Pinstar

I also want to give a shout out to the maker of this fine game, Paradox Interactive. If you like this game, also look into their other recent titles...especially Crusader Kings II. (Yes it is a completely different genre of game, but does not shy away from complexity and may be of interest to the type of players who like a good complex city simulater.) I'm waiting for my bank account to recover a bit, but I'll certainly have this game on my watch list!

Is there a mod that says exactly how many jobs of which wealth level a given building provides? So rather than it saying "65/67 jobs" It would say "11/12 R$ jobs" "42/43 R$$ jobs" "12/12 R$$$ jobs"

Another reason not to do the endless landfill/never play again gambit is that whatever city plot you designate as your hell hole... it is likely that your region will grow up and around it. You may start to find that the real estate that it sits on might be helpful to continue your region and having an area that you aren't going to touch blocks you from doing that. I personally don't like making region deals further than 1 city away. If a new city is too far from my power or garbage center...I make it a new center. This makes me make some dirty sections every few cities, which helps keep my region diverse.

Overthrew the former king of France to take the city in Crusader Kings II TNP will state their favorite Pony

Add "To make" at the end of the article title and you see what I think really happened. Yes, a gigantically complex simulation is hard to make and balance... but doesn't automatically mean the game itself will be less fun. Consitering that it came out in a half-finished state... WITH the change in design philosophy, I would immagine that a polished game with the original design would have taken several more years, something that EA wasn't willing to pay for.

I am torn, I've been starting and restarting my new region a few times to test out mods and I'm genuinely 50/50 on the CAM mod. I have not developed my regions to the extent to where I'm starting to see stage 9+ buildings... but I don't want to get that far and find that I don't like the dynamic. For those of you who have built up a CAM enabled region enough to start seeing those buildings in action...what are your thoughts? Do you think your region is better off for using the CAM? Or are those massive buildings poorly balanced and make the game either too easy or too hard? If I didn't use the CAM, I'd probably use the Industry and CS doubler to help bring their jobcounts in line from vanilla. Bonus question: If one were to do a city journal, do you think the presence of the CAM mod would help/hinder/not impact the entertainment value of said journal.

How does ground rail (The vanilla stuff that industry likes to use for their freight) compare in terms of speed and capacity compared to Elevated Rail. Is that what you mean when you say "Heavy Rail"?

The original Sim City had hospitals and schools that would pop up on their own that didn't cost you anything... granted...they didn't DO anything, as the simulation hadn't become complex enough at that point to worry about health and education levels. They were just for show...and to unlock a reward building in the SNES version. I guess you could call them private?

I had a few crashes when I first installed NAM 3.1, but after doing a fresh reinstall with an updated plugin pack (the 3gb one that includes NAM, CAM, SPAM and a bunch more) I haven't had a crash yet.

Going back to the topic of ID... I find that keeping a section of ID is handy even after a city starts to mature. Whenever you zone brand new residentials, they will always start out with a very low EQ...even if you have a supurb education system. IT will take them a few years to catch up with the rest of the city. In the mean time, those uneducated workers will be looking for uneducated jobs... and having a bank of ID will keep them happy and employed without causing CS$ to build everywhere. It also keeps ID demand fulfilled, so that that burst of new uneducated workers doesn't suddenly cause ID to start growing in your I-M and I-HT sections. I like to build them next to my dirty utilities since that area is going to be a polluted hell-hole anyway.

EL trains cost less to maintain IIRC. That aspect can be huge as it isn't just the initial construction costs you are building. If you are running a line through an area where space isn't at a premium, such as a medium/low density residential suburb or maybe an industrial sector...it would be more cost-effective to have EL trains rather than subways. The benefit of EL trains is that they can become subways when they need to. So you can link a bunch of low/medium density suburbs with EL-trains and have them turn into subways when they reach the high-density downtown area...where space IS at a premium. EL rails are inferior to monorails, which are much faster but take up about the same amount of space...and ground rail, which is much cheaper AND can handle freight traffic as well as passengers at about the same speed. The main thing EL rail has going for it is its ability to turn into subways and back without passengers having to exit the rail system during their trip.

So far so good. The Commercial zones are getting regular employment. The buildings on that plateau continued to upgrade in wealth and density. On last check, 800 people were using my subway station. That sounds like pretty much all the jobs offered by the buildings up there, more or less. I also found another way around this that doesn't involve subways. Since ped malls don't deform the terrain, I run a line of it out to 1 tile away from the main road system. I place a bus stop in between the road and the ped mall. People take the bus to plateau, get off the bus station and hop on the ped mall behind it. So I can accomplish this without a dedicated subway system.

Experiment completed. I'll let the screen shot speak for itself.