Cob92

I only just realized a month or so ago that the only difference between medium and high density non-avenue roads is what buildings develop on them. They both have two lanes in either direction. You don't get better traffic flow by upgrading it, just more population along the road, clogging it further. Actually high density roads do have slightly longer green lights at intersections, but other than that, yeah there are no traffic benefits to upgrading. Unless you have UDON installed, you're very limited in how much you can increase road capacity without going for avenues.

1. You need to control population growth by limiting the density of your roads. If you just open the city to all development you're going to end up with overpopulation. 2. Place your sewage treatment plant next to your water pumps so you recycle your water. On river maps, build your water infrastructure near the river for a stronger natural supply. 3. Try to develop your infrastructure at least as fast as you grow your population. In particular, make sure that you have education capacity, as educated Sims consume fewer resources and create fewer problems for your city.

They can do the job, but you need an ungodly number of them to keep your factories full. I usually use them as an intermediary to keep my Omega operation growing while I transition from traditional extraction methods to VTOL shipments. If you're playing online, having extraction infrastructure that you don't actually use could help serve as a hedge against fluctuations in oil and ore prices. You can keep your reserves ready to go and simply flip the switch if the cost of importing gets too high.

I feel like desirability and land value maps are next to meaningless in SC4. You can have the whole map maxed out in both areas but that doesn't seem to affect development patterns at all.

The thing you have to keep in mind is each advisor provides advice independently of the others, and all of them aside from the environment advisor are essentially aimed at the traditional infinite growth paradigm that SimCity is based on. If you wish to limit growth you should not listen to them so closely.

Personally, I will always try to keep essential upgrade buildings in cities that I own, given how unreliable the average SC2013 player is. The last thing I want is for the guy on the other side of the region to bulldoze his HQ and shut down my entire electronics sector.

It's not a terrible game, it's just very limited in terms of what it can do with regards to scale. I much prefer its simulation of traffic and services to SC4, and things like tourism have distinct functionality within the simulation whereas they were just eye candy in SC4. Where it falls short is that you will fill the city spaces up very quickly and find yourself having to build more densely in order to get reasonable population figures. There is no room for suburban sprawl or rural areas; the game is strictly geared to playing compact urban cores and small towns.

Density is increased by increasing happiness. To do this, you need to make sure that your residents are provided with access to parks or shopping, as well as any services that they complain about lacking. Understand the effects that parks have on land value; place only the parks that correspond to the land value that you want in that area of your city. Land value dictates the wealth of the buildings that develop there, so you can manipulate the wealth of a district by adjusting its land value through parks. To increase industry tech level, you need a college or university in the city. Colleges allow medium tech industry to develop, while a university will raise your industry to the highest tech level.

You either maximize population or wealth. Low wealth buildings hold more people than high wealth ones, and you don't have to raise land values to get high density buildings. You can pack about 1 million Sims into a city if you get all low wealth, high density towers.

As far as I know, SimCity taxes are basically just property taxes

Some time back, the formula that the game uses to calculate your city's nominal population was published on the Internet, and it was confirmed that there are 3 functions used: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a8pw6/proof_of_population_inflation/ The game displays this number in the bottom bar using a method appropriately named "GetFudgedPopulation". This number has no meaning outside of leaderboard ego stroking.

I try to build cities to be livable as well as profitable, but they all end up reaching New York levels of density after a while because you can't grow by sprawling in this game. So the only way to get the number of people necessary to drive a large metropolitan economy is to build up.

But they look awesome and that's what counts. Really though, once you get outside North America, grid-breaking downtowns are pretty common. We've got two great examples here in New York and Boston. Most of Manhattan is a grid, but Downtown is just a spider web of roads from the original Dutch village that was the start of NYC.