copperreddc

So my sewage plant maxes out and I build another one which is farther south but less eastern (pretending the city square is perfectly aligned by coordinates for descriptive purposes) and the new one maxes out immediately, leaving the other one at green. They are essentially equidistant from the city and close to each other. Why do they not balance out? Basically the routing network decides there's only one that seems closer and over burdens that one. Why? Why? Why?

Deleting this too.--hym And this.--hym As for services though.. they seem pretty unnecessary to me. As long as you have reasonable education, fires, crime, and medical issues are pretty minimal. That is unless you have dirty industry.. I find the game to be extremely imbalanced in favor of medium wealth residents & HT industry. There are no savings to be made by having low wealth sims & dirty industry.. unless I'm doing it wrong? I mean, I've got a high wealth city [like 50$$$/30$$/20$ split] with no local industry and its profitable without specialization.. Doing the same for a low wealth city and/or with dirty industry is nearly impossible without tons of health issues, crime, fires... I find the tax system infuriating and I can see what you mean about the various wealth taxes. Even if I set high wealth to half the regular rates, I don't get any statistically significant increase in high wealth population, but fiddle with the medium wealth R and I either get a 50% pop rise in a day or two or more abandoned buildings than I can handle.

In theory... for the game all students are the same, so doesn't care too much about in what building you educate them. This doesn't make any sense at all, so of course that's how it's set up. The same as shuttle bus depots versus municipal bus garages aka the big double decker thing?

So when you get a higher end building, like a high school, you can just bulldoze the elementary schools? Really? Hmm.

Yes, but it's weird: I spend a lot of time playing the game (as much as one can with a full life and full time job) but a lot of the time is spent dealing with bugs and stuff not working. I'd actually spend less time, albeit a lot more enjoyable time at that, if I didn't have to deal with nonsense like basic traffic not working, or being unable to fix pollution effectively or the never ending water problems. I still don't understand why I as mayor have to go and bulldoze individuaal buildings.

Perhaps a better question for Mr. Quigley is why didn't they design GlassBox from the ground up to use multiple cores for the simulation. As is, I cannot imagine a scenario in which they redesign the engine to make use of multi-core systems in just an expansion. We are going to have to wait for an all out sequel before it gets much better. So we are talking about a 32bit one core game.... what were they thinking. Anyways, considering http://arstechnica.c...years-for-this/ pics of their cities of 200k pop... how about placing 5 sims per house instead of like 30. Therefore you have just as many entities, but requiring a much bigger map for a 200k pop. Who does not have a multicore 64bit processor? I think this is a fair question although I don't necessarily blame EA because there is definitely a trend in not using all the resources available on most systems in other games. Civ 5 comes to mind, especially as you get later and later in the game. That said Windows isn't fully 64bit either so its a bit of a sticky wicket either way. I was thinking about upgrading my box to something bigger and more powerful but it seems immaterial is the apps can't use it. That and a considerable amount of the processing is taing place on the server in this game, albeit far less than an MMO.

How do you integrate buses and streetcars? No bus stops on streetcar lines might work but I'm uncertain on this.

I look at their transit model and I think "What is this, LA?" It most certainly doesn't reflect transit planning in any major city, except again, LA, the disaster zone of road gridlock. LA is improving but it's not a model for good planning. I also call bull on their "wealthier residents drive, they don't use transit" concept, which is laughably wrong and a sign they have no idea about transit at all. It's possibly the biggest issue I have with the game. I am going to hope for a DLC fix but in the meantime I want to find a workaround. From an earlier posting I see the fix is to remove bus stops and plonk down park and rides. Does anyone know if the big municipal bus depot helps a lot and if you should then remove the shuttles? The shuttle service description sounds very inefficient. Thanks!

In the AI it might make sense but that's not how cities really work. In the real world a park and ride is at the exterior of the city, or the suburbs to let people drop off their cars and ride transit in. It also means someone is driving to the lot and thus taking up more space on the road. Now I'm very aware of bus bunching (thanks WMATA!) and I know it can be an impediment but really bus lanes and bus only streets are more of a solution. I look at their transit model and I think "What is this, LA?" It most certainly doesn't reflect transit planning in any major city, except again, LA, the disaster zone of road gridlock. I also call bull on their "wealthier residents drive, they don't use transit" concept, which is laughably wrong and a sign they have no idea about transit at all.

Not all - the 16 city region is split in 4 corners which are seperate to each other so even those are not 16 city regions... although i guess they could be connected via great works. That makes more sense. I thought they were in the same corner but since I can't seem to get it back I may just leave it and call it a lesson learned. Thanks for clearing that up.

Do the trees do anything about pollution?

You can abandon a whole region from your main page. it seems to take the server awhile to realize you did it, but it will eventually disappear. Thanks. Someone started a city in my region but then left so I guess I might as well clean that out. The city was doing well but there's so much pollution that I can't clean up that I'll just start over.

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. I've seen this too on the trade depots. They're empty but my mines shut down. I even had full trucks and no traffic issues.

I must be unlucky then. I've had it work briefly but not long term. I still don't understand why if I try to trade between X and Y why the region view repeatedly says the cities are not connected.

So I'm bankrupt yet again (how I'm supposed to squeeze more garbage dumps into my growing city I do not know. If anyone knows the metric on how much the recyling plant diverts from the dump I would be most grateful) and I can't realistically dig out of this hole. If I want to start a new city it shows me the region map, but that's not what I want, I want to start over. Is that an option, or do we just litter the region with dying cities until the end of time? TIA