morriswalters

The R-C city I'm doing now is up to 90+ k. No mass transit. Unlocked solar concentrator at the university. Currently running a 4500 per hour surplus. One high school and one elementary school. Got rid of the University after I unlocked solar. About 86 percent satisfaction. Zero pollution and zero industry. Had an earthquake and it took me 2 hours to get back to where I was at. Mass transit may cause more problems than it solves. I'm going to push that hard. See how bad traffic can get and have the city work. The random nature of agents combined with the random nature of buses may work against the city. Interesting note. You don't seem to generate tech if no industry that uses it exists on the map. No golden bars while my uni operated even though it was there long enough to research solar after getting enough students to get the first upgrade..

I don't need a reason or excuse. Beer is Nectar.

Did you look at the building on the industry screen. I have seen this prompt when the building had no freight to ship. I don't believe that it i failing because of freight.

Well that was a test. The map I'm doing now, I'm doing all at once. That map is unlocked and has plenty of cash. Bringing up a balanced city is difficult in terms of cash flow. I think the thing I am doing that is helping me the most is considering buildings and not agents. I work from the building density screen. Most of the dialogs are, well I won't say useless, rather unhelpful. I look at raw counts of population but I don't get excited if I have jobs open. I just don't want unemployed. But I keep my population close to the jobs. The farther an agent has to travel the more the chance that won't get there at all. I still get small amounts of abandonment but I just move the building somewhere else. I control which way buildings face and where they build. I wish I knew a way to make them fill the space, but the game is picky about space and will fill from the center if it can. I use pieces of road to make building grow at specific points, but that is a pain. The way the zoning is done doesn't like corners. I think it has to do with the underlying grid.

If it your intent to use commercial to drive a city then don't use high wealth at all. Build and wait should be your mantra. It takes time for commercial and residential to sync. Push commercial and let residential lag. Design your commercial in corridors surrounded by your residential. Control the agents by reducing the distance they have to travel. This keeps traffic in check. This was a test run in an old city, about 45 game years. I took the screenshot because since the density of the area I was testing was so high, the Lizard had nothing to destroy when he knocked on my door. Before they shut down the test server for whatever reason I got it to 90 k in this config. Now I'm rying to do a whole map that way. Slow going.

I am not seeing the problems with pollution that others are but currently my cities are all commercial and residential. One is a 50 year old city on the test server and the other I started today on North American West(?). No problems there so far. The one on the test server had industry before I wiped it out. And now I have zero pollution. Sims are dying like flies though. No traffic issues, but it is only at 90k give or take. But I'm only using 1/4 of the map.

It's beginning to look like poor housekeeping on Maxis part. Nothing ever seems to reset. I have cleared all my maps of everything. I have cleaned up almost all ground pollution. On a map where I never had any industry at all, I have light pollution. On a map where I had oil drilling I have moderate pollution. On a map where I had industry I now have no pollution except that from a small patch of fallout. Pollution spawns from the ground and this can be demonstrated. It's not blowing in off the map. It looks like the regional mechanics making it happen. Once started it apparently never stops. The degree of pollution in each of my cities in the Trinity region varies by the age of the cities. My first city is clear. My second city is light and my last city moderate to heavy. All the cities are planted with trees. I have water usage on maps where there are no users. The main data panels are loaded with phantom numbers which are unconnected to anything in the game. It seems that the developers have no mechanism for cleaning up if you start anew on a old map, An interesting note the wind direction appears to be to the north east on my region, Cape Trinity. And I believe it may be so everywhere. The pointer when you right click to move using the mouse is a compass.

Is this a single city in a region? It was my understanding that pollution from neighbouring cities was supposed to effect neighbouring cities, but I have seen no evidence of this to date. It may be the case that the "update" has effected this. I had emptied the other two cities in my region earlier and this city had about 70 k. I have now deleted everything inside all three cities in my region, roads, everything. There are nothing there. I can tell you that pollution spawns out of the ground, in circular areas. when two circles overlap than pollution strengthens. I'm going to watch for a few game years. Currently what I am seeing is enhanced pollution. I post again.

Well now maybe not. I have a city that is 38 game years old and all of a sudden I have sims dying like flies and germs all over the place. This despite having 4 wellness vans and using solar power and sewage treatment plants. I spend a lot of time cleaning up after deaths. Her might check that he doesn't have fallout.

Yep, you be an engineer.

I'm downloading as I type. On the test server. I downloaded something, but no love logging on.

That turns out not to be the case. If the wealth level on a piece of $$ property falls they will complain about their neighbors dropping property values. What it actually means is that you killed some wealth enhancer somewhere.

I would take it as the devs pushing you to add more housing. There is no rent to be "too high". The messages, or so I'm beginning to believe, are meant to confuse. They tell you the obvious but in reality tell you nothing worth knowing. No matter how hard I try, small retail is always needing people. I have thousands of unemployed and yet businesses fail due to no workers. I'm told that all three wealth classes work in factories, yet you never know who is not there, or if they are actually needed. It implies that there are three types of worker agents, yet agents go to the first house they pass so how can that be? I have shops with high wealth goods, but can anybody buy them? Or are there high wealth shoppers?

I would be careful taking what buildings are complaining about too literally. I think complaining about schools is a euphemism that simply means the building is no longer educated and will abandon. And I think that means that it has no students. I have taken to bulldozing a building that tells me that. I simply watch the number of students enrolled at the Uni if I have one. If you watch tech consumed by industry it falls off when no students are attending Uni and rises again when school starts. If more is consumed than replaced, tech levels fall. I never run the high school. I run the Uni and an elementary school. If the elementary robs student from my Uni I turn off buses or classrooms until I get it where it needs to be. I keep general education up to keep my recycling higher. I believe that is how it works. In other words it is possible to have 3 tech bars and two education bars. I run 3 tech bars and 4 education bars. If you need to upgrade the Uni use dorms, they add 500 students to the roster. So if you have 1000 students attending and add two dorms you should be able to get 2000 students and get an upgrade. It's cheaper. This also may be another way to help your tech level.

Have you ever wondered why the ground looks so ugly when you play? I did and it caused me to discover something I hadn't noticed. Have you wondered why the rain doesn't fill up your water table? I know why. It's not a fault of the mechanic, it's intentional. When you go large the area under any tall building goes dry. I normally don't look at the water map once I set my water pump and sewage treatment plant. But I'm developing a high wealth commercial city with no industry. First I noticed that it is always green around the sewage treatment plant. Since the city I'm developing is not meant to be a large population city I only have a few tall buildings and I noticed when I looked at the water table there were white circles of no water under those buildings. Therefore dirt in your cities instead of grass. Just out of curiosity can somebody check this?

Be careful paying attention to the power chart. They don't work well and the individual utilities info isn't any better. Also windmills start and stop at random times. As the buildings jump in density they jump in consumption. Add more fans and see it that helps. I did an experiment using a long road on a empty maps. Agents dissipate over time, Given a sufficiently long road with intersections and they can't light the road lights. Other than that I don't know what to tell you.

RCI works the way it does for the multiplayer side of the equation. A true supply and demand system couldn't work. The games are not concurrent. There is no way that I am aware of that it could work given that. CXL tried this very thing and Monte Cristo went broke doing it. EA has to act as a broker in the market. In CXL you could actually sell player to player, and almost immediately player learned how to game they system. Start selling a resource and never go back to that city. If you didn't, it was a never ending source of a resource even if the selling city couldn't support it. I've heard somebody mention doing that with Nuclear, get a plant going and never go back, and sell that power forever. Doesn't EA delete cities after some period? If they do that is one of the things that they are doing it for. It doesn't matter in single player SimCity 4, you are the only chicken in the coop. This is why they say that it is working as intended. Not to be picky, but hasn't anyone noticed how like CXL this game is? The roads work almost exactly the same and have the same type of graphical glitches, but they had one way streets and more variation in each style. Buildings had a lot of animations. This biggest difference are agents and how EA handles the market. CXL even had great works, only you built them on your own map. The highway interchanges even look a lot alike. And the interchanges consumed a lot of map space, but the maps were much bigger.

If you have pollution you have germs, if you build too close to industry the same. Watch your wind. Hospitals have wellness centers which will help but they are expensive.

The games balanced to push you. Taxes will be hard to keep at a rate that will support you. A lot of people make processors. You can run a negative in taxes and still make money that way. You can even sell things you recycle on the market. Education is a key metric. I have a city on the test server at 90k, give or take. I took my time, started schools as soon as I could afford them. Once I got the University it was all over. A little high tech industry, recycling and a processor factory. I have about 23 million and nothing to spend it on, so I tinker, compress and generally play with the setup. No oil, no coal, no ore. By 60 k population I had plenty of cash, had unlocked all the clean energy sources, most of the great works. I use the high efficiency solar concentrators. Wind is unreliable after you get larger. I don't worry about law or medicine. If I need them I have a second city, that I'm fooling with. I start out with a mix of industry and commercial and bring it up slowly. Plop utilities first, wind, a dump and a water tower. Push up to about 15k population, setting schools police and fire department. Save some money, you should be able to get 3000 and hour at that point, and set the water treatment and sewage plants. Once you have done that just keep going, University next.. Tourism is a bore and I never gamble. I personally find high population cities a waste of time. With these maps they look like a chess board filled with pieces. I like to mix it up. The neat thing if it tickles your funny bone, is that you can unlock everything with 100k population by using multiple cities

Industry dies if it can't get rid of freight. If you don't use a trade depot, industry will deliver to commercial. So industry is limited by commercial in that sense. You would need an awful lot of commercial to support very much industry without a trade depot.

If you just want a city with lots of diversity it's easy to do, it just requires lot's of work. Using a map with no oil, no coal and no ore It should be possible to get to a respectable size without doing some of the sillier things. But you can't have everything. I have a city of about 90k. I do a little recycling, sell a few processors, and am self contained. Some high tech industry, a University, and elementary school. Small enough to go solar when I unlocked it. I was compressing my map but the disaster wizard messed with me and I put it to bed for the night.

If you have high tech industry the hazmat truck is good. Other than that multiple fire stations will work.

If you play long enough you'll get tired of them. In one city today I have had six. the lizard once, two earthquakes, two tornadoes, and at least one flying saucer and one meteor shower with a radiation spot. I got tired of it and came here to kibbutz.

Nuclear is dangerous because sims are random. Tech level is generated when sims go to the Community college and the University. Tech level drops at night and must be replenished every day. If something interferes it won't be replenished. And it fails silently. And like everything else in the game there is a finite amount. High tech industry also uses tech level. If you have an elementary school or high school running they will compete for students. I think the devs hate nuclear.

Each residence appears to have it's own intersection with the sidewalk. And the agents go ahead or go in or cross the street. Maybe. It may also be wealth related. Agents may be biased by their wealth class. I have a map where I have twice as many jobs available than I have in the $ wealth class, yet still $ wealth residences fail. 10000 jobs and 5000 sims, go figure. Overall I consider all the numbers to be unreliable. I use a number of strategies. I de-zone a building to keep it from expanding if I have to raise the density of the road. That lets me mix the density of homes on a road. I'm trying to make retail like traps, one road in and out. But still things fail.