Anything

its to do with happiness. they need to be happy for quite some time for density in the area to increase. click on a house and youll see the density info. maybe you dont have any parks of shops (commercial) nearby, or your tax rate is too high. they also need enough space for the big building to be placed. if you cant fit a big park or a school in that spot, then a 3d building wont fit either.

in my experience Ive always needed to dedicate a whole city to make a casino city. need lots of space for the stadium, airport, hotels, all the casinos and shitloads of public transport. in a non casino city tourism seems more a hindrance than a benefit. mostly because of traffic (experienced in 7) i tried a full casino city again recently in 6 (cause i setup a new region) but some problems still mean its not very fun or profitable to do. currently my tech city injects 10million to my casino city every now and then to keep it running. + number of workers seems to have gotten better. i hardly had any problems finding enough workers this time. not sure if this was better planning or not + tourism visitor number seems less fickle and buggy. i noticed that if i did a big change (eg demolish and rebuild a casino), or something went wrong (eg the stadium turned off cause of power), it would still take several days of low tourism numbers to recover. but i didnt see the old problem where the tourists never come back and you would go bankrupt and have to start again. - the game still grinds to a halt once you get past 100k tourists. this means to me that a hugely successful (10mil/year +) low/medium wealth casino city isnt going to be possible in the long run. - as of patch 6, the high wealth casino extensions are STILL broken. so a crazy high wealth casino city doesnt seem possible either i havent checked if it was fixed in 7 i dont have the amusement park dlc. i hear it makes at least $100-200k. but i sure as hell dont have the space. but in summary, a casino city is still not 'fun' for me, and is mostly a large source of frustration.

the million need only be spent once, and its visible from all cities once the authorization has happened. sometimes it can take a long time to sync between cities. ive experienced bugs several times where it doesnt ever show up from the point of view of other cities. this appears to be exaggerated if I swap cities a lot during and immediately after the authorization process. since patch 6 several other users on this forum appear to have also experienced similar issues. you may have to contact ea to get it fixed.

wonder if you could use something like http://www.autohotkey.com/ to make a macro to press n or m a preset number of times while you're holding down the mouse button. sending key presses to another application isn't difficult, there are many applications out there. but capturing that left click event from simcity might be. worst case, you could probably make a macro to press n every 10 seconds, start it up, start building the road, hold the button and wait for the right number of n's (or m's) that you need for the right height, then let go. just out of interest, do you have to keep breathing in / out to click and drag?

i just ran one of my cities for a few days to see if i could notice some changes. as expected, more bugs and problems but quite a few good changes too - tunnels absolutely rock. they require very little lead up / ending space so they can be placed very easily. have some crossing my city all over the place already. i cant wait to build a city from scratch with them - careful bulldozing tho. it will be demolished before you lift your left mouse button, giving you no opportunity to cancel. - power, sewage, water, garbage, recycling, crime & sickness values all seem to have been tweaked to use/cause more. my city was static and not growing and i was tightly managing all my resources (trying to save a few $). but now are all very negative... and they gradually got worse every day for the first few days of playing. - had to add a whole 2nd recycling plant to cope with the city (250k pop), and its only just enough! its funny watching the trucks drive between the two tho, trying to offload. - i found that i had to rebuild my garbage and recycling plants before vehicles would show up (i waited 3 days in game, now its very far behind in garbage and probably making the sickness i mentioned worse). i didnt have to rebuild anything else tho. - garbage & recycling trucks that are full still go out and try to collect garbage - often garbage trucks will return home after collecting only 1 house's garbage. - they still all queue up behind each other, but now in several groups of only 4-5. better i guess, they now reach every house much quicker. - the delivery trucks from the recycling plants dont remove the stuff very well. eg: it will sit at 100% aluminium for 24 hours before it finally gets emptied. but this isnt new, it was happening before patch. - traffic in peak times seems actually worse, but it eases much more quickly. probably because the cars dont do as many stupid things. i get huge gridlocks at 6am and 8pm, that clear within a few hours. at other times its almost a ghost town. this seems a bit more real to me. - my public transport usage has increased 3 fold. - university and college popularity has increased quite a bit. while my highschool popularity has decreased. school now only teaches about 100 students (yes i know its not normally necessary, but i like the schoolbusses to cut some traffic) cool garbage stats man :

what do the churches do? from the layer options it seems they promote happyness, but of course theres no description i placed one, and immediately noticed power issues, i was in the negative by 50megawats! it also says not to bulldoze them, but i did anyway using so much power, that modern church must have holographic projectors, lazor light shows and gold leaf replicators. edit: same with the sewage, a huge increase there too. i guess religious people like to poop a lot

suggest looking at it wasn't created that long ago, has quite a few comments on the (in)completeness of the game eg, there are still some buildings that you can place that still do nothing. patch 7 is about to come out this or next week. for me its a promising update, if the changes to traffic does what i hope it does then it might actually be worth playing again. unfortunately, so far it seems that every patch has added more bugs than its fixed. sc2013 has an airport you can place, but not many creative options on how you want it to look. it has 1 type of arcology great work you can build outside your city, but last i checked it does more harm than good as 1million workers try to drive into your town and find a job. when it first came out the fact that it was online to overloaded slow buggy servers was $%&^!, but i haven't had a problem with the onlinenessness of the game in many weeks (months?) now.

ive seen other sync issues (university not unlocked etc) that can be fixed by opening closing the game / swapping cities / rebuilding the department of education (or whatever). but once you actually plop the great work it seems only ea staff can fix it. similar issues have happened to me quite a while ago in two of my regions. with a solar plant and with an international airport. two cities could see it and actively contribute to it. but the third sees a blank patch of grass and according to it its not even unlocked. i think it might happen because i swapped cities while it was going through the approval process. ea live chat support were unable to help, and requested that i call their support line during US business hours ... because the world revolves around USA timezones. i waited until 2am and called soon after they opened. sat on hold for an hour, talked to someone for about 3 minutes who transferred me somewhere else and on hold for another 45, and the call dropped out as soon as the next person picked up. I was much impressed. i cbf trying again and eventually ended up abandoning whole regions. i would say that if you want it fixed you would probably have to call up and talk to someone directly.

so many 4 way intersections!

its taken up to 24hours (real time) for me previously when the servers were more busy. btw youre only 1/10th the way there. now you need to provide the resources to build the thing. normally i like to knock it over asap, I budget 10million and just do it in a single hit from 1 city, buying all the resources.

take a look at the patch notes, theres detailed descriptions about the place already but in short; truck A says 'ive got those 20 houses over there', truck b says 'ive got the next 20', truck c .... etc. so they should all split up and hit the streets with a little more of a strategy same goes for fire, police, everything. even residents looking for houses or work i think (which is the main cause of traffic issues) i felt like giving patch 6 a go, but 7 sounds like its going to be such an improvement i cant be bothered and so waiting instead .... now just waiting for EA to dissapoint

i believe there was some effort made a few patches ago to make the location they decide to pickup from a little more random than just the closest. but its still pretty fail i have high hopes for patch 7, the reservation system should make all service vehicles behave completely different

i use the big $$$ park. if it fits then a big high desnsity building will fit. so put two, then put roads on either side, and you will have room for two blocks back to back

ive used them a couple of times when i've noticed the school busses aren't making it to a certain area because of the stupid game's path finding / etc, and so education there sucks. they seem to work really well and quite quickly. lots of people walk there. but they sometimes created a bit of a traffic jam

nice. i never thought of the idea of using road cost to measure distance