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[irmo]

Reducing the power given by waterwheels is no good, as it would make them useless.

It wouldn't, because you can link them together. For exactly the same reason it wouldn't solve the problem.
 

Increasing the power required to operate a pump is also no good, as only one dwarf can operate a pump and an increase would make it impossible to operate manually.

Manual operation doesn't actually generate power; it makes the pump run without power. (This is kind of a hack, but I suspect it's needed to allow a pump to be manually operated while it's connected to other machines.) So manually operating a pump will still work. The problem, again, isn't the exact amount of power involved, but that it's possible to extract energy from the same water over and over.

I tend to think of the water reactor as more like a charming in-universe dwarfism than a bug.

I know we have kind of a tradition of treating bugs as quirks of dwarven behavior (nobles making insane impossible demands, etc.) but this needs to be fixed so that it's possible to balance other machinery when we get some. If the assumption is that everyone has unlimited power available, then all powered machinery is essentially free, and all power sources besides the water reactor are redundant.

Concerning what greenskye said: why should power be readily available on maps without rivers? Rivers give you free energy. Historically that's a major reason to settle near them (second to "free water", which is even more useful) and grain mills, sawmills, smithies, and other industries were built on rivers when possible to take advantage of that.

[K7avenger]

While it can be considered kind of an exploit, I don't see the necessity of removing it. If you're so much against it, just don't use it. Also, remember this, no amount of water wheel/pump exploit fixing will make us want to use windmills. They suck, and that's the BEST case scenario (worst of course, being they won't work at all). Bump windmills up a notch and THEN we can talk. I mean seriously, 40 power from 1 windmill on a good map (or could be 20, or 0, you never know until you build it) and half of that is liable to get eaten just from the gears and axles.

[greenskye]

Concerning what greenskye said: why should power be readily available on maps without rivers? Rivers give you free energy. Historically that's a major reason to settle near them (second to "free water", which is even more useful) and grain mills, sawmills, smithies, and other industries were built on rivers when possible to take advantage of that.

I didn't say that power should be readily available. I meant for power to be balanced properly. This might involve increasing the power output of windmills in deserts or something. I'm not really sure how to fix it, but I do know that removing workarounds before implementing real fixes only frustrates players. If you're going to nerf power availability you should understand the impact removing reactors from the game causes. If you want to make power impossible to achieve on certain maps that's fine, but make that a specific design goal, not just a by-product of removing an exploit.

P.S. I mean "you" as in the general, not "you" specifically.

[G-Flex]

While it can be considered kind of an exploit, I don't see the necessity of removing it. If you're so much against it, just don't use it. Also, remember this, no amount of water wheel/pump exploit fixing will make us want to use windmills. They suck, and that's the BEST case scenario (worst of course, being they won't work at all). Bump windmills up a notch and THEN we can talk. I mean seriously, 40 power from 1 windmill on a good map (or could be 20, or 0, you never know until you build it) and half of that is liable to get eaten just from the gears and axles.

Better wind power would be nice, but we probably shouldn't be able to run ridiculous engineering megaprojects with them; that's what rivers are for. After all, there should be some benefit.


At any rate, it's hard to just ignore the problems with water power and pretend you can't exploit it, because no matter what you do, it doesn't make any sense. The problems that cause perpetual motion are the same problems that let you, say, get infinite energy by putting a ton of waterwheels in a row along the same flow, without any loss. The problem is definitely less obvious, but it's unavoidable.

[K7avenger]

Of course it doesn't make sense, its perpetual motion. But of ALL THE BUGS AND ISSUES that need fixing....does this even register? I mean, don't we have more important things to worry about like say...I dunno...actually getting your military to wear what they're supposed to wear (I still can't get my dwarves to wear cloaks without taking off their breastplate first, hoods either), or getting the miner to realize that yes, you can use the same pick for mining as you do whoopin ass.

[612DwarfAvenue]

I agree, leave this bug for last.

[G-Flex]

Of course it doesn't make sense, its perpetual motion. But of ALL THE BUGS AND ISSUES that need fixing....does this even register? I mean, don't we have more important things to worry about like say...I dunno...actually getting your military to wear what they're supposed to wear (I still can't get my dwarves to wear cloaks without taking off their breastplate first, hoods either), or getting the miner to realize that yes, you can use the same pick for mining as you do whoopin ass.

Of course there are more urgent things that need consideration, but Toady is planning to do some mechanical feature overhauling in the near future, so it's still worth mentioning.

Personally, I'm still waiting for the days when alligators actually bite harder than cows.

[Root Infinity]

Make pumps have a slight water loss.  Problem solved - there has to be new flow in the system or it stops eventually.

Water is mesured in sevenths of a tile. So the minimal loss is 1/7 per pump which is pretty much.(Considering people build pump stacks whit 20+ pumps)
Either decrasing the pump efficiency or water wheel energy production should fix this easily.

What about having (say) a 5% chance of losing 1/7 water, like the way movement is modelled? (wait x steps; y percent chance of moving) That would mean that your 20-height pump stack should lose only ~0.64 units of water per tile pumped(~9% loss if it was full (7/7); ~32% loss if it was only pumping 2/7 tiles), whereas a DWR, pumping pretty much once per frame, would lose water extremely rapidly (a day is 1200 time units, which means ~600 trips through the pump per tile).

This could be tweaked up or down, depending.

[irmo]

What about having (say) a 5% chance of losing 1/7 water, like the way movement is modelled? (wait x steps; y percent chance of moving) That would mean that your 20-height pump stack should lose only ~0.64 units of water per tile pumped(~9% loss if it was full (7/7); ~32% loss if it was only pumping 2/7 tiles), whereas a DWR, pumping pretty much once per frame, would lose water extremely rapidly (a day is 1200 time units, which means ~600 trips through the pump per tile).

That doesn't fix the problem. The problem is not that the same water can be infinitely recycled in a closed system. It's that waterwheels produce energy without slowing down the water or reducing its pressure.

[kaenneth]

I was thinking that Waterwheels should require the water drop a z-level to generate power, instead of just flowing horizontally.

[LordZorintrhox]

I've always thought that fluids should have some sort of "energy" on the tile representing the flow (energy of 0 being stagnant water, brooks might be 4, major rivers 10, whatever).

Realistically they should, but that makes the fluid physics massively more complicated.

I thought I should give more of a reason why it makes the physics more complicated: water (I am pretty sure) teleports when it travels through a system in DF, so the energy would not be coherent and you could (possibly) make an even worse exploit with a cunning arrangement of tunnels, assuming that water is some sort of "object" that moves around and not a property of an empty tile.

While I agree there are more pressing bugs/quirks, it still warrants some (more) thought.

Hmmm, if a water wheel needed the water to fall to generate power, let's instead assume it needed it to fall 3 z levels, since the building is three tiles long anyway and water wheels are circular.  That means you'd need 4 screw pumps to get the water high enough to fall over the wheel if you drew water from the same basin as the wheel sits on.  That leaves a net power of 50 ( 90 - 10 x 4 ).  If you halve a waterwheel's power output, then it at least breaks even which would be the case in a frictionless world.  Bump up a waterwheel's power consumption to 15 and it is a loosing system and will never work.

A more complicated but perhaps better solution may be to use the fact that a waterwheel is already aware if it sits on top of moving water.  If you change that to being aware of how many tiles of moving water are within the imaginary 3x3x1 volume which the wheel takes up, with a max count of three, then you might have something.  You could say the output of the wheel is 15 x n, where n is the number of moving tiles of water.  The wheel would consume 10 itself, leaving a max output of 35.  Change pumps to use 15 power.  Then for max power, you need 60 power to pump the water and you will always need 25 more power than what the wheel can possibly provide.

Of course, that nerfs waterwheels significantly, but it is sorta odd that you can currently power a pump from 80 tiles away.  Assuming DF tiles are around 2 meters, that means a 9 foot water wheel can power a pump that can move eight cubic meters of water two meters high from one and two thirds football fields away.  In terms of the wooden bearings alone that seems rather impossible.

[Root Infinity]

I've always thought that fluids should have some sort of "energy" on the tile representing the flow (energy of 0 being stagnant water, brooks might be 4, major rivers 10, whatever).

Realistically they should, but that makes the fluid physics massively more complicated.

I thought I should give more of a reason why it makes the physics more complicated: water (I am pretty sure) teleports when it travels through a system in DF, so the energy would not be coherent and you could (possibly) make an even worse exploit with a cunning arrangement of tunnels, assuming that water is some sort of "object" that moves around and not a property of an empty tile.

While I agree there are more pressing bugs/quirks, it still warrants some (more) thought.

Hmmm, if a water wheel needed the water to fall to generate power, let's instead assume it needed it to fall 3 z levels, since the building is three tiles long anyway and water wheels are circular.  That means you'd need 4 screw pumps to get the water high enough to fall over the wheel if you drew water from the same basin as the wheel sits on.  That leaves a net power of 50 ( 90 - 10 x 4 ).  If you halve a waterwheel's power output, then it at least breaks even which would be the case in a frictionless world.  Bump up a waterwheel's power consumption to 15 and it is a loosing system and will never work.

A more complicated but perhaps better solution may be to use the fact that a waterwheel is already aware if it sits on top of moving water.  If you change that to being aware of how many tiles of moving water are within the imaginary 3x3x1 volume which the wheel takes up, with a max count of three, then you might have something.  You could say the output of the wheel is 15 x n, where n is the number of moving tiles of water.  The wheel would consume 10 itself, leaving a max output of 35.  Change pumps to use 15 power.  Then for max power, you need 60 power to pump the water and you will always need 25 more power than what the wheel can possibly provide.

Of course, that nerfs waterwheels significantly, but it is sorta odd that you can currently power a pump from 80 tiles away.  Assuming DF tiles are around 2 meters, that means a 9 foot water wheel can power a pump that can move eight cubic meters of water two meters high from one and two thirds football fields away.  In terms of the wooden bearings alone that seems rather impossible.

Yea... but before that we'd need better scaling. Having two kittens unable to stand in a tile but 9999 dragons able to sit on the selfsame tile doesn't make sense. It should be easy, relatively speaking, to fix all of the issues like this once one decides on a specific scale, however, I believe that that would require a jump at least as large as the jump from 2d to 3d, if not larger. It would change the entire feel of the game...

[profit]

Honestly... The use of the power is marginal at best, it is not like you can power any real industries or anything from water wheels... Why even bother patching this exploit..

I haven't built anything that has been hooked up to a water wheel in ages...   If I ever do, it is probably for a pump stack that I have no real use for other than flooding the world in magma...

There are a million other things I would be concerned about, before wasting precious coding time with something so marginal that it would barely effect game play...  Even the bolt melting exploit would probably be a higher priority than this.

[K7avenger]

I don't think it would take long to code for this. You'd simply have to turn the energy requirements for pumps up and lower energy generation of water wheels. That's what....2 numbers? 3 if you make windmills useful. But I'm with profit when he says that there's not much use for power at the moment. Its used for pumps and....millstones. That's all. And I, for some reason, doubt that people are setting up reactors to power millstones so that leaves the pumps. Which are probably (like profit said!) pumping magma up for forges or flooding the world, and the novelty of the latter gets old pretty fast. I think...I think we need more things for power to, well...power.

[G-Flex]

I don't think it would take long to code for this. You'd simply have to turn the energy requirements for pumps up and lower energy generation of water wheels. That's what....2 numbers?

I already described why this wouldn't be sufficient. Even if a pump requires 100 power and a waterwheel only provides 1 power, you can still use a pump to generate a flow and then stick 200 waterwheels along that flow.