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 ...

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"

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

I found it easier to just build a community college to level up to a University, instead of via just grade/high schools alone. For the buses, do you notice a pattern in terms of the areas where students aren't getting picked up? Perhaps this can help you pin point any traffic issues. Also, you'll need a bit of time I think for the attendance rate to increase.

This page might answer your question: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/107699/how-much-data-does-simcity-transfer Some have reported a bit of data usage (something like 100MB per hour), so you may need to be careful.

O RLY? I wonder how much TVs and processors will fall in price ...

Night of the Living Damned: Zombies Invade Simsville In exclusive photos obtained by The Bugle, it appears that the walking dead are indeed walking the streets of Simsville. A series of photos taken by a reader of The Bugle, who wishes to remain anonymous, shows police battling the undead on the streets of Simsville. The incident happened on the night of the 26th, and coincides with reports by other readers of a gunfight near the location where these photos were taken. Read More ...

I like the style, but wouldn't have mind it if it was ultra realistic as well. Don't want to give EA any ideas, but perhaps we'll see ultra-realism via a DLC at some point?

+1 on the undo feature. I think at the very least, there should be a "save" button where you can press it and get a response back from the server to tell you that the save has been a success, so that you know if there is a rollback, you know the worst case scenario of when it rolls back to. Heck, I'd even settle for a save status indicator telling you when the last successful save was made.

SimCity 2013 is all about traffic. You have to make sure the agents can get to work in time, get back, and go shopping, all in a day's time ready to start the next day. If sims can't do this for whatever reason, then they'll run out money and you know what happens next. And it's almost always due to traffic problems. Even if you don't have "orange" or "red" patches on your roads, it doesn't mean that the sims aren't having trouble getting their daily routines done. You may have to do some major restructuring in order to fix traffic problems, but don't be afraid to do it, since cities rebuild themselves rather quickly (I restructured once, population went from 70k to 19k, but after about 3 in-game days, it was up to 140k - so if you have a good economy, don't worry too much about laying waste to large sections of your city). A couple of other things to note: make sure you have the right balance of low/med/high wealth sims, and check the population details panel to see if you have jobs catered to each class of sims. Best not to have too many unfulfilled jobs (as that can invite neighbouring sims to flood in and congest your city entrances), but ensure there isn't unemployment either. Put commercial zones mixed in with your residential ones (you only need 1 or 2 C block for every say 6 R blocks), as this allows sims to get to these jobs faster/easier, and also to go shopping in these areas after work is done.

Well at least there are acknowledging the issues and trying to fix it.

Oh crap, I better not load my new electronic city in Twain then. If 7 industrial buildings can do that, I don't want to know what the 4 processor plants and 4 CE factories I built will do (in addition to about 5 high density industrial buildings).

In this second and final edition of our historical series, we examine the period from 1925 to the present. The following features excerpts from the historical text, 'Simsville: From Sinsville to Metropolis', by Pulitzer nominated author and Simsville residence, Brandon Zeltzer. ------ The 1920's was the Golden Age of Simsville. It was during this time the city builts its first sewerage system, first factories, and the first newspaper, The Simsville Bugle. Affectionately known as The Bugle by Simsvillians, the meteoric rise of the newspaper closely followed the meteoric rise of the city itself, by that time, it was one of the most prosperous cities in North America. The Bugle's reputation as a leading news source extended not only within the city and the Whitewater Valley region itself, but beyond. But when the Great Depression arrived, all that Simsville achieved in the preceding 20 years or so was wiped out almost instantly. First to go was industry. Overnight, the factories that had been at the center of the Simsville economic miracle shut down and closed their doors. Manufactured materials, everything from alloys to metals, sat in trade depots with no global market for these goods. Trade depot with unsold stockpiled goods, circa 1932 People lost their livelihoods overnight. Unemployment was at 45%. Poverty was everywhere. In this photo from 1933, a previously leafy and well-to-do suburb of Simsville turns into a deserted wasteland A prosperous metropolis turned into a crime ridden urban nightmare almost overnight. Photo circa 1933 How Simsville dealt with this economic armageddon would unfortunately define the city, and its citizens, for decades to come, in what many consider the most shameful period of Simsville's history. First was the Llama massacre of 1934. When city officials were slow to respond to food shortages during the peak of the Great Depression, the starving citizens of Simsville took it upon themselves to solve this crisis. The internationally respected Simsville Zoo, home to the world's largest herd of captivity bred llama, was broken into, and in what could only be described as a massacre, not a single llama survived the ensuing slaughter as hungry citizens killed and barbecued indiscriminately. One resident of neighboring Elm Grove wrote in his diary on that fateful day in 1934: "The smell lofting over from the broken wasteland that is Simsville was unbearable. You could not go outside and come inside without smelling of roast llama. A smell that brings the most ghastly images imaginable, yet surprising salivating at the same time." The decline of Simsville became an incubator for something even more shameful. When Adam "Benito" Whitcliff rose to the position of mayor in 1935, it would herald in one of the most shameful periods in Simsville's then short history. Whitcliff, an admirer of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, would lead the city for the next 8 years under the guiding principles of his fascist idols in Europe, including Mussolini and Hitler. Bringing order to chaos, the citizens of Simsville embraced Whitcliff and his discriminating policies. The Simsville Bugle, once held in the same esteem as The New York Times or The Washington Post, published shameful editorial after editorial praising Whitcliff and his views, to the dismay of most ordinary Americans. The paper has never recovered from this disastrous period in its otherwise illustrious history. A shameful headline from the June 6 1935 edition of The Simsville Bugle, ironically exactly 9 years before American troops made that fateful landing in Normandy, France Ignorance became the catchphrase of Simsville. When the mayor commissioned local builders to recreate the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa with the city, a series of photographic mistakes led to the building of a non-leaning version of the tower. Only shoddy construction and poor engineering eventually led the tower to lean in the right direction. This present day photo shows the infamous Leaning Tower of Simsville Even the declaration of war against Hitler's Germany didn't change mayor Whitcliff's politics, but by then, the citizens of Simsville had had enough. Whitcliff lost to challenger Gregory Lehane in the 1943 election by a historic margin of 92% to 6%. The damage had been done though, and at the war's end, Simsville had become the butt of a many jokes. One U.S. senator even jokingly putting forth a motion in the senate to declare Simsville enemy territory, and hence subject to war reparations payments. But like the defeated nations of Germany and Japan, Simsville refocused the ignominy of "defeat" into productivity and rebuilding. The second Golden Age of Simsville had begun, and the city flourished again. The city stayed out of the headlines, quietly rebuilding its industry, taking advantage of the consumer electronic and computing revolutions of the 80's and 90's. Even The Bugle's reputation recovered somewhat. Simsville is now a center of consumer electronic manufacturing and export Presently under the steady leadership of mayor Peter Less, the city has undergone major transformations in the last decade. The city continues on its journey to reach its full potential, and regain its reputation as one of the premier metropolises of the world. A metropolis once again - Simsville in 2013 A new sun rises in Simsville