Cob92

Oh, that's easy. Server load. Not sure if that's the official reason, but it's probable. As you're running the game you're online. As you're online you're using the server somehow. Pausing the game for someone who has left the computer entirely may be cutting back on the amount of tasks the server is keeping track of. Maxis doesn't want to run servers for a bunch of people not actually sitting at their keyboards, when less server load could reduce rollbacks, etc for people who are actively playing. I wouldn't leave this game running all night anyway though. With random disasters, you run the risk of waking up to a pile of rubble where your city used to be.

I have a sneaking suspicion that pollution is just spawned based on some number related to the total emissions of the region. Phantom pollution happened even before this patch, where you would have a city upwind of all the industry and would still get polluted, making the whole wind mechanic useless.

Had the same thing happen to my casino city; it pretty much cancelled out the casino fixes because the magic pollution cloud drove away all my medium wealth tourists.

RHW is not a road, it's a highway. You can't connect any buildings directly to it; you must use ramps to connect it to city streets, which in turn have the buildings on them. Look here for examples of how to use it correctly:

That lizard is the worst! So many people killed for a snack at the dump!

One of my main business districts and port cities:

Back to back lot consolidation is quite common. You mostly see it when mansions move into a residential area.

Students here at the university are planning to go up tomorrow to deliver aid and blood instead of going to DIA parties.

Looks like the long-lost alpha version of SimCity Societies.

dont let those numbers fool you the cities are bigger than what u think... I did a little math and i figured out why it seems odds to me. The Game scale is totally out of whack in a very extreme way. For example the Largest city size possible is supposed to represent a 4 kilo square. Which would make each game tile about 16 meters (or about 52 feet) square. Not only I can fit a Nice size single family home in one of those tiles, but also a 3 story Townhouse, or a Multistory commercial Office Building... 1x2 lets me fit multistory Apartment complexes...The biggest shopping mall in the game can fit in less then 100 square yards, parking lot included. I could go on and on but you get my point I think. It would seem that "Sims" are very very small people. So given that, I guess the crazy elaborate highway interchanges in NAM/RHW are in fact very useful. SC4 changed the scale from past SimCities. Used to be that each tile represented 1 acre.

Welcome to Frasierville! Today we head south on LS-10, the main freeway linking the cities of Los Santos. We leave the crowded streets, sky-high condos, and bustling districts of Kanopolis behind for the wide open fields and pristine landscapes of the southern islands. We make our stop in the remote town of Frasierville, tucked away nicely at the base of Mt. Hickey. Founded in the early 20th century, Frasierville spent the majority of its existence as a quiet fishing town, unknown to most of the world and set in its age-old ways. National Steel had operated an ore mine in the vicinity of the town since the 1960s, but the town boomed in 2001 when the regional council of Los Santos announced the creation of a revolutionary new space port on the outskirts of Kanopolis. Obtaining the necessary raw materials led to a rapid expansion of the mining operation, and thus explosive growth overtook this once-quaint village. 1998: 2002: 2008: We see here a town transformed, as National Steel and its supporting operations pumped millions of Simoleons into the local economy. A massive trailer park was constructed on the edge of town to house the swarms of miners and factory workers needed to produce the steel for the space port. With the arrival of a more affluent managerial class comes increased activism, as these outsiders seek to shake the foundations of town government. Frustrated with the 20 mile commute to the school in Harleyton, these middle-class migrants staged a protest in front of Town Hall in 2004, forcing a civic response: The new school, Frasierville Elementary, opened for the fall of the 2004-2005 school year to the applause of local parents. Though the residents of the trailer parks held relatively little interest in the issue, the town nevertheless extended school bus service to these areas, bringing the children of self-described "rednecks" and "hicks" into the school system. That concludes our tour of Frasierville for the day... Back in the city, the borough of West Kanopolis is undergoing a dramatic transformation, with the emergence of the technology industry as a major player and a business district that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The old Central Power Station has been replaced by a sleek, modern nuclear power plant: Passing by the plant along the West Side Expressway: Here we can get a general overview of the borough, with the recently constructed World Trade Center in the foreground: Constructed in 2006, the World Trade Center is the corporate hub of the trading operation at the Port of Kanopolis. The three building complex houses thousands of office workers and dozens of companies: The old row of apartment housing along the South Shore has been razed and replaced by a row of shiny new condominium towers: Some shots around the West Kanopolis Commerce District: Meanwhile, the Kanopolis Institute of Technology has opened in the center of the old, original downtown area. KIT boasts enrollment numbers that rival the University of Los Santos, and is the home of the nuclear technology program that is expected to power the entire region one day: Yet, some vestiges of the poor, downtrodden roots of the borough remain, from the mountaintop ghetto on the sites of the old coal mines, to the housing projects in the East End: The Commerce District at night: Not quite sure where to take the region next; should I go for more greenfield development in the south or renovate the older areas?

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Number one, eh? Never thought I'd receive any recognition for a CJ.

While it is a departure from previous editions, how unreal is it? Look at what happened in the last 5 years in the US alone. Giant swaths of new development in areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and South Florida. Loads of people buying up the new houses, because they were there. Now there's ghost towns with empty houses galore because people couldn't afford them. Might even be a bit more realistic? SimHousingBubble, followed by SimGreatRecession. Can't wait to see what happens when the electronics bubble in this game finally bursts.

I find that the 6 AM and 3 PM classes get the worst attendance while 9 AM and 12 PM timeslots are always overcrowded. As for getting more people into the university, only way to do it is to have multiple pedestrian entrances and heavy mass transit access.

This is simply an amazing CJ! I love the slow, organic pace of growth here, and the transformation from podunk country town to bustling suburban city. Is the original bridge still there?

The population is fudged.

As with most things in this game, preventing the problem is much easier than trying to fight it once it's established. Somewhat realistic though; it took decades to clean up New York City, and sending 10000 police officers to Detroit tomorrow would not eliminate the crime instantly.

The reason I blame the Republicans is because they were the ones who went out of their way to shoot down the federal transportation aid that was earmarked for the city. It's not a general political thing, just a specific grudge I have because that delayed the completion of Metrorail by years. I don't live in the inner loop, but I support rail being built there because 1) Connecting every part of suburban Houston by rail will never happen. You'd have to build hundreds of miles of rail to even come close to it. 2) When the commuter rail finally rolls out to the burbs, people who take it into the town will need a way to get around (kind of like the way that Sims in SC will take the heavy rail train to a city then use the streetcars to get to their final destinations). Doesn't matter how many commuter lines you build if people who don't work near the station have to ride the bus or call a cab to get where they're going. One of the things I do like about this game is that it is accurate to the way cities tend to work in the part of the country that I'm most familiar with. Highways dominate, every building has a mandatory parking lot, and mass transit options are pretty much limited to buses and trains. Now if only they could combine that with the ability to break the Sunbelt mold.

The money is there, but not the will to spend it. Particularly in the U.S., suburban taxpayers will balk at sinking money into mass transit, but will happily approve multibillion dollar freeways in the exurbs so that new subdivisions can be built. In Houston, the west side Republicans have relentlessly tried to cripple the Houston MTA because, in the minds of the suburbanites and exurbanites, mass transit is just a charity program for poor inner-city minorities. The pervasiveness of the car culture here is insane, so much so that people who don't or can't drive are treated as invalids, and owning a car (and the detached house to park it in) is considered THE gate to adulthood. As a result, our light rail system is years behind schedule, and anything more advanced than a streetcar ends up staying on the drawing board for eternity.

It's sort of shameful that SC4 has better movement of residents and commuters in the region than the new game, which is supposed to be HEAVILY region-oriented. Each city operates like its own little country, and the only commuters magically grow cars out of the freeway in the middle of nowhere and drive into your city, causing mass congestion so the locals can't do anything. If only you could grow cars in real life like Sims do...

Actually, in the United States, light rail is the big mass-transit trend for cities that previously had little or no mass transit. Cities like Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Denver, Portland, and others are focusing on the construction of light rail (aka tram) networks because heavy rail (like NYC subway, Chicago L, or DC Metro) is prohibitively expensive and monorail is not being built anywhere. Trams were eliminated by the cities initially because of the shift to a focus on freeway construction and automobile mobility in the latter part of the 20th century; they are now making a comeback because of a renewed interest in car alternatives and urban living, not to mention the grinding traffic congestion that car-only systems created. Oh, I didn't know LA was running the trams again. I lived in southern part of CA for 2 years, and still didn't noticed it, Silly me. Makes me wonder, is it one of the unique American trend in public transport to bring back trams, or happening globally? More like America catching up to the rest of the world after having virtually no mass transit in most of the country for half a century. I don't know how all cities are doing it, but in Houston, the long term strategy is for the inner-city light rail to serve as a counterpart to the commuter rail that will be built by the 2020s and 30s. Most of Europe never even got rid of their tram systems. And yes, light rail has returned to Los Angeles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_(Los_Angeles_County)

Actually, in the United States, light rail is the big mass-transit trend for cities that previously had little or no mass transit. Cities like Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Denver, Portland, and others are focusing on the construction of light rail (aka tram) networks because heavy rail (like NYC subway, Chicago L, or DC Metro) is prohibitively expensive and monorail is not being built anywhere. Trams were eliminated by the cities initially because of the shift to a focus on freeway construction and automobile mobility in the latter part of the 20th century; they are now making a comeback because of a renewed interest in car alternatives and urban living, not to mention the grinding traffic congestion that car-only systems created.

I think you can pull it off best if you lay the avenues in such a manner to allow the potential development of back-to-back high density buildings within each U-bend. That gives you enough space for virtually anything.

I've heard it said elsewhere on this forum that the pure residential cities that have been constructed in order to prove that the simulation doesn't work actually do not function as full cities. The only reason they can exist is because the simulator in SimCity 2013 will construct buildings regardless of whether an area is really livable or not, so long as the happiness requirement is fulfilled. In other words, Sims are lured into the city with the promise of a tax-free paradise and leave as soon as they figure out that it's really just a giant slum. They are replaced by other Sims who go through the same cycle.