CosmicSpeed

I have done the same, and have not even TRIED to go back to my others. I have 2 regions I play consistently, both private (i know...) One for 2.0 and a new 16 city region for 3.0. My 2.0 region is the 7 city islands where I am trying out road techniques with the "road editing" by means of the SHIFT key. My 3.0 region has just one city, and almost NO traffic other than shuttles, police, ambulances, fire and garbage trucks. I agree you cannot say all is well/woe is me based off old designs.

Marky Market is one I have seen a few times.

I am torn on Regional busses. I have a city that has a neighbors busses transporting people in and out no problem. BUT they do loop on streets yet my traffic isn't bad because of my zoning (R ALWAYS across from C)

I think there is still a problem with Fire Trucks, and ALL busses. But overall, traffic is highly improved esp with RoR.

I feel like the game is quicker to load and also quicker to zoom in/out of regional mode. Also, Why won't it let me post in the 3.0 Discussion thread? I feel the Traffic fix for Right on Red has helped a lot! The Abandoned House restriction is a pain though, It makes your city look devastated if you have a lot of abandoned homes you have to destroy and the lot just sits there, and sits there, and sits there.

Perfect, on my way home now.

^ Any word on the downtime?

Thanks!, interesting reference. Per usual, Maxis has included a TON of these sort of references. I hope to include more as I discover them.

I think it is just the nature of managing only one city at a time. Sometimes I leave my city when it is making negative Simoleons or has service or civil demands and re-structure my neighbors to meet the demands for the original city. If the city was running in real-time, I would have no idea what to expect. It would be nice for a regional transaction option or tab with the transactions coming into effect when going from city to city and have the ability to control in-our flow and the such.

• Transit: Streetcar stops can now be placed directly on standalone streetcar tracks, and passengers can walk along the tracks to them. • Transit: Tuned the chance buses or streetcars will go to high-traffic stops first as a minor traffic improvement. • Edit Mode: Added more valid snap points in edit mode. This improvement is most noticeable on Parks. THIS IS PHENOMENAL!!!! • RCI Tuning: Bulldozing abandoned or rubble buildings will now prevent new developments for 6-12 hours. • Trees: Trees now last longer, but also do not eliminate as much ground pollution. Not cool, but I can see how this is more "realistic"

So I don't have any pictures of the beginning of the city other than this: But in this city I really, REALLY tried to micromanage and make things compact. I started with Single-clicks of R, waiting until the WHOLE lot was full and then plopping a single-click C. So essentially it looks like a green and blue checkerboard. However, this takes some deleting and deleting and deleting to get the desired homes to appear. What I mean by this is that sometimes a house may only take up 3/4 of a space with not enough for another populated home so it will plop an indiscriminate R zone like a fence or doghouse. Those are not what you want and can take up valuable space. Sometimes you can get 2 populated R homes in a single low wealth click. Also, you can fool the zone system occasionally by dezoning and rezoning. This usually works when units dont take up the whole space and you can essentially rezone the space to where the actually layout of the building zone lies and then plop another, different zone closer. Now this only really works if you truly care about micromanaging your city but take a look at this example: I have close to only about 1/3 of the map complete and have a funny combo of buildings that I think looks quite nice. I have OUTSTANDING happiness and very rarely do buildings fall into disrepair. Traffic is low due to everyone basically being surrounded by commercial, civil buildings and parks. But it is not without its near-disasters. A Meteor shower rocked the town and set a few buildings ablaze but no real harm done other than ground pollution at the impact zones. Tiny Industrial section, needs to grow just slightly:

Those "DOTS". Don't get me started on those dots. Countless times I have cursed at those dots because on either side of my perfectly placed avenue/road 4-way intersection, the long parks dont line up closest to the road! sdk^%#JHVJK(*^HGKJHV!!!!!! I am so OCD sometimes over aesthetics and this drives me mad. I have gotten to the point where I just accept it. I do wish zoning was locked into place by specific RCI zones, regardless of road density. That would allow more control of when and where we could place wealth zones. But that was one of the major changes between 4 and 2013. At first I liked it but now you really have to change your play style. I find myself going back to zoned areas once they have grown in size and adjusting the type of zones based on building size/location/type. I still keep the checker pattern if I can, just the zoned areas are now quite large. Having R directly next to C DRASTICALLY reduced your traffic issues. Sims love to walk if they can.

SUCCESS! Only took about 20 minutes o make this avenue bridge in regular mode, now to just build a great city around it. I shall call it Bumpy Bridge

That chart is extremely helpful, especially if you are trying to make a compact city. Until you get to thinking about how Industrial looks and it is all kinds of crazy EDIT I have discovered if you interchange R and C zones you can really make things compact. Plop R, wait until a foundation is placed, DEZONE, and zone C right next to it, Sometimes a building will be smaller then the zone and if the placement is right, you can dezone, and plop a new zone where the re once was a partial section of a different zone. Did that make any sense?

I think the smallest an actual "I" building (with workers) can be is about 3-4 individual clicks wide on a street. I have sometimes seen a minimum size of "R" being 2 homes sharing what was initially one single click. "C" smallest is usually 1 click each. As far as largest go, I am uncertain.

SimCity does not equal RealCity

I have found the smallest an industrial plot can be is somewhere between 3-4 individual zone clicks. Anything more, if it is close to an edge will get the junk you are referring to. I have found that the smallest parks fit in those spaces very nice without deleting adjacent industry and can help with commercial and residential happiness.

This weekend I decided to experiment. With Turtle Speed. I created a 3-city region to keep it simple with a main objective of ONLY playing in Turtle Speed. Secondary objective, minimal pollution. The creators give you a pretty good region to start with; one city has all the resources while the other two just have good water and wind supply. I start with one of these and call it TurtleSpeed (to remind me f my goal). I build away in Clearwater, trying to micromanage everything I can. Progress started slow, EXTREMELY slow. And I found myself taking out loan after loan. Once I got my first town hall upgrade, my first module was a Dept. of Finance to open up the larger loan amounts. My first plop was a library and RCI JUST enough to meet the demands. That means I had a mere 10 industrial buildings to start with. From here on out it is just Commercial and Residential to see if I can flourish with minimal pollution from industry. So far so good, right? Well.....right. I have only minimal traffic issues and as of August of Year 1, I have almost 20K population, Wind Power, 1x Clinic, 2x Fire Small, 1x Police, Dept of Tourism and Finance, Grade School, Community College, Expo Center. But I couldn't neglect my other cities. My plot of land of Norwich Heights with the resources has become JUST an OIL town for now with a Dept of Utilities (Sewage Central), Trash Collection for region, 1x Clinic and a trade depot for a booming industrial section with some residential and commercial. It is having some issues with making a profit, having to turn off parks and other sources but it is finally catching up to par with my main city of Clearwater. My third town only has a few houses. Because of Turtle Speed, you really end up spending a lot of time with individual cities and it is hard to even manage 3 at this speed right now. Discoveries of Turtle Speed: -There is some sort of correlation of actual time spent playing the game and the amount of time it takes structures to be built in your city. I only have a few small (low/mid class ) high rises but they were built in my city in due time, all in turtle speed, sometime I feel within a "hour" of sim-play. -It takes TIME, I was nervous about my first Expo event as I had No Dept. of Tourism or transportation system or other drives for tourists, but I managed to make 15K off the Motocross event. -It is a lot of fun. I managed to power my 2 cities off of a mere 3 wind turbines for a long time. Once I added population and the Expo Center, power and sewage production/consumption went up drastically and I had to plop more. -I am just drawing roads, no grid format here for the most part and traffic has been alright. I have been keeping how I want avenues to look in the city when i design the layout and so far so good. I hope to get some images up soon. Any other people have some experiences with turtle speed?

It was a rainy weekend so not much to do here. I really am nit sure JUST turtle speed has any true benefits. It does allow you to slow yourself down and micromanage but there is not too big of a point in running a whole simulation at that speed. You just wish things would happen faster and you end up spending money/taking out loans. I will still maintain the region but I am having fun experimenting with sole R, C an I cities.

I attempted this last night. 3-city region called RCI. Cities: Residential: 2x Clinic, Town Hall, about 20k residents so far Commercial: 1x Police, 1x Casino Industrial: 1x Oil Power, 1x Oil Drill, Trash, 1x Fire Station It takes a bit to have your civil services populate from the residential city but just give it about 2 in game hours and they should get up and running. My clinics are about half modified because my industrial city needed coverage. Each city makes money, but Residential makes the most followed by Commercial and Industrial, although Industrial has a low income because of the other services they have to cover. I am having issues with Hotels in Commercial, I dont know how to get them to place. I have tried bulldozing but the same gas stations and other non hotels keep popping up. Parks seem to help both Residential and Commercial but Industrial could care less (I had to plop one because they asked for "More Parks" but no-one ever attends them. Funny thing, Residential town has a few homeless people, even though ALL THERE IS ARE HOMES!

I could get the SLIGHTEST angle. Then when it would proceed it would give me an EXTREME up or down angle that could not be solved. At one point I had a very bumpy Avenue but could never get the overpass to work. His Icon was black, I am not sure what that means unless it is a simple setting. I tried shift clicking and different paths other than straight but nothing seemed to work.

Insane, I am going to try this, slow and tedious process right now.

In my Turtle Speed region, I am experimenting with one city eventually converting completely to Industrial. Right now, the only I am planning on converting the one that has all the resources but you need residential workers to accomodate for the jobs you place. So unless you have JUST a residential and JUST a commercial region, it probably wouldn't work. ... You have just given me a great idea though. Along with my Turtle Speed Region, I can create te exact same region and test your hypothesis....Can a SimCity region survive with RCI, independent cities? My guess is that it would take a TON of work on specific cities and waiting long enough in each city for the region to "catch-up" and recognize your R-Town, I-Town and C-town.

In my 16-City Region of Carolina, I have 4 established cities connected by road. The Northern 2 cities are connected by rail as well with a new 5th city I just created. Because there are no road, I cannot share any of the civil services, but because I have unlocked all the town hall modules, people are commuting by train to my city. However, it is not large enough to have any freight commerce yet. Also, I have had to put in the usual services to appease the masses and police was my last plop. I noticed crime was up in the area and the only connection to civilization was by rail., I didn't see any Notifications in the upper portion of the screen but I could have missed them (stepped away for 10 minutes and a Zombie Outbreak occured...) I want to experiment more with this in regards to tourism as well with no roads. My two southern cities in the group of 4 are also connected by rail with another group and I want to see if a gambling city will crime by rail.

This is EXACTLY the way I have been playing and I have been one to only slightly complain about the game as a whole. I think there is a strange level of flow you need to attain and MAINTAIn in order to achieve what I would call SimKarma. I hardly every play in Cheetah only because I really try and micromanage my civil industries, where my zoning is located in reference to parks and road densities, and checking wind and land values.