i'll make a post here. just read this long-running thread and it looks like pretty much all the shortcomings are covered, so my post will be a general response to many of the critiques i read.
- commute time: certainly the calculations are not realistic, but one of the most rewarding things is to see a building go gray on you; you see the commute is too long; you view their routes; you add some bus stop near the building and their target locations, or you add another subway line to avoid congestion, or make a road an avenue, etc; then you see the building go bright again and see your commute-time graph spike downward after resolving lots of these, and seeing the population shoot up because of it
- desirability: sometimes, just to watch the jobs graph spike upwards, i'll have an IT city with tons of demand for jobs build up, but with desirability low so nobody takes the jobs; so then i'll add in lots of parks, reduce garbage, etc, then click cheetah speed, watch the entire area 'go green' with increased desirability and reap the results - all without zoning another Industrial square
so for many of the problems people have identified there are ways to resolve them. heck, that's even part of the fun of the game. for example, my current region has just over 1 million Sims, with the largest city being a mid-sized tile with 400K+ residents. i've got some serious traffic issues between that and my neighboring CO and Ix cities, in spite of highways, multiple subway and avenue and monorail connections going out. and my commute time has been 160+ for a while now. the way i see this is a challenge - how can i best spend my budget surplus to decrease the traffic congestion, and hence lower my commute times, but keep the population up?
but so i keep with the thread's topic and complain about something...i hate crashes and diagonal-road support, too
dlgrasse
