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What knowledge I have gathered so far.

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Zakis

War Priestess
Ok granted the servers are completely fucked right now but I was able to get on and play for a few hours in our "oh god what the fuck are we doing region". I have some thoughts/opinions.

-City boxes are small. I'll probably have my own single player sixteen region for the simple fact that I like to constantly expand. Its more of a demolish stuff and refocus your city when you need space.

-Having spoken about city size, I feel its necessary to try to optimize your space with grid type layouts. I am not one to build a small city and let it go. I have to constantly grow.

-You should have a general idea on specialisation before you enter the region. I got sidetracked building some gambling houses and a gambling HQ and it cost me.

-I am going to assume it was server issues partially but once we setup a serious go we should be communicating resource needs etc. From what it looked like in my trade depots i should have been pulling in some decent cash but because the server wasnt properly letting cities interact in a timely manner I wasnt seeing much income.

just a few thoughts...ill post more later.
 
I've put maybe 6 hours in and here are the things I've picked up on so far.

1. It's expensive, but you probably want to extend the initial avenue into the city. Streets can't be upgraded into Avenues, and it seems like a good idea to make plans for having a couple for density and mass transit.

2. Make sure you give your Town hall space to grow. The additional department buildings are huge and take up a lot of space, and you are going to need those buildings to progress.

3. If you want your commercial to become high density, then you have to build residential in with it. no matter how many bus stops I placed, my commercial zones would not move up in density until i interspersed some residential in the immediate vicinity.

4. DON'T build a nuclear power plant unless you at least have a community college. If the citizens are not smart enough you will continue to have meltdowns.

5. If you can, get resources from your neighbor, police, fire, health. It cost them nothing but lowers how much of those resources you need which saves you money and creates more room for residential, commercial, ect.
 
Brassidus said:
I've put maybe 6 hours in and here are the things I've picked up on so far.

1. It's expensive, but you probably want to extend the initial avenue into the city. Streets can't be upgraded into Avenues, and it seems like a good idea to make plans for having a couple for density and mass transit.

2. Make sure you give your Town hall space to grow. The additional department buildings are huge and take up a lot of space, and you are going to need those buildings to progress.

3. If you want your commercial to become high density, then you have to build residential in with it. no matter how many bus stops I placed, my commercial zones would not move up in density until i interspersed some residential in the immediate vicinity.

4. DON'T build a nuclear power plant unless you at least have a community college. If the citizens are not smart enough you will continue to have meltdowns.

5. If you can, get resources from your neighbor, police, fire, health. It cost them nothing but lowers how much of those resources you need which saves you money and creates more room for residential, commercial, ect.
Click to expand...

I also noticed that crime got COMPLETELY out of control in my mining spec town, regardless of the number of police. On my next try, I built Dept of Education and quickly moved to secure a high school and community college. I was able to easily maintain the crime rate with one small and one large police dept, with about 1/2 the squad cars of both.

2 Fire Depts seem the way to go as well. I built one large one by my main residential area, and a small one dedicated to my industrial area that seemed to catch fire just out of boredom.

Has anyone else gotten the zombie event yet?? Hilarious.
 
Pretty good tips, I'll have to keep them in mind. One thing I just found out as I was playing (I got in for a little while over the last hour) is that proper placement of bus stops and park n ride lots is CRITICAL. I read on reddit that one dev said to think more like real life bus stops and pair up the stops instead of just randomly placing. I tried this in a city and it works wonders. Basically just pair the bus stops one on each side of the street (this is key) where you want them to go. Add in a few park and rides and my traffic when from fairly congested to barely any cars on the road at all!
 
Ok based on the post Love linked from reddit, I have a new city in our region with a better layout and mainly buses for transport as well as a ferry port(considering a rail system soon). I have all my roads as medium or high density streets and little to no traffic jams. Hordes of Sims take the bus or walk(probably due to the layout>?). The city is not massive in population yet so I assume I will continually need to expand it but for a small-mid sized city it is handling it well.
 
I'm having an issue I can't quite figure out. I have a city with about 40K people right now nicely balanced between the wealth classes. The only thing is when I go to look at population details for workers and jobs being filled there is a huge discrepancy. When I total up the numbers for workers in all classes and shoppers for all classes I come up with about 12K people. The issue is that I'm "short" about 10K workers for all the job classes. What happened to the other 28K people in my city that are just not showing up as working or shopping? Are 2/3 of my people lazy asses not doing anything at all?
 
Zephyr said:
I'm having an issue I can't quite figure out. I have a city with about 40K people right now nicely balanced between the wealth classes. The only thing is when I go to look at population details for workers and jobs being filled there is a huge discrepancy. When I total up the numbers for workers in all classes and shoppers for all classes I come up with about 12K people. The issue is that I'm "short" about 10K workers for all the job classes. What happened to the other 28K people in my city that are just not showing up as working or shopping? Are 2/3 of my people lazy asses not doing anything at all?
Click to expand...

Possibly? Is it an education issue? If they dont have any form of education at all, they will turn to crime. I also think some things might be chalked up to bugs. For instance the RCI advisor has to be bugged...the jerkface continues to tell me I need more residential areas because I am short on shoppers....close to 3/4s of my city is frackin residential area
 
I tore down half of my commercial zones and replaced with industrial. Didn't do any good though. Commerce demand was still 0 and industry demand was maxed. Residential demand was also maxed, but also said there was a job shortage, but my industrial business was shutting down because of lack of educated workers, but my university + dorm only had 50 people enrolled. My community college classes were full, but they apparently weren't smart enough for the Univ. entrance exams.
 
I'm having an issue I can't quite figure out. I have a city with about 40K people right now nicely balanced between the wealth classes. The only thing is when I go to look at population details for workers and jobs being filled there is a huge discrepancy. When I total up the numbers for workers in all classes and shoppers for all classes I come up with about 12K people. The issue is that I'm "short" about 10K workers for all the job classes. What happened to the other 28K people in my city that are just not showing up as working or shopping? Are 2/3 of my people lazy asses not doing anything at all?
Click to expand...

My guess is that you are having traffic problems. The 10K people aren't reaching their destination in time, so they turn around and go home.
 
Love is Dead said:
My guess is that you are having traffic problems. The 10K people aren't reaching their destination in time, so they turn around and go home.
Click to expand...

Thats one system I completely disagree with in this game. You tend to have to start out with smaller sized roads, but always need to upgrade them. Why the fuck do I need to blow up every building that touches that road? Sure I can see how it is slightly realistic in some cases concerning cities like NY where everything is squished together but its also the reverse in a lot of places. We dont have buildings ON TOP of roads.

My main gripe here is no matter what kind of transit infrastructure you have, you WILL have traffic jams. I have a medium wealth city with a ferry station, an INSANE bus system with tons of buses/bus stops, a Streetcar system down my major roadway(that I had to bulldoze dozens of buildings to put in) and recently an airport. Traffic is better than my original city in another cluster of the region but I still get traffic jams. Short of engineering jetpacks for my Sims there isnt a way around that unless I apparantly Demolish 9/10s of my city to put in 6 lane highways to EVERYWHERE.
 
I'm still not sure if roads need a buff. Traffic is for sure the most difficult aspect of this game, but I know there are ways around it, I just haven't figured it out yet. Grid systems are severely punished as they cause bottlenecks at intersections. The key to effective traffic systems is minimizing the number of intersections through snake-like roads or easily accessible and effectively designed mass transit.

This thread helps: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19sbn9/how_streetcarlight_rail_works/

And you can scroll down and find some information from the guy at maxis who designed the streetcar system.
 
Love is Dead said:
I'm still not sure if roads need a buff. Traffic is for sure the most difficult aspect of this game, but I know there are ways around it, I just haven't figured it out yet. Grid systems are severely punished as they cause bottlenecks at intersections. The key to effective traffic systems is minimizing the number of intersections through snake-like roads or easily accessible and effectively designed mass transit.

This thread helps: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/19sbn9/how_streetcarlight_rail_works/

And you can scroll down and find some information from the guy at maxis who designed the streetcar system.
Click to expand...


Cool I will definitely read this. I tend to make Grid type cities so maybe its time to try something new.
 
I feel like the game just sucker-punched me. I was doing perfectly fine until it decided to bombard the center of my high density residential area with a radioactive meteor shower. There's just absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it.
Now I'm stuck with an uninhabitable area in the middle of my city - a consequence that was beyond my control.
To be honest, that bothers me. A lot.
 
Jia said:
I feel like the game just sucker-punched me. I was doing perfectly fine until it decided to bombard the center of my high density residential area with a radioactive meteor shower. There's just absolutely nothing I could have done to prevent it.
Now I'm stuck with an uninhabitable area in the middle of my city - a consequence that was beyond my control.
To be honest, that bothers me. A lot.
Click to expand...

Yeahhhhhhh the disasters don't bug me until you tell me radioactive. That is kinda bollax.[DOUBLEPOST=1362878994,1362878956][/DOUBLEPOST]Can a hazzmat firefighter help the radioactivity?
 
I haven't had to deal with that...

What did happen outside of my control is that workers/shoppers/students began commuting to my city, but I only have one highway entrance and no rail. There is a MASSIVE bottleneck when people try to leave the city and for some reason the game designers didn't think that perhaps it might be beneficial to allow me to create more than ONE connection to the region. I tried my best to fix it, but there's nothing I can do. The city is completely backed up and I even made sure to use a snake-like road system. I can't find a way to bar people from commuting to my city, so the only solution would be to have everyone else in the region balance their RCI so that their citizens stop commuting, but that defeats the whole purpose of region-play.

I dunno, I'm beginning to think this game wasn't really complete when they decided to ship it. I played FFXIV 1.0, and this is about on par with that in terms of play-ability. To put that into perspective, the MMO launched without an auction house or a way to search for items you wished to purchase. The idea was people had "retainers" that would physically stand in a market and sell goods to people that clicked on them. Players had to search through literally thousands of retainers to find the items they were looking for.

The ideas, concepts, and graphics are all there, but the mechanics of the game are clearly in their infancy in terms of development. Its such simple things, too, that I really get the feeling like Maxis was pressured to release the game on time and were forced to get "key" elements finished to ship the product, and then hoped to fix the mechanics in patches. I've been a gamer my whole life and I'm very lenient when it comes to this kind of stuff. I'm not even mad about the servers. This game just isn't at a playable state yet, and its all a matter of getting the mechanics working correctly. This game will be brilliant once they hammer out the details of the traffic system, but in its current state I would say that SC4 without NAM is more playable than this game.

Sure, there are ways around the glitches and errors, but I don't want to have to be forced to play around incomplete design. I could start my own region and micromanage everything, but that's just not... fun.
 
Yeah its a great game in theory but there is a lot they need to tweak imo. Ill list what I have noticed so far.

-First one is sort of preference, but its HUGE for me. "You cant build over there, theres an invisible dotted line that spells the end of your city. Really? I realize there needs to be some limitations due to region play but this is the best they could come up with? This game as a whole is as much about managing space in your box as it is building a city. I feel like my new city has come to a point where I need to tear it all down and restructure it because it is just not operating efficiently. The thing is, I feel like this is an intended part of the game, nip and tuck there, blow up a few buildings here. I dont agree. I miss the old way of doing things. Need residential zones? Throw it on the edge of your city borders and move on to the next thing on the list...oh wait you cant, theres a dotted line there...guess you need to blow up some profitable factories or maybe a school so you can put more residential down.

-Inefficient City or Bugs? I say this because I have a completely maxed out Garbage Dump in my city. I mean I have all the trucks 2 dump lots and 3 incinerators, and usually no trash in said dump(it gets incinerated). I have little to no TRAFFIC problems, save for the single entrance to my city. When I look at my garbage overlay my trucks are dispersed throughout the city picking up trash. Yet for some god forsaken reason, 3/4s of my city is complaining that there is garbage everywhere? HOW? PLEASE TELL ME HOW THERE IS GARBAGE EVERYWHERE? You folks might read this and say well you might have to build more trucks. That would require me to build ANOTHER garbage dump, which I would need to DESTROY things to make room for. That would bring us back to my first point in this post.

-Lending services to cities, completely unrealistic and not working properly. At one point this afternoon I was in a really good spot with my city. I had garbage and recycling trucks as well as fire, police and EMS out to all three neighboring cities. I kept getting popups that I was making money off of Love's trash and Tristan's criminals. Ok so later on I finally open up the region window to check out what I was sending out to who when my city turned south and I see that all the things im lending out are earning me nothing? Bug? Then I notice one of the cities im lending my ambulance out to is paying me 100 simoleons for the service. Well great a hundred simoleons an hr/day/week/month/year? I notice it also shows up in my recent transactions on my finance page which makes it look like I am getting a hundred simoleons a month or year. Thats completely unrealistic. Ambulance services are atrociously expensive in the real world. Besides it costs something like 400 simoleons an hour to keep a public library open and all i get is a hundred simoleons a year to send my EMS workers out to another city? They need to clean the budget stuff up considerably.
 
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