osse84

It is strange how little SC4 sold considering how popular it became. Is piracy to blame? Myself, I think I bought it 4 times over the years. Now last on Steam. SC13 however did not appeal to me. I think it is a shame that it sold as much as it did in the beginning, but I think that was mostly hype, as well as fans desperately hoping for the best against their better judgment. I guess the real question is, is the EA servers still busy? Sure they got a lot of sales from it, but if players are bored with it aleady, then it is a massive failure.

I don't think Maxis has confirmed any of this yet. They want to change the tile size to a bigger tile [link], but the problem is that most normal computers can't handle this. We got to wait a bit longer I guess. Well, they could at least have given those with fast computers the option of playing on larger maps. Also, if they had placed each city directly adjacent to each other, without that ugly wasteland between them, the size wouldn't matter so much as it would look much bigger and real. I'm still on the fence as far as SC is concerned. It was clear from the start that this was not the game that I wanted, so therefore I never bought it. Maybe if they implement most of the things in the survey, and make the game more customizable, then maybe I will consider buying it. On a side note, wonder how busy their servers are now. Surely people can't still be playing it? It looks so boring.

What we need is an openSC4.org Love open ttd, but somehow time moves so much faster in it than what I member. Once money starts pouring, I set out building intercity track and before I'm done, suddenly it's 1992 and the game is almost over... Maybe it's just me who is exceptionally slow

RE - snwboardn Yes, they need to stop making that simplest approach to path finding. What is the point of simulating each and every sim/entity, if they can't make independent, smart choices anyway? Just stupid gimmicks and unnecessary waste of machine power. Also, if the sim's commute range are as poor, or even poorer than in SC4, it would really piss me off. It is very annoying when they choose to make the game harder than it needs to be by making the commute system irrationally stupid. I'm not anticipating that this new SC will be very difficult, I'm just saying that if they want to add difficulty to the game, they should find other means than by dumbing down traffic. Unfortunately since my computer is in service, I didn't get to try out the beta as much as I'd liked too. It didn't run very well on my old one. What I can say though is that I wasn't very impressed with the new gridless network dynamics. That was much better handled in CitiesXL.

But....but.....but...... How would EA pull all the idiot facespacers into buying the game if it wasn't simplified and forced you to play online? .... Sorry for the hijack/rant. Just Hate with a capital H what the new "SimCity" is going to be. If I invent a time machine in the future, rest assured we will never know the pain SimFaceSpace will cause us. That's okay, it was I who brought it up But I sort of need help here, so we should probably try to restrain ourselves as to not derail the thread completely. Although I agree 100%, and I feel for you brother. I long for a new SC which would bring this great legacy into the future with sleek and massive metropols and complex networks, but SC2013 is not it for me (obviously, as it provides neither). And besides, no devs can make the perfect city builder on their own. They have to utilize the modding community, who are their greatest fans, and build the game with them in mind too. Otherwise it'll all be rubbish, and stay rubbish.

Taxes are divided by wealth level isn't it? High taxes for the rich will prevent mansions from spawning, since demand for high wealth real estate wil plumit. That might work. I will check next time I play. Have been a bit busy, so haven't been able to play without the I and C multipliers. My guess would be that when I remove them, even more sims can't find work, so the whole town collapses... but I will try. I like CAM though, because many great bats lists it as a dependency. It's a shame really, concidereing the grand scale of this game, that Maxis put such unrealistic and restricting commute times into the game. I sort of wish they would just release the source code of this neglected gem instead of rebooting the series with the upcoming new release, which at least to me does not appear to be going in the right direction. OpenSC4.org would have been awesome! They have improved a lot in SC5, but only the things that annoyed the hell out of me in SC4 and Cities XL They should strive for realism instead of such cartoonish nonsense (imho).

Yes, I have the industry quadruple and commercial doubler installed (Much good that have done me), as well as the CAM. I didn't, prior to reading this thread, understand that the jobs xxx/yyy parameter on buildings did just mean currently x out of max y jobs available for that building, and not x out of y number of workers. So when my citizens refuse to travel to the D-I and CS$ already there, I'm at no avail... I've been putting in some schools and hospitals in the city, but it only resulted in demand for R$$ and R$$$ because the R$ already there don't want to travel any further for work. I think it's very hard to build CS$, because whenever they get too close to where people live they transform into CS$$ and offices. That's what's been happening to my downtown after introducing some R$$ and R$$$. The whole place suddenly got full of CO$$$ towers even though half of them are empty and demand for them are still high. Demand for R$$$ is also high even though they abandon their towers rather quickly since some of them have a hard time finding those empty CO$$$ towers (which are not that far away, although not right next by). It's so annoying. I haven't even built out one quarter of the map and already they are whining about commute times. It's been so long since I played this game, but can't remember it being this stubborn with the NAM installed before. So far I have one neighboring city. It's connected to Slum City by train, avenue and two HWs. It has approx 20'000 R$$ and R$$$ inhabitants (no R$) and about just as many jobs. People travel from Slum City to this suburb for work, mostly by train, but not within Slum city itself. I use the default tax level.

Yes that's probably it, but then I don't understand why the city (let's call it Slum City) demand more D-I, instead of R$. Things have become slightly more complicated since yesterday with a few additions of R$$ to Slum City, and some R$$ and R$$$ in a neighboring one. The neighboring city is still below 2000 inhabitants and has a few M-I. Commuting from slum city appears to be working. So this is the current Jobs and Pop stats of Slum City: The three lines of significance is R$, CS$ and D-I. There are as you can see plenty of D-I in the city without workers, still it demands more and I can't get more poor shits to move in, because the demand is as follows: Since I started adding some R$$ (so far very few) the I-M went through the roof for some reason, even though I've been building some. I don't want the same situation as with the D-I. CS$ is usually also in high demand, even though there are plenty of unstaffed ones around already. Slum City is very poorly educated, and receives no health care. I guess I could throw in a hospital. No wonder no one wanna live there. I just don't want it to become Middle class, because once that happens I never now where to put away my poor people.

Nope. What it says is that - given the current desirability conditions - the facility is able to provide 25 out of a theoretically possible 33 job vacancies to be filled. You checked that no Sim is actually going to work there, and you understood that part just fine. Thank you for providing a picture instead of making us guess. The situation is clear: Industry is too far away, and those few connections that exist between the city and its industrial areas are not exactly the shortest possible routes, either. On a large map, this means that with the default traffic simulator that came with the game commute times will be far, far too long for your Sims to reach these jobs, whether by car or by bus. Adding bus stops was a good idea, but it may not be enough to alleviate the problem. You may have to provide a faster means of transport such as a direct EL-Rail line (and when I say "direct", I mean "direct", i.e. straight, shortest line from residential to industrial core), or the distance may be too long in general for the default traffic simulator to handle. IIRC, the commute time allowed by the default traffic simulator for Sims to reach a suitable job is around 6 minutes (!!) - a daily commute of 7 minutes will cause the affected Sim to say "Hey, I'm unemployed, can't reach any job". Therefore, if you like to build spread out cities like these, you should consider downloading the NAM. It comes with a choice of new traffic simulators that contain much more realistic settings (often at the expense of some CPU power, which shouldn't be that much of a problem given the evolution of computer capabilities between the original SC4 release and now!) and will allow you to build more realistic towns. Still, it cannot hurt to learn the importance of short and direct commute paths. Many people build things that won't be much use, e.g. a highway ring running between residential and industrial. However, what's important is to provide for quick travel from residential to industrial and vice versa. I see one example in your screenshot: Your freight rail station. I guess it doesn't see much use. You see, in SC4 the goal of freight traffic is to reach the edge of the map as quickly as possible. It will end there. Freight trucks can go to freight rail stations so that the cargo is loaded on trains, but that will only work if the freight reaches the edge of the map quicker than by truck. I know that the resulting city layout often wouldn't look to realistic, I'm just trying to make you more sensitive for the way the simulator works. If you download the NAM and use a better traffic simulator, this new simulator will help to cover up transport layouts that are inefficient (in terms of SC4's simulation engine). However, if you are sensitive to the basic workings of the simulation engine AND have a better traffic simulator at your back, you'll be able to achieve great things. Much good advice here. I have the much the same problem. What I don understand though is why is DI demand up high when there is not enough workers? And why does it go down when I build more, if no one works there? And if no one works there, how come they don't go bankrupt? How can they pay taxes and ship goods if no one works in them? My city has only CS§ and DI, more so than inhabitants, so why does it only demand for R§§ and R§§§? I know my town isn't perfect. It's supposed to be a dirty slum. There's a more or less straight rail line from the residential area all the way along the industrial, but no one wants to commute further than the first station. I have the NAM installed with the ultra simulator, and usually the sims are willing to commute quite far, but not here. I don't get it.