gmart530

My one city (230K) has seen improvements in garbage collection. Strangely the overlay says that about 3500/3700 bins are picked up yet it's showing no sites holding garbage. I have noticed a better collection of recycling however. Sadly recycling seems to cap out at around 6,000 bins for some reason. The trucks can only carry so much, and there's no way I'm building a second recycling center, it takes up too much space for the sizes of these cities, especially ones with undulating terrain. I have noticed small pockets of air pollution though not to the degrees that others do. My city never really has any traffic issues to begin with aside from standard rush hour. I think the biggest issue, as others have pointed out, lies in traffic lights. Lights in an actual urban environment are on timers to coincide with each other, that way corridors/arterials are actually flowing. From what I can tell, driving in these SimCity's would be like a personal hell, constantly getting hit with every light. It leads me to believe that the lights themselves are all completely independent from one another creating a whole host of issues in our cities. To fix this though, I can't even begin to imagine how maxis would handle this. Edit: As for the rest of the fixes, I've still got empty desks and uneducated sims for some reason, so I'm not sure if the University is working correctly or if the out-of-town students are taking spots of students in the city.

What? Are we reading different patch notes or something ? It appears we are actually, the notes posted on the subreddit: Traffic: Medium density roads now create traffic lights at intersections with other roads and avenues of equal or higher density. This appears to be different from the official EA post. Normally I'd ere on the side of the official EA post, but the subreddit is posted by Maxis official. I could be wrong and am now scratching my head why the two posts are different. edit: source

Also interested to see, though I feel like there are some core elements still missing. While traffic's been tweaked I still don't think it's properly working, I've had oil delivery trucks take the most round about way and ultimately cause my plant run out, various other issues with industrial "shipping freight", garbage seemingly be impossible to be completely picked up beyond 8,000 or so cans, education being sporadic despite having plenty of desks open (though maybe this is being fixed). My biggest concern is actually the addition of street lights to medium density streets. Traffic lights so far have been the number 1 enemy when it comes to traffic, now that basically all road densities will have them, I fear traffic will be slightly worse post-patch. With hesitation I'm going to be trying it after monday, but my hopes aren't high. I still think that the glassbox engine and the agent system is still a poor choice that ultimately encourages a carbon-copy style of city building.

Honestly, I've found that happiness bonuses come more from the employed/working sims, than the shopping sims. They seem to be more of a bonus happiness. This will probably especially be important with the upcoming patch change: Unemployment is a far greater issue, it causes crime and homelessness. When I zone, I generally zone a la carte with my industrial as a nice job sink. 1 High Density industrial provides a ton of jobs, usually enough to offset commercial. At the end of the day you'd rather have commercial that's over saturated and never going out of business.

the feedback is so poor in this game as to whats making a building unhappy and the solutions arent taken instantly. ive had buildings who say they miss school with a bus stop outside of it, germ issues seem impossible to solve, crime is equally inconsistent as police are icredibly stupid when it comes to apprehending. Occasionally industry will complain about freight despute sitting across from the depot. Dont even get me started on the "needs more shoppers/wheres the shopping" when its next door or across the street. I honestly park spam as best I can without demolishing preexisting buildings

To make sure that your industrial ships its freight, I would make it a point to put your trade depot near the industrial area, literally right next to it. You aren't limited to trade depots, so I generally place one near my factories, and another near my city entrance. Make sure that the route is accessible, meaning that your trade depot is on the same side of the street, or if on the opposite side, an intersection is nearby to allow for u-turns. Lastly when it comes to RCI, you can largely ignore chasing the "freight order" number. To me, in the current form of the game, the amount of industrial required to fulfill even 50% freight orders would outstrip your workforce. I would hope this is something that gets patched as freight has no bearing on how well commercial shops or service buildings function.

My one city has been rolling along nicely, 230k low pollution, low crime/fire/traffic. Now I've got a university with about more than half of my students enrolled, yet for some reason there are still buildings with tons of uneducated students. I never see their numbers change through the day. I've tried placing an elementary school but they still don't leave?

In my experience trying to chase freight orders seems to be a fool's errand that can only end badly for your city. I build "trade" specialized education cities. I'm currently at 220K pop and have 2 (TWO) high density medium tech factories. I'm fulfilling maybe 1000, of my 10,000 freight orders. All of my Industrial and Commercial buildings boast profits and maybe once an hour (real time) does a building abandon. Freight orders seem to be an artificial demand that doesn't justify its existence on the population tab. That said, this RCI issue spills into the taxes situation. So far (about 70+ hours played) it's never viable to have tax income come anywhere other than your residential. Meaning that if you hope to make money from commercial development forget it, it'll never outstrip residential taxes since commercial can't exist without a significant number of residents. Alloy/Plastic exports do more than enough to generate supplemental income on top of taxes. However when the global market gets truly up and running, I have a feeling these prices will plummet as recycling is far too profitable for an infinite stock of resources. But that's another discussion for another time. Edit: I failed to make the point I was trying to make about chasing freight orders. It seems that the amount of freight orders required, creates an extremely disproportionate quantity of industrial zones to residential zones. After all, residents need to work in the factories. Well high density industrial factories, while putting out a nice amount of freight, require a VAST amount of workers to run and keep from going out of business. After a point, you'll simply run out of room to zone residential and it will be impossible to meet the employment demands of your factories. This is why cities have THOUSANDS of unfilled jobs, they usually are in the industrial sector. This is why factories and commercial zones will probably be abandoned over the course of your game because sims are bouncing back and forth between the various options without the consistency to keep them open longer. Additionally, when you talk about region play, in order to fill those 7,000 jobs you'd need the region to provide you with them which means huge traffic issues given the 1 entrance aspect of the city connection, not to mention that it would mean you trying to convince some random person that they need to build residential only and have no other zones to compete with it, after all if they make industrial/commercial as well it will only contribute to the already high pool of open positions. Compound that even further by the fact that inter-region commuting seems to be extremely inconsistant and buggy and you've got quite a mess on your hands Long story short, ignore freight orders. Build the minimum amount of industrial needed to satisfy your tech (electronics) pre-requisites, and to give sims stable employment, otherwise it's just a number that can be discarded.

Do you mean a self-sustained city? Self-sustained region seems kind of redundant considering there's nothing beyond the region (unless you mean no dependance on global markets). I wouldn't say you need separate parts per-se, but you also don't want it really mixed. Sims will always move into a city, and they will always move in based on conditions/demand. If you zone residential around say a statue/modern art park, some of them may not all pop up as high wealth. Some may pop up as medium or even low because there isn't any open residential to move into in any other area and the city has a demand for low wealth sims. In this case you'll start seeing the "high rent" complaints. Getting to high density isn't all that hard assuming that you have some basic services covered for your low-wealth sims. The most important is that they can shop, and that they can work.

That's actually really funny, this has been a great thread. Hope Maxis sees this and comments, I'd love to see them get a laugh out this. As a coworker just said "those must have been the wives and the children of criminals as well"

Placing water pump as close to water as possible also gives unlimited water.

Does anyone know if Maxis Man makes criminals into citizens after one arrest? If that is the case then this unique scenario when you're bombed with someone else's criminals would actually make Maxis Man almost worth using! It's honestly hard to say. I've tried to watch him because I had the "quest" to capture 5 criminals. I sent him out plenty of times and he seems to get stuck in traffic (some superhero!) and u-turns just like every other service vehicle in the game.

Forgot to mention that the inflation isn't linear, so the higher that number goes (say from 150k-250k) the gains in actual work force will be smaller than say 15k-30k. These are getfudgedpopulation numbers we're talking about of course.

Yes, always go by the numbers in your population panel. Be wary that it's been reported by some that these don't give the full picture. Regardless of what the "unfilled jobs" numbers are, they may be more than that because residents may not actually be getting to work and in turn not earning money to earn happiness. If this happens enough they will run out of money (despite jobs being available).

Ugh. One of my favorite cities I had going in a region is doomed to a similar issue. One of the players basically grabbed all the oil cities and build mega refineries, had a giant lizard attack in his major city and gave up. It's been two weeks since he played in this region and now I'm getting all his criminals, though not at the numbers you are (only about 50 regional, I have 15 as I am a green city). As a knee jerk reaction, another regionmate decided to send tons of police cars (despite me having enough) and now they are stuck in my city causing traffic jams (on top of already bad traffic). This has led to other significant problems causing a serious economic downturn in my city as crime has caused a lot of business to leave. Despite my pleas on the region wall, they go unanswered... Sadly, I feel like my experience is being ruined, or I'm being unnecessarily punished. I'm being beaten up by the "multiplayer" aspect, and kicked while I'm down with the crippling traffic system. Private regions from here on out.