mike119

Yesterday was the first day since the game came out that I did not play it. StoNe220022 put it perfectly above: "City Tile Size - No matter how creative individuals are, if you give them a concreted predetermined limited canvas, they will design and build for efficiency. City maps are functioning more like 'levels that need to be conquered' as opposed to a giant blank canvas. Ironically, due to the way traffic works, city specialisation, road real estate, pollution / industry, utilities water/power flow...you no longer experiment with your build but instead find the most practical and efficient way of doing things, and will stick to that model for every city. Players may find their cities starting to look and feel the same using only the specialisation to differentiate, once they would have found the best way to 'conquer that level'" I realized yesterday that I figured out a decent way to keep traffic down and that every single city I was building started looking the same. It's so stupid how crippling traffic can be. There's traffic in every city but they don't all fail. Maybe it's because not everyone leaves the house at exactly 7AM every day. And what helps traffic? No 4-way intersections and a small limit on traffic lights, if any at all. Oh, and don't put commercial buildings on the main street, put them on side streets since everyone leaves the building at exactly the same time and they'll block the road. Want to relieve traffic by providing buses? They mostly just follow each other. Make sure you don't add too many stops because each of those buses will stop at every single bus stop.

Disasters could be entertaining if they weren't so frequent, and sometimes so costly that they'll all but bankrupt your city. Last night I had about $1k and had to sit and watch as my 1 fire truck tried to put out fires from a meteor shower... I guess what I did learn is that when a meteor or 5 do hit your city, pause as soon as the fires break out, destroy the adjacent buildings and de-zone, or make roads to "quarantine" the buildings on fire (I don't think fires jump across streets, not sure though). In trying to avoid 4-way intersections my city has/had a lot of buildings next to each other.

I had a fire at the solar farm while in my main city. The entire city lost power, shutting down the fire station. I had only one other small city in the region. I went to that city, also now shut down with no power, and put in enough windmills to power that city. When I went back to my big city there was about 3 hours left and the other city sent a fire truck.

"I also notice that even though I have plenty of capacity with the sewage treatment plant, I constantly have complaints regarding backed up pipes. Game bug.. possibly?" I'm assuming by the line previous to this that you already got rid of every single outflow pipe. If you haven't, then they will back up while the sewage treatment is working. I think I did run into this problem once and that was when there was only one route to the sewage plant. Basically like all sewage is coming in at the same time and the in-flow pipe can't handle every bit of it at once. Water flow has a similar issue with reaching buildings the furthest down the line when you use too many windy roads and don't use many intersections.