Sixfortyfive

Setting middle-click to center is definitely something that I miss from DOS. If right-click could be set to Query instead of the pop-up menu that'd be even better. The default pop-up menu isn't terribly convenient. Would it be feasible to port over Shift-click Help pop-ups from DOS, or is that too much work? The stock Windows version moved all of the in-game help text to Windows help files that are broken on the modern OS.

The idea of commercial and industrial zones counting toward "population" in the same way that residential zones do has always been a particular quirk of SimCity that doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you sit back and think about it for too long. You can try to invent backward-thinking justifications for it (C/I workers vs R stay-at-home / students, out of town commuter jobs, etc.) but none of it really cleanly explains away everything. Sometimes I reflect on how a game like SC2K might have been received if it had been released during a different era. It exists in the very specific time when home internet access existed but was still about 3 years away from mainstream adoption. Would the same audience that picked apart SimCity 2013's many systemic flaws have been just as critical of SC2K's? While I do think that some of SC2K's "quirks" are more justifiable (simplistic braindead traffic generation in SC2K is more acceptable than that of 2013 because 2K never made the boneheaded mistake of actually showing you all the details at a ground level, instead wisely keeping much of it abstracted and obfuscated), sometimes I think that it probably could have benefited from an environment that called out weird behavior in the water or LE/EQ subsystems and gotten them patched. Do any veteran players actually like playing with arcologies these days? I know that on some level technically everything about SimCity is some variant of a "number goes up" game, but these days I tend to actually want there to be some kind of work or trade-off involved in upping said numbers. Actually now that I'm thinking about this, I recall that some disasters also seem to be biased toward the center of the city. Like whenever a monster or chemical spill occurs, they tend to coalesce around the same area. Not sure how useful that is, but I've observed it consistently enough to believe that it's not a coincidence.

I feel like I'd need to read over that at least 20 more times to digest it. But my first takeaway is that I'm not imagining things when I've observed that the C-to-I demand ratio in one 100k population city has been notably different from the ratio in another city of the same total population. Can you clarify the difference between "Industrial Jobs" and "Industrial Population"?

What I've noticed from experience is that this problem is more pronounced when your city's population is more stable. You can verify it by creating a city entirely of light density zones (so that land-value based growth/decay never happens), zero taxes (so that tax-based decay never happens), and in which sims never have to drive more than 1 tile to reach their destination (so that traffic-based decay never happens). For whatever reason, when the entire map is developed and no more people are moving in or out of your city, the trendlines for both LE and EQ rapidly get more extreme. If you have underfunded services, then both values will bottom-out and eventually roll-under, and when you have well-funded services, they'll hit their "maximum" values of 100 and 150 and eventually roll-over. I dunno if it'd be feasible to "fix." Like maybe you could patch-up the overflow bug itself but there's just something fundamentally off in the way in which this behavior is so closely tied to population growth/decay in the first place.

Reverse-engineering the water pump output wasn't too hard because it's pretty easy to at least spot the major factors that influence them (sea level, bordering fresh water, weather) just from experience. Once you notice that every water pump query window reports "gallons" as a multiple of 720, and you then divide that number by 720, you end up with a number that's equal to the number of watered tiles that pump outputs, which is a pretty clear indicator that the water system is operating in tiles as a measurement and that "gallons" is just a fake user-facing translation/obfuscation for it (and is why the stated in-game water tower capacity makes no sense). From there it's really easy to calculate exactly how much of an influence that sea level and fresh water tiles have, leaving the weather effect as the only one left to figure out. And after logging enough data, eventually the patterns are going to reveal themselves there, too. Figuring out that the "weather tile bonus" was actually just equal to "precipitation / 2" was the very last piece of it for me; I didn't even think to check for the in-game weather reports in the newspapers as I was logging everything, and precipitation is explicitly reported there. For water treatment plants, I had "Power, Politics, and Planning" as a starting point, which explicitly states that one treatment plant should be built for every 20,000 citizens. That number has always stuck out to me for two reasons: it's very specific, and it's wrong. Personal experience had taught me that I could get away with building about half that many plants for the same effect, and that population didn't actually seem to be the deciding factor, as I could observe cases where a population of entirely high-density zones required fewer treatment plants per capita than the same population of entirely light-density zones. Putting two and two together, and knowing at this point that a lot of calculations concerning water and power actually work off of tiles (not user-facing units like "gallons" or "megawatts"), I figured that treatment plants were probably the same way. "20,000 citizens" happens to be the exact population of "2000 light-density tiles," so 2000 tiles was literally the first measurement that I checked for, and it turned out to be correct. It was also straightforward enough to determine from a bunch of A/B tests and graph-watching that there was some citywide pollution factor that increased or decreased proportionally depending on specific citywide attributes (industry tax ratios, pollution controls, water pumps / treatment). It's also when I noticed that said citywide pollution barely made a dent in the wider simulation at all, and that the only pollution that seemed to "really" matter was the kind that emanated from specific buildings and had an immediate effect on its direct neighbors, which is why I draw the distinction between "citywide" and "localized" pollution in my guide. I would've never been able to reverse-engineer the precise pollution divisor, though. I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that it's an oversight that the water treatment bonus is applied to cities without a water system. The way that I had viewed it was that the introduction of an untreated water supply would logically introduce a lot of pollution into the city, and that treatment plants would have to be constructed to clean up that specific pollution that the water system itself introduces. So, that functionality makes sense to me. (What doesn't make sense, however, is that treatment plants function perfectly fine even if they're not connected to power or water. This actually reminds me that I wanted to check if there were any other buildings in the game that draw power but don't actually need it to function; I haven't gotten around to that yet.) I think it might be a case of editorializing to suggest that revenues are "missing" from military base functionality in the first place. I suspect that military bases are functioning precisely as intended (other than the fact that the stock Win95 version has trouble actually building them, that is). If you read up on developer interviews and comments, Fred Haslam noted that when he brought the implementation of military bases to the table, there was a lot of internal pushback among the team regarding exactly how much visibility and influence the military industrial complex should have on their quaint city simulation game. Some of the team members didn't want them to be included at all. The precise functionality of Captain Hero / Maxis Man, for example, is a concession to those team members: the superhero shows up only in cities that DON'T have a military base. So, the vague and waffling text box that pops up when you get the military base proposal ("a military base may bring extra revenues but may also bring more problems") very much strikes me as a way for the designers to paper-over their internal disagreement: in reality, the military base in SC2K brings no extra revenues and no extra problems, and this is by design. The only real effect it has concerns disaster management (some extra dispatch units depending on base type balanced against random superhero chance), with any other "benefit" or "detriment" being left to the imagination of the player and a reflection of their own personal values and decisions. Tangentially related, but I've noticed that the title screen on the stock Special Edition only seems to play the "intended" title screen BGM if the FMV intro is missing. I know this is the case on Windows and I think it's also the case on DOS.

I love this post because it mirrors completely what I went through a few months ago: a desire to pick up the game again mixed with a frustration over a lot of legacy community "knowledge" that didn't stand up to actual testing. It started with a desire to actually break down the water system because old wives' tales about the "phantom water pump" still persisted, and it eventually ended with me cleaning up a bunch of notes and turning it into my first GameFAQs submission in nearly 20 years. Like, it's actually pretty satisfying for someone to come along and verify the specific 4 heavy polluting industries that I had also independently determined through my own trial-and-error checks, but this time with some actual insight on the simulation's inner workings to back it up. I'd actually appreciate it if you could give the latter link a read and let me know if anything in it should be fixed. Much of my testing was done only in actual surface-level gameplay. I've poked around a little with Cheat Engine for some specific things, but proper assembly inspection or debugging is something that's presently beyond my skillset or time commitment.

I imagine that it's for the same reason why other parts of the simulation are obfuscated or abstracted: it slightly breaks the immersion if the in-game month is revealed to have only 25 days instead of a fully accurate calendar. Don't read this as a complaint though. This update is something I'd probably keep on even if I had an option to toggle it off.

Beyond issues that are unique to the networking component of Network Edition, there's also the issue of other parts of the game being either broken or omitted from that version altogether. Like it doesn't have a terrain editor IIRC, and weather effects that change from month to month in other versions are just frozen in stasis in that one. In general, it was like a few small things would get broken or lost in translation every time the game was ported to a new platform. It's part of the reason why I've never really agreed with calling the Win95 version of the game the "definitive" edition in the first place. Yeah, you can natively run it at higher resolutions and faster speeds, but as this thread demonstrates alone, there's a whole lot of little stuff that just doesn't work right even after accounting for the extra hurdles to get it running on modern operating systems. It's been a while since I checked, but I think even the terrain editor is slightly off in Win95 compared to Mac/DOS. Like I think you're more likely to observe repeat patterns when automatically generating terrain, and extending land to its highest elevation doesn't always work smoothly.

One more aspect of the Win95 game that could stand to be cleaned up a bit is the Debug cheat menu: - "Add All Inventions" doesn't work. It tries to bring up the help screen (which itself causes an error on modern Windows). - "Add All Gifts" not only adds everything in the rewards menu, but it also adds all inventions as well as a $500k cash bonus. Those latter two effects arguably deserve to be removed, since they're already represented by other cheats (presuming that the one dedicated to inventions is fixed). - "Show Version Info" and "Graph Kludge" ought to be moved to an always-available menu, as there's no real reason for them to be "cheats." The Version Info also doesn't seem to show up correctly on modern Windows, or at least it isn't for me.

From my own experience, prisons reduce citywide crime by about 20%. In some cities, they're more effective than the Neighborhood Watch ordinance. That's not bad for a building that doesn't require yearly funding. The main thing that dictates their effectiveness is the presence of an already effective police force. Prisons don't do much in cities that have sparse police coverage in the first place.

One thing that I'm not sure is a bug or not--and I kind of feel fine with leaving it as-is even if it is a bug but wanted to touch upon anyway--is how the game handles prison capacity. When prisons are under capacity, they basically make the police department more effective by increasing its crime-suppressing effect. When prisons are over capacity, they no longer provide such a boost. A prison has a capacity of 10,000 inmates, and it releases 1/4th of those inmates on parole at the end of each year. So, in theory, as long as citywide crime is held to a pace of under 2,500 new prisoners per year, then the prisons should never exceed capacity. However, it seems like the order of operations for new prisoners is implemented in such a way that the capacity check occurs after additional prisoners from the new year are added, but before the old prisoners from the previous year are released. So, if you have just a little over 8,000 prisoners being held one year, and at the end of the year you add 2,000 more, the game then adds them up to a total of over 10,000, fails the capacity check and removes the boost, and then releases 2,000 of the original inmates. If you then check the microsim for the prison, you'll see that it's only at 80-81% capacity or so, but it's no longer increasing police efficiency because the capacity check occurred before the inmate count was brought back under 10k. Or at least that's what seems to be happening just from observing the graphs and microsims. I'd be curious to know what's actually happening under the hood. I'm honestly fine with how all of that works in terms of game balance alone, but it doesn't seem like it's all communicated very well to the player. PPP even states that there's supposedly a newspaper story specifically about prison overcrowding that's supposed to trigger. I haven't done any datamining of my own to verify that it exists, but I'm almost certain that I've never seen such a thing in-game.

Predefined order or not doesn't matter to me so long as each song that doesn't already play during defined moments (budget, disasters, etc) has a roughly equal chance of being picked. I liked the DOS version's playback functionality as a general rule: the game stays silent until you click a tool.

Dunno if someone mentioned this already, but another potential QoL addition for the Win95 version would be to make it actually play all of the music in the game. There are a number of MIDI files that will play in other versions of the game but never on Win95. I don't know the exact rhyme or reason for it, but IIRC some of the missing music specifically plays in DOS when you just click various items on the toolbar, whereas clicking the toolbar doesn't seem to trigger music in Win95.

Even though I said I'm not particularly interested in playing a significantly rebalanced game, I figure that if you're already poking around in there for things to tweak, then I'd offer some food for thought on things about the game that have stood out to me for one reason or another. This is kind of a rambling stream of consciousness post alternating between suggestions, questions, and misc remarks. Also trying not to repeat too much of what I've already said: Do the health and education subsystems do anything of consequence at all, and is this something you think should be tweaked? A lot of documentation suggests that a highly-educated workforce is required to attract workers to high-tech, low-pollution industries, but in my own experience, this isn't the case. When I set tax incentives to punish high-polluters from the outset of the game, that alone is enough to significantly decrease citywide pollution, and it has no observable consequence on industrial growth so long as the average industrial tax rate doesn't change. Pollution itself also does not appear to have as large of an impact on the game as players assume. Pollution that originates from individual buildings does matter and can have a strong impact on neighboring zones, but this is limited to a range of about 4 tiles from the origin point. (You can verify this in the Map views.) Pollution that is produced on a citywide scale (no pollution-based industry tax incentives, lack of pollution controls ordinance, lack of adequate water treatment), however, doesn't really seem to matter at all. Despite each of these 3 citywide factors causing huge variations in the reported pollution value in the Graphs window, they don't seem to have observable impacts on land value or zone development. I've also yet to see any evidence that pollution has a significant effect on LE, despite documentation to the contrary. LE itself also doesn't seem to really matter. Low LE does not deter RCI growth. The only observable consequence that I've seen from LE is that higher LE lessens the burden on the educational facilities because it allows for better student-teacher ratios, but that's not a big deal in itself because EQ doesn't seem to matter either. EQ does not appear to influence industry as documented. And while schools and colleges appear to have the intended effect on EQ that they're supposed to have, I've yet to observe any actual effect from libraries or museums at all. Documentation says that they prevent EQ from decaying with old age; experience shows no evidence for this. (Maintaining a stable population and high RCI demand, however, seems to accelerate the trendlines for both EQ and LE, even though that doesn't make a ton of sense to me on the surface. And like I think I mentioned earlier, if your population is *perfectly* stable, then it eventually causes rollover bugs for both LE and EQ.) Do Parking Fines actually "encourage mass transit usage and slightly inhibit commerce" as stated? When I tested ordinances, I didn't notice any effect for parking fines other than their beneficial financial impact. Thought it would be kind of interesting if parking fines had a negative impact on commerce equivalent to a 1% tax hike, but balanced out by also extending the walkable distance to rail/sub stations from 3 tiles to 6. Do Junior Sports do literally anything? Couldn't figure this one out. Not only are multi-tile buildings normally prevented from spawning at the city's edge, it seems that if they ever do, then there are weird glitches that mess with their appearance and shift their location when you bulldoze them. The north side of the map is the only side where I've seen it happen; you can try zoning dense industrial along that edge to verify. You have any idea what's going on there? You have any idea on what the exact population cap thresholds are for the different zone types and how recreational facilities, ports, and neighboring connections boost them? I notice that you don't have to construct those facilities immediately after they're demanded. There is some kind of grace period before the caps actually come into play, but I don't know the exact values. (I wrote a section in my guide that details the exact values as reported in the status window demands, but these aren't the "real" values that the simulation actually checks against when it determines whether you're actually over the cap or not.) On recreational facilities: As-is, stadiums are incredibly inefficient. They only seem to boost the residential cap by the same amount as zoos (and by the same per-tile amount as marinas) despite being way more expensive. Maybe this is developer commentary on how rich sports team owners are always swindling their municipalities with expensive stadium contracts, but it makes me wonder if there's some potential for adjusting stadium effectiveness in-game in one way or another. When I was testing disasters across different versions of the game, I noticed that radioactive waste *never* seems to decay in Win95. Worth checking to see if it's bugged compared to other versions. How does the "downtown" land value bonus work exactly? Is the city center determined to be the geographic mid-point between the currently developed areas of the map? Does this mid-point shift around the map as you extend the outer range of your city? Does the bonus increase depending on the total land area of your city or its population? This is all stuff that I've had on my testing bucket list for some time but just never made time for. Would it be worthwhile to make the microsim query windows display more worthwhile information? This is a thought I had when I was testing different aspects of the water system. The in-game information presented for water treatment plants and desalinization plants, for example, are entirely worthless. The only relevant information for treatment plants is whether they're over capacity or not, and this is determined by building 1 treatment plant per 2000 city tiles; I'm pretty sure that the microsim info for them is all junk. Would it be feasible to alter how the game checks for the unused scenario win conditions? The scenario data structure allows the creator to specify win conditions for things like crime, traffic, pollution, and land value, but none of those things are implemented in sensible, user-friendly ways. For example, the crime limit doesn't check for the reported crime value in the Graphs window, but for "total monthly crime," which isn't displayed to the user anywhere in-game. And it also unfairly punishes large cities because a city that is twice as large by land area than a smaller city will have twice as much "total crime" than that smaller city even if their reported crime rates in the Graphs window is the same. I've long felt that if the game was just checking these values against the Graphs window instead, then it could allow for some more interesting and varied custom scenarios. I also feel that this is probably the reason why Las Vegas is the only officially released scenario that uses something other than population as the win condition; they had to have realized at some point that population was the only win criteria that actually functioned as intended. Some thoughts on the water system: Water pump output is calculated by: SeaLevel * 5 + BorderingFreshTiles * 10 + Precipitation / 2 Desalinization plant output is calculated by: BorderingSaltTiles * 20 (this is calculated per-tile, not per-building) (These output values are calculated in tiles. The game multiplies this by 720 and reports that as "gallons" to the player.) I've long felt that the use of "SeaLevel" in water pump calculations was a mistake. It would be much more sensible for the pump's output to be influenced by the elevation that separates it from the sea level, not just the raw sea level value of the map itself. In fact, some strategy guides indicate that this is how it was "supposed" to work in the first place. IMO, it would make sense to replace the "SeaLevel * 5" part of the water pump formula with a calculation that takes into account the difference between the pump's elevation and the sea level, while also making the modified output as consistent with the original calculation as possible in "typical" situations. Like, the default sea level for terrain generation is 4, which makes that part of the formula work out to be "4 * 5 = 20" in its unmodified form on any randomly generated city with default settings. So, I'd make it so that when a pump is constructed at the same level as the shoreline, then this part of the equation would still equal 20, but as you build pumps at higher and higher elevations, this value would decrease accordingly since the pump isn't tapping into ground water as effectively. Making a "sensible" water pump formula like this might not please min-maxers, though, as seasoned players know that they should just build their maps with the highest possible sea level to make their pumps more efficient. Changing how this works would break such cities. Desalinization plants arguably deserve a boost to their output in any case. There are almost no circumstances where they're more efficient than water pumps when placed in similarly advantageous terrain. Water towers also arguably deserve some kind of boost. It is pretty much always more sensible to build more water pumps instead because droughts can last a long time and deplete your water tower reserves regardless of what you do. (Also, water towers store "400 tiles" of water, not 40000 gallons.) Water treatment plants seem to mostly function as intended, though they curiously don't have to be connected to either power or water as they're currently implemented. Anyway, if I was looking to actually rebalance any of the above factors myself, my first course of action would probably be to ask "well, how did SimCity 3000 handle this?" and then consider back-porting that functionality to 2000 in cases where it made sense... But then that kind of just works itself back around to the issue I had at the start: at what point are you just recreating 3000 and reinventing the wheel? Why wouldn't I just play 3000 instead?

Look up how the ordinances work in code and see if you can copy/modify one for your own purposes. Several of them boost zone demand for specific financial costs or vice versa. Homeless Shelter, for example, reduces revenue equivalent to lowering residential taxes by 0.5% and increases commercial demand equivalent to lowering commercial taxes by 1.0%. Lots of stuff like that in there.