Shardak

Yesterday I was making tons of cash by having 2 recycling plants, each with 4 alloy reclamation addons. Then with a trade depot selling allow for 48,000 a shipment, I was rolling in the dough. Today, neither of my plants will produce any alloy. Here is one plant, filled up with recyclables, but not producing alloy. Here is one (of the 4) alloy reclamation rigs attached to this plant: Any ideas what is going on?

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 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

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.

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.

I have had the following issues: 1) Money transfer doesnt work (money gets removed from account of source city, but never deposited in destination city) 2) Water/Power cannot be reliably traded between cities. I have one city that produces an excess 500k gallons of water per day. Another city needs water, but the UI only allows me to sell 70 kgallons... 3) A residential-only city will not send enough workers to my main city. I have 10,000 low income jobs open in the main city. The residential-only city has 2000 low income workers, but will only send about 200 of them over...the rest stay unemployed. I have connected the cities by ferry, rail and regional bus connections (and each of those report thousands of riders per day..not sure where they are actually going).

I have multiple cities in my region, I am controlling several of them myself. If I try and send a gift from one city to another, the simoleons get deducted from the source city, but never arrive at the destination city. I just lost 250k this way. Tried again with a smaller amount, and same result. Anyone else seeing this?

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.

Also I am pretty sure that is not correct. After rebuilding my plants, I went only alloy and its working fine. I think you can choose to process your recycling into either metal, alloy or plastic. You can do all plastic if you want..it will consume all the input "recyclable material" that gets delivered to the plant.

Here is my main. Made lots of money from recycling, and now have put in a processor factory, which doubles your money (the export price of processors is double the raw materials used to make them).

Nope, my trade depot has 3 empty alloy storage buildings. I ended up bulldozing and re-building both plants (cost 400,000...ouch). The newly placed plants are functioning normally. Must have been a glitch in the matrix.

Yes I am doing a 16-city region (Viridien Woods)...but the region play options are so buggy at the moment that I am going to start a single city that doesnt need to rely on the outside world. I got my main city up to 150k people, with over 1 million in cash, and then tried to plug in some other cities to handle water, power, garbage etc. I think due to server issues or bugs in the code, it just didnt work. It caused the economy to crash when power and water started fluctuating. My main city is down to 100k population and 300k cash. I have added back its own power/water/garbage services and its slowly recovering. If you do try region play, make sure you have a backup plan when region play craps out. You may need lots of money fast to add services back to your main city.

That may be the formula but it wasnt working. I had 500 kgal excess, and a total of 3 cities, and could only sell 70kgal to one city.

I tried it again, and this time waited until I saw the cash truck make the pickup...still didnt deposit the cash (but it took the cash from the source city). I will be making an all-in-one city next so I can avoid region play for a few weeks until they work out the bugs.

Im pretty sure the game does not give you control over this. If you build a road on ground that changes elevation, the game automatically puts the bridge in for you. There is no way to put in elevated roads on flat land that I saw in the betas, or in watching the "lets all be mayor" videos.

After playing in all the beta's, I agree with the Ars Technica review. It feels like the game took one step forward (glassbox) and 2 steps back (tiny cities, online only, no saves etc etc). But I pre-ordered and will be playing. I had fun in the betas and think I will get 100 hours at least out of the game before it gets boring.

Pretty fun, I got to play about 3.5 hours. Got my population to 130k, and then ran out of room. Had high demand for more zones but no place to put them. I wish the city was about 4 times its current size. Had a couple crashes but otherwise ran very well.

Its an additional 1.75GB download after the installer starts up. Got in, but when trying to create a city i get error "Unable to create your city at this time, please claim it again". Bummer dude