Cob92

Actually the extra Water and Power are divided up equally amongst all the connected cities (including the unstarted cities), unless you have stopped the power and water sources from exporting to the other cities. Garabage, Recycling, and Trade depot trucks are subject to traffic and can get stuck in traffic. University and Community College commuting is broken. There is an issue that can prevent students from being picked up by school buses that is unrelated to heavy traffic. Heavy Traffic can prevent school buses from pick up students if they get delayed long enough. Where's my education patch...? Seems to me that commuting is the only really broken thing. Few workers commute to neighboring cities, while it seems that students will not commute at all. Shoppers commute, but there is no reliable way to track their numbers, and I end up having to put stores in every neighborhood because people won't go shop in the downtown of the big city next door. Service sharing works fine for me; I've been able to completely get rid of garbage facilities in some cities and rely completely on trucks coming from a dump in another city. One city can provide services for an entire region if you invest enough in it.

I think we'll see one eventually. Despite the game's flaws, it still sold very well and EA touted it as one of the high points of the year, speaking from a business standpoint. Had the game been well-polished for release, this thread probably would not exist.

This really ought to have been in the game since version 1.0. What I would like to see is a mod that changes the way zones are drawn. It's hard to visualize land parcel boundaries and determine exactly how much land you need to zone to get a perfect row of buildings. Right now you end up with random trailers and other crap in the middle of your downtown.

You've got a lot of people for whom "city-building" consists of covering the maximum amount of space possible in urban sprawl, no doubt inspired by the real cities of modern America. Once they run out of room to slap down buildings, they're done. Still, there's only so much you can do with a fully built-out city in this game without demolishing the whole thing and starting over. That's my chief complaint: cities reach a state of stasis far too quickly. In past SimCity games, cities contained such a massive number of elements that it was almost always possible to find ways to improve and tinker with an existing city without changing it into an entirely new city. You could renovate neighborhoods, reroute freeways, optimize subway lines, shift around schools, create greenbelts, widen streets and modify the grid, and so on. SimCity 2013 needs more stuff that you can do with a mature city instead of prodding people toward greenfield building.

Biggest advantage of solo play is that you don't have to worry about people taking over city slots, building one or two streets and then abandoning the whole thing. Biggest disadvantage is that it gets tedious jumping from city to city.

As a Texas native I can tell you that the speed limit is virtually never enforced to the number, unless a town decides to set up a speed trap. You can get away with mild speeding (~5 over) around DPS and big city police, and most people do more than that. I've seen only a handful of Houston drivers who actually obey speed limits, and out of all the cops on the road here, I've seen only one in my lifetime who stayed under the limit (usually traffic will be flowing at 5 over while HPD cars blaze by doing 10-15 over the limit).

I've really begun to notice this the last few years. I see 75 MPH speed limits everywhere. It wouldn't surprise me at all for my state to try a 90 MPH limit one day just to be doing it. I drive through rural areas a lot because I go to college in another city but travel back to Houston to visit my family, and I've noticed that a lot of roads that were limited to 70 just 2 or 3 years ago have since had their speed limits raised, along with the addition of signs warning drivers to stay out of the left lane unless passing.

It seems that in the Texas Triangle these days, 75 MPH is the most common rural speed limit (I've heard of 85 MPH limits on I-10 in West Texas, but that's a part of the state that I've yet to visit). Some two-lane farm to market roads will have speed limits of 60-70, but most of the major highways and freeways will be 70+. The new tollways they are building also tend to have limits of 75, with a few sections of the 130 near Austin having a limit of 85 MPH. Regardless of the limit, traffic tends to flow ~ 5 MPH over the limit in the countryside, and when you get to Houston you'll have to go 10-15 over the limit to keep up, if the traffic isn't heavy enough to slow it down.

Since Maxis already said that bigger cities are out: -More cities per region: I'd like to fill up a region with 30+ cities -Cities nearer each other; clusters should be easily identified as such. -Things that can be added to the empty space to make the region feel more "complete". -More lot sizes; if there is not space for parking I'd like to see medium/high density buildings that grow without it and simply cover the lot. -Reasons to produce resources. There is not enough in the game to drive demand for final stage resources like computers, TVs, and fuel.

At the very least, he should be barred from holding a driver's license for the duration of his punishment. For a Texan, being prohibited from driving is very nearly the same thing as imprisonment.

I'd like to add I-45 in Houston to this list. The freeway is packed 24 hours a day (I've actually been caught in traffic jams at 3 am on 45), there's always construction, and there are never enough lanes to keep up with growth. They need to just make it the size of the new Katy Freeway all the way to Galveston, and then be done with it. You do have a point there. They keep improving 45 only in small segments rather than just improving the whole thing. The north side is not that great once you pass the beltway at Greenspoint. It's super bad from West Rd. and around the Shepherd curve. They are holding meetings with the nearby neighborhoods, however, they aren't really having it. Took them years to get moving on the HOV extensions and lane additions on the Gulf Freeway to Clear Lake, despite the fact that this section has been approaching capacity for years. I always say that the problem with Greater Houston is that it still tries to apply a small-town mindset to the issues and concerns of a major American city.

I'd like to add I-45 in Houston to this list. The freeway is packed 24 hours a day (I've actually been caught in traffic jams at 3 am on 45), there's always construction, and there are never enough lanes to keep up with growth. They need to just make it the size of the new Katy Freeway all the way to Galveston, and then be done with it.

It's easiest if you build a Community College before going for the University.

Problem with that is that you can't zone on RHW. I'm not sure if you've been to Texas, but the major cities here use a configuration where frontage roads are lined with commercial and residential development with driveways opening directly onto the frontage road. The frontage roads in turn are squeezed as close to the freeway as possible (at least in Houston; Austin seems to prefer more green space) so that development is able to come right up to the freeway corridor. What you need for this in SimCity would be a FARHW that connects to OWR running parallel to the freeway main lanes. Indeed, inside ramps like that should help. The idea of better supporting frontage roads has been on the drawing board for awhile now, and the main difficulties are figuring out the best geometry of the OWR/NWM OWR interfaces that would be receiving the connection from the RHW, and how to handle the implementation matters, as we're trying to move away from static puzzle piece ramps and toward FLEXRamps. As far as the "urban" side of things, part of that could be combatted with clever lotting at present. We've discussed some other ideas, though nothing definitive. New networks are off the table, however, as crosslinking is already nightmarish at present. I also think that some of the RHW's critics may want to give the QuickChange system in NAM 32 a chance. It'll still be a rather basic offering--diamonds and the inner portions of parclos--but that's going to be one area we'll keep expanding in future NAM releases, and it provides a more accessible way into the RHW. -Tarkus I'm looking forward to seeing that. I like the RHW more and more as it develops, and I'm starting to look for more ways to incorporate it into my cities. The problem is that I'm essentially having to start a new region from scratch because the only truly RHW-based regions on my PC have succumbed to eternal commuter bugs and spiraling unemployment problems despite a lack of C and I demand.

Electronics is the best moneymaking specialization. Education doesn't produce money by itself; you have to use the gains from education to grow your high tech industry to make money. Really, the point of the education city is to research technologies for the region.

In lieu of larger maps, I would like to see a region upgrade expansion. Regions with more cities, more ways to connect cities, ways to use the empty space in the region (suburbs, shopping malls, industrial parks, national parks, regional landfills, etc.), upgrades for regional transportation (your city should be able to build a freeway loop that circles it with an entrance on every side that is landlocked), more Great Works, commuting fixed once and for all. I would also like to see the addition of tools to build freeways through city limits instead of being limited to building overpasses on avenues. It would also be great if Maxis could change the building footprint system to allow more compact construction of medium and high density buildings. Too much land is wasted on lawns and parking lots.

You might be. As it's been mentioned, the MHW is seriously underscaled and if you take a look around google maps and follow some highways, you'll find that they are very, very likely to resemble RHWs more closely than MHWs. In the end it's obviously down to personal preference, but for a coherent, uniform look in your transportation network, there's no way around using the RHW really. MHW may be severely underscaled, but in my experience, its aesthetic more closely matches a typical urban freeway than the RHW. RHW is nice and flexible, but it is too flat, wide, and grassy to fit in with a congested downtown area. Plus it doesn't support frontage roads well, which means no Texas-style freeways.

Assuming 2 hours of play per day, I'd say it takes roughly 2-3 days for a large city of mine to reach something of a mature state, with skyscrapers in the CBD, full spectrum of municipal services, airport, and land area over 90% developed. If I just want to sprawl as quickly as possible I can do it even faster, but then I end up with something resembling the ghettos of Houston.

In which case, as far as a CBD is concerned, what's the point of trams, elevated rail, and subways? Seems the light rail system is reduced to eye-candy in the downtown. It makes sense somewhat though. Passengers on a train that is just passing through won't shop at the businesses lining the street. What you need is to have transit stops in downtown so that people get off the train and walk.

Probably that you can't upgrade from roads to avenues. SC4 is the only city builder I've ever played that allows that, and that's probably because of the tile-based gameplay. Cities XL also requires you to demolish in order to build a road type with a wider right-of-way.

Even in this day and age, the majority of computer users have no idea how software development works, or where bugs come from. Most of them cannot read code in any language and still treat the computer as a sort of "magic box". They are experts at the consumption side of things, but the production side remains alien to them. That's why a CS grad today can still reliably expect to pull down salaries in the neighborhood of $70,000 and upwards.

I would prefer one where you just plop the terminal and you can put the runway in a number of positions relative to the terminal. I'm sure the players would be smart enough to remember to build runways for the airport.

No, buildings can only be aligned against a road. My suggestion for the airport is to build it about halfway through the development of your city; you can finance it with a bond.

Been playing on Hard for the past decade, and I find even that to be too easy sometimes.

I want to see the regional minor works, as well as the ability to upgrade your city's highway connection. It might make sense to just have one ramp off the highway when you are a podunk town of 500 people, but a major city should be able to have a beltway circling the plot with entrances on all sides. One-way networks would be great as well and improve possibilities for urban expressways (right now you still have problems with people turning against the intended flow of traffic because of open intersections). I also want to see some real use for resources in the game's regular economy; right now it seems like there's not much to drive demand. Fuel especially doesn't really have any purpose for existence. It would be nice if, for example, fuel prices were tied to the number of cars driven in each city in each region on the server, so that auto-dependent regions would have the effect of raising fuel prices. Moreover, fuel would be incorporated into the local economy by requiring Sims to spend a certain chunk of their money on it if they drive to work or shop, as well as reducing the profit margins of shops that receive freight from other cities (cost of long haul shipping). Money spent on fuel would then be unavailable for shopping, thereby having the indirect effect of lowering happiness. When fuel is cheap, the effect would be hardly noticeable, but a spike in prices would squeeze Sims' budgets, and leave poorer Sims with virtually nothing left over for shopping. It would also be nice if Sims' preference for public transportation were affected by fuel prices, so that cheap fuel encourages driving, but expensive fuel would encourage Sims to try to take transit in a greater variety of cases.