ADYX

if a city with 167k sims need 7-8 treatment plants i can assume you have a big concentration of ID/agriculture since cities double in population usually dont require more than 2-3 (if any). somewhat important: water pollution (the one you see in graphs and territory view) is NOT the water pollution in the pipelines, its the pollutions of the underground waters from where you are extracting the water (dont know the right english term, in italian it would be "falda acquifera"). so basically red/yellow areas are the ones you are not supposed to drill into while looking for water. this being said you can do the 2 things you asked: 1) importing water from a neighbour, in which case you dont need to bother with your water pollution at all (as long as the place where the water is produced is clean, the water will get clean to where you need it). you can even have a completely red map and no bad things will happen (except the girl advisor telling to reduce it, but that is just a useless message) 2) producing your own water in places that are water pollution free, such as the opposite edge of the map compared to ID/farm/power plants/garbage. if you do so remember to provide energy to the water pump to work EDIT: a really nice analogy that came to my mind: imagine the water pollution view like a gold ore map. you are the digger and have to look for gold, so you look at the map and you see that in some areas there is no gold (red areas), so you just dig elsewhere. while mining (building stuff) you see that the in the map that less gold is avaiable (more red areas) so you start again digging elsewhere, to the point that there is no gold left (full red area due to ID farming all over the place) and you change map.

nope, i imply something that is somewhat the opposite: CO does not emply enough R$ compared to the majority of sims. theoretically there are population caps, in a sandbox region at somepoint i actually hit one: a big map, half R$, half ID, and 2 medium maps full ID. at some point my pop just stopped growing, the map for R$ was green (well... greenish ), and demand at 5k. at the time my R$ pop was around 350k sims, and even if demand was high it was not growing so i had to build stadiums and zoo, then population exploded and in 10 game years went above 500k R$. the thing that bugs me is: since "high end" jobs (CO3$ CO2$) emply such a little number of R$ compared to R$$, 20% vs 65% and 40% vs 50% (last one is somewhat more balanced) it means that if one would want to fill up a region with CO jobs, R$$ population cap (and probably R$$$ cap too) will be hit before even half the R$ pop is reached. so one either throws in the garbage about 500k worth of R$, or has to deal with unemployment (unless the usage of R$ only job types, such as ID and CS$) thats the part that gives me headaches, especially since the game apparently wants mayors to deal with R$: most buildings that provide cap reliefs for R$$ also give it for R$. i had tried quite a couple of times to "separate" the class populations (a map for R$, a map R$$ and a map R$$$) and i always got low crime, low abandonment, but then at some point the system always collapsed for some reason. why i want to give all sims CO and CS3 jobs, is because these are the best paying ones, and this usually helps while fighting crime EG: one region, a 250k pop map, high lvl of EQ, all services given, had like 120k R$$, 100k R$ and 30k R$$$, full police coverage, had around 25-30 crimes per month with the corfue ordinance and cycles of abbandonment/reconstruction from R$$$ (and a sim income graph of 30.000 simoleons) another one, 650k pop map, no EQ at all (0), 630k R$, 20k R$$, only health coverage, full ID and C$ jobs, had 30-35 crimes per month without the corfue. an income graph of 2-3000 simoleons. so i assume people dont usually commit crime towards the ones with a similar income, otherwise the crime in the second city should have been aroun 4 times higher, but it wasnt. so i want to make a map with good paying jobs for everyone (including R$) to cut down on crime (which definately kills CO$$$ and R$$$ desirability).

I did run some numbers general lee: the best i got out of it was that for R$ and R$$ its easier to raise caps (stadiums/market building/zoo/etc) and also for reason outside of my understanding high density (as in high stages 7/8) will not grow in certain areas unless there is a number of "happy" areas (parks/flowers/etc). to test this i used the god mode "trick" to plant trees, which seem to raise desirability by FAR more than any other phenomenon in game: i made it to grow stage 5-6 R$$$ in the middle of ID (no education, health, high water and air pollution) by zoning an area and keeping pressed the mouse button with the "spam trees" selected. also i was far enough of pop cap (i have the census vault building addon so i can constantly check on that). this somewhat makes me assume there is a direct link between happy areas and high density. i must have asked my question wrong i assume, ill try to make it a bit more understandable (stuff always makes sense when i think of it but rarely when i try explaining it to others ) by summing up the bonus structures that apply a cap relief on a given social class (poor, medium, rich sims) and the "necessary" happy areas to obtain development it seems (to me, so if needed i can provide more of my calculations) that there is a population cap (high for $ and $$, low for $$$) which, after looking at the jobs offered by the various types, seems to leave a "free" ammount of R$ (unemployed). what i wanted to do was to find out more about this caps and out of calculations and with the help of repository census vault it appeared to me that caps are aprox: R$ = 0.98M R$$ = 1.05M R$$$ = 0.37M (this one was not checked in game, just mathematically) then given as true what the census vault says (meaning only 60% of population is actually active workforce) and that at some point most of the population works in CO ($$ or $$$) since CS are given by the ammount of that wealth type and IHT is only one that can be built in a city without producing abbandonment due to air and water pollution but has extremely few jobs, what i wanted to break down is how many buildings of a certain type i needed to employ everyone (more or less) at population cap. obviously going for just CO ($$ or $$$) alone would leave hundreds of thousands of R$ unemployed. looking at is as if it were chemistry, the limitation reagent in all CO equations is R$$ (65% for 3$ and 50% for 2$). the equations in cap conditions somewhat balances itself if only R$$ and R$$$ are being taken into consideration: R3$ cap is about 1/3 of the R2$ which is not so far from the CO3$ job tables (15% and 65% being 1/4). in cap conditions using CO3$ seems that most R3$ sims have an occupation, and every single R2$ has one. on the other hand we have around 600k R$ unemployed sims. this is the main reason i wanted to use in my equation CO2$ (balances a bit R2$ and R$) and CS3$ (62% R$ against 30% R2$). to make the question incredibly simple: why do we have such a high R$ cap if in the "top" SC4 society there is not enough space for them? and assuming one would want to (have, and) emply them all, what would be the best job mix?

the "downside" of having the ranger station is that (if i dont remember wrong) it gives more desirability effects on the surrounding building (even though it fights less pollution) to fight pollution you can either: -curse (useless) -paint trees in god mode saving the boredom of planting them one by one and waiting for their growth (works to only some extent and you should watch out for desirability variations, since areas will look rly desirable at first developing $$$ types which will abbandon shortly after due to Desirability lvls raising and getting back to normal) -using nam to make more sims go for subway or creating secluded areas for R (mostly R$$$) types, since C types either dont bother with pollution or "like" customer effect so much that pollution, due to vehicles, rarely affects their desirability edited for better comprehention

1st of all i wanna say im gonna add some rly personal infos in the end of the thread and id LOVE if they would be either skipped or ignored by insensitive ppl. hey back ppl: after testing load of interesting stuff i somewhat got interessed into gathering data through empirical formulas. after some testing done (not gonna go into detail since veterans prolly know arldy what i didn, and new ppl have no idea of it to begin with) what i came out with is that: - R$ pop is capped at aprox 0.98M sims - R$$ pop is capped at aprox 1.05~1.1M sims both simulations had ONLY that few number of parks to actually ALLOW (not favour, did that through the God Mode Tree painting) high density growth. What i did was usually "consuming demand" (ID for R$ and CO$$ for R$$ sims), then through the census vault values i got these numbers out working with the percentages. - R$$$ NOT EVEN BY FAR tested in a decent way, but preliminary results (i actually had to do MASSIVELLY HUGE changes to a city i loved the way it was, so couldnt save and crashed before getting the "good numbers" out) showed the R$$$ pop cap should be somewhere along 0.35-:-0.4M R$$$ sims. I still missed some rewards, some retarded items that i felt like a waste of space. thats why i say i calculated the "raw" formula by using the census vault formula and aproximating it with a bit of maths (sry for incoherence, im far too italian and far too drunk to be able not to make typing errors in english). Whatever, regardless of a lot of stuff my results were aprox 0.38M R$$$ pop, so i kept it "wide" along 0.35M and 0.4M. ik that i missed "some" of the rewards stuff (some was integrated into calculation, some may have not been, cant remember, im too sad/depressed and happy at the same time to remember it.....) in the end if we think it through the "rich" sims usually make up for the smallest portion of the population so aiming for a city that hits R$ and R$$ caps, hardly hits R$$$ cap. Ok getting down to maths: (dont tell me to f**k myself) ive used the census repository posted by ripplejet to see "what employes who" and assuming im aiming for a H-U-G-E commercial region (CO$$ CO$$$ and CS$$$ and R kinds). i alrdy have a theory of how to do that (i sacrificed some RL time to play this game lately since RL sucks) by hitting in order R$ cap, R$$ cap and lately the ammount of R$$$ necessary to have the "system" working, and im willing to share if anyone should be interessed. ive narrowed down some numbers: R$ cap = 0.98M R$$ cap = 1.05M R$$$ cap = 0.38M (so being W, workforce, aprox 60% of pop) R$w cap = 0.59M R$$w cap= 0.63M R$$$w cap = 0.22M since of how the designated C employ i got the functions (for values check Workforce and Demand on sc4d) basically i found that the "NECESSARY" c types ive choosen should have the following values: CO$$$ = 0.467 (or 46.7%) CO$$ = 0.057 (or 5.7%) CS$$$ = -0.03 (????????????) (or NEGATIVE 3%) i solved the equation chosen through substitution and the values are (to say the least) weird. the starting conditions i have put at the base were: Co3= X= 15%R3 + 65%R2 + 20%R1 Co2= Y= 10%R3 + 50%R2 + 40%R1 Cs3= Z= 8%R3 + 30%R2 + 62%R1 Results gotten out were something like: Co3= -0.0734R1 + 0.09R2 - 0.26R3 Co2= 0.067R1 - 0.12R2 + 0.42R3 Cs3= -0.04R1 + 0.02R2 - 0.086R3 Can anyone take the time (if wanted) to check the stuff i found out? and if so can you find the stuff i just said coherent? Basically i wanted to see if there was a value of "perfect distribution" of C buildings so that the whole population at cap(and max EQ) would find workplaces in the wealthiest, best looking, highest capacity, buildings. Ty in advance PS personal stuff related: ive been having a rly bad series of moments IRL and im quite fed up with all of it... when i look at this community i dont only see "pros" and/or "addicts" to this game, but also real ppl with real lives and real feelings, so if anyone would feel like talking (or listening) to my problems id rly appreciate it... thank you again in advance.

this stuff should also be influenced by the game mechanic that makes cities see their neighbours values boosted by 10%. in pure theory (if im not mistaken) the demands that other tiles receive are usually higher than what they should be, so maybe when you play Mechana your game simply sees 10% more sims looking for ID jobs, which ends up making it look like you need more industry. when you switch back to flatville your sims see 10% more jobs than are actually there and you have R demand (so on). in the end you will never fill up all industry, thats sort of a fact also the pathfinding of sims is somewhat retarded (i had similar problems with that) meaning i had 2 cities, 1 R+ID, 2 ID, and all Rs lived in the southEASTERN corner of the first one (which was alrdy south) and for some weird reason all sims that commuted to work in the other city (northern one) and they only worked in the WESTERN side of city 2 (so theoretically they had longer commute time due to choosing to work on that specific side). even after several tests, (destroying roads, subways and having abbandonment )they would plain ignore the eastern side (closer to them) and go for the western one.

ty for your reply Z, so after your advice i "doubled" (actually i went from the 4 to the 16 lines per direction) but honestly i fail to see a real improvement... the commute time graph is still behaving worse than a sysmograph going up and down between 4 and 12 (whichever measurement unit that may be, cuz either minutes or hours dont make any sense ) and the lines are not even remotely greener... and after checking i found out that my nam is NAM31 i did increase my population though, from 530 to 600k, but it makes so little sense to have 4 times the capacity, and a 15% raise on usage makes it all look almost the same color as it was before (mostly dark yellow, orange and a bit darker orange). regarding RL capacity thats exactly what i was trying to say: a 120% or maybe even 140% would still make sense, but 300% no, it is just writing random numbers due to the actual volume of a wagon and the fact that our bodies are not made of Lego :kitty: :kitty: going back to the game mechanic, being the subway the fastest transportation (as i read in other threads), and due to commute time resetting over the city edge, wuoldnt it be possible to get to a point where, maxed out capacity or not, the routes converge to the "one and only" tubeline going towards the sims` direction? and therefore useless to add any more possible paths? (and somewhat a huge letdown since thats not the way RL works )

i dont know what NAM version i have... i do remember i downloaded the 3... something, but if i check the TSCT it says "SimulatorVersion: 2.4.1" i plain dont understand the main reasons for traffic congestion (if you look at the street traffic graph the streets are mostly green and below... except those 3-4 that are yellow and the one orange one) so i dont even know if that is an actual problem for my city. this one time i tried to make 1way roads all the old congested roads, but it ended up giving me less congestion but WAY more traffic (almost all the central area of the residencial part was red, and the rest was orange), so i got scared and put it back the way it was. my real problem here is not having any idea who the real enemy is: congestion or traffic? which one am i actually supposed to fight? also and pretty nasty thing, when i was trying to get rid of congestion, i saw the commute time graph go totally berserk... up`n`down and so on finally, what do you mean with "consider red lines for subways"? should i double them (again? since there is 5, 4 and 4 tubes for each direction) or should i try overfund the subway? besides me failing to understand what a 300% capacity means (if a subway train is full, then it`s full... not like you can "glue" more ppl to it to have it move more ppl)

i would also like to add a thing even if i may not be as experienced with many thing aswell as veterans of this game: i do assume the poor sims are the bricks needed the raise the society pyramide, meaning you should first go for many poor, maybe even uneducated, sims. this way you will start having lots of C$ and ID demand, which will turn into giving you more R$ demand, which will bring along needs for services, which will attract R$$, IM, C$$ and CO$$, then R$$$ and the rest. the fact that you skipped agriculture at all, zone very little ID, and gave far too many services (unasked for) ended up making your city have the "qualitative" behaviour of a big city (as in IHT, CO$$$ demand) but without the feedback given by all the stuff your city was missing (tons of buildings and hundreds of thousands of sims) which, by not being there was not able to produce demand

ok i got the screen (which took me like 1 hour :kitty: ). sry for the late reply nonny but my car broke and my real life commute time went up 250% regarding to the commuter thingy, after you see the tile layout maybe it will become clearer: above this there is a full land tile, to its side (since this one is in the corner) there is a medium tile (it is the SW corner of the NY region in the original game) that is split into 3 land areas by a river/sea. If i connect the eastern side of that medium tile to other stuff will this create loop or not? ofc assuming im not so stupid to place ferries/bridges/subway connections. Meaning id play the medium tile as 2 separate cities but in the same map: west as an industrial addition to my city and east as other stuff i will decide to develop later. Edit: btw any advice regarding my traffic?

hey nonny, it been a while seen how its a communist country ghetto that holds 460k souls in it traffic is pretty nasty but connections seem to be valid (atm). should u want some screens of it i can post. problem is lately almost all my subway are "exploding"... from the main R area there are like 5 (FIVE) parallel sw tubes going east, 4 going north and 3 going ENE but they are all going orange/red. and the roads are literally a hell... the questions abt the commuter was more in the way of "can sims cross natural barriers to eternally commute?". meaning can they cross a river if no river tansportation is give? can they cross an area which has no streets/buildings? (can post some pics of this too if needed). also: is it just me or the poor sims like (for unknown reasons) pollution? but seem to dislike other things? when i started working on my ghetto i basically made the following pattern: R/R/R -> C/C --------> ID/ID/ID/ID/ID/ID/ID basically ID pollution was (and still is, actually its gotten worse) able to "touch" the first block of R buildings, but checking on appetibility (or likelihood? or... damn im missing the actual term) graph i saw that the first 2 blocks of R were a green area, the last block of R was brown/orange (transition phase), the 2 blocks of Cs were pretty red and then the ID area was not by far so red, it was actually greener than the last R block (can also give a screen of this if needed)

thank you coug, ive read the stage limits thread back to back. the reader tool as for me is quite a double pain since my simcity4 was installed in italian, which makes it even harder to get what stage a building is since awfully often the names are not translated literally (and i have to look it up by images to be sure which one is which )

im sorry to bumb the thread, i know it is really unpolite and usually not something ppl take kindly to (and belive me i wouldnt have done it but after 2 days having 0replies and mostly 0views makes me feel kind justified)... also id love to add some questions since im at it: does it make sense to connect cities to sim nation? (meaning the edge of the region map). if so why? are there any reasons to do so? may it "invoke" the commuter bug? finally: my population is totally nuts :kitty: over the last 80 years i have had a population of ~400k sims, and for the last 80 years my "population divided in age groups" chart has shown me that ~110k are ppl ages 51-60, 80k ages 61-70, and around 50k 71-90 (these should work anyways). since around 20k are children i thought that my city in around 20 to 30 years would become half the population (due to over 240k ppl dying). but after 80 years nothing happened, the chart keeps looking the same which doesnt make much sense... assuming the ppl age all together the 110k shouldve gove 61-70 then 71-80, but that its not very realistic cuz ppl may die sooner/later, and the point is: how can i have one year 60k 41-50 and 110k 51-60 and over 10 years later the SAME values? are some sims aging faster then other? do some stop aging? im rly not able to tell what is going on PS: damn... before replying it showed me 0 views, now it shows 51... i feel like such an idiot... im sorry

1st of all hello again simtropolis community its been a while since i last posted on here, for a series of personal reasons (wont get down to details but most RL nasty problems coming up so less time for this game) and also cuz of some game reasons: - playing the game with more humility taught me so so so much, and many doubts solved themselves - experimenting is key, and instead of starting a reason aiming to skyscrapers i tried to screw around and answer a lot of "what if...."s - spending a bit less time to focus on "little" problems (see infinite commuter ) and i started to nerd into some old threads here and in SC4dev and learned a lot. basically some of the old questions i asked in my old thread became so clear to me that im actually feeling ashamed to post them here, but anyways, let me start with the questions (and assumptions) Buildings and building stages: after aprox 3 days (a total of 5 hrs spread around) looking for some illuminating thread i couldnt find anything about this... at first i tried to grind a way in game to figure out the building stages ingame, but it was just wasted time. after that i came here and starting to look around for clues, and i found some things: sadly there were mostly threads related to high level stages so quite useless. i didnt lose hope, digged deeper and found 2 really nice sources: a post about a GM i think, tornado maybe, who linked this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4_tH08pH62NaG0tYWxaYVZiYkE/view and another link to a wiki page with all percentages about "how much of each you need to get higher stage" so my questions are basically: what are stages? at first i thought i was a simple way of defining buildings. but if so, what does the game use to sort them into categories? if the answer is (how i assume) capacity, then how come MANY buildings belong to the same stage but have such differences in term of capacity? in the document that i found it says some stage8 R$ buildings have 1600 capacity, occupying a 2x4 (or 4x2) slot while some stage7 have over 2000 capacity for the same slot. also in the wiki page it says that buildings basically need to be somewhat spread along the various stages (as in you cant have a city of full stage8 according to it), example the R$ but if this is true then 2 questions arise: why so often when one starts a city and some pop requirements then all buildings "evolve" (or almost all) but then the so called stage 1, 2 and 3 come "missing"? meaning that most building become big buildings and there is no bungalow or really ugly house left. also, assuming this is true (which i do, id never mistrust ppl that played this game for so long, im just trying to understand), that there is an ingame requirement for some % to be met, why then if one tries to do a healthy city with ghetto-high density ghetto-wealthy ppl, and then buldozes down all the ghetto/low density areas around, and zones for more R, instead of crappy houses coming up, its always a skyscraper? also is there a way of telling (possibly from ingame, cuz alt-tabbing is a real pain and learning all buildings by heart its just bs) what building belongs to which stage? on the infinite commuter or looping commuter or whatever one wants to call it: ive learned it the hard way... by screwing up a region and abbandoning it. then i found out the post by nonny moose about the tree shaped region. my questions (to keep it short) are: 1) can this "bug" be exploited as in building a huge commercial center on the edge where 4 maps meet? abusing the concept of having infinite traffic at some point? 2) can it come up if using "barriers" for sims not to be able to cross over? as in: city A is connected to upper city B (call it B+) and lower city B (call it B-) is connected to city C, if the connection is A-B-C-A-B etc then the loop can happen, but what if the B is divided into 2, meaning the REAL connection should be A-(B+) (huge river, no ferries, no boats, no bridges, no subway, only electricity and water) (B-)-C-A from what i have gathered a sim commuting cant come back to the same city (as in leaving from A to B+ he cant go back to work in A i assume), but then he must stop in B+ to find a job cuz he cant cross the river, and the longest chain happening would be in theory (B+)-A-C-(B-) but then he would be stuck there or anyways unable to reach city A again 3) can it be avoided somehow by making the connections so screwed up abong the cities that a sim would find it unappealing to go to over the border? as in imagine placing a "frying pan"shaped highway in a city of the loop, with no connections in the holding part of the pan but only up in the half that is opposite to the corner? last questions then i promise to shut up so u dont start hating me straight away: its somewhat related to both of the topic and its due to ttraffic volume VS congestion... assuming a RL situation congestion means heavy traffic (stop`n`go) so while theoretically congestion leeds to less traffic after the bottleneck, heavy traffic itself can but also could not lead to congestion. so game wide which one is better to have (or which one is better to avoid)? i ask cuz last night in a desperate attempt to get rid of congestion with one-way roads i ended up having FAR more volume on my roads in the R area (like 4-5 red roads in the traffic simulator) BOTH during morning and evening commute, but the evening was worse, then i restord the old roads to my ppl and the graphs turned back to a nice green/yellow overall but the congestion was again all over the place (so accepting advice) these questions came around the past 10 days while i was trying to make a rly nast retro 1925-1930 like communist russia industrial area, so tons of poor ppl having to work in a polluted, unhealty (not so unhealthy cuz due to game mechanics i had to build hospitals or ppl wouldnt have come), low-wage, low education, VERY high density with high police control area. i can bring up some screens if needed ty all in advance (sry if the thread is long and all but i thought making it like this may help one day "the next guy" looking around for similar problems who may find help in here)

ADYXLAND (city B) AQUARYA (city A) MOONSILVER (city C) SUNGOLD (city D) region map hope this helps cant actually find the "edit" button (damn my eyes) so ill double post (sry for that, ik its rude ). where can i find nam and how do i install/use it