Several questions

[Hybr1d 20]

I just started playing again today after a few years and I have some questions ( I'm a little rusty and don't remember a whole lot )

- Should I even bother with building agriculture, dirty and manufacturing industry? I know at the start of a city the population is dumb, so should I build industry and demolish it later on?

- Should I keep a good mix of residential wealth types?

- If i have an island in my region that can't be connected to the mainland ( too far awya to build a bridge on ), could the island be connected through a ferry system?

[Titanicbuff 1,262]

- Should I even bother with building agriculture, dirty and manufacturing industry? I know at the start of a city the population is dumb, so should I build industry and demolish it later on?

-You need the industry for your city to prosper- I generally do dense industry zoning as it seems to have a varied amount of dirty to high tech.

- Should I keep a good mix of residential wealth types?

-yes

- If i have an island in my region that can't be connected to the mainland ( too far awya to build a bridge on ), could the island be connected through a ferry system?

-It only depends how many grids spaces- for instence 1 grid and 1 grid- small grids are the rule i've noticed but I have managed it as far as 1 small and 1 large away. Generally Air is your best bet.

Hope this helped

[coldrifting 30]

1. You likely will need industrial for a while, so you want to keep it, at least till your pretty far in.

2. Not sure

3. Yeah, you could build a ferry. There's two types, passenger, which only caries passengers, and passenger and car, which carries both. I don't think they can carry buses. Passenger ferries can't dock at Car and Passenger Ferry terminals.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

1. You can leave out agricultural, but you'll need I-D and I-M for starters. I also think that all industries are useful for aesthetical reasons - those old brick factories spewing black smoke into the air do have that certain flair to them... In any case, as your Sims get smarter, most I-D will be replaced by I-M and I-HT. If the EQ is high, you may end up with mostly I-HT and only some remaining I-M.

2. Absolutely. High-wealth buildings can appear far too easily because they don't have that high a desirability requirement, and then they'll dilapidate because there are not enough suitable jobs. There is also a bug in game that causes rich Sims not to work in high-tech industry at all, although they should. There's a fix for that on the STEX, but I don't remember by whom off the top of my head. There's also a mod that increases the desirability requirements of high-wealth Sims; this one was made by bones1 and is very useful.

You may want to increase taxes for wealthy Sims by about 0.5-1% to keep a healthy balance. This could be roughly around 35% poor, 50% medium, and 15% rich or something in that general direction.

However, remember that you can also use the region concept to make one city tile predominantly inhabitated by poor Sims, and another city tile as a wealthy suburb full of mansions...

3. As the others said, you can build a ferry. As long as there are ferry ports in two adjacent city tiles and a coherent body of water between these two ferry ports, Sims will be able to use that ferry. You may have to switch back and forth between the city tiles and wait for a few month for traffic routes to be calculated.

As far as air transport is concerned, this doesn't exist in SimCity. Airports merely rise commercial demand and/or demand caps, but they don't serve any transport-related purpose.

[cogeo 960]

Strictly speaking industry is not needed, however without industry growth will be slow.I actually build a region without industry. It was hard early on, but as cities grow beyond 4000-5000 residents they seem to be accelerating fast (you will have to satisfy ALL kinds of demand, and not snub even CS$).

As commercial services are not really drive development (demand for CS only appears AFTER the residential pop of their respective wealth level has increased) your primary drivers will be CO$$ and CO$$$ (initially the civic sector). Then, as population increases (as a result of civic + CO jobs), you get CS demand capable of offering 67% additional CS jobs. For example, with 1000 civic+CO jobs, you will get enough residnets (model-wise 2000) to create CS demand for another 667 CS jobs, ultimately getting 1667 total jobs and 3333 total residents. If you have good education, demand for CO$$ and CO$$$ will start rising, and you can get more CO jobs, then more residents, more CS and so on. It's slow but it works!

  Edited April 11, 2012 by cogeo  

[N G T 3]

1 For the start, you should need it, but put in a separate city if i were you to avoid hastles of pollution and build a road/rail connection to it

2 Yes you should providing that the buildings are in different parts of the city because if you have low wealth with high wealth. Their will be more traffic noise because low wealth things have more people in them and it will disturb the high wealth and force them to move away

3. Yes ferries do work fine as long as the connection is in the same body of water. Bridges do work as well if you think about it but their thousands more and the hastle of starting a new city and the anoyingness of only going straight. Thats why most people prefer ferries

  Edited April 18, 2012 by N G T  

[Moskva 75]

I agree with previous posters, go industrial, even heavy industry and if you want and like the taste of it, you can always keep it! Agricolture is cool, keep it in the outskirts. Do not worry much about wealth, higher wealth will come where it's cooler for them but always mind about placing parks everywhere for everyone, it helps greatly. Use ferries to connect island cities, that's the only working and eye-candy way.

  Edited April 18, 2012 by Moskva  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I just started playing again today after a few years and I have some questions ( I'm a little rusty and don't remember a whole lot )

- Should I even bother with building agriculture, dirty and manufacturing industry? I know at the start of a city the population is dumb, so should I build industry and demolish it later on?

Yes to building both. Think of the farms as a land bank that you can consume piecemeal as needed, the same way it happens in real life. A subdivision here, a subdivision there, voilà, an abandoned farmstead. If you later set the taxes on ID to 20% you'll get a nice kick in the treasury for a while, and they will be replaced by IM. You can do the same with IM, but I generally don't. You need some grunt jobs all the time.

- Should I keep a good mix of residential wealth types?

Absolutely. Sims don't live forever. Take a look at your population by age graph occasionally.

- If i have an island in my region that can't be connected to the mainland ( too far awya to build a bridge on ), could the island be connected through a ferry system?

Yes.