logical ratios (rci)

[Aardvark1313 5]

Being that I'm so rusty at this game, I found information that doesn't seem right to me. Someone on you tube(maybe it's an old one, I never thought to check the date) says to use an RCI ratio of, in order, 2:1:1 which makes no sense to me based on the numbers I've semi-calculated. The ratio to me should be more along the lines of 8:1:1(this doesn't compensate for med/high wealth numbers which I think I figured out a better way than dropping a gazillion expensive and idiotic parks to fix). There used to be a flawed, yet helpful application someone had made long ago that I can't find now that had the actual values of all buildings and which you could add to help pre-plan things a bit even(I think it was called, not surprisingly i suppose, Sim population calculator or something like that) though some numbers were off and after a time, as the city got bigger, the numbers started getting a bit wonky as you can't always see every single building grow so that you can change and adapt to the bigger values of the denser buildings etc.

 

     What I decided to do for med and high was to simply use buildings that increase land value naturally(police/fire/mayor's house etc) for med and the mayor's mansion(since it appears that every addition seems to enlarge the size of the high lvl are covered as long as I place it well. Are my numbers sound? and does my tactic for increasing at least a good chunk of the land values naturally make sense? Increasing land values using parks drives me absolutely batshit crazy(pardon the language).

 

   To finalize, does anyone know what that application is I'm talking about and if so, is there a better or improved one somewhere?

 

thanks for any help guys and gals

[Agente Silva 28]

Hi there. I think I found the population mod you are looking for:

 

 

Regarding land value distribution, I think placing parks makes sense considering if you find those in a real city it makes that place more pleasant and therefore people will want to live there or hangaround - so I think it is ok to assume parks and decorations raise land value. If you find the base game´s parks a bit limited and repetitive you could, and should , download the Parklets mod (). To use this you´ll need the User Interface mod AKAR ().

 

Hope you enjoy them

 

Be well,

[Aardvark1313 5]

I found the page I was talking about but I have no idea how to link it here(not very good at this am I lol).

 

http://sscalc.com/  but the link doesn't seem to work. Problem with it is 3-fold. Some of the numbers are wrong, some of the internal math doesn't work properly as they don't always match what's on the on screen(beyond the normal game delays I mean) and it doesn't include any of the new buildings from any of the freebies(progressive ins, churches etc) or the cities of tomorrow(which is fine since I don't intend to buy it). I wish I did understand all this as there's another game I play called "A TAle in the desert" that has a utility I use for keeping track of mines, but It's java, it's old and needs serious updating and improvements and I can't do it...hell I've even offered people in the game money to fix it for me and no takers. The optimal version(which would be, even to my untrained mind)a logistical nightmare, would be to somehow attach that kind of  spreadsheet like sscalc directly into the game to make adjustments on the fly as buildings change as it's often easy to miss changes and sometimes you get 5 low density buildings changing into 3 mid-density, but unless you spot it right away and aren't busy on another part of the city, I have to go back and do a manual count...over and over and over every time there are massive density changes.

 

  As far as the parks, I do agree that even in rl, cities have parks and they do tend to help land values a bit as well as giving people places to go and enjoy, but the system employed by SimCity makes no sense as no real city would put parks every other block. That's what frustrates me, not just the amount of them you need to plop down to get the maximum radius for the class of wealth you want, each one takes a valuable piece of land from a more important RCI building as well as block(depending on how you place them) the density growth of 1 or more buildings. Add the expense of them and the added budget strain and It drives me for one bananas lol. I do have the parklets mod but haven't tested it yet to see if I installed it correctly and if it works, much less play around with it yet...working on it. I d-loaded a ton of mods and have been testing them 1 by 1 to make sure they all work and do what I hope they do based on their descriptions. Sorry, didn't mean to let this go this long but sometimes, like an inspired novelist, I can't stop typing once I'm on a subject lol .

[Cyclone Boom 16,910]

I found the page I was talking about but I have no idea how to link it here(not very good at this am I lol).

 

http://sscalc.com/  but the link doesn't seem to work.

 

Try sccalc.com

[Aardvark1313 5]

 oops I copied the wrong letters no wonder hehe errrm....mmmm.....but still and all, that one is out of date and some of the info is inaccurate as I mentioned and doesn't keep accurate numbers even with the processing delay you have to compensate for in the game. If I understood how to do spreadsheets  and the math behind them, or fix my other game's  java map or even do mods, I'd do it myself but I am unfortunately as useless at creating all of the above. Hell even after following instructions, I can only get about 75% of all the mods I downloaded to work lol.  Sucks to be sitting here, old with an IQ of a genius and yet I just can't wrap my head around those things....frustrating I must say. Guess I'll just keep using it as a guideline only and improvise as I always do, works out. Just a matter of patience while waiting for blocks to mature from med to high density(as my current city is) since my unemployment rate shot through the roof quicker than my population could grow as mentioned. The joys of SimCity.

 

   On a side note, I haven't explored all the maps fully, but are there any with flatter plots? Whitewater valley, the 1 plot I'm working on in particular wastes close to a full 30%+ on high rocky terrain which makes it a pain to work with. Give me some dynamite man and let me blow that $%&^! to rubble so the whole map can be flat lol.

[Agente Silva 28]

Regarding building population I confess I don´t look at them numbers in a "cirurgical" way I mean, I use it as a bit of reference but I don´t take it as the "holy grail" because I have come to realize there is no point expecting (specially in this Simcity) to "zero" the numbers. I think you will alway have a certain degree of unbalance (wich I think is ok because it´s exactly that behaviour that pushes development ).

 

Anyway, about land value... if you notice, it is very frequent to see a tiny spacing between buildings (side-to-side or back-to-back). In the parklets menu you´ll find strips of parks (much prettier than that tall tree row) that you can fit in that spacing, without destroying any of those buildings. Try the mod and tell us what you think

 

And don´t forget... don´t go OCD on the numbers xD

 

Be well mate

[Aardvark1313 5]

I'm still struggling with getting the tree anywhere mod to work, but I do have the parklet one working though I've been using it mostly as a cheap pollution controller and hadn't noticed any land value changes from it. Maybe I wasn't paying attention as I dropped the little buggers. As for being OCD, I'm only that when the math on things or games make no sense and I can't balance the numbers...bout the only time I go total OCD lol but I know what you mean. When working with a flawed product, do the best you can and hope the entire city doesn't go BOOM! on you.  Lost count of how many times I've unleashed disasters out of sheer frustration lol. (I do hope I'm thinking of the right mod btw, the one that adds the 4 itty-bitty tree types at the end of the nature tab, that can fit pretty much anywhere?).

[Agente Silva 28]

Yes, that´s the trees anywhere mod... it works with me. You should see the dot of tree placement turning white on the zone you can plop a tree. Usually it´s ploppable anywhere, as mod name suggests, but sometimes it won´t. I´ll assume you tried that and still no sucess... anyway, you won´t be missing much, but yea... if for some it works, it should work with you as well

 

Regarding your "freight nightmare" thread, have you tried what I suggested? (Nikola´s Industrial mod ONLY, no R+C mod, and going for midtech industry?)

[Aardvark1313 5]

Screw the freight, I've learned to ignore it and my commerce isn't being affected at all. I still did the medium density/medium tech just to bring the population and job situation under control, but the problem is, was and always will be the horrible imbalance with the goods produced. There should have been a direct and fluid correlation between freight and produced goods for commerce from the get-go. Yet another of the many instances of a poor AI and behind the scenes mathematics. The way it SHOULD have worked is the more freight produced and shipped to the commerce section, the more goods the commercial building produces, not this too low, fixed amount which is practically impossible to ba;ance properly. Sorry if I sound grumpy, but last night i saved my game with my 1 city close to my 1 million$ target to get my space center GW up and I  know for a fact i saved it, yet today I find that I lost over 6 hrs of work so now my city is a total freaking mess and I'm not sure I can fix it. grrrrrrrrrr. Now I find myself wishing there was a mod to extend the life of underground resources even a bit. Not infinite, that would be crazy, but at least 2X the amount would satisfy me in order to buy the time and money required for the advanced stuff like replacing all resource buildings, once exhausted with the advanced stuff like recycling center etc. Easier to do in a multi-player game no doubt, a bit harder on single unless you play 5+ cities all at once. But as I said, I'm just grouchy at the time and effort lost and just venting lol sorry.

 

 

   Small edit, even though, during that entire 6 hr session last night I showed over 1700 shoppers yet i never had more than 800 statisfied, today suddenly, the numbers have changed to almost all satisfied even though I did nothing different as I was fixing this broken city. Go figure, I sure as hell don't get why for 6 hrs nothing changed yet boom! now everything's semi-fine..This game will be the death of me I tells you!! da death of me!!! lol