How to build two communicating cities

[Lumdir 1]

Hi guys, this post should answer an easy question: what should I do to make two good communicating cities?

I tell you this because I would like to have a residential/touristic city and a working city with resources etc.

 

The title of the topic means... everyone of us can claim a city and build everything within: residential, commercial, factories, schools, police, services and so on; but what happens when you try to play like our old Sim City 4, with a "working city" and a "dormitory city"?

 

You place town hall also in the working one or just in the dormitory? And what about schools? How do you make these communicate? Trains? Busses?

here's a lot to say and I don't want to fill my topic/request with dump informations so I wait for your answers.

 

Hope someone of you already did this (because I can't find anything about on youtube) and will clearly help me to do it too!

 

Thank you!

[A_S00 2]

Build two cities in the same region, and connect them in as many ways as possible.  That can include:

-Road (don't have to do anything, just make sure there's a road connecting them on the region map).

-Bus (have a bus terminal in one and place bus stops in the other).

-Train (passenger train depot in both cities, make sure there's a rail connection on the region map).

-Boat (passenger ferry depot in both cities).

-Air?  I haven't set up an airport yet, not sure.

 

Once you've done that, students and workers will go from one city to the other according to education and job availability, which allows for the working/dormitory setup.  You can also volunteer vehicles for garbage collection, law enforcement, fire prevention, and medical aid via the region screen.  And stuff that gets unlocked via city specialization HQ buildings gets unlocked for the whole region (so if you've got a trade HQ with an electronics division in one city, the whole region will be able to export TV's and computers at trade ports).

 

As far as I can tell, cities can't share any city hall functions, so you'll need one in each city.  You also can't set up any kind of persistent resource trading (so, if you've got metals in one city and a plastics industry in the other, there's no way to combine them into an electronics industry that's any more efficient than just buying materials off the global market), although you can manually gift resources and money.

[perafilozof 143]

I have noticed that low wealth $ workers don't like to commute for work , while medium wealth $$ workers have not problems with it. At least that is how it works in one of my cities that has 12 ,000+ $$ workers commuting in from the two cities my firends have next to me. And 10/11,000 needed $ workers. As for $$$ workers I have about 1,400 commuting in.

 

I am in the process of making a two city interconnected region exactly to test this all out.

[JimCityBuilder 14]

I says in the fficial guide that if I have a department of transportation in one city it allows for the building of other mass transit systems in any of the other cities although I am not finding this to be true ! Therefore I am unable to share workers between the cities and everything fails, what could be going wrong here or is this an issue that needs an update to resolve ?

[Lumdir 1]

I says in the fficial guide that if I have a department of transportation in one city it allows for the building of other mass transit systems in any of the other cities although I am not finding this to be true ! Therefore I am unable to share workers between the cities and everything fails, what could be going wrong here or is this an issue that needs an update to resolve ?

 

Found that problem too. Try to go to main menu and then re-enter in your game. Worked for me.

 

 

Once you've done that, students and workers will go from one city to the other according to education and job availability, which allows for the working/dormitory setup.  You can also volunteer vehicles for garbage collection, law enforcement, fire prevention, and medical aid via the region screen.  And stuff that gets unlocked via city specialization HQ buildings gets unlocked for the whole region (so if you've got a trade HQ with an electronics division in one city, the whole region will be able to export TV's and computers at trade ports).

 

As far as I can tell, cities can't share any city hall functions, so you'll need one in each city.  You also can't set up any kind of persistent resource trading (so, if you've got metals in one city and a plastics industry in the other, there's no way to combine them into an electronics industry that's any more efficient than just buying materials off the global market), although you can manually gift resources and money.

 

I heard that learned workers will go to the "factory city" but won't increase factories tech level... it is true? If yes I would need to put schools also in the factory city and that's so boring.

What about zoning? Should I put residential and commercial into the "dormitory city" and ONLY industrial/warehouses into the "working city"?

[Lumdir 1]

Up.

[JimCityBuilder 14]

The update yesterday seems to have resolved the issues with intercity transportation but it can still take an age to show up once a transport system is put in place, also most Sims don't seem to want to commute and that is not helping things, mybe it is an issue of making the city to commute to a desirability thing similar to attracting tourists ? Will play around with this and see what happens.

 

Jim

[Bobington 4]

Train stations can easily handle thousands of commuters, good luck getting them to use it however.

[gmart530 6]

A sandbox city I have has about 50,000 residents (phantom pop of course), with about 4,000 $-wealth jobs open.  Curiously I made a connecting city with ONLY zoned res right next to a short avenue by the entrance.  Of the 300 available workers about half of the population is content on being unemployed while the other half commutes.  I'm not using buses in my main city (fear of traffic) so I don't have any regional mass transit.  Plopped a train station but it didn't increase the number, some just started using train to travel (they have to pass the train station in order to leave the city anyway)