Rhadamant5186

I posted a new thread a few days ago about a natural disaster actually crippling my city and it DIDN'T destroy my Nuclear Powerplant! A meteor strike took out my sewage and water pumps and I quickly rebuilt the broken sewage and water only to realize when the meteor hit it took out my ENTIRE water table. My water table went from deep blue to white after one meteor hit. There is no water in my entire city and the city is 750k pop so there's no way I could possible import the required 800k/gal that I'd need.

Just to note, if you think the solar power great work is a work-around for powering a large city keep in mind that the solar power great work sets on fire constantly and that'll stop supplying your city with power. Woop. woop.

On a given morning try to follow a sim worker who lives in the building to their job. My guess is that you'll probably find out that a lot of the residents who live in that building never actually make it to work, even if you don't have traffic issues. Seeing that the residential building is in the corner of the map only helps to make the case that the residents in that building never make it anywhere.

gmart530's comment isn't actually true. Having water pumps near natural bodies of water does not provide unlimited water. The way to get unlimited water is to create a feedback loop with Sewage Treatment or Outflow Pipes (I suggest Sewage Treatment) and water pumps. Your sewage treatment or outflow pipes takes your sewage and puts it back into the ground either as clean ground water (if you use sewage treatment) or dirty water (if you use outflow pipes). A water pump on top of where those facilities output their water will pump it back in to your city.

In this game it is easier to think of your sims as hive minded insects with certain attributes. There are basically six types of sims that work. Low Wealth Uneducated Low Wealth Educated Medium Wealth Uneducated Medium Wealth Educated High Wealth Uneducated* High Wealth Educated *Granted, there is probably not much of a demand for High Wealth Uneducated workers. So the way the game works is that every worker of each type at the start of the day starts to travel to the first job they're eligible to work. In this scenario we will run through Low Wealth Uneducated (LWU) workers. So all your LWUs travel to the nearest LWU job. If they get there and the job is filled they attempt to travel to the next LWU job. This goes on until all the jobs are filled and if you have any remainder LWUs, they become unemployed. At the end of the day everyone returns back home. All of the LWUs head towards the closest low wealth housing. If there are no houses left at the end of the day those LWUs without houses become homeless and congregate towards your parks or bus depots to leave the city. This method of filling jobs and houses also applies to schools.

Building 3 dormitories will help boost attendance, but if you read the description of the dormitory it actually doesn't increase capacity for your city's students. A dormitory will basically just supply fake students to your school but it doesn't allow for more of your city to actually attend the University. If you want a university that has a really good attendance rate you should close all your other types of educational buildings.

The way people commute to work is that they drive to the nearest job that they are qualified for. If that job has been filled, they drive to the next available job, and so on. If you have poor road layouts what happens is that people will attempt to fill jobs, but the jobs are already filled so they flood cul-de-sacs and one way roads in an attempt to seek employment. Make sure your road layouts allow for your work commuters to easily flow into their jobs. I am not attempting to call it smart, but that's just the way the game is designed. This also applies to how people return 'home' after work. When people leave work, they actually just drive to the closest empty residence of their wealth level.

If you have water to spare and your neighbor decides to buy it, it actually doesn't effect you at all. You don't actually deplete your water tables any faster and when you use more of your own water it will just cut off your neighbor from using it. Don't worry about attempting to stop neighbors from buying excess water/power/sewage because the game 'fakes' it all anyway so it doesn't really effect you or your city.

Try to earn enough money to start a specialization, they make lots of money. With a few processor plants and TV factories you can easily make millions per day, this will help you economically jumpstart your region because you'll be about to cash infuse other cities with big gifts! If you don't think you can afford a specialization or if you don't have the room you can always try to raise taxes a bit. The poorer the civilians the more tolerant they are of higher taxes. I forget the exact numbers, but if my memory serves I think 12/10/9 or 12/11/9 is the limit before your populace will start complaining.

that's because everything happening at the local city environment is calculated by your computer. hence why the always-online requirement cannot be removed... maybe ea can look at this: when in privatmode you can handle a region online in a region and not just a city....why not? and if you want to play with friends an open region and only online in the city They could, but they won't. SimCity is designed to run fairly well on low end machines. If a low end computer was asked to simulate 16 cities at once in a region, it wouldn't be able to handle that amount of processing. In fact the city size is so damn small because Maxis was worried that low end computers couldn't even handle a larger city, let alone multiple cities. So, as much as you would like to simulate time over multiple cities at once, it won't happen unless you run multiple copies of SimCity or if the game gets heavily modded as some point from a 3rd party.

The way people commute to work is that they drive to the nearest job that they are qualified for. If that job has been filled, they drive to the next available job, and so on. If you have poor road layouts what happens is that people will attempt to fill jobs, but the jobs are already filled so they flood cul-de-sacs and one way roads in an attempt to seek employment. Make sure your road layouts allow for your work commuters to easily flow into their jobs.

Heh ... Everyone involved in the region will be on together this evening. We'll see if anything we're trying is bringing numbers down. Sadly, if they keep rising, we may all vote to abandon the entire region and move elsewhere. You could also try to just demolish your highway connection to your region and then attempt to clean up your criminal problem while making sure your city is sustainable without a highway connection? Well that's just one idea, but I doubt that'd work.

The trouble with satellite and DSL and all those post-dialup solutions is that your upload speed is still 56k, even if your download speed is considerably faster the game may require you to have a decent upload speed so that you can re-sync your cities up with Origin.

Nope! The SimCity only simulates changes in the city you have loaded. You'll have to either swap between the two cities to elapse time or have a friend play one of your two cities for you.

The problem we've got - the criminals in question are NOT from my city, so they're not in residences. They're all out running around inside the city, helping clog traffic, and if you switch to region view, they're moving around on the highway from one city to the next. Detective's don't seem to make any difference. I'd LOVE somebody to find the math on how this all works somewhere. It would tell us if we need to just give up or not! Is there a max number of criminals vs citizens for a city? What determines the max number of available criminals? IS there a max? Fudged numbers and all - wonder what the "converted to crime" ratio is for a population of a destroyed city that suddenly found themselves thrown out into the cold when their expensive penthouse burned?? The longer we play right now, the HIGHER the numbers are growing, so we're not even sure how many we will eventually have to deal with. I don't remember the population numbers for the city that was destroyed, but it was VERY high. If we add the criminal numbers up between all the cities at this point, we're quickly approaching a known total of 5,000. If each has to be arrested 7 times - I don't see 35,000 arrest EVER happening! The region may be lost. If nothing else, all our doughnut shop owners will be able to happily retire in Aruba. Maybe he just unlocked a fun new mode of the game... Sin City! All joking aside I'd be interested to hear if you're ever able to clear up the massive crimewave you're currently suffering.

The hilarious ramification of this population fudging is when you get into really high numbers. One of my cities, which sits around 750k or so is approximately 90-92% zoned for residential with just TINY zones for high tech high dense industry and commercial. Because so much of the population is fudged I only need a few extra jobs to support my workforce when I went from 150K to 750K. This is really helpful to know when you start to really expand a city vertically because if you zone C and I as much as you are zoning R you'll have a lot of unfilled jobs in your city.

Thanks for clearing that up. So you get 6 patrol cars for 600 dollars or 1 detective car for 750 dollars? Awesome. Is one detective really worth 7.5 regular police?

I haven't multiboxed this game, but I have played it in a LAN setting. If you're looking to play in a region that doesn't get abused and abandoned try to play private regions with friends or join a region that some simtropolis members have going. It sounds like your complaint is more about the quality of the players in your region rather than some problem with multiplayer. A lot of the people here are awesome and I am sure they'd be more than happy to play with you!

Does anyone know if Maxis Man makes criminals into citizens after one arrest? If that is the case then this unique scenario when you're bombed with someone else's criminals would actually make Maxis Man almost worth using! It's honestly hard to say. I've tried to watch him because I had the "quest" to capture 5 criminals. I sent him out plenty of times and he seems to get stuck in traffic (some superhero!) and u-turns just like every other service vehicle in the game. The game doesn't really inform us how crime works, that's the main root of the problem here. The game provides different ways to 'rehabilitate' criminals but doesn't actually inform us how the math on this works. For instance, how effective are crime prevention vans? How much of a difference does a university's department of law make? Is it really worth the massive 750$ hourly cost to have a single detective car make stakeouts around your city? They don't actually give us the hard numbers because I have this overwhelming feeling like a lot of the numbers are totally fudged, just like population and global prices. I've experimented a lot with detective precincts and crime prevention vans, but without hard numbers its really tough to know if they're financially worth the investment. It seems like a hospital's wellness vans are really helpful, but police detectives and crime prevention vans are a lot less effective because education and poverty are a lot stronger and more powerful factors for crime.

Does anyone know if Maxis Man makes criminals into citizens after one arrest? If that is the case then this unique scenario when you're bombed with someone else's criminals would actually make Maxis Man almost worth using!

In my experience people 'run out of money' when they are trying to get to work, but are unable to get their either do to high traffic or a long commute, so they aren't actually able to earn any money even though they are technically employed.

Hey TuPhat, for the record it wasn't actually me who criminal-bombed his city, I just was able to infer first that his situation was most likely caused by a neighbor doing this to his poor city. On a side note... you know what this game needs? Martial Law!!!

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that. I assumed that's what he already did, but it is good to confirm.

Fortunately you don't really need too many schools. The way the game is setup is that your city has a student population that needs to attend any educational building, so if you work your way up to unlocking a university or community college you'll only need that one building and not any of the others (like grade schools or high schools).

Sounds brilliant to me! Yeah it is totally terrible that you can have your city invaded by criminals by neighbors, but that's the 'multiplayer experience' that Maxis is so happy to promote. There are far too many ways to screw with your neighbors, like sending them criminals, air pollution and tons of traffic and far too few ways to actually help them without gifted handouts. Regional police, fire, health and education doesn't really work too well.