SimCity

[spek1098]

Yea, I just had that rollback thing happen to me last night, but only lost 15 minutes or so of work.

Tom, do you have any pointers to help me get past 100k in my city?

 

[mndsm]

Zone residential, have jobs, plop parks and stuff. Sims move in if they're happy. Schools, police, fire, all important. Unfortunately you run into major traffic problems if you have that many people- My current City is mid 230k, and I can't get a damn thing to work. My schools are suffering as a result and I damn near blew up a Nuke plant from unskilled labor, even though I have like 5 schools..... only have maybe 200 students total. Traffic is a motherfucker.

 

[Workdawg]

...patch 2.0 (scary that they're that high already), at which point it will be better.

Forgive my pickiness and incoming rant, but as a developer, the ignorance bothers me. Version numbers are pretty arbitrary. They can mean a lot, or almost nothing. Depends on how they are structured. My personal preference for something like a game would be that the first number is the version of the game. In this case, ALL builds and patches would be 1.xxx. After that, you'd probably have some sort of benchmarks that indicate when you move from 1.0 to 1.1. Probably some new functionality implemented. You would then have 1.0.1 that could be the first patch to the game, with no new functionality. It could even be 1.0.1.10, because it took them 10 builds to get 1.0.1 correct.

But that doesn't mean EA/whoever agrees with me. They might increment the first number based on the day of the week it was built or the number people who sent them hatemail that day, who knows.

At work I have two projects that have always used different versioning systems. One simply uses the year, quarter, and build number for the version. Right now, I just built 13.1.1. My other project was completely arbitrary and the last version was 11.08.07. The last digit in this one was also build number, but the first two meant almost nothing.

/rant


As for nuclear power, do you have higher education, or just elementary/middle schools? If you want to not blow up, you really need to have higher-ed to get your overall smarts up. Maybe all your sims are already as smart as your schools can teach. Also, school bus stops, everywhere.

 

[mOjO]

You being bothered by a non-IT individuals interpretation of the meaning of version numbers bothers me. This was less of a rant, and more of an excuse to pontificate. You sir owe the douchbag jar $1.

 

[Workdawg]

Is pontificate your new hippy buzzword or something? QQ

 

[dmention7]

 

[Workdawg]

Also:

 

[mndsm]

Forgive my pickiness and incoming rant, but as a developer, the ignorance bothers me. Version numbers are pretty arbitrary. They can mean a lot, or almost nothing. Depends on how they are structured. My personal preference for something like a game would be that the first number is the version of the game. In this case, ALL builds and patches would be 1.xxx. After that, you'd probably have some sort of benchmarks that indicate when you move from 1.0 to 1.1. Probably some new functionality implemented. You would then have 1.0.1 that could be the first patch to the game, with no new functionality. It could even be 1.0.1.10, because it took them 10 builds to get 1.0.1 correct.

But that doesn't mean EA/whoever agrees with me. They might increment the first number based on the day of the week it was built or the number people who sent them hatemail that day, who knows.

At work I have two projects that have always used different versioning systems. One simply uses the year, quarter, and build number for the version. Right now, I just built 13.1.1. My other project was completely arbitrary and the last version was 11.08.07. The last digit in this one was also build number, but the first two meant almost nothing.

/rant


As for nuclear power, do you have higher education, or just elementary/middle schools? If you want to not blow up, you really need to have higher-ed to get your overall smarts up. Maybe all your sims are already as smart as your schools can teach. Also, school bus stops, everywhere.

No offense taken to any of that, I simply don't know these things, and figured they followed some sort of logical order.

As far as my education, I have two elementary schools, a high school, and a full on university WITH a school of engineering on my current city. I can't get students to any of em for shit, and I have 4 bus stops a block, it seems. I think it really is a matter of traffic not allowing students to get where they need to be in a timely fashion. I have well over 5k potential enrollees, and I have maybe 400 show up to all the schools combined in a given day. I had to tear down my nuke plant and stick a couple of oil burners in there to get me by without an explosion. Kind of a PITA when I was relying on this city to give my great work the power it needs.I'm hoping the traffic patch in this next update will address some of that, or i'm pretty well fucked from here on out. I think the next trick is getting a research project running to give me the good solar things. It's the only thing I can think of for the long term, assuming it allows me to.

 

[Picklz]

I've had no issue w/ education and nuclear power in the city I went that route with, but I also don't have serious traffic issues either....there ARE issues w/ traffic and pathing in the game, but a lot of them can also be worked around with some amount of planning and engineering. It's actually quite interesting to watch traffic flow/patterns and then make changes and see how they impact things, I've learned so much from the first few cities, things like making sure the university is placed as such that most traffic will have a right turn into it, vs making a long line of traffic pull U turns and stuff....etc.

Also I love how this thread is just a complete shitshow when it started as a way to get together to play the game, maybe i'll have to start an on-point thread that isn't about bashing the game...if you don't like it don't buy (or play) it.

 

[mndsm]

Hey, I'm not trying to make it a shitshow.... I'm genuinely interested in the game.

 

[dmention7]

Offtopic posts? Not in mah mnmazda!

But staying on topic, SimCity is a game that one can play on the home computer for many hours of fun!

 

[spek1098]

Agreed, less off topic BS, more SimCity talk.

On that, schools confuse me. I read on the SimCity site some where that schools are not tiered or at least not tiered as it seemed. They said on there to bulldoze the Elementry when you build a High school, because they serve the same populations. So by that I took that a community college serves the same pop as the university, so perhaps having both actually sucks people out of the university, taking away chances to upgrade the university. I'm not sure, but what I've read leads me to believe there is two tiers: primary education and college.

 

[mndsm]

That's kind of what i've garnered as well. I can't get my school pop up enough to bulldoze my elementary to test it- and I've never built a community college- I figure build the best right away, and I've generally been funnelling money from one city to the next, so I'm never really worried about going broke if I start a new spot. I just can't figure out for the life of me how to get more students in. I have stops EVERYWHERE, a huge bus system, and my schools are BARELY getting me one hat, and NO tech. This city would be sunk as shit if I didn't have 3 processor plants running wide open..... need them TV's.

 

[AJ]

wtf are you talking about with TVs? I have not seen anything abotu a TV plant, in fact I'm having problems just getting past the fact that as I add the 3 types of zones, the only way I can build the city is tear is all down once I have enough money to put bigger streets up so more population can come up. And then traffic and crime fucks me - if I had to do this in real life, we'd all die.

 

[Picklz]

I build with medium avenues vs streets so I can upgrade to the largest streets w/o buldozing, it's more expensive to start with but much less of a headach later on, I also use dirt roads for long distances at the start between residential and industrial/power/etc to keep them separated without spending all my cash on roads.

Under the specialization menu there are things like processor factorys, consumer electronics factories (that let you build tvs or computers) etc. You have to work your way up to having them but once you get them going, zomg money!

 

[Workdawg]

My biggest city has one off the entrance to the area and that's it. The rest is pretty all streets. High density branches off the avenue, medium density off those, and some low density if there are more branches. One of the keys I've found it to try to avoid 4 way stops as much as possible.

There are a couple of 4 ways in there, but nowhere with heavy traffic. 130k+ population and I have pretty much no red traffic areas, even during rush hour.

Upper left:

Upper Right:

Lower Right:

 

[mndsm]

wtf are you talking about with TVs? I have not seen anything abotu a TV plant, in fact I'm having problems just getting past the fact that as I add the 3 types of zones, the only way I can build the city is tear is all down once I have enough money to put bigger streets up so more population can come up. And then traffic and crime fucks me - if I had to do this in real life, we'd all die.

TV's are an upgrade you get from selling x amount of processors in a given day. TV's make HELLA more money. TV's are also critical for building the Arcology Great Work..... and that's the one I'm stuck on. As far as traffic, I build the heaviest streets I can out of the box, I have at least 1 city with 100% high density avenues. Maybe that's where I'm screwing up. Traffic is the bane of any game of this- stops fire trucks, police, buses, delivery trucks, the whole bit.

 

[mndsm]

Well, they pushed some sort of update. I have no idea if it was the right patch, but it seems that my city was slightly more stable. I didn't have any rollback issues this round, and was able to crank out a bunch of work. Now if only I could get my people educated.........

 

[mndsm]

Aaaaand I spoke too soon. Rolled twice this morning... But I am sorta making progress. I have the cash to start a TV factory, just don't want to do it til I know the game is more stable. At least I got out of an earthquake.

 

[WhiteSpy9]

well... this isn't going to be out until Feb '13 for OSX.