Hurricanes and disaster relief.

[Electric Monkey]

How do you guys cope? Every time I've had a hurricane it's finished me off for good -  the farms tend to go quite easily, and even if they're still standing, then the fields are waterlogged and the crops don't grow as well. By the time I've rebuilt and found new workers to replace the casualties, everyone's starving and the economy's down the drain. The world bank imposes salary caps, I have to cancel an election, a US gunboat turns up to ask why I'm not making enough money, and then my army turns against me.

Even worse is when there's a one-two punch, with two storms within 5 years or so. That can take out the docks, and render the old sites unusable. With cluttered shorelines like I tend to have, that can ruin me totally.

[Coconut Kid]

... render the old sites unusable. ...

And just how is that? You are supposed to be able to build right on top of the debris piles. In some cases along the coast that can be quite a saving in leveling land work.

... found new workers to replace the casualties ...

Usually your Port will be the first priority to rebuild unless you need a 2nd Construction Office to employ all the unemployed survivors. Get it built before you start placing any other buildings. Then the immigrants will come.

... everyone's starving ...

You are supposed to get a kind of "grace" period for a couple of years after a storm when people don't starve. Are you aware of the false warning of starvation that comes with Ranches?

[Electric Monkey]

Thanks, I'll try to put your advice into practice.

... render the old sites unusable. ...

And just how is that? You are supposed to be able to build right on top of the debris piles. In some cases along the coast that can be quite a saving in leveling land work.

I don't know - maybe I just couldn't find the site of the original amongst all the rubble of the dockers' houses and the port, but I couldn't get the blueprint to turn green. All the other buildings could be built on top of rubble ok.

... found new workers to replace the casualties ...

Usually your Port will be the first priority to rebuild unless you need a 2nd Construction Office to employ all the unemployed survivors. Get it built before you start placing any other buildings. Then the immigrants will come.

... everyone's starving ...

You are supposed to get a kind of "grace" period for a couple of years after a storm when people don't starve. Are you aware of the false warning of starvation that comes with Ranches?

I think maybe my problem is not developing fast enough to get food and housing back up before the grace period runs out. My population's in the hundreds, and my builders are pretty slow. I'll practice more.

Another problem might have been that all my farms, houses etc were built outwards from the initial dock - on the upwind side of the island. Are you expected to plan for storms by building all your vulnerable structures so that they're sheltered by hills? I could play about with that, but it'll be tricky to build out and it could mess up the standard anti-pollution measures.

[Captain Carrrghter]

The "grace period" is the time it takes for Tropicans to exhaust their personal reserves. On a well-stocked island, Tropicans tend to keep about a three years' supply of food. After that, if adequate food is not being grown, food quality drops rapidly and starvation begins.

Of course, the "grace period" is longer if you have stored food that survived... unfortunately marketplaces and restaurants are both almost as vulnerable as farms.

Since even corn takes about a year from completion of the farm until the first harvest, you have about two years to get your food supply up and running again after a hurricane. My advice--build as many construction offices as you'll need to rebuild in that time frame before the hurricane hits your shores. And don't even think about rebuilding anything but your dock until your food supply is secure.

If your farms get wiped out a second time in less than five years.... very little you can do, my friend. 

That can take out the docks, and render the old sites unusable.

If you've built a road right up to your dock, you have to bulldoze the road before you can build the dock in the same spot. I suspect that this may be your problem if it's specific to docks.

[Brf]

Are you expected to plan for storms by building all your vulnerable structures so that they're sheltered by hills?

I doubt that matters. The buildings destroyed appear to be pretty much random.

[Captain Carrrghter]

I likewise doubt that building location influences hurricane damage.

However, a while back I did take a peek at the fresh rainfall overlay immediately following a hurricane. Most of the associated rain fell on the upwind side of the island, with a few waterlogged streaks across the entire width. This is not something I've systematically verified,  however.

Corn will grow almost anywhere, but you may want to keep your farms out of really waterlogged areas when you rebuild.

[Electric Monkey]

I've just done a game where I got hit by a hurricane.I've started writing about it in AAR under Red Storm I made rather a mess of the rebuilding,and it set me back a good number of years, but at least I stayed in power. The island was pretty thoroughly waterlogged (it's very flat), and most of the land was yellow to red for corn and tobacco, but dark green for pineapples and sugar. The weird thing is that five years later, the soil wetness shows that the land's dried out, but the crop feritility displays still show the same thing (although the green bands for corn and tobacco have got slightly wider, they're nowhere near what they used to be). I could have plumped for sugar and pineapples right away, but I was always expecting the land to dry out, leaving me with useless farms.

[Brf]

You can switch your farms pretty quickly to or from pineapple and corn.

I would have planted pineapple, and then switched to corn once it dried out.

[Electric Monkey]

Yeah, that's one of the things I'm going to have to learn. Looking back on it I could have got at least one harvest of pineapples before the land dried out - and even if I didn't I suppose I'd lose nothing except the maintanance costs - whcih I'mnever very good at managing anyway.

[Coconut Kid]

... If you've built a road right up to your dock, you have to bulldoze the road before you can build the dock in the same spot. I suspect that this may be your problem if it's specific to docks.

Well, at least a couple of squares/tiles of the road.

This is an important point for anyone who practices Junta_Joe's system of building roads under everything, especially the Ports.

It is important to remember that roads can be built under any existing building and the perspective can fool you into clicking under a building's footprint even when you don't intend to. It is also important to learn the Port's footprint - it is a great deal larger than the little building ; where the Teamsters park their loads is in/on the Port's footprint.

 

[SimTropico]

I've never had a hurricane before...

[Sticker]

I've never had a hurricane before...

what are you setting your random events at?  Because I find you don't get anything besides price changes unless you are over two or three points on the slider.

[el lagarto]

So I just had a hurricane-induced famine. Unbeknownst to me, my corn and tobacco farms were all water-logged. By the time I realized what happened, my people were starving, I was out of cash, and a UN-monitored election was coming down on my head. Shortly thereafter I was in a small boat...

So now I know that hurricanes are major rain events that substantially change the soil moisture, and thus affect agriculture. A good argument for building a ranch or two if you are playing with Random Events set high enough to get hurricanes. If the ranch survives, grazing will be very good after the storm.

Do hurricanes do anything else that I haven't noticed? Change the fishing quality? Crank up or damage vegetation levels?

I know they damage, and sometimes destroy, buildings.  Do buildings repair themselves (I think the Palace repairs itself when damaged by rebels), or do Construction Workers have to work on them? If the Workers do have to fix them, how does damage repair compare in priority with new construction?

Thanks for the benefit of the wisdom of the groupmind


ps: Lo, I am the necromancer of threads! 
search is down at the moment, so I just looked for a hurricane-related thread in the last few screens. Hope I haven't overlooked the definitive hurricane thread.

[Coconut Kid]

I just had a hurricane-induced famine. Unbeknownst to me, my corn and tobacco farms were all water-logged. ...
So now I know that hurricanes are major rain events that substantially change the soil moisture, and thus affect agriculture. ...

water-logged farms. I'm not sure that I believe that such a thing exists, at least with corn farms. Let me back away from that foolish statement and add "water-logged crop land" to the hazards of hurricanes. True enough, soil moisture variations have an effect on some crops. But there has been no prior discussion which identified corn as having production cut short by excess moisture, especially to the point of causing a famine. If you have any farms left standing in a water-logged area, it's probably one of the rare occasions that a change in crop may be worthwhile -- try for a couple of quick harvests of pineapple before the soil dries back to normal.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=9134.msg185787#msg185787
4) Crops. Q, One of the most frustrating things in a game is to develop a dependency on a single cash crop, only to notice later that the land devoted to the farms has turned orange, indicating that it is unsuitable for that crop.  Is crop rotation necessary, or is the change purely climatic?  Can you anticipate changes by using the info overlays for soil and rain?  
A, Rotating crops has no impact.  It's purely climate related, based on rainfall.  The initial values for crop suitability are are based on the game running an internal weather model for 80 years at game start, and averaging the results.  Of course, it's a long-term average, and there are short-term fluctuations. Steinmeyer: "I usually just accept that there will be good and bad harvests, based on the rainfall... I don't typically adjust my crop patterns too much after I've built a farm."

The key, I think, is "short-term fluctuations." That probably indicates a period not more than five years. Although it certainly relates to how fast the "bands of rainfall" move from right to left across the island normally..

My memory is not at its sharpest, but I seem to recall that part of the destruction of a hurricane is the loss of government reserves of food the personal reserves of the survivors are not lost. So, you have only a relatively short grace period to reestablish production. Most players shift all surviving, non-tree farms to corn production. (Well, actually most players turn off "random events" so they don't have to deal with hurricanes.) After things are restored, crops are shifted back to economic production. Personally, I have found Ranches to be quite susceptble to hurricane destruction and the cattle are killed just like people - so ranches are no "ace in the hole" for post-hurricane food supply. Hurricanes have not been observed changing fishing quality and it is doubtful that they do (complexity of programming, eh?). Hurricanes do blow down trees and screw up lumber production.

Do buildings repair themselves, or do Construction Workers have to work on them? If the Workers do have to fix them, how does damage repair compare in priority with new construction?

There has been discussion disputing that. My feeble memory can not recall the final settlement. I am now satisfied that building damage is "subsumed" into the maintence program that you are charged for, and gradually the damage points disappear without intervention by the Laborers -- as discussed later in this thread. On the other hand, the piles of debris from collapsed buildings is a stong concern of the Laborers, and they will sometimes frustrate you by clearing them before they build what you have ordered.

 

[Coconut Kid]

... ps: Lo, I am the necromancer of threads!
search is down at the moment, so I just looked for a hurricane-related thread in the last few screens. Hope I haven't overlooked the definitive hurricane thread.

I just used "Internet Explorer" to access advanced search to hit the word hurricane on three of the pertinent boards. I got four pages (~120 hits) of results.

I suspect there is no single "definitive" thread.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=8109.0

Year 2138 [this makes the issue suspect since the design is for 80 years max] It took out my farms (as usual) -- and so I rebuild quickly -- except I forgot to switch farms back to food items (my island is big in sugar) I started replacing sugar farms first -- and forgot to switch to food crops. So about a year or two later my population starts keeling over from starvation -- by the time I caught the mistake it was too late. [One also suspects a 'high-speed' game with no annual check of the Almanac.]

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=9134.msg188773#msg188773

This is a summary of the definitive discussion of the changes made to hurricanes by the version 1.51 patch which finalized the Paradise Island expansion. If you wish to know how to handle hurricanes, you need to read it.

[Coconut Kid]

OOps, I didn't reread the thread.

Now that I have, I don't think I need to change much.

Electric Monkey uses "waterlogged" -- and the rest of us put in a hyphen. Search indicates that the concept has not appeared in many threads.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=9531.0
Which is "First AAR: Red Storm" by Electric Monkey.

The issue is "Do the hurricane rains so saturate the soil that corn farms become unproductive; and if so, for how many years?" It's really the drying out period that we need to know.

Perhaps it happens only on "very" flat islands, which by the way will likely have poor fishing grounds. If so, then perhaps your people will have to live on pineapples. But then again ---

Meanwhile the search for the definitive thread on soil moisture goes on.

 

[Coconut Kid]

Some thoughts on agriculture, soil quality and rainfall is actually about using the land shaping tool of the editor to create a specialized island. While fun to do, there are simple choices in the initial settings to accomplish much the same thing. Important among them is knowing that the vegetation setting also sets the quantity of rainfall.

How such terraformed formations may be impacted by a hurricane is speculation at this point.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=5471.0

(Discovered while searching about water-logged.)

[TeamStar]

This last link is great, CK! Lots of nice tips for map makers...

[el lagarto]

Thanks for the links and information, Coconut Kid.

Maybe famine was too strong a term. I didn't have a lot of starvation deaths (possibly not any), but I did have a general food shortage, lots of people missing meals, and walking halfway across the island to find food.

As to water-logged, the farms that survived the storm were all on windward slopes or flat land that was not sheltered from the sea. It took me some months at least to realize what was going on, and when I did, I checked on all the corn and tobacco farms: the whole  region was red, the soil was too wet to be good for corn or tobacco. Over the next year or so it dried out, but by then my food stocks had been totally depleted.

This thread
http://tropico.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/cafe/index.php?topic=9347.0
has pretty good evidence that buildings self-repair, without laborers being involved. This goes along with my experience. In playing "Rebels on Parade" several times, I had my Palace shot up quite a bit, and never noticed workers contributing to the repairs.

[Coconut Kid]

@ el lagarto

Yes, that's an important thread of which I had lost track. Thanks for pointing it out. Updated:
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tropico/cafe/index.php?topic=9347.0

It has two important points of information.

First} There is reasonably clear evidence that damaged buildings "heal" themselves over time.

Second} It is possible to use the "employment agency" for off-shore skilled workers without directing them to a specific building (and thereby risking a crash when they arrive after the building no longer exists).

Perhaps some of the murk about what Laborers are doing during a reconstruction period arose because of they do automatically spend time removing the wreckage of destroyed buildings. Sometimes that activity seems disconnected in priority from the construction waiting on them.

[TNT]

... If you've built a road right up to your dock, you have to bulldoze the road before you can build the dock in the same spot. I suspect that this may be your problem if it's specific to docks.

Well, at least a couple of squares/tiles of the road.

This is an important point for anyone who practices Junta_Joe's system of building roads under everything, especially the Ports.

Hah, wow, I wish I had known that in my first tries when I preferred playing random events games, rebuilding my dock was always a major nuisance.

[TNT]

I've never had a hurricane before...

what are you setting your random events at?  Because I find you don't get anything besides price changes unless you are over two or three points on the slider.

[/glow]

So true, but then again, I found that the endless seesawing of pineapple prices was an annoyance too. Just endless letters and warnings that "price goes up" then "price gone down" and over and over again.

So I went back to playing 0 random events, but I do miss the hurricanes, I especially like the way they get rid of my shacks and force my peons into housing.

[Coconut Kid]

... So I went back to playing 0 random events, ...

And why is that?

 

[TNT]

I like events, they're just not diverse enough... On random settings I've never encountered anything other than hurricanes and price changes, is there anything else?

[Coconut Kid]

..., is there anything else?

Yes.

What a jerk I am. Somewhere there is a compilation of those which have been experienced. I can't find it today (11/12/11). I'll try to keep in mind trying to bring the inventory of random events to a greater prominance. Here is one example:

I've had that a few times, and it was a disease via the Random events.

An announcement is made and you'll start to see your peons drop dead over a period of around 6-9 months (ish). If you at the right zoom you'll hear the sounds as they die. Then you can just scroll over the island and see the bodies everywhere.

Just be sure to set your Immigration Office to 'open door' to get the numbers up quickly. ...

It might be worth the reminder that this about random stuff, so the developers had a notion about setting the frequency of each one.