DVDGuy

Bulldozing and rebuilding seems to be the solution to a lot of problems. It's the SimCity equivalent of banging on electronic equipments to make it work!

I did run into a problem with a particular factory not doing well, even though tech shows pink/purple lines running all around the area (since the uni wasn't far away, and other nearby factories were at full capacity). Demolished and rebuilt the add-on assembly line that wasn't at full capacity, and it fixed the problem. This was pre patch 3.0 though, so maybe it has been fixed.

It may not be as realistic (at least from a free market perspective), but I think it's a bit more fun to be able to have a direct hand in micromanaging specializations. You could say the same about utilities, since most are privatized these days and the local government would normally have no say in the building or running of power/water/sewage plants.

I've noticed that sewage plants tend to "idle" throughout the day at about half their peak demand. If you sample it a couple time in the day and it is staying above 50%, you probably need to upgrade it. Yeah, sewage "demand" fluctuates a lot, so you have to built in a lot of excess capacity. For all my utilities, I try to keep the excess needle pointing well in the green. If the excess capacity indicator ever turns yellow, then you'll be susceptible to browouts. This sounds more like the problem you have, rather than an employment one, since you say the plant closes multiple times a day and I don't think that should happen if it was simply a lack of employees (then it should be closed almost all of the time).

Had this happen once. Loaded another city in the region (one where I knew the train was working before), and then loading back that other city made the trains come. The trade port train and ships are quite buggy unfortunately.

It beats working!

I thought it was fairly easy. Recycling gives a decent hit to the treasury and a balanced RCI will give you plenty. You may be right, and to be honest, I haven't tried in a while. The first city where I tried to do without specialization nearly failed because of the recycling center bug, and the second one got hit by an unending series of disasters. Both went into the red before I could build up a sizable cash buffer to deal with changes due to bugs, the patches, and the patch bugs.

I use 9/9/9 (I guess Herman Cain had some good ideas after all). Trying to rely on tax income to ensure the city is profitable is very hard, especially if you also want to keep the sims happy with services. A couple more processor factories should do the trick.

Same here.

Have you built the rail or sea connection for the port yet? I find rail most reliable in terms of global deliveries, and the more lots you have for a single trade item, the more crates get shipped off per train. I did have this issue one time where the trade train would never arrive to pick anything up, but reloading the map after visiting another city in the region seems to have solved the problem. As for the global delivery trucks, they come from the region, so if your regional connection is congested or if the trucks have trouble navigating within your city, this may be why the global trucks never arrive to pick anything up. Or it could be just another one of the game's bugs. Use the trade data map to keep track of where the trucks are.

  Should have given away free curtains, instead of free turtles, probably ...

I just build the Maxis Manor, that makes that request go away permanently (you don't have to do anything with him if you don't care). Then just accept the Dr Vu request, but never fulfill it, and it will sit in the queue and you can just ignore that. Or just do what all good mayors do, completely ignore the wishes of your constituents and pretend those speech bubbles don't exist ... or only "listen" the ones that you want to listen to

This is going to be SO helpful. You can have tracks branching off the avenue's through alley's. I hope they one day give us roads where the trains actually share the street with the cars. This caught my attention as well. Could radically change the current road placement strategies. Let just hope the path finding for streetcars are better, then maybe cities can finally have complex streetcar networks that actually works.

In case people don't get it, read this first:   http://www.ea.com/news/we-can-do-better

OFFICE OF THE MAYOR CITY OF SIMSVILLE PETER LESS, MAYOR May 6, 2013 To the citizens of Simsville, in response to our "win" in the Worst City in America poll The tallest windmill kills the most birds. That’s an expression I frequently use when asked to defend Simsville place amongst America's most successful cities. And it comes to mind again this week as we get deeper into the brackets of an annual Web poll to name the “Worst City in America.” This is the same poll that last year judged us as worse than cities that have more serial killers per capita than honor students, cities that consists of nothing more than blocks after blocks of low wealth buildings, cities that don't even have industry. The complaints against us last year were our support of inhumane treatment of llamas (not true), and that our city was somehow responsible for ruining the ending to Mass Effect 3 (only partially true). This year’s contest started in March with Simsville outpolling a city whose greatest export is crime, and (gulp) allegedly responsible for Simsville's recent crime wave. Their city emblem is an Internet friendly cute kitten, ours is a smelly llama. So no surprise that we drew more votes there. Let me cut to the chase: it appears Simsville has “won.” Like the Yankees, Lakers and EA, Simsville is one of those organizations that is defined by both a legacy of success, and a legion of critics (especially me regarding all three of those organisations). Are we really the “Worst City in America?” I’ll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include unexplained sewer shut downs, bridges that didn’t meet the other side of the river, missteps on new tax models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of the Simsville Streetcar system. We owe our citizens better performance than this. Some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate – like all large organisations we are not perfect. But others just don’t hold water: Many continue to claim the Always-On street light system in SimCity is a waste of money. It's not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period. Some claim there’s no room for a streetcar system as a competitor to buses. 19,000 confirmed passengers are proving that wrong. We’ve seen mailing lists that direct people to vote for Simsville because they disagree with the winner of Simsville's Best Looking Llama of the year award. Yes, really ... In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against Simsville for allowing our LGBT citizens to own more than two cheetahs as pets. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT/llama policy by voting Simsville the Worst City in America. That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst city, bring it on. Because we're not caving on that. We are committed to fixing our mistakes. Over the last three weeks, 90,000 Simsvillians took us up on a free turtle offer for their troubles. We owed them that. We’re constantly listening to feedback from our citizens, through our Residents Complaints hotline, Twitter, this journal, or other sites. The feedback is vital, and impacts the decisions we make. I expect the debate will include a lot of comments under this post. But here’s the truth: each year Simsville interacts with more than 35 million residents and non-residents; Our city is breaking records for revenue and new citizens; The Simsville City mobile app, Simsvigram, is at the top of the (local) app sale charts; Our streetcar system and tourist attractions are stunning achievements with millions of visitors every year; and the Simsville Facebook build your own city social game, SimCity, is being enjoyed by millions of passionate fans all over the world. Every day, thousands of people across the country visit and love our city - literally, thousands more than will vote in this contest. So here’s my response to this poll: We can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this city, the people from around the region that work at city hall, the success we create and the people that get to enjoy them. The tallest windmill kills the most birds. At Simsville we remain proud and unbowed. I leave you with a response to an even earlier criticism aimed at our "Simsville 2.0" plan. The Simsville Bugle mocked our forward looking vision of the city as "drastic" and "controversial", but the proof is in the pudding. Our plans have succeeded in improving the city's traffic problems, improved the city's ability to support more population, and fixed many issues that citizens have been struggling with. So far from the disaster that The Simsville Bugle tried to paint, Simsville 2.0 is a huge success. And I leave you with before and after photos of how the new Simsville compares to the old. A picture tells a thousand words, and we'll let these pictures tell them to you. Before "Simsville 2.0" After "Simsville 2.0"