TheKebab

The pictures were from an old city, and even though it isn't visible, it had a well-covered subway network. In my newer region, all areas are connected with a mix of monorail and heavy rail in low/mid-density areas + intercity connections. Bus is available everywhere, and subway is used in high-density areas.

Well it has been some time now, and I've started building a much lager region with many suburban areas. Basically, it seems that I can keep all R$$$ sims employed by relying heavily on inter-regional traffic (most of the rich sims seem to be able to find jobs long as there is a great capacity in other cities), but I'll have to live with some strange commuter bugs, such as the eternal one instead. There is still a slightly larger need for R$$$ than there are jobs, but this can be controlled by altering the R$$$ taxes somewhere around 9.5-10.5 across the entire region. As of now, there are no dilapidated or abandoned lots. By raising the desirability to extreme levels in a commercial area making up for the lack of costumers (lots of large parks, and reducing the pollution locally to 0% by filling every free spot with trees) it exploded with CO$$$ mini-scrapers until the demand was over-satisfied!

From what I know, you should keep every stage in your educational system. The university is basically the large version of the city college, just like there are large/main versions of the other services. Afaik, the large versions also have some efficiency advantages over the smaller. The reason to why your sims at the edges of the coverage circles are less educated is simple. Describing the coverage as a perfect circle is misleading, it is more like a gradient, the coverage gets worse the closer you come to the outer edge. This can be fixed by either overlapping the coverage among the buildings, or increasing ambulance/bus funding so that no homes are too close to the outer edge.

Originally posted by: rapswin I am having trouble finding some stadiums to put in my city. I prefer soccer stadiums but can some please help me find a place where i can find some stadiums.quote> Start by looking on the STEX, I suppose? Also, you have triple-posted this thread.

I'm having a hard time understanding this myself. - The growth has been rather evenly distributed over the relevant groups, no dips, just increasing numbers. I've basically turned the city into a sim paradise, the desirability charts are even all green in the areas where my little remaining ID is (!). The red spot you can see is just on top of my coal power plants. - Well that might be a problem, you see, when the first signs of R$$$ unemployment showed up I stopped expanding the residental zones and focused completely on satisfying I and C demand. The population has also grown very old in the meantime. C is satisfied, almost a little too much, while R$ is through the roof, even on the CAM-extended RCI diagram. CO$$$ is still in demand, but won't develop anymore since I removed all congestion with a subway network, as you can see in one of the pictures. The visible zone was just a test, and not part of the town layout. - All buildings in the city have water in an abundance - I've got CAM installed (which includes that fix) and DATpacked, and there are clearly some IHT buildings who employ R$$$ visible with the route query. I'm aware of the problems that can occur on avenues, so I added some return pieces early on. - In fact, I've already read that entire thread. Gave me good ideas for a new region, but couldn't really explain this situation, since most of the conditions do not seem to apply.

I had bad wealth distribution in mind, and this topic gave strength to that theory. However, this is (rather exactly) what the distribution looks like: R$$$ - 15% R$$ - 70% R$ - 15% The amount of rich people seems to stay at fairly healthy value (I guess they tend to look very over-represented due to the huge amount of land area they take for themselves). The middle class is what it should be, the major part of the population. Poor residents are almost exactly as many as the rich ones, and as far as I know, they shoulsn't really have to be many more than that in a well-educated and healthy city. R$$ make the majority of the workforce anyway (at least what I can tell from reading all the numbers), while R$ fills in a small part these guys won't take. ID and CS$ would therefore not be high in demand. ID is 2k (on a 40k population), and CS$ is good as non-existant (about 200 in total). CO$$$ is the single largest employer at 10k. Besides, ID and CS$ don't seem employ any rich sims anyway. This doesn't add up. I'll try getting a bigger support from the other groups anyway. No mansions until there are apartment complexes in place? Damn, I usually have 3 mansions at 500 residents before adding a water supply. Oh well, enough with the theories. Maybe I need to stop being such a carebear mayor. I always tend to give the residents absolutely everything they desire - healthcare, full education coverage all the way from grade schools up to universities and museums, services, protection, decent taxes, low pollution and parks in an abundance - from very early on and then just watch the events unfold. I don't really meddle with their ways, and would never plop RCI buildings myself. Maybe this approach is "too perfect" and will generate a broken city. I've thought of a plan creating big rural/suburban and industrial areas around a larger tile which will then be fed with the appropriate demands for creating a central urban area. Maybe just providing basic education and luxuries in the support areas so they won't advance to R$$$ in too large quantities is necessary? But won't that ruin the quality of the workforce, and just create a demand for the slightly useless ID and CS$ jobs? Or should I just tax them out, with the risk of way too many R$$$ moving into a neighbouring city? Or simply just not build limit breakers such as parks, which would also keep desirability under control? Wow, this game sure gets harder the more you look into it, haha. And yep, enough with the modding. NAM is kinda essential, or otherwise long-distance commuting, use of mass transit and such will not work that well at all. I'm kinda disappointed at the descision to add buses to congestion though, and there seems to be no way to change it back. CAM I just added for the possibility of getting larger buildings later on in a more scaled fashion, mainly the massive industrial ones.

It got lost somewhere in the writing process, but I have done some testing prior to installing new mods. Basically, I just use NAM + CAM (The massive amount of other stuff is just the dependancy nightmare for new lots to display properly). NAM was put to test during the long time I spent in the 250k-city, and CAM seemed to work fine in a test I ran prior to my current region (but forgot to mention). I would never try and install custom content in the main files, you probably already know about the fix, I have just merged the functional .dat-file of CAM into simcity1. A simple 15-second process that fixes the wonky double-demand bug (tried CAM both unmerged and merged) and still leaves the original files as backups. The recommendation was to create new regions using CAM from the start in order to avoid massive unpredictable changes in established cities. I am possibly still in the "Let's see how big it can get" phase and have put a lot of time into my projects, but haven't really experimented much with different ones. A total restart it is right now. I guess asking for advice would just give me instructions on how someone else prefers to play the game, but making sure that R$$$ stays proportionally low seems to be a rather rare issue, so there must be something I'm doing fundamentally wrong? I will try with less IHT though. Thanks for the advice, sorry if it sounded like I was contradicting you for a while there, I'll try again with a more unmodified approach.

Hi there! I've been registered for some time, but this is my first topic, so I'll just introduce myself quickly, and apologize on beforehand for how large this post will be. When I was a kid my grandpa bought SC3K for me, and said something along the lines of "Here's a good game you should try instead of that mindless violent stuff (He has never played computer games himself, but did some research prior to getting it)". Wise decision. At first I would just create bad cities that went bankrupt quickly, but after taking advantage of the opportunity buildings it didn't take long before every city ended up as the perfect metropolis. When SC3K started feeling dull, SC4 was the best news ever. I didn't pick it up until Deluxe Edition was out though. I was copletely overwhelmed by the new difficulty and dropped it for a long time. It wasn't until 2 years ago that I picked it up again with a more strategic approach, and even managed to make the cities profitable. By this time last year I made my first "large" city successfully, and as I heard about NAM, I added it halfway through with good results. However, at 250k residents the simulation speed ran painfully slow, and eventually the game simply crapped out on me refusing to build any new lots despite the skyhigh demand. I dropped it again. Now, to get to the point, I picked it up again last week. I thought I'd do it propely this time, so I installed NAM at the "low" setting, and read through all Z's tech posts about the traffic simulator over at SC4Devotion for fun and greater understanding. I found out about CAM somewhere along the way, read all about that too, and ended up sacrificing my entire weekend downloading and installing all files needed for the CAMeLOT starter packs. I even made sure to kill the double-employment bug by DATpacking CAM into simcity1.dat. I also modified the traffic simulator wit TSCT to use the Euro mass transit profile and reduced the intersection congestion effect. The city, combined with a tiny neighbour for trash and increased demand, ran fine for some time. Then it hit me. Massive R$$$ unemployment, out of all buildings it was probably less than 10% that did not show up as completely unemployed. This is not an entirely new problem, in my earlier attempts the rich would go without jobs too, but probably just about 40% of them. I tried satisfying all the job demands, and eventually I succeeded, but the situation was still the same. The only bar still standing high was CO$$$ that wouldn't develop no matter how good the desirability values were. I recalled from my earlier attempt that the few CO skyscrapers the city developed only would appear on avenues with high traffic where subway coverage was missing. Luckily my residential area was arranged around an avenue with the industrial are in the other end, and commercial somewhere in the middle. So I ruined my (relatively) nice layout by zonig for dense commercial in the tree buffert zone meant to protect the residents from pollution by the avenue. It worked, eventually, and soon mid-sized CO$$$ buildings with up to 500 workplaces started popping up along the avenue. What annoyed me was that costumers would not reach "high" unless it was congested close to red. I played around with the traffic simulator, someone had said that costumer values would remain the same based on the formula even if I raised the road capacity, but experiments proved the opposite. So I crammed in CO until the demand was fulfilled, then added a subway to get rid of the congestion. Still nothing, the unemployment remained the same. If there is anything I miss from SC3K it is the more advanced graphs for those values. Now, it is still a small city at 40k residents, but my playstyle is very slow, so I tend to let areas settle down with good health and education before moving on. It works reasonably well, the city is always profitable with all services and the essential ordinances in place. The unemployment of R$$$ on the other hand leads to what I like to call "The stupid circle". Eventually all their buildings dilapidate into dark and ugly R$$ and R$ versions. These won't be replaced by appropriate wealth buildings, since dilapidated versions of the fancy ones seems to have greater capacities than those. The demand for R$$$ is still there, so now regular buildings of lower classes get replaced by fancy mansions, which then go out of work and dilapidate again, until this circle has turned the entire city into UglyTown. Urban renewal is really bad for the economic balance, and just seems to make the circle process even more furious. After reading some threads currently at the first two pages here I found out that I commited 2 big taboos. The first one is giving in for the IHT demand, since it just increases R$$$ demand without actually supporting it. I also use a city plan that is supposed to make the industrial areas look attractive, at the same time as they are surrounded by a forest of trees to encapsule the heavy pollution of any eventual ID activity and the two coal plants powering the city. It goes without saying that it is space ineffective. The second taboo is that I re-zoned the low-density areas as mid-density. In my old playstyle I leave the first rural area as it is and then plan new high-density areas around it. However, CAM raises the bar for when large apartments appear in the Maxis stages, and my exotic choice of environment design makes it too pricey to expand areally this early. Planning ahead with the dense building style of skyscraper areas is also not profitable too early on. Thus the re-zoning. tl;dr : I've ended up with a city with high R$$$ unemployment, maybe due to bad choices, that I despite its profitability really dislike playing in. Maybe I should just olibterate the cities in the region (luckily I haven't played for too long yet) and just star over with a new approach? I'm open to ideas. At the time of writing it is very late, but I could post some pictures if it makes it easier to understand the situation tomorrow. It may be a rather massive post to reply to, but any input is higly appreciated!