xcorps

Great post, very interesting.

Cynical, but true to a large degree. http://www.neoseeker.com/news/21277-ea-touts-sports-titles-digital-sales-as-driving-force-for-q2-fy13-results/ Will my 60 bucks make a difference? No. But I look at 1.8 billion in revenue and profit of only 49 million and can see that's not a good return, even though it's double from the previous year.(Piracy and DRM didn't make that difference, but I bet the corporate line says otherwise). So if enough people don't plop down 60$, maybe (though I seriously doubt it) EA will have a management turnover that will begin to turn the ship around to a better business model that focuses on enjoyment of the product rather than exploiting the purchaser.

You are/were a computer professional with decades of experiance, right? Your perspective of the "not a toaster" is vastly different than a person who just wants to play a game in their leisure time. I shouldn't have to learn the ins and outs of Winx security features to load a darn game. It's ludicrous. It's like saying you have to know the gap setting on your spark plugs before you drive to the store. Needing to know how to secure your machine from unknown intrusions that you unwittingly agree to is not the hallmark of good business. You shouldn't buy this game, but not because you don't want to learn how to secure your machine. You shouldn't buy this game (or any other EA title) because you shouldn't support bad business practice.

I bought the Simcity 4 Deluxe Edition on Steam 3 weeks ago, the File Version for the .exe is 1.1.641.0 When I installed SPAM, I didn't see an option to use a traffic simulator. To make sure I didn't break anything, I just need to rerun the traffic simulator configuration tool, set everything to the default values, and save it? ( I actually did this when I installed NAM, but haven't touched it since) Thanks for the information on the hole digger and the link. I haven't (yet) gotten to the point where I'm messing with elevations of transit (I haven't even tried trams, monorails, or el rail yet) but it's good to know for the futcha.

It was indeed SPAM, many thanks for your response.

I see that options for ordinance mods are limited. It doesn't appear there's been much modding on the ordinances, are there any non cheat mods that you recommend? (looking more for "flavor" type stuff than instant problem solving stuff) What is the appeal of the "Hole Digging Lots" mod? I was at work browsing through mods with my phone last week and discovered a nice Agriculture mod that greatly expanded on farms. It included the ability to make non square lots and other cool features. My lovely bride, a dedicated techniphobe and card carrying luddite, erased my browsing history on the phone. Any help with the name of that mod? From my first Simcity 4 game, a few questions on transit: Some rail help..(NAM installed) I built a city comprised entirely of industry and some commercial to provide jobs for what I intended to be my resident only city. The road and avenue system was tied by highway to the resident city, and I ran rail and provided passenger stations throughout both cities (about every 6-8 squares along the rail right of way when it passed by zones I wanted to tie in. My residential city was compromised of a 6x6 block of 6x6 High Density residential, with avenues around the main block and through the center, with rail around the avenues and the passenger stations tied in. I initially started with a rail station for each 6x6 zone, but as the population grew, the passenger stations hit as high as 600% capacity. I don't know much about the transit system, but I know that isn't a "good thing"..so I plopped more train stations down. Interestingly, if I plopped a train station adjacent to another, the demand didn't cut in half. Sometimes it would drop to 500%, sometimes 300%, but there was never an even distribution of passengers. I eventually ended up with a "wall" of passenger stations to get the capacity numbers lower than 200%. The same thing on a smaller scale happened with the destination stations in the industrial zone. In some areas, it would take 5-6 stations to get what I believed to be a decent capacity, in some places only 2-3. I assumed this was because of job density (at this point it was all hi tech hi density) but exploring the job numbers didn't support that conclusion as the jobs seemed to be fairly evenly dispersed throughout the industrial area. I noticed the same begin to happen in the commercial district, but I suddenly discovered ped malls and lost interest in getting the passenger numbers down as I began to construct the most convoluted series of pedmall supported commercial zones I could come up with. I guess my question from that WoT is: How can I plan a passenger rail transit system that provides 5 star service but still gets the sims to work on time? Regarding ped malls: When I discovered the fun of ped malls, I began utilizing them to abuse the road sytem by putting commercial districts anywhere and everywhere I could fit them. I even had zones with no road access at all, just ped malls tied into rail/subway lines. The zones grew and developed, but I am wondering how that affects the customer count. I even experimented with extremely long districts (like 20 tiles long) with only one way in and one way out, but I couldn't really get a feel for how it works. All the guides say "commercial needs traffic through" but I'm not sure if what I was seeing was due to the demand buff you get from ped malls, or if the sims were just that satisfied with my city. I didn't really run into any problems until I hit a population of 180k, but the whole city started to collapse at that point. I don't have a really good grasp on why just yet, but I'm starting anew and hope to plan a more efficient system. Regarding freight: I initially including quite a few freight stations on my rail network. They were completely unused. I guess the drive to the seaport was short enough to keep the trains pretty empty. Anyone know of a good guide for how freight works? Many thanks for reading my TLDR, and thanks for your insight.