TheFlemishDuck

rant/ "It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community." Thorstein Veblen Now i am an anti-capitalist, so there goes for my oppinion for what regards America's more extreme form of capitalism (relative to more mixed economics oriented Europe for ex.) and what it is probable to produce. Whatever consumer mediocrity EA is to produce, EA's shareholders won't mind about the mediocrity, as long as it performs relativly well in profit by any means than its competitors, and in bussiness it does not always need to be those with most merrit apparently who wind up on top, as in any field of bussiness those who bring more capital to the playing field can often gain not nessecarily by quality of product but by capital power trough takeovers, big marketing budgets, capacity for distribution etc. But really all that capital that all these large firms have, hold or play with is nowadays usually thin air anyway conjured from a fractional banking system modeled to provide capital power to risk takers with tax payers money as collateral. The gaming industry in a nutschell: small company's of entrepeneuring programmers having a dream of a game and hardly any acces to capital to complete it, and expensive suits who studied at top bussiness school jousting piles of money towards game development that might statisticly make them good money on the basis of a bunch of pie charts. The latter usually are only succesfull if the can exploit a name been sold out by one of the former who's then finally enabled after long work to realy cash in. The problem with the gaming industry is that too much money gets diverted to the hands of men too incompetent to direct an effecient bussiness, because regardless how much weve payed for this game and EA might have "cashed in", there is so much more money we would have spend to timely qualitive update's to the sim city Franchise, regardless of how much content we could have added ourselfs. Bussiness in general has been limping behind developments in the gaming industry, few even that would have ever thought that gaming would become an industry to surpass the movie industry in size, and has a great potential for further growh still. Most of you here must know a few gaming company's who began small and succesfully have run game franchises with good revenue and to who you have payed quite a bit more for games over the years than you have spend in the sim city franchise, who probably have better customer care, patches and modabilety options, all things which probably many of you as customer have learned to value in games besides superficial game elements. With other words, Ea performs fairly bad regarding these, and it will keep customers away. There is a very considerable segment of gamers for who modabillety and freedom in utilization of the product is paramount to their evaluation of the product, because the extension of playabilety achieved by open source modding makes the product more economicly interresting over time, and limitation of it makes the game far less interresting in a money to value aspect. I think also that the server based system of this game is a choice made that eventually costs them money too, and which quality of service heavily weigh's on the game quality. And i doubt EA will listen too me, but otoh i think they will eventually be a a far smaller company 10 to 20 years down the line.Their bussiness mentality is too old to survive a next new gamer genneration who has gron up with the minecraft bussiness model. /rant

It's mostly as was mine, i had less high wealth zone's though, Personally i am not achieving results as a few patches/games ago neither. You can add a bit too income still with something like a casino, a high tourist attraction like empire state, and some alloy production from recycleable's though. I think it's still an easy enoguh strategy though to make a good amount of money. just asside, ive noticed that a large university can create quite a lot of tourists, I should plop the empire state next to the university's entrance next time.

Utilities in the corners and and mid wealth raising services in the center, which i think is pretty standard. It is not nessecary to have youre whole map being residential/commerce to be able to make a load of money, but having experimented with different layouts it seems to be all about placement and location to really have youre commerce make the best amount possible. Education and a school of bussiness added to a university seems to increase commerce income over time too. I'm having difficulty to reach the 50K simmolian mark per hour i posted earlier though. The best i did so far was 44k profit after fairly unrestricted spending in services and education, and that was i think 2 patches ago, Still principaly with having something like a 1 commerce to 3 housing ratio, and stratifying that to some point, its not to hard to employ youre citizins and make a lot of money in the process. All the recent maps i played i ended up with millions of Simoleans. Having played a few more games im not sure if this recommended setup is something that must be so strictly adhered too, different setups could work, some might be better, and some might handle traffic better if you grow over a certain point. I guess the concept of a commerce city could be broadly redefined in that it is a city with a minimal of 1 commerce to 3 residential ratio or more, where all citizins are employed by commerce/services and there is no industry. A commerce city might be more succesfull when its people and it's commerce earns more, possibly by having commerce very central of between residential area's. By stratyfying the poppulation in something like 1/4th of residential area being rich, 1/4th middle class and half poor class, it's not so hard to attain a balance between the workforce where everyone is employed in commerce, which can be achieved with strategic placement of parks. I mainly use $$$ parks and $ parks, the middle class will typicly develop at the fringes of the rich zone and near the city services. Also, i plant quite a few trees, often to tackle possible ground pollution from energy or even smog (although even a forrest has trouble breaking down a patch of air pollution) but it also seems that planting trees adds to products being sold via the commerce I retain some poor class, you can still keep youre commerce running with thousands of unfilled jobs in either class, so its not that one needs so much poor people anyway.

Well all things are covered and in walking distance or even next to each other, that goes for res, commerce zone's and parks, because of the pattern used, and parks seem to stimulate growth indeed, Low wealth parks to stimulate low wealth area's and others wealth parks to stimulate other strata's.Ill check the goods tab and see then how it effects my city's commerce and growth while im building a city.

Wanna make shitloads of Simmoleons? 50K simmoleons per hour sounds nice? Commerce city is a strategy devised, tested, and found sound by yours truly. it started out of an experiment on the relation between total commerce income in relation to poppulation income and the relation between amount of commerce and labour. i had enough city's before my recent ones where commerce tax income was less than 40% of the amount of poppulation tax income, whereas in my recent city's commerce tax income is actually greater than poppulation tax income. And asside from that, even withought industry there is absolutly no unemployement either, quite au contraire. The strategy exists out of having a ratio of about 1 park square , 2.5 hd (high density, or otherwise said the size of one tower) commerce square's and 5.5 hd residential square's out of a grid of 9 hd square's forming a big square itself, and having that layout basicly coppied for the majority of the city's surface. the park suare is the middle square of that grid pattern and when the grid gets coppied over the city's certain grids get 3 commerce square's and others 2, hence the number of 2.5 commerce to 9 square's ratio for the city. in effect, it means that there is a ratio of almost 1 commerce square of every 2 residential square's, however commerce square's should get more customers than from 2 residential square's because the pattern i so devised that the as much residential as possible from neighbouring grids is also covered by the same commerce square. A commerce hd square in theory should be reachable by 20 other hd square's on foot. Given the ratio's posted above, about 2 of those square's could be park, about 5 to 6 other commerce, and then there could be another 12/13 residential square's. In my layout design i make it my job to have all the commerce quare's i put down be covered as close to that mark of 12 residential square's as possible given other commerce square's and park square's. I am not sure if it is truly the proximity of so much residential square's that makes all my commerce profitable, but it is my observation that all my commerce pops up to high towers to be very profitable and stay so. There is also a reason why parks are always in the middle of a 9 HD square grid. Park management ive noticed can be quite an expenditure, so parks must be effeciently located to be profitable.In any case commerce city needs a bit of every poppulation group, you basicly plop a few middle and rich neighbourhoods via the center parks and like that it's easy to ballance the poppulation to have no unemployement, rather have a shortage of workers yet no shortage as much as to break bussiness in my cases. As a proof of the soundness of that strategy, consider that given that my commerce tax income is higher than my poppulation tax income at a ratio of about 1 commerce square's to 2 residential ones, that basicly commerce can have a much higher income density than residential. Asside from that, it is probably so that there are also a lot less costs involved at having a higher ratio of commerce, since afaik commerce uses up less water and energy and might have a lower pricetag involved when it concerns other service's too, Poppulation might be somewhat smaller, depends how you stratify youre city, i have to investigate still which strata makes me the most per HD square, so far i have been rather more looking at ballancing labour but since when it all pops to towers i can have it that all people are employed even with loads of jobs to spare, there is still room to have more of one or another strata to maximize commerce profit. Now as to some amounts of fail: It was my impression that given this grid pattern where parks and commerce are basicly always in walking distance for residential square, that traffic should have been extremely light. It was, even with just HD streets square's all over the city. It just wasn't for a given area around my city exit, where there was loads of traffic, not that the dying people of poor residential towers in the area minded as much as long as park and commerce were near, but the load of traffic was very weird because in the commuting and visting tab there was 0 movers, commuters or tourists anyway, in theory there should have been no traffic there, no other city's in the region neither and all my poppulation was happy, employed locally and staying. The idea was that having no industry and everyone working in local bussiness nearby would make it a traffic heaven and for much of the city it was so except at that damn regional connector.