BlackJackal

I should clarify. I have numerous ploppable commercial office towers from the STEX, but since they are made by different people some of the occupant figures are way off in relation to each other, IE: small buildings holding more jobs than larger ones. And the ratio of $$ and $$$ is off as well. I know SC4Tool can change these two numbers but will it work in-game?

Okay, now I have a question. Take a CO$$$ office tower for example. Now, not ALL of those jobs are CO$$$ right? There is usually a mix of CO$$$ and CO$$ in the building. Can I use SC4Tool to edit those figures just fine? And will it work? What if I want to combined some CO and some CS?

BJ. I need a better name.

I'm not sure if that would work. For example, the stock San Francisco region has the city of San Francisco split up into 4 medium cities and I'd like to be able to combine them into one large city. I don't think this is possible however, unless I could get a carbon-copy of the map JPEG and re-render it with my own config.bmp.

All road links between my cities are accomplished with highways and I always place a toll booth near the connection. I think it helps as I've never experienced this problem before.

If you have SC4Tool, you can use its Exemplar editor to change the number and type of occupants.

I recommend using waste to energy plants, if possible. They're expensive and dirty but you get power out of them, and when you get a really big city nearby, the landfill space required to process all that garbage is huge, and also expensive. Note that waste to energy plants don't register as capacity on the graph. The blue line that represents capacity is just storage capacity. WtE plants don't store trash, they burn it. If you have landfills, those show up as capacity on the graph. The actual garbage level, in green, shows you how much garbage is in your city. If that line is above the blue line, then there is trash in your streets. If not, then all of your garbage is in the landfills. If you use WtE plants like me then the garbage level should be zero, IE: you burned all the trash you made that month. Anyway, as long as you have a road connection you can export garbage. Have a look at your garbage graph. Is the amount of garbage going up? If so, ease the export rate up until that green line begins to fall. Once it starts falling, you're sending out more garbage than what you're producing and you can stop there. Eventually all the garbage will be gone, though it might take a little while. I should note that your export rate will NOT show up on the graph. If your export rate is as high as it can go, and your garbage levels are still going up (or at least not coming down), then your neighbour to which the trash is being sent can't take any more trash. This means their landfills are full and/or their WtE plants are at maximum capacity. You need to add more. Once you add another WtE plant, you will be able to export more to that city. Your exporting ability is also limited by your ability to pay for the deal, but that's not usually an issue.

The amount of garbage you can export is tied to the capacity of the other city to consume it, either in landfills or waste to energy plants. As your city expands and produces more garbage, you need to increase the capacity of your neighbour to accept more.

It's worth adding that you can only edit the config.bmp for regions that have not been rendered yet. I think, anyway. If you edit the config to a region that already exists then the new squares will just show up as blank level terrain. If there is a way to change the layout for pre-existing regions, especialy the Maxis ones, I'd love to hear it.

The same issue exists for hospitals. It's just something you have to deal with. Find the areas where the coverage for two schools overlap and place a third one there to space them out a little.

The CPR training does not have any effect on the usage of your hospitals, I don't think. It suppliments them, however, and adds to your citizens' life expectancy, which makes it worth using regardless, provided you can afford it. If you are having overcrowding problems and your funding is as high as it can possibly go, your only real option is to construct more hospitals.

From SimCity.com: If you reduce the Power Department budget too much, your power poles will deteriorate over time and eventually end up sparking. Since the sparks can cause fires nearby, you should take care of this situation, either by increasing funding to at least 100% or by replacing the distressed power poles.quote> So the moral of the story is to keep your funding at 100% to keep poles from sparking. This will not fix poles that are already sparking, as those need to be replaced. As for power deals, you need to establish a neighbour connection between the two cities using power lines. IE: Drag your power lines to the edge of the map. This will allow for the sale of power from one city to another. The same goes for water, except you'd use pipes obviously.

There is no tried and true grid system you can really lay out. It depends on the terrain and where you plan to place certain parts of the city. Place the majority of your commercial zones in a central location with high capacity roads (alternating one-ways, avenues). You can build highways that stretch outward from this central business district into the residential areas surrounding it. Same with mass transit. Your network will be it's most dense in this core area and spread out like a web. Subway lines might be more sparse out in the residential areas but you may want to place parking garages near the stations so sims can park their cars and get on the subway. I'd suggest taking my earlier advice and getting some road-top bus/subway stations. You also don't want huge numbers of wealthy sims because they always have trouble finding jobs. The overwhelming majority of your sims should be middle class. Keep the taxes for the middle class the lowest, the wealthy the highest, and the lower class somewhere in the middle. In order to provide jobs for the upper class, since they seem to have the hardest time finding work, make sure your high-wealth commercial and high-tech industrial tax rates are lower as well. This will help with abandonment issues. Really though the game is about experimentation. It's not a linear game where we can tell you how to beat it. Try things and see what works and what doesn't.

The best approach is to develop first with absolutely no services. No schools, hospitals, fire stations, police, or water. You will only get low wealth residents and commerce, and dirty industry. You can continue to expand like this (adding fire stations as necessary to stop fires in progress). Also, you should not have mass transit except for maybe rail and buses. I'd suggest downloading a road-top bus/subway station set from STEX so you don't have to demolish buildings later on to fit in a subway system. Anyway, ignore the advisors at first when they complain about a lack of services, but eventually you will want to add them. Water is required to get higher densities, as well as medium and high wealth residents, and it increases industrial options as well. Only when your city is large enough should you begin adding the major services, and only when you can afford them. Make sure to keep tabs on each school and hospital to make sure that you are only funding for what you need, and not the full capacity. Usually by the time I start adding health/education, the large schools are available to me and I exclusively use them, and the large medical center.

Originally posted by: dev Canadian locations volneralble to terrorismquote> Beebs: We don't use much Canadian oil...we seem to buy it from dictators and invasive countries...Maybe Canada could donate some...quote> Actually, Canada is the largest supplier of oil to the United States. Even moreso than Saudi Arabia and the rest of the middle east combined. Canada doesn't get much attention, though, because it is a friendly nation with a stable government.

I construct a rail and bus system from the beginning because they're cheap. Subway is the only other form of transit I use, and in order to make room for it later, I will place 'Open Paved Area' whereever I plan on placing subway stations in the future. I love the subway, because the system takes up no space on the surface, aside from stations.

The oilsands are a huge open-pit style mining facility, which would be very difficult to attack. The ports of Montreal and Vancouver come to mind, but the two big ones that I can think of are the CN Tower, because it's such a well known landmark and a major attack on it would be visually stunning (like the World Trade Center), and the other obvious one would be the Parliament Buildings, as that's the home of the government.

I'm sure some of the difference could be accountd for by carpooling. The commuters information may just be the number of cars parking at the building, and not the total number of people commuting by car? I'm not sure.

You've probably hit a demand cap. When your city gets to a certain size you will reach these caps where the city will not grow anymore, and you need to provide something for the sims. The biggest one is usually parks. You need an adqauate number of parks to bust through the residential demand cap. Later, things like the airport will help with commercial demand caps. There are probably other threads and resources you can search for, for further information. As for money, in a small city like that you don't really need a lot of services. Also, you can probably cut back on funding for your schools and hospitals. Go into the budget, and check the actual usage and capacity for each school and hospital -- only fund for what you need. If you have a Large Elementary School with a capacity of 3000 (full funding), but there are only 800 students, then reduce the funding so your capacity is something like 1000. When your city grows, the Education Advisor will let you know when a school is over capacity, and you can raise the funding to compensate (by then you will have more tax revenue to cover it).

I love the SPUI interchange for Highway/Road or Highway/Avenue, and I'd like to see a full 4-level stack interchange between highways. Probably could make the stack pretty tight and save some space that would otherwise be taken up by those massive loop ramps on the default cloverleaf. Those things are ugly. The single-ramp flyover is a good idea, too, where one highway merges into another in one direction. Sort of like a Y-stack but one road remains straight. I also feel the need for some kind of T-intersection between roads and highways, perhaps in the form of a trumpet. The standard diamond interchange looks ugly when you want to bring a road to an end at a highway. I use the highway/highway T-intersection for ending an avenue at a highway, myself.

So, I started fooling aroung with DatGen, looking at the various properties available to mass-transit stations and toll booths. I can find the property that dictates how much each sim pays when passing through a toll booth (Transit Switch Fare) but there is no coresponding property for mass-transit stations. IE: Adding the Transit Switch Fare to a mass transit station I got off of STEX (because I thought perhaps it was supposed to be there but wasn't) simply added that money under the 'Roads: Tolls' part of the budget. There appears to be no property to modify mass transit fares, but if somebody out there knows something I don't, I'd love to hear it. From DatGen I know that the going rate at the default toll booths is about $0.10 per sim. After doing some experimentation again I discovered that the issue I was noticing with GLR is actually across the entire mass transit system. I had approximately 200 sims traveling along a stretch of elevated rail, and my revenue from mass transit fares was $5. That works out to roughly 2 and a half cents per sim, or 25% of the road tolls. The other forms of mass transit were giving me similar results. Now, unless I'm mistaken, road tolls usually aren't as expensive as mass transit fares, or they are at least on par. For example, the TTC Subway in Toronto is about $2.50 per fare the last time I was there, but the 407 ETR (Electronic toll) highway is $0.13 per kilometer. $2.50 would get you almost 20 kilometers. What I'd LIKE to do is change the fares for mass transit so that they're more in line with the road tolls, if that's possible. EDIT: Seems my inital experiments were in vain! Mass transit revenue is not only connected to the number of sims traveling on the network, but also the DISTANCE they travel. I extended the network by about three times and ran it again, and noticed a significant increase in the fares.

Wow, I always had my R$$$ and C$$$ taxes the lowest, along with I-HT, in order to encourage them to move into my city and provide jobs for them.

The rail lines need to be connected to your neighbour cities, first. Usually industries that border onto the rail line can send freight along it, but you can build a frieght station so industries further away can truck their goods to the rail line.

Awesome. I was just doing some testing earlier to see which parks and rewards worked the best for desirability, but a complete list like this is immensley useful.