Cob92

Let me get mad at "The Game of Life" because the game uses a spinner rather than having make moral choices about which direction to head in life. I get your frustration but sometimes people want this game to be SO realistic they should just go into a City Planning career. I hope you see my sarcasm here and I hate that you are disappointed with the update, but this GAME can only go so far, and I personally think they are doing a good job of helping the game function without too many errors. Sure... my point is that SC4 didn't have these traffic problems, so we have gone BACKWARDS - that's a first for this franchise. It’s called "SIM" city for a reason you know, as in “simulation”? I have played SimCity for almost 24 years, and this latest version has us doing some very weird things just to get the traffic to function? Come on… no excuses for game developers that have a 24 YEAR HISTORY! I guess I expected the GAME to be fun, not frustrating? My mistake! Cities do have roads that pass straight through without intersecting surface streets to connect different areas; they're called freeways. We don't have a true freeway in Simcity, but building a road that goes over or under city streets with few intersections effectively accomplishes the same thing. In fact, such roads exist in real cities (see Memorial Dr. and Allen Pkwy in Houston, Wacker Dr. in Chicago, and so on), If all you have are a bunch of narrow surface streets with at-grade intersections, your city will have traffic issues as it grows. You can't make that work by itself in anything larger than a small country town.

Yes, students will go anywhere, but the different schools still have defined roles ingame: -Elementary schools are for starting up education in new cities. You need school attendance to unlock the higher level schools, and they are cheap enough for small villages to afford. -High Schools are for maximizing residential education in large cities where tech levels are not a concern. The high school is the most cost-effective educational institution in the game, and its buses prevent students from contributing to traffic. -Community Colleges have the lowest running costs and get your tech up to the mid-level industries, but they have no student transportation of their own. They depend on your city buses and streetcars to get students to school on time. Use them where you need some sort of tech level, but don't require the unique features of the university. -Universities maximize both technology and education in addition to providing the research projects. Use them in cities where you want to develop high tech industry or unlock research for the region; they can function in a city with almost no residents thanks to their dorms. Their drawbacks are that they require very large land areas, especially for addons to the campus, and they require mass transit to be of maximum usefulness.

SC4 is still remarkably fun even with few mods. Most of the stuff beyond the NAM changes the look of the city rather than changing the way the game is played. My cities still contain plenty of Maxis buildings, with smatterings of custom content here and there. I use a set of custom functional airports that are Maxis-sized, but use the modular airport props and textures for a much more appealing look.

Probably a transportation problem. You need public buses and streetcars to get students to school effectively,

It takes time for police to suppress crime in a city. Unlike SC4, you do not want to wait until the very last minute to introduce services.

Hopefully it also cuts down on the number of homeless generated. I wish that the disasters actually affected your injury and death stats, so that having a good hospital and EMS system actually meant something in that context. This would also create another niche for the Red Cross; dealing with the overflow of injured Sims during a major disaster, or perhaps providing a refuge for survivors in the case of something like a zombie outbreak or nuclear disaster.

Definatly! A uni student attending the morning class would never happen loool!!! Too hungover lol Definatly! A uni student attending the morning class would never happen loool!!! Too hungover lol Got that right! In my time in college, I have yet to see anyone take an 8 or 9 AM class unless that was absolutely the only option available. I also think I've noticed a situation where a ton of students heading to the university disappear by around 7AM and turn into workers instead. EDIT: I think there is a bug where students are disappearing from the city entirely. Setting up schools with buses has not increased enrollment numbers at all. I have a city with less than 50% enrollment and dropping steadily.

It seems like hardly anybody comes for the midday or afternoon classes. There is a massive rush of students for the morning classes and then nothing. Horribly unrealistic and breaks the university.

EA does this with all of their games. It's the same thing with Battlefield 3 whenever an update or something comes out; whole game goes down for an hour or so and the 50,000 players are forced to go do something else.

I actually like that feature, where I live, just about every city and town has it's Board of Education in a separate building than in City Hall. The reason being a Board of Education is actually one of the largest departments in any city. I work for a City Govt (In the Highway Dept.) and our Board. of Ed is actually about 50% of the entire Govt workforce. They too have their own building a block away from our Town Hall. But then why not segregate out the offices for every city department. The only towns I've seen with a "consolidated" city hall are the small ones that put the mayor's office in the back of the police station and hold city council meetings in the high school gym.

The problem is that the region servers sync up relatively infrequently, and since the region data is server-side, you have to wait for that sync to take place before actions in one city will show up in another.

For some reason the universities don't do a good job of spreading tech beyond the city that they're built in. If you want high-tech without a uni, you can put the Vu Tower in your city or build the space center, which maxes out the tech for the entire region, eliminating the need for local colleges or secondary universities.

You should be able to upgrade to a vertical city hall, like in LA or Houston, instead of being forced to sprawl your modules all over the place. And I don't understand why the DoE must always be a separate building.

. In fact given the size of the map, its not even a city, its more like a district. So in real life you have Manhattan, which is a purely C district (city in Simcity), or Kowloon in Hong Kong which is purely C. Actually, those districts validate the game rather than anyone trying to make a city consisting of a single zone type. Manhattan may be the commercial hub of NYC but it still has a population of 1.6 million people, even in the Financial District and Midtown. Downtown Chicago has tens of thousands of people living there. Even the infamous sprawl burbs of America still have some low-level commercial and industrial uses present. You'd be hard pressed to find a city or district that is 100% residences or 100% businesses.

The new patch allows you to bridge over roads, so I tend to adopt a strategy of building "expressways" through my city to move traffic between neighborhoods faster. These expressways avoid at grade intersections with other major streets so that traffic can move at maximum speed to its destination. That combined with the improved AI really eliminates the most egregious traffic issues (though you will still have to deal with roads that are pushed far beyond their limits in a big city).

Unlike industrial towns, you can't simply raise a CBD from nothing and expect it to work well. Most of my best business districts get large because they are the oldest thing in the region, at the crossroads of every major transit route in the region, and because I've invested heavily in providing city services in the area. You can of course develop business districts anywhere you want provided that you have sufficient demand and population, but a big downtown with skyscrapers is something that you need to invest in early on and grow over time. These two pictures depict the same CBD at different points in time, to illustrate my point:

I am surprised that you were able to produce any high wealth development with a 20% tax on them! I always believed that a 20% tax would lead to a collapse of that sector (at least that was the case in SC4).

There are 2x2 McMansions as well, by the same guy. I actually try to get whole neighborhoods of them for a more realistic suburban feeling. Anyway, if you want high wealth development to stop completely, you need to raise taxes to something like 15%-20%. Slight tax increases will impact demand but won't kill it off all the way.

Depends on who you talk to. Back when I was at Baylor, I met people who thought that Waco was heaven on Earth. I still can't wrap my head around how they came to that conclusion, but they love that town.

Jersey City, NJ!

I guess the main issue is that a lot of transportation mods simply wouldn't work in SC2013 because of map size limitations. Were SC2013 a more open game, I would argue that it has greater transportation modding potential because of the agent-based traffic system. In SC4, things like turning lanes are mostly cosmetic additions, with perhaps a capacity increase to represent their effects on traffic flow. In this game, every new road and intersection type would allow players to profoundly affect the gameplay by changing the way traffic moves. It becomes more than simply adding as much capacity as possible.

I think within Texas, Dallas gets much more praise than it deserves. I've visited the place a couple of times, and it's really nothing special; just an endless sea of sprawl. Not a total hellhole like Waco, but it has the same flaws that detract from every other city in this state (including Austin). People talk about how the DART system makes Dallas a mass transit pioneer, yet the ridership per mile is very low and the trains don't go to many core neighborhoods. Seems like in this state, the quality of a city is based solely on the size of the house you can get in the burbs; things like transportation efficiency (other than automobiles), vibrant and enjoyable downtown areas, cultural offerings, commute time, and so on are just ignored.

Problems with low desirability perhaps? I-HT will abandon if it develops in a polluted area. As for the research centers, don't worry about the radiation. All that means is that you need to put the centers outside of your urban core with no buildings immediately touching them.

You'll need at least some polluting industry to get your city growing again; the good news is that it looks like your city favors manufacturing and high tech industry over Dirty industry. Keep your industry away from your downtown core, and put the worst polluters in another city if necessary. You actually have it in the worst spot right now; from here on out, you need to either build by the city edge or add ports to your coast to shorten the freight trips (the real Manhattan became great because of its port). With your residential areas, what you need to do, in addition to moving the mansions, is to upgrade your core zones to medium density so that apartments and condos can move in. The R$ Sims will automatically fill up any area that the rich and middle class don't want. You can zone any kind of residential on the empty land that you want; the important thing is that you open new land to development.

Looking at your city, I see you have a very spread out business district. You really need to limit dense development to just a few blocks in your city center; anything else will dilute demand and create a forest of mid-rise office blocks. As for your resident situation, you need more industry. Doesn't have to be in your main city, but you need it somewhere in the region.