cjuk88

You don't but it helps because cruise ship docks bring in medium & high wealth tourists, and you can have as many as you like, which means you can manage traffic well. Tourism is still a little bugged. my big tourism city basically seems to have an unlimited tourist draw now. Almost like having x number of high wealth tourists has attracted more, and it snowballs. Its got to the point that if I load the city and play for a game year, I have to quit because I have 2 avenues, the length of the entire map full of cars trying to leave the city. This is because more tourists come than there are things to do, and after a while they just leave. Building more attractions worsens the problem because it causes even more tourists to arrive. If I demolish the city and leave it for a game year with nothing built, the tourist drive doesn't fall away. However, this is better than the v1 tourism which was completely unpredictable... My top tips for casino cities: 1) Make sure you target the type of tourist you want. If you want only high wealth, don't attract too many med/low wealth 2) Use commercial zones to make hotels. Make sure you create enough hotel beds for your casino patrons. 3) Use ferry docks and airships to bring in the med/high wealth, and position them close so that tourists walk (so as not to create too much traffic) 4) Try to have as little population as you can get away with to staff your buildings. Gambling cities will generate traffic, so you want to minimise the amount of other traffic that you might generate

Computers are very good. However, my new most profitable city, believe it or not, is my new gambling city. Playing in the Grand Haven map in the Reflection Atoll region I have made a city that is currently running on 334k per hour in gambling & tourism profits. I have 2 MW elite megatowers with Elite Tourism crowns making 44k an hour profit, and then the remaining 290k comes from a total of 6 maxed out Elegant casinos. My biggest challenge is making sure I have enough high wealth hotels so that tourists stay in the city and traffic doesn't go mental. Its become a bit unplayable on my laptop though as my high wealth tourist draw is up to 146k tourists, and so there are literally tens of thousands of them walking around...

Just to confirm: to see a users cities, do the following: Log on to the correct server In the main menu, click on 'Friends List' in the top right corner Search for their origin ID Click on their avatar, this will bring up a list of their games. Voila!

@REvolverRPG: I think the best way to look at another players city is to search for them by Origin ID... I'll look into it. I'd post pictures but I play the game on a Macbook Air (HD4000 graphics) so I have to play on minimum! That is until I get my new Macbook Pro with GT750M.... In terms of profitability, Offices are by far the most profitable tower levels. However, you need to apply them well for maximum results. Having all your offices in their own tower s allows you to make best use of hologram advertising crowns. I think that the key to making towers work well is understanding what they need in terms of workers/shoppers/happiness/etc.. and making sure you have good transport links. In general, I think its fair to say that the best way to make money in general is to employ some kind of specialism. It is entirely possible to make profitable cities without specialising, but the big profits are always found there. A good basic tip is always to make sure you are maximising recycling, and to take advantage of importing power/water/sewage capacity.

No worries... Skybridges definitely work for me. I can see agents moving between them, and also clearly see the difference in traffic on the roads below. However, as with all these things, you need to think about your traffic flow. Skybridges are really only useful if your residents have a reason to go to another tower. This really only applies if you have offices or malls. I typically keep malls in the residential towers. I haven't yet experimented with having them seperate. In my 'TowerTown' city (feel free to have a look at it. Server: EUW1, Region: Tomorrow Atoll, User: cjuk00) where I have all RCI in towers, and only services which can't be in towers outside them, I have skybridges. But In my Omega town, where all work is in factories, and only apartments and malls are in the towers, I don't have them since there is no reason for a sim to travel to another tower... All residential towers are the easiest for sure, but also by far the least profitable. Gen 2 crowns are researched at the Academy for regular towers. Gen III and Gen IV are for Elite towers. I was wondering if you could clarify that up a bit. I did put my $$ in regular megatowers, and they still complained about the low land values.I assumed this is because I placed that regular tower in a low-value area. From what I've figured out, the land value of the tower is determined by the land it is placed on, regardless of the wealth level of the apartments or the kind of tower (elite or normal). If I'm wrong, please let me know, as this is why I asked for the clarification. I don't buy this at all. It seems to make no difference to me. The happiness of residents with land value is exactly the same is with normal zones. If the land value is right, it makes them happy. if it isn't, they'll be unhappy. However, if they have lots of work, lots of shopping, parks, schools, etc... then the fact that the land value is low won't matter. A couple of parks round the tower is a quick fix. Absolutely. I believe that the sims don;t derive extra happiness from land value above whats required, but it certainly works fine. In my academy city, virtually all my land value is high wealth, and no issues with my med wealth tower residents.

@TheVintek: To clarify: Maxis said that there was a bug concerning the movement of agents within Megatowers that will be addressed in the next patch. Essentially, agents (workers, shoppers, even sometimes power and water) get stuck within a tower. This could be responsible for multiple issues: Sick sims never getting to a hospital, shoppers not making it to malls in the same tower, workers not making it to jobs right outside and complaining of no work, etc... For me, this issue is fixed with a reload. However, you have to understand that the reaction time of the status messages to changes is slow. So, for example, you may have some sick sims, they get treated, but the level may continue to abandon for a day or so after before it returns to happiness and re-populates. This is true of all buildings, but more so of megatowers which seem a bit 'laggy' in this respect. I'm not sure this is a game breaking issue really, because the delay sometimes works in your favor. Eg: You have unemployed residents, but they won't complain for a few days giving you time to create jobs.

For me, I think: The hotels issue seems to be fixed for me. I now have a cambling/tourist city with lots of normal shops that haven't turned into hotels... RCI is fine. Works well. I actually like the new method better. Its more fluid. Transport works great for me now. Several city plots have multiple region entrances, which I like. So I'd like to see: Megatower bugs fixed. Malls seem particularly odd. Maybe I'm missing something... New interesting regions Mac performance improved. It really does seem to underperform on my Mac in OSX compared to windows (vis Bootcamp)

Personally, with Maglev, I'm not sure I see the attraction of subways anymore? Now you have several transport options that don't compete for roads. And certainly, lots of tunnelling can definitely become tricky (as indeed it is in real life!). For me, I'm really enjoying this game. If anything, I'd say that CoT has made it too easy. All my cities end up making 25-50k an hour before specialisations.

@Griffon: Exactly. All the sims live in the towers, and work outside. As such, there are no skybridges between towers, as all the shopping they need is within the tower they live in. This is very useful as it saves a level! Now, I still think the mall levels are bugged, but due to the way megatowers appear to work in the game engine, its very hard to tell exactly whats going on. Let me explain: So, with normal commercial, you build up a residential area, and that creates shoppers and in turn a demand for commercial. You build commercial buildings, and once they get stocked with workers, their goods become available, and provided they get sold, you get happy sims and profitable commercial districts. Any sims who needed shopping, but don't make it to the commercial won't feel the benefits, and the commercial won't sell all their goods and will complain. Either way, this is reflected in the numbers in the Population dialog. However, this isn't the case with megatower malls! You build them, and then the apartments are instantly happy, but despite having less goods than shoppers, they often lose tons of money. The pop stats window says everything is good. Typically, they work OK when they are built, but quickly reach a point when they never work. I suspect this is tied to the bug of agents getting stuck in the towers... My next plan is to try an 8 elite megatower city, and see exactly how many office levels I can get to work in a tower, so I can try and get more than 500k a day pre-bonus tower profit

@Griffon: So An update: I have successfully built up a 400k pop Omega city, whereby all shopping and residential is catered for in Megatowers, and all work (factories and services) are outside the towers. This seems to work flawlessly. No complaints about workers. I have however seen the glitch that Maxis have admitted to, which is that sometimes worker (and presumably shopper) agents get 'stuck' in the tower. However, I find that a game restart and waiting a day fixes this, and all is well again. Obviously for the above to work, you have to have good transport to your towers, as in the case of say a low wealth tower, that can be thousands of workers trying to leave via the road exit at any one time! So far, in this city I have the following: - 4 completely low-wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments) - 2 completely med-wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments) - 2 multi purpose towers (1 LW mall, 3 apartments, 1 MW mall, 2 apartments, Nuclear reactor) I think this is pretty optimum, but I am going to try going with mixing up the wealths, so that the amount of traffic around the low wealth tower decreases. I'll pop a park crown on top for happiness. --------------------- In other news: I have successfully built up a self sufficient elite megatower city with the following towers: - 2 High Tech office towers (6 High tech offices, skybridge, waste reduction, ad crown) [These make 750-900k a day with 100% bonus] - 4 high wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments) - 2 med wealth towers (2 malls, 6 apartments) So for high tech offices, the ratio seems to be 1:2:1 offices:MW apartment:HW apartment Because I have the offices all together, this city has all services etc... and still makes 50k an hour...

I remember something else too: My Academy city inevitably needs low wealth workers, and since my Omega town is mostly low wealth, I thought I would try and get some commuting going between the 2. Turns out, residents of megatowers seem particularly un-inclined to commute out of the city. Even when I deliberately created 2000 extra workers, and put a train station and bus terminal outside their tower, they wouldn't commute out... Same went for high wealth tower residents from the academy city over to the Omega town. How odd....

I've been playing around a lot with Megatowers with interesting results. I started a new region (In Reflection Atoll - EUW1, user: cjuk00 name: Tomorrow Atoll. For those who would like to take a look) with the intention of building up a selection of cities as follows: First, a Utility/Seed city to provide startup cash and utilities to the others Second, an Omega city. Lots of industry, big Omega Corp. Third, An Academy city. Clean/Green, lots of high wealth Then probably a gambling town and an eco university town to finish it off. Currently, I have a self sufficient Utilities town that breaks even, has balanced jobs (no commuting) and provides garbage, sewage, water and ~600MW of power to the Omega and Academy cities. In the Omega city I have 8 standard megatowers that contain all the residential for the whole city. I have a couple of Mall units. Then there is a ton of industrial, community colleges for education, and some commercial for shopping. In the Academy city, I have 8 Elite megatowers. In this city, I tried very deliberately to have minimal low wealth jobs, so that I wouldn't need to have a lot of low wealth residential or low wealth commuters. So from this exercise, I have learned a bunch of things: Sims will happily find all their work outside the megatower. So all residential towers work well, although make little money. Sims seem to pay less tax per head when in a megatower, so as above, residential towers tend to make ~15k a day Sims sometimes have trouble getting to education outside the tower. Even though I have a community college right outside each 2 megatowers in my Omega city, and enough desks for everyone, there are still a bunch of people not enrolled for no reason... I haven't tested to see if school buses fixes this... Mall levels are seriously bugged. I can only reliably get them to work when they are in the same tower as the residential units. And even then, its touch and go... Sims don't seem to shop in a megatower mall unless they live in a megatower. Whats particularly odd about the malls is that you'll have lets say 1500 unsatisfied mid-wealth shoppers. So you build a mall for them. Now the pop stats window will tell you that now there are an extra 1k (or whatever the number is) goods available, and an extra 1k satisfied shoppers, yet your mall level will report huge losses. This is in contrast to regular commercial which tends to be more consistent. Eg. if you have all goods sold, you have happy zones. This is not true in megatower malls. It seems that pop stats will tell you goods are sold, but the mall dialog will report no sales... Offices work very well in megatowers. In my Academy city I have 2 elite towers which are all high-tech offices (except for a skybridge). Add some holo crowns and these pay for my entire city and then some. I have 0% tax accross the board and make 35k an hour... However, a bit like casinos and tourists back in v1, the numbers fluctuate wildly. So you have to ignore the instantaneous numbers and just look at daily profits. My 2 towers with a 4 crown holo bonus make ~500k a day each! Sky bridges don't appear to have a level 'cost'. It doesn't seem to affect sims if they are in the middle or not.... However, Sky bridges do seem to have distance cost. So if your sims go from their tower, to the work tower via another, then that is a longer 'commute' and can sometimes lead to the old open jobs and out of work sims problem. I'll keep experimenting and let you guys know how I go!

Do not demolish and rebuild. If you do, chances are most of your service vehicles (construction trucks, ambulances, fire, police, streetcars, etc...) will be lost forever. When you rebuild your services you'll be paying for vehicles but they won't appear. I have abandoned a dozen or so 150k+ big, good cities because of this crippling bug

Ive tweeted the devs about it. For me, this is the number 1 game breaking bug. Most of the others really only affect certain styles, or just require you to understand the game mechanics and work around them, but this will eventually make every city unplayable, if your the type of person who likes to demolish and improve over time (which has got to be the vast majority of players, surely??). Traffic is fine, not perfect, but fine. Commuters are manageable Casinos don't bother me Trade works well for me on some servers But this is literally forcing me to abandon city after city

Is there any improvement on this? This seems to be pretty game breaking. I don't know about you, but when I'm experimenting with a city - trying to optimise bits of it - I demolish whole sections and rebuild them regularly. To me, that is the whole point of a city builder... However, it seems that this often happens, with multiple kinds of service vehicle. I have one city, which I have completely demolished 4 times. My process for doing this to avoid losing the service vehicles is as follows: 1) First start by demolishing all mass transit stops (buss stops, streetcar stops). This will force all vehicles to go back to their garages eventually, as they won't have anyone to pick up. 2) Once transit vehicles have returned to their garages, switch the buildings off. Wait a bit, then demolish 3) Turn off police/fire/hospitals/recycling/garbage, wait for vehicles to return, then demolish Then demolish the down, from the furthest point away from the highway, toward the highway. All vehicle agents will end up leaving. The first 3 times I did this, I had no problems with Police, Fire, Recycling/Garbage, or buses. But now streetcars are all gone, and i'm missing 5 ambulances I find this unbelievably frustrating, and this needs to be fixed with the utmost urgency. Is there a way to 'recover' them?

I don't think this is a deliberate fudge. The workers numbers don't appear to be fudged, so it wouldn't make sense for a job to be fudged. There does however seem to be an issue whereby a job exists, say at a commercial building, but then at some point it stops existing (you demolished it, it upgraded density, etc..) but those jobs don't disappear from the total, in certain circumstances. Personally I have no problem with the fudged population total. It serves no purpose in the game anyway, so thats fine. Here's my take on jobs though: Instead of worrying lots about the unfilled jobs number, think of it this way: A building has say 400 jobs (HD commercial, for example). However, it doesn't need all 400 to function. In fact, often times the minimum worker requirement is much less, especially with ploppables. Equally, the most important thing for residents is that they have a job, so that they stay happy and don't run out of money. So, now, in all my cities, I actually normally find a balance with about 10% unfilled jobs. This normally means no building has a 'worker shortage', and sims have job options. Not to mention, in an RC city, if you wan't to aim for 100% shopper satisfaction, then I find you normally need more C than jobs alone would suggest

I think that these issues are totally fixable within the current architecture. The beauty of an agent system is that its easy to change the rules that govern the agents. The real question is will it be fixed in time to 'save' the game from a slow fade out. EA need to repair the game in order to claw back from the PR nightmare. But beyond that, they aren't going to flog a dead horse....

This is a good read. I personally think that for the most part, the actual traffic system works very well. Its realistic, and fairly intelligent. There are a couple of improvements that can be made, but for the most part, its good. The issues we are all experiencing seem to have more to do with the agent AI, than with the traffic system. Take the service vehicles as an example. The issue with garbage collection is not traffic, its that the vehicles appear to take a pretty random route, that often leads them following each other around, instead of dividing themselves up. Obviously in a town where there is crazy traffic at 5am, that is going to slow down collection. Take the traffic quantities as another example: in a sensible city with a good workers/jobs balance and no insane commuter numbers, this again works pretty well. The problems come when you suddenly get an unlimited number of visitors from the region because of an acknowledged issue with mass transit. So yeah, this is interesting, and I think for the most part it is great. But there are still a lot of issues that need addressing in order to fix our traffic problems. But they aren't really issues with the road system

Actually, I think you'll find that there is a hotel somewhere spewing them out infinitely. There does seem to be a small bug where a hotel (as in a C building that is a hotel, not a ploppable) will generate waaaay more cabs than it has guests. Demolish that hotel and you should return to a sensible number...

I understand the reasons for the agent system, and it makes perfect sense as an approach if you're trying to have a 'real' simulator - one where what you see is whats actually happening, as opposed to a vague approximation of what is essentially a spreadsheet behind the scenes (SC4) However, It does seem that in order to make this transition they have abandoned a lot of the 'realism' that was present in simpler simulations like SC4. I would personally much rather have some visual trickery and more logic behind the scenes. For me, though, the agent system is not in itself broken. A few changes would make it infinitely more realistic: 1) People should not all leave at the same time for work. It should be random what time they leave, say between 6-8am, as an example. So you have a realistic traffic distribution. 2) Instead of agents going to the closest available job first, why not have a weighting system (like they now do with road usage) so that they'll go to a random job, but thats weighted toward ones that are closer. So again, you'd have a more realistic traffic flow 3) Tune the performance of intersections by allowing better light timings, and by allowing 2 sides of an intersection to flow at the same time. Or, even simpler, allow turning on red lights 4) service vehicles should not behave like normal sim agents. They should, at the time of being 'summoned' (by a fire or start of shift) have a route plotted for them individually. So although this takes way more simulation power, you're only doing it for relatively few service vehicle agents, not the thousands of sims. So fire trucks would respond 1 truck to 1 fire, no matter the size (yes, not realistic, but better than 5 going to 1 fire when there are 3 fires!) and garbage vehicles would have a route plotted for them that divides them amongst the map in an efficient way. 5) Apply a weighting to shoppers and tourists too. Instead of them going simply to the closest appropriate building, these should be weighted. Sims should want to go to fancier landmarks more, even if they are further away. Casinos should be the same, if I build a fancy casino, it should draw gamblers away from the gambling houses. Its fancier! 6) Streetcars should have plotted routes. I'm OK with buses being more random, because if you make them go round every stop in a prescribed route, it becomes really inefficient unless you let players set routes, which is much more complicated. But streetcars should follow a loop. The game should plot a route, from the depot, and back to the depot, which stops at every stop with the least travel distance possible. Yes, its not ideal, but it would prevent the completely random wait times that you currently have. Streetcars should leave the depot at minimum intervals to avoid clumping. 7) lastly, trains should visit all stations in a city in the same way as above, with equal preference. These 7 things would transform the game into something way more playable, and don't require creating complete agent persistance, which I understand would essentially require a complete rethink of how the engine works.

The quickest way to do this is as follows: Get the dirt road tool, set it to straight. For this explanation, consider the four corners to be NW,NE,SE,SW (clockwise). Go to the NW corner, start the road from the intersection of the 2 guides that appear. Hold shift, so you can draw at exactly a 45 degree angle. Draw a road to the middle of the map. Do the same from the NE corner. Where these roads intersect will be the exact map center. Delete the overshoot so that the roads form a 'V' holding shift again, draw a road straight up from the center of the V. This is your centerline Using the desired road, select the circle tool. Now, if you pick a starting point for the circle anywhere along the centerline and, holding shift, drag to the exact map center, you will have a perfect circle that is perfectly centered. Voila!

I have found a couple of tips for tourism that I will share: 1) Train stations are bugged. In every city I have multiple stations, the trains (and waiting times) are heavily biased to the station with the shortest track distance to the city border, so you need to only have 1 station next to tourism land, or make sure your stations have similar track distances, otherwise your tourists will end up there. 2) Streetcars are the same. Because of the retarded AI of the Streetcars, I had 5k tourists in my town, but when I looked at the data layer, I had a total of 2k of them waiting at various streetcar stops. The lesson here is to either avoid streetcars until they fix them, or have few streetcar stops, or don't put them in your tourism center. 3) Municipal buses are excellent at bringing in tourists, but tourists will always arrive at your bus terminal, so make sure that is in town 4) Boats are great, but can also be bugged by crazy inexplicable wait times 5) Expo center is by far the best way to bring tourists in. Its very cheap and brings in a lot. 6) Before building any casinos, build a successful tourism center with lots of profitable landmarks. I can make 10k an hour in my best tourism city on just landmarks... Other than the above, you need to understand a couple of geme mechanics here: There are 3 kinds of sims at play here: Residents (shoppers from your city), Visitors (shoppers from other cities in the region), Tourists (these come from nowhere). All 3 kinds will visit an expo center, but only tourists will visit a casino. So just because you have full expo events doesn't mean you'll have full casinos... Make sure you don't focus too much on your hourly budget. Casino/Landmark profit per day is what counts. You will find that you will make money during some parts of the day, and make nearly nothing the rest of the time. Don't worry about this. Just look at the daily profit. It is true though, that the bigger casinos are much less profitable than the gambling houses. In fact, you will never make any money out of the big casinos without mid and high wealth tourists. The sleek casino, for example, won't even break even when its full of low wealth tourists. You need medium wealth and high wealth.

Not always... some pieces become permanent. However, i find this only happens with industrial areas

I agree with hert. I have built several large 150k+ cities with various specialisations and have learnt how to manage the traffic. There are still problems, but these are all to do with traffic intelligence, not quantity. The first major problem is the pathfinding. I actually don't have an issue with sims having to arrive on the right side of the street on medium density streets and higher. That makes sense. However, I have a problem with the way the traffic negotiates that limitation. Some examples: 1) I had a avenue running east west, with a high density street intersecting it from the south (actually the road that forms part of the stadium.) Accross opposite that T intersection is a casino, placed on the avenue. before I plopped the stadium, cars would only exit and turn right from the casino. OK that makes sense. Then, i plop the stadium. This forms a trafffic light intersection near the entrance of the casino. Great! now instead of going all the way to the end of the avenue to uturn and leave, they can exit the casino, and then almost immediately uturn. But they dont, they go down into the stadium, and uturn there?? 2) On a HD avenue, the three lanes are divided approaching intersections. Left lane is for left turns, u turns, or straight ahead (if there is no left turn). Right lane for right turns, center lane straight ahead. However, at a T intersection, traffic only moves from one road at a time. Instead of in real life, where normally traffic is moving on 2 roads at once. 3) There appear to be certain intersections where cars can't u-turn 4) its silly that cars cant turn accross low density streets and dirt roads

And to clarify: EA haven't done anything illegal. Not even close. These things happen. Should they: No! Game releases should be better than this. But they do. And they will. Go to the pub :-)