toroca

Your commercial and industrial demands are low because you have more jobs than your city needs. With 500,000 sims, you'll need, on average, about 250,000 jobs, because only half of an average city's population are part of the workforce. The rest are kids or retired people who are not part of the workforce. In other words, you have something like 190,000 more jobs than you actually need. If you have sims that can't find jobs, then the problem is likely commute time or a mismatch between available job types and the types of sims looking for work. Too many R$$$ sims is the most common cause of the latter problem.

I eliminate ID and IM entirely. You don't need them in a developed city with a strong educational system. They're primarily employers for dumb R$ sims, but dumb R$ sims can work in literally every other employer type in the game, so there's no need to put up with polluting factories if you don't want them.

The problem that no one seems to understand until they've been around the community for a while is that just because there are Office or High Tech jobs available, they may NOT be for R$$$ sims. Co$$$ is the single-best employer in the game for R$$$ sims, but only 15% of the jobs in a Co$$$ building are for R$$$. That means a skyscraper with 1000 jobs in it is only supplying 150 R$$$ jobs. The remaining 850 are divided among R$ and R$$ sims. In C0$$ and IHT, the ratio is even smaller; only 10% of the jobs are for R$$$ sims. The best way to limit unemployment among R$$$ sims is to use taxes to limit the percentage of your population that they account for. If you have LOTS of Office and IHT, you may be able to have as many as 25-30% of your population be R$$$ without problems, since in an average city, only half of them are actually in the workforce (and thus needing jobs). I keep my R$$$ taxes high, just to the point where demand goes flat and is neither positive nor negative. If I build up a surplus of jobs, I'll lower it for a while to let more of them move in, but I closely monitor the Jobs and Population graph while I do so. It has been my experience that R$$$ sims will tolerate high taxes so long as you don't actually push their demand into negative territory.

Originally posted by: Easy Bakes But still, those a re pitifull return rates compared what they were in the 80s Saving accounts were never less then 5% and CD's were around 12%. to bad i was broke in the 80s. quote> Yes, and it wouldn't surprise me if those rates in the 80s contributed to the savings and loan crisis that in terms of bank failures was worse than what we've seen so far during this "Great Recession." Originally posted by: Duke87 Originally posted by: MattShizzle I think they raised the ammount insured to more than $100,000 recently.quote> That was temporary, in light of the financial collapses last fall. quote> While technically you're right, I would be quite surprised if it wasn't made permanent. It was origianlly supposed to expire at the end of this year, and it's been extended through 2013 now. And even if it does expire and drops back to $100,000, that's still more of a guarantee than people who use the mattress method. It's not difficult to spread your money around in different types of accounts at different banks to make sure it's all insured; as far as I'm concerned, if people HAVE enough money to exceed the insurance limits, then they have enough money to pay someone to make sure it's all insured if they're not smart enough to do it themselves.

Sims will travel through multiple city tiles to get to a job. The catch is that there must be RCI zoning in the city tiles they're travelling through, as rims13 has described. The distance they'll go is determined on the fly; it's not a set distance. Transit speed is the main determining factor. On faster networks they'll travel farther.

Yes, both of these are possible, although the trips from A through B to C are rare if you're not using a transit mod, because sims in the unmodded game won't travel anywhere NEAR as far to get to a job. The unmodded game is extremely unrealistic when it comes to travel times and distances.

Originally posted by: blade2k5 Maybe where you live, but not around here. And please, don't assume I haven't. quote> I don't know where "around here" is, but there are some good ones online. ING Direct has high yield savings accounts, and while right now they're only at 1.3%, it's a variable rate that climbs when the economy is better. I've seen them over 3% in the past. Another one, called Ally Bank, has a 1.55% APY right now, and they also have CDs at 1.95%. Their CDs have no minimum deposit, and they even lack a penalty for early withdrawal. Another called Everbank has a 2.15% APY for their savings, with a bonus rate of 3.01% for the first three months. None of these rates are as high as you can find under a better economy, but they're still far and away better than what a typical local bank offers, and it's certainly better than what you get if it's sitting in a safe in your house! And if you're looking for a savings account in order to actually SAVE money, it shouldn't matter that the primary access for these is all online; if you're saving, you don't need to access this money at the ATM every day. They're all FDIC Insured, as well. Originally posted by: MattShizzle The ones that do have that sort of interest rate require you to have a lot in or they charge you a fee every month that costs more than the interest you make anyway.quote> None of the ones I've named do that, nor does the one I have. No minimum amount, no fees, etc. The only limitation on mine is that I can't make more than 6 withdrawals per month. That's never been a problem. It's a SAVINGS account after all, and if I need to pull money out of it, I make sure to pull ENOUGH out. I can always put it back in if I take too much. All it takes is a little research, and not even a LOT of that.

The term "Vanilla" has been around since before there WERE any significant mods, and it has always meant the original version of the game, without Rush Hour/Deluxe as SC4BOY said. I've been part of the SC4 community since BEFORE that term was used, and that's what it has always meant. People first started using it right after the release of Rush Hour. Veterans of the community use the separate term "unmodded" when referring to whether any custom items/mods have been installed. The two terms can be used together as well, though it's kind of redundant to say "Vanilla unmodded" since 99% of all mods/custom items won't work on Vanilla anyway because they require updates to the game that were made in Rush Hour and the BAT Patch.

You need to find a bank that will offer you a high interest savings account, blade. I've got one that has a 2.75% APY on it at present, and back before the recession started it went as high as 5.75%. As long as it's FDIC insured (or the equivalent elsewhere) a high interest savings account is a much better place for money than a safe.

I don't understand why so many people are so surprised that CXL is being compared to SC4... Am I the only one who realizes that CXL is the first real competition to come along for SC4 in seven frakking years? They're both city-builders. Comparisons are inevitable. Get over it or go find something else to read. I don't count Societies as real competition, by the way, because the SimCity fanbase watched the prerelease coverage and knew in advance that it wasn't the game they wanted. That's why it sold so miserably. We were hoping for something different with CXL because of how much Monte Cristo engaged the fanbase. EA and Tilted Mill essentially made a game and expected us to like it because it was a new SimCity, regardless of the fact that it didn't have anything we wanted or asked for in SC4's supposed replacement. I have said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating, because it is evidence of just how GOOD SC4 actually is: In Societies' debut month, November of 2007, it was OUTSOLD by SC4 Deluxe. What was then almost a five-year-old game outsold its own successor when it was brand new. What's more, SC4 Deluxe was the tenth highest selling game of November, 2007. THAT'S staying power. And it wasn't a fluke, either; SC4 Deluxe has appeared in the top ten best selling PC game charts sporadically ever since it was released, and SC4 Vanilla DOMINATED the sales charts when it was new. Neither SCS nor CXL can make the same claim. SimCity 4 may not have sold as well as The Sims (but then again, no game in history ever has, so that's not really saying anything) but it IS a best-selling game that has surely made a huge profit for EA. The fact that it can still be found new on the shelf (and not even the bargain bins) in practically every game store is further evidence; how many other PC games that are seven years old still have such a prominent place on store shelves? Now, because of the fact that SC4 remains the market leader in city building games, comparisons with CXL were inevitable and to be expected, especially since Monte Cristo made it a point early on to engage the SimCity fanbase, ostensibly to find out what we wanted in the "next big thing" in our genre. And that's why there is so much dissappointment over CXL. It is NOT the game we were hoping MC was going to make. Much of our input was seemingly ignored. And the release version seems half-finished, even compared with the original non-Rush Hour release of SC4 back in January of 2003. Two of the primary ommisions are also two of the most ludicrous: lack of terraforming tools and lack of mass transit. There hasn't been a major city-building game without both of those features since the original SimCity, and that was 20 years ago! What were they thinking? Are they actually surprised by the fan backlash over these two omissions? They shouldn't be; it was present during the beta. CXL is a major step forward in city builders in some areas. The graphics are beautiful, of course. The road construction system wins hands down over any prior city builder. The way they did farms is great. But in every other way I could think of during the beta, CXL is a step backward from SC4, which, be honest, is the game it has to beat to be successful. The zoning is a step backward, and a big one; the last time the SimCity series had a comparable zoning feature was the original version (I'm referring to the set sizes and lack of flexibility in building sizes). The only place the zoning comes out ahead is the fact that it can align to the newly-curvable roads. That's a plus, but not a big enough one to overcome the lack of flexibility. Another step backward is in the area of information presentation. Many of the complaints I've seen (and made) about CXL is that you're not given any real information. There's a lack of water? Okay, so how many water structures do I need to build to take care of it? No idea, because we're not given any data on output or consumption. Where are the charts and graphs we've become accustomed to? There are some there, but they all seem to lack some critical information. The simulation is not very deep, as others have mentioned. It mostly boils down to "build what satisfies them." In SC4 a whole myriad of factors could affect your city and what happened in various parts of it. In CXL... not so much. CXL seems more sterile than SC4, less alive. It also seems more like a model set than a sandbox. In SC4, one of the joys for me was never knowing what new building might appear, or when an area might upgrade itself to higher wealth, or whatever. In CXL, you pretty much know what to expect from the moment you place a zone. It's only one step away from a system in which you manually place every single building. I always avoided custom RCI buildings that were only ploppable in SC4 for the precise reason that I don't WANT to plop every single thing. I'd rather have them grow naturally when conditions are right for them. Nothing like that happens in CXL. And while SC4's development engine could sometimes be overzealous in building and rebuilding an area, I prefer that to the static, unchanging neighborhoods in CXL. I had high hopes for CXL. I really did. Monte Cristo's early involvement with the community made me hope that they would get it right where EA screwed it up. I was dearly hoping that CXL would be the city builder that would finally dethrone SC4 as the reigning king of city builders. In part, I had these hopes because I'm petty and I wanted to see a smaller developer bloody the nose of giant EA in a genre they have a virtual monopoly in, especially after they released the crap that was Societies and dared to stick the venerable SimCity name on it. But I don't think it's going to happen. CXL has some definite positives, but in most of the areas people are looking for, SC4 still reigns supreme. Gameplay can keep ancient games alive; I know of several active gaming communities surrounding games that are now over a decade old (one I'm thinking of was originally released on DOS for frak's sake), and it's because the games they center on were so well made that even though they look very dated now, they're still great fun to play. SC4 is pretty much in that category; it's showing its age, but it's still so fun to play that thousands of us continue to play it. The proof is in the size of the still-active fan community. I wish Monte Cristo had paid more attention to the fan community in the end. I think CXL would have a better chance at longevity if they had. They did a better job than EA did with Societies, no doubt whatsoever about that. But for me, at least, and many other gamers I've discussed this with, they have not managed to replace SC4. Not yet. Maybe they will eventually when more of the content is released, but as others have said, I'm not willing to pay for a half-finished game. Give me a final product that has what I want in a city builder and you'll have a fan for life. Until then, I'll stick with SC4. No "crying" here, just a simple statement of fact.

Easy Bakes: The only people who actually think that are paranoid. AV companies have no need to take such measures, because there are enough REAL security threats in the world to keep them busy forever. It's been proven that organized crime rings in various parts of the world are actively creating new malicious software to steal people's private information, take control of their computers, and so forth. Fighting those threats is lucrative enough that no legit AV company would resort to creating threats themselves. The risk is too great; if they did and were ever found out, they'd be out of business instantly, in a market that has more than enough business to go around.

I don't believe it's a bug. I think it's simply a quirk in the demand or growth simulator. All other things being equal, the simulator sees no reason to stir things up by firing up new development in established neighborhoods - until something changes. That's where the park-plop trick comes in. That triggers a temporary major spike in mayor rating and other factors, enough to spark off a new wave of growth. By the time the temporary effect fades, the whole neighborhood is redeveloping already. I've seen it dozens and dozens of time; no change despite a zone upgrade; plop a few parks and kaboom, buildings going up everywhere.

No offense, MsProll21, but if you couldn't get C$$$ without a mod, then you didn't have all the right desirability factors, etc. In a well-developed region, it's actually harder to get the LOWER wealth types of Commerce, because it tends to get pushed out by the high wealth versions over time.

The only goal of freight trips in SC4 is to get out of the city tile as quickly as possible, whether it's to an adjacent city or not. This has already been said in this thread, but it bears repeating, because there's a reason for it. In the real world, cities utilize very little of their own production. The vast majority of what is produced at any factory is shipped out of town to other cities, other states/provinces/whatever, and to other countries. People sometimes complain that the way SC4 does things is "unrealistic" when in fact it's about as realistic as it gets. Cities in the real world use only a small fraction of what they produce. SC4 imitates this. As to the original question, as has already been stated, the primary point of freight rail is to get freight trucks off the road, which lowers pollution, and to shorten freight trips, since trains move faster than trucks.

I segregate office from service. I ONLY allow Co$$ and Co$$$ to grow in my downtown core city tile. In every other tile in the region, I raise their taxes to the maximum. I do the reverse with services. All three services have a 20% tax rate in the downtown core, but in every other city tile they have normal taxes. This has the effect of concentrating ALL office demand for the entire region into the downtown core, and lets me build service shopping centers all over the region. The sole exception to this rule is a single city tile directly adjacent to my downtown core city tile, in which I've been letting the office core expand. That tile also has a large services area, but the two types have thus far kept to their own areas. Office prefers to build near other office, and services prefer to be with other service.

Dirty and Manufacturing Industry are the only developer types in the game that I tax completely out of my cities. I make the effort VERY early on in my cities to switch entirely to IHT and I then raise taxes on ID and IM to 20% region-wide. In my Honolulu region, which has been my main one for something like five years now, I had completed the switch to IHT before the regional population had passed 6,000. Yes, less than six thousand. There hasn't been a smelly factory in my region ever since, and it's over two million people at present. The reason you don't need ID and IM is because of the job spread. ID jobs are 100% R$ jobs. No R$$ and R$$$ sims can work there at all. And half of all the jobs at IM buildings are R$. But why would you need those jobs? Every single other employer type in the game provides at least 10% R$ jobs, and two thirds of them provide 40% or more of their jobs to R$ sims. R$ can literally work anywhere. The difficult ones to employ are R$$$ since jobs for them are exceedingly scarce compared to R$ and R$$.

Originally posted by: xenxander Sir you are inaccurate here. I verified this morning - if you zone both mid and high-denisty industry and high-tech grows in both (which it can), if it's the same building it will always employ the same number of sims. if Bob's Semiconductors erects in medium density industry zones and employs 74 sims, having Bob's Semiconductors erect in high-density industrial zones will still only employ 74 sims. So what I have said is true, if you want high-tech, do not zone high-density. This way you can avoid having dirty factories popping up (unless that's your goal). And I will state it again, THE EXACT SAME buildings erect in both high and medium density industrial zones, in regards to high-tech. The largest high-tech buildings will pop up in medium density zones - verified. quote> Sorry, but you are both wrong and right on this. You're right in that all IHT buildings that come with the game will grow on either medium or high density zoning. But you are wrong in thinking this equates to no need for high density. High density zoning is still just that, high density. You may get all the same buildings with the same number of jobs on medium density zones, but what you will NOT get is all the same lots, for the buildings that have more than one. IHT on high density zoning tends to pack more of the big buildings into a smaller space, thus the jobs-per-tile aspect SC4Boy mentioned. Fully-developed medium density IHT zones will tend to have more filler tiles, larger lots, and fewer of the big buildings compared to the same amount of high density zoning, everything else being equal. It's not a huge effect, but I believe it's there.

You say you have parks and such in the non-developing areas. My question is this: did you place any of them after you zoned the area, or were they all in place first? A trick I've used hundreds of times in my cities to "force" growth in undeveloping areas or newly rezoned areas that aren't changing is to plop a handfull of small parks randomly throughout the area. The temporary spike in Mayor Rating seems to trigger instant (and sometimes explosive) growth in these areas. A notable incident for me happened in West Honolulu, part of my primary region and next door to my downtown core. My office core had become very dense and I wanted to expand it, so I wanted to shift the population next door so I could replace some residential buildings downtown with commerce. To do this, I first rezoned large sections of West Honolulu to medium density and some high density. After waiting for literally years of game time and seeing no change, I plopped about a dozen parks throughout the rezoned areas. Within a year, the population in West Honolulu had jumped by more than 100,000; and in a city tile that was at the time only about 250,000 people, that's a lot. I almost screwed it up, in fact, by growing too much, too fast. Now, if this doesn't help, the next thing to look at is service coverage. Look at the developed areas of your city, and then look at the undeveloped ones. What is present in the developed parts but not the undeveloped? I have found that in some cases sims will not occupy newly zoned areas unles they have all the same services that can be found elsewhere in the city (police, fire, education, health care, etc). Desirability may look high, but the lack of one thing can prevent them from moving in, without them bothering to tell you why.

I've read Z's thread about the development of his new traffic simulator over at SC4Devotion, but I don't understand one thing: with his simulator, the commute time graph in all of my city tiles has gone from showing a commute of anywhere between 15 and 110 minutes to between 0.5 and 3.0. Is that intentional, or is it conflicting with something? I don't mind short commutes, but 3 minutes seems a little low for the heart of a city (region) of 2 million sims. Can anyone shed some light on this topic?

Unless you deliberately leave an empty space after every two zoned spaces (which would get exceedingly tedious in short order), it's not really possible to prevent a 3x3 from developing out of three 1x3 zones. And I'm pretty sure there are 2x3 lots as well, and as Livin in Sim mentions, they'll develop on a 2x2 lot. They will also occasionally take over larger lots created by merging zones from two back-to-back rows. I'm pretty sure I've seen 2x4, 3x4, 4x4, 3x6, and 4x6 zones all with mansions on them, and all created by the game merging zones from two opposite facing rows.

asd195, education helps way more for getting CO than having R$$$ sims does. The problem with R$$$ sims is there's almost nowhere for them to work. The best R$$$ employer in the game is Co$$$, but even there, only 15% of the jobs per building are for R$$$ sims. The rest are divided unevenly between R$$ and R$ sims. Co$$ and IHT are tied for second place as R$$$ employers, but in them, only 10% of available jobs are for R$$$ sims. In IHT, 80% of the jobs are for R$$ sims. I limit R$$$ sims to no more than 25-30% of my city tiles' populations, depending on what kind of employers are present in the city. I use taxes to do so, but there is no specific rate, because R$$$ demand varies a little from city tile to city tile, and part of that is based on the population of each tile. What I do is raise the R$$$ tax rate gradually by 0.1 at a time JUST until R$$$ demand goes negative. Then I leave it there. This rate ranges anywhere from 10.9% to 12.4% in my region at present. I've found that this method will for the most part prevent them from abandoning their existing buildings, but it also prevents them from building new ones. When I've added a lot of new job providers, I'll lower the tax rate slightly to let some more in, but never for very long, because my R$$$ demand tends to be so high that lowering the tax rate by 0.1% will let them essentially take over the city. If that happens, they start to abandon because there are more of them in the workforce than there are jobs for them. I keep a close eye on the jobs and population graph to make sure they stay around a quarter of the total population.

I've never liked segregating different development types in different cities. I think it looks weird, and it's more trouble than its worth. If you're past the point where ID and IM make up the bulk of your industry, you can simply put IHT in amongst the rest. Pollution from IHT buildings is so low that even R$$$ sims have no problem living next door. And desirability factors for IHT and residential are very similar; parks, low pollution, etc. All of my cities have IHT intermixed with the rest and no ID or IM anywhere in the region.

You're welcome, acec. This is something that we grappled with years ago when the game was still new until we finally figured out what the issue was. It was a combination of factors, but the key to it was knowing there's a wealth spread in the employers. Once it became a little more common knowledge that only 15% of Co$$$ jobs and 10% of Co$$ and IHT jobs are for the R$$$ sims, it became clear, and that also explains the "safe" percentage of R$$$ population being around 20-25% for most players. What works best for me is to keep R$$$ tax levels just at the point where there's no demand for them, and leave R$ and R$$ taxes at normal levels. Unlike many players, I do NOT tax R$ sims out of my cities; there are jobs for them in every single type of employer. If you have a good education system and good services like police, fire, and health care, the vast majority of R$ sims will convert into R$$ sims on their own, without further intervention from you. I also usually end up with a few large R$ apartment structures, rather than endless rows of low wealth houses. I haven't updated it for quite a while, but if you look at my city journal, especially in the later chapters, you can spot some low wealth apartment towers in among the medium and high wealth ones in my region's downtown core city. http://www.ussdragonstar.com/simcity4/cityjournal/hawaiisaga/index.html They don't detract from the rest of the city as some people believe. If you don't know they're there, it's easy to overlook them. I achieve best results when the majority of my residents are R$$ sims, because R$$ sims pay almost as much in taxes as do R$$$ sims, and they're not NEARLY as picky. R$$$ sims can be hard to keep in place if there's the slightest thing wrong in their area; R$$ sims will overlook all but the most serious issues if you've provided good services and such. R$$ sims are also pretty much the easiest to employ - with the exception of a couple of the low wealth employer types like Dirty Industry, every type of employer provides R$$ jobs. Indeed, some provide LOTS of them; IHT jobs are 80% R$$. Co$$$ jobs are 65% R$$, and Co$$ are 50% R$$. In a well-educated city, those three employer types will be by far the most numerous, and the majority of their jobs are for the middle class.