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What knowledge I have gathered so far.

I've spent the few hours I've put into the new region just practicing balance. I have a very small city with 10k population, and I improve it slowly to keep jobs/shopping/population in check while everything moves up in density. Even with only 10k pop, I'm making 5.7k / hr. This allows me to easily afford education, transportation, utilities, etc.. as I need them. I've tried just filling the entire plot with zoned area and trying to keep up, but it seems much more logical to push your approval rating over 80% and work on density, then expand.
I haven't had any traffic problems so far, but almost all my roads are avenues and the city is symmetrical so the shortest route from A-B generally doesn't cause a bottleneck unless people are entering/leaving the city in mass.
 
Xiypher said:
I've spent the few hours I've put into the new region just practicing balance. I have a very small city with 10k population, and I improve it slowly to keep jobs/shopping/population in check while everything moves up in density. Even with only 10k pop, I'm making 5.7k / hr. This allows me to easily afford education, transportation, utilities, etc.. as I need them. I've tried just filling the entire plot with zoned area and trying to keep up, but it seems much more logical to push your approval rating over 80% and work on density, then expand.
I haven't had any traffic problems so far, but almost all my roads are avenues and the city is symmetrical so the shortest route from A-B generally doesn't cause a bottleneck unless people are entering/leaving the city in mass.
Click to expand...
Slow growth seems mandated. When I try to push too fast with too many services, my city goes in the red and spirals out of control. I've had the most success waiting for citizens to complain about something (like no police) rather than preemptively build it in hopes of making the city more attractive. Adding public transit too soon also seems to be a death knell. If a solid foundation of taxes from IRC aren't laid, everything goes to pot. And not in the good way.
 
The pathing in this game isn't quite complete in terms of coding. Anything that requires pathing will take the shortest route to it's target. In your case you say buses, so if you plop down a bus stop and people are waiting there it dispatches ALL buses to that location. It doesn't do the calculation of how many people are waiting vs. how many buses it will take to pick them all up. Same thing with fire stations. A fire is set off and all of the trucks go to that fire even though it only requires 1-2. If there is another fire and its further away from the truck than the current fire, the truck will still go to the same fire. This can be fixed and I imagine it will in a patch soon, but its not a simple fix because every single thing on the roads uses this system.
 
I think there's something seriously odd going on with the balance of workers and shoppers in this game. When you look at the details tab of your population only about 10% of your population seems to do anything at all. If you have a high density residential you will require a certain level of commercial and industrial in order to get that building and continue to support it. Usually the buildings grow together, so once you get high commercial, you get high residential and high industrial. It works all the way around. The problem is that with only 10% of your population, you can't fulfill the needs of these buildings and they eventually shut down. I don't think this is really working as it is intended. Once you get to a higher density population its impossible to keep all buildings filled with workers. There seems to be some kind of limit on how many sims the game will actually simulate. You can take a look at the numbers yourself, its all plainly there. You'll find about 90% of your population essentially does nothing, but the buildings still require those numbers of people to function for working and shopping. Everyone I've heard of has had a problem that they can't solve with workers as they increase density. Something seems off.

Just found a post here regarding this: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a6oeo/proof_that_the_game_is_misleading_regarding/

Knowledge bomb from the dude that designed it. TL;DR: The coding isn't finished

http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-6-streetcars
 
Love that reddit post BTW. Seems pretty close to what I've been seeing.
My city is laid out as follows:
70% Residential, 10% Commercial, 20% Industrial
Fairly even mix of low/med wealth (little to no high wealth), and the majority of all zoned areas are high density. I have 2 elementary schools, each with max classrooms. This increases "skilled workers". The majority of my industrial buildings "need more workers" or are closed due to "not enough workers". My commercial has "not enough shoppers" or "no workers". My residential has some "no places to shop", and many, many unfilled jobs. RCI demand says I has a maximum demand for industrial, 0 for commercial, and around 50% for residential. If I zone more industrial it drops my approval rating because there are no workers or places to ship freight. If I zone more residential, people don't go to the open jobs, and it only gets worse.

I was up to 150k population, but bulldozed around 35% of my city to keep things under control, so i'm around 100k pop now. Nothing is working out. Current plan: Save up ~200k and bulldoze everything and start over... keeping everything low wealth, and low-med density. Seems like that is the only way to remain sustainable. It seems near impossible to stay profitable without a city specialization doing the grunt work, I was trying to avoid a large negative hourly cost mixed with large monthly trade profits, but I may have no choice.

Edit: I jacked my taxes up to 20% and i'm letting the city sort itself out. Maintaining around 50k pop for a while and i'm up to 750k. Once i stop profiting, i'm starting over on the same plot of land for Pittsburbia II
 
tr1age said:
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At least the fire would be put out quickly... or so you would think
images
 
Seems like the people who are having the most fun with the game are the ones who are looking for creative ways to showcase its shortcomings. :)
 
If I had the nerve to play it again, I'd probably try this:

The thing about this game that made me realize it brought out masochistic tenancies was when I built my one road city. I built it as an experiment to see if that really worked as a solution to traffic, and how would the city fare.
It's my favorite city I've built by a landslide.
It's not hugely wealthy, or huge in population, but it's a well oiled machine. Every morning two recycling centers full of trucks march out and pick up the hundreds of bins of recycling. That in turn gets taken to the processor plant where I produce my processors. Everyone is pretty happy, well educated and I can do this all with one fire station and one police station. There is virtually no crime or fires because everyone is highly educated. No traffic. It's a model city.... with one long street.
Click to expand...
Source: Reddit
 
Xiypher said:
Edit: I jacked my taxes up to 20% and i'm letting the city sort itself out. Maintaining around 50k pop for a while and i'm up to 750k. Once i stop profiting, i'm starting over on the same plot of land for Pittsburbia II
Click to expand...

Update: So I log in after work, and I'm only making 10k an hour so I go into the profits tab and my taxes are reset to only 9%. All the abandoned buildings I destroyed are being rebuilt, still at high density, and my population climbed back up to 100k in about 10 minutes. So, naturally, I jacked taxes up again so i'm gaining 30k an hour and wait. Once population hits 40-50k, lower taxes... population jumps back up. Rinse & repeat. I'm up to 2mil and counting to get me started on a new city once I bulldoze the streets. Going to ride this out for a bit and see what kind of profits I can pull off these suckers.
 
Xiypher said:
Update: So I log in after work, and I'm only making 10k an hour so I go into the profits tab and my taxes are reset to only 9%. All the abandoned buildings I destroyed are being rebuilt, still at high density, and my population climbed back up to 100k in about 10 minutes. So, naturally, I jacked taxes up again so i'm gaining 30k an hour and wait. Once population hits 40-50k, lower taxes... population jumps back up. Rinse & repeat. I'm up to 2mil and counting to get me started on a new city once I bulldoze the streets. Going to ride this out for a bit and see what kind of profits I can pull off these suckers.
Click to expand...

You might just want to try playing sandbox mode where you can just press a key to gain 100k.

http://www.simcityhub.com/simcity-news/simcity-sandbox-cheats

Saves time if you're just interested in testing ideas.
 
So now a modder has managed to play the game offline (though he's not able to save his city - yet).
And to add insult to injury, he can edit the freeway (and the railway) outside of the city's boundaries, just like any other road: adding additional exits, letting it run straight through your lot, etc.



Maybe it is time to ask for a refund, what with the server issues, the unfinished product, and most of all, all of these lies we've been fed about how it's impossible to play this game offline (and now a mere modder does the impossible!). At this point I wouldn't even care if EA banned my account.
 
Jia said:
So now a modder has managed to play the game offline (though he's not able to save his city - yet).
And to add insult to injury, he can edit the freeway (and the railway) outside of the city's boundaries, just like any other road: adding additional exits, letting it run straight through your lot, etc.



Maybe it is time to ask for a refund, what with the server issues, the unfinished product, and most of all, all of these lies we've been fed about how it's impossible to play this game offline (and now a mere modder does the impossible!). At this point I wouldn't even care if EA banned my account.
Click to expand...


I would say let the modder fix the game and fire all the "engineers" if its to impossible for them (almost said firefighters instead of engineers)
 
EA (and, consequently Maxis) insisted that it's impossible. The real culprit is EA, not those few workers who did their jobs.
 
Jia said:
So now a modder has managed to play the game offline (though he's not able to save his city - yet).
And to add insult to injury, he can edit the freeway (and the railway) outside of the city's boundaries, just like any other road: adding additional exits, letting it run straight through your lot, etc.



Maybe it is time to ask for a refund, what with the server issues, the unfinished product, and most of all, all of these lies we've been fed about how it's impossible to play this game offline (and now a mere modder does the impossible!). At this point I wouldn't even care if EA banned my account.
Click to expand...



The only way to do this is to ask your bank for a refund due to the product not working and the company refusing to give a refund. EA will ban your account though. Small loss really though lol. I have been considering it. Problem is I bought and paid for it on greenman in like January so I am not sure if the length of time would affect me getting my bank to remove the charge.
 
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