Bibor_Kiraly

Forget the RCI. The RCI bar is a result of what you already zoned, not the other way around. What matters is the supply and demand charts for sims, workers, shoppers and all others. The first mistake people do (myself included) is to zone too much industrial areas. One factory can easily supply jobs for two blocks of low-density residential. A good rule of thumb would be to zone 1 industrial for every 5 or even 6 low-density residential blocks. City Hall, utilities and literally everything you plop, except roads, provides jobs too. The second mistake is to zone too much commercial and to zone low-density commercial away from the residential areas. Mix commercial and residential together. A good ratio is 1 block of commercial for every 3 residential ones. To sum up, low density zoning should have a RCI ratio of roughly 6:2:1. *** You cannot provide exclusively $, $$ or $$$ jobs. The game simply doesn't work that way. Most buildings demand workers from all three categories. Maybe a factory requires 50 times more $ workers than $$$ ones, but they still do require them. It's a good idea to separate the $, $$ and $$$ neighbourhoods, for several reasons. It's quite easy to do. Dedicate a part of your map for, say, $$$ residents. Plant the City Hall there, plant some $$$ parks and wait for the zone desirability map to turn dark blue in that part of the map. Then zone commercial and residential. See wealthy sims move in. Repeat the procedure for $$ neighbourhoods (make sure you plop the proper $$ parks). *** The trick to fixing traffic congestion, ludicrous utility expenses and almost everyhing else in the game that's not a bug is to properly implement the proper RCI ratio and to separate the social classes. You don't want your sims to commute too much, you want them to be able to find jobs and entertainment in the city they live. Keep the "demand" slightly higher from your supply. Not by much, but avoid being at 0, else you will see an influx of workers and shoppers from other cities (again, jamming your city). Once you master this on low-density, move up to medium density. Once you master it on medium, move to high. "All R" cities and "R and C only" cities are a myth. For some reason, some people seem to be fascinated by arbitrary high numbers. The fact is, these sorts of cities work only for a brief time before they collapse. Also, they grow only if these are the first and only cities in the region. *** Separating the $, $$ and $$$ has numerous advantages, as I mentioned before: - Public transportation: Rich sims don't travel the same way medium and low wealth sims do. No need for buses and train stations. - $ residential houses three, four times more population than $$$ for same building density. $$$ zones allows for narrower streets, no public transportation and more effective utilities (police, hospitals etc.). - you need to plop only one type of parks - you can educate social classes differently. $$$ are most interested in education. Meaning, among other things, you can position your recycling center closer to people that recycle more ($$ and $$$) and leave the traffic jam of the $ areas for the end of the recycling shift.

My last city failed (and barely recovered; if it did, not sure yet) from a mass "no places to shop" for my $ and (to a lesser extent) $$ sims. Parks adjacent to residences, commericals adjacent to residences. No tourism (i.e. no hotels). Nothing helps. On the population overlay, 90% of sims were cyan (that is, workers) and only $$ blue shoppers appear. What the heck is going on? :/ EDIT: Mass transit is not to blame, as at least pedestrian blue sims would be visible. And there was plenty of jobs available, so it's not that only offices should've spawned. It's hard to discern from building names whether shops or offices are inside.

The most determining trigger for traffic (in my opinion) is if you have more than one high density building between two intersections. Also if you have high density buildings *on* intersections. It's worse for commercial and industrial than for residential.

From the screenshot, I'd say sims have no choice but to come by car, as that's the fastest in your setup. You didn't mention how many railway stations you have. Also, for tourist sims to leave their cars, you need to have park&rides at city entrance so they have a place to leave their car (and buses to pick them up).

unfortunately for you, water and sewage distribution works like IRL. dont place the water facilities near huge consumers like refineries.

Yes, its terrible. A graphical, very crude representation of an external organ that you share with half the humans and mammals on the planet. Just imagine: streets in shapes of ears, tongues, hands, feet. I have no words...

I would like an undo button and a manual backup save option for the whole region. 10 saves would be quite enough.

As long as the yellow bar is very low compared to the green one (residential overlay), I lower taxes a bit.

I played two pre-patch cities today and i cant reproduce this problem. both cities are heavy polluters too.

I'm not 100% sure how it worked before, but now roads to avenues of equal density have no lights, but a stop sign, while road intersections hav lights. You might want to revisit the idea of having avenues for directed traffic.

The only two I can think of as being tricky to manage are the theatres (like Shakespeare's) that eat into your Expo centre visitor count, and the Edificio Copan which is basically a residential. Other than that, I find them all pretty okay.

Good question. For starters, plop one 192-capacity $ park for each high density $ residential (make it adjacent). That should keep a sizeable number of $ shoppers happy for that building. Library per ever 2 high density $ residental should pick up some more shoppers. As for the rest, well, having a few unsatisfied shoppers shouldn't hurt.

C depending on I is not a good mechanic anyway. most goods are bought on the global market. if local industry wont create, someone else will. no other system would make sense anyway

commerce hotels and casino lodging adds a night shift for gamblers

halby on youtube got a bunch of stuff right (and some dead wrong) but he states that industry ships only a fraction of its good to local shops. the rest gets exported (thus the trade depot requirement). Industry wants to ship locally. thats why you get the "we have nowhere to ship our freight" even if theres a depot across the street. the C I relation isnt broken, it just acts in an undocumented fashion.

A casino or two wouldn't defile your RCI paradise

On long term, you should. Larger utilities like sewage plants, large police stations and especially industries like the smelting plant or coal mine. These basically replace factories. For example, if I have oil, ore or coal, I build the initial 7 factories and then raze them when I have enough mines. I don't look at RCI at all. I use the F2 charts to see if I have excess unemployed or too much unfilled jobs. Basically you're free to develop your city as you wish, without even looking at RCI, as long as you meet the demand for either population or jobs. In a nutshell, ignore the RCI bars as these are irrelevant. I presume Maxis initially developed and then simply "cut out" most of the hardcore features. These might return in some future "hardcore" patches. I hope.

You'll notice that buildings on intersections have more money and happiness. That's because these get filled up first. This is why cul-de-sacs dont work on long-term. Provide more directions that sims can take, make it a real network where sims move in 4, 5, 8 directions all the time. This will make sinks "healthier".

For buses and streetcars to work properly, you need to have multiple stops with people waiting at them at the same time. Currently the system works but public transport doesnt prioritize the most congested ones. Your initial placement of stops might not be optimal, so you need to plop them and delete them until you get the stop placement right.

There are many bugs still present in the major rating (and overall happiness of sims), but a vast majority of things that affect the major rating work. To understand why shops go broke, factores get abandoned and sims go broke you first need to understand how agents move, because that's of paramount importance for all your buildings to work properly (and thus raise the happiness levels). When an agent (shopper, worker or student) goes out at 6 AM it looks for the closest building that can satisfy its needs (workplace for worker, commercial building or park for shopper, university, college or school bus stop for student). At the end of the shift, all three types now try to find the closest residential building to bring back money, happiness or education to. Buildings (sinks) that are the end of that line are more likely to get less cash, less happiness and less education. Here's a crude graphical representation: RESIDENCE * --------- RESIDENCE --------- FACTORY --------- FACTORY * Buildings marked with * are more likely to perform poorly, because agents will try to fill the buildings without the asterisk first. It's entirely possible for your, say, commercial buildings to be both happy about profit and angry about lack of customers at the same time. Luckily, there's an easy fix for this problem, and that is to spread your RCI buildings around the map. Don't just stuff all factories in one corner of the map. Give agents/sims options or multiple directions they can move to. This way RCI buildings will have multiple directions of approach and are more likely to fill up by a decent amount of happiness or money (the two most important aspects).

Any of the above, but generally the amount of area you zone for a specific type. For every 6 residental buildings you want 2 commericial and 1 industrial.

As people already said, high rent means not enough housing.

Only HQ-unlocked buildings carry over for the whole region (I can confirm Refinery, Smelting Factory). Commerce Divison/Trade HQ Trade Port storage unlocks do not carry over. Although this might be a bug from day 1.

The Hospital Wellness Center's Wellness vans "teach sims hygiene". Basically the same mechanics as firefighters. They go to a building or a few every day and remove germs.

Frankly, I'm quite sick of the pollution generated on this forum about the "stupidity of agents" and how the game is broken in RCI. It's not. As Halbystarcraft puts it, yes, it's simplified, there's no "hardcore mode" yet, but the mechanics are in there, turned off at the moment, so that easymode people can have fun. That doesn't mean that if you want to play it hardcore you cannot. You can. It's quite challenging to create a "working" RCI city. But it's quite doable and rewarding. Traffic congestion and the "stupid pathing" of agents seems to be the core of all complaints. For some dumb reason, people still try to play this game SimCity 4 style. This is not SC4. It has more options than SC4. Congestion occurs when thousands of sims try to fulfill their roles by using a car. Thus, the obvious solution is to make them not use the car. Just like in real life. That's it. Mystery solved. Wow, that was difficult. Issue #1: University/College agent congestion Fix: Place the university/college in the opposite direction from factories and commercial districts. No not zone RCI in that direction. Issue #2: Worker agent congestion Place bus stops and/or trams at residential and industrial districts. Sims *will* use public transportation if provided. Do not place high density $ or $$ residential buildings at crossroads, as sims will move into them diagonally over the crossroads, blocking traffic. $$$ HD worker population is very low, so this is not an issue (67 workers per building). Issue #3: Shopper agent congestion For every high density $ residential, place an adjacent 192-pop $ park. Same logic for $$ residential (football, baseball, parks etc.). Libraries work too. Not all shoppers will go to these, but it will cut the shopper agent congestion by a *huge* chunk. High-density commercial need to be spread out. General Fixes: Use buses for residential-industrial connections and use trams for residential-commercial-education connections. Or the other way around, whatever you prefer. The other alternative is to use buses for $ agents and trams for $$ agents. This also works great. Having two adjacent $$ or $ high density residential, industrial or commerical buildings is a bad idea. Use parks or utilities to fill the gaps. Avoid high density commercial buildings, if you can help it. If you do want them, as I mentioned, spread them out, mix them with HQ buildings if you're going for the looks. There are many ways for sims to spend money, commercial buildings are just one of many. Build a city with these suggestions in mind, and the stupidity of agents will evaporate for the most part.