building stages and infinite commuter

[ADYX 1]

1st of all hello again simtropolis community  its been a while since i last posted on here, for a series of personal reasons (wont get down to details but most RL nasty problems coming up so less time for this game) and also cuz of some game reasons:

- playing the game with more humility taught me so so so much, and many doubts solved themselves

- experimenting is key, and instead of starting a reason aiming to skyscrapers i tried to screw around and answer a lot of "what if...."s

- spending a bit less time to focus on "little" problems (see infinite commuter  ) and i started to nerd into some old threads here and in SC4dev and learned a lot. 

basically some of the old questions i asked in my old thread became so clear to me that im actually feeling ashamed to post them here, but anyways, let me start with the questions (and assumptions)

 

Buildings and building stages:

after aprox 3 days (a total of 5 hrs spread around) looking for some illuminating thread i couldnt find anything about this... at first i tried to grind a way in game to figure out the building stages ingame, but it was just wasted time. after that i came here and starting to look around for clues, and i found some things: sadly there were mostly threads related to high level stages so quite useless. i didnt lose hope, digged deeper and found 2 really nice sources: a post about a GM i think, tornado maybe, who linked this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4_tH08pH62NaG0tYWxaYVZiYkE/view and another link to a wiki page with all percentages about "how much of each you need to get higher stage"

 

so my questions are basically:

what are stages? at first i thought i was a simple way of defining buildings. but if so, what does the game use to sort them into categories? if the answer is (how i assume) capacity, then how come MANY buildings belong to the same stage but have such differences in term of capacity? 

in the document that i found it says some stage8 R$ buildings have 1600 capacity, occupying a 2x4 (or 4x2) slot while some stage7 have over 2000 capacity for the same slot. 

 

also in the wiki page it says that buildings basically need to be somewhat spread along the various stages (as in you cant have a city of full stage8 according to it), example the R$

 

19846

 

1 %

2 %

5 %

10 %

15 %

18 %

29 %

20 %

but if this is true then 2 questions arise: why so often when one starts a city and some pop requirements then all buildings "evolve" (or almost all) but then the so called stage 1, 2 and 3 come "missing"? meaning that most building become big buildings and there is no bungalow or really ugly house left.

also, assuming this is true (which i do, id never mistrust ppl that played this game for so long, im just trying to understand), that there is an ingame requirement for some % to be met, why then if one tries to do a healthy city with ghetto-high density ghetto-wealthy ppl, and then buldozes down all the ghetto/low density areas around, and zones for more R, instead of crappy houses coming up, its always a skyscraper?

 

also is there a way of telling (possibly from ingame, cuz alt-tabbing is a real pain and learning all buildings by heart its just bs) what building belongs to which stage?

 

on the infinite commuter or looping commuter or whatever one wants to call it:

ive learned it the hard way... by screwing up a region and abbandoning it. then i found out the post by nonny moose about the tree shaped region. my questions (to keep it short) are:

1) can this "bug" be exploited as in building a huge commercial center on the edge where 4 maps meet? abusing the concept of having infinite traffic at some point? 

2) can it come up if using "barriers" for sims not to be able to cross over? as in: city A is connected to upper city B (call it B+) and lower city B (call it B-) is connected to city C, if the connection is A-B-C-A-B etc then the loop can happen, but what if the B is divided into 2, meaning the REAL connection should be A-(B+) (huge river, no ferries, no boats, no bridges, no subway, only electricity and water) (B-)-C-A

from what i have gathered a sim commuting cant come back to the same city (as in leaving from A to B+ he cant go back to work in A i assume), but then he must stop in B+ to find a job cuz he cant cross the river, and the longest chain happening would be in theory (B+)-A-C-(B-) but then he would be stuck there or anyways unable to reach city A again

3) can it be avoided somehow by making the connections so screwed up abong the cities that a sim would find it unappealing to go to over the border? as in imagine placing a "frying pan"shaped highway in a city of the loop, with no connections in the holding part of the pan but only up in the half that is opposite to the corner? 

 

last questions then i promise to shut up    so u dont start hating me straight away:

its somewhat related to both of the topic and its due to ttraffic volume VS congestion... 

assuming a RL situation congestion means heavy traffic (stop`n`go) so while theoretically congestion leeds to less traffic after the bottleneck, heavy traffic itself can but also could not lead to congestion. so game wide which one is better to have (or which one is better to avoid)?

i ask cuz last night in a desperate attempt to get rid of congestion with one-way roads i ended up having FAR more volume on my roads in the R area (like 4-5 red roads in the traffic simulator) BOTH during morning and evening commute, but the evening was worse, then i restord the old roads to my ppl and the graphs turned back to a nice green/yellow overall but the congestion was again all over the place (so accepting advice)

 

these questions came around the past 10 days while i was trying to make a rly nast retro 1925-1930 like communist russia industrial area, so tons of poor ppl having to work in a polluted, unhealty (not so unhealthy cuz due to game mechanics i had to build hospitals or ppl wouldnt have come), low-wage, low education, VERY high density with high police control area. i can bring up some screens if needed 

 

ty all in advance (sry if the thread is long and all but i thought making it like this may help one day "the next guy" looking around for similar problems who may find help in here)

[ADYX 1]

im sorry to bumb the thread, i know it is really unpolite and usually not something ppl take kindly to (and belive me i wouldnt have done it but after 2 days having 0replies and mostly 0views makes me feel kind justified)...

 

also id love to add some questions since im at it:

does it make sense to connect cities to sim nation? (meaning the edge of the region map). if so why? are there any reasons to do so? may it "invoke" the commuter bug?

 

finally: my population is totally nuts  :kitty: over the last 80 years i have had a population of ~400k sims, and for the last 80 years my "population divided in age groups" chart has shown me that ~110k are ppl ages 51-60, 80k ages 61-70, and around 50k 71-90 (these should work anyways). since around 20k are children i thought that my city in around 20 to 30 years would become half the population (due to over 240k ppl dying). but after 80 years nothing happened, the chart keeps looking the same which doesnt make much sense... 

assuming the ppl age all together the 110k shouldve gove 61-70 then 71-80, but that its not very realistic cuz ppl may die sooner/later, and the point is: how can i have one year 60k 41-50 and 110k 51-60 and over 10 years later the SAME values? are some sims aging faster then other? do some stop aging? im rly not able to tell what is going on

 

PS: damn... before replying it showed me 0 views, now it shows 51... i feel like such an idiot... im sorry 

[SimCoug 5,976]

-This is a very informative thread regarding Stage Limits. 

 

-I don't know of a way to find out what stage each lot is using the query tool, but it seems like that should be possible since the sage limit is a property for each lot.  It would just be a matter of modding the query tool to include that value.  The only sure way that I know if is to use the Reader tool and look up each lot individually, which is quite a pain.

 

-Regarding the infinite commuter loop, yes, it can be exploited to get very high traffic around your commercial zones (as well as get extra income with mass transit fare) but I wouldn't recommend it, because in the end it just throws off the game dynamics.

 

Sorry I couldn't get to all your questions, maybe somebody else can chime in.  

[ADYX 1]

thank you coug, ive read the stage limits thread back to back. the reader tool as for me is quite a double pain since my simcity4 was installed in italian, which makes it even harder to get what stage a building is since awfully often the names are not translated literally (and i have to look it up by images to be sure which one is which  )

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

<snip>

 

also id love to add some questions since im at it:

does it make sense to connect cities to sim nation? (meaning the edge of the region map). if so why? are there any reasons to do so? may it "invoke" the commuter bug?

 

finally: my population is totally nuts  :kitty: over the last 80 years i have had a population of ~400k sims, and for the last 80 years my "population divided in age groups" chart has shown me that ~110k are ppl ages 51-60, 80k ages 61-70, and around 50k 71-90 (these should work anyways). since around 20k are children i thought that my city in around 20 to 30 years would become half the population (due to over 240k ppl dying). but after 80 years nothing happened, the chart keeps looking the same which doesnt make much sense... 

assuming the ppl age all together the 110k shouldve gove 61-70 then 71-80, but that its not very realistic cuz ppl may die sooner/later, and the point is: how can i have one year 60k 41-50 and 110k 51-60 and over 10 years later the SAME values? are some sims aging faster then other? do some stop aging? im rly not able to tell what is going on

 

<snip>

It doesn't invoke anything except export of freight to the great bit bucket in the sky if you connect to a null area.  Never fear this, it just becomes a bit sink.  I'd be surprised if any Sims commuted to those links because there are no jobs there.

 

Static population seems to be the rule in really old cities.  You'd think they'd be cyclic, but it doesn't seem to be the case.  Do you have any valid neighbour connections?  If so, how is the traffic?

 

The dreaded eternal commuter loop can only happen between three or more cities where a commuting Sim moves from City A to City B anticipating finding a job, can't find one and moves on to city C.  Arriving in City C again finding no work, then if City C connects to City A he way well choose to go there completing the loop and there is no job for him in City A and around he goes. 

 

This is a problem with the program exe which can't be mangled by us.  It would be a matter of adding a city of origin attribute to each commuter and not allowing him to loop back, but this would probably need the Sim/commuter object to be amended and some new routines added.  The best avoidance strategy is to set your intercity connections up as a tree, ever branching but never returning.  Under those conditions the destination finder should post a no-job zot for this commuter, but since the game can't look forward into the next city and discover that there is no job, and forward further, etc.  this won't work as the game is programmed.  The whole region would have to be loaded (in virtual space) and then paged in to see if there were jobs there for the commuter.  I think the drag on the system would be staggering.  The alternative would be to keep an available jobs tree for all cities in the region that had been activated.  This would have to be updated as jobs are taken when the city is loaded.  Overall, it is quite a horrible can of worms.

 

My Roman friend, I have had occasion to have manuals for computers translated from Italian to English, and you would be wildly amused by some of the results.  One really terrible example was 'virgule courante' got translated into running comma instead of floating point.  They gave up on 'elaboratore' and just called it elaborator instead of processor.  This was all about 50 years ago, and the details are fading now.  At the time we were marketing a system from Olivetti into an English speaking market.

 

Ciao.

[ADYX 1]

hey nonny, it been a while 

 

seen how its a communist country ghetto that holds 460k souls in it traffic is pretty nasty but connections seem to be valid (atm). should u want some screens of it i can post. problem is lately almost all my subway are "exploding"... from the main R area there are like 5 (FIVE) parallel sw tubes going east, 4 going north and 3 going ENE but they are all going orange/red. and the roads are literally a hell... 

 

the questions abt the commuter was more in the way of "can sims cross natural barriers to eternally commute?". meaning can they cross a river if no river tansportation is give? can they cross an area which has no streets/buildings? (can post some pics of this too if needed). 

 

also: is it just me or the poor sims like (for unknown reasons) pollution? but seem to dislike other things? when i started working on my ghetto i basically made the following pattern:

 

R/R/R -> C/C --------> ID/ID/ID/ID/ID/ID/ID

basically ID pollution was (and still is, actually its gotten worse) able to "touch" the first block of R buildings, but checking on appetibility (or likelihood? or... damn im missing the actual term) graph i saw that the first 2 blocks of R were a green area, the last block of R was brown/orange (transition phase), the 2 blocks of Cs were pretty red and then the ID area was not by far so red, it was actually greener than the last R block (can also give a screen of this if needed)

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

What did it look like on the desirability screen?  I have found that R$ will live anywhere, even next to a toxic waste dump.

 

"Dirty Lil, dirty Lil

"Lives on top of garbage hill.

"Never washes

"Never will.

"(hack) p'too, dirty Lil."

[ADYX 1]

ok i got the screen (which took me like 1 hour  :kitty: ).

sry for the late reply nonny but my car broke and my real life commute time went up 250% 

 

 

regarding to the commuter thingy, after you see the tile layout maybe it will become clearer: above this there is a full land tile, to its side (since this one is in the corner) there is a medium tile (it is the SW corner of the NY region in the original game) that is split into 3 land areas by a river/sea. If i connect the eastern side of that medium tile to other stuff will this create loop or not? ofc assuming im not so stupid to place ferries/bridges/subway connections. Meaning id play the medium tile as 2 separate cities but in the same map: west as an industrial addition to my city and east as other stuff i will decide to develop later.

 

Edit: btw any advice regarding my traffic? 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

If you have NAM 32 then you should consider any red traffic lines for subways, and some of the yellows as well.  Maybe the red intersections are candidates for traffic circles (use the one way street tool to create this).

[ADYX 1]

i dont know what NAM version i have... i do remember i downloaded the 3... something, but if i check the TSCT it says "SimulatorVersion: 2.4.1"

 

i plain dont understand the main reasons for traffic congestion (if you look at the street traffic graph the streets are mostly green and below... except those 3-4 that are yellow and the one orange one) so i dont even know if that is an actual problem for my city. this one time i tried to make 1way roads all the old congested roads, but it ended up giving me less congestion but WAY more traffic (almost all the central area of the residencial part was red, and the rest was orange), so i got scared and put it back the way it was. my real problem here is not having any idea who the real enemy is: congestion or traffic? which one am i actually supposed to fight? 

also and pretty nasty thing, when i was trying to get rid of congestion, i saw the commute time graph go totally berserk... up`n`down and so on

 

finally, what do you mean with "consider red lines for subways"? should i double them (again? since there is 5, 4 and 4 tubes for each direction) or should i try overfund the subway? besides me failing to understand what a 300% capacity means (if a subway train is full, then it`s full... not like you can "glue" more ppl to it to have it move more ppl)

[infamousjbe 593]

 (if a subway train is full, then it`s full... not like you can "glue" more ppl to it to have it move more ppl)

 

Sure you can. Here's a perfect example of 300% capacity. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG-meaGqg-M

 

 

 

"consider red lines for subways"?

 

What I believe Mr. Nonny was suggesting is running a subway line just beneath the roads/streets that are red/orange congested. This should ease the congestion of those particular networks and drastically reduce your commute times.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Just to give you an idea, here is a subway map of my current largest city.  [click to enlarge]
 


Note that one of the lines (the green one) emerges and crosses the water on an EL bridge.

 

The population is still under 1M.

[z1 566]

i dont know what NAM version i have... i do remember i downloaded the 3... something, but if i check the TSCT it says "SimulatorVersion: 2.4.1"

 

You don't have the latest NAM version, then.  NAM 32 was released on January 15th; it is highly recommended that you upgrade to it.

 

 

should i double them (again? since there is 5, 4 and 4 tubes for each direction)

 

That's not very many subway lines for this game.  Traffic in big cities flows best in SC4 if you use a lot more subway lines than you would in RL.  They are also very helpful in reducing abandonment due to commute time.

 

or should i try overfund the subway?

 

Overfunding mass transit won't do anything.

 

besides me failing to understand what a 300% capacity means (if a subway train is full, then it`s full... not like you can "glue" more ppl to it to have it move more ppl)

 

If you've ever been in a subway train at rush hour in a major city, you'll find many subway cars at over 100% capacity.  This simply means that they are carrying more people than they were designed to hold.

 

But actually, things are a little more abstract in the game.  In the game's internal model, there are no subway cars, or subway trains (or any other type of vehicle).  There are just Sims acting like single-person subway trains, which make no stops except at their destination, where they turn into pedestrians or some other type of vehicle.  And "capacity" in SC4 is simply the nominal network capacity; in both the Maxis and NAM simulators, it's the level at which travel types go at the network's nominal speed, but it doesn't have to be (and wasn't in some earlier NAM traffic simulators).  The more a network goes over capacity, the more the speed drops, in a fairly linear fashion.  But whereas in the real world, there's a limit where network usage is high enough to cause traffic to grind to a halt, traffic never drops below 30% of a network's nominal speed in SC4, even at intersections.  The inability to set lower speeds than this is a game bug.  As a consequence, you can keep adding more and more Sims to a network, and traffic will continue to move at at least 30% of nominal speed.  This means that in reality, all networks have infinite capacity.  But the traffic simulator notes the speed slowdown, and generally reroutes the Sims to a faster route before congestion gets too bad.  However, sometimes traveling at 30% of nominal speed is faster than having Sims go out of their way for a different route, so in that case, the traffic simulator will just pile them in.

[ADYX 1]

ty for your reply Z, so after your advice i "doubled" (actually i went from the 4 to the 16 lines per direction) but honestly i fail to see a real improvement... the commute time graph is still behaving worse than a sysmograph going up and down between 4 and 12 (whichever measurement unit that may be, cuz either minutes or hours dont make any sense ) and the lines are not even remotely greener... and after checking i found out that my nam is NAM31

i did increase my population though, from 530 to 600k, but it makes so little sense to have 4 times the capacity, and a 15% raise on usage makes it all look almost the same color as it was before (mostly dark yellow, orange and a bit darker orange).

 

regarding RL capacity thats exactly what i was trying to say: a 120% or maybe even 140% would still make sense, but 300% no, it is just writing random numbers due to the actual volume of a wagon and the fact that our bodies are not made of Lego  :kitty:  :kitty:

 

going back to the game mechanic, being the subway the fastest transportation (as i read in other threads), and due to commute time resetting over the city edge, wuoldnt it be possible to get to a point where, maxed out capacity or not, the routes converge to the "one and only" tubeline going towards the sims` direction? and therefore useless to add any more possible paths? (and somewhat a huge letdown since thats not the way RL works  )

[z1 566]

ty for your reply Z, so after your advice i "doubled" (actually i went from the 4 to the 16 lines per direction) but honestly i fail to see a real improvement...

 

Did you place lots of stations?  Mass transit needs lots of stations in this game to be really effective.

 

But looking at your graphs, traffic congestion as such does not seem to be your real problem.  I would think that the subway volume view looks better now, or at least after you add some more stations.

 

the commute time graph is still behaving worse than a sysmograph going up and down between 4 and 12 (whichever measurement unit that may be, cuz either minutes or hours dont make any sense )

 

The commute time graph is calibrated in minutes, and it is permanently broken.  You should ignore it.  The traffic data views give you the information you need, along with the Route Query tool.

 

and the lines are not even remotely greener...

Your heaviest volume now seems to be in the subway / el rail / GLR networks.  If it's saturated all around, you can either build more subway lines, or upgrade to the High traffic simulator.

 

 

going back to the game mechanic, being the subway the fastest transportation (as i read in other threads)...

 

No, the subway is actually the slowest form of rapid transit in the NAM, with a speed of 105 kph.  The subway's biggest advantage is that it doesn't take up real estate.  You can see the subway drawing traffic from your roads, so speed is not your problem.

 

 

, and due to commute time resetting over the city edge, wuoldnt it be possible to get to a point where, maxed out capacity or not, the routes converge to the "one and only" tubeline going towards the sims` direction? and therefore useless to add any more possible paths? (and somewhat a huge letdown since thats not the way RL works  )

 

Fortunately, the game doesn't work that way.  If you see a subway line way over capacity, all you have to do is build another one right next to it, with occasional connections, and the traffic simulator will quickly balance out the traffic between the two lines.  I have a pair of cities connected by about a dozen subway lines in parallel, and all the lines are carrying traffic of 30K to 40K.

[APSMS 1,893]

It may be worth noting that, in addition to what Z said, the network capacity graph is calculated based on the road network capacity, which means, among other things, that the data is always incorrect for higher capacity networks like RHW/MHW, rail (light or heavy), subways, and monorail, because the "300%" is based on the nominal capacity of the road network, which for obvious reasons has a much lower capacity than any of the networks aforementioned.

 

The congestion graph, however, should be the real indicator of problems, as it is based solely on a network's usage in relation to its total capacity, and is not in reference to the road network. I notice that it's the roads that are mainly congested, and the subway/el-rail only appear to be over-used, but aren't in reality.