How to ruin a city with a water pump

[regann0 1]

Just thought id share with you all a short tale of city misery. 

I had my city, of about 90K people, turning over a nice little profit of about $3-4K a month. More of a commercial and residential city, with a small portion of high technology industrial. 

Id spent quite a bit of time making this city, couple of months, no cheats, just playing around, adding in neighbouring cities, etc etc etc. It was my first city since buying the game, so i was quite sentimental about it.

I had about 7 standard water pumps, and needed another,  so i thought I would get rid of them all and upgrade to a larger water pump (which is a bat downloaded off STEX. )

So i paused the game, deleted all my small standard pumps and planted the new one over where an existing pump was. Restarted my game. 

All my city was without water, which i figured was normal, because sometimes it takes a bit for things to filter down into the system. The pump hadnt been registered yet, so next month it will, no dramas. 

Another month goes by. Nope

Another month. OK im starting to panic here. Pause the game. City still has NO water. So i just place all the small pumps back and get rid of the bigger one. (still dont know why it didnt register meh, no bother). 

OH no, too late. My population goes from 90K to 35K.... All my sims moved out!   Damn. A month goes by whilst im in panic mode. OH!!!!    10K move back into the city (because the smaller pumps have registered themselves, and the city now has water)

So no dramas, ill just wait n see what happens. Yep sure enough, 4 months later, my population was back to 85K and all seemed good. I breathed a sigh of relief and saved my game. 

BIG MISTAKE. 

Shortly after i notice my RCI graph. WOW. suddenly all my downtown commercial district has been abandoned, and the citizens are asking for HEAPS of dirty/manufacturing industry. WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?!?!

So i check the education panel. oh dear. My City Education Quotient has gone from about 150, to 80. Dear oh dear. all the smart people moved out, and the people that moved back in are all dumb!!!!!!!!!!

Disaster. Id already saved the game, no going back. My city of months of work was doomed. 

I unfortunately had to use a money cheat, in order to reimburse myself of 'capital loses' as i called it. Ive recovered the city now, after a few days of playing the game, but the asthetics of the city are totally changed. It has a huge dirty industrial area, and my plans of how it was going to go previously are in ruins. 

It did however have some positives. It gave me a good challange in managing my budget. Cutting existing 'luxury' expenses, reducing facilities that had overlapping areas, constantly playing with the tax system etc. Even though i did 'cheat' and gave myself some money, i only gave myself what i had spent on the water plants and then replacing the old ones, roughly $20K, so my treasury was only back to where it was before all this. 

i also now have no qualms about gutting this city. Before where my sentiment had the better of me and i wouldnt demolish buildings/areas, now its all changed.

So the lesson learnt was thus - Before upgrading any infrastructure, leave the existing infrastructure in place until the new infrastructure has taken over suitably. 

A bit like real life really. 

[Yeah_Right 2]

Ohhhhhhhh bad luck buddy. haha.

maaaan that sucks.

p.s: i know this isn't the place for it, but I need help with homework, and my parents aren't home, and nobody on MSN knows the answer, but what is a textual signifier? (its for my english assignment, and I cant find anything on the web)

thanks

[High5flyier 7]

The next lesson is to do regional backups every couple of days or even after an a major upgrade to a city. That way you can always just replace your troubled city. I just leave the backup folder in the upper right corner of my desk top and date it. After reading your story I did a new backup because my last one was 5 days old and we all get into situations like what you just experienced.

[rct3twins 14]

Tough luck buddy. Would want some pics of your city.

[Lordy Lord 0]

That sucks, sounds like it was a cool city too. My friend used to play SC4, but he stopped because his huge city was going all black even though it had plenty of jobs. Personaly I think what caused it was that he tried to put in a highway after his city was all developed.

[Nardo69 51]

Well, as I always say: Don't forget to make Backups ...

I guess that big custom pump was bigger that 1x1, in this case I found out that you should connect all tiles to pipes as it is sometimes hard to find the "right" tile.

On the other hand see it positive: you learned quite some, and if you do right it you'll see that even dirty industrial cities can be very beautiful!

Take care

Bernhard

[projectadam 0]

That is a bad break.

Any reason why this is in the CJ section though?

[High5flyier 7]

Since were still on the subject, I have always found it best to first add the new utility, be it water; electric;wast; or civic building.and play the game and let the new item become established in the city before I remove the old item.

[packersfan 666]

Dang, I should make a backup of my region!!! Yeah, I sometimes have problems with my downloaded water towers or pumps, wierd, sometimes they work just fine, other times they don't work!!! Recently I've been have power issues because I'm running some of my cities on Trash to Energy plants, which works as long as you have trash, and for some goofy reason I was shipping all the excess garbage out, so eventually my plants had nothing to convert! Ah, the joys o managing a complicated region's infrastructure!

[jerry101 1]

I accidently left a city running once, while I took a phone call. I came back, and the city had collapsed. Several water pumps had burned out and one power plant was on the verge of failing. The city's population had dropped significantly. I thought about exiting and reloading, but then I decided to take it on as a challenge.

Yes, I would resurrect the city. First, I built new water pumps and replaced all my power plants. I still had access to solar plants, so sweet. I tore up the south side industrial district, and replaced it with high density commercial and residential, extending my downtown (which is primarily in the city square to the south. I upgraded some schools and built new ones.

I started it up again, waited a few years to see if abandoned buildings would repopulate, and many of them did, all but the low wealth ones. Best of all, the new downtown extension at the south of the map exploded. Soon enough I had the Galvin Corp and some growable high rise bats sprung up. Population nearly doubled and that was before I started bulldozing the remaining abandoned buildings.

The city was better after the power/water disaster than it was before.

Within any disaster is an opportunity to make your city better than ever. I've thought about engineering such disasters in stagnant cities to make them grow again.

[nihonkaranws 88]

Hahahah! That's funny but cool! Lols...!

[bbfan02 23]

There's cheats for this people!!

[Stardragon 4]

This is something I have noticed. Water providers (pumps, towers, etc.) that are downloaded content and not original MAXIS need to be conncted to an original MAXIS water provider (at least one) via pipes to work and give out their water. Don't ask me why it's that way, because I don't know. That is just how it works. Funky glitch huh?

~~Stardragon/Dragonshardz~~

[Zelgadis 638]

Seems that this should be in game experiments.

ISF

[Robbert 0]

The issue with the custom, larger-than-1x1-pumps is that the pipes don't connect like they should.

I found however, that (almost?) always the pipes need to go under the main building, which you can see undergrond, and not the small pipe-piece you can also see underground.

Maybe a little hard to understand, but haven't got time for a screeny...

[Patricius Maximus 236]

Bad situation.

[ezoons 0]

Oh man. I had something similar happen once when in an industrial city the water supply was shut down because of water pollution. Everybody just packed and moved out. Even after cleaning up the pollution, I was left with a city full of abandoned building shells and nearly half the population gone.

[Hahayoudied 3]

That reminded me of that one time I aciendently bulldozed the powerline connecting 2 hydrogen powerplants to a large city. Much of the city population left and worse, after I fixed the problem; this weird power bug appears shortly after. The bug caused ALL of the city's powerplants' max power production to fall by about 90%, and the powerplants demanded more money by 500%. At the end, I gave up and deleted the city.

[un1 40]

I've never heard of stuff like that though if the large pump has two or more tiles you may want to cover them all with the water pipe.

[edmonton_stinks 5]

That really sucks.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Just out of curiosity, what pump did you use?  Did it have the name Black Hole Water Pump?  Because like some had said, you need to connect the pipes to all parts of the main building if it's a BATed custom like that.  Sorry to hear about your city...

Lesson learned though, if you make a huge change and something goes wrong...either wait for everything to work itself out...or just don't save at all lol.  I know how you feel though, I remember working really hard on one of my cities, and the game froze when I tried to save it, so when I did the ctrl/alt/del thing and started the game again, it was just a huge hole.   It's a sign from the SimGods to make backups of SimNation, I tells 'ya.

-Yoshi

[vailo 13]

that happened to me once, but i fixed it by reconnecting the pipes after i built the new pump

[katamariguy 6]

Remember that it is better to build onto the original systems.

[The Arrowz 3]

if you were on the verge of needing 8 pumps, just use the larger one that's ingame, it more or less is about the capacity of 10 pumps but the monthly cost isn't as high. strange, this never happened to me

[adhoc 1]

Why didn't you simply exit to region without saving?

[someoneperson 0]

@adhoc:

I don't mean to be rude, but he kind of already saved it... That was when everything looked alright... YOU CAN'T GO BACK!

[Adnoxaei 0]

wow, that's gonna take a tone of effort to undo, if it's worth it...

[fusion_lemon 2]

well, usually I would prefer adding a large pump onto the existing system, after the new pump works then Idelete the old ones