Darmok

Anduin Valley Revisited Introduction This will be my second posting of a city, and the first time I'll try to do an entire region. So I humbly ask to bare with me and have a little patience at times. First, to all the modders and batters here at Simtropolis, who made this game the living thing it is now THANK YOU! Hats off to you people! I'd like to point out that the inspiration to post again, comes from seeing the outstanding work of Jeroni with it CJ "Sculpting Columbia River". And one thing he wrote in one of his update, and I quote : ___" This is a suggestion to who wants to hear it, play WITH SC4 and not AGAINST! That's the key." end of quote__ that comment wich is the best advice I've seen in a long time decided me to go ahead and do it! So I'll try to be as patient and as dedicated as he is. This will be done in the same spirit. Wich is that I'm using a lot of mods, including the fabulous NAM, and so much custom bat and lots that I'm afraid to look at the size of my plugins directory. And now, On with the show! Minas Tirith (MT) Phase 1 I chose the Anduin Valley map to do this experiment, because it's not a very big region, and that I like it's diversity. By the way, that terrain was uploaded to Simtropolis by Wraith, in his CJ called Andurin Valley here's the link : https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=31539&forumID=36&catID=8&search=1&searchstring = it's at the bottom of the 7th message as a linked file, but unfortunately it is no longer available. As I've always been a huge fan of the J.R.R. Tolkien books, all the city names will be inspired by all the unusual and interresting names I found in the Lord of the rings trilogy. Minas Tirith should be fairly big, perhaps around 250.000 or so, but with the exception of Osgiliath, the rest should be smaller. Here you can see the basic layout that'll guide me for MT. But I'll probably digress from it from time to time. As you can see the south shore sector should be less crowded, and the north section will be more industrial, commercial and densely populated. The terraforming process begins by laying some tracks around the hillside. There will be also some chosen few who'll live on that hill later on. Some more pics of the terraforming process on and around the hill. In pics 5 and 6 you can see that I've tried to do an acceptable grade for the tracks. In this one you have a global view of the work so far. And here's a zoom on the terraforming of the hill. Please bear in mind that this region will NOT be budget minded, Mayor Darmok recently inherited some huge fortune, and decided to buy some land and create kind of an Utopia region. And being nature minded he'll try to integrate lots of walkways and parks. So be advised that this CJ will probably not appeal to the accountants. So that's it for now, any comments are welcome. I hope you'll like it. If so I'll do my best to keep you updated on a regular basis ! See ya ! Darmok (PICTURES RELINKED ON JUNE 5TH 2008)

Problems with trash and recycling Since "Patch" 7 (if you can call it that..) the trash AND recycling collecting is going south. TRASH First, citizens are teed of because they say the trash isn't collected, so I look at the Waste disposal menu and map, first it indicates that I collect MORE garbage than there is in "reality", 6,399 of 6,003 garbage cans collected!!! So I collect almost 400 MORE cans than there is !!!, and NO I don't volunteer trucks to other cities… Second looking at the map the amount of garbage is LOW (very light brown) NO high or overflowing anywhere on the map. And still they are complaining. RECYCLING Déja-Vu… Followed the recycling (waste) menu/map for an entire game day, NOT ONE of the 32 Recycling Collection Trucks went out!!! NOT ONE! Needless to say thay both of my Recycling plants have stopped production, and moreso they have in Storage Plastic, Alloy and Metal and won't deliver it!!! Anyone having those quirks? Thanks for any input you can give. P.S. I'm beginning to feel sick and tired of those supposed "patch" that create as much problems as they're trying to solve!

Here's a good place to start... There are several good ones

Update 8 downloaded and installed. Reading the Update 8 notes, and I quote : "Recycling and Garbage: Trucks now operate 24 hours a day " end of QUOTE As in several of my cities, despite having 32 trucks (both for recycling and garbage collecting) I have a lot of problems with that part of the "simulation" (for lack of a more accurate term) I was delighted to learn that they were finally addressing the problem... That is until I tested the patch... Methodology : I've tried two things 1- Without any modifications, I loaded the problematic city, opened the garbage map, and let the game play 3 game days and watched. Well, trucks (garbage AND recycling) went out around 6am and came back to garages around 11am having collected only 980 or so garbage cans on a total of 4800 available, and recycling is worst with 7800 or so recycling bins on a total of 55000 or so available 2- Then I tried the old trick of deleting the trucks garages for both garbage and recycing, and let the game play another 3 game days just to be on the safe side.... SAME thing happenned the trucks come back to the garage at 11am and DO NOT GO BACK on the streets till the next morning.... So much for "operating 24 hours a day" ! ! ! Does anybody share a similar situation? Thanks for reading. -John P.S. The sim citizens are protesting at City Hall and at the Mayor mansion as we speak about the garbage situation ;-)

As a matter of fact, yes, I've noticed it on several occasions... just checked my cities in my latest region, turns out that in one of them some "unauthorized" garbage trucks are showing up even if they are not volunteered by the other city ! in another one they are required and volunteered...

Hi Dan, Thanks for your input, every bit count! I'm currently making some tests in a new region, (with dhoppeii), and so far the bug/glitch/problem only appears after a city goes over 100k population AND have bad traffic, if you fail to pick up all trash even just once in 24hrs game time, then the numbers begin to be fudged, strangely enough I've seen two outcomes: 1 - Numbers seemed to be higher than other cities same or almost same size and graphs shows trash/recycling still not picked up AND citizens complaining. 2- Numbers and map are not on par I.E. Map shows NO trash/recycling to be picked up, citizens are NOT complaining about trash, NO ground pollution besides Industry that is. So fed up with this that I'm now trying to develop techniques to keep my cities under or around low 100k population This should be called Simtown and not Simcitiy And to top it off… servers problems… Yup they've "improved" the game… yeah right… P.S. If you make some tests of your own please keep us appraised -John

Am I the only one with that problem? On the Mac version, the "disable random disasters" option is NOT working. I HAVE to do it every time I start the game, because when I forget to do so... wham... earthquakes, zombies, you name it MAXIS listen to this - I AM NOT 6 YEARS OLD! I DON'T WANT ZOMBIES IN A CITY SIMULATION! Is this too complicated to implement? A preference dialog box that ACTUALLY works? Jeez, I'M teed off just lost 20 buildings due to friggin' zombies, ZOMBIES for crying out loud... yeah that's a serious simulation... Everytime they're supposedly repairing some bugs they're creating new ones.... Sorry, just had to vent the frustration... If anyone having the same problem, any of you found a workaround?

Thanks Dan, It's kind of annoying when you HAVE to go into the settings each and every time to disable some "feature" And anyways, I've never found disasters to be a necessary part of the simulation. Even if I don't like them, I can understand floods, earthquake and tornadoes, but VERY SPARINGLY as in real life, but Zombies, Aliens, Robots, meteors and Godzilla should be kept for kiddies arcade games. Well on my PC I don't have that problem, seems to be Mac centric...

The new regions keep this in mind - I especially like one of the jungle maps where the middle spot has three highway connections. I've always tried to keep myself to city spaces where the road cuts through, not simply stopping dead as if the highway planners ran out of cash. I agree, but in the meantime it just look like the game designers at Maxis ran out of common sense...

I don't know about the police helicopters, BUT fire helicopters works extremely well! the thing is if you want them to work, and this is completely counterintuitive, you MUST buldoze ALL firetrucks garages (except Hazmats) place the Fire dispatch tower on the Fire station and some helicopters of course (I have 2 in a 220,000 sims city) and THEN they will extinguish ALL fires except Hazmat fires. Working very well... for a steep cost, of course, but they are not affected by traffic

Forgot one very important point Maxis MUST allow us to create more than one entrance point from the regional highway, this situation is one of the main factor that we have such horrendous traffic, NO CITY EVER had just ONE point of entry! This is causing such bottlenecks that in some of my cities it renders several services totally ineffective, like trash (which in turn affects health), recycling, police and anything that rely on traffic fluidity, as for the fire dept. I use only helicopters so it's OK but it's a totally unrealistic workaround. This is completely and utterly UNACCEPTABLE.

Brubin, I also am a long time SimCity player (since the first version, so yeah a long time, sigh). The following suggestion is not meant as disrespect but rather in the spirit of covering all possible bases... Is by any chance, the game might be on pause?? If not, that's the strangest thing I've read so far on SimCity, but it wouldn't surprise me that you might have found,yet, another bug... -John P.S. By the way I play on both platform, PC and MAC

REAL planning mode Here's something I would love to see implemented. Could go like this : An overlay map on which we could draw AND MEASURE and AT NO COST the road layout of our city. Then when we have the necessary funds we can then chose from that layout the section we want to be created and commit them to the "real" city and then pay for it. But at least we could really plan our city and not pay the full price only to measure with tree row or house of worship or whatever workaround we found!

Good topic. 1. Cities connection, I.E. The ability to connect ALL cities in a region, either they are connected off the bat, or we have the ability to connect them ourselves. Wich would have several benefits. a. Ability to gift to ANY cities on the region map b. Great works usable by ALL cities on the region map 2. Bigger maps of course (flogging a dead horse here) 3. Repair idiocies, I.E. Cannot unlock the processor factory if you exceed the requirements (I only have HIGH tech industries so I can't unlock it because the game requires MID tech industries, so they PENALISE you for being too good!!! 4. One way streets 5. Repair the TRASH/RECYCLING bug where the trash/recycling map is not on par with the numbers (I.E. in several of my NEW cities, the map shows no more trash to be collected, where the numbers says otherwise) 6. Parks that we can plop WHERE we want (no need to snap to street/roads/avenues so we can fill those between sectors holes 7. Ability to plop Homeless centers, like in real life so we can help them and return them to the workers pool. 8. Ability to remove some options like Dr. Vu and Maxis Man (never used them and don't want to EVER use them) I could go forever I think, but for the time being let's go with those YMMV -John

The only way I found to make gift in a secure fashion, is to make your gift, THEN wait until you see the message that it has been received, and THEN wait until the message fades away, THEN without getting out of region view click on the LOAD button of the city to which you gave money, when in the new city, wait a few minutes/hour (game time of course) and it should arrive. Never had any problems after doing it this way... Hope this help -John

Yup it's a private region Dan, but nonetheless I didn't receive your friend invite... I found you on the Origin launcher... sent you a friend request what's strange is that I couldn't find you in-game though... Anyhow request sent.

Latest test... Tried with only 2 garbage trucks They wored until 2pm and then stopped, still the same results, around 1k over 4k (supposedly) so everything is pointing towards faulty numbers.... the graphs are still showing ALL garbage AND recycling is being collected, but numbers are saying otherwise. Would be nice to be able to "reset" these numbers to zero and see what happens...

The city is 10 years old, gamewise ofcourse ;-) I improved it trough thick and thin, so I don't want to ditch it just yet... What can I say, I must be old school, I just can't admit that everytime they'll do an update I'll have to start anew, I like to patiently improve my cities, if we HAVE to abandon them at each patich them I'll stop playing until they finally get it right.... And as a sidebar, I must say that since update 8 the abandonment factor has been horrendous! While before I could see one or so building being abandonned in one day, and sometimes only every few days... Now there is not a single day without lots of abandonment, even went up to 20 abandonned buildings in one single shot ! Never saw that before update 8 !

That would be interesting Dan, though I made a search for "dhoppeii" in the friends list and didn't find you!

Other test on my lunch hour... Same situation but pop is now 181k garbage 1048/4310 recycling 7833/55215 Again garbage/recycling map shows NO residual garbage recycling to be picked, BUT numbers are saying otherwise... There's definitely something broken here... at least with previous saved games... I don't know if thereMs a way to "reset" that situation for the collecting to go as patched, or "supposedly" patched...

Ok, just tested with 4 garbage trucks City (created before the patch) = Bindman's Bluff : 179 000 odd citizens Garbage = 4400 odd cans Recycling = 55000 odd bins Collecting shift started at 6am or so AND ENDED around 11AM, they didn't came back. Garbage collected 1120 odd cans of 4400 or so (with 4 trucks) Recycling collected 7700 odd bins of 55000 or so (with 32 trucks, didn't change their numbers for that test...) So it seems that in cities created before the patch the 24 hours a day shift is not working for recycling and garbage. (at least in my case) And what's strange is that when looking at the graphs (brown and green) there is very little left to be picked, so the graph bars and the numbers do NOT reflect that same data... now which one is broken I don't know, but it's evident that there is still a LOT to be improved on that particular (and for me at least very frustrating) topic... -John

Thanks all, for your input. r00n83, you might be right about the numbers being bugged. Dan, just to test, I created a new region and tested garbage in a new city (sandbox mode)... So far with only 4 trucks I'm up to 1044 trash cans collected (wich represents 100%) and the y don,t stop until every can's picked up, so far they're working until 2pm or so... Now I,m back into "Blindman's Bluff" (174,172 citizens) and I'll delete all my trucks and will try try with only 4 and see where it leads... I'll keep you appraised... -John

There definitely IS a problem with the garbage/recycling collection. Sure, demolishing and rebuilding the garages, "reactivate" the trucks… (which we shouldn't had to do in the first place!) But, after watching all my cities for several game days, the sad fact is, the garbage/recycling collection is NOT effective. First evident problem, they make their round at the rush hour, while in real life they do that BEFORE, at least in every city I lived in! Second, the routing is STILL AWFULL, every truck I followed pass in front of lots and lots of TRASH FULL buildings before deciding to stop at a small house or small commerce, then go and do a very complicated route before stopping again at a medium sized low trash building and in the process managing to pass before lots and lots of FULL trash big buildings without stopping, and after their last stop (the truck only having 1.5 tons out of 5 capacity it returns to the dump and stays there!!!! and it's not a question of not having enough time because in the meantime other trucks are still doing rounds! I guess they must be unionized! The result, even with 32 trucks I only manage to get 6,500 out of 16,800… (and in another one of my cities 32 local trucks plus 32 from two direct neighbhor cities the trash situation is still in the red!) Maxis needs to assess this problem seriously, because trash causes illness, illness needs to be addressed with increased health services which reduce your budget etc. etc. all because they messed up the trash routine! Even if it was not perfect before the patch I didn't have ANY city who had the garbage situation in the red… as soon as I opened the cities after the patch the problem arose instantly there were NO time delay I.E. several game days of play, it just went from OK to VERY BAD in a blink… I really hope they'll fix this.

Thank you both, Locutor and SockoJr53, that was the solution, altough now either the stats displayed in the garbage map are incorrect or the map itself is incorrect because the map show NO garbage left at ALL after the garbage trucks have made their rounds, BUT the statistic says that they have collected only 1400 of 4400 cans ! ! ! The recycling map and stats have the same problem, almost no recycling left to be picked up according to the map, but the numbers says otherwise, around 6000 cans collected of 55 000 ! ! ! Before update 7 garbage AND recycling were in the green, now in the red.... Oh well, I'll try to find a workaround, just hoping I won't have to abandon this city!