Howitzer Zak

Edit: I cross-posted this at Simcity Hall since this site was so slow and kept returning as unavailable. Guess the post went through. If you visit both sites, sorry. Yes I'm crazy, but I like to know how things work, it makes me better at creating cities. Here are some things I found out from fooling in sandbox mode, feel free to make corrections, additions. Let's start with housing data (XXX are just missing data, I'll try to fill in later). A low income, low density home has 6 adults and 2 kids. Of these 6 adults, 4 are workers and 2 are shoppers. A medium income, low density home has 3 adults and 2 kids. Of these 3 adults, 2 are workers and 1 are shoppers. Didn't check high yet A low income, med density home has 60 adults and 15 kids. Of these 60 adults, 40 are workers and 20 are shoppers. A med income, med density home has 30 adults and 7 kids. Of these 30 adults, 20 are workers and 10 are shoppers. Didn't check high income yet High density is where things get weird... The population seems to keep increasing, but the # of workers stays static, not sure if it's a bug or working as intended. A low income, high density home has 5000+ adults and 100 kids. Of these 5000+ adults, 400 are workers and 200 are shoppers. A med income, high density home has 2500+ adults and XXX kids. Of these 2500+ adults, 200 are workers and 100 are shoppers. A high income, high density home has 500+ adults and XXX kids. Of these 500+ adults, 67 are workers and XXX are shoppers. Now business data: A Wind Power farm supplies 20 low income jobs and 6 med income jobs A Dump supplies 20 low income jobs and 6 med income jobs A Fire Department supplies 20 low income jobs and 6 med income jobs A Grade School supplies 40 low income jobs and 10 med income jobs A Police Station supplies 10 low income jobs and 4 med income jobs A Clinic supplies 12 low income jobs and 8 med income jobs and 4 high income jobs A low income, low density store #1 supplies 5 low income jobs and 2 med income jobs A low income, low density store #2 supplies 10 low income jobs and 4 med income jobs A med income, low density store #1 supplies 6 low income jobs and 4 med income jobs and 2 high income jobs A med income, low density store #2 supplies 3 low income jobs and 2 med income jobs and 1 high income job A low income, med density store #1 supplies 60 low income jobs and 16 med income jobs A low income, low density industrial supplies 20 low income jobs and 6 med income jobs and 1 high income job ALL parks, not matter what the size or income supply 5 low income jobs and 2 med income jobs City Hall (final upgrade) supplies 40 low income jobs and 20 med income jobs and 8 high income jobs I still need to make some high density businesses and see what they provide Some general notes of interest: Kids do not count toward your population Shoppers who go to parks return happiness back to the home, kids who go to parks do NOTHING AT ALL Freight delivered to stores does not affect the store supplies at all, it only returns happiness to the source industry Commerce stores vary in worker count (see above). SOME commerce stores stay open at night (Gas, Hotdog stand) and others don't! There are a lot of shoppers wandering around at night, so it may be beneficial to blow up buildings until you get one open all night ANY time you add upgrades to buildings (extra fire truck, police station, school buildings, dump trucks, extra wind turbines etc...), no workers are added, the worker count stays the same for the building Medium/high income residents start off as educated, but can become uneducated if you have no schools # of workers in a building seems to have no effect on that building (i.e power output from power plants etc...) When Students return home they add education to the home, they do not increase happiness And just a non-statistical note/rant Buses and bus stops are completely broken. I have nice evenly spaced bus stops and maxed out trollys and I couldn't figure out why I had so much traffic until I looked at the garbage/recycle trucks trying to move about. Buses get stuck CONSTANTLY at bus stops. They just sit there forever and block all three lanes of traffic. I sat there and watched the buses just sit there for an entire day, not moving. Every time I saw this happen I removed the bus stop and the bus happily moved along. I did this every time one got stuck. After that, ALL my traffic problems went away. Major bug. This seems to happen most frequently with the large buses, not the small shuttle buses. If you got this far, thanks for reading. I have a lot more notes of interest, I just need to verify them. I'm also going to do more sandboxing and see what else I can find. Feel free to comment or add things I may have missed.

The Rail Yard doesn't need a road connection, but it does need a rail connection which you can make with the railroad tool. I created one this morning in the brief time I was able to play and the Rail yard never worked. It would never move any freight or Ore (yes I had it selected to sell). I had to eventually buy trucks to move all my ore since I demolished all my trade depots.

Sorry, your city is lost... I was able to log in to, started a city, but about 1 minute in got that red message on the top left. Let me play for 15 minutes before booting me. 99.99% sure the city state is lost from the time of the disconnect, would make sense. YEah that woudl suck beause I played for a few hours and had that red message after a few minutes. I would 'like' your post because it is helpful, but I dislike the implications enough to where that is not even possible for me to do. Well I think it boots you after 20 minutes of disconnection. So it is possible that you had brief moments of connectivty during those 2 hours, so the city may be in the state it was in 20 minutes before your boot.

Sorry, your city is lost... I was able to log in to, started a city, but about 1 minute in got that red message on the top left. Let me play for 15 minutes before booting me. 99.99% sure the city state is lost from the time of the disconnect, would make sense.

I can't even log in, not sure how anyone is playing. The select server button is greyed out, can't even change it

Just an odd thing, I tried to reclaim and abandoned city and it gave me an error, something about not having the content that the city was built with. Does this mean that if I don't have certain DLC's in the future it's going to restrict gameplay? I'm assuming I got the error because I don't have the extra city sets. Most users who buy the game and didn't preorder will have to at LEAST buy the Maxis Man DLC in order to play with anyone other than people who didn't pre-order. This seems like it will be a problem once this game is a little older and more DLC's start coming out.

Spent quite a few hours on this city.

Invite sent

If this is anything like Beta 2, Amazon will send me the key for this beta in 3 days

thanks! Just stopped watching a guy who took out three bonds, then proceeded to spend it all on roads, run out of money, and get forced to abandon his city and go to another lol

Anyone going to be streaming when this gets started? I was looking in on a few streams I found on the EA forums, but they all seem to be 12 year olds with 80 year old racist sailor vocabularies getting mad at EA/Maxis.

Be happy you're in the beta! So many of us sad folks just WATCHING people try to play beta 3.

Not sure what this means... Heads up, Mayors -- the #SimCityBeta servers are currently closed. Phase 1 of our test is complete and our next phase starts at 6pm PST. https://twitter.com/simcity/status/306931878584258560 Edit: I didn't get in beta 3, just watching from the sidelines

I tried creating a city with no Industry and it was hard. I think if I had more time to reduce my low income folks and get some more medium income folks it would be ok, but with no industry I had a lot of low income folks out of work. Another odd thing, not sure if it was a cooincidence or not, I'm hoping that the game is this good of a simulation: In my little dirt road town I had 3 commerce building (Refrigerator Store, Fortune Telling, and a chicken place). I had one Industry building, they made doughnut parts (or just doughnuts, something to do with doughnuts). Even though I had commerce buildings, the industry kept complaining that they didn't have any where to ship goods too. Now I'm not sure if they just made too much stuff for 3 commerce buildings or they were really looking for a doughnut shop to open. I'm hoping the latter.

Here is another screen of another important overlay that I used constantly (Land Value). I'm not sure people realize entirely how parks and things work. Parks seem to generate an area of effect that stacks. So if you have two parks side-by-side, like in my screen shot, the value of that land is increased accordingly. My baseball field, that has a huge area of effect only increased the land value a little, pushing it into the next tier. There seems to be a gradient of these values too, not just the static levels we see. (Sorry for the jaggys and black bars, this is one of my first games before I changed the video settings to 1900x1200 and AA. Here is the effect of high land value (This guy was so hard to please, demanded a ton of stuff, and left the city on multiple occasions, had to bulldoze the area like 5 times lol: