traffic Mastering traffic

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

Frankly, I'm quite sick of the pollution generated on this forum about the "stupidity of agents" and how the game is broken in RCI. It's not. As Halbystarcraft puts it, yes, it's simplified, there's no "hardcore mode" yet, but the mechanics are in there, turned off at the moment, so that easymode people can have fun. That doesn't mean that if you want to play it hardcore you cannot. You can. It's quite challenging to create a "working" RCI city. But it's quite doable and rewarding.

 

Traffic congestion and the "stupid pathing" of agents seems to be the core of all complaints.

 

For some dumb reason, people still try to play this game SimCity 4 style. This is not SC4. It has more options than SC4.

 

Congestion occurs when thousands of sims try to fulfill their roles by using a car. Thus, the obvious solution is to make them not use the car. Just like in real life.

 

That's it. Mystery solved. Wow, that was difficult. 

 

Issue #1: University/College agent congestion

Fix: Place the university/college in the opposite direction from factories and commercial districts. No not zone RCI in that direction.

 

Issue #2: Worker agent congestion

Place bus stops and/or trams at residential and industrial districts. Sims *will* use public transportation if provided.

Do not place high density $ or $$ residential buildings at crossroads, as sims will move into them diagonally over the crossroads, blocking traffic. $$$ HD worker population is very low, so this is not an issue (67 workers per building).

 

Issue #3: Shopper agent congestion

For every high density $ residential, place an adjacent 192-pop $ park. Same logic for $$ residential (football, baseball, parks etc.). Libraries work too. Not all shoppers will go to these, but it will cut the shopper agent congestion by a *huge* chunk.

High-density commercial need to be spread out. 

 

General Fixes:

Use buses for residential-industrial connections and use trams for residential-commercial-education connections. Or the other way around, whatever you prefer. The other alternative is to use buses for $ agents and trams for $$ agents. This also works great.

Having two adjacent $$ or $ high density residential, industrial or commerical buildings is a bad idea. Use parks or utilities to fill the gaps. 

Avoid high density commercial buildings, if you can help it. If you do want them, as I mentioned, spread them out, mix them with HQ buildings if you're going for the looks. There are many ways for sims to spend money, commercial buildings are just one of many.

 

Build a city with these suggestions in mind, and the stupidity of agents will evaporate for the most part.

[Titan 8]

While I do agree that some posts are created from general ignorance, there are still several issues that plague this game.

 

Most of your suggestions are spot on, and I think that if people spent more time developing their cities with better awareness and planning we'd have less negative posts about stupid AI issues.

 

However, this doesn't change the fact that there are core mechanics that need to be addressed. I'm hoping that these issues will be fixed over time, but at the moment they are causing some very real problems for players.

 

Your suggestions are good ones and I've also seen his YouTube videos. I've followed his advice and created some very interesting cities. Still, the same problems keep creeping back up to haunt me. I just hope that Maxis

can alleviate some of the more pressing issues surrounding this game.

 

On a side note: I don't feel that complaining about stupid AI (when referring to the AI playing follow the leader when going to and from work) is a stupid complaint. This is at the root of some of the most glaring issues with SimCity. Let's hope they find a creative solution to this, even if they cannot change this behavior entirely.

[AlexMBrennan 11]

Congestion occurs when thousands of sims try to fulfill their roles by using a car. Thus, the obvious solution is to make them not use the car. Just like in real life.

Which is by and large impossible - for example, the university serves an order of magnitude more students than can a bus/tram stop can serve. Rather than waiting for the bus, student agents who travelled to the university by bus will magically produce a car ex culo to drive home.

Or how about placing park-and-ride at the highway on the city border to limit commuter traffic? Nope, they just ignore that.

Which is a simple workaround for stupid bus/tram agent behaviour (or the lack of bus/tram lines)

For every high density $ residential, place an adjacent 192-pop $ park

Yeah, when I am out of food I frequently visit parks, too. Who needs food?

Just because you can work around the broken parts doesn't mean that it isn't broken.

[Rhadamant5186 19]

Frankly, I'm quite sick of the pollution generated on this forum about the "stupidity of agents" and how the game is broken in RCI. It's not. As Halbystarcraft puts it, yes, it's simplified, there's no "hardcore mode" yet, but the mechanics are in there, turned off at the moment, so that easymode people can have fun. That doesn't mean that if you want to play it hardcore you cannot. You can. It's quite challenging to create a "working" RCI city. But it's quite doable and rewarding.

 

Traffic congestion and the "stupid pathing" of agents seems to be the core of all complaints.

 

For some dumb reason, people still try to play this game SimCity 4 style. This is not SC4. It has more options than SC4.

 

Congestion occurs when thousands of sims try to fulfill their roles by using a car. Thus, the obvious solution is to make them not use the car. Just like in real life.

 

That's it. Mystery solved. Wow, that was difficult. 

 

Issue #1: University/College agent congestion

Fix: Place the university/college in the opposite direction from factories and commercial districts. No not zone RCI in that direction.

 

Issue #2: Worker agent congestion

Place bus stops and/or trams at residential and industrial districts. Sims *will* use public transportation if provided.

Do not place high density $ or $$ residential buildings at crossroads, as sims will move into them diagonally over the crossroads, blocking traffic. $$$ HD worker population is very low, so this is not an issue (67 workers per building).

 

Issue #3: Shopper agent congestion

For every high density $ residential, place an adjacent 192-pop $ park. Same logic for $$ residential (football, baseball, parks etc.). Libraries work too. Not all shoppers will go to these, but it will cut the shopper agent congestion by a *huge* chunk.

High-density commercial need to be spread out. 

 

General Fixes:

Use buses for residential-industrial connections and use trams for residential-commercial-education connections. Or the other way around, whatever you prefer. The other alternative is to use buses for $ agents and trams for $$ agents. This also works great.

Having two adjacent $$ or $ high density residential, industrial or commerical buildings is a bad idea. Use parks or utilities to fill the gaps. 

Avoid high density commercial buildings, if you can help it. If you do want them, as I mentioned, spread them out, mix them with HQ buildings if you're going for the looks. There are many ways for sims to spend money, commercial buildings are just one of many.

 

Build a city with these suggestions in mind, and the stupidity of agents will evaporate for the most part.

 

 

Your solution to issue #1 is a bad fix. Industries actually LIKE and PREFER to have Community colleges and Universities near by, not only does it raise their tech level, it makes them HAPPY! Sure, you can solve traffic issues by moving your education buildings to some far flung corner, but then your enrollment will drop and your tech level will drop and Processors/TV/Computer manufacturing will drop and in an extreme example you could even suffer a nuclear meltdown if the university enrollment drops enough. Your fix is fail.

 

Issue #2 and 3 would work, sure, if you wanted your city to be more like a sprawling suburbia, but I am fairly sure the game is called SimCity, not SimSprawlingSuburbia, so in regards to both of those fixes, yeah I admit they will work, but they are just work-arounds for the really bad agent scripting that was programmed into this game. As a software developer myself I know I would be ashamed if that's the solution I sought to a complex pathing issue.

 

I think I can speak for many players when I say that we want high density cities. All your solutions just provide us for a way to make medium density suburbias, so basically you too are saying that a high density metropolis with function traffic is effectively impossible if your solution to traffic is to avoid high density low and medium wealth buildings.

 

Given this is a simulator I would like to think that the game we purchased should be able to simulate a variety of cities, not just one cookie cutter templated city that works in sync with the JUNK coding put in this game.

[CosmicSpeed 28]

Lets keep this to techniques, and leave the complaints about the "Agents" in another thread.

 

After creating a few cities and discovering what works the best for me I have come up with this:

 

- I never zone on avenues

- I usually plop Hospitals, Fire, Police, Education and Traffic units on Avenues, never on streets

- "T" Intersections, no "X"

 

- Keep your street layout to a brick pattern

- I roads that run parallel to the highway/avenues to help congestion.

- Alternate intersections from avenues to either north/south east/west, never have an intersection next to each other empty on the same side of the avenue.

 

I will try and upload some images if I get a chance, this alleviates traffic for my cities

[Rhadamant5186 19]

Lets keep this to techniques, and leave the complaints about the "Agents" in another thread.

 

After creating a few cities and discovering what works the best for me I have come up with this:

 

- I never zone on avenues

- I usually plop Hospitals, Fire, Police, Education and Traffic units on Avenues, never on streets

- "T" Intersections, no "X"

 

- Keep your street layout to a brick pattern

- I roads that run parallel to the highway/avenues to help congestion.

- Alternate intersections from avenues to either north/south east/west, never have an intersection next to each other empty on the same side of the avenue.

 

I will try and upload some images if I get a chance, this alleviates traffic for my cities

 

My whole point is that needing to find work arounds for all the bad coding put into this game makes it so that rather than designing, customizing and personalizing cities we are forced to lay cities out in a very cookie cutter way in accordance to the major restrictions passed down to us by the very flawed game engine. Don't you agree?

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

Your solution to issue #1 is a bad fix. Industries actually LIKE and PREFER to have Community colleges and Universities near by, not only does it raise their tech level, it makes them HAPPY! Sure, you can solve traffic issues by moving your education buildings to some far flung corner, but then your enrollment will drop and your tech level will drop and Processors/TV/Computer manufacturing will drop and in an extreme example you could even suffer a nuclear meltdown if the university enrollment drops enough. Your fix is fail.

 

Issue #2 and 3 would work, sure, if you wanted your city to be more like a sprawling suburbia, but I am fairly sure the game is called SimCity, not SimSprawlingSuburbia, so in regards to both of those fixes, yeah I admit they will work, but they are just work-arounds for the really bad agent scripting that was programmed into this game. As a software developer myself I know I would be ashamed if that's the solution I sought to a complex pathing issue.

 

I think I can speak for many players when I say that we want high density cities. All your solutions just provide us for a way to make medium density suburbias, so basically you too are saying that a high density metropolis with function traffic is effectively impossible if your solution to traffic is to avoid high density low and medium wealth buildings.

 

Given this is a simulator I would like to think that the game we purchased should be able to simulate a variety of cities, not just one cookie cutter templated city that works in sync with the JUNK coding put in this game.

 

 

For #1 it doesn't mean you cannot place a Uni near your industrial area. You can, just provide a separate route to it.

 

High density cities are high density cities. It doesn't mean that high density buildings must lean on each other all the time. Interestingly though, a High density $ or $$$ area works just fine, because the amount of rich sims is small enough to work in such a fashion. If you look at most real-world low-weath high-rises, you'll see they cannot sustain a level of building density as you suggest.

[CosmicSpeed 28]

For all we know, SIM's are NOT human.

 

Therefore, SIM's act differently than humans, therefore, the way they act in the game is normal for them but alien to us.

 

It is all about perspective.

 

For me, I look at the game as "how can I make my SIM's happy as possible" rather than "why can't I make my simulated city like a human city"

[fimiki 1]

To the OP, thank you for creating a post with specific, detailed, tested, and helpful points.  Finding information like this is a gem when browsing SimCity forums filled with threads agonizing over how terrible the game is.  Granted, the game has nowhere near the scope and depth that I was hoping for, but amidst the bugs and glitches there are glimpses of genius.  The UI and data layers are miles ahead of any other city simulator, and I can see how an agent-based system could result in interesting emergent behavior.  In any case, all the other Sim City games I've played, including my cherished Sim City 2000, had a number of hacks you had to employ in order to craft the city you wanted.  Anyone remember the tricks needed to make underwater tunnels or bridges that didn't need ramps?  Part of playing any sim game is learning how to game the system, and I fully expect to do this in Sim City 5 as well.

 

 

 

Issue #3: Shopper agent congestion

For every high density $ residential, place an adjacent 192-pop $ park. Same logic for $$ residential (football, baseball, parks etc.). Libraries work too. Not all shoppers will go to these, but it will cut the shopper agent congestion by a *huge* chunk.

High-density commercial need to be spread out. 

 

...There are many ways for sims to spend money, commercial buildings are just one of many.

 

In any case, I'd like to know more about these alternative shopping options for shopper sims.  How do you determine which parks are "192-pop" parks?  How many shoppers are satisfied by each park?  How many shoppers does a library satisfy?  I've seen spreadsheets that break down the worker/shopper/student and low/medium/high worker counts for different buildings, but hardly any of them agree on the shopping goods produced by commercial zones, much less the goods produced by buildings you lay down yourself.  I like the idea of a park-filled residential/industrial city to supply goods to more densely packed residential/commercial cities, but I'm not sure how to balance the park-to-residence ratio. 

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

In any case, I'd like to know more about these alternative shopping options for shopper sims.  How do you determine which parks are "192-pop" parks?  How many shoppers are satisfied by each park?  How many shoppers does a library satisfy?  I've seen spreadsheets that break down the worker/shopper/student and low/medium/high worker counts for different buildings, but hardly any of them agree on the shopping goods produced by commercial zones, much less the goods produced by buildings you lay down yourself.  I like the idea of a park-filled residential/industrial city to supply goods to more densely packed residential/commercial cities, but I'm not sure how to balance the park-to-residence ratio. 

 

Shopping is a misleading term. Sims seek "happiness". They can find it in shopping, parks, recreation and libraries. If you mouseover a park in the menu you can see its capacity ("visitors per day"), although this will be split between happiness-seekers and kids. The largest $ park accepts 192 sims. Happiness-seeking sims are satisfied with the park of their wealth status. Parks & Recreation also provide some jobs. The downside of parks, compared to commericial buildings is that they cost money, while commercial buildings give money via tax.

You can see how much a commercial building provides by selecting the Commericial datamap and hovering over the dark blue (goods) bar. This is best done before the shoppers rush out (say, before 6 AM). Same is true for the number of workers a workplace provides. A solid working high density commercial building provides around 120 to 200 jobs.

 

I'm a strong advocate of having both commercial and non-commercial happiness for my sims. You can see how I placed parks in the post above. That's the $$ district.

 

EDIT: In the city I placed screenshots about, my parks have 1625 visitors per day (total), which accounts for roughly 30% of my sim's happiness needs.

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

I successfully created a city with the above stated concepts. Screenshots incoming. And yes, it's High Density almost exclusively. Around 100.000k citizens, minimal traffic

[5uper_Mania 6]

I think I read this on the SimBlog but I've replicated EA's tip on keeping intersections residential free. Basically, when it comes to zoning blocks  I paint corners at intersections blue, and completing the rest of the block green. I've noticed less traffic congestion.

 

The funny thing is even though the spacing seems limited, there are ingame models for high density buildings even for the most confined spaces. So, for example if one painted the intersection corners with a reasonable amount of blue, as roads expands and building density is up for an upgrade, a building will eventually pop up on the corner much taller than it's predecessor albeit a bit skinny looking.

[Bibor_Kiraly 21]

Here are the screenshots of a HD city in making. Granted, not all buildings are HD yet, but getting there.