Sindai

Originally posted by: black_coat I remember someone speculating that the increased bus speed was done to encourage residents to use buses instead of cars, particularly $$ residents since they use the mode of transportation that is fastest. I'm not sure if that is true, but it's plausible to believe that this may have been done during development. Has this theory been verified by experimentation?quote>Yes that's pretty much it. Not to steer the topic in a different direction, but is there anything in 'Simcity1.bat' related to pedestrian traffic? Is it too much to ask my sims to walk a whole block to get to work?quote>This is just part of the larger issue that all commute times are vastly slower than they should be. I find that NAM's 10x commute speed gives realistic pedestrian distances.

Just use the ctrl button to force zones of that size. A lot of buildings have multiple lot sizes, filling in the extra space in the larger ones with parking lot textures.

This has to be a mac problem. THe max commute time is supposed to be 60 minutes or more. I have a city that averages 17 minutes with zero no job zots.

The fields also employ sims, not just the buildings (which is all the query shows). In the gameplay experiments forum there's a thread about farm jobs and I don't think size makes a big difference in the end. Just zone whatever size you think looks best. But yeah, farms grow differently from any other type of zone. Every continuous one will turn into a farm with a single main building and everything else as fields. To get different farms touching each other you have to zone them with gaps, wait for them to develop, then fill in the spaces with new zones. Once they've grown farms are a fixed size. They won't merge.

10x commute speed is your friend. It's possible to get big cities with the default values, but you really have to game the system and it makes it extremely difficult to get realistic cities.

Education. An educated population has no demand for dirty industry and a very small demand for manufacturing industry. You shouldn't have much trouble keeping pollution at a managable level then. Car pollution is nothing compared to industry.

That only changes the angle by 90 degrees. The problem is that if you try and zone between two road types that are parallel to each other, the zones will always face the faster one. Holding alt will just rotate them so they have no road connection at all. Unfortunately the only workaround I know of is demolishing the faster transit, zoning to face the slow one, and then rebuilding it.

You should only be getting no connection zots if the lots don't face (ie: aren't oriented with the arrow touching) a road square. This is actually pretty tough to do because the game tries hard to only let you create zones that face roads, so I'm wondering if you're not describing the problem accurately. Could you give us a screenshot?

The way the game calculates and transfers stuff between cities is rather spotty and hackish. Building pure R/C/I cities is a pain in general and I suspect the way you're using the super demand mod is exacerbating the problem.

Not really. R$ sims actually demand some CO$$$ at the higher EQ levels, so of course eliminating R$ drops CO$$$ demand. While N_O is correct that a diverse city is healthiest and easiest to maintain, it is also true that CO$$$ doesn't need R$ workers to stay happy.

1. Probably. Well-educated $$ and $$$ demand some High Tech industry, but mostly they demand commercial. So you can probably get away with zero industry. If your growth does start to stall the first thing to try would be zoning for HT, though. 2. No. Rich commercial can do without $ sims.

1x1 zones can be very stubborn for some weird reason, but in my experience they will develop eventually given enough time and demand. I expect the root cause is that the game calculates lot desirability based on size or something, so 1x1 zones are undervalued. Sort of like how crime seems linked to lot size so very large buildings always have extremely high crime.

Gridding is easy but wastes space on underused roads. Treeing is theoretically more efficient but requires good planning and an instinct for how much traffic your roads can take. I think those are pretty much the only two archetypes there are, although I've actually created a nice low-density small-tile town based around a single giant one-way street loop. In reality most people use some combination of the two. I find that with NAM's "perfect pathfinding" sims are actually pretty good at taking roads and avenues to relieve congestion even if a street would be the shortest path as the bird flies. So I end up with a "grid" of avenues going "with the flow," then roads branching out perpendicularly, then streets connecting the roads. When zoning a new area I usually throw diagonal roads in semi-randomly to break up the rectangles, and the occaisional area that's completely different from everything around it. Remember that one feature both large grids and trees share is a certain fractal-ness. Regionally you have grids or trees of highways, which feed to smaller avenue grid/trees, which feed roads, which (at least in low-density areas) feed streets. Lastly, I think it's a good idea to experiment with the capacity/speed/time mods NAM has until you find one that feels right to you. I ended up settling on 2x capacity 10x speed. Because it felt more realistic than the default while still preserving some challenge.

I'm almost certain that the PC installer has all of the parameter changing options for each pathfinding option. I just used it recently.

That's plausible, but that scenario only shows that it works from the top down - ie, CO$$$ buildings will tolerate lack of $ employees, but not of $$$ employees. That's a lot more plausible from a coding standpoint - all you need to do is path the $$$ sims first, then $$, then $. I've never had a city short on $$$ sims, but all of mine tend to be short on $, and it doesn't seem to have any obvious ill effects. It also makes sense considering how the simulator gives preference to $$$ sims in other areas.