Grimhood

That city is awesome! I want to make something like that.

Demolish some residential and replace with industrial or commercial until you have all of your people employed.

You install the Origin client and download with that.

My fire trucks often go to more than just one fire at the same time, so i don't think it's 100% bugged. But I do think it would be better if only one truck was dispatched if only a single building is on fire.

Or an old water tower?

I think high rent occurs when you have low income on med or high wealth land value (or med wealth on high wealth land). There's no way to have too little housing since housing and population are basically the same thing. You should be able to fix this by reducing land value or bulldozing the offended property so it rebuilds with the correct wealth level.

Does anyone have real numbers for the number of jobs and goods that commercial buildings provide? And does a shopper need 1 good from a shop to become satisfied?

That doesn't sound right. I think shops should satisfy more shoppers than the number of workers they require. In any case, parks and libraries also satisfy shopping demand without creating many jobs.

That answers my question, thanks.

Even with a depot, I can have little or no industrial, tons of unfilled freight orders, and everyone's happy. I know that industrial is happy when they have a depot to ship to, but nobody seems to care about unfilled freight orders. That's why I ask. If commercial doesn't need freight, then who does? Where are these orders coming from? The demand doesn't seem to really exist.

TuPhat, I like your layouts. I made an oil city last night using your design and its working very well. Traffic is quite light even at 60k population so far. Question - could you connect your residential and industrial roads on the north side of the map? It seems that would aid in getting people to work in the refineries and oil rigs without affecting your trade connection on the south end.. I was thinking of trying this on my city, just wondering if that is something you tried already yourself.

Do freight orders have an effect on anything else in the game besides the yellow bar? If filling orders doesn't increase happiness for anything or anyone then it can safely be ignored, right?

This thread has changed the way I play the game. I started a new city last night, and played for about 5 hours, mostly on Cheetah speed, just to get up to about 60k population. That's a much slower pace than I am used to, but my city is solid, I would not be afraid to let it run unattended for a while. My approach was as follows: - I limited myself to about 1/2 of the available grid at first. I found that as I grew and added services, recycling, etc, I grew into the rest of the space. - Start with a small amount of residential (10-15 buildings), a windmill, water tower, and sewer pipe. 12% taxes to start with, I lower it as I go along. - After they move in, check unemployment and unsatisfied shopper numbers. Slowly add 2-3 commercial buildings at a time until things get in balance. - At this point I want to add a school, but I need $400/hr surplus revenue first. I don't have the tax income yet, so I slowly add more residential. - Check the unemployment and shopper statistics again and add more commercial to balance. - Once I have enough income, I plop the school and wait until the next day to check the numbers again. All the while looking at the population map, traffic flow, etc, and tweaking as necessary. - Decide on the next service I want to add, and SLOWLY increase population as necessary to get the tax revenue to pay for it. Balance shopping and employment with commercial zoning. You have to go slow, because it takes time for the zoning to have an impact on your statistics. - When I reach a point where shoppers are satisfied, but I still have unemployed workers, I add one industrial building and see where things stand after it is up and running. This adds jobs without creating unsold goods. - When I've spread out enough, I start increasing density rather than adding more zones. I increase one building at a time! First, dezone the street, then upgrade it. The buildings won't increase in density if they have no zoning. Then I add back the zoning for two buildings, which will combine into a higher density one. Check the numbers and adjust. I try to increase commercial buildings first, then residential, so that the shopping and jobs are available before my population increases. If anyone else plays this way, I'd like to hear about your experiences. If you don't, give it a try!

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.

Try to put water pumps on both sides of your sewage plant. He sewage plant adds water in a circle around itself, so if you have pumps on both sides you can grab more of the water. Try importing sewage from your other cities, I assume that will make more water.

I have an electronics city 300k people. Traffic is pretty good, it gets red near the city entrance at rush hour, but aside from that I'm in good shape. Unfilled jobs are abundant. Services are good. 0 crimes, 0 fires, 0 deaths per day. I have a lvl 5 University. I've tried many things, including lowering taxes to 7%, replacing shops with parks to reduce spending, creating more jobs, and I still have a constant supply of buildings being abandoned, or about to be. I've even resorted to looking at the happiness map and bulldozing any red building complaining about money, but that only makes them go away for a little while. I've got 79 homeless in my city, so of course when I add parks they immediately occupy them. Overall happiness rating is about 82%. I'm really at a loss about what causes an out of money situation, and therefore I can't fix it. Neither underemployment nor overshopping seem to be a cause. I was really hoping to get my population higher, but I can't seem to break out of the 280k-300k range. I have a lot of high density buildings, but no sky scrapers yet. Any ideas?

Make sure it didn't shut down due to storage being full. Put 4 delivery trucks as well.

Do you also have commercial in your residential area? How do you prevent death by taxi?

Yeah I think the tourists want to go shopping. I'll try connecting an avenue with commercial zoning to the expo/bus/train area and see what happens.

Tried my first tourism city last night. Everything was looking good until I plopped the bus station, train station, and expo center. My city was immediately invaded by taxis, and now my traffic is a disaster. So I think I will start over. The key is to put lots of commercial next to the expo/transit center???

Yeah that's what I was thinking. High tech industry very quickly, clean power, and cleanest options available for everything else. Using another city for garbage feels like cheating to me haha. The dump doesn't cause pollution if you don't incinerate it or bulldoze it.

Yeah I was kind of counting on this. I'll be happy to get rid of BootCamp! Lets just hope...you know...that it works.

In this game you really need to dream up the possibilities and set your own goals. Another game i enjoyed, EVE Online, was like that too. Once you get past the tutorial it's wide open. You have to identify a challenge and then try to do it. Personally I'd like to make a green city of 100k with a balanced budget. Not sure how ill measure "green" though...

so what should we try to achieve? collect every single game achievement? on ever server? (since they don't carry over) Have you managed to max out the mayors mansion (not in sandbox of course)? I have made many cities and consider myself a pretty skilled player at this point, but I havnt managed to keep my citizens happy enough in any city I have tried. SimCity is a toy, not a game. Its not meant to be "won", so saying its too easy does not make sense to me. SC4 didnt have acheivements, thats EA/Maxis grasping at the whole online thing which seems obsessed with acheivements these days. In every SC release I have always played aiming for my own goals, since there is no "win". There are many styles of play and always have been in every SC. Some people go for visually pleasing and interesting cities, caring little about mechanics behind SC, this is where SC4 and mods thrived. But given your idea that SC13 is "too easy", this obviously isnt your route, as that play style is about being artistic, not beating something. (though personally I think this is the hardest, because I have never made beautiful cities, even if I made awesome utopias from a mechnics view in every iteration of SC). For others its all about packing as many sims per inch as possible and making it work. Let me stress, making it work, I dont mean making one of those all residential cities with no services that implodes on itsself as soon as you unpause it. Another style would be going for perfect balance, make all the sims as happy as possible in a reasonable sized city. This is my playstyle, and probably the most common. An upgraded mayors mansion is a good test for how well you have done on this. To date I have yet to see a single person, anywhere, manage to get a fully upgraded mansion other then sandbox mode. Too easy? No one has "beat the game" yet. But yeah, if you think making millions of simoleons means you "won", because you made processors or TVs, yeah, the game is easy. But thats never been what SC is about, staying in the green is easy, keeping the citizens happy is not, no matter how rich you are. SC13 is limited in a lot of ways, its buggy, it isnt what most of us wanted. But it is not, in any way, too easy. I have a fully upgraded mayor's mansion. It's relatively easy, lol. Get a pretty good happiness rating, say in the 80's, and then about once every hour or so, bulldoze any building that's unhappy. This is not a very satisfying achievement, though! Getting it by actually generating happiness sounds like a good challenge.

Still, no. The city placements aren't all right beside each other like SC4. And even in the 16 city regions, cities are in small groups and can't connect to other groups. Right. This is the always online, ultra interaction version of SimCity. So naturally your interaction options are severely limited. Try finding a region with available slots haha.