Big city development lags

[HSG86 0]

Hey everyone

I have a problem, I am pretty new to the game, but now in my 3rd city I run into a problem. I build the city really well until it reached about 750,000 inhabitants. But now the game starts to lag and I have the feeling the simulation is not working properly anymore. There is for example a great need for HT industrial or $$ residential, but if I assign areas for this purpose, it takes now 1-2 years until these areas are getting developed and industry/residential build something. This problem has just started now with that high number of residents. Before it was really fast with the reaction of the game/simulation to changes in the game. Also certain infrastructure elements like roads or trains take a unusual long time until they are used (maybe also a year) by the game and the population. That makes me think that the game lags and can't handle all of the information.

My city is well build, enough parks, civics and so on, infrastructure is well planned, no traffic jams. Also I have a pretty good machine, a new Macbook Pro (I play the game in bootcamp windows), so I would find it hard to believe that my computer is too bad. I also have the feeling that this problem started since I founded a neighbouring city with 150,000 inhabitants where around 30,000 persons are coming over to my big city. Other important facts are: I use some plugins such Industry Quadrupler or the traffic plugin NAM, but nothing else big. And I had no problems with these plugins before I hit a certain population level.

I would appreciate some feedback and help, thanks!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, it wouldn't matter if you were running this on an Atlas-8 (8 CPUs) because the game can only use one of them. It is a legacy game written in the Windows '95 time-frame and never updated since. Because of this, it can't use the optional features of most GPUs, which should be set ot 'application selected' so as not to mess up the game.

Next, when you have 750,000 Sims, you also have at least that many other objects in the game, so lets say somewhere around 2 million total and I am being conservative. Each and every one of these has to be visited by the simulator on every pass, and this simply takes CPU cycles. The game will bog down, especially if you try to run in the highest speed, because the co-routines and sub-tasks have no chance to catch up and the main loop is sitting waiting for the rendezvous. You can speed up slightly be cutting down on the animation properties, but the eye-candy is what this game is about, so that really is a non-starter.

You haven't seen anything yet. Wait 'til your population is around two or three million in one city. That's when you can make a coffee while waiting for something to happen. Unless you have oodles of money to purchase a very much faster processor than you have, your fate is sealed.

However, if you change your goal to something other than a staggering megalopolis, you can get a lot of fun out of this, especially with regional play. Connecting a few city tiles into one city and playing them by switching between them frequently so their times are about the same can be very interesting.

Everyone starts trying to make downtown Kholi Cutt (formerly Calcutta), but you can find that boring after you've done it once. I've been playing for ten years now, and I like my cities green and sparse rather than a jammed up mass of concrete and steel. Maybe its because I've been there and done that, and now I want to see what cities will be like when we lose this fascination with people heaps.

On the other hand, that may be your bag. In that case, patience is needed. This game is not one for the "now generation" because as things get bigger, the game seems slower. The little CPU gerbils are running ever so hard in their cage. People on laptops have reported overheat shutdowns because this program keeps the CPU at 100% most of the time. At least one person posted that his laptop burned out.

[HSG86 0]

Thanks for that honest feedback, I get your point. I was just wondering whether that was a normal thing to happen and it seems like this. I get what you mean with the different game motivation, about building nice cities and so on, but in the beginning you want to max your city out to see what works and what not. So I find it pretty disappointing that after half of the map and 800.000 inhabitants the game loses extremly its appeal. This just surprised me as I never heard about this problem when reading the forum and all this stories about multi million cities.

I will try to tweak whatever possible resource at my computer to minimze that problem.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Tune ups.

Run disk cleanup and defragmenter regularly, at least weekly. If you are playing a really big city, defrag that file when you finish playing.

Check your virtual memory. It should be fixed at 2GB per CPU.

If you have never run the two disk space maintenance programs, run each of them overnight. Not worth watching paint dry.

The program DATPACKER can be used to shrink the disk residency of your plugins, but there are maintenance issues if you have to change anything. To reduce this space, I pack my plugins individually using the Files2dat program by ilive. None of this will speed up your game, only the initial loading time.

City loading time is totally dependent on the size of the city.

Run in Turtle mode and make more use of the animation as entertainment. There is a lot of good stuff in there for you to see. While you are watching all this neat activity, other things will be building.

Save frequently to avoid doing things over after a CTD. If I do a lot of zoning or network layout, I do a save immediately. If the save is very slow, it is probably defragmentation time.

When working with puzzle pieces, use magnification 5 (or 6), be very careful of touching a TE lot (which will crash the program), and save when you are happy with any part of your new structure.

You have reached the micro-management stage, and can have more fun problem solving than building, but building can go on as well. You just need to find other things in the game besides watching buildings grow. Relax and enjoy the program. It is a leisure time activity.

Running on one of the faster rates just puts you under pressure. This is supposed to be relaxing down time, so make it so. You can always go make a sandwich or something while waiting for some event and you can always switch to Cheetah for a short burst to force some development.

I have multiple desktops, so if things get really boring, I can switch while it runs, and do something else, like read my mail or post stuff on here. If the sound of the game goes away, I know I have had a crash, which isn't very often any more. I always do a save before I switch.

I have been running this game for about 10 years now, and have changed styles many times, and create new goals ad lib. I have never really been able to get along without running it at least two days a week. If you get bored with it, don't run for a couple of days. You can then come back with a newer outlook, and maybe some new thoughts on what to do next.