Megatower Strategy and Problems Discussion

[Griffon 19]

first of all where do most people put them? random or strategic location?

what levels do you put in them? and in what order?

what crowns do you use/like the most?

also what zones do you place around the rest of your city? like do you not zone commercial because you place all the commercial in your megatowers? and other stuff like that.

 

And any other discussions about megatowers you can think about as a whole.

 

To start off, I normally just place them randomly around my city and not next to each other, but usually with a MagLev next to one exit.  I try to place the mall/office levels around my skybridge (thinking back to SimTower I thought that would be a good idea) and the skybridge as close the center as possible (level 4 or 5 usually) so every level has equal access to them.  I also place the levels as needed.  The megatower adviser guy usually tells me what is needed in them.  I also favor the solar crowns because two of them can power any CoT city I've built so far plus the solar crowns don't take up any room in your city and if you have all eight megatowers you can place at least one of each type of crown anyways (so it's not like you don't have room for the others).

 

Here is one problem I have with them.  After playing a city for a long time (usually by game year four) my megatowers start to go abandoned.  The residential levels say they can't find work so they move out, then my office/mall levels start to go red because they're losing shoppers/workers from the residential moving out and soon I have entire megatowers that are red.  Has anyone else encountered this problem?  If so how do you fix it?

 

Another thing I can't figure out is that a residential level in one tower is red and an office level in another tower that is directly connected with skybridges is also red.  The residential says they can't find work and office says not enough workers.  The solution is easy, get the residential from one building to work at the office in the other (isn't this what the skybridges are for?), but they're not smart enough to figure this out for themselves.  How can this problem be solved?

 

These problems really affect my Academy cities, because my Academy is basically ran off the megatower population, then my ControlNet drops when they leave and something ran by ControlNet stops working which leads to other problems.

 

So that is why I wanted to start this discussion for megatower strategies and problems (for me and everyone else to understand how to use them better/more efficiently).

[Xenocity 343]

First off in every Simcity game, The Sims are utterly stupid and lazy.

This causes problems in each game.

 

As for the Megatower office issue, each office type hires a set amount from each of the wealth levels.

You may have a high tech ($$$) office that cannot find enough $ or $$ Sims to fill the $ and $$ jobs (All workers come from the towers).

Same goes for each office type.

 

My city suffers from a lack of $ level Sims causing my city and towers to  have a work shortage leading to stuff shutting down.

 

Last night I had 1M simoleans saved up to pay for the International airport for my region, then all of a sudden 4 of my 7 towers starting having problems with the $$ level sims.

This caused my Mall levels and some offices to lose their $$ employees causing them to bleed money.

 

This caused me to bleed 40-60k an hour trying to figure out the issue and I went bankrupt twice.

 

What I learned was the following:

 

• Use $$ Apartment sections sparingly
• Use $$ Apartments in normal poor towers not elite towers (or they will whine about land value in time and move out)
• Use offices sparingly (generally when told to by the adviser), the sims will go to your local commerical zones for work making them profitable
• Park level and Park crowns help keep your Sims happy in your towers (and non tower sims as well)
• Put one school in a central tower and have the other towers link up to said tower
• Hologram marketing crown to boost renters, office workers, and mall shoppers (it will make them profitable)
• Use Skyclops and Tourism crowns in tourist/gambling cities (don't bother if your city isn't a tourist or gaming city)
• Waste reduction level produces lots of recyclables and drives down the other ulitity usage
• Solar Generator crowns provide tons of cheap electricity to your city/region (I like these)
• If your city needs water, us air scrubber crowns
• Make sure you have enough Controlnet
• Make sure you connect all the road sides of your towers to road to help with traffic flow
• Make one central tower to connect all others too

My towers are now profitable again and my population is happy.

Also don't become too dependant on your towers for electricity in case you need to shut them down for unprofitability.

Never bulldoze the whole tower, just the levels (much cheaper this way to rebuild).

 

I hope this helps

 

Here is my current set up ( the other poor tower is hidden behind the elite tower on the left).

[Griffon 19]

@Xenocity thanks that helps, I really like your central tower idea.  Next city I'll make the center tower have two skybridge levels so I really can connect all my towers to it.

 

I've noticed that for most levels that you get money back on (residential, mall, and office) your only barely getting any money back from the residential and mall levels (about enough to cover the expenses).  If you want a profitable metatower system you need office levels and that's why I place a lot of them, but I usually place them in one tower topped with an advertising crown to get even more money off them (maybe that's my problem).

 

Most of these problems I mentioned earlier are in my Academy cities.  In a mostly low wealth OmegaCo city I had, I was making $30,000/hr profit from megatowers, but I only used low wealth office levels so they'd have more low wealth jobs and I also used a lot of advertising crowns.  I also had one Elite tower filled up with all high wealth residential, a park, and a service level to supply the high wealth jobs in the offices and for my ControlNet extension building.  Also I got all my towers to be owned by OmegaCo (the elite tower was the hardest to convert) which made me even more money from the towers and kept them happier (as long as they were supplied with Omega).

 

And just so you know if you don't like the starting bases on the towers you can bulldoze them and put something else there.  It is expensive since it's like your paying double for the first level.  About the only time I do this is on elite towers to replace the medium wealth with high wealth and when I do this I use the residential level because it's the cheapest to build.  It's $100,000 for a regular tower and $200,000 for an elite tower plus what ever the starting level of your tower costs.

[Snugies 91]

I'm having trouble making money off my towers, as i'm just using them to supply workers to the industry to keep unemployment up. so maybe that's why they are unprofitable for me as i'm just using low income housing and some low income mall levels. I read on the EA forums that you want to have high city demand for what you are building in the office tower.
I also found my elite mega towers unprofitable again I was only building mid income housing.

[upcreekcity 0]

Sorry if this is obvious,but many people didn't know this (including me) Mega towers have 3 road connections at the base.

One is automatically connected,the others require manual connection.

[Griffon 19]

Sorry if this is obvious,but many people didn't know this (including me) Mega towers have 3 road connections at the base.

One is automatically connected,the others require manual connection.

Well for me I've watched all three simcity twitch streams by the developers.  It's always Ross and someone else, can't remember their names now.  Anyways they built an Academy City before the launch of CoT and mentioned the three road entrances.

 

The OmegaCo stream wasn't anything new to me (since it was two days after the launch), but they probably could have read this topic because all levels of all the megatowers in that city was red.  I watch those streams because it's about the only time you get to directly ask them questions about the game if you can put up with the "bigger maps" spamming people and not all questions get answered.

 

Speaking of OmegaCo if you didn't know this.  If your megatowers get enough Omega deliveries they can convert to OmegaCo too and you get even more money from OmegaCo.  That also means all shopping done outside the towers are done with drones (lessing road traffic).  I had two towers with mostly residential converted in one city and they used more than 600 drones each per day.  One more thing, elite towers are the hardest to convert but still possible.

[SnakePlissken11 0]

Wow I didn't know about the 3 entrances thanks guys, it should probably help with traffic later on. Does anyone have/know a successful setup for plopping the megatower mall and office levels? There's so many factors involved. For instance you need to take into account land-based zones that interact with the malls/offices, and if you build skybridges sims will probably use them to travel to malls/offices in another tower. 

 

From my own experience i created a few cities with no land-based zones and just megatowers. I noticed that land-based zones are essential, because over and over again I would plop towers with 4 apartments separated by 1 mall level of the same wealth and it always came up with the "not enough shoppers" problem. This problem went away once I added land-based residential zones, so i'm thinking sims from those zones play a very important role in shopping/working in towers even though towers can supposedly become "sustainable cities" with skybridges.

 

Also does anyone know if plopping the skybridge in the middle really makes it easier for sims? I've also been hearing that if you only have education from towers and no elementary school, since education stemming from the normal towers is high school only then sims growing up (child sims) won't acquire the prerequisite schooling to enter the high school stage. Is this considered true you think?

[Griffon 19]

I honestly don't know of any good designs for megatowers.  I usually place residential at the bottom since they are usually the most stable with malls and offices closer to the top in case I have to edit them later because it's easier to edit the top levels and this seems to work.  The theory behind drones is that they do the shopping for your sims, which means that distance and location shouldn't matter for them and they could go shopping even if the malls are at the tops of the towers in another city (at least this is how it should work).

 

I said I usually place the skybridge in the middle so the people in the megatowers can reach all levels of the other towers equally.  I have no idea if that even matters.

 

I was thinking back to SimTower.  In SimTower you basically win when you build 100 levels and place the cathedral on the very top.  Your tower is extremely profitable for the first 25-30 levels (as far as the normal elevators will reach) then you have to start using express elevators that move only in intervals of 15 and place sky lobbies every 15 levels.  People in that game don't like using express elevators then get off to use a different elevator so you start to lose money on those levels.  I'm thinking of the skybridge as the express elevator and the normal elevator as the tower elevator.  Basically thinking that not many of them like using the skybridges to work at other towers.  Also a good strategy in SimTower was to place fast food stores above and below your sky lobbies.  The sky lobbies are like the skybridge station and I thought to place malls and offices above and below them.

 

But once again, I don't know if SimTower logic applies here although.  I think they mentioned SimTower in one twitch broadcast and compared it to the megatowers.

 

I definitely don't think sims will travel through another megatower to get to one on the other side using skybridges and they definitely won't leave the towers unless they have to (I could be wrong on those).

 

As far as education goes every house produces students(as well as workers and shoppers).  The students don't have an age, you can send them to any type of school and still get educated.  I prefer the regular megatower education levels because they hold 2,000 students instead of only 1,200 in elite towers.  Another bonus to megatower education levels is they come with their own school busses.  Education isn't required for your non-tower population, but people in your towers will eventually complain and move out without education.  So by putting education in megatowers it helps them find schools better.

 

Another long post but hope that helps.

 

Btw need other people answering questions besides just me, because I'd like to know what other think about the megatowers and have them give their ideas too.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

The good thing about the Elite MegaTowers' Education Levels is that they increase tech level of factories like Community Colleges and have a better cost per desk ratio than community colleges. I have seen sims travel through MegaTowers to get to other MegaTowers or to bypass traffic on the ground to a MegaTower on the other side of town. Also, I never ever build park levels in my MegaTowers. My residential towers have 6 apartments, 1 skybridge station, 1 waste reduction level (running out of water becomes a problem otherwise), and a park crown. I have so many park crowns that I always have the full regional bonus (I just wish there was a higher limit so I could get an even bigger bonus). Personally, I dislike office levels because they don't produce freight or increase hapiness. I also learned that high density factories produce less freight per worker than medium density, which produces less freight per worker than low density (which makes no sense gameplay-wise or realistically because large, modernized factories hire few workers and are EXTREMELY productive). When I want to futrize my entire city, I try to put all my R$$ in basic MegaTowers because zoned/grown R$$ doesn't futurize much.

 

 

--Ocram

[Froudini 4]

First post here... Anyways, I've been playing about 8-10 cities with Megatowers with varied success. First of all, there really isn't any "magic forumula" to get the towers to work, as it really depends on what your city needs at the time. I have not yet tried to have 8 towers, but I have 4 in my current city which makes me about 13-20K profit pr hour. I'll list some tips on the form of a wall of text:

 

• Disclaimer - I am not claiming that this will work for everyone, but it has worked pretty consistently for the last few cities I've made.
• Avoid mixing wealth level for residents. When you are making a tower, take a look at what type of residents your city needs. If it's low wealth sims, then you should make it accordingly
• Build slowly and try to learn what each floor does to the various charts for residential, commercial and industrial. You don't need to hold off for hours, but give it a few minutes with 3x speed to let it stabilize before adding new floors.
• If you can, avoid putting shopping in your tower. I am not sure if it as bug, but I've seen it happen so many times and what it does is that it can cause sims to complain that there are no places to shop, even though they are in the same building as a shop of the same wealth level that are complaining there are no customers. Even if you have a big city of 200.000+ people, you can manage fine by using regular commercial zones on the ground. I'm sure it is possible to have a working mall, but I found this problem to happen at some point during the game.
• You can buldoze the base floor of any building. It removes the cost of the building completely (same as turning it off...), but you can still put out the base for later use. Pretty handy if you want to reserve some space for later. Another good thing about this is that it let's you completely customize a tower, for example if you want a pure high wealth tower from top to bottom. 
• If you have decided to go for a low wealth tower, always start with the ones that have residential ground floor. As long as your city needs it, I usually start with 2-3 residential floors right away. Then I always put a park floor, because it's sims and they love parks. If you are going to use a sky bridge, try to get in the 4-5th floor. The reason for that is if you need to make adjustments like deleting a floor, it's not a good thing to have to delete it just to reach that malfunctioning shopping floor... Use the top 1-2 floors to test things out so you can delete them without having to kick out 5000 sims from a working floor.
• Sky bridges look nice and it let's you send your sims around town in a cool way. The problem is that I've had issues much like the shopping floor "bug". Sims complain there are no place to shop, yet a connected tower has a shopping floor is screaming for more customers. Sky bridge will also take away an entire floor that could have been used for residential purposes. Just plop a bus stop, mag lev station or stuff like that close to the building and the sims will get around just fine.
• If you are installing utility floors like power plants, garbage reduction and so on, put them as low as you can for the same reason I mentioned earlier. Those floors can't really "fail" so there is no need to put them as number 7 or 8 in case you need to delete floors. Basically, keep the "safest" floors on the bottom, like parks and utility. 
• Offices, shopping and schools should go on the top floors for the same reason I mentioned earlier. They are the most unstable floors and it hurts less to just have to delete your crown and maybe one floor to remove them if needed.
• Office floors are great, especially the low-tech offices works great for a low wealth building. The job distribution is 600/100/50 between low/medium/high wealth sims, but as long as the 600 low wealth spots are filled, you will still make a profit and you won't get spammed with messages that the sims are unhappy.
• DO NOT USE THE SOLAR PANEL CROWN AS YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF POWER! If one or more floors needs to be removed it sucks cut all your power. Yes you can rebuild it but your entire city will lose power, water, sewage treatment and so on until it is back online. If you want extra power to sell to the region it's cool, but it is much safer to install an atomic reactor or fusion reactor floor at the very bottom of your building. At least you have a power plant for your city, even if all the seven floors you built above sucks ass
• Keep some space around the towers, as it lets you tweak stuff like commercial needs. Given that you place a tower in an area with similar wealth-level sims, just one or two commercial buildings can fulfill the shopping needs to many sims.
• Again, there really isn't a magic formula to tower composition, but I'll still list a combo that has worked great for me, not just for a half hour but consistently on different maps. Using the tips I stated above I would go something like this
• Regular tower. Floor 1-3: Low wealth residential. Floor 4: Park. Floor 5: Office (low tech) or sky bridge if you want that. Floor 6-7: more low wealth residents. Floor 8: Office (low tech). You can also put other stuff there to experiment as it is very easy to delete if needed. The crown is not crucial, but when I have 2-3 towers with office buildings I put the advertising crown as it increase the profit by 20% for each crown you have up to 100% for 5 crowns in the region (not just the city).

 

I hope this helps some of you who are struggling with making a profit from towers. 

[Griffon 19]

@OcramSeattle really liked your post and think of offices as commercial that people don't shop at.  They're not making or selling any products, just making money more efficiently than malls (probably by collecting rent on offices in the levels).  Like I said before I think the megatowers are based off SimTower.  I don't know if you played it before, but SimTower made money off mainly office rents.  The people living in your tower worked in the offices in your tower and people outside the tower shopped at the shopping levels.  You even had tourists visit your hotel levels.  So in SimTower you had residential, office, malls, tourism, service levels(security, hospitals, and garbage), transportation (underground metro station), and crowns (the Cathedral).  Sounds a lot like megatowers with a few differences.

 

@Froudini good ideas too, although I don't try to make a profit from megatowers anymore.  I did at first, but with OmegaCo in my cities that usually covers all my costs and more.  Your megatower increases the wealth of the area around them.  Regular megatowers increase medium wealth and elite increases high wealth land value (especially if you add a park to them).  Parks really help keep them happy (if I don't put a park level I add a park crown).  I haven't thought about not mixing wealth in towes before, I'll start doing that now.

 

I don't like placing nuclear power levels in the towers because they'll leak radiation if there isn't enough education which isn't really as bad as the nuclear plants.  I've come to really dislike fusion reactors because if they fail to ignite, your whole city has a blackout but if they do your whole city gets full power.  The tower fusion reactors are harder to ignite for some reason and if you they run out of ControlNet you have to reignite them to get them to start working again.  Its just a pain to do, but I have tried to put a fully upgraded oil power plant right in front of them to help them ignite better.

 

Again with the power crowns, they are the best way to power your city, but it really hurts you if you (or someone else) bulldozes them, because not only do you lose the power that crown is producing it also decreases the amount the other crowns are producing.  This happened to me, I had two and a neighbor had one, so we had a three bonus level.  They got rid of theirs for some reason so I lost about 160MW and went negative.  Also if you're having problems with keeping your megatowers full of power, try placing at least one solar crown. Even if you don't need the power, it really helps since power also flows along skybridges and it's at the very top of your towers instead of somewhere else in the city.

FYI: The regular megatower solar crowns produce 200MW plus 40MW per crown per bonus level and elite megatower solar crowns produce 400MW plus 80MW per crown per bonus level and the bonuses really add up if you have more than one per city.  Example for elite crowns: one produces 480MW, two produces 1,120MW, and three produces 1,920MW, etc.

 

In my last OmegaCo City, someone finally unlocked the ground scrubber (I'm usually too impatient to unlock them).  They slowly remove all the ground pollution no matter how dirty it is and keeps it clean.  I had two air scrubber crowns near the ground scrubbers and the combination kept the city nearly pollution free (still some air pollution probably because they were regular air scrubbers and not maxed bonus) while providing a ton of ground water (all clean due to the ground scrubbers).

 

One more thing, I've found that the least any residential level can have is 6 sims for some reason.  If you only have those 6 people and you can't solve their problem to get more people to move back in (try to solve problem before this point if you can though), try turning that level off long enough for them to move out.  When you turn it back on people usually start moving back in like you just placed that level, but this doesn't always work.  Sometimes when I turn it back on there is a different problem they're complaining about.  Like if they were complaining about work, now they're complaining about health for example.

 

I'd like to know if anyone did the achievements that require all 8 levels of the same levels (all 8 residential, all 8 mall, or all 8 offices) and make a profit off all of them.  I'd think residential would be the easiest. 

[Ocram's Razr 963]

@OcramSeattle really liked your post and think of offices as commercial that people don't shop at.  They're not making or selling any products, just making money more efficiently than malls (probably by collecting rent on offices in the levels).  Like I said before I think the megatowers are based off SimTower.  I don't know if you played it before, but SimTower made money off mainly office rents.  The people living in your tower worked in the offices in your tower and people outside the tower shopped at the shopping levels.  You even had tourists visit your hotel levels.  So in SimTower you had residential, office, malls, tourism, service levels(security, hospitals, and garbage), transportation (underground metro station), and crowns (the Cathedral).  Sounds a lot like megatowers with a few differences.

Why yes, Griffon, I have played SimTower. I have also played Yoot Tower and a couple similar games (Corporation Inc, Tiny Tower, OpenTower, and Highrise Developer) as well as having made my own "High Definition" graphics corresponding with the majority of the rooms in SimTower (with only 2-4 rooms animated by me and another 5-10 animated by the developers of Highrise Developer).

About Office Levels in MegaTowers:

I have played Cities XL and I think that offices should NOT consume freight but should boost the amount of freight (or profits) of industry in the city. As it stands, there are usually too many job sinks for the amount of freight produced. I think commercial shops work fine the way they do now (though I think that hotels and offices should be less reliant on freight). However, I would like to see at least one of three things happen:

1. All densities of factories produce the same amount of freight per worker as low density factories.

2. Offices produce Office Services (and consume paper and/or a small amount of computers but don't require them, they just boost profits, like commerce doesn't really need freight but if taxes are high, their profits are not high enough without freight), which travel like electricity (or ControlNET) to factories, boosting their profits and freight production. Paper would be a new resource that could be recycled and offices could get their own demand bar (turning RCI into RCIO).

3. Omega-infected factories produce twice as much freight from the same amount of Omega.

I really don't build offices in my MegaTowers because of the aforementioned reason that I have unfilled jobs, unsatisfied shoppers, and unfilled freight orders all at the same time.

--Ocram

[Griffon 19]

Why yes, Griffon, I have played SimTower. I have also played Yoot Tower and a couple similar games (Corporation Inc, Tiny Tower, OpenTower, and Highrise Developer) as well as having made my own "High Definition" graphics corresponding with the majority of the rooms in SimTower (with only 2-4 rooms animated by me and another 5-10 animated by the developers of Highrise Developer).

Sounds interesting and that your very experienced in tower building games.  I can't do much with graphics other than tell them what to do in games once someone made them.  I mostly do this for Civ4 BTS, I download the graphics from the fan website and place them in the game with the stats I give them.

 

About Office Levels in MegaTowers:

I have played Cities XL and I think that offices should NOT consume freight but should boost the amount of freight (or profits) of industry in the city. As it stands, there are usually too many job sinks for the amount of freight produced. I think commercial shops work fine the way they do now (though I think that hotels and offices should be less reliant on freight). However, I would like to see at least one of three things happen:

1. All densities of factories produce the same amount of freight per worker as low density factories.

2. Offices produce Office Services (and consume paper and/or a small amount of computers but don't require them, they just boost profits, like commerce doesn't really need freight but if taxes are high, their profits are not high enough without freight), which travel like electricity (or ControlNET) to factories, boosting their profits and freight production. Paper would be a new resource that could be recycled and offices could get their own demand bar (turning RCI into RCIO).

3. Omega-infected factories produce twice as much freight from the same amount of Omega.

I really don't build offices in my MegaTowers because of the aforementioned reason that I have unfilled jobs, unsatisfied shoppers, and unfilled freight orders all at the same time.

--Ocram

I agree with all these changes to offices and industry and I think you need to add that higher tech industries should also be more productive since if they have better tech that should improve efficiency.  I remember that in SC4 there was a demand for offices although you had to expand the RCI bars into their individual wealth demand bars instead of just looking at the three bars, but otherwise useless because they grew from commercial zones.  I did like how offices actually had a purpose in CitiesXL, but most of the time were hard to grown in your city because they required holiday resource and hotels to produce office services, had to have a place that used the service, and had to be near an intercity connection (took me quite a few cities to figure this out).

 

The thing about offices is they are only there for megatowers to turn a profit and not cost you an hourly expense, but besides that, they're useless because they create a ton more jobs to fill, not really solving any problems.  I see your point for not using them in towers, not to mention they cost a ton to build.  So I'd suggest using megatower to hold mainly services (drones, power, education, etc.) and people with little or no offices and malls (that is probably the point you were trying to make anyways).

[SnakePlissken11 0]

Yea mall levels have always created two large problems for me, for once they failed you have 1. An unworkable mall that drains your revenue and 2. Sims working at said unworkable mall that could be working somewhere else. All the while the RCI bar is showing huge demand for commercial, obv a game glitch. Offices are okay to have imo. Eventually sims seem to move on to other jobs are your city expands, but from my experience at least 1 of the wealth job bars is completely full which makes it at least "medium green" profitable. 

 

As for parks, I run into problems if I have more than 2 apartments and only 1 park, as 1 or more apartments start demanding parks or malls, especially if I have 3 apartments followed by the park. This is why I have at least 2 parks for 4 or more apartments, or at the very least spread the parks between apartments as much as you can. Parks have a limit to the number of people, and the only parks you can increase that limit for is the crowns. I have also had similar experiences with education. Eventually sims demand it. I recommend having 2 normal tower education levels once your population reaches 150k or more, that's when I started having problems.

 

As for energy, at one point I had a 300MW excess from my wave power plant, so I built a fusion reactor on the other side of the map. The wave plant was my only source of power and it ignited the reactor just fine. So I think if your other power source excess is at least halfway into the green zone it should ignite the reactor and the distance from it doesn't matter. Lastly, with towers I eventually have this huge crime problem. At one point one of my towers had all red malfunctioning levels and the crime bar went up to the sky! I had about 300 criminals at large, my police precinct was in the corner of the map but it had full drones for it, 28 cars, 2 helicopters and 1 detective wing. I even built a small police station near the tower but it didn't do much. The tower next to it even had a safety level. I think there might be a bug where police don't arrest as many criminals as they should or something because I only had 16 arrested at the most out of the 50 for a precinct. That tower was the worst but there were crime bars all over the city, the only place there weren't any was in 3 of my elite towers.

 

Also, I like to build the Copan landmark because if you ever need some extra medium wealth workers the landmark will give you 1100 medium wealth sims to live xD, it also increases the population if you're trying to max it out as much as possible.

[Froudini 4]

I also found out another thing about office buildings in towers. They can get up to 50% (but no more) of the required workers from outside the tower. I made a tower  with just one office at the base floor and waited for each wealth levels position to be filled and it stopped at exactly 50%. This may also be the reason why sims inside the towers complain about having no jobs, even though you keep adding offices. If your city in general needs jobs, the sims outside the megatowers will basically take half the jobs in there. This also leads me to believe that sims in other mega-towers can only utilize 50% of the available jobs in a connected tower, which again is the reason I think it is so hard to have a setup where you have one tower with mostly apartment floors and another tower with commercial floors. Conclusion is that it is best to have self-sustained towers for the most part. 

 

@Griffon

 

Regarding power and water for the towers. I first thought it was the only way to fix it the way you described, by putting power/water-source closer or on top of towers, but after some testing it seems to me that if you have more than two towers you need to have a "buffer" of about 200+ (of the respective units for power and water) which is in the middle of the green part of the meter. This kept my towers working fine, as long as I kept those levels above the 200+ mark.

 

In a future patch I would really like to see one major change to the towers and that is the ability to remodel a floor without having to buldoze several floors first. Simply add a "remodel" button so I can change a floor that failed.

 

 

My personal best with towers was in a city with 310.000 population -  5 Towers that a had a combined expense/profit of -58.000/+95.000 pr hour

[Griffon 19]

@Froudini that is very interresting, thanks for the information.  I usually rely quite a bit on the power crowns and usually have more than one, but also have a backup power supply so I also usually have a huge excess amount too.  I usually have one oil power plant and however many power crowns I need to power the rest of my city.

 

And if you really can't get more than 50% jobs filled from outside the megatower the office level is in then that explains a lot about why a residential level can be complaining about work in one tower and an office level be complaining about not enough people working in another (and other things as well).

[Spanders 0]

My 400k self-sufficent city with 8 towers been doing good without the major problems described in this thread. Until now.

 

My towers suddenly got random problems where agents couldn't find job etc and the apartments got abandoned. Seeing my income dropped from 30k to -60k i was in a hurry. Source of the problem turned out to be transport, more specific my railnetwork in my city. Suddenly trains didn't pick up passengers because of a bugged station at my entrance. Fixing that fixed everything.

 

My towers, which are pure residential, had access to other means of transportation. But my city simply died when one means of transportation went bad. Stupid agents.

[Griffon 19]

Not sure if this will work for every city, but I in the city I just made I only had one apartment level in my megatowers complaining about not having work.

 

I was playing in the desert region with 14 cities (I think it's called Rambling Badlands).  I had two cities on one side and took control of an abandoned city on other side so by this time every single Academy tech was researched.  That city was in bad shape (three 50k loans, $80k, and losing close to $1k/hr), but I turned it around and it was all flat too.  Anyways I built an academy for ControlNet and started building my megatowers (I already had 200k population at this point).  One megatower was an elite tower with all high wealth residential for Academy workers then I stated a regular megetower.

 

Long story short I found if you mixed the wealths (about 50% of each) for regular megatowers and placed a low tech Office level on top (in case I had to edit it) with a park crown, it kept all the people in the towers happy.  In two towers I placed 4 residential (2 low wealth and 2 medium wealth), a skybridge, a low wealth mall (because I had a high low wealth commercial demand) and two low tech offices on top with an advertising crown and that setup also really worked well (probably not for all towers though).  In this city I build all 8 megatowers and only 2 were elite towers, I set a new personal best for population which is 526k (so close to the 600k mark), and like I said I only had 1 level complaining about not having enough work.  I also didn't have any offices or malls complaining either.

 

I got this idea from @Froudini's post about the 50% rule.  The 50% rule is: only 50% of all office jobs fill up with people outside the tower it's placed it, which means 50% (minimum) of those jobs are free for people in that tower to get employed at (and give them jobs so they don't complain).

 

I haven't tested this out in other cities yet or with mostly elite towers, but I'm going to continue using this strategy for now because it seemed to work.

 

EDIT: I joined a new region and built a new city similar to the last one and got 555k population this time with no megatower complaints so far.

[cjuk88 4]

I've been playing around a lot with Megatowers with interesting results.

 

I started a new region (In Reflection Atoll - EUW1, user: cjuk00 name: Tomorrow Atoll. For those who would like to take a look) with the intention of building up a selection of cities as follows:

 

First, a Utility/Seed city to provide startup cash and utilities to the others

Second, an Omega city. Lots of industry, big Omega Corp.

Third, An Academy city. Clean/Green, lots of high wealth

 

Then probably a gambling town and an eco university town to finish it off.

 

Currently, I have a self sufficient Utilities town that breaks even, has balanced jobs (no commuting) and provides garbage, sewage, water and ~600MW of power to the Omega and Academy cities.

 

In the Omega city I have 8 standard megatowers that contain all the residential for the whole city. I have a couple of Mall units. Then there is a ton of industrial, community colleges for education, and some commercial for shopping.

 

In the Academy city, I have 8 Elite megatowers. In this city, I tried very deliberately to have minimal low wealth jobs, so that I wouldn't need to have a lot of low wealth residential or low wealth commuters. 

 

So from this exercise, I have learned a bunch of things:

1. Sims will happily find all their work outside the megatower. So all residential towers work well, although make little money.
2. Sims seem to pay less tax per head when in a megatower, so as above, residential towers tend to make ~15k a day
3. Sims sometimes have trouble getting to education outside the tower. Even though I have a community college right outside each 2 megatowers in my Omega city, and enough desks for everyone, there are still a bunch of people not enrolled for no reason... I haven't tested to see if school buses fixes this...
4. Mall levels are seriously bugged. I can only reliably get them to work when they are in the same tower as the residential units. And even then, its touch and go... Sims don't seem to shop in a megatower mall unless they live in a megatower. Whats particularly odd about the malls is that you'll have lets say 1500 unsatisfied mid-wealth shoppers. So you build a mall for them. Now the pop stats window will tell you that now there are an extra 1k (or whatever the number is) goods available, and an extra 1k satisfied shoppers, yet your mall level will report huge losses. This is in contrast to regular commercial which tends to be more consistent. Eg. if you have all goods sold, you have happy zones. This is not true in megatower malls. It seems that pop stats will tell you goods are sold, but the mall dialog will report no sales...
5. Offices work very well in megatowers. In my Academy city I have 2 elite towers which are all high-tech offices (except for a skybridge). Add some holo crowns and these pay for my entire city and then some. I have 0% tax accross the board and make 35k an hour... However, a bit like casinos and tourists back in v1, the numbers fluctuate wildly. So you have to ignore the instantaneous numbers and just look at daily profits. My 2 towers with a 4 crown holo bonus make ~500k a day each!
6. Sky bridges don't appear to have a level 'cost'. It doesn't seem to affect sims if they are in the middle or not....
7. However, Sky bridges do seem to have distance cost. So if your sims go from their tower, to the work tower via another, then that is a longer 'commute' and can sometimes lead to the old open jobs and out of work sims problem.

I'll keep experimenting and let you guys know how I go!

[cjuk88 4]

I remember something else too:

 

My Academy city inevitably needs low wealth workers, and since my Omega town is mostly low wealth, I thought I would try and get some commuting going between the 2.

 

Turns out, residents of megatowers seem particularly un-inclined to commute out of the city. Even when I deliberately created 2000 extra workers, and put a train station and bus terminal outside their tower, they wouldn't commute out...

 

Same went for high wealth tower residents from the academy city over to the Omega town.

 

How odd....

[Griffon 19]

@cjuk88 I've noticed that sims living in the megatowers really don't like to leave the megatower complexes (although they will) and I personally haven't seen any of them commuting to other cities either.  That is why I suggested in the "Update/Patch 9.0: What Do You Want To See?" topic to add MagLev region connections, then in a later post to add a transportation crown (or level) for connection to other cities so your sims in the megatowers don't have to touch the ground to get to work, because they can fly to other megatowers in other cities.

 

That is why I said in my last post to add at least one office level (usually the lowest tech available) to each tower and mix the residential wealth (with a park crown to increase happiness more) so they can find work in the offices if they can't find work somewhere else in the city and this seems to work for two of my cities now.  This was my main problem with megatowers; sims unable to find work living in megatowers and offices not having enough workers.

(it might not have been very clear in that post, if not sorry)

[KonstantinII 1,106]

Guys do you have pictures of mega towers? I want images of all the levels and all angles, details especially. I could try make BAT and recreate in SC4.

[cjuk88 4]

@Griffon: 

 

So An update:

 

I have successfully built up a 400k pop Omega city, whereby all shopping and residential is catered for in Megatowers, and all work (factories and services) are outside the towers. This seems to work flawlessly. No complaints about workers.

I have however seen the glitch that Maxis have admitted to, which is that sometimes worker (and presumably shopper) agents get 'stuck' in the tower. However, I find that a game restart and waiting a day fixes this, and all is well again.

Obviously for the above to work, you have to have good transport to your towers, as in the case of say a low wealth tower, that can be thousands of workers trying to leave via the road exit at any one time!

 

So far, in this city I have the following:

- 4 completely low-wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments)

- 2 completely med-wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments)

- 2 multi purpose towers (1 LW mall, 3 apartments, 1 MW mall, 2 apartments, Nuclear reactor)

 

I think this is pretty optimum, but I am going to try going with mixing up the wealths, so that the amount of traffic around the low wealth tower decreases. I'll pop a park crown on top for happiness.

 

---------------------

 

In other news: 

 

I have successfully built up a self sufficient elite megatower city with the following towers:

 

- 2 High Tech office towers (6 High tech offices, skybridge, waste reduction, ad crown) [These make 750-900k a day with 100% bonus]

- 4 high wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments)

- 2 med wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments)

 

So for high tech offices, the ratio seems to be 1:2:1 offices:MW apartment:HW apartment

 

Because I have the offices all together, this city has all services etc... and still makes 50k an hour...

[Griffon 19]

@cjuk88, so you only have megatowers for residential and commercial zones and no residential or commercial zones outside the megatowers?  If so I can see how your system would work well. 

 

All of my cities have 3/4 residential with commercial mixed in and 1/4 industry and megatowers filled with mostly residential on top of that.  Although my demand bars are high for all residential wealths, my megatower residents were abandoning their levels from not having enough work and offices complaining about not having enough workers at the same time.  Either way I found a good solution to my own cities.

 

I am glad you said there is a bug causing megatower residents to get sick all of a sudden and leave for no reason.  In all my cities I have a fully upgraded hospital (including the university researched buildings).  In one city it was completely full, so I added a fully upgraded clinic and it filled up too and I had 88 deaths/day in that city (I did get the zombie disaster unlocked in this city though).  I just thought it was from Omega because after 3 or 4 game years everyone (even megatowers) starts complaining about health problems and that only happens in Omega cities (which is almost every one of my cities now).

[cjuk88 4]

@Griffon:

 

Exactly. All the sims live in the towers, and work outside. As such, there are no skybridges between towers, as all the shopping they need is within the tower they live in. This is very useful as it saves a level!

 

Now, I still think the mall levels are bugged, but due to the way megatowers appear to work in the game engine, its very hard to tell exactly whats going on. Let me explain:

So, with normal commercial, you build up a residential area, and that creates shoppers and in turn a demand for commercial. You build commercial buildings, and once they get stocked with workers, their goods become available, and provided they get sold, you get happy sims and profitable commercial districts. Any sims who needed shopping, but don't make it to the commercial won't feel the benefits, and the commercial won't sell all their goods and will complain. Either way, this is reflected in the numbers in the Population dialog.

 

However, this isn't the case with megatower malls! You build them, and then the apartments are instantly happy, but despite having less goods than shoppers, they often lose tons of money. The pop stats window says everything is good. Typically, they work OK when they are built, but quickly reach a point when they never work. I suspect this is tied to the bug of agents getting stuck in the towers...

 

My next plan is to try an 8 elite megatower city, and see exactly how many office levels I can get to work in a tower, so I can try and get more than 500k a day pre-bonus tower profit

[TheVintek 0]

Hey guys, just started my own city from the ground up with mega towers and its going well, only got two questions, one how do I get rid of the sick sims in one of my towers? I've got a fully upgraded hospital and also two fully upgraded clinics at the base of said tower, and second question is the fusion reactor, whats its purpose, every 5 min I have to reignite the reactor.

[Griffon 19]

Hey guys, just started my own city from the ground up with mega towers and its going well, only got two questions, one how do I get rid of the sick sims in one of my towers? I've got a fully upgraded hospital and also two fully upgraded clinics at the base of said tower, and second question is the fusion reactor, whats its purpose, every 5 min I have to reignite the reactor.

Well from what @cjuk88 said in the below quote the sickness in megatowers is a bug.  With the fusion reactor, it will supply continuous power as long as you have enough ControlNet and water to keep it running or until you shut it down or it gets destroyed.  Usually the problem is running out of ControlNet not water, so to fix this problem import more ControlNet or build an Academy extension in your city to produce more ControlNet.  Also you have to keep igniting the fusion reactor if #1 it fails to ignite and #2 it stops working for some reason.  I've found it's harder to ignite the fusion reactors if they are in the megatowers.

 

I have however seen the glitch that Maxis have admitted to, which is that sometimes worker (and presumably shopper) agents get 'stuck' in the tower. However, I find that a game restart and waiting a day fixes this, and all is well again.

[cjuk88 4]

@TheVintek: To clarify: Maxis said that there was a bug concerning the movement of agents within Megatowers that will be addressed in the next patch. Essentially, agents (workers, shoppers, even sometimes power and water) get stuck within a tower. This could be responsible for multiple issues: Sick sims never getting to a hospital, shoppers not making it to malls in the same tower, workers not making it to jobs right outside and complaining of no work, etc...

 

For me, this issue is fixed with a reload. However, you have to understand that the reaction time of the status messages to changes is slow. So, for example, you may have some sick sims, they get treated, but the level may continue to abandon for a day or so after before it returns to happiness and re-populates. This is true of all buildings, but more so of megatowers which seem a bit 'laggy' in this respect. I'm not sure this is a game breaking issue really, because the delay sometimes works in your favor. Eg: You have unemployed residents, but they won't complain for a few days giving you time to create jobs.

[REvolverRPG 5]

First of all, thanks for all the awesome info you guys have given, You saved me much heartache and I am one of the people who didnt know about the three roads into a MegaTower!

 

Now, down to business. I've seen a bunch of people complain about how the Skybridges don't seem to be working, at not least how we would assume they should, and even saw a post where the player doesn't use them at all. 

 

My question is, is the verdict still out on whether or not Skybridges even work? I would love to have them on all of my towers considering I think they look AWESOME, but if they don't work, then I have much better uses for all those levels.

 

BTW, in my SUCCESSFUL cities with Megatowers, I seem to usually only build apartment levels, with the occasional office or mall. I still have industrial and commercial zones on the ground so I guess they keep me from making my towers otherwise. I really love the waste reducion levels and the Gen 1 Solar Power Crowns (although this leads me to wonder where Gen 2 is), but Mark II Air Scrubber Crowns work wonders for those maps where water is limited.

 

• Use $$ Apartments in normal poor towers not elite towers (or they will whine about land value in time and move out)

 

I was wondering if you could clarify that up a bit. I did put my $$ in regular megatowers, and they still complained about the low land values.I assumed this is because I placed that regular tower in a low-value area. From what I've figured out, the land value of the tower is determined by the land it is placed on, regardless of the wealth level of the apartments or the kind of tower (elite or normal). If I'm wrong, please let me know, as this is why I asked for the clarification.

 

Finally, would it be ok to place $ apartments in a tower that is built in a medium-value area, or $$ apartments in a tower that is built in a high-value area?

 

Again, thank you all for all these posts. It took me a whole game-break and a bag of popcorn to read.

[cjuk88 4]

First of all, thanks for all the awesome info you guys have given, You saved me much heartache and I am one of the people who didnt know about the three roads into a MegaTower!

No worries...

 

 

Now, down to business. I've seen a bunch of people complain about how the Skybridges don't seem to be working, at not least how we would assume they should, and even saw a post where the player doesn't use them at all. 

 

My question is, is the verdict still out on whether or not Skybridges even work? I would love to have them on all of my towers considering I think they look AWESOME, but if they don't work, then I have much better uses for all those levels.

Skybridges definitely work for me. I can see agents moving between them, and also clearly see the difference in traffic on the roads below.

However, as with all these things, you need to think about your traffic flow. Skybridges are really only useful if your residents have a reason to go to another tower. This really only applies if you have offices or malls. I typically keep malls in the residential towers. I haven't yet experimented with having them seperate.

In my 'TowerTown' city (feel free to have a look at it. Server: EUW1, Region: Tomorrow Atoll, User: cjuk00) where I have all RCI in towers, and only services which can't be in towers outside them, I have skybridges. But In my Omega town, where all work is in factories, and only apartments and malls are in the towers, I don't have them since there is no reason for a sim to travel to another tower...

 

BTW, in my SUCCESSFUL cities with Megatowers, I seem to usually only build apartment levels, with the occasional office or mall. I still have industrial and commercial zones on the ground so I guess they keep me from making my towers otherwise. I really love the waste reducion levels and the Gen 1 Solar Power Crowns (although this leads me to wonder where Gen 2 is), but Mark II Air Scrubber Crowns work wonders for those maps where water is limited.

All residential towers are the easiest for sure, but also by far the least profitable. Gen 2 crowns are researched at the Academy for regular towers. Gen III and Gen IV are for Elite towers.

 

• Use $$ Apartments in normal poor towers not elite towers (or they will whine about land value in time and move out)

 

I was wondering if you could clarify that up a bit. I did put my $$ in regular megatowers, and they still complained about the low land values.I assumed this is because I placed that regular tower in a low-value area. From what I've figured out, the land value of the tower is determined by the land it is placed on, regardless of the wealth level of the apartments or the kind of tower (elite or normal). If I'm wrong, please let me know, as this is why I asked for the clarification.

I don't buy this at all. It seems to make no difference to me. The happiness of residents with land value is exactly the same is with normal zones. If the land value is right, it makes them happy. if it isn't, they'll be unhappy. However, if they have lots of work, lots of shopping, parks, schools, etc... then the fact that the land value is low won't matter.

A couple of parks round the tower is a quick fix.

 

Finally, would it be ok to place $ apartments in a tower that is built in a medium-value area, or $$ apartments in a tower that is built in a high-value area?

Absolutely. I believe that the sims don;t derive extra happiness from land value above whats required, but it certainly works fine. In my academy city, virtually all my land value is high wealth, and no issues with my med wealth tower residents.