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What knowledge I have gathered so far.

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.

Ugh. After my third water treatment plant decided to run dry even though I placed it next to the river running through my map, I was getting really annoyed. I had to completely redesign several neighborhoods on my map while looking for a new spot to pump water. At some point I figured out that you could just plop it onto the most ground-polluted spot you can find and you'd be fine as long as you had a filtration system going. Apparently you can just recycle the polluted water indefinitely. That's a "nice" solution when you're stuck in a desert, but jeez... I have an abundance of water flowing through my city, but the best way to provide my people with water is by feeding them their own recycled poop?

-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.
Oh man, don't get me started. I decided to track one of my garbage trucks to figure out what the heck its problem was, until I noticed that it spent a good two minutes driving the same random pattern, repeatedly. It would go back and forth on the same five roads (which had no garbage to pick up) for ages and then finally snap out of it and move on. I was so frustrated that I just wanted to click on the darn thing and tell it where to go myself - not because I want that type of gameplay, but because it was just unbearable to watch.
 
Here is my thing. So far I am enjoying the game but have my quirks.

I do want to state however this game to me is extremely addicting. I LOVE making money. lol And I am good at it. These games always cater to my greed side. I'm currently at 2.6 mil day income. :p ANYWAY..

A: Any type of natural disaster that causes ireeverasable land damage is stupid. Radioactive meteors is not right.
B: Why is there not a CLEAR way to clean up say: Air Pollution, Ground Pollution, Recyclables?
  • Let me expand: Every building in my city is at max recyclables I build 3 different recycling facilities and they say there is nothing to recycle. uh... I also have university, highschool, and gradeschool.
Why is it that if you place a school on the other side of town rather than in the middle of your SKYSCRAPERS it seems like you don't actually take advantage of the population going to it? Even if you make a direct avenue to it and busses. I don't like that you have to break up the skyscrapers that sucks. PLUS did you realize HOW MUCH GROUND POLLUTION those fuckers make? I had no idea. Maybe it is a garabage truck thing but dammmnnn.

Money in this game is simple, but the downside is that your income reflected in your hourly isnt being reflected by your import export. And there is no tab to see exactly what that number is, progress in the day, only the top number you ever hit from your trade HQ.

The idea that when you abandon a city after stripping it dry and then the city doesn't reset is "realistic" but sucks for anyone who gets hit with nuclear meteors in a full region that has no where else to go.
Watching your buses roll out in packs of 50 and never deviate from each other when the rest of the town needs them is overly frustrtrating. I did fix some of my trafffic issues but god knows how.

So while I wouldn't go as far as saying this game is not fun I definitely would go with the idea that it is not running at its best and needs a lot of tweaks in order to get glass box to actually play nice with human beings. Ya know maybe popups that helped you clean up air pollution instead of just yelling about it. Also false positive yelling is annoying. You don't need another police station if there is ONE criminal.

But that will happen in time as right now they have to deal with the online issue and then EA has to actually say OK to Maxis to doing the RIGHT things instead of the dumb ass EA ones.
 
While zoned areas are immediately abandoned if they're built on radioactive ground, I noticed that nobody cared if I plopped a school or a park in the area (I bet Rux would love this). At least now I know where to put my Empire State Building once I have enough cash for it.

Glad's game is completely screwed though - I just had a look at his town, and his nuclear power plant's meltdown left a huge chunk of his map uninhabitable. :(
 
While zoned areas are immediately abandoned if they're built on radioactive ground, I noticed that nobody cared if I plopped a school or a park in the area (I bet Rux would love this). At least now I know where to put my Empire State Building once I have enough cash for it.

Glad's game is completely screwed though - I just had a look at his town, and his nuclear power plant's meltdown left a huge chunk of his map uninhabitable. :(

Well why did he build that without education!?!??! That is MY QUESTION!?!?! lol But on a serious note there should be a way to deal with that fallout.. but there isn't. pffft for realism.
 
Well why did he build that without education!?!??! That is MY QUESTION!?!?! lol But on a serious note there should be a way to deal with that fallout.. but there isn't. pffft for realism.
How does sharing education in a region work? I have two schools, a high school, and a university in my town - as my neighbor, couldn't he have benefited from my school system?
 
How does sharing education in a region work? I have two schools, a high school, and a university in my town - as my neighbor, couldn't he have benefited from my school system?

Not really. they are too far away. Shit even having a school 2 meters from a building is often too far.
 
I have a school bus connection to Loveisdead, who is on the other side of the map. I don't get it.
I don't get this game!
 
The game is fun but it needs tweaks, I am just frustrated with my city because I refuse to tear things down. Also the school system is messed from what someone(Love or Claark can't remember) was saying. The sims go from their "place of residence" to the closest job available, so you have to have all your schools in the residential area apparantly if your putting high tech industry and stuff next to where your sims live.

Referring to Jia's truck post...I had about 30 moving trucks driving in an insane loop on one road for hours yesterday. I had to completely destroy the road to make it stop.
 
The only way I've figured out how to deal with ground pollution is to plop down trees under the Nature $$ parks menu all the way to the right. Its very slow and requires that you basically destroy whatever buildings are on top of the ground pollution. The trees die (kind of like they eat ground pollution and in turn die from it, which is sort of how it works in real life I guess) and you have to continually replenish them until its gone.
 
Ok so ultimately the pathing needs tweaking in the game. After spending some time watching my garbage trucks do donuts in the suburbs, I came to this conclusion. I also think that in using my poorly planned but effective wavy roads I traded ZERO traffic problems for a myriad of other problems(fitting buildings in, space for density expansion and longer drives for vehicles). I will stick with some sort of grid next time and hope they improve the pathing for everything in this game and add extra exits/entrances to cities.

Right now I have no traffic problems inside my city but the entrance to the region highway is backed up for miles out into the region with people coming into my city which KILLS trade profits. I make a nice turnaround when they head out of my city and sell the goods, but I being to lose my profit margin for a bit while they attempt to make it back into my city. Apparantly trading on just rail isnt enough either.
 
Triage... I think you are literally stealing my low wealth workers with your regional buses from bus stops in my town and taking them to work in your city. That and you are dropping off around 10k worth of medium wealth people into my town to take all of the medium wealth jobs.
 
It seems that my patience with games isn't what it used to be, so I'm taking a break from the game for the time being. For me the frustration is outweighing the fun. Don't get me wrong, the game is enjoyable and running well for the most part, but it's annoying to play for hours only to bump into some weird bugs/imbalances that eventually ruin the game. I feel like I'm still playing a beta version with the types of flaws I'm running into.

Hopefully they can fix the game soon.
 
It seems that my patience with games isn't what it used to be, so I'm taking a break from the game for the time being. For me the frustration is outweighing the fun. Don't get me wrong, the game is enjoyable and running well for the most part, but it's annoying to play for hours only to bump into some weird bugs/imbalances that eventually ruin the game. I feel like I'm still playing a beta version with the types of flaws I'm running into.

Hopefully they can fix the game soon.

Jia that is what I did. I played twice since release. Once the first day and once Saturday whenw e all got it working. THe bugs and server things are too much when EA goes. ALL CLEAR Ill try again :)
 
Alright, after playing a bunch last night I realized that the little RCI bars at the bottom showing demand are bogus. Each building requires low/medium/high wealth workers to some degree (this was true in SC4 as well). To find out how many workers you need click on your population number at the bottom then hit the details tab. There will be numbers showing how many jobs of what wealth you have open as well as some other information. For your city to be successful and in the positive in terms of hourly income, you have to have most of these jobs filled.
 
Alright, after playing a bunch last night I realized that the little RCI bars at the bottom showing demand are bogus. Each building requires low/medium/high wealth workers to some degree (this was true in SC4 as well). To find out how many workers you need click on your population number at the bottom then hit the details tab. There will be numbers showing how many jobs of what wealth you have open as well as some other information. For your city to be successful and in the positive in terms of hourly income, you have to have most of these jobs filled.

This is actually helpful. I knew something was up. Reddit is actually a good source to A: get pissed at the bugs but B: figuring a way around them.
 
I got frustrated playing with the sandbox the other night. Then I looked up the cheats to make things work and play with stuff. It went better then.

Basically, I was just trying to see how to get things like transportation set up in isolation- without fires, medical issues, or crime.
Didn't matter, they still hated my rail.
 
According to a Redditor with a Maxis account claiming to be a coder for the transportation system, the algorithm used is D* (D-Star). Here's a wiki article about it- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D*

Hopefully someone here smarter than me will be able to make sense of that.
 
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