This Place Is Dangerous To My City's Health

[Synergy67 88]

I just lost a very successful city I was working on for days, because I used a park which happens to help reduce pollution (I had put it in my parks folder and didn't even remember it was supposed to have an extra anti-pollution effect.) When bulldozed, it instantly sent my city's pollution up to something like 25 million and absolutely nothing I could do reduced it. I planted a bunch of air cleaners, added the 80% pollution reduction mod (it worked, but I still had tens of thousands of unit of pollution.) My city of 40K abandoned quickly. I started bulldozing suspect buildings I thought might be generating the wrong amount of pollution. I eventually dezoned and dozed the entire city tile and pollution remained in the stratosphere unchanged. I am forced to abandon this city.

Prior to this, I had gone through my parks menu on pause, and was plopping sample parks to decide on one, then bulldozing them. When done checking stuff out, I saved my city, because I had done some other stuff I wanted to keep, thinking all was fine, and hit go. Instant devastation. It took me a couple hours just to figure out what the culprit was. I read through several similar articles I found here and elsewhere. None of the suggestions worked. I have one left to try, the radical ordinance mod which should instantly remove all pollution. The question is, is there anything I can do to slowly "clean" the air which will be reading as zero percent pollution to eventually be able to remove the ordinance and have my city back to normal after time? Or does the radical ordinance mod cause the same problem too—catastrophic pollution once removed? And even if it doesn't, is there any way to remove millions of units of pollution with the mod running...or at all? I am so sad to lose this city. It was going so amazingly well.

I know this is a problem with lots and bats which affect pollution. I knew that about the old Black Hole water tower, which I also found out about the wrong way some time back. I didn't realize how common this problem is and how many lots are infected with this city-destroying bugginess. Is there any self-monitoring going on in the community here to get such lots flagged and removed? I just flagged the one from 2004 that destroyed my city. In the last decade has no one noticed this for this one park, let alone any number of other problematic lots/bats? That truly amazes me.

I am doing my best to use only what seem to be safe, non-cheating sorts of mods & additions, except the Black Hole trash facility. It does what essentially I would do with a lot more work, in creating a dump city for landfill and have to endless micromanage shipping garbage around the region to the city. I'd rather pay a premium to just have a utility to do it and pretend I'm doing it the normal way.

I also learned that many BATs are carelessly built with radically incorrect pollution settings. What's the deal with bat builders that they do not attend to the settings of the buildings they create? I'm on a Mac so can't look at the lot editor or any of your many wonderful little utilities you've created or I'd be checking everything out myself. I have to rely on the reporting and repairing of others. Is it hard and complicated to understand all the settings for lots and bats, so the novice doesn't even realize they are there? Or is is carelessness? I'm trying not to get really upset about how much stuff is messed up that I may or may not be able to realize in advance. This stuff should be removed from the STEX if it is broken/hazardous. Or warnings applied to everything that is.

I also recently learned that residential lots can't be successfully plopped (or are very hard to force to stick) and how industrial plops generate no freight, arrrrgh. There go most of the beautiful HIDP lots I was starting to use to make cool industrial areas. Now I am sticking to growable RCI lots only. What is safe to use?

So, I keep finding out things that are broken after using them and wasting my time or entire cities. Is there a collected FAQ/warning about what is known to work/not work, what to be wary of, and what are the pros and cons of various choices we can make here regarding mods and downloads? That would be a terrifically helpful document to compile. I feel like I am reinventing the wheel by slowly finding out all these anomalies one by one, often very painfully. I like making a very aesthetically pleasing city, and the added variety and fun of all the additions offered here for an overall challenging and rewarding game play. The ride is fun, not just some goal of a sea of skyscrapers. I like to play the game as reasonably close to the original intention as possible. But I am becoming quite afraid to use things. Now I know all those fun growable RCI lots I have in my plugins folder probably have wrong settings for pollution and who knows what else. I am scared any one of them could destroy my city if bulldozed. I have T-Wrecks STATS and VALUES Pack Vol.01 which replaces the bad DESC files, but this is very old now and there are tons more that probably need fixing. What to do? I don't want to ruin my game. I really want to use the lovely offerings here.

I also know now that roadtop mass transit lots may slow down processing (at best) because they count/somehow calculate every single vehicle which goes through them (as they are technically a drive-through building), so I'm not sure I want to slow down my game any more with those. I have a dual core 2.66GHz MacPro, and the game STiLL really holds up on my cities over 100K, when it calculates the quarterly traffic and so on. It's frustrating how badly ported this game is for Mac, but Windows is not a reasonable or desirable option for me. I am also shocked at how many sloppy things are messed up/unfinished/broken in the Maxis game release, which so many astute and attentive folks here have figured out and sought to remedy when possible over the years. I still have no night lighting or update patch for my Mac version here I just started playing recently. They aren't available anywhere online anymore that I can find. I just missed by months the ending of Zelgadis' site that was hosting those files.

But wait, there's more. I also know that transit stations for trains (and others I presume) count everything that goes through them so they give you a false number of actual station use, unless, as Nonny Moose continues to remind folks, to put them on a spur, which I am now doing thanks to him pointing it out more than once around here. But I just happen upon this stuff bit by bit as I read up on issues and problems, almost randomly.

One document with all these known issues? Does it exist? I would hope the people who learn about all these game-changing/ruining issues would do something simple like this to not let the newbies find them out the hard way over and over without reading through ten years of dialog here.

Is there anything else like this I am now missing? Articles, links, advice, anything in response appreciated. I don't want to ruin any more games. I love this game, despite its flaws. I played it a bit a few years back, gave up due to too slow a system, but finally upgraded an old G4 Mac to this MacPro and now have the processing power to play it about as well as it ever could on a Mac, which still sucks on large cities. Also, with the newer Radeon graphics cards like the 1GB 5700 I put in my Mac, the graphic performance got worse than with the old 512MB card, which I also read about subsequently online. My upgrade = worse gameplay. Man, this game is a glorious hacked mess. I love it. I hate it. It's a relationship I'm not ready to leave.

I meant to post a link to the offending park. It is this one here:

This innocuous little park alone ate my entire city for breakfast.

[Halen Of Dania 350]

It seems that you ramble on in this post about other lots and how you can't update your game on mac. That is totally besides your first and utmost problem which was this lot. I'm glad you chose to flag the lot (not bat) you where using. But does it really make a difference to someone if it was made in 2004 compared to something similar. It's unfair to deem something from 2004 "unfit" when you can turn around and say another lot that does the exact same thing as a bug free lot! But from what I can see your problem is the lot's fault and there is nothing to turn that back. Just how the game was designed to respond to radical mods and such.

Regards Josh Halen

Edit: Your Computer set up only increases preformance. The only known problem that arises with newer computers is that they crash with more than one core in newer , more powerful machines. In that instance set the affinity to 1 cpu by going ctrl -alt -delete and finding the process and right clicking that and set affinity.

[Synergy67 88]

Thanks, Josh. Happily, I don't have trouble with crashes, just an occasional freeze requiring a force quit, usually only after I've been playing for quite a while. I started my post above with my immediate problem as a launch point to describe all my related concerns about the things that can be damaging to the game that might not be knowable in advance without the lot editor or other tools I can't use. I wanted to mention what I know, so I have a shot at finding out any other significant concerns I don't yet know about. I'm not sure I understand your comment about being fair to a 2004 lot. Whether it is ten years old or brand new is irrelevant, just whether or not it has the power to destroy my city.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

One should be aware than any of the so-called "pollution devouring" lots will disgorge all pollution they've absorbed if they are destroyed. The only solution I can think of is to lay down the Black-hole pollution eater.

Of course, you could restore the city file from your backups couldn't you?

[Synergy67 88]

Looks like I should start backing up my cities. I'm used to playing Civilization, which autosaves the last five turns. I was thinking SimCity had at least one previous iteration of each city as auto-backup in case a city gets corrupted. That would make good sense, considering how many hours, weeks, months or even years a player may put into a city. it's kind of surprising that Maxis didn't even implement a way to make a separate save instead of one perpetual overwriting save. It's kind of discouraging to quit just to make intermittent backups very often when it takes almost 30 seconds to load up 2 GB of plugins every time I start. I'll at least start duplicating cities upon quitting for the day. I did save my polluted city, but have since rebuilt it even better from scratch from what I learned playing it last time and have about caught up now to where I was. I haven't seen this black hole pollution eater. I'll have a look for it in case I blunder into this situation again.

By the way, Nonny, you seem to post some of the most useful, knowing information about how the game and mods actually work, which I highly appreciate. One thing I am presently curious about is if the industry doubler mod will mess up any other game mechanics or stats by using it. I know that the IHT §§§ fix messes up caps/demand if used. I'm curious, what, if any sorts of mods you use for your games?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Wal, pardner, we only use silver bullets.

But seriously, I don't use anything that messes with the demands. I've tried some of them but they skew the game too much for my taste. The only serious mods I have are the NAM and some of its supplements like NWM. I have a few statistical items like the census repository, and equinox' lot query item that shows stats on lot queries, but that's about it. Oh, and I use the SPAM because I like seasonal farms, and I have some seasonal trees.

I use the PEG Brigantine water, and PEG's Pine tree mods and MMP lots for my terrain. No slope mod. Every slope mod I've tried has caused some kind of problem with the terrain and sometimes crashes.

I am really very conservative, and hardly ever use even highways because my current style doesn't need them. I am doing towns and villages at the moment, and often have several on one big tile.