Eriseley

Likewise, never had much luck with commuting, especially workers. However you might be able to rezone some of the commercial zones in your industrial city into residential zones. It is surprising how many unsatisfied shoppers you can get away with sometimes.

I use multiple buildings to help control traffic sometimes. Either multiple 'drive in' buildings at different locations to spread out the road demands, or the main backbone of education is grade/high schools and the college/uni section doesn't get expanded much and just catches some people. This works against maxing out your uni level if that's what you're going for, though.

I'm not sure what I think. The decision trees and behavior of agents seem incredibly simple, yet on the other hand the fudging of population numbers compared to actual agents seems a clear decision to prevent an explosion of agents to process. I do think a lot of the GlassBox engine would kinda fail with larger maps, from water and energy not reaching sections of city to mass transit vehicles never hitting stops and that kind of thing.

Is that Vu tower? That's your crime issue, it converts your sims into criminals. It should also be teching up your industry. Tech is also emitted from community colleges and universities every day, the amount depending on attendance. CCs will get you one upgrade, Uni can max it. Tech is not actually related to Education level except that they are generally from the same building. Grade and high schools have nothing to do with Tech level. It looks like you've placed parks and otherwise brought in higher wealth sims, and that will make your population amount lower, as higher wealth buildings have less population. In any case, you will want to upgrade roads to medium density roads to fit more people.

Well, I wonder if they satisfy the "no shopping" need, and I'm pretty sure shopper agents go there even if they're not out of money. I think about the building more as a way to interact with shopper agents than education though, it just happens to provide education as the payoff. I find it at least accelerates getting an uneducated city to educated, and you can pay less attention to class sizes being just a bit too small.

Firstly trade depots cannot connect to rail, only the more advanced trade ports (just in case). In their case, there is a rail access building you can add to the port in building edit mode (where you add storage bays), and it can only be placed a certain distance from the building as well as must be along the rail, so the rail must be close enough.

It's possible you do get the income but it isn't recorded in the budget and just silently added. I've never noticed one way or another...actually my current cities have been successfully buying, but the seller isn't even showing anyone buying after running both several game months. Heh. Anyway I just discovered that bit about donating vehicles which is really cool.

Well one update definitely worked: no more mysterious air pollution filling your entire city from the region or from incinerating one ounce of garbage.

As much as I'd like that stuff, I want things like the regional play that already does exist to work properly, mass transit AI to be more than shuttling around lemmings to random locations to aimlessly wander, and buildings to stop bugging out.

Hopefully trade depots and ports function to move freight between cities. But even lacking that, freight trucks are actually some of the most successful "agents", and seem to check for valid destinations before routing or at least don't end up dogpiling building after building.

I just like when my garbage trucks troll them on single-lane roads.

Yeah, not sure what's up with that. Sometimes I get a little freight traffic out, but never more than 100 orders. But a Trade Depot will absorb tons of freight and disappear it for you in your industrial city, and your commercial city simply doesn't need it, for now. Hopefully 6.0 fixes this since making freight more necessary is the crux of that patch.

I was going to make a city like this but got sidetracked into a tourist town for regional reasons. Anyway it seems like an interesting specialization because all you need are the ports, which are fairly low profile compared to everything you need to make the other specializations work. I would probably use it as supplemental income for an otherwise normal city, because it'd get annoying watching the markets all the time.

I've been using both a grade school and a college funnily enough, in order to cut down on traffic. I'm pretty sure education buildings send out agents just like power plants, water pumps and such, which ping your buildings. If you don't expand class sizes for your colleges, and depending on placement, you seem to get a very modest spawn of driving students, and the rest will be grade school. So I get enough people going to colleges to generate enough tech to keep my industry upgraded, and cover the rest with schools.

One thing I've found building industrial cities is that your city can operate fine with plenty of unsatisfied shoppers so long as services are good. If you are looking at that statistic trying to have enough commercial to satisfy everybody, you don't end up with many leftover workers, but you can actually ignore it and pay more attention to "can't find shopping" messages, which itself is sometimes just location and not amount of commercial. As mentioned you can dezone to stay at medium density and a couple of these shops spread around your residential might serve better than one big building somewhere in the middle, even if they provide less shopping. In any case, that all seems to work fine until regional play where your unsatisfied shoppers might flood out to someone else's city, annihilating highways unless you both have mass transit set up.