donpost

That is brilliant

As OP said, the RCI is misleading. However, so is the "population" chart. That chart only shows you the maximum number of workers, the maximum number of jobs, the maximum number of shoppers, and the maximum number of goods. Then the chart simply does the subtraction. This chart does NOT show how many sims are actually making it to work, or how many sims are actually shopping. The only way to get a good feel for this is to look at the population data layer (the one with 3 people as the icon). If you have "We need money", make sure people in those homes are actually getting to work. There might be enough jobs and no traffic, but the jobs are located too far away for them to get to work. Same with shopping. There may be enough goods, but the goods they need are too far away. Here is a video describing this: (its not mine, btw. This guy makes great SimCity videos. Browse his channel. You'll be a better player for watching them.) *snip* video for size Thanks! That guy's channel is really good. Already learned a lot from just watching one of them!

No idea what you are talking about in 90% of your posts, but I just wanted to say keep up the good work! Mods are what will make or break this game. All hail the modders!

Nice thread! Just a quick comment on the RCI meter. The I bar is based on how many "unfulfilled freight orders" you have, which is meaningless. I just use I as the OP says, to absorb any extra employment after supplying enough C to fulfill shopping demand, The C bar is based on the number of unsatisfied shoppers. The R bar is based on the number of unfilled jobs. So the RCI bar isn't totally useless (well, apart from I). After the latest patch came out with the traffic fix I decided to build a grid city to push it to the limit but instead I find myself painstaking trying to balance RCI by upgrading the density of buildings one at at time etc. It's much more fun! PROTIP - Plan for your R$$$ residents from the start! I waited until I have circa 300 unfilled R$$$ jobs thinking that 300 isn't a big number, but when you only get 1 worker per low density R$$$ household it really is! So now I'm faced with the decision of placing 300 low density houses (and building the parks to increase the land value to make them $$$), or build only a few and wait patiently for them to upgrade. EDIT - QUESTION: Have you been running into any happiness problems in the residential areas? I find that I can have 100% employment amongst my sims, and 100% shopper satisfaction, but still have homes that say "We need money!" or "Where's the shopping in this town?". It's not a traffic issue because my traffic is pretty light.

Great read! I had considered it myself when trying to answer the question of why does my Sim"city" of 30,000 require 4 and 6 lane roads when the town I live in IRL with the same population survives just fine with 2 lane roads (one in each direction). No time compression (between ingame clock and ingame speed) would be a nice solution. I can think of a few drawbacks though. For example can our computers run the simulation fast enough to make an ingame day not take hours of realtime play?

Nice work, oppie! I was hoping Maxis would add the option to build paths on that menu - the community got there first! EDIT: Can you place parks along paths? That would be a whole extra dimension of awesome.

Yes that it correct. And although a resident who has left a high wealth household will look for a high wealth job, the opposite is not true i.e. a high wealth worker will leave work and could potentially go home to a low wealth property if that's what happens to be closest.

I assume we are all aware that resident's don't have permenant homes/jobs, and will instead goto the first job/home they find. It's annoying not to have a feature that even vanilla Simcity 4 had, but I can live with it. However, it leads to more problems on the streets. I tried an experiment: I built one long road across the map, and added some jobs in the form of a coal power plant and some industry about 3/4 of the way along the road. I then built a small bit of residential at the end closest to the jobs, and a large amount of residential at the end of the road FURTHEST from the jobs. When 6am/pm rolls around it's commute time. Roughly half of all the people at work will leave instantly, with the rest leaving gradually after that. The problem is that when all these people leave work they all head for the closest house with space for them, which happens to be the small residential area. So you have 100s of workers heading for a few houses which fill up instantly, leaving the rest of the people to drive all that way for nothing and have to head all the way down the other end of the city back through all of the traffic where the larger residential zone is. This is half the reason why there is so many traffic problems in larger cities. Surely this is an easy fix? You don't have to tie every person to one house and one job, just have some code that prevents 100s of workers all heading to the same house. The same issue affects shoppers, although shoppers tend to leave home gradually rather than all at once so it's no so much of a problem. So now when it comes to bad AI we have: Terrible pathfinding (shortest route chosen rather than fastest route based on road density, or even fastest route based on road density and traffic) Drunken city service vehicles that cannot navigate to their destination (everything from buses and trams to ambulances and garbage trucks) The first-come first-served rush (noted above) Junction AI? What are the chances of all this being fixed do we think? Have I missed out any other AI brainfarts?

I knew there would be server issues on launch and I was willing to put up with that. But reading this thread, and seeing that even the underlying ENGINE and gameplay are a mess too - that's really sad This stuff sounds so fundamental and wide reaching, I'm not entirely confident it will get fixed.

In SC4 you had to have some of each education building, because each building catered for a different age group. Is this true in SC2013, or can I delete "lower level" educational buildings as I move on? So for example, if I have a University, can I just delete all of the other types of school and force everyone to goto University instead?

I've been reading lots of posts about gridlock that cannot be dispelled no matter how you lay out the roads or how much public transport you use. It seems the engine isn't designed with cities with >100k residents in mind.

How would that work? Would all cars in the city start driving in the left when you placed Big Ben? Why would that be desirable? Anyway, it's $20, UK pricing hasn't been announced. Difference between Digital Deluxe and Limited Edition is £20 in UK - and all you get extra is these packs. Madness.

Who in their right mind would pay £20 for this? I guess some people must or it wouldn't be for sale. The British set doesn't even have cars driving on the left!

Have they made the tile siz......just kidding My question is, has there been any improvement to the vehicle pathfinding? What I mean by this is that we were told that cars would take routes to avoid traffic, but in beta 1 this didnt appear to happen so you got one long traffic jam on one road, with the surrounding alternative routes empty.

I love the fact they couldn't even be arsed to get the cars to drive on the left in the British set. I'll still be buying the game - but no way am I spending all that extra cash on a few pretty buildings!