PeniG

I have no objection to mods that fix unpatched game bugs, which I think this counts as. I just want a good experience-based grasp of the mechanics and what I do and don’t enjoy about them before I start complicating things with mods to customize the experience. I don’t have an ideal city or region in mind. I want to see them develop and to challenge myself to make different kinds of cities within the parameters of the game. The cash flow is an important part of that, and there’s nothing like a funds hemorrhage to tip you off that you haven’t balanced all your elements correctly and need to quit without saving. So, thank you and I’ll see about installing the NAM lite before I play the next big city in the region (I’m taking a leaf from my Sims 2 experience and playing rotationally, cycling in new regions as I gain experience and think of new strategies for starting a neighborhood and planning for future development), and see how that changes things.

I have been playing SC4 Rush Hour for a couple of months, experimenting and trying to get some game mastery before I muck around with mods other than bug fixes. I’ve been lurking around the forum reading threads and picking up tips as I could, figuring out how to solve problems as they arise, but both my search fu and my experiments have failed me on this one, but it’s probably something simple I’m overlooking. Traffic being a recurring problem in most of my cities at the moment I decided it was time for light rail. I have good bus networks, but some of my intersections have more than a hundred buses going through them. So I chose a congested straight route touching concentrations of industrial, commercial, and residential zoning and placed three elevated rail stations along it in a straight line across town. In the residential space closest to the stations I placed parking garages and bus stops. I altered the street layout in the vicinity to accommodate the tracks and made sure everything connected. Which sounds like a silly thing to assure y’all of, but my eyesight is poor and this is exactly the kind of error that tripped me up most in the earliest stages. I thought it was working because congestion along that corridor virtually disappeared. But I saw less reduction of traffic in the redundant routes than I had hoped for, and when after 20 years I checked it’s traffic in the rails and stations, there was none at all. This bewilders me. It’s probably something very simple that for some reason is counterintuitive to me, or a game mechanic I haven’t grasped yet, but the experiments I’m thinking of are all expensive, time consuming, and will have serious knock on effects. Most of the development along the route is medium rather than high density, for example, and I don’t feel I have enough give in the budget to upgrade the health and education facilities to accommodate that without triggering a disaster cascade; I certainly don’t, if the problem is something like the orientation of the stations denying access to them. (Orientation is a consistent problem of mine; I keep trying to rotate plop items as if they were Sims 2 furniture. I can’t always make out the little arrows. ) So the question is: what do I need to check to make sure I’ve set up correctly , and what conditions do I have to meet, to make light rail functional?