Pengwuino

What??? That doesn't sound right at all! So like... oh, I've been shot, better hop on the bus??? This is in my big city where there are bus stops at every corner pretty much and I have NAM installed. What a crazy game. Sometimes I think Maxis didn't even know what they were doing when they designed the game.

I noticed I had a problem that was fairly common in my cities. My cities are built in such a way that there is a strip of residential tiles that are relatively distant from any hospital. I've always had my hospitals setup in such a way that all residential building were all within range, even if they were rather close to the edge of the circle. However, those strips towards the edge of the rings had poor health. So I was wondering, does greater ambulance funding, regardless of whether or not you are including any new people, contribute to better health?

So I checked the taxes in every adjascent city and my main city was the lowest R$$ and R$$$ and Co tax rates around! So I lowered them some more... no go. Then I decided to do the unthinkable and bulldoze the bulidings with the oldest people... and also a little less taxes. BOOM, demand went up. So unfortunately because of that last tax decrease, I'm not sure which did it. What about the old people though? Where do they go? Poor old people Getting kicked outa my city like that. How do I build a Florida retirement community?

The sims are mainly 21-30 and 30-40, older people are scarce. I dont see tremendous amounts of traffic leaving the city for work or coming in but I'll recount everything. It's unfortunate this game is horrific when it comes to accurately representing the number of people who commute between cities. One second its 20,000 through a rail station, the next its 5.

No, it is just a medium international airport with plenty of room to spare.

My income hasnt been dropping rapidly.....which is quite odd considering the average income has crashed. It has been dropping, I'm losing money. I have about 160k in income and use to have about 15k-20k profit each month and now im losing about 5k. My population has been stable and even growing at times. The demand for everything has just died though. And I'm seeing more and more and more buildings become abandoned or becoming filled with poorer sims. I'm going back to my information and I noticed that almost 10 years ago exactly, the income dipped form about 23k to 13k... and a few years earlier from around 30k dropping to the 23k. Nothing else seemed to happen though at that time. No jump in air pollution, crime, anything. No real movement in the population types or job types either, things seemed normal. Surrounding cities were able to build up cities though. One city to the south has a healthy middle class demand along with lower class. A city to the north has R$$$ demand to spare heh. As an aside, I notice my advisor keeps saying "BUILD AIRPORT YO!!!" but I already have a medium international airport . What the dealio?

So I've been trying to figure out how in the world my city has seemingly fallen apart over the past decade or so. I've been investigating everything, but everything seems fine. Then I noticed something I didn't check.... residential average income. So I looked. $5-$10k and falling. The first question is, is this unemployment that is destroying my city?? I don't see any buildings with the no-job marker. I don't imagine it being hte age of the population since I have a similar city with pretty much an identical age distribution and education distribution with $50k average income. I have an adjascent "rich-only" suburb that is begging for more room to build R$$$ skyscrapers and Co$$$ skyscrapers. Everything else is fine, power, water, education, health care, garbage, crime, etc. What in the world could be causing this?? I almost spit my soda out when I first saw it! I was thinking that maybe air pollution is a problem but it really isn't that bad. I think im going to try to basically vomit large parks and gardens onto my city and see if it helps anything.

Thanks, I prefer walls of text The thing about the college and university thing, like i said earlier, when I deleted the college, it seemed like the university scooped up all of the city college people so it feels like the city college is siphoning off instead of acting as a stepping stone to the university. So considering all that you have told me, would it make sense to zone areas of town with no elementary or high schools? So that the area is less desirable for poor sims and more desirable for rich sims? That is, if my goal is to move the two away from each other so I can deal with their needs separately. Would the sims that become educated grow up and move to the better side of town after becoming educated? I've noticed that even though i have 0 gaps in my educational coverage, I always have these bands of mildly poorly educated sims. I have my areas zoned out in squares and it seems the top and bottoms of the squares (with the government bulidings at the center) aren't that well educated (and yes, the busing does reach every one of them). Is there anything to say about this?

Ok and somewhat unrelated, my advisors keep *****ing about funding education and all this good stuff. However, all my schools are funded enough for the students they have. My population fluctuated so much that i had to put a fair number of large elementary and high schools up and when things settle down for a while, I have schools that only need something like 20% capacity so I only give them 25% or so funding. I'm not sure how to balance this out so they stop complaining... or is i tsomething i dont need to worry about.

So I was wondering, do you still need the small versions of the buildings in my title? I noticed that when I have a university, the city college seems to just siphon off of it. Similarly, I noticed that when I got a main library, all my smaller libraries had very very little useage after that. Same with the art museums. Are they siphoning off the main buildings as well? If so, are there any uses for having the smaller buildings anyhow? I wondered if the disease research center would do the same, but when i deleted a large number of hospitals, the research center didn't take over the health care duties teehee. How about the college/university? I did notice that when i deleted the city college, they all went to the university. Is having a city college if youa lready have a university with room to spare any use? Does the university give better education? Thanks!

I must have had some damn baby boomer generation or something. I've had full access to high schools and elementary and all the education buildings for everyone for the longest time. Buncha morons in my cities! How do I turn off my citizens ability to watch MTV?

So what about my regional demand? It looks like demand is flat everywhere. I even figured maybe theres not enough poor people? so I made a city full of poor people and connected it to my largest city and even my R$ demand went flat sadface! How do you get a higher Co$$ and Co$$$ demand? Those seem to bring in the money and eventually the R$$$ guys. But now it' s just.... dead.

Well my zone section is working correctly now and I LOVE the enhanced traffic volume display. So how about land value? How important is that as far as getting welathy sims and corporate offices to spring up? I just went into my industrial zone that was red land value everywhere and just tossed up a bunch of high density residential without keeping R$$ and R$$$ out through taxes. Well, initially I had a ton of R$ buildings popping up... but soon after, I started seeing R$$ buildings... after a few minutes there were more middle class buildings then R$! Then a couple R$$$ skyscrapers popped up!!! I suspect I have not enough places for poor people to move in so they move into the better parts of town and pull down thta part of town and drive out the R$$$ people. So i want to make a big lump of R$.... I guess that means I'm forced to use taxes to keep R$$ and R$$$ out?

I believe I tried to install NAM, but it made my Zone display look all screwed up so I uninstalled it. Maybe I should give it another shot. EDIT: Woo, ok, so I got it installed with a minimum installation and it all looks nice and what not. So at least now I have a nice little transport network kind of going Although now I have to figure out how to fix my cities so that they take advatnage of mass transit that actually works! So far I boosted one cities revenue by like 30% just off the mass transit working as expected, but another I put into the red because I noticed an avenue was super busy and I noticed they were all from commuters going from city A -> B -> C and I simply alloewd them to use the subway........ which meant they no longer took a rest stop in my B city which hurt revenue a little FUN STUFF

Another ... square on the region map? I'm not sure what everything is technically called. I suppose technically it's a new city but when I load a new city and just fill it completely with industry, it sure doesn't feel like a city .