RedImperator

Without question, it's the lack of an "Undo" function. I can't tell you how much time and how many Simoleons I've wasted thanks to one lousy little mis-click that manages to completely screw up some major project.

The separate local-express lines is an interesting idea; I'll have to try it for some of my overcrowded lines (don't know why I didn't think of it; I grew up near the Pennsy's old four-track main near Philadelphia, where SEPTA commuter trains use the outer two tracks and Amtrak uses the inner two). The only problem is that I use viaduct rail nearly exclusively, so there aren't any four track stations I could use as express stops unless I want to raise the ground fifteen meters at express stops, which will look silly.

If demand crashed in multiple cities, it doesn't sound like a demand cap problem, unless he hit it in more than one place simultaneously. I would think it's more likely he just overbuilt, especially since it's relatively easy to overbuild CO$$$. Get your zones back in balance and the problem will take care of itself.

Originally posted by: Jezus53The thing I hate about this argument is that many do not understand that traffic needs to go somewhere. I'm not saying you specifically, but many people seem to think that if the highway is removed and a buelevard or whatever is put in it's place then cars will no long travel there. But people need to go through there to get where they need to go. The only way to remove major road routes is to go completely underground but that is not possible. Also, most highways are not new to an area. Most people move in after the highway is built so you would know it was there before you moved in. quote> The difference is that a boulevard, assuming it's properly designed, can be a space inhabitable by humans and usable as transportation infrastructure. The Champs-Élysées is 12 lanes wide and a critical part of Paris's transportation network, but it's also the most famous walks in the world. Try setting up a sidewalk bistro in the shoulder of the Santa Monica freeway.

The future is probably going to look like the past, with the single-use zoning car suburb disappearing in favor of arrangements that look an awful lot like a small town. There will probably also be a revival of small to medium size cities, as they'll be able to support certain necessary services (large hospitals, industry, cultural institutions) that small towns can't, without the overwhelming size of big cities. I don't know why, when you tell people, "We'll probably have to give up on suburbia as we know it," their reaction is "I don't want to live in a 40 story apartment building!", when the American imagination is positively JAMMED with idealized images of the prewar small town.

Actually, archaeologists know quite a lot about the Mayan calendar. It's rather complicated, but ingenious, with multiple interlocking cycles. When some "Maya doomsday 2012" huckster starts screeching about the "end of the Mayan calendar", what's really happening is that the longest commonly-used cycle, called a "b'ak'tun", is rolling over. Specifically, the 13th b'ak'tun, which started on September 18, 1618, will end, and we'll start the 14th b'ak'tun, which will continue until March 26, 2407. Note that there was nothing special at all to the Mayans about the 13th b'ak'tun. It was a big deal to make it to the end of a b'ak'tun for the Mayans (note: they didn't even make it to the start of this one; or at least Classical Mayan civilization didn't), but when one b'ak'tun ends, all it means is another one begins. There are surviving Mayan monuments which reference dates beyond 2012, and their full calendar system (using cycles above the b'ak'tun) won't "run out" for several OCTILLION years. You want a good analogy to all this Maya 2012 nonsense? Imagine you have a car with 12,999 miles on the odometer. Now imagine someone telling you that when the last nine rolls over, the car will explode, because the all-knowing ancient Chrysler tribe's "number system" stops at 12,999 and therefore, they predicted the End of the Car. Granted, in a Chrysler product, that might actually be true.

Part of the problem is how property taxes are calculated in most places. If you own a downtown lot and you make improvements to the building, your taxes go up. If you tear the building down and make it a parking lot, your taxes go down. So even though you could make more money on rents than you could in parking fees, your income is higher with the parking lot. The solution is to tax the value of the land, rather than the buildings on top of them--under such a system, the economics are revered. If you make improvements to the building, your rents go up but your property taxes stay the same, whereas if you tear it down, your income falls while your taxes hold steady. Obviously, implementing a system in practice would be a lot more complicated (and all that goes out the window if the city is in such a state of economic collapse that there are no tenants to be had no matter how nice the building, but even Detroit still has some economic activity downtown), and a land tax creates its own perverse disincentives that would have to be addressed, but the system is workable and make more sense than one which punishes improvements and rewards turning downtowns into parking deserts.

Originally posted by: MattShizzle Is there a mod that prevents lots (commercial mainly) of the same sort repeating so much close together? I find it totally unrealistic and kind of annoying when you get a whole block or several of (for example) Depiesse's Diner. If there isn't already would someone be able to make one?quote> There are two solutions. Neither are elegant: 1. Download boatloads of custom content so the simulator has more lots to chose from, when they grow, make some of them historical so they don't upgrade to a higher stage with the rest of the block, make blockers for the really obnoxious buildings (*cough*Freytag*cough*), and be quick with the bulldozer when the repetition gets out of hand anyway. 2. Download buildings that look good repeated. Unfortunately, there aren't many commercial buildings that do that.

Originally posted by: Fourjays The whole "custom content isn't profitable" argument doesn't work, as proven by EA themselves with the Sims franchise. There is a huge amount of custom content. One of the things EA did with the Sims 3 was to get all the content creators involved to see what they could do with it. I think that any future Sim City should take the Sims approach and release expansions, and not to add stuff that should be there in the first place either. The Sims 2 was great with all the expansions, but was still good without them. It was only after an expansion pack came out that people would be like "it's so dull without the expansion". I played SC4 without RH for years and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is only now that I have played RH that I realise it is better with it. But with CXL people are saying it is dull and add-ons will make it better... this is not a good start. Unfortunately for MC, even if they changed to an expansion pack model I wouldn't bother - the game mechanics are fundamentally flawed, and even an expansion pack can't fix that.quote> This. The Sims 2 has an absolutely gargantuan modding community; easily 3, 4 times larger than SimCity 4's, probably much more. My girlfriend's DL'd hair take up more hard drive space than my entire Plugins folder. The modders were actually directly competing with EA, which released "stuff packs" in-between expansion packs to add more hair, clothes, furniture, etc., and a major selling point of the XPs was all the new stuff they added. And EA made a flipping fortune off TS2. The idea that you can't let the users make custom content because you won't make any money that way is completely ridiculous; if anything, most game companies are going the other way, saving money on artists' and coders' salaries by letting the fan community provide extra content and even bugfixes (hello, Paradox Interactive) for free. Monte Cristo isn't allowing custom content because they decided to make an MMO instead of a traditional standalone simulator, and they want to lock players into subscriptions by taking all their toys away if they quit. That's what strikes me as skeezy about the whole thing; I'm not opposed to an MMO model if the MMO adds value (such as interaction with other cities), but hell will freeze over before I pay a monthly fee just to play a non-crippled version of a city simulator.

You can easily empty a dump without cheating by using incinerators. As far as I remember, trying to wipe it out with disasters won't work. You'll just end up with garbage plastered to the inside wall of the crater.

OK, so here's my problem: I've got a new city (about 65,000 people) that's growing like gangbusters. By manipulating the tax rates, zone sizes, and a combination of "building blocker" mods (little homebrewed mods that I use to prevent buildings I don't want at the moment from growing), I've forced the growth of huge neighborhoods of one style of rowhouse, like you'd see in Baltimore or Philadelphia. The rowhouses are R$$ and hold about 45 people each. Now I want to make some higher-density neighborhoods of six-ten story W2W apartments. My problem is, the W2W apartments I have will grow on the same size lots as the rowhouses, and since several of them are R$$ and contain more people than the rowhouses, they'll overgrow the rowhouses and eventually destroy the neighborhoods I created. So here's the question: is there a way I could mod the rowhouses so they'd be protected from overgrowth? I know I could solve the problem easily by raising the number of residents in them, but I wouldn't want, say 200 people living in a two story rowhouse permanently, and doing that temporarily would play merry hell with the simulator. Are there any other values that control whether or not one building is replaced by another? I know my way around Reader a little bit so I could make the mod myself, but I'm not sure what all the values in Reader do. Post Script: Obviously, I could just check the "Make Historical" box on all the rowhouses and that would protect them. However, there are hundreds of them and there's no saying I won't run into this problem in the future, so I'd like a more elegant solution.