Civic buildings still work without power / road access /...? Possible mod idea?

[Kartenhaus 73]

So recently I realized some questionable behaviour with civic buildings (and possibly other building types as well), which also happens to be a pretty fundamental gameplay element:

• Civic buildings actually don't seem to care if they have no electricity or road access.
• Even though the according "zots" appear, they can seemingly be ignored and everything still works.

Now my game version could be bugged, but I believe this might just be standard behaviour.
I even did a small test with two new residential areas with one medical clinic each, one of which was unpowered (and both without road access). Other than the obvious fact that the pathfinder fails to create commute for the jobs, both areas saw similiar improvements to health when running the simulation for a couple of years.
Logically thinking, this might just encourage not powering civic buildings if easily possible, since then we can save a tiny bit of power consumption...

This seems like such a basic thing to overlook that maybe even this was intentional by the developers.
Regardless, I'd be really interested to see if it were possible to make these buildings just "not work" when no power/road access is available. It could also be interesting to add water as a requirement for certain buildings for even more realism.

Has anyone else ever noticed this? I'd be really excited to hear that this isn't so hardcoded that there is no way of changing it...

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

I have indeed noticed that many of the civic buildings will do their job perfectly well sans electricity and roads. One exception is a fire station will have a reduced coverage radius without a road connection and, ofc, the fire trucks could not go anywhere if needing to dispatch them. I happen to give them both and go on. I imagine one could peek under the hood and maybe add or tweak a value or two in their exemplars to make them get really, really upset if those items were not supplied.

Are you familiar with iLive's Reader? That'd be the place to start looking. Here's a tutorial for it too.

[Kartenhaus 73]

This special rule regarding fire stations sounds really interesting.

I currently have zero active modding experience with SimCity 4, but I've recently thought about maybe looking into it.
I do already know about this list though:
http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Exemplar_properties#Fire_Protection_Simulator

0x69b425db

Float32

FireProtectionSim, StationNoRoad Multiplier

(0.0 - 1.0)

This actually seems to be the right variable. Sadly, it appears to be exclusive to the fire protection simulator...

Now I also don't have any knowledge with creating custom lots. But I wonder if it is possible to set any "requirements" there?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

12 minutes ago, Kartenhaus said:

Sadly, it appears to be exclusive to the fire protection simulator...

It appears so.

Just to test I added that property to the medical clinic and set it to 0.5:

 

And, as expected, it had no affect on the radii when placing two clinics. One touching a street and the other not:

 

I wouldn't give up just yet as there might be some other options.

 

15 minutes ago, Kartenhaus said:

Now I also don't have any knowledge with creating custom lots.

For this I highly recommended PIM-X. It comes with a guide in PDF format and if you go thru that step by step you can create custom lots with minimal pain.

Here's my first one after learning just the basic basics:

^ That's a low wealth 4x4 growable residential. Sure, I broke the rules by using a medium wealth house on the lot, but it's for my own use so phooey on consistency.

[Kartenhaus 73]

Now I know it's a bit late but here I am with a follow-up to this thread.

I believe I have found an elegant solution to the exploitative gameplay tactic of not powering buildings that don't actually require power to function.

My first idea was lowering the power consumption of all affected buildings to 0 and later tweaking power production to be more costly. This would have turned out to be a lot of work to get done perfectly. Furthermore, mods with new buildings would also have to be adjusted manually.
So I decided against it.

A far easier solution was raising the "Power radiation radius" in the "Utilities" exemplar high enough so a whole city tile would already be covered by one power plant positioned anywhere on the map!
So what I did was raise this value from "0x00000002" to "0x00000100".
The latter number was calculated by looking at a large city tile, which is 256x256 map tiles. "0x00000100" in decimal is 256. Therefore a power plant in any corner of a large city tile can power it fully.

Now of course this removes the gameplay element of placing power lines to create a power grid in your city.
But I have never really been a fan of having to do this in the first place.
Firstly, it's always a chore since there is hardly any strategy involved - simply connect everything to everything else because you have to.
I also don't believe there is much merit in having two seperate power zones - this just sounds like it's asking for trouble.
Later on in the game, when all parts of the city grow closer together, you need to remove your old power lines to create space and in the end hardly any of them are required at all.

They now still have one use left though: Neighbor Connections.

Power_radiation_radius_256_27-May-2019.zip

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

17 minutes ago, Kartenhaus said:

A far easier solution was raising the "Power radiation radius" in the "Utilities" exemplar high enough so a whole city tile would already be covered by one power plant positioned anywhere on the map!

It sounds like you've perfected Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower.

[Terring 6,476]

Wait, you've achieved wireless transmission of energy in SimCity? Finally!!

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

On 12/13/2018 at 11:22 AM, Kartenhaus said:

Other than the obvious fact that the pathfinder fails to create commute for the jobs

Sorry I din't flag this a year ago... Sims preferentially seek out employment at civic buildings that have them. If there is a civic job available when a sim looks for a job, it will try to path to it. If the sim fails, it will raise a no-job zot (and may dilapidate for long commute). If other sims eventually soak up the civic jobs, then the failed sim might look elsewhere before causing more problems, but that depends on timing (it's a race condition). You might have to bulldoze and let new sims build replacement homes that succeed in the very same spots that failed before.

The real problem is when the civic building is totally cut off. A whole city can complain with no-job zots despite plentiful jobs at all wealth levels (I've seen it). So make sure that your schools and hospitals have road access networked to residential zones.

[Naomi57 2,985]

On 14/12/2018 at 11:08 AM, CorinaMarie said:

For this I highly recommended PIM-X. It comes with a guide in PDF format and if you go thru that step by step you can create custom lots with minimal pain.

 

On 14/12/2018 at 10:19 AM, CorinaMarie said:

Are you familiar with iLive's Reader? That'd be the place to start looking. Here's a tutorial for it too.

Hi Cori, I'm planning to get into iLive's Reader soon.  Is PIM-X a better option, instead, or do the two complement each other?

[CorinaMarie 29,893]

5 hours ago, Naomi57 said:

Hi Cori, I'm planning to get into iLive's Reader soon.  Is PIM-X a better option, instead, or do the two complement each other?

They are two completely different animals.

Reader is used for editing all types of properties of exemplars which are like records in a database along with other file formats the game's data files use. PIM-X is in the same category as Maxis's Lot Editor (LE). That's where you have a visual representation of a lot, the ground textures you place, the building, props (such as trees, park benches, etc).

Ofc, PIM-X and LE then create files which have exemplars with properties so there is an overlap with Reader in that regard.

It is technically possible to create everything in Reader that both PIM-X and LE create, but would require an insane amount of knowledge for what and where all the calculated codes for LotConfiguration (et. al.) need to be.