Shardak

I think these patch notes are actually for 1.5.1 which was released yesterday 3/15. The patch this morning updated the game to 1.6, I have not seen those patch notes. 1.6.1 has not been released. Here is my game version after this mornings patch:

I feel the same way. Once you are able to export TVs, you can make a million per day with one electronics factory. But what really turns me off to the game is just how poorly the simulation behaves. Sims are basically lemmings, that just follow the sim in front of them. They all take the closest job in the morning, and go to the closest house at night. No sim actually lives in a particular house. Given how much Maxis hyped the aspect of every Sim being simulated, the fact that they follow such terrible AI is disappointing. I am going back to Starcraft, will try simcity again in a few months and see if any improvements have been made.

Adding industrial zones will give you more in tax revenue (it seems to me that industry pays better than commercial or residential). I added a few square blocks of industry to one of my residential cities and it gave around 10k/hour in taxes at medium density. Or you can reduce services...close some police stations, parks etc.

I dont think radiation ever goes away. It appears to be bugged...sometimes it even gets stronger over time. I had a meteor hit ground early on in my city and it left radiation. I have now gone over 10 years on the same city and the radiation is still there, unchanged. Then I left the game running while I had dinner last night....came back and there had been a disaster which blew up my nuclear reactor...now half my city is dead. Parks and trees do nothing. I wanted to try a water filtration tank which is supposed to remove ground polution, but the water table on my city is totally gone so I cant turn on the water plant.

According to a post on the EA forums, the bug with the recycling plants is caused by sending your trucks to other citiies. As soon as one of your recycle trucks leaves your city, the plant will stop producing. I think there might be more to it than that. I stopped sending trucks to other cities and did see an improvement. My plants now operate a few hours a day without bulldozing and replacing them. They seem to start at 8am and run until noon or so.

2 full processor deliver trucks head to the electronics factory, which only has room for one trucks deliveries. The first truck delivers 500 crates of processors, filling the factory. The second truck then heads back to the trade port to dump the un-needed processors. However, it goes to a trade depot that only contains alloy storage lots, and the processors disappear. Video: http://www.twitch.tv/shardak/c/2014087 I have since deleted one of the alloy storage bins on that trade port, and put a processor bin to stop the losses.

I nearly had my nuclear reactor blow up cause of dropping education levels. All my school buses got stuck at an elementary school, caused every school to go to nearly 0 enrolled students. Buses must have been stuck for days... Video: http://www.twitch.tv/shardak/c/2011497

There was just a patch released (1.3) that says traffic was optimized for complex road systems. Wonder if it will help make it more realistic.

Since I now have the 20 minute queue timer on my original server (NA East 1), I tried one of the new servers last night. The game felt much more responsive in general, and I was able to finally see sims commuting between my 2 cities with some sense of logic. I have 1000 open low wealth jobs in my industial/commercial city, and was able to get about 750 of those jobs filled by sims commuting in from my residential city (by driving and municipal buses). This never worked on the NA East 1 server....the number of workers commuting in to city A never equaled the commuting out count on city B. So I think reducing server load will go a long ways to helping region play.

Yes its a bug. If you delete and re-create the plant it will start working. I have multiple recycle plants in my city and when one gets stuck they all get stuck. I found that if you bulldoze just one of them and replace it, they will all start working again. So i put a sacrificial recycle plant in, with no reclamation lines and no extra trucks. I use it purely for bulldozing / replacing (since its expensive to replace the reclamation lines).

Do both cities have municiple bus stations and a train stations for workers to commute with? Have you checked the wait time on your mass transit? Yes I have the big bus stations, trains and ferry connections, and all report thousands of users per day and 30-60 minute wait times. Its just bugged due to server volume according to a maxis employee on reddit. The high server loads mean that the transferring of anything between cities is not working consistently enough to make regional-play system work.

I have City A that has 90% commercial buildings. It has 10,000 medium wealth jobs open. In City B I have about 8000 unemployed medium wealth workers. It shows about 500 workers commuting from B to A..not sure why the others dont commute. Also, when I look in the population numbers in City A it shows 20,000 people commuting in...but that number does not match the "Commuting Out" numbers from my other cities. So something is seriously borked with region play. Maybe just adding new servers will help spread out the load and fix these issues, but I doubt it.

Best way I found to make money was recycling. Build a recycling plant, put 4 alloy reclamation lines on it. Also get a trade depot with 2-4 alloy storage bins. Go into the trade depot options "Manage Global Market", and set it to Export alloy. Once you do that for a while and unlock the processor factory, start recycling both plastic and alloy and stop exporting them. Send them to the processor factory and then export the processors (results in 2x the profit of just exporting alloy). My city of 200k residents makes close to 1 million per day just by exporting processors.

I think the best option is turning on GRIDLINES in the road building tool. That seems to keep things tightly packed when building density upgrades. The other visual hint you will get is if you use the ZONE tool, you will notice a little green line that marks the size of biggest lot that can develop on the current size road. To test this out, draw a straight road with the first section as low-density street, then a little bit medium density and then high density. Now drag the mouse down this road when using the ZONE tool, you will see the different size lots. Medium and high density appear to have the same lot-size.

I was having serious problems with: 1) garbage collection not getting to all the areas of the city 2) fire/police/ambulances not appearing to do anything at all (had dozens of cop cars, but criminals were all over the place). 3)Major gridlock at the entry to my city from the regional highway. I assume this was causing commuters to get stuck but not sure how to tell. I had all the mass-transit options maxed out....tons of shuttle buses, municipal buses, rail, streetcars etc...but my traffic was out of control. As I was zoomed in following a garbage truck to see why it was basically going in circles, I noticed that there was gridlock caused by about 10 buses waiting at a bus stop. So I decided to bulldoze the bus-stop...and traffic cleared right up. I removed all bus-stops from streets (left a few in place on the high density avenues). I replaced the bus-stops with a few park and ride lots. This dropped traffic congestion probably 75% across my entire city. It seems like if you have too many buses or too many bus-stops, the buses will block traffic as they sit at the bus-stop waiting to load people. After this, my crime, health issues, and garbage issues all went away. I was able to reduce my garbage and recycle truck count by 50% and they now clean the whole city, same with police cars. Following a recycle truck now, I can see it actually working instead of sitting still or driving around the same block over and over again. It was kind of cool that I could actually see the problem by zooming down close to street level. So kudo's to glassbox for that. Still I think there may be a bug in the code...as you should not have 20 buses waiting in line at the same bus-stop.