Spinmaster

One thing I haven't seen mentioned (not that it hasn't... I just haven't seen it if so)... I'd love some way to customize my intersections. Two low-capacity streets intersect... maybe I don't want a 4-way stop. That's fine as a default, but I'd love to be able to change it (perhaps by clicking the center of it to get an "intersection designer"), make a two-way stop, use flashing caution/stop lights, or even put a regular traffic signal there. Maybe even though it's a street intersecting with a road, I actually want a traffic signal there, instead of just stop signs on the streets. Or I want high-speed roads, but they've so little traffic (deep rural area) that stop signs are sufficient even when two of 'em intersect. I haven't seen a lot of neighborhoods where every single 4-way street intersection was a 4-way stop. Some yes, but usually there's a through street, no bigger or faster than the others, just not a stop sign at every single intersection. And a more-than-4-way intersection would be interesting, too. I've seen plenty with 6, 8 ... even 10-way. Yeah, I try to avoid those myself when I'm driving, considering that I've grown rather fond of living, but I've seen them nonetheless. Eh 8 would probably be fine as a limit though. Just some thoughts. Edit: (I didn't notice there was a poll at the start of this thread...) The "everything and more" option isn't available, so I cannot answer the poll. But I hope to see at least the options we had in SC4, plus the suggestions etc.. from fans, and most importantly, some kind of "hooks" to allow custom transportation types. Include all the basic ideas; monorail, bus, rail and variations thereof (subway, el, etc...). And let "the community" create and add custom transportation types. Mostly for new ideas, but also classics... would be kinda cool to put in a San Francisco-style cable car network or pneumatic subway (yes, it did exist... sort of). Extensibility is the key. SC4 is still alive today because of what fans have done. But there are still limits we're all crying over, such as the inability to add a new transportation type (without sacrificing another e.g. high-speed rail vs. monorail) is one of 'em.

I would second N_O_Body's reply if you're going to pay someone to do the actual work to replace the board. And if you're not confident enough to risk $500 on your own skills to do it, then don't... go ahead and get a new desktop. I did exactly this a year ago, replaced the system board in my own zd8000. It's not too difficult, and HP's technical docs are pretty good, but again if it's not something you've done before, don't. The parts are delicate, and it's essential to follow the steps precisely, and carefully, or you'll be back to square-one... only much poorer. A used board cost me $500, on ebay, which is where you'd look to find one. Good luck though, I could only find one at the time (and a quick glance just now... I can't even find the 256mb video model). The other option, if it's even still possible, is a brand-new board from HP .. for about $825. That's just for the board, not the labor cost for someone to replace it for you. Definitely if that's all you can find... just get a new machine instead. Note that a good desktop these days doesn't cost much more than that $500 board (if you can even find one now)... nevermind the $825 for a new one. Might be worth the peace-of-mind alone to indeed just buy a new machine for an extra $100 ~ $200. While yes, it is still very capable of handling today's games... it's still 3 years old. The gap between what it can do and what new machines can do is much larger now - worth it to just upgrade to a new machine, if you have the excuse to do so. (Side-note: the ventilation is an issue, yes... but so too was the 2+ years of dust, hair, and thankfully unidentifiable substances that had blanketed the video chip, in my case... I filled a quart-sized plastic bag with the "gunk" I pulled out of that thing... if anything, I was impressed it hadn't blown up much sooner). As to the processor... the "GHz" alone doesn't mean everything, when it comes to how fast a cpu is. A 3.0GHz P4 with hyperthreading was very very nice, and still gets the job done today... but the latest 2.x GHz (and even less) dual-cores are much faster still (wider, faster bus; more and faster cache, better temperatures... the mere fact of effectively having TWO cpu's, etc...). There's little if anything they can't handle that an "old" zd8000 could.

To borrow my favorite quote from Pulp Fiction... "Well, let's not start ... quite yet."quote> (if you can't fill in the ... then I ain't gonna tell ya ) My answer is the same as MC's ... "I hope so." I am optimistic, they do seem to be very attentive to the various discussions and suggestions, and seem committed to producing a truly top-notch city simulation. But I agree with Mogwai1313, the graphics are the least of my concerns. Honestly, SCS' graphics don't bother me at all, it's the complete lack of zoning, the pathetic lack of transportation options, and 100+ other things that keep me from even being curious about it. And City Life didn't exactly prove MC can make a city simulation as good as or better than SC4. Their devotion is admirable, and as I said I am certainly optimistic about the results; if the game is even half as good as their apparent devotion to the fans (something EA seriously dropped the ball on), I think it'll blow SC:S away. Will I buy it? Probably. But that's the optimism talking. We'll see what reality brings, in due time. There is no "yes" or "no" answer for me until it's on the shelves.

Originally posted by: The_Dalai_Llama By the way, Simtropolis and its subsidiaries don't condone placing small rocks in packages of SimCity Societies and returning them to Wal-Mart or any retail store.quote> If I had bought it, I wouldn't do that... it would be a waste of small rocks, which I find more useful and interesting than SC:S anyway.

I wouldn't actually go so far as to say "this proves SCS sucks" (though I wouldn't disagree with that sentiment either), but rather that EA - and Maxis - got it right with SimCity 4. Look at the other titles in that list. Most are quite new, but a few others are also long-lasting success stories. This is what I hope EA is seeing, that despite their belief that SC4 was too hard, people loved it, and still do... and they tell their friends, who also love it. With SCS they took a big step in the wrong direction, in my opinion. There were so many ways to make the next SC a true sequel - as in Sim City 4 +++++++++ - and making it more accessible to new players, not by taking away detailed management but by simply adding options and helpers. Don't want to lay water pipes? Fine... flip an option, and a small surcharge is added to the city's water budget based on # of buildings, and assuming they're just all watered. Not sure where to put your next el rail line? Ask your transportation advisor - and let him show you where you need the stations. Things like that, added to the game to help players who don't want to manage every minute detail... or who just aren't good at those parts. Me, I suck at keeping my schools and hospitals at "just right" capacity; most of the time I'm either way over-budgeted or I have strikes. I'd love an option to have my education advisor to actually DO something, herself, like automagically tweak the school budgets every month, instead of just yelling at me all the time. Is that what I'm paying her for? Sheesh, my wife will happily do that for free!! The point is, SC4 has so much to love in spite of (or, for me, because of) its complexity, and its longevity proves it. But while I agree it's tough to "get into" from a new-player's perspective, they could've solved that issue by adding features, instead of making a game that doesn't even resemble its predecessors. SC4 still is more successful than its successor. I hate to say "I told you so" ... but EA, I (and many others) told you so. Good luck competing with CU. I don't mean that sarcastically, I would love to have TWO top-notch city building games to choose from, but SCS ain't one of 'em. Will EA try to compete with the next SC sequel? Or will EA continue with the deaf-monkey act, and pretend they haven't heard all the anti-SCS banter... and basically leave this niche open for MC to dominate? We'll see.

I should think a building's value - which could be influenced by age, occupancy, even environmental factors - could be the main factor in a building's "replacement." A single-family cottage is much easier and cheaper to replace than a $50 million skyscraper. Only when demand is sufficiently high such that, demolishing an old building and replacing it is actually more cost-effective than renovating it, should the building be "replaced." This to me would be much closer to how the real world works - except when good ol' "eminent domain" is swinging the wrecking ball, of course. I could see a slider or other control to perhaps weight that some though, if for some reason you actually want them to change more frequently.

Isn't someone at SC4D working on a utility to help visually sort plugins in the menus? Or was I hallucinating (which, I'll admit, is a possibility)?

Originally posted by: Androv To 'see' something you need to have the files on your computer so it can display them. So I don't see how that would get around the problem.quote> Actually, no... you don't have to have the files. Only the images need to be transmitted (and mouse/keyboard commands the other way). "Only" is the arguable word though, I'll grant that. But internet video streaming and Citrix are but two good examples of how it's quite possible to see images from a remote computer without having its file on the local machine. For CU/SC4/whatever it would be a matter of how much data needs to be transmitted and how fast the game can assemble and transmit it. That may make it impractical, but certainly not impossible.

The one thing that annoyed me most about regional play with SC4 was a lack of a regional budget. My little farming village doesn't need even $100,000. My screaming metropolis with its own massive airport needs a lot more than $500,000. Yeah there are ways to work around this (neighbor deals, money "cheats", various bank mods) but I'd much prefer to just have a budget for the entire region. The next thing was moving between neighbors. Would've been nice to go to the edge of a "city tile" and actually see the neighbor, or some representation thereof, and perhaps even have an option to jump to it immediately (well after a save/load cycle I suppose). I'll acknowledge the idea of simply scrolling an entire region in 3D would be impractical, requiring either low detail or limits to city sizes... either of which would be wholly unacceptable of course (could this also be a factor in SC:S' apparent limits, since it appears you'll be able to in fact scroll an entire map? hmmm). But a way to see and quickly jump from one "district" to another would've been great. Maybe the "some representation" could even just be simple flat 2D images of the surrounding neighbors, similar to the region view in SC4 - just a picture of the neighbor (even if empty, just the terrain), instead of the empty void we have now in SC4. Click on that "neighbor image" and effectively swap which piece of the city you're actually working with. (highlighting added to 2nd paragraph... and thought finished in 1st paragraph... don't ya just hate being interrupted when you're goofing off at work?)

Rather than downloading someone else's city, imagine having network access to it (at the mayor's invitation, of course). You don't download someone else's city, you just visit it, explore it, possibly interact with it... maybe even build in it, depending on what the mayor allows certain visitors to do. This could be a great way to share cities. You don't need to have that custom skyscraper, you just need to be able to see it - only its image need be transmitted. Indeed there would have to be configurable compromise between how much detail is streamed vs. how much bandwidth you have, but that could be configurable by the visitor. Are you willing to real slow to see better detail, or do you just want to move around it reasonably quick, sacrificing some details to do so? You're the visitor, you decide (though the mayor would have to have some "visitor-throttling" ability based on his/her own network connection, of course). I can envision a mayor "inviting" people to visit his/her city, perhaps granting permissions to some of them to add/change/demolish, and others just "look." Imagine a living CJ... you don't just look at pretty pictures of someone else's city... you go there. This would certainly add a new dimension to the game... to the genre, I think. Are there any other simulation games that do this? Let you "visit" someone else's creation without actually downloading a saved game file? Well.. I'd love to see it done in CU. Dunno if it's possible but sure would be cool, I think.

If the question is "can my system handle perfect pathfinding" the answer is "probably yes." Is it the best to use? That's totally subjective. Many find "better" to be "better enough" while others insist on perfection and are willing to sacrifice some performance for it. I'm the latter, so I can't actually say if better is good enough or not. In fact, I've been considering stepping back to "better" (I use perfect, now). I am curious how much of a performance vs. accuracy difference there is. And even with "perfect" I've caught plenty of sims doing bizarre things to get to work... so it ain't really "perfect." As for the other options re: capacity, speed, and commute time... many have asked, none have gotten a straight answer, and nobody will - it's very subjective. It really depends what you want. As-is, most people would agree there are some seriously unrealistic scaling issues in the game. Too many residents in a little tiny house. An hour to drive across a 2km-wide city. A little tiny bus stop as wide as a house. Some folks are content to just deal with these things as part of the game, others prefer things more realistic - which by no means eliminates challenges, just makes new ones. Some don't even want the challenges from dealing with traffic at all. Do you want the challenge of dealing with those issues? Do you want things more realistic? Or do you want traffic issues to just go away? Others can tell you what settings they use and why, but only you can decide in the end what's best for you and your style of playing the game. Personally, I use 2x capacity; since I can't cut the number of people in a house, at least I can give them more room on the roads. And 10x speeds; 6 minutes to travel 2km is at least a little closer to reality, for me. I don't use a commute-limit increase, but I'm sure some could argue for or against it as well. But... that's me.

Take care not to fall into the same trap I've found myself in countless times (as well as many many other members here). "A prosperous city has a lot of rich people." Survey says: xxx A lot of rich businesses, yes. People, no. High-wealth commercial offices and services, and high tech industry... they're beautiful, they pollute minimally, and they pay a killing in taxes, even with a low tax rate - which is how your city becomes "prosperous." And yes, those businesses do employ the most rich people, who have beautiful houses and also pay a lot in taxes. But even the richest commercial offices are only 15% occupied by rich sims (and high tech, 10%). The rest are mostly mid-wealth sims, with a healthy dose of low-wealth sims. Moral: too many rich sims = too many unemployed rich sims, and not very many rich businesses. With NAM pushed to the extreme options, I suppose one could "forget" about traffic. That's just a matter of taste though. Some like to deal with the realism of traffic problems, some don't. NAM adds a lot of needed flexibility, from no help at all to radical increases in speed, capacity, and commute limits. How far to push it is left up to the individual user. Personally, I use 2x capacity and 10x speed (no commute limit increase), because 18 people in a tiny single-family cottage (6 ~ 9 of whom are commuters - overwhelming my streets et al), and 90 minutes to drive across a 2km x 2km (medium) city tile (I can walk that far in less time)... I felt those needed fixin'.

Actually even in those far-off pics, while I can't make out stop signs and traffic lights... I do see what appear to be crosswalks... on a highway. (I'll just take it as coincidence this thread caught the attention of someone named "masochist" ... )

It's difficult to explain.quote>Well thank you for clearing that up! i think with NAM it will help me forget about traffic and worry more on development, don't you agree?quote> 50% agree. You still have to carefully plan and build your traffic networks. NAM does nothing for a poorly-planned network. What it does do though is make your sims choose their routes according to best time, as in actually go somewhat out-of-the-way to take a faster road, or take the train, etc... Kinda like most sane people do in the real world. Without NAM they take the shortest distance - which often means they'll all bee-line it through the severely clogged neighborhood streets, even though there's a highway just two blocks away. NAM's pathfinding changes this to shortest time - which means what makes sense to you will (for the most part) make sense to your sims; they'll go out of the way to some extent to take the faster routes you've laid out for them, even using multiple forms of mass transit efficiently. Even if you choose not to use a capacity/speed/commute limit boost, which are optional, the pathfinding alone makes NAM an essential. Personally I regard it as an almost-official patch! Playing without it is just too frustrating. I have noticed the traffic noise issue also (I do use 2x capacity and 10x speed). I'd guess that's due to total volume. At a given point-in-time there may only be 50 cars on the street, but throughout the day those boosts probably mean increased total volume on that street. If it bothers my sims enough to bother me, I'll adjust something, an upgraded road, some transit stops, cut off through-traffic (e.g. turn a street into a dead-end, so the only traffic on it are the folks who live there), etc... Just a thought. It's still worth paying attention to traffic noise though, even though it doesn't seem to tick them off too much. Anyway yes, NAM will help you, not by letting you "forget about traffic" though, but because if you plan your transit network properly, your sims will use it properly - that's what NAM does (nevermind that it also adds a plethora of detailed road pieces, diagonal streets, turning lanes, roundabouts, GLR, bridges, .... )

If you really don't want to obliterate but you also don't want to "cheat" (and as far as I know, there are NO cheats that will get rid of radiation for you anyway)... put another power plant there. And your landfill. And any other ploppable "undesirable necessities." Mind you, the radiation will forever keep your "environment" bar solid red in that city (ok, not "forever" ... but pretty darn close), but you can keep the city AND still make at least some use of the otherwise useless land. Your sims won't build squat there, not even dirty industry will tolerate radiation (and I know of no mod that will change their minds about that), but that doesn't mean YOU can't build some useful things there. Save money and put the big-and-cheap coal and oil-burning plants there. Too much air pollution? So what - it's all radiation there now anyway. You ain't gonna make it any worse! The only way to get rid of radiation in less than a few thousand years is indeed to obliterate the city. You just have to decide whether or not you want to wipe out the whole city and start over, or make the best of it and live with the radiation. (And obliterating the city will eliminate the radiation, despite the earlier post - just not the crater left behind when your plant exploded - but you can terraform that).

Also, be extra-careful not to rush dezoning of the landfills as they do empty. Creating and/or leaving behind irregular-shaped landfills (e.g. with sections less than 2x2 - the minimum size for a landfill zone) triggers a well-known bug such that the garbage on them will never decompose. As a general rule, if you cannot dezone at least 2x2 and leave behind discernable 2x2 portions (until that's all that remains, of course), then wait until you can before you dezone any of it.

There aren't enough people of the targeted age ranges in the area. Each type of school is for a particular age bracket. I don't remember the specific numbers, but generally speaking an elementary school, for example, will sit empty if most of the people within its radius are too old for it. In fact, you'll see this cycle... the youngins grow old and leave school. Eventually they die. New youngins come in and fill up your school again. 'Round and 'round we go. You might also want to download (and possibly tweak) some schools from STEX for specific use in rural or suburban areas. I do this all the time now. The in-game schools (and clinics, hospitals, firehouses... darn near everything) are fine for dense urban areas, but their radii are utterly ridiculous for anything less than a condo farm, in my opinion. I'm sure plenty of folks here can top this, but I've lived as far as 20 miles from a school "in my day" when I was going to school... the buses seemed to find me just fine. But even the "large" in-game elementary school barely breaks a 1km radius!! So I use the in-game ones for a dense city, but otherwise I have separate schools for rural and suburban areas. The "rural" ones can cover an entire large tile full of farms or empty land and low-density houses, while the suburban ones cover an entire medium tile full of mostly low-density housing plus a few scattered apartments. I tweaked the radii myself using SC4Tool or the iLive Reader tool. Not a slap to any of the creators (major thanks to them... tweak, I can... create, I cannot), just a recognition that the topic of "how far should it cover" is very subjective, and I had my own idea. I also upped the related busing/ambulance costs, and I'm sure to not put the "rural" school in a suburban area etc... I'm striving for balance, not trying to save $$$ by cheating. If a rural area grows into a more dense suburb, then I replace the school with the suburban one, and add more. Seems realistic to me, as the city grows, so too should my school system, no?

I'm not a modder by any stretch, but I have tweaked a few lots for my own purposes from time to time. Found it necessary once I discovered many old bus stops consuming more electricity than most houses and offering 100 jobs in a 1x1 bus stop. And occasional other "nice things" that had unbalanced stats (usually not the creators' faults, I understand... nonetheless I'm left with the choice to either fix or discard them). Anyway, I've been looking for some way to finely control/influence where the rich build. Using taxes to keep them only in certain tiles... isn't granular enough. Denying water also prevents lower-wealth stage 4 and up; also no good. I suppose I could put other nasty NIMBY things, but... I'm trying at the same time to not to be a bastard to the less fortunate in my city. Then yesterday, it struck me, as I was driving through a particularly wealthy neighborhood, and I noticed the conspicuous lack of bus stops... "duh, rich people don't ride buses." Even in the rare case they do use mass transit... buses are pretty much out of the question, usually. So I'm thinking I want to use them to granularly control where in a city I want my rich people. I usually sprinkle my cities with bus stops anyway. And the people use them, some to get to work, others to get to other mass transit networks. Unfortunately the rich of course also build near them... but never use them. So... if I could tweak my bus stops to deliberately fend them off, then I can simply not put any bus stops where I want the rich neighborhoods to be. But I'm not sure which exemplar to fiddle with. My guess is, I must add the "Desirability Effect Values" exemplar. "Radius in cells, Max effect, min effect for each developer." But I'm not sure how really to add the values. How to use the tool, yes, but how many, or which ones I want to be non-zero to achieve my desired (or undesired, I suppose) effect. I don't want a bus stop that already does this, as I want to be able to use and tweak my own now and in the future (though if there IS one on STEX already... I'd love to see it as a reference, I suppose). Any help, please oh please? Or is this even possible in the first place?

Well in fairness, even in real-life with rural highways, having any buildings with direct access is rare, and with good reason. High-speed traffic and pedestrians are generally a bad mix. However, it is very common to either: 1) have access roads/streets running from or even parallel to it, where stores, apartments, etc. are 2) slow the rural highway down to "surface street" speeds when it's passing through a dense area with business etc directly accessing it, or intersecting with another rural highway, e.g. normally it's 65mph but slows down to 30 ~ 40 while passing through the center of some don't-blink town. You can achieve the same effect by simply transitioning it to an avenue for those stretches. Really the only thing presenting a dilemma is what to do about bridges. No bridges with the RHW so... either a slower avenue bridge or a too-grand-to-be-rural "regular" highway bridge. I suppose the plain, flat bridge suffices though, but it does seem odd to go from a 4-lane highway to a 6-lane bridge and back again. Maybe that would be a nice new bridge for NAM? One lumped in with the ground highway bridges, but with 4-lane textures specifically for the RHW (which would then look silly with a regular ground highway, but at least we'd have a true "RHW" bridge... sort of). But zoning along a RHW ... either use access roads and zone along those, or slow it down to an avenue and zone along that. A true stretch of rural highway rarely has stuff zoned right up to it with direct access.

What does it look like in your mayor rating data view? That's (usually) handy for finding what patches are driving your *average* rating down, but it's often overlooked. All of the rewards with a mayor rating requirement are based on the average mayor rating, but in fact the mayor rating varies all over the city. Check the data view to see where it's good or bad. If it's just blanketed bad over the whole city, that's likely a bug. Either a bad download or your game, itself, is corrupted. That, or you truly are a horrible, horrible mayor.

The first thing a sim learns in SC4 is that picking tomatoes for a living sucks (in the game, anyway). Any education at all is enough to forbid any new farm development. Either take it away from some parts of the current city, or start a neighbor city with no education. When enough morons move into it, you should get enough demand in that city, and the ones around it, to grow farms. Watch other amenities too, though. Mid- and high-wealth will move in instead, if you provide water, parks, police, etc... and they won't work on farms, educated or not (a small % of uneducated mid's will, but not much). Health and fire coverage are usually all I give my "farm folk" and even those, they don't really need.

One thing about IHT vs high-density though... there are no IHT buildings that require high-density zoning. Not in-game anyway, but I don't recall seeing any custom ones that require high-density, either. So if your goal is IHT, and you're not planning to step the zones through high-density dirty and manufacturing (which do include some high-density buildings), you can save a chunk of money by just zoning medium-density.

Originally posted by: webz888 Try connecting the road next to the landfill to the rest of the roads in your city. The garbage trucks have to pick up garbage from somewhere, right?quote> I'm thinking high chance this is the problem, and often, actually. Some time ago (unfortunately long enough that I don't have a picture, the city is since gone) ... I had a little tiny "corner" of a small city, with nothing more than a highway passing through. No exits. No lots. No other roads. Just trees and llamas, and one tiny stretch of highway bending through it. Just south of the highway was a small patch of empty land. Same to the north. Neither was enough to develop much, not even enough space for a useful highway exit, but just enough to put a modest landfill and neighboring road-connection, so my neighbor city could get to whatever I put in those patches. The landfill was perfectly happy. No "no-car zots" at all. And the neighbor city was happily sending its refuse to it. Then I decided to put another neighbor road connection, this time on the north side of the highway, and zone just a couple tiny factories there. They grew. And then my landfill's no-car-zot appeared. It seemed, it wasn't that the landfill, itself, was lacking road access - that hadn't changed. But there was now something else in the city producing garbage that had no direct connection to it. The landfill's road simply ran off the tile to the neighboring city, no roads directly between it and the new industrial nook, which essentially did the same thing on its side of the highway. "For it to work" the garbage trucks would've had to exit the city and go through the neighbor connections (both of them) to haul garbage from the industrial buildings to the landfill... it seems, they don't want to do that (not out-and-back to the same city). Just to be sure ... I bulldozed part of the highway and put a road from one side to the other (didn't really have enough space for an overpass). Voila... no more zot. So... that zot can appear, not only due to a disconnected landfill, but if also any garbage-producing lot in your city cannot be directly reached by a garbage truck via roads to/from the landfill. In even a modest, established city it may be near impossible to figure out from where a garbage truck cannot get to/from the landfill. There's no route-query tool for garbage trucks, unfortunately. So it's making sense to me now why this seems to be such a mystery when it happens. Now that I'm thinking of it though, probably if you just let it run for a while, that area should accumulate a lot of excess garbage - which will become evident on the map eventually.

Crucial: more than one type of surface road; highway; rail. Without, I wouldn't even waste my time with it. I'm speaking solely for myself here, I just wouldn't even give it a look without rails or highways, or with only one type of "street" ... and no, asphalt vs. brick vs. candy-cane light poles isn't what I mean. I really wish they'd come clean about it if they're doing these items. I speak only for myself as to whether or not I'd "waste my time" but I'm pretty sure a LOT of folks are eagerly curious at least, about whether or not there will BE rails and/or highways. Can live without ... for now.. but would be nice: airport, elevated <something> (rail/monorail/turbo teacups/whatever), seaport/ferry/water taxi. Same here, would be nice if they'd at least say "yes" or "maybe not at first but available" or "the fans can make these themselves if they want" or... something. By being silent about the transportation options, I'm forced to believe there simply won't be many. Am I wrong? Good - then PLEASE say some things on this subject, TM!!!! Moot: "Oooooo... what are my people building there where I zoned and placed a new recipe of amenities? Ahhhh.... nice!" (aka zoning, and for better or worse letting my people decide what kind of residential, commercial, or industrial building belongs where based on what I've given them). Eh well. This is still the missing part that has me believing "not until it's in the bargain bin, for me" regardless of the above.