Can’t call this a Bug, but it wasn’t mentioned in any of the notes on the new Version, so here goes:
Downloaded 8 today, continued an already started game from yesterday. Within minutes 3 out of my 4 wells went dry. All were working fine for the first 3 - 5 years’ of game play on 7.6, dried up within a game Month or so on 8.
Question: is the sensitivity of wells to the ground water been increased? In a half-dozen games started on 7.6, I never had this many wells go dry so fast, and it was not on a ‘dry’ map!
I now have the same issue and I was near the 250 population mark. Now all the wells are dry, which basically ruined this playthrough. I started over and now, there’s nearly zero places with water on a lowland lakes map. I could understand having some areas where water might be a little less available on a map of that type but certainly not so rare that the well would have to be so far or rare that one couldn’t have a functioning map, specifically on a lowland lakes map.
New water wells now start at 0 and the level grows from there, gradually filling over time, taking into consideration the irrigation level of the well area.
The best thing that could be done, make many wells, preventing proximity, when you go up and level up, it will normalize, my city had a high level of dry wells, but there was no lack of water, the markets had almost 500 units of water each, so I saw no problems
I’ve been playing 0.8 in the playtest and always get the low water icons but I just build more around your city and I’ve never had any problems being out of water even when there is a fire. Also planting trees around the well helps as well.
My issue, in fact, was that every well except one almost immediately went to Dry over a relatively short time without displaying any ‘low water’ warnings at all - and this on a lowland lakes map in which the entire area was showing medium blue in overlay. I was able to move or redig the wells and get water, but I’ll go back tomorrow in another session and see how long the new wells last. IF, on a relatively wet map (all the wells were within 15 tiles of a pond or lake) I have to dig new wells every few years, what in the world will happen on an arid map?
That isn’t a normal action of the game. When the new well is built it should immediately signal a low water level until 50 units of water has been stored in it.
This is probaby just a difference in how you’re wording it, but when one digs a well, it’s to access groundwater to get water from it, not to store water in it. On a lowland lakes map, the natural assumption is that the water table is higher and thus those wells would never be automatically dry when initially dug.
Your analysis is correct. But the game uses and treats that water as “storage.” Hence my usage.
The game pre 8.0 wasn’t notifying us of low water levels with level 1 wells, so I expect we just didn’t notice the wells need to fill up. Like you, I always assumed they came full or near full once built.
If the game treats wells as “storage” then why aren’t they listed under Storage, versus as a proper Resource?
Chalking this up to ‘fantasy setting’ because when you dig an actual well, you’re either in the groundwater or you’re not. There’s no ‘waiting for it to fill up’.
I said the water was treated as storage in the well, not the well itself. I believe all resource buildings have some internal storage. In the case of water, however, the well is the primary storage.
A simple tutorial by Crate should solve any confusion caused by the well fill and storage ability.
For the record, this is what is actually happening here (at least for me):
The well that is nearest to a market will basically always run dry. There will be one of the workers constantly going back and forth between the well and the market, constantly taking water from the well.
Why Markets suddenly need so much water is a mystery to me. Why they don’t decide to go to another well that is fuller is also not veyr logical. But that seems to be what’s going on, anyway.
Started a quick new game last night primarily to dig a well and see what happened. Sure enough, got a Dry Well indication right away, then it disappeared after a few minutes.
So, the system is working in 8 as described. I suspect my problem was having wells ‘left over’ from 7.6 when I fired up the on-going game in 8 yesterday - the game, basically, was catching up on notifications it had not given me before.
They do need to make the ‘well mechanic’ clear in a tutorial/pop-up note, however, because it is counter-intuitive: as far as I can tell, it is the only FF ‘storage’ that automatically fills up over time AND tells you it is empty as if there is something you have to do about it. I think, in my original 7.6 to 8 game, I just dug 3 unnecessary new wells when I should have just waited . . .
But this is exactly wrong: the well starts out Dry and then fills up without any need to ‘build more wells’. I’m going to check to confirm this later today, but that’s how it seemed to work this morning and how it was described. Need to rewrite this Tip, unless I’ve mis-understood the mechanic completely.
I see what you mean, but the tooltip isn’t wrong. If the well has run dry, it would generally be because you don’t have enough wells.
The problem isn’t this tooltip itself - the info it gives is usually correct. The problem is that the tooltip shows when you’ve just placed the well, in which case it’s not correct.
And another problem seems to be that the closest well to any market also runs dry because the market just constantly takes all the water is has from it.
