halby

vanilla (no mods) a road, an avenue, and a highway, can all support 30,000 volume. you just need to use buses, so there is no congestion.

hehe, it's not guilt, NAM is better in every way over the original game EXCEPT difficulty... and granted, it's stupid that the original game requires you to do non-realistic things like deny road access to places in order to force proper travel, but it's harder, it's a challenge, and more importantly it's a challenge that is common to everyone, cuz the moment you give people options on how to play, you take away the universal benchmark we all had... any high score I get with mods installed is purely a high score vs myself, it can't be compared to what others have done because i'm not necessarily using the exact same settings as them. Anyway,as far as a challenge goes, getting 1 million people into a single city with no region connections, WITHOUT using buses, seems like a pretty impossible goal... think about it a single commercial skyscraper provides 20,000 jobs, but the congestion caused by trying to squeeze 20,000 ppl thru 1 tile into the building is untennable, even splitting it to 3 entrances you are still maxing out a type of transportation just for that single building... and on top of that, with the non-modded transportation model, providing 10 routes into the building does nothing, because everyone will use their shortest route, meaning only 1 or 2 of those entrances will be utilized. You have to design a crazy maze of subways such that there is 1 and only 1 path btw residential building X and commercial building Y, then do it again and again and again, until you can actually get all of your workers into the building... and all that only nets you 40,000 sims with 20,000 workforce, now do that over and over until you can squeeze a million sims into 500,000 jobs. It's crazy challenging, and it's a fun challenge... not at all a realistic challenge mind you, but fun it's a completely different game than simcity with NAM.

So, I think the problem is related to EQ, basically my goal was to see how many people i could jam into a limited space on only dirty industry jobs, but dirty industry jobs require a low EQ, so i'd get max pop of happy hard working folks, then teh schools would inflate their EQ beyond the point at which they were employable in my city, so they'd bail, then a bunch of new stupid people would move in, work happily, get educated, and bail... repeat pretty funny stuff.

Thanks Z1! I've since caved and just switched from classic traffic volume to medium, and it fixed the problem immediately, though I still feel like it's cheating, I guess I'd rather build a huge kick ass city with cheats, and then afterwards, try again without them. My end-goal has always been 1 million sims in a no-mods city with no regional neighbors... the key to longevity in any game is picking a goal that's so impossible that you can keep playing forever

doin some experimenting with a relatively small self-contained city (100k ish) with a little bit of everything, but only a very small number of residential buildings, maybe 20... so all 100,000 ppl are squeezed into 20 buildings, avg of 5,000 per building, some have 20,000 some don't... anyway, every 3-4 years literally half of my population moves out, then back into the city. it's crazy.

I've read in the FAQ the 'why is my nam so slow' post where they said 'nam is usually only 10% slower, but in certain special cases, specifically in a super large city with lots of subways, it can be significantly slower' i'm using a super large city with lots of subways and it is unbearably slow, like to cheetah thru 3 months takes about 2 minutes, whereas without nam it takes about 15 seconds... nam is awesome, and i'd love to use it, but it gets frustrating making a change then having to afk for 2 minutes just to go forward 3 months and look at the new traffic layout.

The overlay in NAM is super helpful, but I don't want NAM it's self, I tried setting all the settings to default, and managed to emulate the default traffic style thru name, but simulator Z is like 20x slower than default simulator... So, is there a standalone version of that subway traffic volume overlay?

New question: I have a building with 2k commuters who all use the same subway entrance... yet that subway station says 90 ppl using it?

why don't they use the yellow path? oh snape! that'd be driving backwards on a 1-way avenue. i get it. duh.

DO level 8 commercial skyscrapers have $$$, $$, AND $ jobs? and if so, how many of each? I'm wondering how many poor people is best to keep around

So, i have some high tech buildings with 30/80 listed under jobs, that's a big deal i'm losing more than half of my jobs to undesirability... but all of the desirability factors are listed as max? so... must be environment.. When i throw down 6 flower gardens around this building it suddenly jumps to 48/51 instead of 35/51 wow, i learned something new. thought i'd share, not that it's probably news to anyone else

Thanks I'll try that when I get done playing around with non-nam, I still feel like if everyone insists nam is required for ppl who want to have big cities, that by definition means nam gives you a huge advantage... why cheat when you haven't even beaten the game normally yet Once I'm done making cities the hard way, i'll try out doing it the easy way. https://i.imgur.com/uUQh1.jpg

I tried nam, but i didn't like how i had a bunch of sims walking hundreds of tiles as pedestrians, just seemed like cheating to me. the parking garage theory is more 'cuz thats a cool idea!' than 'you cant do stuff without this!' obviously there are plenty of ppl with 1.6 mil cities who didnt use parking garages... but what I find fun, is to try and grow my city steadily larger, while making sure that all jobs have ppl to work them, and all sims have a place to work... it is an impossible goal, which is good, cuz it means i can keep having fun striving toward it forever! (and ever!) WHat bugs me, is when I make a dirty factory, for example, with 0 people of proper education/wealth/range who can work at it... and that factory produces goods, pays me taxes, and has no workers... to me that just makes no sense, that factory should shut down eventually due to low demand, but it doesn't. i've had a 20 dirty industrial drive and 60 dirty industrial capacity for hundreds of years,.. in fact it's where i get a lot of my cash from un-worked over-taxed factories that continue to exist presumably because the concept of abandonment due to low demand is not enforced on workplaces. I would imagine the thought process behind not abandoning such buildings is that they are wasted real estate, and they are not contributing toward my population, only my wallet, but still. is dum.

Hi, I was never able to get a city bigger than 40k until I discovered the trick of forcing sims to have wonderfully short commutes OR NOTHING... ie: i build a industrial zone of like 16x16, a residential zone of 16x16 and a commercial zone of 8x8, connect those 3 together, everyone is happy, i move off somewhere unconnected, and repeat... nobody can go in btw these relatively small sections, so nobody is commuting further than a maximum of about 32 tiles under any circumstances. This worked so well, that i finally broke thru 40k and got a 520,000 sims into my city in approximately 20 seperate unconnected areas. But lately I'm starting to run out of space, and I'm noticing that, for example, the first zone i ever built, still has crappy 400 population houses in it, despite there being 20,000 sim skyscrapers elsewhere in the city... it seems that once a building is built, and the residents have stable work, they simply don't upgrade or move out ever, and why would they, the same exact jobs are available within driving distance as always.. BUT if i de-zone a house, and re-zone it, that house comes back massively larger.. sims move in, discover there are no jobs, and after a few years, that new massive house just goes abandoned and rots... strange. This, i think, is because sims decide whether or not to move into an available zone based on the city-wide or maybe even region-wide demand for sims, rather than the availability of jobs within reasonable commute distance. OK, neet. so now for the question, Most jobs in my city have work for poor, midclass, and rich sims, but most of them are only 1/3 populated, because of my disperate zoning technique, ie: if a 16x16 residential area is tied to a 16x16 industry area and nothing else, you will tend to get all sims of the same class (say all poor or all rich) in that area... so the industry they are connected to, might have jobs available for $ $$ and $$$, but only 1 of the job types gets filled. This is actually good, i believe this is really why the tactic I am using works so well, because I have all of these jobs with openings for 50 $ 500$$ and 5 $$$, but only the $ are working there, so that counts as 500 available jobs for the rest of my city, so people move into other locations like crazy trying to fill these available jobs, find out they can't get tehre, and make due with whatever i give them instead. MUAHAHAHA... But I can't help thinking things would be more space-efficient if i wasn't wasting so many jobs in unreachable limbo.. What seems like a good idea, would be to have poor sims in 1 area, midclass in another, and upperclass in a 3rd area, and connect those 3 to a few jobs, then repeat.. ie: zone 4x4 rich 8x8 midclass and 10x10 poor, and connect them all together to a 16x16 industrial + 4x4 commercial... But whenever I try to so this, I find that poor people and rich people simply refuse to live together So then I was thinking I could have all of the rich people in the whole city live in one giant skyscraper strewn central business district, and connect that district by monorail to every single mini-zone... so i started doing this, and it worked wonders for generating a ton of super happy skyscraper livin rich folks in the cbd, but all of the sub-zones i connected via monorail started mingling! THOSE BASTARDS! my goal was for the rich ppl to join you, not for you to hop a monorail over to sub-zone 12 and get a job as a steel worker instead of a chemist... wtf. So now I'm thinking of ways to prevent non-rich ppl from riding my monorails, here are two ideas i had: Goal: rich ppl can go everywhere, non-rich ppl are stuck within their mini-zone. Each mini-zone has R C and I, rich town has R and C. Solution: create parking garage + monorail pairs in rich town that are not within walking distance of eachother. Rich ppl drive to monorail_1 and use that to get to zone_1, or drive to monorail_2 and go to zone_2, but ppl who live in zone-1 can't go from zone-1 to zone-2 because of the parking garages (and lack of bus/subway) boom.

with 6% tax rate, i got a new 20,000 sim skyscraper, holy crap i'm up to 550k dudes without changing a single thing other than the tax rate... but i'm only pulling in 80k instead of 120k, and my expenses are 120k, so somethings gotta give. clevah tho, thx for all the tips.