SIM City 5 - Actual Strategy Discussion

[RockinZ28]

that's pretty awesome, but had you say you had no need of imports, you aren't counting. The plastic and alloy you needed to make processors and then tvs?

Im making my own plastic and alloy from the recycling plants. No need to go through the mine or drilling upgrade paths to smelt alloy or refine oil, which will both run out and take up significant space.

 

[Stuka87]

Im making my own plastic and alloy from the recycling plants. No need to go through the mine or drilling upgrade paths to smelt alloy or refine oil, which will both run out and take up significant space.

Unfortunately you need MANY recycling plants to get the same volume of plastics, metal, or alloys. Mine are always backed up.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Im making my own plastic and alloy from the recycling plants. No need to go through the mine or drilling upgrade paths to smelt alloy or refine oil, which will both run out and take up significant space.

In my experience recycling is a fairly limited resource for plastic.

I had two recycling plants, a healthy city of ~100k educated people, and still could not keep up with plastic demands to make processors.

 

[RockinZ28]

Mine seem to function fine. You have to add the extra production lines for alloy and plastic. They can supply a fully upgraded processor plant and tv plant, and still make excess cpus which I also export once they accumulate in the trade port.

Probably another bug. Traffic does have to flow pretty well though, otherwise your recycling trucks get clogged up throughout the city and dont collect shit.

 

[pwoz]

Unfortunately you need MANY recycling plants to get the same volume of plastics, metal, or alloys. Mine are always backed up.

In the event you aren't aware, there is currently a bug where recycling plants will stop working. This might be causing your backup, check to make sure they are producing.

You have to demolish and rebuild it to fix this. Usually demolishing one will fix all that are stuck. I haven't seen what causes the bug yet.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

In the event you aren't aware, there is currently a bug where recycling plants will stop working. This might be causing your backup, check to make sure they are producing.

You have to demolish and rebuild it to fix this. Usually demolishing one will fix all that are stuck. I haven't seen what causes the bug yet.

Is there a list somewhere of bugs like this?


Every time I get 'stuck' my first thought is that it's yet another idiotic bug.

 

[RockinZ28]

Is there a list somewhere of bugs like this?


Every time I get 'stuck' my first thought is that it's yet another idiotic bug.

Theres a bug list somewhere on the official EA forums for simcity. Saw it pasted on another forum

Its loooong.

This game never should have been released in this state.

Ive been pretty lucky and only experienced annoying bugs so far, nothing game breaking.

 

[erwos]

Yeah, the server problems are really small fries compared to some of the bugs in this game. There are some YouTube videos floating around showing how utterly broken pathing is right now; suffice it to say, taking a city past ~125k people is nearly impossible in the long run unless you follow some VERY strict guidelines about layout and exploit dezoning. Your city just explodes after traffic jams render all services unusable.

Mass transit is also completely screwed up; buses sound great, but wind up jamming up your traffic when things get crowded. And emergency vehicles... ugh. Why bother with sirens if no one's getting out of the way?

I love the game, and I love the concept, but they have some serious patching work to do.

 

[Jaguwar]

LOL I saw that earlier, I decided to follow an ambulance... and was dismayed to find it waiting for a traffic light to turn green. What's that about???

Anyway, I appreciate all the tips I'm finding here. I've discovered it might not be such a good idea to have too much infrastructure/"placed" buildings close together. Upgrading, say, and oil refinery that's too close to something like your garbage dump can lower the spaces needed to upgrade the dump without bulldozing one of the other, all of which means quite a bit of expense.

 

[dagamer34]

What do you recommend to someone who's never played Sim City before and just bought it today because he liked the concepts based off a YouTube video? :wub:

 

[novasatori]

I can get most cities to 270k even without using trade systems (like processors/tv) so it isn't impossible, it isn't even really hard. It is breaking 270-300k that I have problems with as you can no longer really self sustain that type of population and with the buggy regional sharing it can crumble fast.

Also for processors just import, you still make a profit importing 100% of the necessary components, even for TVs.

I setup processors/alloy/plastics on 3 trade depots to import and then setup TVs to export.

 

[pcslookout]

I got up to 300k population but I had well over $3 million to use when building that city.

 

[Dominato3r]

What do you recommend to someone who's never played Sim City before and just bought it today because he liked the concepts based off a YouTube video? :wub:

Grow your city naturally (Start off with low density roads etc). A lot fo yotube videos just go wild with high density avenues and layouts, which could be pretty confusing.

Basic rule of thumb is to keep your sims happy, and keep an eye on your RCI (Residential, commercial industrial) demand.

 

[pcslookout]

Grow your city naturally (Start off with low density roads etc). A lot fo yotube videos just go wild with high density avenues and layouts, which could be pretty confusing.

Basic rule of thumb is to keep your sims happy, and keep an eye on your RCI (Residential, commercial industrial) demand.

Yep.

Unless you want to leave it on overnight making millions of dollars then build a wonderful city with it.

 

[dagamer34]

Grow your city naturally (Start off with low density roads etc). A lot fo yotube videos just go wild with high density avenues and layouts, which could be pretty confusing.

Basic rule of thumb is to keep your sims happy, and keep an eye on your RCI (Residential, commercial industrial) demand.

Yep, I learned that the hard way with my first city. Need to start slow. It's almost impossible to catch up with RCI once it's gone off the deep end. Also, I kept destroying my important buildings because I built them in front of crappy roads.

 

[Sho'Nuff]

NM -

 

[redrider4life4]

One thing I did notice last night into this morning is how long it takes to switch from producing one item to selling another. My oil fields are drying up so I'm trying to switch over to refineries for fuel/plastic. It took my city about 3-4 full days before it actually started working correctly. I was making 205k/day from just drilling selling oil, I sold all my oil depots and converted them all to plastic/fuel. Built 3 oil refineries and had all my oil sent there.

My profit tanked initially to almost zero, but now it gradually climbed back and is now at 250k. I do find the refineries don't process the oil fast enough, my fields are constantly not working due to being full on storage. This has nothing to do with the actual delivery trucks, the refineries just don't process the oil fast enough, right now the max seems to be 4800 barrels a day and my fields put out 10-13k.

 

[erwos]

You can definitely get to 300k, but the city will implode shortly after from traffic.

I am starting to wonder if the game play paradigm is different than previous SimCity games, in that raw population isn't really a good gauge of what's a successful city. I mean, think about it: if you build a university, your industry zones all go $$$, and that means your residential and commercial will broadly need to follow. That decreases population a LOT.

Maybe they need a success criteria that's more obvious? *shrugs*

 

[Phanuel]

You can definitely get to 300k, but the city will implode shortly after from traffic.

I am starting to wonder if the game play paradigm is different than previous SimCity games, in that raw population isn't really a good gauge of what's a successful city. I mean, think about it: if you build a university, your industry zones all go $$$, and that means your residential and commercial will broadly need to follow. That decreases population a LOT.

Maybe they need a success criteria that's more obvious? *shrugs*

RCI is broken in this game as far as I can tell.

Residential is bugged, while the population increases with density, actual number of workers does not. It seems that low density housing will give you a higher % of workers/shoppers/students instead of sims that do absolutely nothing. You'll notice that in the population tab your total workers is abysmal, between 9-11% once you're in the 100k+ population level. People have done testing and posted similar results to the EA SimCity forums.

I think that low density housing is probably the way to go, and worrying about overall population numbers is completely pointless as by the end of the game you can have 80% of the map zoned as residential and still have C and I complaining about needing workers in a 200k pop city.

 

[exar333]

RCI is broken in this game as far as I can tell.

Residential is bugged, while the population increases with density, actual number of workers does not. It seems that low density housing will give you a higher % of workers/shoppers/students instead of sims that do absolutely nothing. You'll notice that in the population tab your total workers is abysmal, between 9-11% once you're in the 100k+ population level. People have done testing and posted similar results to the EA SimCity forums.

I think that low density housing is probably the way to go, and worrying about overall population numbers is completely pointless as by the end of the game you can have 80% of the map zoned as residential and still have C and I complaining about needing workers in a 200k pop city.

This. In my latest city, I went from 30k-70k population and industry was still making the same $$$ and saying the same thing (worker shortage). I didn't even have that much industry to start with.

The cities are WAY too small. I remember seeing the city map on SC 2000 and thinking 'there is no way I could ever use all of that....' On SC5, I immediately think 'this is too small...'

 

[InfiniteLurker]

I've tried the sewage/treatment solution and for some reason I might be missing something, my water was still contaminated.

To resolve this, when you build the water plant, be sure to use the filtered water pumps. Also, the first pump that comes with the water plant is NOT filtered, so you can bulldoze it and replace it with a filtered one.

 

[redrider4life4]

Very good info, I will be sure to do that when I get home.

 

[Genx87]

So I must had done something right. Everything is pegged at max for demand. But my village square is maxed out on zoning and I am just passing 200K.

I went with the basic grid look. Next city I will try something more original.

 

[KaOTiK]

My factories across my region are all being abandoned now because of no unskilled workers once I set up my one city for all education. Now everyone is too good to work and residential buildings get abandoned because they have no money since the tenants are snobs who don't want to work for anything below them so they go homeless.

 

[nickbits]

Yep.

Unless you want to leave it on overnight making millions of dollars then build a wonderful city with it.

That has failed for me the couple times I tried it. I come back to a city ridden with fire and crime and half deserted.