Windmills are useful when you are fine with something operating only occasionally, like a gristmill that doesnt need to run 24/7 or a paper factory, or when you dont want to or cant mess with water.īeaver power is great early on and again beavers are easy to crank out and if you only need to run 1 or 2 buildings beaver power is just better since you dont need to fiddle with the wind or water nonsense involved and can place them anywhere. water wheels do work during droughts but you do have to build a damn to hold water and feed them during the drought. Water wheels need both depth and rate of flow to properly turn, not much really like you could have a beaver pee on it and it would crank out max power. long as you give a waterwheel max flow it should always operate at 100% but windmills can fluctuate, i dont think ive ever seen mine drop below 50% though. they do only operate with the wind and some times that starts at the dead of night and ends just shortly after the work day starts. i always place mine high up though ive never really stuck a windmill in a canyon.

This is key.Īll windmills turn to face the wind, or at least mine do big and small im not sure why yours would not be. Slow moving water, as an example, will not allow the water wheel to generate 100% efficiency. As an example, creating turns, widening or narrowing water paths in certain ways, including the use of levees to get the water to travel with differing levels of 'flowing force', as you see fit. One thing I've noticed is the game is VERY centered around manipulating the land and water flow. Beaver powered wheels only operate during working hours, small windmills don't turn with the wind (no wind gauges), large windmills are usually reliable, while water wheels are the best, but are useless during droughts. The fact is that none of the game's power sources ever run 24/7. I haven't seen any real 'weather mechanics' in the game outside of flooding and droughts, but there appears to be 'windy days' and 'non-windy days' as I've seen a number of times in my current city, where the large ones aren't always running.

I've seen this occasionally with the large windmills (turn with the wind) whereas the little ones don't. the district management system, supposedly there to help with the pathfinding, is cumbersome and extremely annoying to use.Įven with these shortcomings (which may be fixed one day), it's well worth the price if you like city builders with a minecraft taste.Originally posted by ianscott1957:Mine keep stopping with no output showing. there's an exploit which can be used to negate droughts almost completely and, unless they do some major modifications to the way water evaporation works, it's impossible to fix. Banished felt a lot more dangerous and it had very few resources. the number of resources/production chains is bloating for no particularly good reason. The problem is games are very much binary (at least at the highest level): either you manage to get droughts under control and then they are irrelevant, or you don't and you 'die' (something which you can always avoid with some creative population management tricks, actually.). I've got it some time ago and it's a solid game with some good ideas (like different foods/improvements providing boosts to citizen's performance).

Timberborn windmills