radii in education data view

[sdsc4 0]

Dear all,

First, thanks for the work many of you put in to building plugins and helping fellow SC4 fans. It is incredible how much SimCity content is out there!

I'm wondering if you can recommend a plugin/strategy for getting a handle on Education radii / school bus funding. I have so many buildings (elementary schools, high schools, libraries) that there are too many circles in the Education Data View so I can't use it very easily. Any suggestions?

[Darkwings 5]

The short answer: don't look at the circles. Almost never. You will need more than 100% area coverage as your city grows for anything except fire fighters and (depending on what you do) police detps.

The proper answer:

-A big hospital can handle 3300 patients. In its covered area you can easily get 10000+ patients later in the game. After a bit you'll need 2, then 3, probably 4.of them close together to handle all the highrises you'll get.

-A large elementary school will be in the same situation, filling up later in the game.

High School's circle isn't huge and it will fill up fast, so you need to plan R areas beforehand.

You'll be offered up to 4 private schools if the coverage is not enough.

Libraries will help, but with a lesser effect.

Also each type of school covers a particular age range (as in real life). Museums don't have a range and help to prevent older people to lose Education Level.

So you actually need everything to cover area+age range. and most probably everything on the double (or more).

Also, near the edge of the circle the effect is so low that it won't do any good. The 'decent effect' area is actually about 2/3 of any max range.

Since the game is based on a grid, try to fill up the inner square of those circles and don't bother with the rest.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The even neater answer for schools is to turn busing off. This can eat your budget and is unnecessary if you have a public transit system. No point in paying twice for a bus system. You can do this in one swoul foop with the single slider for buses.

[sdsc4 0]

Thanks for your comments. Darkwings, I agree that in the long run, I'll need >1 coverage for all squares due to capacity caps. However, my current city is about 110,000 and takes up the whole map. In the long run I can turn down the bus budget as I add educational facilities to deal with the increased population, but that would be too expensive right now. For now, I want to pay more for buses and cover everybody in my city with the facilities I have. I also want to *verify* I have everybody covered.

Is there any way to do this without doing something drastic like turning off buses entirely? I don't want to change the game mechanics quite so much.

  Edited July 11, 2012 by sdsc4  

[Darkwings 5]

Mmm. I don't know what your goal is, so I can't give a sure-kill advice.

Anyway, you don't actually need to cover any single house. What you usually should care about is the Education Level. (over 150 = good)

Bring out the Data View, activate Education and see if any zone is less then a shade of green.

If you are not satisfied with the result, you can always rezone some houses.

Same goes for Health and Crime.

Anyway, the method stated above (filling only the inner square of the circles you see) should fix that for you with minimal overlapping.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Actually, I rather like overlaps. I enjoy the imaginary jurisdictional flaps when new kids move in.

[Ltw 401]

You could also build hospitals which cover more tiles than the default Maxis hospital.

There are two hospitals I recommend:

- BSC Mercy General Hospital (LEX)

This hospital is cost/patient quite realistic, at full capacity it is more expensive than the default hospital, but it has a much larger capacity. If you lower your budget for this hospital it is cheaper than the default hospital.

-

This hospital has a big capacity and is cheap, very cheap. This makes it less realistic than the Mercy General Hospital though, but if you've got problems with your budget this hospital is the one you want.

Update:

Looking at the pinned thread in this forum (Top 10 mods) you could also use mod. It doubles your circles so you need less schools etc. Might help making those circles look more organized.

  Edited July 12, 2012 by Ltw