JustSomeZombie

I noticed this just a few minutes ago myself; I'm having a bit of a resource dilemma and thought, "Hey, I'll just buy from the other cities across the way!" Negative. If there's not a road connecting them then you can't buy anything from them. That would seem to defy the idea put in place of a "global economy." I can put freight on a boat or a train and ship anywhere, I can fly tourists in from other parts of the planet (surely no one would fly from one zone to another) but I can't buy water from a town within the same region? That's silly. Surely they'll implement some feature to connect "clusters" of towns to one another. Even if the Great Work only impacts the adjacent tiles... the rest should be open season (at a cost of course.)

Well, here's the thing; Paying $200 for a game, up front, isn't at all uncommon. I've done it twice in the past year (and I'm not what one would consider a "hardcore" gamer.) In the MMO genre, they're lifetime subscriptions and every game calls them something a little different. It's always a gamble with MMO's but people still do it. Look at Star Wars: The Old Republic. Everyone thought it would be awesome so people lined up like it was an iPhone release to play it. A month later? It was like the Hebrews evacuating Egypt- people couldn't crawl over one another fast enough to get away from it. The same thing (to a considerably less dramatic effect) happened to The Secret World- several but several years of hype that added up to basically the Price-Is-Right fail horn. Both of those games had options for lifetime subscriptions that were in (or at) the $200 clam mark and people did it- not because they knew the game would be flawless out of the box, but because they wanted to be there when improvements were made, no matter what. And that's the problem I take with the premise of this argument; would I pay that much money for a game? Absolutely. If I love something or anticipate loving something? Why not. But I wouldn't do it because EA assured me it was "perfect" and that no updates would ever need to be done to it, ever. I a.) wouldn't believe them and b.) would feel like I was being taken for sucker since basically every game that costs any more than this one did, comes with a guarantee of exactly the opposite- fresh, new, content on a regular basis. I'm with you on the DRM thing though- I should be able to play Sim City wherever I want. I shouldn't have to connect to their servers to do it. That makes my $70 seem like just a lifetime rental. But Sim City fell victim to it and rather than not buy it, we showed up in record numbers to do just that. $1.1 million copies in the first two weeks- unheard of. So we can complain about the DRM all we like, but to EA, we probably seem like that ex we all have who talks about how "over us" they are by posting things on Facebook like "Never thinking about him again! Ever!"

The thought of pollution reducing rainfall is an intriguing one but... I'm leaning to the side that says this game wasn't programmed to go that in depth. If it does, I'm kind of screwed in this particular region since they've already built an Archology that basically wrecked the environment to create. If rainfall only happens in environmentally friendly cities (... which, now thinking on it, is the only time I've seen it rain in the game- in a city I created that used nothing but solar and wind for power- but that could be pure coincidence) then I might as well rebrand Lost Angles Los Vegas. I can verify, 100%, that the sewage treatment plant alleviated the problem (though it took a while.) The city is still bone dry, but so far, so good. I should also point out that I'm using 108K gallons per hour in a city of 46K people. It is heavily industrial, with a completely maxed out advanced coal mine, two ore mines, three processor plants, and then a whole host of industrial zones with just one small section for residential. The recycling plan is also maxed out. In a different region, I have a city with a population of about 115K. They're only using 80K gallons per hour. It's on an island and that city is almost completely residential with just a few commercial spaces. So... does industrial require more water to operate on whole? To the "U" idea... I'd try it if I had the space, but land is at a premium here. I can't take up that kind of space until it becomes dire (and I'm pretty sure this city will run out of resources before then.)

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one facing this issue. A couple of things since my last post; 1.) I did a little reading a discovered that apparently (though this sounds wrong, and gross, and downright blasphemous) if you put a sewage treatment center right next (or very close to) a water pump, the ground water won't be depleted as quickly. I'm in the middle of trying this for myself this very minute. I also read that rain water is supposed to replenish ground reservoirs (which would make sense because... realistically, that water needs to be replenished somehow right?) but I've yet to have it rain so I'm not sure if that's true or not. 2.) My other thought was that maybe this works like sewage; so take the city from this example, it doesn't need a sewage treatment plant because all the sewage is being taken care of by the three other cities. But the instant I build a a plant? BLAMO, the the alarm turns red and that little person with their exclamation mark is demanding I build more at once, least my people be subject to baths of their filth. I don't need it but maybe the game mechanics aren't recognizing two things at once? That while that facility is at capacity, the city is just fine thanks to outside help? As an experiment, when every last pump and tower in my city is dry, I'll tear them all down and see what happens. Terribly frustrating but I'm thinking these sorts of "issues" will be corrected in the coming weeks. Thanks for the feedback all! Stay tuned.

And not a drop to drink! Alright, so I'm a little late to this particular region I'm playing in. They've already constructed an archology so I'm basically at my leisure to do as I please. I figure with coal and ore under the zone I chose, I'd go for a high tech industrial city. No big deal. I'm purchasing sewage, power, and water from the three neighboring zones connected by roads. Sewage and Power seem to be no sweat- they're easily outpacing my demand. The same should be true (if not more so) for water. I've constructed a metric ton of water towers (and even ran a water pumping station dry) in my city of 45K people in addition to the water they're providing. According to the regional charts, each one of the three cities should have been enough to cover my consumption alone. But it isn't. I'm running a huge water deficit somehow. All of that would be moot... except that the one building that perpetually has problems getting water is the advanced Coal Mine. When that shuts down due to lack of water, so does the smelting plant. When that goes I lose alloy. Once that's gone it's only a matter of time before the processor plants shut down (because the recycling plant can only provide so much.) I've tapped my entire zone completely dry (seriously- not a blue spec on the map.) Given that everything else, regionally, seems to be working I'm curious as to what could be the cause. I've considered that it could be a time factor. My city sprang up (literally) overnight and the game mechanics could be just really, really late to the game... but then why is everything else working? I'm consuming less than a 1/4 of what the cities in my region have available for sale. Is there a way to increase that number? What am I missing here?