Shlarin

Environmental advisor.. she never quits complaining about my lack of trees.. then again, I build my cities to max density

Anyone try building a city and getting their jail to fill up to over 800 inmates? It's not as easy as it sounds.. if you build lots of police stations, criminals will get caught but very few will be dumb enough to commit crimes. Build too few police stations and criminals don't get caught.. Just for fun, anyone find a way so that the jails get filled up with a ton of prisoners?

Make a high tech industrial city nearby.. hopefully, you'll be offered the hydrogen plant in that city which is the most powerful plant. Build a bunch of them and sell power to the industrial city.

If the US defaults on its debt, the states will be split up into the following "spheres of influence": West Coast: Japan and China Northern States: Canada Southern States: Mexico East Coast: European Union

Yeah, running subway tubes side by side seems to work well in Simulator Z.. then again, they offer much higher capacity tubes so you'd need quite a few skyscrapers before you'll see your tubes turning red under the "Ultra" option..

Weird.. for some reason, most of the poor people in my cities are old.. this is especially true when i build a new city with R $$ and R $$$ taxes set to 20% and no jobs available except by commuting to the neighboring city.

Although I'm quite obsessive about keeping my cities in a grid, I found that refusing to greatly upgrade the transit connections in your corners helps. Having subways with up to 10 tubes back to back is not uncommon in my cities but I tend to go easy on the "multi-tubing" of subways when near corners even when these connections are all red.

If you're new to the game, I'd suggest only building what's in high demand on your indicator. That way, it gets developed right away even if desirability isn't too great..

I'll only list the features I really need since extra "features" will end up eating away at my tax dollars: - 24 hour subway, light rail, or rapid transit system. - All locations within the city proper are 1km or less from the nearest rapid transit stop and 50m or less from the nearest bus or light rail stop. - Rail link to a nearby airport with a 30 minute or less transit time from the city center. - Maximum wait time of 5 minutes for all public transit during business hours, 10 minutes off hours or weekends, and 20 minutes in the middle of the night. - Intercity train service to all nearby cities on a 30 minute interval during waking hours. - Citywide WiFi service (like Google Wifi in Mountain View, CA) - Several colleges or universities - A multi-story Main Library - Sufficient park-and-ride lots in the outskirts or suburbs - No suburban sprawl or oversized single-floored malls

The amenities of this 16-story apartment are quite nice, considering its $300/mo pricetag. I've seen countless tall R $ buildings pop up in my cities but really wonder how the conditions are inside.. Anyone else got examples like these? Maybe from outside the US as well..

Officially, the smallest tile (64x64) is 1 km² but realistically, considering the sizes of the buildings as a reference, it's more like 1 mile² at least. Even then, I can easily squeeze 300,000 to 400,000 sims in a 64x64 tile.. I don't know of any neighborhoods in the world that comes anywhere near a *fraction* of a population density of 300,000 people per square mile.

There's a site that lists all the standard Maxis growable buildings and their corresponding stage (google it; i can't remember the link.)

I'm not sure if High customers even helps at all. I've had no problems developing massive downtowns of skyscrapers or large shopping districts while customers stays "Low", mainly due to my extensive public transportation system. Sims will need to work, and they'll need to shop. If you got a city of 100,000 with only 1 shopping district in town and no neighbors, they'll HAVE to go there to buy food, clothing, etc. even if it's not by car or foot; never mind the "low" customers rating..

Move a MySim into one of the few medium wealth buildings and see what he says..

Originally posted by: tungston Originally posted by: Shlarin Is it possible to make a growable commercial, industrial, or residential building with a subway stop in the basement? Or would this be limited to civic buildings only?quote> I am not sure why you would want growable lots with subway stations popping up all over the city.quote> I've seen some downtown malls with such a feature (like the one at the Powell BART station in San Francisco.) It probably only makes sense to put them in Stage 7 or 8 skyscrapers or the 6x6 malls..

Is it possible to make a growable commercial, industrial, or residential building with a subway stop in the basement? Or would this be limited to civic buildings only?

I second building more high tech.. they employ a lot of R $$ sims but very few R $$$ or R $.. that'll at least help balance your medium wealth residential population.

Tokyo, Japan Berkeley, CA (USA) Amsterdam, Netherlands Shanghai, China Munich, Germany

1) First, build more neighboring cities. 2) Set taxes on R $$$ to 20% in those cities. 3) Try to build whatever is in high demand in your main city in those cities (including dirty industry) 4) Return to your main city and lower taxes on everyone. 5) Bulldoze all instances of McCormick Building (the small fat red 4x4 apartment). It doesn't house many people and can't be upgraded. 6) Bulldoze all of the smaller R $$$ buildings. Use a mod or look at a building listing website to check their stages. If the building is R $$$ and isn't stage 7 or 8 (basically a skyscraper) then bulldoze it! Assuming you have high desirability, this will cause a bunch of R $$$ skyscrapers to develop in your main city. Once demand for R $$$ plunges, many of these buildings will dilapidate and start housing ridiculous numbers of R $$ and R $ residents and your population will skyrocket.

I've been trying to prevent McCormick building from being built in my cities since it can't be upgraded and holds very few people for a maximum stage residential building (not to mention it's very ugly.) Anyone know if the mechanics of the game do not allow the functionality of "banning" a certain building or that it's possible but no mods for it has been made yet? For right now, all u can do is just bulldoze a building on your "no-no" list when it pops up.

Try to get CS $$$ buildings to develop.. they only employ 8% R $$$'s but 63% R $'s. And generally, they pay more taxes per employee than a CO $$$ building. It seems almost all of my highly profitable cities contain significant CS, particularly CS $$$

Get NAM, select the Simulator Z park-and-ride option but don't build any parking garages

Also, the graph view of crime vs the data view of crime on the map doesn't seem to add up sometimes, especially if you have a very high population density. In one of my cities with about 1,000,000 residential and 3,000,000 commercial (mostly skyscrapers), crime is very rampant on the "data view" but hovers around 30-40 on the graph.. the police advisor keeps complaining about crime but the Mysims always applaud about how safe their neighborhoods are.. go figure

I have a region that doesn't have a single square of medium or low density zoning.. I zoned high density for residential and commercial right from the start (but started industry at medium which later I upgraded to high.) I ran out of money pretty quickly in the beginning of my first city but at around a population of 50000, growth became explosive and skyscrapers started popping. It definitely paid off; however, I don't recommend starting with high (or even medium) density if this is your first city.. have some practice first before pulling this off. At least make your residential zones high density so you only need to zone a small block of tall apartment buildings and skimp on school bus and ambulance funding..

Strip club.. with a realistic amount of crime