Was i hit by an earthquake?

[texico11 3]

I was just watching the city animation when i decided to make a few small suburbs. paused the game, added in some low-density residentials in the corner of my city, added a wind power plant as i didnt want to add to the mainstream, unpaused, and about 20 seconds later power literally cuts, sending my entire city to a stop. whats more is several buildinds in random places are destroyed, and roads throughout my city have also been destroyed. at first i thought it was a graphical glitch, then i noticed that there where random roads in the middle of nowhere that where still there, whereas large chunks of my transit where gone!



does anyone have a clue what an earth happened? my power was dependant on a neighbour connection. i noticed that the electricity pylons connecting me to that city was gone. i reistablished that connection but im not given the option to buy power from them anymore. this is crazy? i cant enter live-mode in this current state. theres a good chance i have to totally re-lay all my roads, power lines, water supplys, and then build a power plant that can relieve my 24k demand. thats another annoying factor. nuclear power comes into the game when your power demand is 25k. i was approaching 25k when those suburbs started to build, but cos of this power cut the power demand has dropped to 0, so if i dont reistablish neighbour connections, i have no sutable power supply that can meet my massive demand without horrible cost or pollution.

[deathtopumpkins 43]

It couldn't have been an earthquake, because any disasters have to be caused by the player. There are no random disasters in SC4.

[Jazzmaster 716]

Could you post any specs of your computer? This is something new to me, but it could be caused by a faulty download file. Have you added any plugins recently? For now I'd say don't enter your city, and if you do, don't unpause it because all your buildings will abandon. I doubt it was an earthquake, since disasters don't occur spontaneously and without warning in this version of Sim City (that did happen in previous versions).

-Yoshi

[s_olah 87]

Fire does happen randomly...true it doesn't really cause any damage

[texico11 3]

Pentium 4 - 3Ghz

Nvidea GeForce 6200 - 256mb

1024MB RAM

Windows XP SP2 - 32bit

i've only ever downloaded one plugin which was the extra cheats DDL, because most of the plugins only work with rush hour, which i dont have. that cheats DDL didnt even work either, so i removed that a few days ago. no plugins at the time of this incident.

I've just assessed the entire damage. it appears to be worse than i thought, in aproximates... 80% of my rail system is gone, 60% of my road network is gone, all bus stop appears to have been destroyed, 30% of the buildings on the east of the river are destroyed, 50% of my highway system have been destroyed, 99% of my power is gone, 20% of my powerlines are down, all my bridges are destroyed, 1 water tower is destroyed.

its just a disaster. its gonna cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands to repair this damage.

[Jazzmaster 716]

That's probably the freakiest thing I've ever heard in the game...then again, I've had problems with a city before. I've heard of transit lines suffering congestion and being a bit worn, but that wouldn't happen to the smallest degree unless you had hundreds upon thousands of people using the same route every day (and low funding)...

Your PC seems up to spec for this game, I wish there was more I could do to help, but this is as much as I know...

If you think you need it, there's a mod called the BSC Funding Mod that can freeze a budget so no money goes in or comes out. Just a possible option, I can tell you where to find it if you want.

-Yoshi

[3hirty6ix 0]

Originally posted by: texico11

my power was dependant on a neighbour connection. i noticed that the electricity pylons connecting me to that city was gone. i reistablished that connection but im not given the option to buy power from them anymore. this is crazy?

quote>

Make sure your neighbor city has enough power to supply to this city and some headroom (I don't know the exact percentage). Add a new plant if needed in the other city. This "should" allow you to make the neighbor deal. I believe you'll have to unpause the game before this happens though.

[projectadam 0]

I have had instances like this happen before but never to this wide scale. The cause in my case was that I had spent close to all of my money and was not able to pay my neighborhood utility bill (I was making a profit and everything, it just decided to say that I could not pay the bill anymore). The reason why this kind of reminds me of that is because some of my road work went missing (because it changed all of my funding for transportation, utilities, etc...) and even though I had the money I could not buy back from my neighbor. Check and see if you are also missing some of your water pipes and check out your financing screen and see if your percentages are under funded. The only thing that can be done is rebuild, put a power plant in this city tile and play several years before you can buy utilities again.

[texico11 3]

regarding my PC btw, do you have any idea why i get so much lag? probably hovers around 5fps all the time. you said my pc was up to spec :S

[texico11 3]

Originally posted by: projectadam I have had instances like this happen before but never to this wide scale. The cause in my case was that I had spent close to all of my money and was not able to pay my neighborhood utility bill (I was making a profit and everything, it just decided to say that I could not pay the bill anymore). The reason why this kind of reminds me of that is because some of my road work went missing (because it changed all of my funding for transportation, utilities, etc...) and even though I had the money I could not buy back from my neighbor. Check and see if you are also missing some of your water pipes and check out your financing screen and see if your percentages are under funded. The only thing that can be done is rebuild, put a power plant in this city tile and play several years before you can buy utilities again.quote>

 

checked all the screens, but funding hasnt changed. 

few things before hand:

i was trying to adjust the size of the affected area for the hill elevation tool. instead of pressing shift-1, i pressed control-1. my game freezed for about 20 seconds, but since i was zoomed right in to that area, i didnt notice any difference, so i assumed it was just lag. i also nearly over-spent, with only 2k simoleons left, but i hit play for a little while untill it went up to 15k, as i had the game on fast-forward and was earning alot of money monthly. i've rebuild a good 50% of the roads but i simply dont have the money. i had to simplify all my roads greatly so sims could still get about without excesive roads. i also only managed to get one bridge in, and my highway bridge is a no-go, so sims cant commute to the northern island where all the industry is, because a standard road brings horrendous congestion; too much infact. as a result, my city dropped to 75k in 2 months, from 88k. thats a hell of alot of people. i might have to resort to money cheats to get the kind of budget to fix this disaster. i cant replace any ports and due to low demand alot of the buildings wont regrow either. im gonna post some screenshots in a little while.

[Trioxis 32]

That is quite freaky and most probably a bug within the game itself. The only thing you can do now is to rebuild your city. Maybe it has something to do with the keys you pressed but it's very odd.