Sim City 5 (2013) - Sim<parameter: string>

[Lucavi]

The only thing they could ever offer that I'd want is the Sims University, but that's a brand-new title, so they won't offer it, and I'm hell-bent on pirating everything from EA at this point anyway, just to give them one last "fuck you" for this nonsense.

[Kaisha]

Gotta love it when other publishers see a situation to make money, and goes with it - http://store.steampowered.com/sub/19282/?snr=1_4_4__112

Spoiler: show

Given how much I sucked at Tropico 3, I'm holding off on this one for now

[Prothescar]

Thats actually a pretty incredible deal, 1/6th the price and worth so much more than Simcity is at the minute

[Lucavi]

So I heard that some inter-region things were disabled. I'm not talking about xbox achievements or friends list, but I was wondering if anyone else who can actually play is having an issue where unemployed workers are not actively commuting to other cities for work. I constantly develop cities that have a severe lack of low wealth sims ( massing low-wealth sims involves having a shit ton of services to compensate for the sheer numbers, which winds up bumping up land values to middle-wealth), and when I actively manage to create a surplus of low-wealth sims (unemployed, essentially), none of them commute to other cities with low wealth job openings. Conversely, when I swap cities, none of the low-wealth sims come to this new city to work.

No matter what population of a city I have, its always a bunch of 0's for commuting sims, regional students, ect. Is that part of what EA disabled? If not, what is the secret to having workers and students commute?

[KoalaTrap]

So, the only day I had issues playing was yesterday, and I've been having a blast with the game. I'm on my second city in the region and I gotta say it gets pretty challenging once you're extremely limited on room for stuff and constantly having to upgrade water, power, garbage and sewage. I'm excited to get more cities in my region and get them all working together and their roles more clearly defined. Going the high-tech / educational route with the 2nd city has been pretty fun.
However, I wish the city size was a lot bigger. It feels way to small compared to the good old SC2000 days (last one I played). Would be cool if eventually you could remove all the square plots and build where ever you want on the region.

[Uzor]

Commuting between regions work for me. When you first tart the city it doesn't, but eventually it works. Not sure wha causes it to "activate", but I even see the need of other cities in the region on my zone options.

[Qalbert]

[Cream Soda]

Spoiler: show

[Ratatapa]

yay free game

http://www.explosion.com/23898/ea-of...imcity-buyers/

inb4 a 2009 10$ game

[Insanecyclone]

The Simpocalypse has already begun

Spoiler: show

at least until things are steady

[Kaisha]

inb4 a 2009 10$ game

Nothing like buying a City Simulator, and getting a third-person shooter out of it instead to play in the meantime.

Thread-jackin' time, what's the trick to getting your population educated in SC4? I got two public schools with decent coverage range, and a high school, and all three have less than 40 people in them while my education graph is basically flat lined. I'm trying to make a city here not run by retards.

Spoilered for large'ish.

Spoiler: show

Not much to my dinky unorganized town of mostly agricultural(high demand for it regardless of how much more space I allocate to it), low/med residential, and some dirty industrial, but shit isn't really progressing much. At least the cashflow is stable for the time being.

[Maestro]

Would it be plausible to bulldoze your entire city once you have a large source of funds to start over to have a better organized city?

Or is it better to just slowly reform the city even though you're likely to incur a great deal of -income/hour?

Depends how far along you are. I had around 130-140k people but all my roads were high density and I wanted to upgrade to the avenues but because the streets are wider you are not allowed to upgrade high density streets to high density avenues. I had around $400k inwith my budget around -$9k/hr, and bulldozed first bottom 2 rows of city and with the new avenues w/ streetcar, budget jumped to around -$16k/hr. That amount with the price of streets along with losing the taxes from the buildings you tore down til new ones get placed along with the fact land wealth got affected as I lost a few parks/fountains etc. If your pretty far in game and want to re-organize have a large sum of cash to fall back on if you want to do whole sections of the city. Otherwise go slow say 1 square of area a day. Shit would be easier if cheetah speed was active.

[Salodin]

Nothing like buying a City Simulator, and getting a third-person shooter out of it instead to play in the meantime.

Thread-jackin' time, what's the trick to getting your population educated in SC4? I got two public schools with decent coverage range, and a high school, and all three have less than 40 people in them while my education graph is basically flat lined. I'm trying to make a city here not run by retards.

Spoilered for large'ish.

Spoiler: show

Not much to my dinky unorganized town of mostly agricultural(high demand for it regardless of how much more space I allocate to it), low/med residential, and some dirty industrial, but shit isn't really progressing much. At least the cashflow is stable for the time being.

Not too sure about any of your questions, but I know agriculture always has a higher then needed demand. Basically, you can never satisfy it and building too much of it only makes less of the population available to work the jobs that matter. Maybe try getting rid of some farms, getting other industrial jobs, and the demand for more education will increase?

[synistar]

On SC4, seeing as how your city is only 3 years old, it will take some time for the education to kick in. At about year 10-15 your EQ should rise. High school isn't necessary this early on. Adjust your sliders to save some cash because 2 schools for that low density city doesn't make full fiscal sense. Same with the high school. Adjust the sliders on your bus usage and # of teachers. You also built a jail too early. It's only needed once your police stations get too full of criminals. Or if you have a crap deficit, you get the prompt to build a federal jail and they give you money for it.
Streets are better for residential zones. The capacity of streets do not accommodate commercial thoroughfares much. Your sims will eventually get pissed.

[Kaisha]

On SC4, seeing as how your city is only 3 years old, it will take some time for the education to kick in. At about year 10-15 your EQ should rise. High school isn't necessary this early on. Adjust your sliders to save some cash because 2 schools for that low density city doesn't make full fiscal sense. Same with the high school.

Ah, didn't realize city's longevity determined the level of education. Figured when I connected it to the neighbouring cities it'd just steal folks from there.

Adjust the sliders on your bus usage and # of teachers.

Did that long ago. Game makes me feel like a jew at times. "How much can I starve these places to save on operationa costs".

You also built a jail too early. It's only needed once your police stations get too full of criminals. Or if you have a crap deficit, you get the prompt to build a federal jail and they give you money for it.

I starved it, only just built it to shut up the one advisor who thinks having no jail/police station in a city with zero crime is a huge mistake, and I was tired of the red text appearing in the notifications tray repeatedly.

Streets are better for residential zones. The capacity of streets do not accommodate commercial thoroughfares much. Your sims will eventually get pissed.

Noted. Might end up demolishing my industrial and putting it farther away from residential to deal with pollution. Already got my power supply in the corner of the map for the same reason. Should have picked me a location that isn't a peninsula, would give me more breathing room.

[Lucavi]

General consensus on the OF is that the game is bugged to only have around 10% of the population working at any point in time. No one seems to be able to get above 10% of the populace working, which always results in a massive amount of unfilled jobs as cities grow, especially for low-wage jobs. I'm hoping EA gets on the horn and fixes it, because its a pretty annoying bug, especially for profitability of cities.

Edit: Link to thread. http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/9342349.page

Edit: Some think EA fudges the ratios between citizens to population numbers as city size increases, in order to save on the strain that accounting for each and every individual sim in a 100k+ population city would cause on the servers. The ratio seems to start at 1 to 1 for a young city, and as it grows, seems to drop down before eventually ending at 1 to 0.1. Its why so many people are having an excess of 10k unfilled jobs once hitting the threshold of around 150k+ pop in each city, regardless of education or zoning.

I, personally, have zoned one strip of medium-density industrial, one strip of medium-density commercial and 15-20 strips of high-density residential in a single city with no regional support, grown the population to 135k, and still had an excess of 4,000 jobs unfulfilled, with shops closing due to lack of workers, despite having massive amounts of low- wealth high rises.

It would absolutely make sense that EA had Maxis cut corners on things like this, given that the game has to process each individual separately. What annoys me is that they somehow either didn't think that hardcores who care about this stuff would notice, or simply dismissed it, favoring the casual consumer who just wants to lay strips down, then meteor everything into the ground.

[Azull]

My working population now is poor - 19k, med - 4k with a total pop of 280k and no unemployment. I have about 17k unfilled jobs. So maybe? Could also mean the math is coded wrong somewhere so you end up with more demand then can be filled which goes unused..thats my guess..someone forgot to carry the 1.

[Lucavi]

There's a theory that when density increases for commercial and industrial, the number of jobs required accurately scales. However, with residential, the total population number scales accurately, but the number of actual residences working jobs is not scaling properly, or was designed to scale less and less as population sizes increased (presumably to reduce server strain or simply as a design choice). You may get 4k pop from a single low-wealth high-rise, but only 400 workers, yet every time industrial upgrades, you get another 2k jobs required.

It also seems that freight orders are useless. Everyone has thousands of unshipped orders, yet with enough population, every company talks about having massive success with freight. What the heck are they shipping, and who is making it? This game is more like SimUtopia than SimCity.

[Salodin]

Is that a result of the features they deactivated though? Or is no one sure.

[Johnblaze]

I've been reading this thread and watching my wife's frustration up until yesterday... So is this game even worth me getting to play with her yet? Just wondering if I should save my $60 right now.