Experiment: region with zero industry or commerce.

[+Guest]

Wow, what is interesting is that it is the only city in the region. However the result isn't very pretty in my opinion. Have fun.

[Compromise 1]

Date: 3/31/2005 1:10:08 PM Author: SkiGeek Let's not forget:  the purpose of an experiment is to set up conditions and test and see what happens.  They can provide useful information that can be used in future cities.

I agree. This expirement could prove useful for future cities for many reasons such as how much civic buildings contribute to the city job amount.

 

You must have a lot of toll booths in your cities to get that much income.

[Timbuk2 0]

woa... thats pretty cool

I feel bad for your Sims tho, they are victims of an expierament

 

that must be a TON of toll booths to get that much income! It must be a lot of traffic congestion too.

[____----____ 37]

great idea this is a must follow

[Prophet42 1,503]

Interesting experiment.  Do you have any further plans for testing, like introducing commercial or industrial zones and see if it upsets the balance.  Or maybe set up a neighboring city with commerce and see if the sims abandon the civic jobs in preference for commercial jobs.  Keep us posted.

[DreamSlave2112 0]

That is actually pretty cool, though I am personally opposed to Communism, since all your jobs are civic based, i.e. the government. But it looks really good.

[ephorex_77 0]

This is an interesting one

Your sims are basically surviving off employment given to them by civic buildings and you're surviving off tolls on every road

[fightcancer 0]

this experiment seems to have buried a lot of the myths about the necessity of industry and commerce.

did you ever get the mass transit going?

[nealos101 20]

Date: 6/3/2005 2:39:43 PM Author: fightcancer

this experiment seems to have buried a lot of the myths about the necessity of industry and commerce.

did you ever get the mass transit going?

quote>

Maybe he's given up or it's taking too long?

 

The complexity of the game will eventually bury him :-(. Shame, this could have been a successful experiment.

 

I think the game is too complex for such situations to expand... eventually you'll be looking at loosing any chance of expanding outwards... The game is so unrealistic it makes me cry but yet it still posseses a little realism with the fact ALL cities need industry and commercial.  40K is good though...

 

Nealos101.

[fightcancer 0]

I agree.  It could have been very interesting.  You may be right that it wouldn't be able to grow much more.

[EricN 0]

Date: 6/3/2005 6:27:04 PM
Author: nealos101

Maybe he's given up or it's taking too long?

The complexity of the game will eventually bury him :-(. Shame, this could have been a successful experiment.

I think the game is too complex for such situations to expand... eventually you'll be looking at loosing any chance of expanding outwards... The game is so unrealistic it makes me cry but yet it still posseses a little realism with the fact ALL cities need industry and commercial. 40K is good though...

Nealos101.

quote>

Actually, the complexities of moving made me lose my CD.

I recently bought another copy and rediscovered this game.

Fortunately I still have my old saves and recently revisited this experiment. The toughest part about the no-Com, no-Ind challenge is traffic management. Since all my revenue is from toll booths, I need to funnel all commuters, but one over-capacity toll booth in the wrong spot can kill the whole system.

Once you have the traffic sorted out, a civic-only city can thrive quite well. My latest experiment has filled a medium-size map with 250K pop in only 15 years. Again, this is with no mods and no cheats, starting on Hard and taking 400K in loans. I need to find a good way to post the pretty pictures...I don't have access to the webserver I used for the other ones.


There are some other interesting things going on in this experiment:

1) I placed no police stations or hospitals. Crime is rampant, HQ is horrid, yet R$$$ and R$$ are perfectly happy to stay. I only have 1 skateboard park and 3 gazebos per 12x6 block of R-zone, but desirability is high enough to keep most buildings about around 90% full. 15 Big Bens keep my mayor rating at 100 despite the lack of services.

2) I placed no schools other than the City Colleges...633 of them. EQ is climbing linearly, and has just passed 100. There is no sign of it tapering off yet.

3) I have no taxes. Income is $14K in Mass Transit fares and $35K from 2 toll booths (at 9873% capacity). Expenses are $34K. If I really optimized everything...deleted my excess power plants, convinced the remaining pedestrians to take the bus home, and trimmed some fat off my subway system, I could probably balance the budget on one tollbooth.

If someone knows a good place to host pictures, let me know.

Oh yeah...sorry this update took so long...

[snoogans27 0]

Sounds like a kool experiment, never seen a full res city yet.Only thing i don't get is why 633 city colleges or am i reading that wrong?anyways try http://imageshack.us/index.php for your pics

[EricN 0]

Date: 1/20/2006 4:15:06 AM
Author: snoogans27
Sounds like a kool experiment, never seen a full res city yet.Only thing i don't get is why 633 city colleges or am i reading that wrong?

No, you are reading that right...the whole point of this experiment is to test growth with no Commercial or Industrial anywhere in the region.  Every single working sim is employed at a City College, Powerplant, etc.

Here's an initial photo for a better idea:



There's a quarter-million people living there, and they all get every single government holiday

[snoogans27 0]

Wow i had no idea you meant in the whole region. Good experiment I bet your sims are very smart I really had no idea that was possible.

[soldyne 111]

well they cant be that smart, they still live in that city.  lol!

 

seriously though, it was a good idea and very interesting.  thanks for posting it.

[jackel.22 3]

and i used to think i went over the top when i earned 10k from tolls..................................

your mad, but i take my hat off to you for making it workable

[EricN 0]

I'm working on a new city to smash all doubts that civic-only regions have a limit:

Goal:
1 million people in one city
All Services
Top EQ and HQ
Positive cashflow

Restrictions:
No Commerce
No Industry
No Neighbors

Since I got 250K on a medium, 1M on a large should be pretty straightforward.

I'm up to 650K, with about half the R zoning in place...and 2043 City Colleges built . Unfortunately, I'm running into slow-computer-syndrome, and running this city is like swimming in molasses. The only challenge left is dedicating enough cpu-cycles to get there.



These experiments have taught me a ton. Here are some of the bigger lessons:

1) C+I generates R demand, and R generates C+I demand, but which comes first?. Civic jobs break this chicken and egg cycle!...they create R demand without any requirements beyond a monthly fee.

2) Civic jobs exist regardless of funding levels and desirability. In fact, if the funding is low enough, civic buildings actually generate money through taxes on the residents that work there.

3) School buses and Ambulances are hideous money pits. Consider the following:

Instead of one hospital at $1200 + $200 covering an area, you replace that with 4 hospitals at $300 + $0 for the same coverage.

You accomplished the following:

-Saved $200/month
-Created flexibility for covering odd-shaped areas
-Increased R demand -> increased R pop -> more tax revenue
-The increased R pop generates more C+I demand -> more tax revenue

Saving $200/month and boosting R demand by several hundred points is nothing to scoff at, but here is the real kicker:

Take that $200/month and invest it in plazas in your Commercial areas. Say you have a few C buildings providing 700/1000 jobs each because of 70% desirability. One large plaza in the middle can kick those to 1000/1000 each. Spend your $200 Ambulance money on plazas in key spots, and you can easily add several thousand points to your R demand.

Oh yeah...take that extra C tax revenue and build a nice reward building...you deserve it.

[carinia 0]

Hate to dig up an old thread, but i just absolutely loved this idea. Im a freak for seperating all my towns into all rs, all cs and all is. Ive noticed how when Ill get ona kick to say, upgrade to new schools by placing a lot of htem to decrease funding costs, all the sudden my income goes up and my no job zots go down. Never thought of basing a city entirely off this.. but now I think Ill try! I mean, what could it hurt, right? The way to do that is definately with colleges, even small hs and elementary schools, koisks and large (not delux) police stations... The smaller buildings really do give you a better return on your money and employ the same amount of people as larger buildings do. Well im going to stop talking about this and go actually do it

[Garek Maxwell 1]

I'm actually glad the person above me dug this up. XD

I've not played sim city 4 in a while and I've been thinking about firing it up again lately. This thread brought me back to the crack that is SC4. (It's addictive, don't deny it. )

Anyway, what I would like to know is if there's any BATs out there that would provide a good number of civic jobs with little cost and little improvement over the area of influence. For example, a hospital that employs 150 sims but only costs $100 to maintain but also only gives a neglible improvement over the health of those in the area of inlfuence. Another example would be a government building that acts like a small park that provides jobs and has low maintenance.

So basically, Communistic BATs. XD

[Vanasonic 49]

Woah, I should try that myself sometime.

[plasticboy 36]

C'mon. You're a liar. Show us some close-up scrshots!

[Garek Maxwell 1]

He's telling thr truth. It really does work. I can't post screenshots yet because I don't have any, nor can I get into the game now because I'm busy. However, I would be more than willing to do so tomorrow.

But, here's what I can tell you how this works is a quick simple form.

1. If you build, say, a police station and reduce it to ZERO funding, people will still work in it. You can thus GAIN from building 20 police stations. There's no funding costs, nor any riots.

2. You will only gain money primarily from the residential buildings. So your primary source of income is limited. However, as the original poster said, you can gain money from alternative sources. For example, placing tolls on roads. Another way to gain money would be to build those "rewards" that have negative effects but give you money.

That's it really. There's not much else too it. I'm still experimenting myself with this. It seems that colleges afford the most jobs, and raise the residential demand the most. But I've yet to try other things. What I'd love to get my hands on are buildings that offer many civic jobs with low pay requirements for upkeep and have very little bonuses to their area of influence. I can't find any yet, but the default buildings seem like they're enough to suffice.

One thing that I will be trying is to test the no car experiment along with this one to see if it works. If it does, I would think it would be extremely "dictatorial" of the mayor. Amusing too.

[Garek Maxwell 1]

Sorry about the image size. Photobucket smooshed it. Anyway, here's statistics and proof of this working. This is also an older set of images as my little city now has 130,000+ sims.

You still get the picture inspite of the slight smooshing.

Also, I just noticed this too. My rich sims hate the Lincoln center... I don't know why either. Too stuck up or something?

[JFman00 1]

France likes it's civic jobs...

[Cob92 360]

I've never seen a SC4 socialist city that big. So everyone works for the government...