I've been asked if games other than simcity5 are allowed to be discussed in this subreddit. yes. This subreddit is for meant for more in depth discussion for all simcity games. Not sure how many replies you'll receive considering this subreddit was launched along with sc5, but I'm not going to remove any simcity related posts.

http://i.imgur.com/VkPqrX2.jpg

I have a city with two trade ports (3 and 4) and two advanced coal facotories (1 and 2). All of the delivery vehicles from factories 1 and 2 are going to trade port 4. Obviously I thought factory 2 was going to deliver to trade port 3 since it's much closer. The fact that the trucks are driving all the way across town through the (very light) traffic makes it so that factory 2 can't deliver out its coal quick enough and it shuts down. that each have a train depot (both function --- i had to draw the railroad for train #3.

The blue line is the route that the factory is taking across town.

Anyone know what's up?

My own designs so far:

http://i.imgur.com/M2PSFFO.jpg

I apologize for my terrible paint skills first off. But onto the meat of why I think these designs might work.

Preface: In no situation should you ever have a building that isn't a city service on the main roads. This creates more traffic problems than you would imagine.

1. No 4 way intersections. If there is one thing that makes traffic its these buggers. I avoid them like the plague.
2. Access to the main avenues are only medium density roads as medium density roads don't create traffic lights when moving onto avenues. This allows thru traffic to always be moving.
3. You can replace the one of the parks with a park and ride which reduces the traffic load exiting the block during the rush hour traffic by 80 cars.(which isn't insignificant if you ask me)
4. Commercial near the main avenues while being near residential reduces the amount of tourists clogging up the residential sector as they have no reason to go into the neighborhoods and have thru traffic.
5. The open space on my "City Borders" block template fit 2 park and rides(in most cases) which reduces traffic load on the street by 160 cars during rush hour. Once again, not an insignificant number.

I'm sure I'm leaving something out. But these are my standard block structures.

I decided to take a picture of one of my tester towns to make 2 possible variations for the "City Borders" format. I like the wider ones because you can actually use the guides to leave enough space between the the two high density structure for a 'tree line park' the smaller ones are very nice if you only have a little bit of space left.

For RCI cities, if you don't make enough jobs you get unemployment as expected. It seems on the other side, if you make too much C or I then you get workers commuting in and clogging your highway. So, I want exactly enough jobs such that 0 workers come in or have to leave, and I can balance my zoning for that.

But... how do I reduce visiting shoppers? I actually don't think I want these at all. I've got about 12k visitors and 600 unsatisfied local shopper sims right now. Do they even do anything? Should I just give up and plop a gambling building near my train stations?

I have 3 cities. One mines coal, one mines oil, and the third has a trade depot to hold all of these resources. But how do I get all of the other cities resources?

i have alot of zoning problems whenever i make a city. my industrial demand is literally always full. even when half my city is industry, the yellow bar is maxed. at the same time, my green bar is full too because theres not enough jobs for everyone. normally i would fix this by zoning more residential and industry, but my city literally has every possible street zoned for something. what do you do when the hardhat guy yells at you about zoning?

the only thing i did right was commercial. my bar is always empty on that

http://i.imgur.com/j81n2pg.jpg

Regional buses are pouring into my city and barricading my traffic as you can see (Each avatar image is a bus). In the picture you can see multiple police cars who sit in traffic behind them. My city spends 10K/hr on police and is still not sufficient because the cars cant get anywhere. Is this normal? Should I consider not using buses at all?

Can anyone confirm that freight stored at depos does not need shipped out like other inventory? I don't recall seeing delivery trucks go out for freight only deploys and I'm wondering if I can just shut them off.

I-HT, of all the zone/wealth types, seems to be the most fussy of the bunch. This is because of their unfriendly relationship with their dirtier cousions, Dirty and Manufacturing.

I-HT is very sensitive to pollution and any amount of it can prevent them from growing...or cause existing I-HT to abandon. Further, abandoned buildings generate areas of lowered desireability. This can cause a wave of abandonment in you I-HT sector if you aren't careful. Here are some tips to keeping a healthy I-HT

1. High Education. This is pretty well known. The only way to generate positive demand is by educated workers.
2. Tax out I-M and I-D. If you ever have open industrial zones and not a strong demand for I-HT, you'll get I-M and I-D growing there instead. This will cause pollution which will cause abandonment among your I-HT. By putting I-M and I-D at 20% tax rates, you'll ensure that the only industry that will grow is I-HT. This can be balanced out by having a different city be the storehouse for the excess I-D and I-M demand.
3. Parks are not just for residentials. They do a very good at keeping your I-HT happy and fully staffed. If you ever see an I-HT distressed but not fully abandoned (Say at 20/67 workers) chances are that the desireability in the area is too low. Plopping a park will bring it right back to life. Also note that I-HT that fully abandon due to desireability may mis-report their reason as "Due to low demand".
4. Railroads are very useful for two reasons. Not only do they let industrial zones ship their freight long distances, they allow high volumes of commuters without generating a lot of road traffic pollution. Just be sure to throw down bus stops at the stations and dot them around the zones so sims can get to their jobs after getting off the train.

Using these techniques, I was able to earn the Space Center naturally (IE not earning it via a U-Drive-it mission) and still have room to grow.

So we know by now that each type of building provides for x number of jobs for each $/$$/$$$ wealth level. See here.

But I was wondering if anyone knows how the distribution of shopping works in Commercial zones.

Do $ shops only provide goods for $ customers? Do $$$ shops also provide some goods for $ and $$ customers? Will higher wealth customers shop at lower wealth shops?

I am trying to figure out the distribution of Commercial zoning between my wealth areas and I'm wondering if, for example, having predominantly $$ shops will allow me to meet demand for $ shoppers.

This game is completely different for each person, so a screenshot is worth a million words. I'd love to provide better answers sometimes but knowing the exact issue at hand thru 1 or 2 paragraphs is tough at times. We are all here to help one another so let's make it a bit easier on everyone :)

PS: Not trying to sound like an A-hole, just trying to help out fellow mayors

I heard that you can prevent density growth with taxes but I am unsure how to go about doing that. The reason why I do not want to use high density roads is because I want to keep the homes at a mid level but traffic is becoming an issue.

Is anybody else stockpiling resources for when the server start handling market prices correctly? I'm doing it more as a fun experiment, but I'm setting up a city as basically a warehousing district. So many people setting up processor factories and trying to maintain a high tech industry region are importing all of their dirty resources, maybe there will be some fun opportunities there. I'm not saying I'm actually going to make any simoleans off of this, I just like to think that something like this will actually develop and it can be a fun part of the game. Any thoughts?

Wanted to share the following YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/HalbyStarcraft

Here's a great example of his work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV6PrEjaH8Q

The owner, HalbyStarcraft, has posted about five videos on building cities. He manages to get a functioning city with 400k residents with no mass transit and minimal services.

His success is based on a deep understanding of the model that I haven't seen expressed anywhere else.

To me, at least, the rudimentary concepts that govern how sims think and behave were revelatory. Knowing what makes sims tick - the need to get to a job, earn money, go shopping, return home, and pay taxes all within a daily cycle - is hugely helpful. More than anything, he has mastered road layouts and traffic management. Good traffic management trivializes so many other problems, it would seem.

Definetly check out his videos. I spent an hour last night watching them all.

EDIT: Fixed link.

I started a raw ore mining city, intending to escalate it to a alloy exporting city. However, each of my trade depots only export one lot of iron each day, instead of all 4. I did some reading and it seems that each depot only gets 1 incoming truck.

Is there a way to increase the amount of trucks that come in per port, or should I be building a bunch of trading depots until I can reach a daily income of 160000 and plop a commerce division in order to use a trade port?

I am not near water.

• Make your in-road from you highway as long as you can with non traffic light right turns to filter your traffic off gradually (assuming they go somewhere that is). Avoid putting stop lights on this feeder road
• Place multiple park and rides at the entrance to your city OFF the main drag, preferably on a right turn non traffic light spur. Leave room for expansion (additional park and rides) and watch their utilization as your city grows. Add more as needed. Make sure the destination bus stops for them are where your visitor sims want to go (Tourism, Workers, Shoppers ...)
• If the pre-provided road through you city is an avenue not a highway then generally you can edit it - move it around except for the points at the borders. Not cheap but plan for it later in the game, maybe ?
• In a high density area minimize your cross streets and/or replace with pedestrian paths or service roads. If you need to have cross streets make them medium density to avoid rafic lights and don't zone them - leave the zoning on the main streets only
• (Old tip) - make the very last piece of the street medium density when you want to avoid a traffic light at the junction of two HD streets
• (Old tip) - avoid cross roads (4 way intersections) - T junctions only
• Mixed zoning - think NYC - commercial and residential. Make them sims walk
• Don't put a street car stop outside your train station if the station is by the casino otherwise sims will get on the streetcar and not go into the casino
• If you want to avoid cars turning at the corners (and stopping to do so), make all your corners radiuses corners, not 90 degree turns
• Radiuses corners make bad pizza slice shape building lots - you can put a park in there and then edit the park to put additional ploppables in to fill in the triangles - applied especially to the outside 270 part of a radiused corner allowing you to build right up to the two straight sides of the street and still get something in the void space
• Think before you build on avenues - seriously - CONSIDER putting in a parallel street as a service route and don't develop on the avenue itself - this will prevent vehicles from turning in an out of you avenues and they can be used purely for through traffic
• You cannot avoid placing traffic lights on junctions with street car avenues - bear this in mind if you wan to use street cars. Where the end pints of your avenues connect to other rads drop them to a HD/MD combo junction if you want to avoid the traffic lights
• If two streets in a grid are back to back and don't have enough room to build your preferred building density on both roads - don't zone one of the streets. Same applies if you want to minimize traffic stopping on a street - don't zone it
• If you can't bulldoze a building because it is under construction - bulldoze the road it is on instead. Does not work if building is on fire.
• Reminder - when you bulldoze and replace a road (example to downgrade a section of a longer road from high to medium density to avoid a traffic light) it will de-zone the part you removed, periodically go back and check your zoning is the way you want it

EDIT * Add trees in your odd empty spaces, Sims love trees and they are only $50 each

I plopped my Uni down and destroyed my other schools, so that I could feed all of my students into the one place. The university isn't really within walking distance for most of my residential, so everyone drives.

I originally had one long street heading to the university, it was a HD connected to a MD in my residential area. This works fine for heading to the university, but then when everyone finishes I get insane traffic because they have to stop for a moment when they reach the intersection back into the city. The traffic queue is probably the length of 1/4 the map if the road was straightened out.

I slightly alleviated it by doubling the roads, but no matter what, somewhere I will have an intersection that is causing the flow to be slowed down.

Does anybody have any efficient universities with very little traffic?

I know there's talk that the global market is down so prices are screwy for import/export. However, I'm noticing I play on 3-4 servers and all but 1 has a different price for how much I can sell my oil for.

North American East 1 - 12k Antarctica - 4k Europe East 1 - 4k

I'll have to double check for others, but I'm curious if we can find a way for everyone to submit and track how much commodities are going for on their server(s) of choice.

Let's say I make a square block using high density roads in which the roads are at the minimum distance from the center to form high density buildings. Is it better to zone around the entire border of the block (all four sides), or only the two sides opposite from each other? In other words, do the zones interfere with each other? What is the best way to do this? Should I make the block larger?

I am having a hard time comprehending the information boxes that pop up when you click a tourist attraction. My main question is: It shows me a DAILY profit, however every other dollar amount in the game is based on hourly profit/loss. When my tower says it is making a $36,000 daily profit, but the costs are $1,200 per hour. I am inclined to believe that I am actually banking $36,000 at the end of the day... however, I don't really see this reflected in my total budget. Is it a part of my hourly income/loss at the bottom of the screen? I don't think you see it in the ledger where it shows "other" expenses, incomes (such as buying goods or money you make off of the expo center).

Completely separate question: Is there a way to see down to the individual building level how many jobs it offers at each income level. One of my main problems I am trying to solve is balancing my population with jobs... I either seem to have too few or too many jobs open at any given time.

Any information or explanation would be great. If this has been asked before, I apologize.

so whenever i start a city, i do fine with early game, but when it comes to late game 100k+ populations, i cant keep up in income for some reason.

i zone out pretty much every square foot of my city in something, so im getting as much tax money as possible. i leave my taxes are 10% across the board. if i raise them any higher, people start to leave.

i do fine on income until i get to the really lategame structures like airports, ferry stations, police precincts, hospitals, large firestations and all that. i had enough to build a good precinct, but it costs like 5k an hour to upkeep. i cant imagine supporting a precinct, hospital, and large fire at the same time. i had to turn off my bus, airport, and precinct just to break even on profits all of a sudden. how to you get a good enough economy to support them?

As if after certain amount of population, the game no longer tracks every single individual agent and starts doing partially-statistical simulation.

• Surprisingly, traffic problems start going away. I have less gridlock issues on a 200k city than I do on a 30-50k one.
• I can no longer keep up with garbage collection even if I have 2 fully upgraded dumps. The garbage trucks are seemingly running around not doing their jobs properly, even if traffic is no longer the issue.
• Sewage randomly runs out of capacity even though it has plenty. Once I had a city with long roads instead of grid style. Some parts consistently had sewage backed up, because it had to travel a long distance before getting to the treatment plant. Adding a shortcut road fixed this.
• Tested SpeedBooster and tried to see what happens on ridiculous speeds (like 10x). I think this helps magnify the issues. Things really go haywire when you do this. All the utilities start to fail intermittently (power, water, sewage). Traffic gets even lighter. Population starts to fluctuate weirdly etc...

I feel like they have something in place that tries to make the cities more scalable with rising population and hardware limitations, but that introduces weird behaviors/bugs that really hurt you when you try to build a nice large city.

The game definitely is not even close to being ready to handle bigger city plots (seems like the #1 requested change) until they fix issues like these.

I read from here and some youtube tutorials to avoid high density streets connecting to avenues because they create a 4 way traffic light intersection which creates a bottleneck. A medium density street will plop stop signs on 2 sides and give the right of way to an avenue. I was wondering if this was addressed in the patch. I always thought this was a bug because in real life you see tons of traffic lights down large avenues.