Morticcia

When mapping out my zones, when I want high density/high wealth C & R, I use the soccer field as a place holder. It is the same size as those buildings. Unfortnately the snap to grid issues don't let you be as precise as I would like, so sometimes there is a small zoned slice leftover that I will dezone if it develops. I'm pretty sure the largest industrial building exceeds the largest C & R size.

When I was using community colleges my computer factories woudl begin at 96 ton or units always degraded to 48 units/tons (my game isn't working so forgive my poor memory on the units/tons issue) and stay there. I read on this forum a week or so ago you need the university to amp up your tech and production. Since that time I've used only a uni and watched my factories a little more closely. I build the four comp units per factory and I usually have 3 off the road. The output starts out at 96 units/tons. I've seen the output degrade at some and not at others. I've also seen the output come back after degrading. The uni has only had two modules, one being engineering and I think the second was science. I assume degradation has something to do with the fluctuation in skilled labor.

Every time I start a new city and consider attempting this I fail. I've got builditis and I just can't help building commercial and industrial and then trade and so on and so forth. It's a great exercise to try for those with self control.

I play on private regions only and have had no problem sharing the city hall upgrades. I wonder if it is just lag. How long did you wait to get the benefits?

Done and done.

Well this game is turning into a road and depot sim, so extremely apropos.

I understand. My point is that traffic problems can rear it's head in a village, as well as a city. It's counterintuitive. Having traffic in a 600K city is to be expected. It isn't in a starter 5K village with ample streets and avenues. Do you have a university or a CC in your large cities? In all of my cities the higher ed clogs up the streets. Aside from the bottleneck entry issues, higher ed seems the biggest problem in my cities. I haven't taken the tourist route very far. From those screens someone posted with all the taxis, I can only imagine how that will go. It's ridiculous. Damn I can feel a rant coming on, so I'll just end this. Higher ed is not the driving force behind traffic jams; it is commuters and shoppers, especially those that travel between cities. When I reorganized my city, I moved the community college to a different road and the traffic problems in front of it stopped. I always have higher ed traffic. This city has a pop of 12K, and the uni is on a high density streetcar avenue. And this is the third shift, not even the first shift when the traffic is tons worse:

I have no problem getting sims to cross an avenue.

I have actually tried this and I have had traffic problems. It seems once you reach a certain threshold your screwed. Then again I am not putting down multiple bus and streetcar depots. I've kinda stopped striving for larger cities so I'm not seeing the same type of difficulties these days.

I'm not sure if it's been posted here, but the last three times Godzilla that came to town I bullozed everything in front of him and he disappeared pretty quickly thereafter. There was virtually no costly rebuidling needed. Has anyone else tried this and found it to be true? There's a part of me that thinks I just got lucky.

Hybrid, I have no answer, but a similar situation: I demolished a large and successful trade depot imports>processor>computers industry the other day, keeping just one processor in the same location. I put a new trade depot down right next to this. For a few game-time days I then put down tons of trees to remove the excessive pollution as I went about doing other things in the city. After time had elapsed I put down a computer plant next to the depot and it made computers. Yet none of the depot trucks came to pick up the computers. I watched my game with the trade overlay on, which I usually do in my industry cities, and not a single truck with a computer icon showed up. Now I had no traffic, as the town was mostly residential and just 33K with buses and streetcar. In and out came alloy and plastic trucks. I eventually changed the settings to sell the processers piling up at the depot. These sold like hotcakes, leaving my city quite easily. But nothing was picked up at the new computer factory. The preponderance of trucks I saw were alloy trucks. I grew frustrated. I eventually destroyed the computer factory and put down another processor and haven't spent much time in that city since. I figure I'll go back eventually and try again to find a work around. I'll check back here to see if someone has a reason other than it being another bug with no fix.

This is a good point. I read a bunch of your posts yesterday, that made me think twice about demolishing my very profitable electronic city the other night because of what may happen with the global market. I thought I'd try something else there, but I should have just started a new mini region. When and if the market comes online, it will be mighty dull to have to remake every test city I've done to see how the new variables affect them. So, again, this is great advice that I am taking.

I have had traffic jams in cities of 5K. I had major jams in my current city when it was 14K. And that is with a regional bus system and one streetcar depot and almost all avenues. The residential traffic is shoppers, workers, and those pesky community college students. The city entrance traffic is mostly those going to the in-progress arcology. The city had about 34K with that tourist apartment building by the end of the evening yesterday. The arcology was finished just shortly before I went to bed, and then I destroyed almost all of the electronics industry. We'll see tonight how my traffic is. All I can say is that the kinds of traffic jams you get in 5K cities and the kind you get in 600K cities are worlds apart. Imagine a city where the traffic is so bad that people can't even exit driveways, where the fire trucks are barricaded inside of the fire station, where people sit in traffic not just for hours, but for days and weeks on end. That's the kind of traffic we deal with in big cities in this game. I understand. My point is that traffic problems can rear it's head in a village, as well as a city. It's counterintuitive. Having traffic in a 600K city is to be expected. It isn't in a starter 5K village with ample streets and avenues. Do you have a university or a CC in your large cities? In all of my cities the higher ed clogs up the streets. Aside from the bottleneck entry issues, higher ed seems the biggest problem in my cities. I haven't taken the tourist route very far. From those screens someone posted with all the taxis, I can only imagine how that will go. It's ridiculous. Damn I can feel a rant coming on, so I'll just end this.

I know you found a workaround, but I wonder if you zone a new section of industry with a CC nearby, would that work? In all my region attempts, I have kept my university in a different town than where I've tried out electronics and other specializations. I prefer the CC. I know this is a minority opinion, but I haven't been thwarted since abandoning that damn university.

I'm pretty sure the 5.4K jobs number is accurate. But everything I believe is speculation. I've heard, watching youtube strategy videos, that sims don't keep a job or a house. Everyday they move out of their home and get a new job. They get the first available job they come to in their wealth bracket. They keep driving around until they get a job or go home pissed off there are no jobs. I have not watched my sims closely enough to confirm this theory. If this theory is true, then maybe only 1K of those commuters get a job. Or it could be that all or a portion of the 4K commuters get a job, but that the same job was held by one of your sims on that same day. They take over the job when that sim leaves for the day. Or it is a bug. But that would be suprising, now, wouldn't it?

I was working on a city with limited usable land and I stabilized the economy with mostly $$$ residential/commercial/$$industry. I had virtually no RCI abandonment issues. At one point I was impelled to put down more residential when an out-of-the way oil rig and trade depot needed staffing. I neglected the new residential area severely, as I didn't put any services nearby. It stayed low density/low wealth as I attempted to use the oil profits to start up a computer industry. This area kept needing to be bulldozed due to fire and no money. I am pretty sure this area kept getting abandoned because my my industry and commercial interests were all medium wealth and above. I had no low wealth jobs for these guys. Long answer long, check the type of wealth level and make sure you have jobs that are at that level. A low wealth sim needs a low wealth job. A medium wealth sim needs a medium wealth job. edited: formatting gaffe

Absolutely. I always forget about those. When I used the medium wealth parks, my nearby residential stays medium wealth. The low wealth probably does the same.

I have had traffic jams in cities of 5K. I had major jams in my current city when it was 14K. And that is with a regional bus system and one streetcar depot and almost all avenues. The residential traffic is shoppers, workers, and those pesky community college students. The city entrance traffic is mostly those going to the in-progress arcology. The city had about 34K with that tourist apartment building by the end of the evening yesterday. The arcology was finished just shortly before I went to bed, and then I destroyed almost all of the electronics industry. We'll see tonight how my traffic is.

That can happen. I confess that I am a lot less interested in balancing my RCI based on the details screen than I was two weeks ago. I'm zoning a lot of industry in the beginning to make money and find I'm bulldozing most of once it gets higher density and I get access better income streams. If a high tech zone can't find workers, it's time dezone the space. If the same commercial block keeps having problems finding customers then, I replace it with more residential. I'm not playing to the details screen and I am slowly making my way, trying the different specializations, and I can make lucrative cities. It's one option. It's not the only option.

Parks and services will boost the land value within a certain distance. So to keep your land value low and try for density, you need to create jobs (I) and a place to buy happiness ©. Density will come eventually if use avenues or medium or high density streets.

The phrase "big city" is too vague. Is your goal 400K or 40K? What does big city mean to you? If you only have one city in the entire region, without a great works project, you may be able to get by with high density streets and buses up to a point. If you decide to add a specialization that requires trucks, then you will most likely need avenues if you're looking for multi-million dollar paydays.

Truck shipping is a pain. Any serious traffic and you're going to go broke when doing expensive specializations like electronics. When I first encountered the problem I was trying out the oil rigs and just learning to get a handle of the whole freight process. In order to get the larger depot you need to make a certain amount of trade in a day. Yet you can't make that amount of trade because your frickin' trucks get stuck in traffic for 18 hours trying to get back into your city. I kept building trade depots until it took one run of trucks leaving the city to get the trade building upgrade. Once I got trade normalized with the trade dock, I could bulldoze all of those trade depots. I learned then that, for me, shipping by water rules. The bigger depot means less acreage wasted on the depots to hold large amounts of your end-product and the ships come regularly and pay you for a lot of goods at once. I built my first large-scale computer/electronics city yesterday in a land/rail only city. The train rarely came and when it did, most times it didn't pick up any freight. I bulldozed it. By keeping my city small (less than 15K in mostly high density housing) and finagling my streets I was able to give my trucks the right of way and it didn't take long to make a hefty profit. edited content - unfinished thoughts

You don't have to have every variation of wealth and density in your city to have a robust economy and a stable city. You can definitely have low density/high wealth housing, which mostly look like colonial mcmansions, and high density/low wealth housing, which look like your typical square brick slum. I've been able to get low density/high wealth pretty instantaneously. High density of any kind takes a little bit longer.

It's because of all the services your city provides.. Unfilled jobs is the opposite of unemployment.. You have 2 choices. First, you can cut on these services or try to outsource some of them to other cities. Or secondly, you zone more Residential to provide more workers.. I think there is a third choice, and that is to ignore it. If it's not causing you problems with growing a stable city, ignore it.

Is there an FAQ somewhere to help new forum surfers get up to speed with the lingua franca? My first desire is to understand the definition of STEX, as I am seeing it used as both a thing and a place. Could it be an adjective too? I fully cop to having reading comprehension problems, which is why a linquistics key would be helpful for me. Thanks. Tish