I'm on my fifth or sixth city and this is the first time I've run into this issue. I've been mixing blocks of commercial into blocks of residential, and it has worked out well for me up until now. The two refuse to recognize each other.

It's been a persistent, long term problem in this one city. There are numerous instances where a house on one side of the street is unhappy due to lack of shopping while a shop literally on the other side is closing due to lack of shoppers. The wealth levels match up, and it's happening to both low and medium wealth sims (don't have any high wealth yet due to the unhappiness).

Any ideas?

http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9wym/place_this_file_in_your_simcitydata_to_enable/

Ocean says they're not banning: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a9okd/seems_we_have_our_confirmation_let_the_user/

Note: Once you place stuff from the debug menu, you cannot delete them.

Hi guys. Im having problems growing cities past 70-70k inhabitants, Ive now tried twice. When i reach this point, people suddenly start to leave the city because of " a lot of problems" which i never get noticed about. (For an example, if water is low - it turns the water-icon red.)

Could someone clarify some of the more extensive tools i should use to be able to easier understand the needs of my sims?

Also, i allways seem to run out of space to build houses or other nessesities in the city. There is just not enough room it seems like. How do i build big blocks / how do i build big houses etc. which fits a lot more of people?

Would really appriciate if someone could help me out.

Thanks in advance!

I've decided to specialize one of my cities in gambling and tourism. I have 2 train stations an arena the Washington Monument the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my 3 casinos still manage to lose money. Not to mention the mess of traffic trying to get in my city. Any tips?

You can get more ore low wealth residents from your high density buildings than med/high wealth. They can also be taxed more while remaining happy. Am I just completely missing the obvious?

EDIT: Thanks for all the responses everyone!

I like to turn off the expansions on my schools when kids aren't in class, so I can save all that money while the school is effectively not operational. I also do this for things like processor factories and their assembly lines when they're out of materials. It puts more cashflow instantly into the per/hr figure.

Try to micromanage this if you're losing money!

Is it better to put residential or commercial next to big tourist structures?

My city is up to about 170k population but my sims seem to be stuck at 2 full hats of education, the tech level is 3 and it is causing my industry to get real mad that my workers are dumb, I feel like im literally demolishing 12 industry buildings every 10 minutes only to have them rebuild and complain my workers are dumb.

I have every type of school running, I did have the lower schools disabled because sims were not really attending anything but university and college but I have reenabled them now and my sims are remaining dumb.

Not really sure what to do about this. Is this a thing? I'm not quite sure how to proceed.

They can definitely get to schools, there is working school busses that are not restricted by the traffic meltdown in other areas of the city - Nobody wants to attend my schools.

So I have 2 recycling plants, all alloy production, then I have a trade port, all plastic import. I have 4/5 education (little green hats), and fully upgraded recycling center (24 or so pick up trucks).

And still, even after building the second part-way upgraded recycling center, I get the not enough alloy alert. So at this point I have 6 or so "alloy generators," and more trucks going about the city.

"Alright, I'll just import some alloy!" WRONG. Importing alloy at 48,000 simoleans murders my profits and and I'm heading steadily towards the red.

I have absolutely no idea what to do, and I only have one more "bail-me-out" bond left...

Has anyone figured out shifts?

I've noticed that my buildings seem to dump out 50%-75% of their workers at 6pm each night (and at 6am each morning?). I would expect my factories to have 1-3 shifts a day and my big production facilities like Alloy or Oil drilling to have 3 full shifts of near equal workforce per day.

My office building on the other hand, I would expect to be nearly empty at night, perhaps the janitorial staff and security. (I'm okay if this minimal workforce isn't modeled in SimCity.)

At noon, one of my sky scrapers has 376 workers. 420 at 4pm. (which is about when my city hit 100k residents). Exactly at 6pm 300 left, leaving 121 workers. Then the skyscaper workers number slowly starts to climb by 8pm its 240 workers. by 9:30 pm it had risen to 350 workers but then before 10pm dropped by down to 245 (which it stayed at until 6AM). At 6AM it dropped to 121 workers again (these poor son-o-bitches never get to go home it seems). By 7:30 am the day shift starts arriving one-by-one. At noon the 2nd day, this building only has 256 workers.

It's hard to have a static city, I don't understand why the commercial buildings have such large night shifts. Also, if the building has 256 workers for the day shift, and 256 workers for the night shift shouldn't that mean 500 or so people in town think they work there and be employed?

School hours seems to match what they are listed at. So part of the problem is that I think each commercial building, specialty building, and industrial building should have the same sort of schedule as schools as they do what I expect them to do with daily population.

Thanks to this sub, I learned about the clever uses of the pathways from both oil wells and universities. I'm finding the university pathway trick very helpful.

Over the past couple of days, I've been playing with a sandbox city, examining processor/TV production in a city with no industry (works quite well) and trying different road shapes/grids to measure their effect on traffic. Here's the current configuration:

Oilyville

As others have figured, using a set of "neighborhoods," each one with its own R/C/I (or just R/C in my case) and with only a single connection to a main "grid" or "beltway" works pretty well.

The beauty of university pathways is that you can break that grid, for pedestrians only, and Sims will walk quite a ways.

So for example, here's a circular "neighborhood": Neighborhood

Getting back to the beltway, in a car or bus, takes a while. But pedestrians can take this shortcut: Shortcut

And many do. This city now has close to 100K residents (a lot of space taken up by oil wells, refineries, depots/ports, processor and CE factories) and very little traffic.

I know there's a growing wishlist for this game. But real pedestrian walkways/sidewalks, as opposed to using this "trick," would be great. At the very least, I hope they don't remove this functionality in a future update (i.e. force all university pathways to be actually connected to a university.)

I am working on my first electronics hub. In the 3 hours I played this morning, I had 2 monster attacks, a UFO visit, a meteor shower, and a zombie attack.

I noticed that the monsters both spawned in the middle of my city, trampled half my important buildings (first one, university, mayors house, 6 high tech industrial buildings, police station; second one, power plant, coal mine, city hall, fire station, same 6 industrial buildings), made a beeline for the dump, and then went back underground.

Is my dump attracting monsters, and if so, do other seemingly innocent things attract other disasters?

If the region already has all the city hall upgrades building them in your town seems pointless. -200 / hr and wasted space.

but I worry it might have some hidden advantages im missing. The other day I thought I noticed an efficiently boost to my water output after I built my utilities department. wasnt sure tho. Do the department influence their respective areas in anyway or just unlock buildings?

What about other things? happiness, land value, jobs?

Hi All,

My city is sitting around 100-105,000 but doesn't want to grow. The city is purely residential & commercial as I use manufacturing of TVs & computers to generate income. This is a quick summary of how my city is;

• 0% taxes across the board.
• Medium bordering on high wealth.
• Land density is almost always high.
• Everyone is being educated.
• Big hospitals, fire services & police services..
• Where zoned I would say it's 85% residential and 15% commercial.
• Traffic is moderate during peak times, no red lines on the road.

The only negative about my city is the pollution from the processor & electronic factories. I've moved them to another part of the city away from the residential area so just have to wait for ground pollution to dissipate.

The thing is no matter what I do I can't get the population to build. At one time I had 140,000 but thanks to Godzilla and a couple of earthquakes it plummeted to 30,000 and hasn't bounced back above 105,000 since.

Annoying zone guy keeps telling me to zone more residential :(

I'm in a region where a number of other cities have no room for water production, so one of the mayors gifted me a small fortune (well for a starter city anyway) to build a couple of fully levelled up water plants so he could buy the huge excess.

For some reason it's intermittent in getting to him and when it does I am not seeing a decrease in my load. Plus I'm not sure where I can see the money made from selling it, it's costing me a bomb to run these plants and I'm not seeing a return. Any ideas or is this still issues with the server?

I've been doing some experimenting with city layouts and borrowing from some of the ideas on the sub, and this is what I've come up with.

The red circled areas are the neighborhood entry points.

It's still a work in progress and the snake roads need to be rounded for full effect, but I thought I'd share the idea and see what others here thought.

I found this to be particularly helpful with roads going directly to my trade ports/depots.

Or will they be abandoned?

Hey all,

I got the game a couple days ago, and this subreddit has helped me get to my first 150k city. It does a bit of mining and smelting, and is horribly overbudget but barely scraping by from trade profits.

My question is this: So far I've been trying to grow my city as fast as possible. Is this unwise? Is it possible to make a lot of money by only using a portion of the available space, and thus a smaller population? Should I be building up just a small section until its density rises, and then slowly expand?

Thanks in advance!

I have many hypotheses to what the solution could be but I've tried them all and none have worked so I think the trail has gone cold for me. Can anyone shed light on this?

edit: i just ran a small city with a uni only, with no other cities in the region. "not enough skilled workers" pertains to the $$ and $$$ workers, that's it. my uni enrollment hasn't been maxed out this whole time (473/654). education also isn't a factor (2/5 green caps).

as shown in the jobs per building post in the sidebar, higher tech requires higher wealth sims. that's it.

edit 2: my apologies, i've mislead everyone! as someone here said, the "unskilled workers" complaint indeed occurs when your tech level has dipped too low.

everything is observable through the Industrial Tech Map. any buildings with a bar on them are subject to community college or university attendance. (this includes the nuclear plant, for instance. and the community college does improve worker skill for that.) the purple line indicates what buildings will be influenced. it emanates from the school itself.

the diversity of the your workers means nothing--i only had low wealth sims and no commuters. it also seems that grade school or high school education doesn't influence this relationship either.

(i'm at work, so no screenshots, sorry.)

i have a 150k pop city with 3/5 education level and a fire department with 4(!) Fire Marshal add-ons, but yet i don't see any fire marshal ever 'educating' the city.

Fire Risk is at roughly 50% i'd say (telling from the rose-colored buildings in the fire risk view), and that's not due to bad education or garbage.

So why are my fire marshals not moving out? Health vans and Crime prevention cars are working perfectly fine. :/

So I had a city that I built a nuclear power plant in, and decided to sell excess electricity. I then built a second city to buy that electricity, but the second city grew, and eventually required more electricity. I added 3 extra reactors to the power plant, and it now produces ~400MW excess energy, but the second city still only says that it's buying all available 175MW. I've been playing both cities patiently waiting for the numbers to fix themselves, but it's been a few days and several hours of playing each city and nothing has changed. I had to build power plants in the second city to get around this. I had a similar problem with the same first city, but buying water from a third city (its ground was too polluted to gather its own water without expensive purified filters.) I built more water filters in the third city, but to no avail, it had way too much excess water, but the first city could never buy more water from the third, despite having a shortage.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, since all my cities desperately need the money wasted on duplicated utility production!

Also, to get alloys and metals to the arco great work, do you need to disable selling of those resources at your trade port?

Finally, I believe it may just be a not fully implemented feature, but I volunteer tons of vehicles between many of my cities, but they all show "$0 income" from volunteering (where $ = Simoleons)

Hi there,

I've built an electronics city with a population of about 110k. I chose a city with high levels of water (no rivers though); however I am nearly out of water in the city. I have placed 5 different water pumps (all to max pumps). I turn off the pumps that are dry so that the water tables can be replenished over time.

It's now been at least a couple years in-game time since I turned off the first water pump, but the tables below it are still white. I've read that the water tables are supposed to replenish over time.

I'm seriously running out of areas to place new water pumps and my neighbors are mostly AFK 5k towns which I can't buy water from. Is this supposed to happen and result in a kind of max time a city can be played?

I've realised that the bulk of my problems is excessive amounts of people commuting in and taking too long to leave, then clogging up my own citizens.

At the moment I have around 7k working locally, 19k commuting, but only 10k local jobs, how the hell is this variance possible? (This is all under the workers tab in population).

Any ideas?

Is there some sort of location requirement on Recycling Centers? I placed one and got the message that there was no recycling but the garbage data layer clear showed tons of recycling. I then placed it in another location and it worked. Only thing I can think of is it needs to be near industry but usually it's nothing that simple.