NovaBlazer

Agreed pretty neat idea. Did a small LOL when in the last pic it showed serving 1,900 of 2900 possible students. University towns can't live on that small number! =) Better build an arcology!

I have 4 train stations in my gambling city, and since the patch the station closest to the regional intake is getting 75% of the train and the other stations are seeing the remaining fraction. I have taken to putting bus depots near the areas where I wanted the trains to serve, but still overall... this is pretty broken.

Casino city (even after replacing ALL my casinos) has made nearly zero difference Garbage collection is worse than ever.. 24 garbage trucks can only manage to collect about 800 cans. Recycling is pathetic... 16 trucks get 1,600 units of recycling. Police run around in clumps now like the fire trucks used to, the only thing that doesn't is the police helicopter. I have 4 train stations in my city - it used to spread tourists out pretty evenly, but now 75% of all incommers to the city go to the first one. Traffic is about the same Overall: On the whole: I can't tell the difference from the previous versions. Seems like the same old broken stuff is still broken, the only profit to be had is with electronics making, and same ol' blah blah.... *sigh*

I can't say I have ever noticed a hazmat fire with high tech industry. For me hazmat fires only occur in low tech industry.

According to the recent patch notes... It would seem that the problem with tourism (before 2.0) is that new tourists don't spawn and come in your city until the old ones that are out of money leave the region. So if you have bad regional or city traffic, you will see a drop in tourists... Of course... if the patch works correctly, this all changes tomorrow.

I agree with the others... brownouts can spike and drop, be sure to have plenty of extra power in your grid. The wind power (while I have never had an issue with it) with speed 3, may be causing your issues here, try plopping a clean coal plant for a few in game hours on speed 2 (llama) and see if that finally pushes power to your brown out sections.

Students and industry are lazy. Students will go to the closest school to them. Industry will take the skill set of the closest school graduates near them. The best thing to do is to CLOSE the elementary and high school. This will force ALL students to the university. Over time (a few real time hours on speed 2) the skill level of the workers will rise.

MatthewB13 is right about the major factor that goes into building the Great Work; transportation of materials speed. My personal experience was... 1) Only mayor in the region. 2) Building an Arcology 3) Creating my own materials sending to trade depots 4) Four little trade depots set to "Use Resources Locally" each with 4 delivery trucks. I let it run one day on Speed 2 (Llama) - took roughly 8 hours to get the delivery of materials done. Observations: The delivery trucks seemed to start and stop in spurts. They were not very consistent. The "status" bar would stay stuck for 30 minutes at a time then leap forward with updated status. The very last few resources needed took way way more delivery trucks than it should have to finish it off. Then of course the build phase... but that was pretty fast (under 15-30 minutes). Then the final phase when it has to finally register and be available to your region, another 15 minutes. Real World Total Time: 8hr 45m (YMMV) =)

My favorite data point that is missed is... Look at the pie graphs in the second picture. Commuters are a smaller percentage by number, however they are a larger amount of the pie graph. LOL.

Clean water comes out of the sewage treatment facility unless it overflows. Nearby industry can also create ground pollution. In either case you can selectively bulldoze basic pumps and replace them with filtration pumps as needed. Filtration pumps are bigger and need more space than basic ones, so leave some extra room around your pumping station if you think you will need them. Due to my use of filtration pumps, I don't have to worry about sewage spikes, or industry ground pollution. Thus, I get to put my cities fresh water source right in the heart of my dirty industry without any worries whatsoever and save my "clean" land for other uses. Num num! Heavy mineral taste is good for you!

Remember though, to change your water pumps from the standard basic pump to a filtration pump if you employ the solution of using a sewage center to refresh your water tables. Otherwise, you will be pumping dirty polluted water to your people and they will all start crying about GERMS!

Well, the leaves keep getting in the lawns of the high wealth home owners, and they really don't like that. So they call an Arborist and he cuts down the trees and turns it into woodchips to line the flower beds of the high wealth home owners. I recommend planting trees that won't shed leaves.

Good one! Might have to save that for final peer review of my IT projects

One small thing... I brought my train station rail to both sides of the map. And it works pretty well. The good news is that the 2.0 patch might help you out. Not sure I like the idea of recreating all my casinos but, at least they admit that it was fixed.

I still would have bought it... but knowing what I know now, I would have waited for the price to drop to $29.99 (which was basically week 2-3 for most retailers).

The patch notes sound like they address this issue. It sounds to me that you are no longer going to be able to make an R only server with no services and have it grow.

Ug. And the new patch notes don't sound encouraging for people who are stuck in your situation. I believe the wording was something along the lines of 'Made a change which should reduce the amount of cities that get into a "Could not load" state' That sounds to me like it will only help the cities from getting stuck not necessarily fixing the ones that are.

Looks like the "leaked notes" were pretty close. Glad to see the note about Fire Engine clumping being fixed. Also I find it funny that they are going to fix the residential only cities so that they don't continue to grow when NO services are provided... (Did no one test simple things like this... lol). The transaction bug is where you get money on the :03 of an hour, but happiness is checked at :00 of an hour. So people were pausing the game and were jacking up the taxes for 3 minutes and then putting it back down... Wonder which way they fixed that... All in all... sounds like a good patch. What I see that has been removed from the "leaked notes" is that Recycling that returns from other cities will actual have deliverables. Darn. Was hoping my regional services cities could get more goodies to export.

I have had this a few times. There is a way to force it to process: Load the game and stop at the main screen, If in the game, go back to the main screen Once at the main screen click the Play button Select the region that has the city that can not process Select the city that is stuck in the could not process error mode. At this point you will be prompted to force a reload or attempt a rollback to a known good state depending on the condition of your city. Good luck!

This is almost exactly how I do it. I have one added step. When I go to the receiving city, I flip into region mode and go to the gift tab. In about 1-2 minutes the little gift truck will show up on the region map and then start driving toward my new city.

Doh! Hopefully you were stinking rich by then and it wasn't much trouble to switch it out! I did something similar the other day, was noticing my traffic was REALLY bad in on place and I couldn't figure it out... so I started deleting buildings thinking one of them was bugged as was spewing out cars from the parking garage, when I noticed that there was this little 5 foot strip of medium avenue that did not upgrade to high density. If only I had rotated my camera angle before I started deleting buildings!

Speed 2 (Llama) - got familiar with the "feel" after they disabled cheetah shortly after launch.

I personally do a single fuel module and then 3 plastic modules. Anything that is not moved from the refinery via delivery trucks to an upstream provider, goes to the trade depots to be exported. I like to have a little diversity with what I am exporting.

Build a small town... maybe 20 homes. Put in a full recycle center with max trucks Put in a full garbage dump with max trucks Wait for 6am. Watch the silliness. They literally play leap frog as they all rush to the 20 homes to get the 20 cans. They get into a long line and block traffic for about 3 hours. This is the kind of agent behavior that needs change. I can care less about sims having the same home/job each day.

The way I got it to work was to put a train station right next to the expo center and the stadium. I also have a street car stop in front of the two, a bus stop, and two bus depots flanking the stadium and the expo hall. I also have an airport about 1 block away. Easily 75% of my traffic now is buses. However, I do notice that on the far out reach of my city where I have not brought rail and street cars yet, that taxis seem to be all over the commercial business. Which is fine... so I moved my casinos near to the expo center and the stadium and all the alternate transportation and they have started to do well... very well! It seems that the only time I get taxis now is when people want to leave the casino area and travel to the commercial area. Obviously I need to move the commercial closer or provide alternate transportation to the commercial area. So you might be on to something with your idea of moving commercial closer to your expo hall and stadium to reduce taxi traffic.