outs, wherein not enough power is supplied to a building: lights are dimmed (hence the term brown out) and electricity-consuming resources produce less than desirable output. Ever try watching TV during a brownout? It looks like the picture has been vertically squashed and the volume is often lower than it should be.

Of course, if you leave the TV on for any significant period of time you''re going to damage your TV. Same with other sensitive equipment like computers. Even your refrigerator and washer/dryer can be damaged if you don''t unplug them.

But the interesting thing is that it doesn''t happen everywhere. It is in fact fairly random. And of course if it is TOO overloaded, the power simply goes out, in some or all of the affected area.

So, what I''d recommend for you game is a sort of interim period -- say your powerplant can support 95 units of energy, as in the previous example. For anything over 95 but under, say, 120 units, the player gets the message that "Brown outs have been reported across the city" (/base/whatever) and a random set of buildings are labeled accordingly and begin to take a small but continuous amount of damage while production continues at that building. The damage can only be stopped by "turning off the power" at that location, rendering the building ineffective for the time being, or of course by adding another power plant or generator.

Naturally, if the load exceeds 120 units, the power simply goes out at a random set of buildings. The player would do well at this time to turn off the power at buildings that are semi-ok to sacrifice if they cant afford another powerplant, because the random power outage could affect any building on the grid, meaning that even the most critical buildings might even be affected.

Take creative license with that of course just some ideas.

Thanx for the info! It sounds like if I can implement it correctly, I should be able to add quite a bit of gameplay in this respect. In my RTS, buildings within a city are very interdependent, like in real life. In this way, power plants can be targets that would cause a lot of damage to a city...

thanx again. This real-life occurance is much more interesting than my idea where the units closer to the power plant get ''served'' first, and if the plant runs out, the buildings far away are screwed...

Thanx again!

Dwiel

Another option in addition to brownouts (altho this might get into micromanagement too much).

Have the power system managed in such a way that it can issue rolling blackouts when it detects there is not enough power. this way all building have either full/no power. this would be optional to the player of course depending on which he perfered.

Rolling blackouts would make sense, especially if the player could designate parts of the grid to be crucial or some such.

Then the rolling blackout system would turn off non crucial parts of city to maintain the crucial buildings such as hosptials, defense structures, etc.

yeah, the funny thing however is BLACK-OUTS ... I have never found out exactly how or why this happens, but it my understanding that significant brown-outs would also damage the power plants/grids themselves .. as the entire system is in a symbitic managed relationship, where switches are constantly attempting to product exactly the right amount of power for the current usage scenerio ... so when usage rises and falls significantly, in the real world more plants "come online" or "go offline" which basically means they are taken out of the grid temporarily (they may still be operating, but there power is just being thrown away, when offline) ... and the problem is, you can actually try to draw more power down a given line, then it can support ... in which case, once it goes beyond a certain safety margin, it shuts down ... which causes the power draw to be rerouted through other areas of the grid, which might also cause them to exceed their limits ... and a cascade effect happens ...

note, this can only really happen if the change either occurs unexpectedly, or is so great as to be unmanagable ... but remember that it happened for real in the US when basically the entire north-eastern US lost power one night ... because the grid operators could never get enough alternate generators and routes opened up to support the current usage (or actually it may have been they didn''t take enough generators offline when usage fell ... i can''t remember) ...

Yeah, I kinda thought of that too...It does add more gameplay that way... it is also easier to implement... huh... This adds a level of gameplay by letting the user choose the most important buildings. I might use a mix of both.. the user can control the order in which the buildings loose power, and bldgs without power are damaged due to the abrupt and unexpected power outage. also a building that experiences a power outage would take some time when power returns to get all systems up and going again...

thanx for all of the thoughts!

Dwiel

Edit... didn't see Xai's post

that would add an interesting effect to a game, and is actually a very interesting phenomenon in real life, but I think that in my situation, where the city bieng powered is much smaller than any decent sized city.. they will be more like military bases.. That would also be very hard to simulate and very hard for the player to manipulate...

Thanx for the info though!

Dwiel

[edited by - Tazzel3d on March 20, 2003 12:08:15 AM]

or..........


you could make the power plants nuclear, and if they overload they explode- thus wiping out the entire city.

mwhahahahah!!!!!!!!

I like the limit on power etc. What i would do, is actually just hinder output. Simulated brownout. Example...

Say your powerstation can output a max of 95. You just built a new Aritilary Hangglider Production Plant. Your power plant is already at 85 for output. Well say you need 20 units of power to sustain this crucial "Aritilary Hangglider Production Plant".

Well its still getting 10 units of power. WHich is half of what the plant needs. Complete half the process that they need to do (cutting, drilling who cares).. but they have to turn those tools off to use other tools to finish production... etc etc...

Well do to the process and what not.... Production is now hindered according to the percentage you went over. We are missing 50% of the power that is needed to maintain this facility... So naturally instead of being totally incapacitated,(We''ll assume those workers in there are smart and will share the power like I spelled out above), the plant missing 50% of its power...can only operate at 50% efficiancy.

So say it takes 2 minutes to build a hangglider... it now takes 4 minutes.

This is more than likely what i''d try to implement. I also liked the other ideas suggested.

-DD