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Classic!

Yeah, in the long term -- the all-R city is not sustainable because w/o more or less full employment R buildings will eventually run out of money (due to rent payments). That said, given the number of jobs that services provide, it's quite possible to have an all R-city + services that does perfectly well for a good year or more. There's the occasional building that needs to be bulldozed, but that's about it. That said, you're absolutely right -- the way the game works now is -- if you zone it, they will come. Which is a serious departure from all previous titles in the franchise and really takes away a lot of the challenge and pleasure.

That was sort of my point, no? Costs vary greatly, developers need to get paid, but the average is much, much lower than was suggested earlier in the thread. Not to mention that the average that’s talked about in the gaming press is usually the average for multi-platform titles. My point really is this – let’s not encourage the industry in its absurd Hollywood-wannabe strategy by buying into the idea that in order to keep making good games they need to continue increasing budgets and team sizes to a point where anything that sells under 1 mil units (at $69/copy to boot) is considered a failure, which is pretty close to where we’re at right now. Go big or go bust should not be the only way of doing business and making money.

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/ also: Minimum System Requirements Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better Operating System: Windows XP/Vista/7 RAM: 2GB RAM Hard Drive: 10GB HD Space Graphics Card: NVIDIA 7800 or ATI Radeon HD 2x00 or Intel Series 4 integrated graphics or better* Broadband Internet: Minimum 256 kbps download, 64 kbps upload *Minimum of 256MB of on-board RAM and Shader 3.0 or better support. Recommended System Requirements Processor: Intel Core i5 or faster Operating System: Windows 7 RAM: 4GB RAM Graphics Card: NVIDIA GTX 275 or ATI 5850 or better

Obviously, the “community” is not going to come together and make a AAA title. That said, let’s not get hysterical about hundreds of millions of dollars. Your average AAA title probably costs $30-40 mil to develop and market (and that’s being generous). Of course, there's little transparency in the industry, so we don't know as much as we probably should, but ME3 was reported to cost, what -- $40mil? It's a pretty rare case for non-MMO development costs to hit the $100 mil mark (GTAIV, HALO4, a few other landmark titles). Not to mention there isn’t really even a case to be made that mo money always gets you mo money or even mo quality. The original GoW cost $10mil and we know how well that franchise is doing. Meanwhile, APB wasted $100 mil on I don’t know what. I don’t even want to talk about 38 Studios and what they did with their millions.

Easiest thing to do is to unzone all C before plopping tourist attractions. Or use parks/roads to limit plot size. Then you can selectively re-zone to grow hotels where you want them. If you already had all your C turn into hotels, bulldoze a few times until you see regular, non-hotel C being built, unzone right away so it doesn't turn into a hotel.

I haven’t noticed that in my testing. AFAIK, all jobs pay the same. Also, dumbed down certainly ain’t no double negative Not to mention that there are plenty of “good” double negatives in English so there's really no need to cringe. In general, natural languages don’t always operate according to the rules of formal logic.

The protesters are stupid. I really don't know how else to say it. I wish the zombies would just get them all. As far as #1: I'm sure it's supposed to indicate something or other -- I don't know what. That said, land value (i.e. parks) has no effect on rent.

With your population figures and the map more or less filled in, *and* the number of commuters you’re getting from the arcology, *and* your tram lines, the out of money thing is just going to happen – nothing you can do to eliminate it. I posted my AFAIK explanation for the out of money mechanic about a week ago – Well, there is a kind of in-between state where the building is open but is complaining about insufficient workers – I never bothered to test, but there might be a negative happiness modifier tick for that. As far as buildings having different efficiencies based on staffing – I’ve not noticed that. There’s a max number of workers a building can employ (that’s what gets tallied up in F2), and there’s a minimum number of workers the building needs to operate – that number is a small fraction of the theoretical F2 total. There’s a third number – that’s the number of workers the building holds on to during shift changes, and that’s usually in the single digits. Profit for I is generated based on freight deliveries, C profit is generated when shopper agents transport their $1 from R to C. I don’t believe there’s currently a way to encourage shops to stock more goods – those are refilled at beginning of shift independently of anything you do. And there’s no way to encourage shops to pay workers more. The out of money problem is just the agent model cracking up under stress – no persistence + bad pathfinding.

Yeah, it goes away, but it takes a loooooooooooong time, apparently: Developer response re: radiation

Here’s how freight currently works in this game: I buildings want to be able to ship freight every hour – that’s how they make profit, and profit is what makes them happy, allows them to go up in density, and provides you with I tax dollars. Each I building has one truck that goes out and looks for a place to drop off its freight. Freight can be dropped off at depots, ports, C buildings, industrial specialization buildings, some landmarks, some services (these are the sinks). If the truck doesn’t drop off its freight and make it back with the benjamins within the hour, the factory will wait an extra hour before sending the truck out again. If this happens frequently, the factory will complain of no places to ship freight. You can see this process by hitting F12, which pulls up the industrial overlay map. You say you have a depot with a freight module – so you should be all set (emphasis on should, ‘cause the game works in mysterious ways). If everything is working as intended, you’ll see a truck (marked yellow on the overlay) exit the factory, drop the freight at the depot, and return back (this time marked in cyan) to the factory. If things are not working as intended, you might see the delivery truck get stuck in traffic, take a longer route, head to a different sink (like your commercial zone), etc. Sometimes buildings bug out and never send out their trucks. Sometimes the building will complain of no places to ship freight simply because it’s new or has just gone up in density or tech level (which resets all building stats).

I’m not going to argue about rage-quitting. The repeated talk about entitlement – I dunno – still rubs me the wrong way, but I take your point about comradery in figuring out workarounds. vs. the current I want my refund attitude. That said, I think the current attitude is by and large a consequence of the fact that the AAA gaming industry is all grown up and corporate and gamers know that. I’m sure you’re aware that no such vitriol exists vis-à-vis indie developers or those smaller publishers still catering to a select demographic and not chasing after the big bucks. *That* said, there is definitely something wrong with the world when people start contacting the FTC when they don’t like how a game ends (Mass Effect). But – back to the game being broken Look, any game requires a set of rules around which the player can base his interactions. An explicit action has to lead to a foreseeable result. Simulation games have an additional requirement, namely that they create the illusion of being a suitable proxy for the thing they’re simulating. A city sim is predicated on the ability of the player to achieve results by applying common-sense ideas about how a real city works. I’m not talking about realism, I’m talking about logic and am more than willing to accept game logic in places where a direct parallel with the real world is impractical, computationally expensive, or plain not fun. Whether what I described in the two paragraphs above is achieved via the use of an agent model or a statistical model is irrelevant. All the previous titles in the franchise did a passably good job of simulating aggregate behavior by employing a statistical model. Were previous titles perfect? Of course not, but they were fundamentally sound. SC5 is not and it is because the agent system was so badly implemented (and I do think lack persistence is part of the problem, but that's beside the point). Nearly all of the problems people are having with the game (server issues aside) are either the consequence of the agent model (with it's very limited persistence) cracking up under stress, destroying the illusion of a working city, or fucking with our mental model of cause and effect. I’ll give you one example. I spent several posts in another thread earlier today trying to convince people that nuclear plant safety has nothing to do with education level. No one was buying it. Why? Well, because the plant description says the plant requires educated workers. And there’s even a ticker warning you get right before a meltdown that tells you that you’re short of skilled workers. And it sure makes sense that a nuclear power plant would require an educated work force. Problem is, there is no such thing as an educated work force. Worker agents do not have education. Buildings have education. Kid agents can transport education from one sink to another. Workers can only transport money. What the nuclear plant *actually* needs is an agent (similar to the water or the electricity agent, though it is represented differently) that is produced by the college, the university and the vu tower. And I have a few dozen similar examples. Anyway....

OK, so the thread moved on and I feel like I’m going off on a tangent, but: I just want to re-iterate one more time that the OP’s info concerning education and plant safety is wrong (unless I misunderstood the OP). And again, I totally am on board with the OP’s enthusiasm for the game, but education level has nothing to do with plant safety. Education level is correlated with crime, health, garbage, etc. Plant safety has to do with the tech/knowledge network (pink lines that you see when you switch to the industry tech data layer). A college, a uni or a vu tower is all you need to operate a nuclear plant safely. When using a college or a uni, student attendance is something to worry about since it determines the strength of the tech network; when using the vu tower, there’s really nothing to worry about because the vu tower is phenomenally unbalanced in terms of cost/benefit. The stuff about sewage plants and the water table is correct. The stuff about nuclear power plants affecting the water table underneath them (other than indirectly, because of high water consumption), I have not experienced personally and cannot verify. And just in case there’s any confusion – water also has nothing to do with nuclear plant safety. In fact, a nuclear power plant doesn’t even need water to operate. Here’s a screenshot to demonstrate what I’m talking about. The water tower is only here to insure the vu tower doesn’t shut down.

There are two ways -- one is to dezone your C before you plop any gambling/tourism. If you haven't managed to dezone before, you can bulldoze your hotels to see if any other C grows in their place, as soon as you see the C you want, dezone. The other way is to limit the size of the plots (hotels require larger plots than a lot of regular C), which you can do any number of ways, including with the use of parks.

I don't know if I would recommend it -- I only did it as a kind of fu to Maxis/EA -- it's an all R region and I didn't really make it for playing, just as an experiment. If you're thinking of making an R-only city so that you have people commuting to other cities for jobs and shopping -- that's not something that really works as intended just yet. Only a portion of the R population will be willing to commute and at higher pop numbers, commuter traffic will kill you. But yeah, as an experiment...