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.

I just want a better explanation of how mass transit works...can't get my sims to use bus or streetcar reliably.

I've usually handled this one okay with raising taxes and bulldozing commercial. I can usually get away with 50/50 on satisfied/unsatisfied shoppers before places just go abandoned with "lack of shopping" complaints. It seems easier to just not go to high density though...I still haven't figured out random buildings just not having students/kids and becoming uneducated, and high density or high population also seems to bring on places going broke even though there's plenty of employment, although with the latest patch they are usually unphased by going broke and stay happy, too.

I've sat watching the Tech data layer and my nuke plant can consume max Tech down to zero over one night. This might have to do with how many and how advanced the additional plants are, not sure. Also wondering if nuke plant extensions might experience a similar thing to electronics factory extensions not getting the purple stuff if they aren't close enough to a road. Anyway, it's something else to look at/experiment with.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if buildings are what track and issue point to point behavior which the agents march to as they go from building to building, simply informing it what kind of agent they are when they arrive.

I would like regional things to work much better from shared services to commuting to...well everything, and bugs like disappearing service vehicles that bork cities to be fixed so that I can bulldoze without fear. If I could screw around with my little cities and there was more that functioned regionally, I don't think I would mind it so much. Though having purely graphical "sprawl" at city borders so it doesn't suddenly become plains would be nice.

I probably would have waited, and skipped the deluxe edition which has been disappointing (need to stop doing that with games, haha). But I do like the game...maybe just not $60 like it.

Is your abandonment happening in the farthest houses? For sims the routing tends to be shortest point, and your closest houses will absorb most of your shoppers and workers, the outer will miss out. You don't want any place to be too many iterations down the "okay next closest destination" chain or it will struggle.

I would have thought that having having predefined homes and work would actually reduce the number of calcuations for traffic / rerouting. I doubt it. You'd be storing, accessing and changing data for and propagating each individual's routine, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if GlassBox handles things by point/building if possible and tells x number of agents to all do the same thing, so it only needs to calculate the route once (well, until they mob a building to capacity) for that grouping and store far less information (a few flags about whether they have money or whatever for each agent). Even if you blindly had each individual do their routine it'd probably require a lot more work, and you can't do that anyway because it would only work in a completely static city. So now you add constant checks to make sure work/home and route are still valid...and if your city is changing a lot you're needing a lot of individual "find new work" and so on operations.

Well, that statement only seems to rule out possession of homes/jobs. I think there are other methods available to get agents to stagger their destinations a bit while still utilizing the communal "sink" behavior.

Weird...are you on a region with a Space Center or something maybe? Try zoning some industrial with no education going, should come in low tech, then turn on the CC. That may work. Is there another building going like Vu Tower? That's about all I can think of.