Please explain schools to me (and other questions)

[Howitzer Zak 17]

During the beta I pretty much created a school in every city except the last one and I didn't notice any difference at all in education and crime for the last city.

 

I realize that education allows you to build better factories or more advanced factories (which was not available in beta), but is that it, gradeschools seemed useless?  From the description it seems that it's supposed to educate your sims, but I didn't find that to be the case.  Any time I needed more educated sims for jobs, I just built the appropriate higher wealth areas and they just moved in, no need to educate anyone.  Jobs are divided out by wealth class rather than education, higher wealth sims were just educated by default.  Also, as long as there were jobs, the crime rate was low, it didn't seem to have anything to do with education or having schools (kids on the streets as the descriptions imply).  It seemed pretty shallow to me and just a means to create the next tier of education (beta experience only though).

 

Second, we had a little taste of multicity play.  What's to prevent me from creating all my polution and other undesirable buildings in some downwind city and never loading up that city again?  Those cities are pretty much in hibernation yet still produce exports.

 

Third, is there any way to clean up ground polution once you create it?  I didn't see any buildings that actually do that, they reduce it (recycling center etc.), but none that remove existing ground polution.  They kinda hinted at it in blogs, but in game I didn't see anything that would imply that you could.  This would make my second point even more attractive.

 

[Hoipus 292]

The beta never really showed much of the effects of education due to the limited educational choices. In the beta all it really does is reduce the frequency of sims starting fires when they're sufficiently educated. Further education allows sims to produce more elaborate types of industry.

[Haljackey 17,398]

I made a wiki article on education in SimCity (2013). Hope it helps you out a bit: http://wiki.simtropolis.com/Education_%28SimCity_2013%29

[kneebon5 4]

You could only make grade schools, and not high schools, so it wouldnt have a huge impact on things without a high school

[nhgriffith 179]

The devs have also stated that the wind can change direction. That massive industrial city that used to be downwind may suddenly be upwind and now all the pollution is blowing over your city. Moreover, while this dirty city is in hibernation, it's not growing. If you're not playing it, it gets surpassed by the cities you're playing and can't keep up with the demand.

But yea, you can build your industry downwind, and maybe the wind never changes direction forcing you to regret that move... but that's still better than SimCity 4... where nothing crossed city boundaries at all so you can have high wealth residential one block away from industrial and completely unpolluted because it's across a city border. That same trick won't work.

As for clearing up pollution, there are water treatment plants that weren't available in the beta, but also forests work to slowly clear up air and ground pollution--plus they look good and increase land value.

[simcity4deluxe 95]

Actually I made a 2 cities before I stopped playing the beta without industrial and both cities developed pretty well, so actually you don't need to make industrial in order to make a city in Simcity 2013.

[soldyne 111]

I think education takes time to take effect.  1 hour is not enough time to see the full effects of education on a population.  I think they just put it in the tutorial because that is how the tut will be when it ships.

 

unfortunately I was not able to get multicity to work.  I put res in clearwater and industry in norwich and no one would commute.  but I was able to make clearwater successful by using commercial without industry so at least there are options.

[simgozer53 1]

I think education takes time to take effect.  1 hour is not enough time to see the full effects of education on a population.  I think they just put it in the tutorial because that is how the tut will be when it ships.

 

unfortunately I was not able to get multicity to work.  I put res in clearwater and industry in norwich and no one would commute.  but I was able to make clearwater successful by using commercial without industry so at least there are options.

I also wasn't able to get any commuters, and i had the same division of cities as you had. Can anyone shed any light on attracting commuters?

[Howitzer Zak 17]

I think education takes time to take effect.  1 hour is not enough time to see the full effects of education on a population.  I think they just put it in the tutorial because that is how the tut will be when it ships.

 

unfortunately I was not able to get multicity to work.  I put res in clearwater and industry in norwich and no one would commute.  but I was able to make clearwater successful by using commercial without industry so at least there are options.

I also wasn't able to get any commuters, and i had the same division of cities as you had. Can anyone shed any light on attracting commuters?

 

Not sure how it's supposed to work in the live game, but the only way to get commuters to go to the other city was through bus stops as far as I could tell.

[nhgriffith 179]

Actually I made a 2 cities before I stopped playing the beta without industrial and both cities developed pretty well, so actually you don't need to make industrial in order to make a city in Simcity 2013.

At the most, you played 6 months. The Sims can work in commercial zones (or other places like police, fire, clinic, city hall, power plant, etc.), but the Sims require commercial zones to shop in. And the commercial zones require industry in order to put products on the shelves.

If you got to play for longer than an hour, a REGION with no industry would begin to fall apart as there would be no products on the shelves in the commercial districts for your Sims to buy. It's also unlikely there'd be enough jobs in your region.

But of course you can play for 6 months before you need any industry. You could also zone purely industry and play for a few months before your region started realizing there weren't enough residents to work in the factories, or commercial zones to ship the goods too.

I guess it's probably possible if you had a trade city to import industrial goods (I mean the stuff that regular industry would produce that they ship to commercial stores... not resources like ore and such).

As for inter-city commuting, the Sims CAN commute by car, and this is one of the major things they were trying to test with the beta, however it wasn't functioning completely smoothly. It's supposed to take 3-4 minutes, tops, for the regional cities to sync up with each other, but during the beta it was taking 30 minutes minimum for almost every one... and when you're restricted to a one hour total time limit, that's kind of hard to test.

[Ma8thew 77]

Actually I made a 2 cities before I stopped playing the beta without industrial and both cities developed pretty well, so actually you don't need to make industrial in order to make a city in Simcity 2013.

At the most, you played 6 months. The Sims can work in commercial zones (or other places like police, fire, clinic, city hall, power plant, etc.), but the Sims require commercial zones to shop in. And the commercial zones require industry in order to put products on the shelves.

Is this the case? I know that industry can close because of lack of freight destinations, but can commercial businesses close due to lack of freight? I had plenty of complaints of the former, but none of the latter.

[nhgriffith 179]

Is this the case? I know that industry can close because of lack of freight destinations, but can commercial businesses close due to lack of freight? I had plenty of complaints of the former, but none of the latter.

I never experienced in the beta either, but I believe a dev or a video mentioned this somewhere at some point in time.

Industry can have two major problems--not enough workers, not enough freight destinations.

Residential can have two major problems--not enough jobs, not enough shops.

It only makes sense for commercial's two major issues to be not enough shoppers and not enough freight... right?

[Techleo 18]

 The interesting thing is when you build a city with just commercial, you can still thrive. Since the cities are linked to a global economy you can just import. I suppose during times when global industry is booming and material prices are low you could see entire regions dedicated to commercial. Then as the economy becomes more competitive, you would see shifts to more diverse economic models. 

Also if you have one extremely heavy industrial city with a good train system, I suppose you could produce enough for several commercial and residential cities. Frankly thats how cities work where I live.

[Howitzer Zak 17]

I tried creating a city with no Industry and it was hard.  I think if I had more time to reduce my low income folks and get some more medium income folks it would be ok, but with no industry I had a lot of low income folks out of work.

 

Another odd thing, not sure if it was a cooincidence or not, I'm hoping that the game is this good of a simulation:

 

In my little dirt road town I had 3 commerce building (Refrigerator Store, Fortune Telling, and a chicken place).  I had one Industry building, they made doughnut parts (or just doughnuts, something to do with doughnuts).  Even though I had commerce buildings, the industry kept complaining that they didn't have any where to ship goods too.  Now I'm not sure if they just made too much stuff for 3 commerce buildings or they were really looking for a doughnut shop to open.  I'm hoping the latter.

 

[simcity4deluxe 95]

Guessing that either one of those people actually tried to make a city without industry, if arguments were true, then commercial wouldn't develop in Simcity 2013, but since the development is based on demand, you don't need industry, you see, your complaining to me because I didn't run the city long enough, but having a city of at least 16,000 or so on both I'd say the products would leave the shelves in around 2 months - 4 months and getting high wealth isn't hard, I'd say you can run a city without industry and besides regardless of how low the demand was the shops still stayed and developed into medium density and wanted to go high density.

[Towel 76]

Guessing that either one of those people actually tried to make a city without industry, if arguments were true, then commercial wouldn't develop in Simcity 2013, but since the development is based on demand, you don't need industry, you see, your complaining to me because I didn't run the city long enough, but having a city of at least 16,000 or so on both I'd say the products would leave the shelves in around 2 months - 4 months and getting high wealth isn't hard, I'd say you can run a city without industry and besides regardless of how low the demand was the shops still stayed and developed into medium density and wanted to go high density.

 

I'm really not sure how this works ... Glass Box is supposed to require a full economic loop, meaning commercial cannot exist without the freight from industrial. I am keen to try this in the final game, my expectation is that the commercial areas in a no industry region/city will not generate much tax income and will be constantly going out of business.

 

I did notice, commercial buldings would still develop and improve in density in my time with the beta even if they had no employees  or even power. It's entirely possible that your commercial buildings were constantly going out of business due to lack of freight and you didn't notice it.

[simcity4deluxe 95]

Guessing that either one of those people actually tried to make a city without industry, if arguments were true, then commercial wouldn't develop in Simcity 2013, but since the development is based on demand, you don't need industry, you see, your complaining to me because I didn't run the city long enough, but having a city of at least 16,000 or so on both I'd say the products would leave the shelves in around 2 months - 4 months and getting high wealth isn't hard, I'd say you can run a city without industry and besides regardless of how low the demand was the shops still stayed and developed into medium density and wanted to go high density.

 

I'm really not sure how this works ... Glass Box is supposed to require a full economic loop, meaning commercial cannot exist without the freight from industrial. I am keen to try this in the final game, my expectation is that the commercial areas in a no industry region/city will not generate much tax income and will be constantly going out of business.

 

I did notice, commercial buldings would still develop and improve in density in my time with the beta even if they had no employees  or even power. It's entirely possible that your commercial buildings were constantly going out of business due to lack of freight and you didn't notice it.

I pay attention to all the buildings in my city and there wasn't any, the only reason why they went out of business in my city was because of not enough customers and not due to "lack of industry".

[macallen 0]

Education has a great many effects in the game:

1. Your sims pollute less, overall

2. They recycle more, polluting even less

3. They build solar panels on top of their houses, reducing your power draw during the day

4. They increase the tech level of your commerce and industry, causing them to pollute less and produce more

5. It opens up various building expansions that require certain amounts of education

6. The Nuclear reactor specifically states that the chance of an accident is in inverse proportion to the education of the operators

7. Educated sims do less/different crimes, more white collar, less violent

 

The more educated your sims are, the better your city runs, overall.