toroca

In that case I have less advice. I've never had a problem with the middle wealth sims abandoning one me, so I'm not sure what the cause might be.

I realize this thread has been quiet for over a week, but the likely problem has yet to be mentioned here. Since the problem seems to be primarily with R$$$ sims, it is most likely that there were too many of them. Without modding certain specific parts of the game, R$$$ sims move into cities in far greater numbers than the available jobs can support. Newer players often mistakenly assume that all jobs in Co$$$ buildings are for R$$$ sims, and the same for IHT. But Co$$$ buildings only supply 15% of their jobs to R$$$ sims, and Co$$ and IHT only have 10% R$$$ jobs. So if you have a building that contains 2000 R$$$ sims, and we assume that roughly half of them are looking for work (which is typical for SC4), you need 1000 R$$$ level jobs. This would require 10,000 total IHT or Co$$ jobs, since only 10% per building are for R$$$ sims. The other 9000 are intended for R$ and R$$ sims. With Co$$$, it would require a total of about 6700 jobs to get the needed 1000 R$$$ ones. Again, the other 5700 would go to R$ and R$$ sims. Since the unmodded simulator allows far too many R$$$ sims to move in, their job supply is usually severely lacking. The abandoment problem arises for most players when R$$$ sims reach the point where they make up more than 20-25% of the total population, regardless of total city size. Careful management of the R$$$ population through high taxes makes it possible to avoid ever seeing an abandoned or distressed R$$$ building. I allow just enough of them in to take up the available high wealth jobs, and then I raise their taxes to the point where R$$$ demand goes either neutral or even slightly negative.

If you have any demand for a type of development, you have NOT hit a cap for that type. Capped types will show zero demand, neither positive nor negative. In my own experience, I eventually run into an issue in cities where newly placed zones will not develop, despite having lots of positives, just as described in this case. What usually works for me is plopping a few small parks or plazas randomly around the empty zones. This often causes something of a firestorm of development in those areas. I've never bothered to test whether it's the temporary mayor rating boost in those areas that does it, or the slight boost in the attractiveness of the zone, or something related to those factors. The same trick works very well in areas you wish to convert to a denser zone type, particularly with residential zones. I use it frequently when I rezone residential areas from light to medium density, or medium to high density. The slight maintenance cost for the new parks is more than made up for by the boost in tax revenues from the resultant larger buildings.

Is it a specific wealth level of residents that are abandoning? If it's mostly R$$$, then your taxes on them are probably too low, because the unmodded game tends to move more of them in than the available jobs can support.

That's why I write them.

UPDATE - EA has dropped the ten-day validation requirement for both Mass Effect and Spore! According to a technical producer for BioWare, the makers of Mass Effect, both that game and Spore will be making use of a version of secuROM that requires the game to connect to an EA server for validation every ten days in order to keep the game functional. This totalitarian anti-piracy effort will have little or no effect on piracy of Spore, and will only end up harming the millions of law-abiding gamers who will purchase the game. What are some scenarios we can expect? Well, I included them in a petition I've started against this action by EA. Here's a quote of the main portion of my petition: This totalitarian method of copy-protection has several potential drawbacks. Chief among them is that it unfairly penalizes law-abiding gamers who do not have an Internet connection. Such players will be unable to play Spore. Similarly, gamers who only have a laptop computer with no permanent Internet connection will be unable to play it as well. Another possible problem is high traffic on EA's servers. If a large number of players attempt to validate their copy of the game at the same time during the game's launch, EA's servers could potentially become overwhelmed, and players may find their game unable to validate itself, or even potentially locked if something goes wrong with the validation process. A further potential issue is lack of support: what happens a few years down the road when the game is no longer selling well, and EA decides it's not cost-effective to continue supporting it and the validation it requires? They will surely deny that they would ever do so, but it's impossible to predict future events or decisions. If EA ever deactivated its validation servers, then anyone who bought the game would be, quite simply, out of luck. Additionally, a kink in EA's plan is that it is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect; namely, Spore may in fact end up being pirated more frequently because of this anti-piracy protection. A great many gamers will feel outraged by it and be looking for ways around it. Indeed, the outrage is already very visible throughout the community of websites that have sprung up in anticipation of Spore's release; many fans previously excited about Spore have publicly stated they will not purchase this game if it ships with this type of copy-protection. Finally, prior versions of secuROM included with other games have been blamed with causing malfunctions on some consumers' computers, including but not limited to causing some programs to crash or become unuseable, or preventing hardware like CD burners from functioning properly even when used for legitimate purposes. There are at least two other petitions I'm aware of for much the same thing, but mine is thus far the most detailed that I'v seen. If you agree that EA is going too far with this version of secuROM, please show your support by joining the peaceful backlash against this action, and sign the petition. http://www.petitiononline.com/sporecpy/petition.html I honestly don't expect this to have any effect on EA's choice, but it never hurts to try, and there's always a chance the effort will succeed. Thank you for your time and consideration, Toroca PS: The original topic at Simphoni where I read about this is located here. I've also begun a new thread over at SCC.

If you have the Legalized Gambling ordinance enabled, turn it off. That one alone increases the crime rate by 20%. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's much more you can do that hasn't already been mentioned in this thread. You mentioned the university and airport, well, those are frequently locations of high crime just because of their lot size. The way the game handles the crime simulator, larger lots get hit more often by crimes, so the game sees them as being hotbeds of criminal activity, even if the actual crime rate per tile is the same as the rest of the city. Do you need the airport in the city? If you've got enough commercial cap relief from neighbor connections, you might try removing the airport and seeing how that affects the crime level. What is your education rating? The closer to 200 you can get it, the lower crime will drop. Highly educated sims (especially medium and high wealth ones) have a very low "inherent criminality."

The death toll from Cyclone Nargis is likely to be much higher than 100,000. Indeed, the UN and international aid agnecies are currently estimating over 100,000 dead and 250,000 missing; a lot of those missing are not likely to ever be found alive. And that doesn't count in the countless more who will be dying of disease and starvation in the aftermath thanks to the incredibly subpar response to the disaster by their "government." I fully expect Nargis to end up as either the deadliest or second deadliest cyclone in world history. The responses to these two disasters happening so close together really demonstrate some differences. China's government is doing everything they can to save lives, Myanmar's government is acting like everything's back to normal already even though no one outside the country believes it.

Originally posted by: High5flyier Another factor to consider is that a lot of downloads were modded with way too much pollution designed into them. I use the SC4Tool to check the specs on everthing that I download and there are a lot of lots out there that can do you in.quote> I do this too. A lot of BAT creators seem to just leave whatever pollution amount the SC4Tool tacks on to them, and those numbers are usually FAR higher than any of the Maxis-designed buildings that came with the game have. It's really obvious when you compare the pollution amounts auto-addigned to a large office tower to the amount coded into a large office tower from the original game. The SC4Tool often assigns a default value that is orders of magnitude too high.

Originally posted by: belfastuniguyYeah because the American government and agencies did such a good job in the beginning didn't they? In fact the people of New Orleans, those not rich enough to evacuate where left to rot in standards that would even shame a third world nation. Lets not get too sanctimonious shall we. quote> Let's get one thing straight. The people who chose to go to the Superdome instead of leaving the city like they were told to do contributed to the conditions there. They were TOLD to bring their own three day supplies of food and water, and almost NONE of them did. That was a major part of the problem right there. If you live in a hurricane zone, it is YOUR responsibility as much as the government's to make sure you're ready for one, and that includes having emergency supplies ready to go. It's not like there was no warning that the storm was coming. It's not an earthquake or tornado that can't be predicted before it happens. They knew the storm was coming for DAYS, and many of them simply relied on the government to take care of them without bothering to take any responsibility for their own welfare. I have very little sympathy for the people who either a) had the ability to leave and didn't, or b) stayed and didn't follow the instructions they were given. Don't get me wrong, the government failed too, at the local, state, and federal levels, but ESPECIALLY the first two. The local government, as one example, should have appropriated the fleets of school busses we later saw sitting in flooded parking lots and used those to get people without cars out of the threatened area. The state government should have made the evacuation of New Orleans and surrounding areas a much higher priority than they did; the mandatory order wasn't issued until the day before the storm arrived. And once that was issued, people shouldn't have been allowed to stay at the Superdome, they should have been sent OUT of the city altogether. But blaming only the government, as so many people like to do, is not fair. Most of the people who stayed in the city did NOT make any effort to take care of themselves. They are therefore not worthy of my sympathy. ...and we've really wandered off topic now...

I'm with JanYpe here. Those of you whining about the dollar amount the US is pledging need to look at the situation again. There is little point to pledging aid if it's all just going to be confiscated by their military. I don't want my tax dollars propping up a regime like the Myanmar junta, thank you VERY much. Now, if their government steps aside and actually allows the aid groups to DO something, that'd be a different story. Aside from that, the US military has proven itself on more than one occasion to be the most efficient aid-delivery system in the world, most notably in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami. The US military was the first on the scene with relief aid in hundreds of isolated villages throughout the regions affected by the tsunami. We're willing to do the same for Myanmar, but the junta won't LET us. Personally, I am in favor of the United Nations invoking its recently-acknowleged "responsibility to protect" clause in the case of Myanmar and launching a full-scale invasion to actually GET aid to the people who need it. If their government is unwilling or unable to aid their civilian population, then their government needs to be removed from the aid response entirely. I'm not talking regime change, I'm talking preventing them from interfering with the international relief effort. With a UN-estimated 100,000 dead and 250,000 missing, it is time for the international community to do what the junta will not. HELP those poor people.

Need4Camaro has it mostly right. Most of the time when a sim can't find a job (especially if it's a high wealth sim) it's because there aren't jobs of the right type available. What Camaro doesn't have right, though is that it's more complicated than he's making it. He says that R$$ sims can't work at Co$$$ buildings. Well, that's not true. About half of the jobs in a high wealth office building are R$$ jobs. Same thing with R$ sims and high tech industry. A few R$ sims can work there, because 10% of high tech industry jobs are for R$ sims. In fact, nearly all of the employer types provide at least a few jobs for all three sim wealth levels. The exceptions are the low wealth commercial and industrial; those only employ low-wealth sims. All of the others employ a mix. As to the problem, a commercial quadrupler isn't likely to solve the issue. Mods like that don't actually increase the number of jobs; what they do is use up the same amount of demand in a smaller space. Sure, if you install the mod in an established reason, you'd see a temporary increase in jobs, but as soon as the simulation stabilized, you'd be right back where you started. Say you have 2000 commercial jobs now, and flat demand for more (neither positive or negative). If you install a mod that quadruples them, you'd see the number of jobs spike up briefly to 8,000. This would cause the commercial demand to plummet to -6000, and you'd see abandonment of many of your commercial buildings as a result, until the simulation stabilized with the correct number of jobs for the current demand. This is the most common misconception about my Industry Quadrupler mod; people expect it to create more jobs. It doesn't. It takes your existing demand for industry and uses it up in one quarter the space normally required (because industrial buildings in the unmodded game provide a ridiculously low amount of jobs). A commercial increaser would do the exact same thing. Weifa: If (as I'm assuming) your city isn't very big and your sims aren't very smart, you're not going to have much commercial demand. That's all there is to it. A small, uneducated city mostly demands industry; if you want commercial buildings you'll have to grow a larger city and make your sims smarter.

Stardragon, from the sound of it, secuROM will still be on it, but not the online validation check every ten days. secuROM by itself CAN be bad, but not always. I won't be preordering though, because I intend to wait and find out how it affects other people's computers first. secuROM was on the last several of the Sims 2 expansions, and only Bon Voyage caused widespread problems.

UPDATE: IT WORKED!!! EA is dropping the 10 day revalidation requirement from both Mass Effect and Spore!

I just found a great blog over at PC World on this subject. Have a read, it's the best article I've seen on any of the gaming/computer websites about this. The best bit is the quote from the CEO of Stardock Games (emphasis added by me) The reason why we don't put CD copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.quote>

Originally posted by: north country dude 39 signatures, was 18 this morning, wonder how many signatures there will be on Monday?quote> Actually, when I first posted it here, it was only 11, and that was after about ten hours of it being posted only on Simphoni. Since I despise being treated like a criminal instead of a customer, I decided to spread it a bit more, so I posted it at the two other Sim forums I'm a member of, here and at SCC. I leave it to others to link it from the Spore websites or other locations if they wish, since I'm not currently a member of any of them. It'd almost be worth it to me to sign up elsewhere to spread this news to more gamers, but I just can't be bothered since I don't expect the petition to actually succeed in making them reconsider. Who knows, though. It wouldn't be the first time; Ubisoft once dropped a particular anti-piracy tech because of a poll of its fans.

Even if you're right about all of that, JanYpe (and I'm not convinced that you are), you still haven't addressed two of my other primary concerns. What about people who don't have internet, or don't have it permanently (there are more of them than a lot of people realize)? And also, what about the past history of secuROM causing consumers problems unrelated to the software it came bundled with?

Originally posted by: paupsers Anyone who has a computer capable of running Spore will probably have the internet as well. quote>The internet connection requirement is not the only issue, which you'd know if you had read what I posted. I am personally more concerned about the long term, because I still play games that are well over a decade old, and there is no support whatsoever for any of them online. Why should I pay for a game that's likely to stop working five or ten years from now? Would you buy a car that you knew was going to work for only a few years and then "expire?" There's also the matter of prior versions of secuROM harming people's computers. Why should we pay to risk damaging our own property? Why is this such a huge deal? Obviously a hacker/pirate would be worried about this...quote>No offense, but that statement sounds rather naive. Hackers and pirates NEVER worry about copy-protection, because they always find a way around it, usually within DAYS of a game's release, and often ON the day of release. Sorry, but I think the word "totalitarian" is way too strong for this and sounds just plain melodramatic. quote>That's your opinion. I've expressed mine, as have the others in this thread. As far as I'm concerned, this amounts to us paying to be treated like criminals. And I won't. I have no problem with anti-piracy efforts in general, but this is going WAY too far. Get a life, people.quote> Was it really necessary to be rude?

I said a long time ago that I was going to create a mod that changed the Stage Caps to be more realistic, but I never got around to actually doing it. After playing with the Reader today, my interest got reawakened in this, and now I''m trying to find out if there''s still interest for the idea. Here are my basic thoughts on how I''d set this up: 1.) Stage Caps on all forms of commerce would be lowered somewhat, so you''d start getting the larger commercial buildings earlier. 2.) Stage Caps on all residential would be increased significantly, so you''d have to get a higher population before you''d get the biggest buildings. With these two changes, you would see less of the "downtown hole" problem that is common now, where your commercial core (assuming you have one) is dwarfed by the residential buildings around it. The idea is that commercial skyscrapers would appear LONG before residential ones, making for a more realistic city. I wouldn''t be able to completely eliminate the problem of residential buildings being taller than commercial ones, for the simple reason that Maxis for some stupid reason made most of the game''s tall towers residential, contrary to almost every real world city. But I could significantly reduce that problem by keeping the tall residential towers out until your population has grown very large. Note: This mod would NOT be for people who just want to get as high a population or as many skyscrapers as possible, because by making it harder to get the big residential buildings, it would by default become harder to get a high population and the big residential towers. This mod would be for people who want more realistic looking cities. So, what do you think? Would this be worth my effort to produce? If you''re interested in this, please post here with comments and suggestions that I might be able to incorporate into this mod, assuming I actually do create it. EDIT - For those who don''t know what Stage Caps are, they are controls Maxis put in the game that prevent you from getting towering skyscrapers when you first start a new region. They''re meant to make your region grow more realistically, but they don''t really work that way because of the size of the big residential buildings and because the commercial office stage caps are set the same as the residential stage caps, which ends up causing big residential buildings to appear first. The reason for that is that the Stage Caps are based on residents/jobs of each wealth level. So a city might have 50,000 people and thus be past the Stage Cap for Stage 8 (big) residential buildings to appear, but that same city may only have 20,000 commercial office jobs, so it would still be limited to smaller commercial buildings. Ask if you still don''t understand.

Hey all! Building on the incredible popularity of my first version of the Industry Increase Mod (Over 4000 downloads as of this writing, the most of any mod on Simtropolis), I''ve completed this second version of the mod. It goes somewhat farther than the first. The first only tripled the number of jobs Industry provided, this one quadruples the number of jobs provided. Also, I''ve doubled the amount of tax income each Industrial building provides, which should solve the issue some people reported with the first version that Industrial-Only cities could not support themselves monetarily. Best of all, this version is a simple Dat plugin, so no more altering of the SimCity files needed. =) The mod is attached to this post. The zip file contains the mod itself as well as a Readme which covers things in a bit more detail. Hopefully Ralphael or someone else will see fit to stick it in the Mods section and remove the old version. =) Enjoy! And be sure to let me know what you think! Kyle/Toroca

I've been seeing this question pop up a LOT, mostly here, but also a few other places, so I'm going to answer with the method I've been using. This is obviously only intended for buildings that don't come with a growable version. Requirements: SimCity 4 Rush Hour/Deluxe Maxis Plugin Manager Tool Maxis Lot Editor Tool Downloaded BATs I'm not sure if the Plugin Manager requires the actual BAT to be installed or not, if anyone knows, please tell me and I'll update the requirements. Please note, this method will not work if for some reason you can't use the Plugin Manager. It is also important to note that any building requiring a lot larger than 6x6 can't be made growable, at least not according to Maxis. If someone here tries to make one larger than 6x6 growable and succeeds, please post here and I will update this notice. Step 1.) Download BAT building. There are multiple places to do this. Most distribute buildings in Zip Files, so you'll need to unzip the files into the My Documents/SimCity 4/Plugins folder (ONLY this one, the Plugin Manager doesn't read the Program Files plugin folder). The Official SC4 website downloads the files directly into your plugins directory for you though. If the building comes with a readme, be sure to have a look at it, as sometimes there are special circumstances or requirements for downloaded materials. Step 2.) Open the Plugin Manager. On the list on the left side, the Models Category should already be highlighted. In the list on the right, you'll see any models the Plugin Manager found in the Plugins folder. If there is more than one, select the one you intend to make growable. Step 3.) Click on the - sign next to Ploppables on the list on the left side. This should close that section and bring the RCI section up into view. Now, click on the model you want to use on the right side, and drag it onto the RCI category you want it to appear in. A new box will pop up, and this lets you edit the properties of the building. The Plugin Manager will generate numbers of its own for these properties, but you can change them if you wish. Click on the values to edit them. Some will allow you to edit them in the main window, some will require you to click on the gray box that appears on the right side, opening a new edit window. Please note, I will compare many of these values to Hurt Enterprise Headquarters, which is the largest high wealth Commercial Office building in the game in terms of height, and its the second largest in terms of jobs. I will abbreviate it HEH to save me having to type it over and over. Building Value - Unimportant. I leave it alone. Bulldoze Cost - Unimportant, but you can change it if you wish. Capacity Satisfied - One of the most important values. This is where you set how many people live or work in the building. In the Editor box, you should see two lists, Keys and Values. Keys represent the building type and wealth levels, values are the actual capacity numbers. You only want to edit the Values. They can be changed to pretty much anything, but there are some general things to keep in mind. Firstly, the BOTTOM value is for the building's highest wealth. So if you dragged the model into Co$$$ then the bottom number is high wealth capacity. If you dragged it into R$$ then it is medium wealth capacity. Each value above the bottom one is for the next lowest wealth level. Keep in mind that the Maxis-created buildings in the game all hold more people at lower wealth levels. One final thing to remember is that if you set this value much above 7000, you'll never see the building in the game because the game can only use demand up to 6000 at one time, and it will have trouble getting buildings larger than that to grow. Construction Time - Unimportant, but you might want to change it. The number represents the number of game days it takes for the build to appear. HEH takes 238 days. Exemplar Name - This one is VERY important! Whatever name you enter here is what you will see in the game when you query the building! It seems to me that most of the BATters aren't aware of this, because I have seem some ridiculous things come up for queries! Flammability - Somewhat important. The Plugin Manager ususally generates something realistic here, but you may want to replace it anyway. Lower numbers mean less danger of fire. Keep in mind that skyscrapers are usually much less of a fire hazard than a house or industrial building. MaxFireStage - When a building catches fire, this determines how many stages the fire goes through before the building is destroyed. Most skyscrapers should have a Stage of 4 or 5, while smaller buildings should have less. Pollution at Center - This one is important, and I usually edit it because the Plugin Manager seems to generate much higher numbers here than it really should be. HEH generates only 19 air and water pollution, and only 6 garbage. I have yet to see the PM generate numbers anywhere near that low for any building I've edited. In the Edit Window, from top to bottom, the numbers represent Air pollution, water pollution, garbage produced, and radiation pollution. Be warned, if you add radiation to an RCI building, it will probably cause its own abandonment! One additional note, I usually edit these values on most buildings I download, whether they're already growable or not. Most BATters seem to accept the default values, which are often more pollutive than a Gas Power Plant! On this one, keep in mind that residential buildings tend to produce more garbage, and industrial is more power-hungry. Pollution Radii - This is of course how far the pollution produced spreads in tiles. The order is the same for these values, air water garbage radiation. Garbage should stay zero, and air and water shouldn't be high. HEH only has 7 and 8 for its radii. Power Consumed - This one is usually about right, although you may want to increase it if it's a building that would have a lot of exterior lighting or would otherwise be power hungry. HEH uses 277. Water Consumed - This one is usually somewhat too high. HEH uses 2961, so compare to that. Worth - Relatively unimportant. this is how much the building is worth if destroyed by a disaster. Once you've edited any of these properties as you see fit, click OK at the bottom of the screen. You should get a message telling you Plugin Saved Successfully. This creates a new Desc file for the building you've been editing. Step 4.) Close the Plugin Manager and open the Lot Editor. You'll either need to create your own lot, or edit an existing one. It's probably easiest to find an existing lot similar to what you want, and edit that. Make sure you make the lot large enough. In the list, find the building you've been editing. Usually it will be at or near the bottom of the list. Place it on the lot and make any edits that may be needed. Once done, save your lot with a new name. Close the Lot Editor. MAJOR EDIT - After some tinkering and some reading here and at SCC, it appears I was in error in assuming that if a BAT came with a custom lot, you could simply place the building on that lot and it would work. Apparently the building's class is also defined by the lot it can appear on, and if they're being released only on ploppable lots, you'll have to create your own growable lot with the Lot Editor. If anyone knows how to change a landmark lot into an RCI lot, please let me know... Now, look in the Plugins folder. You should see two Desc files (unless you store ALL of your downloaded files in this folder, in which case there may be more than two). The OLDER one you will want to delete, because it was the one that came with the BAT building and is no longer used. The same with the lot files. There should be two, and you only want to keep your new one. Now, you can either leave the remaining files (there should be three, a model file, a Desc file, and a Lot file) in the main folder, or you can create a subfolder for each building. That's what I've done, as it eliminates some confusion by keeping that folder from filling up with a lot of similarly named files. That's all! *hopes I didn't leave something out* *LOL*

Do some more searching online. I was able to find a Buy link for Rush Hour by itself at EA Games' website, Comp USA, Amazon.com, and Target. Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble, and Best Buy don't seem to carry it, at least online, but the others do. One or two of them even carried the Mac version, if that's what you're looking for. I'd give you specific links, but I had them all in this post - and then my computer had a fit and crashed. Sorry, but I'm not going to look for them again; just knowing it can be found at those four sites should allow you to comparison shop to find the best price. Remember to look at shipping costs too. In most cases I searched for Rush Hour in the Video Games category if they had one.

To really prove whether they effect development, make sure you place the parks before any growth happens. Once buildings are in place, building parks near them tends to encourage them to upgrade to either higher density or higher wealth - or both. In fact when I'm upgrading from low density to medium, or medium to high, I plop parks around the spark new growth. Just rezoning alone, buildings tend to stay put for years and years, but a few small parks can cause growth to happen immediately, even in areas that already HAVE parks in them.

The only time I've seen issues like this is when an alteration has been made to the lot in question. It was very common back when people were modding hospitals and schools to have a larger capacity and/or cost or whatever. Basically, in any city where the structure already existed, the game had trouble reconciling the alteration with the existing ones. Bulldozing all of the existing ones and replacing them was I THINK the way to fix the issue.