Environment rating - Help?

[InigoMontoya 0]

What many of you would find a breeze for a school project is turning out to be quite difficult for me, who played SC4 for the first time a few weeks ago.

My science teacher is under the fortunate delusion that SimCity is somehow remotely educational or related to our current unit of study. We have been tasked to create a city with a bunch of characteristics, all but one of which I have achieved or am very close to.

The exception is a high Environment rating.

In the beginning, I tried to be a tree hugging anti-industrial kind of person, but the demand for commercial simply stopped. They demanded industrial zones, I gave it to them, and my environment took a nosedive.

Despite massive tree placement and bulldozing factories to create parks, it's stuck at 0. 0, and it'll probably go down more at this rate!

Any advice on how to raise my environment without completely destroying the polluting culprits is much appreciated.

[psander5 195]

Haha. I think your teacher must be a secret SimCity fan. It would never have happened when I was at school many moons ago!

My advice is to increase your levels of education and health (presuming that they're not already at high levels). Make sure you have some higher education buildings such as libraries, colleges, museums and maybe the university. This will increase the wealth of sims, leading to increased Industrial High Tech demand. IHT is far better for the environment than low wealth dirty industry. Coupled with this, reduce IHT taxes and increase Dirty Industrial taxes. This will aid the switch. It will take a few years to see the changes. It's at this point I usually switch to cheetah speed.

Stick with the parks, and plant plenty of trees throughout the city. Leave some open green spaces between your densest industrial areas and your residential areas. Sims will appreciate this, and it will also help to increase local desireability for lower polluting idustries once the demand is there.

EDIT: Oh, and welcome to Simtropolis!  I hope you stick aroud after your assignment.  It's a nice place to be.

[InigoMontoya 0]

Thanks a bunch! I had a bunch of moron sims with a high school education because my partners didn't want to waste money on a college. =P

I'll probably stick around after the project. SC4 has sparked my interest again after a few years off of SC3000.

[masochist 111]

Heh heh...it'd be hilarious if you teacher were also a member of ST...