Sunfighter

Id like to point out that the 4500 dollar is a game wide nerf...cause...why not..lets ignore the huge unbalance on high tech and nerf...oil.....which btw...makes it now IMPOSSIBLE to upgrade the oil HQ from is basic level, as you need 160K a day in profits...i have 4 oil mines, their max number of wells each..a small city so traffic is no problem..and I can only get about 100K a day which 160K is needed for the basic upgrade...so yea..the screwed over oil

I think Libraries may be bugged as well. Sim shoppers without money are supposed to go to the Library or at least thats what the description says, yet when i plopped one down, i ended up with MASSIVE traffic problems the next day because every shopper WITH $ decided the library was the place to go. This caused a massive queue in my tiny tiny city. I had to demolish the library to save the town, afterwords each $ person ended up with the message couldnt find X shopping and all angry text...yet....its horsecrap, it has to be because my zoning is like 60%R to 40% C, there is no way they couldnt find shopping. I really dont understand what is going on..other then I hate libraries now... The Public Library....THE place to be....

High tech stuff is retardedly unbalanced right now. There are some people running around with 660 MILLION+ monthly budgets due to TVs and processors being unbalanced. The fact that recycling alone is profitable even before making processors with the leftovers is just mind numbingly strange. There is a reason why cities make you PAY to pick up your recyling..its because recycling is extremely expensive and costly..... I always knew simcity had a green bias, but its crazy how lopsided it is currently

Do you know where the traffic is going?

Experiment number 1: Remove that tail section of high density road intersecting the Ave. And make it a T-Section instead of a 4 way light intersection. I believe a T-intersection for high density street vs ave decreases the amount of time given to the street stoplight wise vs having it a 4 way.

What they are not telling you is they reduced the number of agents by about a quarter traffic wise. If you have any cities you havent touched since that patch, watch your number of jobs and shoppers drop..yet demand stays equal..so they reduced the agents.

50K population? Psh..we dont need any mass transit... If only the AI would stop that herding instinct and use the next bridge over...but...nah...

I shifted one road, and the daily gridlock shifted to the north. I think its time for trams.... I appear to have designed the worst road system ever. Who would of guessed limiting intersections could cause such problems..but thats frankly due to terrible U-turning AI. And here is the traffic a few days later, slightly higher population, but with the addition of one extra road that I hope you notice....thanks to AI herding..the addition of one road can make or break your traffic issues... PS...I think RCI is broken in this game. There is zero demand for C, yet it continues to expand in density regardless of demand...this in turn pushes up Residential demand to huge levels. I dont understand it really.

It makes sense though: In real life home size is usually proportionate to the wealth of the people living in the area. I just think it's modeled a little too extremely here, and I feel like there should be more high wealth people per high wealth tower. After all, there are studio apartments in Manhattan that rent for $5k per month in certain neighborhoods. In addition to get more population, unfortunately you have to use curved roads sparingly. Curves will leave lots of gaps and spaces large buildings can't occupy, so to get the most people packed into your city you need a fairly strict grid system. Ironic after all this time weve wanted curvy roads, but nobody thought about having curvy lots to conform to the curves left by the roads. Should be easy for low density stuff as you just have the lot stretch. Higher desnity could be tough as youd need the whole building to stretch and not look weird.

So the Sims live and work at different places each day? That's extremely realistic..... Its efficient, the only problem is they never taught the agents to communicate with each other. So you get this massive herding instinct. As each agent leaving a certain property (be it home, factory, school etc) is all trying to get to the nearest goal. You saw it in my Jude thread. Due to that lack of agent communication, the ideal of keeping zones separate from each other is actually a very bad thing. As the longer the herd is in the streets, the worse the traffic (foot traffic included) gets as herds run into other herds and it just builds and builds. (you can see this effect very easy by watching an elementary school let out, as the walking school kids all head to the closest house, then ping pong house to house till the mob of kids is devoured by houses). I guess agent communication just took too much processing power..i dunno. I tested this out by trying to have a mixed zone city, as well balanced as I could (its hard to guess the populations needed exactly, due to not knowing exact pop,job, sales needed figures for each city. My mixed city is by far and way the most stable city I have, and one of the happiest. In fact the city is running at near 100 happiness whatever the heck that is. Though it was somewhat difficult early on with air pollution from mixed factories, but that stopped once I was able to get higher tech industry. Oh yea..and the city has next to nothing traffic wise.

The agents are not able to communicate with each other. And thus you are getting the balling up. I guess it was a calculation cutback they decided on or something. I dunno why. Seems like itd be a very simple task to do...but again..maybe im missing a complexity in the glassbox engine that makes such an easy task really difficult.

I had the same bug this morning I think its from this latest patch. Sadly the school that got it was on my main road...the only way i got rid of them was to demolish the school.

That is just plain silly that they did not decide to include subways. Most metropolitan areas have a subway system in place. Maybe it's just me because I live near New York. But still it's not like this game makes it easy for you to get a population of 1 million plus anyway. I don't know what they were thinking or aiming on when they built this version of Sim City. In a way I was surprised as you are it wasn't included. But then again, building tunnels isn't an option either. You can do tunnels...sorta...but it can only in cliff faces, very hard to get the AI to do it though, but they are possible, just for some reason (again i think its tied to the lack of terraforming) they wont let the player have control of it. You can also force large bridges on flat maps, but its very expensive, and very time consuming, you can terraform by tricking the AI into doing what you want, but again...SUPER expensive.... Early on in Spagehtti-O's lifetime... I had to take out all 3 bonds right at the start just for the first bridge...i was actually just playing around with roads..but it became a city for the heck of it just to see how confused i could make the traffic AI...and as you saw in the first pictures..i did a good job.

That is just plain silly that they did not decide to include subways. Most metropolitan areas have a subway system in place. Maybe it's just me because I live near New York. But still it's not like this game makes it easy for you to get a population of 1 million plus anyway. Easy to understand why they didnt. The game really isnt finished to be honest. Even without the server issues, there are quite a lot of obvious bugs. Most are connected to sloppy terraforming by the AI (giving the human control would of probably lead to to the people fixing the issues themselves, but hey too much work). Giving the city an underground would effectively mean designing a whole new underground layer, also EVERYTHING in this game is tied to roads..even the train tracks are effectively seen as roads to the glassbox system. Getting the system to understand that subways are roads too but no cars can drive on it, no water can flow on it, and the like probably takes a lot of work. PS a town of 50K people would never have traffic like this in real life unless it was a ring town around a much larger city. And I dont see much sign of an AI that adapts its routes based on traffic, because as you can see there, there is a totally free bridge there getting no use. And I know an intersection connecting the packed road to that empty one isnt much farther past that bridge, but the AI wants to dogpile on the closest route..so you get what you see there.

SunfighterG8, nobody adds me though because I like crime to be my top export.

psh..fine then. I want to beat my traffic record.... and meet the smartest man in the world. That guy in the white car on the other bridge. Come on now! every region needs an experimenter!

The only way to manage growth is road density, yet with traffic being as horrid as it is, most people op for heavy density streets right away. This causes a chain reaction since building size is based on happyness. This takes a while to build up, but once it does the city starts a rapid pop up which throws peoples services for a loop. The only way to stop this is to IGNORE the traffic problems and upgrade the roads when you feel you are ready.

If you want, You can add me as well, Though keep in mind...i make some off the wall towns for the most part. I like to experiment. My last city, The roads look more like i was playing roller coaster tycoon. I dont care what city to make because in all honesty with 16 maps, it doesnt matter.

Off-Topic...but did disabling the search function really save them on data considering I have to hit the load more button about 750 times?

What youre seeing is low wealth vs high wealth. High wealth demands more space.

AO was like near the starting era of large scale MMOs, so their problems could be forgiven. Its 2013, EA should of had the online stuff down by now, sure maybe not day 1, even day 2 id understand. But 5 days is pathetic for one of the largest PC game companies out there.

When youre the only city in the region, how does the tourist thing work? How is the global thing calculated?

I was originally on NA east 1, but i was getting connection issues, so i switched to NA East 3 is what i ment to say.

NA Server 3 was perfectly fine tonight. I started a new region called Coldwater Delta. And of course...made the weirdest city I could do....

The way the region is set up isolates the cities into groups of 4, but using railways and such in certain maps you can somewhat shift things around. Takes a lot of communication though. Unfortunately trying that out has been very difficult since launch for the obvious reasons