Zades

First I have no idea why it melted down (twice) since my sims are educated and the plant does say 'Safe'. I've had two nuclear meltdowns thus far in one of my cities. Yet...nothing much has changed. The first meltdown was so far away from my residential that despite the news flashing "MELTDOWN! EVACUATE!", there was only a 5k population drop (I had around 60k population at that time). Sure some buildings suffered radiation and Sims don't live in them, but other than that my city operations had not really changed. After the first meltdown I collected enough money to re-structure my city so my supply and production chain gets more effective and effectient, and during the re-structure I placed the new nuclear power plant closer to the residential area. And now it melted down again. This time it razed away quite a bit of my buildings. My population fell from 55k to 28k. After I demolished the radiated buildings though, the Sims build most of them back and my population jumped up again. The one thing I have noticed is that the radiation gives my Sims a lot of germs. Yes, germs. Not toxicity. Not cancer. Not mutations. Germs. And since most of my city is powered by workers and shoppers from other cities, it still functions perfectly fine. I actually think the radiation is a good thing since now I can build more trade ports and such to get even more income. Radiation map Health map Population map City UI not showing for some reasons even though I had the checkbox unchecked in options.

The Trade Port is not a Seaport. It does not ship by sea. It's basically a bigger version of the trade depot. You need to upgrade your Trade HQ to unlock it. Once unlocked, build it next to water/rail (not but too near them). The Trade Port comes with multi addons, mostly having to do with what type of items can be stored, but there are two addons that deal with rail and sea shipment. You need to hook the sea one up on the coast and the rail one onto of a railroad. How freight works in this game: Freight is basically items produced by industry. Freight needs to be shipped to a Trade Depot, a Trade Port, or commercial buildings. If your commercial buildings are very far from your industry it helps to build a Trade Depot or Trade Port nearby to accept freight. Your freight shipment per hour is limited by how many trucks you have at the Trade Depot/Port, your traffic, and whether you have a seaport or a rail station attached. The Depot/Port will ship to either global market, commercial buildings, or neighbors. If you have a lot of traffic, escpically at the entrance to your city you might not be able to ship fast enough. If your trucks is busying hauling ore/coal/or whatever else, your freight shipping rate might also not be fast enough.

Yes it is possible and rather quite easy. That is, if all you are aiming for is the high population. Don't build commercial. Don't build industry. Just build resedential. Fill it with parks. Fill it with some services to keep sims happy. And...that's pretty much all you need. Let me explain how this works. There is a massive core game deisgn flaw in SimCity: commercial and industry is actually not required. The parks will function as some sort of job for the Sims (at least that is the current theory) but the Sims don't actually commute to the Parks, making you completely traffic free! Better yet since crimes are broken, building a resedential only city will ensure you are completely crime-free yet filled with a infinite amount of criminals! You see, criminals only commit crime on commercial and industrial buildings, building a city without those garuentees that your crimials will just wonder around and not do anything!

Let me quote what I wrote eariler in another thread, just replace 'Great Works' with [insert thing I want one city to see that comes from another city]:

As far as I know that won't work. The way they have the servers set up is at set intervals the server will send regional data to the client to be updated. If you quit your city, the server will simply save your city, but won't update it with regards to regional information. You have to sit and just wait until the server updates your city.

Nope. Nothing can speed it up. Blame EA. Just sit and wait.

Not sure if this is how it goes for visitors but in the history view of the population it currently says 1.4 million visitors, which I assume is the fudged visitor count. The actual visitor count (the numbers shown in the detail view anyways) is around 170k if you add alll up all the workers/shoppers/tourists/students/whatever else. And the visitor count is still GROWING. If what I'm reading and guessing is correct, it is possible for the game to simulate 170k+ agents/sims in your city (unless I'm missing something sine this is visitors and not actual population). I don't see why EA/Maxis needs to actually fudge the population. 200k is actually on the VERY high side of a 2km^2 area. If you look at highest density cities in the world you'll get a range of 20k-30k population per km^2, which is about for 80k-120k population in our 2km^2 cities. My city highway also is pretty clear of traffic. The only parts of my city that gets any significant amounts of traffic at all is the medium density artery roads to feed into my high density avenue that exits/enters the city. The highway itself is pretty clear all day. And the artery roads only really clog up during morning/evening commute. The total 1.4 million visitors. I know it's listed as by month at the bottom, but as far as I can tell one Sim month = one Sim day. The 170k visitors that's listed. The traffic

Go to another city, transfer money over. Wait for the transfer to finish in that city. Now hop to your frozen city and start a disaster. Time should continue for the duration of the disaster.

Reviews are subject by nature. A reviewer can say "I like this feature x" That statement is subject. Or things like "I think ...", "I feel ...", or whatever else. Those are all subjective opinions. Sure there might be some objective facts like "Doing this thing leads to that other thing happening" but the conclusion from that fact, such as "which I think is neat" is subjective. I cannot think of a situation where something a reviewer praise or denounce can be objective. I may be wrong, in which case you are free to correct me and show me a situation that is not so. You realize most of the reviews during press beta gave the game rather high scores right? With the caveat that they did warn users that they cannot guarantee the same play experience due to it's online nature. Scores were lowered after it was discovered that indeed, launch week sucks. With regards to the temporary nature, the servers themselves are temporary. Very few game companies keep their servers up for a long time for games (Blizzard Entertainment being one of them), EA is not one of them. EA is known for taking down their game servers a year or two down the line. Does that mean since the state of the playable game currently is temporary, we have to wait for reviewers to rate the game after EA took down the server? At which point the score would be 0 since it can't be played at all. At what point do you draw the line? At what point should reviewers review the game. Sure reviews are persistent but does that mean that reviewers have to constantly go back and update their reviews? I think not. Reviewers should judge on a personal level on what they think the players and the viewers what to see, they should review it as such. Each reviewer has different primary audiences, different personalities, and different approaches. As such they should all judge what to review, at what state, by themselves. MMORPG reviewers don't post reviews on day one because generally MMOs are too big and too massive to explore all the content within the first day. Escpically since a lot of the more exciting content are at end game and with a group of people no less. Did you just say SimCity is akin to a MMORPG in structure and server dependency? Really? It is not. The structure is more akin to that of a single player game with a chat client on the side that constantly updates chats from a server, where the company insists that the entire game has a lot of multiplayer components despite only the chat program requiring the connection. I can elaborate on the design and how my conclusion came to be if you want. You also seems to be under the impression that the rage and anger is only from the server problems. It's not. As I've said before, the game itself have major flaws, bugs, and problems that make people wonder why this game got released. If you do not know these problems I can list some of them for you as well as link to threads and discussions that involve these problems. It's not only limited to the server, and indeed most of the server issues are behind us. Right now it's the core game under scrutiny, and it's not faring well.

Reviews are reviews. They are subjective. The reviewers job is to give an impression of the game so that other people can decided if they want to buy it or not. Whatever is written in a review completely depends on the reviewer. One reviewer might rate one part of the game higher than another and let that part have more weight, another reviewer might not. You said these temporal circumstances are 'ridiculous'. I disagree, so does many players as well as many reviewers. You can't really ask reviewers to change score whenever something in a game changes. Reviews should reflect the state of the game when the review is made, not the most current state of the game. And yes I would agree that many reviewers have been pulled by the rage and have changed the scores. To be fair a lot of the reviews did only rate the game before launch and before users discover all the bugs and problems in the game that the reviewers did not. After finding out the problems they decided to lower the score. Yes they changed it. Yes EA might fix it, than again so can any company with any game. Does this mean that all review scores should be withheld until a company says 'ok we won't make changes anymore, go ahead'. No, the review should reflect the current state of the game since when reviewers do get to review something it's usually when a company deemed it quality enough for reviewing or is already out in the hands of the consumers. If at the point it is still nigh-unplayable, there's serious problems with the game or the company that released the game and the reviewer should warn the players about it. I personally like playing games than deciding for myself. SimCity itself had potential to be great, still does in fact. But it's being gimped by so many bugs and problems that made me sad. I always think of how the game could have been, instead of how it currently is. Yes, it is playable. Yes, it is enjoyable. Yes, it still is addicting. But if you realize the bugs and design flaws and the problems with some basic mechanics to the game, you have to stop and wonder, is this truly a finished product? Did Maxis and EA truly wanted this released in this state? When ratings across multiple sites are bad. When the amazon reviews are all mostly bad, including the hilarious 5 star troll ones. You have to stop and wonder about it. This also isn't the first time this has happened, look at Spore, look at Diablo III. All had high exceptations. All ruined by coporate decisions and game design decisions. There is a point when it really is the companies fault and not just because the users are selfish. TL;DR - The rage and anger behind SimCity is, for the most part, the fault of EA and Maxis.

There are?

Check your traffic. In order for the trade depot to sell to the global market it needs to exit your city and exit the region and come back. In you have heavy traffic the trucks will most likely be stuck in traffic and therefor unable to sell your goods. This is why a trade port with either a seaport or a freight rail addon is a lot better than just a depot, as those are guaranteed to sell at set intervals.

I'm actually not quite sure myself. I started the city not intending to house a lot of population or visitors. The idea was to build a production chain from importing oil,ore, and coal to exporting computers and TVs. Which worked and netted me a ton of profit. After suffering through three nuclear meltdowns, my Sims are still rather happy in my city and now lives in radioactivity without a care in a world. How odd. Later I funded the Arcology mostly completely by myself and fueled it by myself. I think that's when my visitor count started to spike up considerably. I think the sheer amount of jobs from the reactor and all the specialization buildings attracted people from the region and the Arcology as well as shopper. Same with my eduction. I have 2 high schools that teaches around 3k students a day, although it's dropping fast (and going to my university instead?). I think having a road network that doesn't get jammed as much going in and out of the city also helps a great deal (although now I'm approaching 1.6m / 200k real visitors it's starting to jam the intercity roads).

It has to do with how EA's servers process SimCity data. You see, despite all their claims that this is a multi-player game, The core game itself is single player. That means that each city is in essence, a contained environment, unaffected by other cities or the region itself. The illusion of online play comes from the regions. The regional data is stored on the server. From what I understand, at set intervals, most likely somewhere in the realm of minutes, the server will sync with all the cities in the region. This illusion holds up pretty well until everyone wants to collaborate on building something like a great work (or one person building it alone). If one city starts a great work the other cities might not yet registered it. And if the other cities are offline they won't register it until they are played again. So if you happen to fuel a great work's resources with one city and than hop to another city, it will not have been built yet. You have to wait an indeterminate amount of time until EA's server deiced to update your city regarding the status of the great work. This applies to ALL stages of the great work, including power and water. To make matters worse, even if you are connected and are updated, the great work's status itself does not update until the end of the day, meaning that for players who do not understand these mechanics to constantly hop between cities and missing out on the update timer, making the status of the great work inconsistent across all cities. In regards to fueling the great work with water and power. First check that you do have enough power and water combined between all your cities that are connected to the great work. Then just sit in one city until EA's server feels like updating the city, than move to another city and repeat. If you do this, all your cities will sooner or later be updated with the great work's new build status. Oh and pray that EA's server doesn't feel like crashing or not saving your progress because than you need to wait in each city again.

Rain is broken. Yes water sources are near infinite. The cap is how much they have. You will keep giving them sewage and they will keep receiving sewage until either you have 0 excess or they have 0 excess. If they build something and it requires more sewage intake, their sewage system will prioritize those over yours, giving you less to buy from. Use trade locally. It gives to everyone connected in the region, which I find annoying at times.

I'm assuming you mean unsatisfied shoppers. Shoppers are unsatisfied when you don't have even shops with goods for them to buy.

If you look at the picture multiple sewage dumps and water plants sit next to the power plant. My water is always at the very least in the yellow since all my production advisers would yell at me since my smelters are always the first thing to go offline when water even drops a little bit. I do have hazmat trucks in the city and it doesn't do anything. Nothing seems to really effect the radiation. Also of note. Sims will go in and out of the radiation zones to shop or work or visit places or whatever, all the radiation zones really give is a lot of germs, sick Sims, and make some buildings abandon once built on the radiation area. Some because I still have high wealth high residential buildings in radiation zones for some reason. And most lower wealth Sims seem not to care about radiation and would happily build their houses on the fringes.

They were educated. I do have a university. The plant plant said the level was 'safe' both times, still is.

Can you show me a picture of your population/visitor chart as well as the data map for tourists?

That really shouldn't happen. It's clear on the highway as far as I can see. My guess would be either it's a bus stop stopping traffic or it's your schools, with people trying to get out, stopping the traffic, try redoing the road so you can put schools on the other side and see if that helps. Also check the bus stops if there are any and see if theres a lot of buses sitting there for no reason.

1. Gambling is broken. I have had my medium wealth and high wealth casinos make profit though. You have to place them where the shoppers and tourists are coming into your city from. Shoppers/tourists will go to the nearest place to shop/tour and if it's full they will go to the next nearest, etc. Even then it's hard to maintain tourist numbers and casino profit since the highway bottleneck will always ensure that at some point in time a large amount of tourists and shoppers will not be able to enter the city, making tourist numbers and profit fall. 2. Place it and wait. It takes a while for recycling to start up.

Always taking the shortest route no matter its nature is not fine. It makes it impossible to guide trafic to the largest avenues. You know... it's something usually done in real life using direction signs. Considering the huge ressources Maxis/EA could invest in this game devlopment, I'm totally clueless about how such a thing could actually happen. It seems so basic to me. Using A* or D* to find the shortest path for 10k sims (which is a city with total population for 100k) is not hard. And that's what they did. The problem that goes with this is that since sims travel to the NEAREST house/work every sim exiting the same building or nearby buildings will go the same way. This causes traffic jams. In all honestly this design is pretty stupid. This does not mean pathfinding is broken. Pathfinding is fine, working as intended. The problem lies in destination and how sims are simulated. Which is the cause of some of the major problems of the game. What you want the sims to do (which is in fact the ideal way to do this), is to have every road add a weight and using maps (in the data structure sense) to solve path finding. Basically speaking a avenue will have higher weight than a cheap dirt road, and each sim will then have to calculate the road weight vs distance to pick a path to do. This doesn't seem to hard to the computer until you realize that there ARE A LOT OF ROADS to go through in a city and A LOT OF sims to calculate this for. To add further to the problem, this does not solve the traffic jam problems. Every sim in the same house and nearby houses will still go to the same work place and search for jobs/homes and as such the roads will still be jammed, just different roads now. To solve that problem the AI will need to plot individual jobs-home-sim (and shopping?) relationships so that sims will return to their houses/jobs in the morning and at night. Doing this will alleviate some of the traffic do to each sim basically having different jobs and will go to different places thereby taking different paths, and alleviating traffic. But even with this there will still be traffic jams and there will still be cases where a lot of sims go from point A to point B will take the slightly longer avenue with a ton of traffic over the shorter street with no traffic simply because the AI does not account of traffic. To account for traffic, each road section will have to have ANOTHER weight added to it. and this weight will have to be UPDATED in almost real-time to account for different amounts of traffic per time of day. Since traffic is not consistant (it changes), sims will have to re-calculate and re-plot their routes every time they actually go somewhere. Not to mention the fact that when they are on the road they ADD more weight to the road's traffic weight since they themselves are in traffic (no matter how light or heavy), and every other sim need to recalculate. This will turn out to be a big mess of computation that most daily consumer computers simply cannot handle well. Not to mention we need to throw in the fact that things need to be rendered on screen. I personally wish EA/Maxis at the very least added more to the pathfinding, but I never expected them to include everything listed above since doing so is just far to complex. I would wager that Maxis does have a build somewhere in their office that actually have more advanced traffic AI implemented, but it costs too much computer resources for average consumers to run.

I had no idea the UI is coded in javascript, wouldn't be my first choice of language to use (I hate js). And yes the TOTAL population at the bottom is fake. This was known through people testing with low wealth, low density buildings and slowly build them up. The total population number is correct until around 500, after that the game will start adding numbers to the total population. Your REAL total population is your total works + total shoppers in the detailed view. Around 100k total population that is actually 10k population. The amount of extra population added per building increases exponentially with the amount of real population.

You pay the money to start it. Once it starts you set all your trade depots/ports to 'use locally' and they will slowly make their way over to the great work. The great work will only show increases in amount at the end of each day. After it is finished building, you need to hop into each city and wait in each city for some time so that each city will update the great work's status. This is because city play is actually offline and only the regional data is transferred through EA's servers. If you are playing in the region alone you will need to hop and wait for each of your active cities to register your great work is done. After that it will need power/water/whatever. Just make sure you have enough excess power/water in all your cities combined and just sit and wait until EA's servers feel like updating the status on the great work. Then it will be done. That's pretty much all the problems and solutions I've encountered.

Although it is true that the simulation does not discriminate by age, there are two types of people that go to school: kids and students, and two types of schools: lower education and higher education. You can see this in the data views. Kids will only go to grade school and high school and will not go to college or university. Students can go to any school. Lower education schools refer to grade and high school. They educate Sims but they do not add to tech level. Higher education refers to college and university and they do add to tech level. As for the library, I have no idea how that works as I've never built one. I think it's somewhere in between. I would guess only students can go to it but it doesn't give tech level. The advantage is that it's open all day. Anyways for all my cities I always get a grade school and once that hits 750 with the extra classroom I build a high school over it. Later on I'll add a university.