IBuildEmpires

^ Which is silly lol Anyway, I totally fixed my traffic issues for the most part. I just chopped out that center portion and forced the traffic to travel down my U setup. The trams seem to be working quite well now and everything is getting better! Well, until I was alerted that my city didn't sync correctly and I would have to roll it back...

Same in Toronto, I see lots of left turn areas on tram lines. But then again, in the old downtown section where the tram is on narrow roads, there is usually "no left" signs, but I think that is to keep people from sitting in the lane waiting for an impossible clearing in oncoming traffic and at the same time possibly blocking streetcar traffic. On the newer lines that are built on avenue type roads, there are usually left turns allowed as the trains have their own center lanes and signal lights that correspond with traffic.

But... Does it look pretty and is it realistic? lol, that's what I aim for. I'm really not digging this T intersection thing because it doesn't seem realistic for me when you look at actual urban planning. Realistically you can't make U turns on most roads anyway! I'm thinking too much about real life traffic strategies and not in game strategies. I used the tram because it seems to be an easy way for my sims to go from residence to commercial without clogging my roads, but I didn't think about the whole U turn thing. I also didn't want to put many intersections on the thoroughfare, but it seemed to be the only way to get sims out of the downtown portion. I'm considering taking a big section out and just running a U avenue all the way downtown and back up again, pretty easy with my existing network. But again, just to fix traffic, it doesn't seem realistic. Its seems counter intuitive to have high capacity roads without businesses or large residential buildings directly attached to them. That also applies to tram networks. I would rather have subways. Either way, thanks for the tips. I'll see what I can do later to clean up that end of the city. I'm slowly getting the hang of the new sim engine.

Ugh, I'm glad this discussion is active here. I'm having some terrible traffic problems that are leading to cascading other problems. Every rush hour, all my avenues get clogged onto the main thoroughfare which means all my services are effectively trapped. So I have rampant crime and health issues that spike daily lol. Not to mention fires that burn out of control... Just as mentioned, pretty much as soon as my city became more dense (around 120k pop) it just got out of control. I'm really not sure how to fix it though. The predefined access/egress off the regional highway is the main issue I think. It seems the majority of entrances into the city tiles consist of a single high capacity avenue off a T interchange from the highway. I've had more luck with this setup than the setup in the city I described above. It has a high capacity avenue that goes across the top corner of the tile and rejoins with the highway at the other side, as seen in the attached picture. I started by having a single avenue at a T intersection with the thoroughfare, but I think the biggest mistake I made was putting my industry at the top corner, so sims have to travel to the thoroughfare and across to get to work. I wanted to put them there to be able to ship freight effectively though, but that plan doesn't seem to be working. So now I have commuters mixing with workers, and services getting stuck in between. Naturally I chose some options for sims to avoid the heavily congested main intersection. I made two other avenue intersections off to the side and shaped the city in a U with a center avenue. It looks good but it doesn't seem to be effective lol. I have a high density road off to the side where the utilities are located as a "spillway" so to say to ease traffic flow. I'm still trying to get used to this quirky traffic routing thing in this game though. I have to throw out all my SC4 transit strategies apparently. The whole "stupid sims" thing with sims going to different jobs and different houses really seems strange and makes traffic unpredictable.

lol! Yes it is indeed win! Got a good chuckle from that.

Well that was exhausting. I just played SimCity for the first time. I guess I didn't do my research, because if I had known I wouldn't have bought it. Barely got into choosing and starting my own region/city and the program crashed. That was after having to juggle servers to even play the game, and also waiting for multiple updates/downloads... Every PC/Xbox game I've purchased in the past has been playable out of the box. Apply updates, grab a few drinks and go. The fact that this is cloud based should have raised big flags for me, but I was willing to give this new incarnation of one of my favourite game series of all time a shot. I will still give it a shot, I just think I'll have to wait and see how this whole server goes. It's just sad to see how many hardcore SC fans have been let down. This is the same problem I had with Dawn of War II. It requires you to be logged into Steam to play, which is total BS. The original Dawn of War was/is a great game and multiplayer was available as part of the package, but offline play was allowed without having to "sign in" to some dumb third party network. What ever happened to games with separate multiplayer and "in game" networks? Remember playing Command and Conquer: Red Alert or Tiberian Sun on in game networks? You know, when you created a user name and just joined a game, no third party crap. Oh yeah, EA bought out all those developers and basically ruined video gaming as we know it. Remember when games had amazing single player campaigns and skirmish modes? Remember when you DIDN'T have to have the internet to play a GAME? It's getting hard to remember all these different passwords and login names I need to play this, use that, login to this... Psst, EA if you listening (and other game developers/publishers), sometimes it's nice to be antisocial and play your game privately. When I read a book, I don't stand on the corner and yell every sentence because I want everyone involved, I sit in a quiet place and have at it for hours at a time. SimCity has always been like a book, something you do yourself, a framework for your imagination. When we want to talk about it we will come onto a forum and do so, until then we are perfectly happy being selfish and antisocial cave dwellers obsessed with our virtual creations. Sorry to vent, but I'm just tired of the usual EA, and to a larger extent the whole "internet connectivity" crap. I don't even know why I still buy these games, I guess I just have a part of me that hopes they will be painless and entertaining. I should just go back to playing Homeworld and Dawn of War against CPU opponents, and keep working on my SC4 region. To be honest, I was reading this thread while loading the game; hoping it wasn't going to be that bad. Now I'm just glad I'm not the only one who is having problems playing the game I paid hard cash for. KCCO /vent

Fixed the map, thanks again! Worked mint.

That's probably what happened actually, now that I think about it. I was trying to figure out the tram-in-avenue thing (new to me). I guess the best thing to do would be to just leave my old cities be, and start the new ones with all the NAM goodies.

Well I guess I won't be building them anymore. I might need to do the CPU count trick though. I haven't had any issues running SC4 on Windows 8 w/ i7 core, but I did have a CTD when messing around with NAM, even though I don't have any other plugins loaded. So perhaps its the dreaded CPU issue coming out of the woodwork. Might also be because the city I was working in basically has no more free tiles lol!

Did not know about the ctrl+shift+o option, thanks! And thanks for the help, just the knowledge I needed. I figured the city was toast, so I'm just glad I can get that tile back. I just downloaded the latest NAM anyway, so it doesn't hurt that I have the option to build that city bigger and better now! I didn't have any plugins at the time the city was causing CTD, but I am thinking it had something to do with the Fire Airport thing. The plane wouldn't land, it just kept circling around and glitching out until CTD. Now I don't build them anymore! Its amazing how much has changed since I last played SC4. I just started back into it after probably 6-7 years of not playing. Got the game when it first came out, have been playing SC since the original. Glad to have SC junkies like you guys around to pick me up after I fail! Thanks again, gonna get on that fix. If only I could get all those cities I made all those years ago...

First post for me as well. I didn't want to create another newb thread since my problem is similar. Maybe you guys can tell me if I'm screwed or not. So I have spent a lot of time working on this one region with multiple interconnected cities and whatnot. My first city (pop ~150k) was the central hub of my region at the time ended up getting a bug and would crash as soon as it loaded. Loading it would crash SC4 right to desktop (Win7). I just ignored it for a while. Then I bought a new computer (Win8) and everything worked flawlessly, except that one damn city! Still would crash when loaded. It happened after I had a little fire and dispatched the water plane. The plane wouldn't go back to the airport and kept glitching out until finally the game crashed. So I was basically screwed, didn't know what to do and just ended up ignoring it. Finally said screw it, I'll just delete the city and start over. WRONG, forgot that deleting the city also deletes all the terrain features, so now my nice region has this ridiculous large level blank terrain lot right on the coast line that is surrounded by other cities. That was a few weeks ago. I pretty much gave up on the game, but who am I kidding, I can't get away from SC4 for that long! Now I am determined to make fix, whatever the cost. I thought it might be as simple as redownloading the blank region, going through the blank tile list once the region was rendered and finding which tile corresponds with the city I deleted. I would need to rename the region of course. But I have yet to try this out, just wanted some opinions first, before I **** anything up. Thanks in advance!