25 hours in. A few questions

[towerbooks3192]

Been a fan of city builders sadly simcity 2000 and 4 were a bit too complicated when I was younger and I never had the patience to play with them til the end or managed to make huge cities. Now I haven't explored every nook and cranny of both SC4 and this game and had been playing with both recently.

I have a few questions regarding this game and would appreciate veterans of the city building genre especially with experience to sims 4 in particular to answer me.

How is this game under the hood in terms of industry and RCI demands? Can you influence RCI by raising and lowering taxes? (e.g higher demand for lower taxed zones)

How greatly does education tie-in with industries? Does getting a more educated population have an impact on what industries would appear in the industrial zones? (e.g. In SC4, having a higher population would produce more manufacturing than dirty industry and I think higher education produce high-tech ones).

Any chance of disasters like riots, spreading fire and meltdown/breakdown of utility plants or strikes in the even of low budget and overcapacity?

Lastly, is there any chance regions will be implemented or at least influence the requirement of districts if we want something like turn an area in to a suburb or farming community while you turn the other areas to an industrial complex, etc and RCI demands will differ from an area and the will tie in with the situation of another area?

 

[IVIaarten]

Been a fan of city builders sadly simcity 2000 and 4 were a bit too complicated when I was younger and I never had the patience to play with them til the end or managed to make huge cities. Now I haven't explored every nook and cranny of both SC4 and this game and had been playing with both recently.

I have a few questions regarding this game and would appreciate veterans of the city building genre especially with experience to sims 4 in particular to answer me.

How is this game under the hood in terms of industry and RCI demands? Can you influence RCI by raising and lowering taxes? (e.g higher demand for lower taxed zones)

The RCI demand is a bit mystical (as in, I don't know the underlying math), but seems logical and straightforward. The only non intuitive factor here is that office demand is factored in to the industrial demand. So it's more like a 'job need' meter instead of an accurate representation of demand for goods.
For that you're better off looking at the import/export data view. Here you'll see how much you're importing/exporting of every type of good. It's a good indicator of actual industrial demand.

You can influence the RCI demand by taxes, and policies.

How greatly does education tie-in with industries? Does getting a more educated population have an impact on what industries would appear in the industrial zones? (e.g. In SC4, having a higher population would produce more manufacturing than dirty industry and I think higher education produce high-tech ones).

I think in this game it works the other way around a bit more.

If you level up your industries (lvl 3 is comparable to high tech), the factories will require highly educated people (and more workers in total as well). As far as the produced goods themselves are concerned, I don't think there's a difference between goods produced by a lvl 1 factory or a lvl 3 factory. Maybe the lvl 3's are more efficient.

You can level up your industries by providing nearby services. They go crazy for public transport as well. If you feel weird building parks in industrial area's, look for some custom ones. I use an industrial parking lot with basic park values for my industrial areas. It doesn't look out of place, it actually looks pretty good there.

The only odd ones out are the forestry and farming industrial specializations. They require primarily uneducated workers. You can achieve this in 2 ways:
- keep a high unemployment (between 6 and 12%), so that overqualified cims will take the jobs regardless
- make sure your supply of education is lower than the demand. This will make sure that some cims remain uneducated. The ones living closer to schools are likely to get educated sooner.

As a separate tip; a lot of people with a background in Simcity assume the 'green area' shown when plopping down a service buiding represents the coverage area. This is false. Fire, garbage, health and police vehicles will travel far outside of that zone, but might be late to the party occasionally. The green area represents the area in which the buildings will get the 'level up effect' from that service.
The graphical indicator of supply/demand is a better indicator on if your city needs more of 'generic service -insert name here-'.

Any chance of disasters like riots, spreading fire and meltdown/breakdown of utility plants or strikes in the even of low budget and overcapacity?

Currently the only 'disaster' in the game is flooding your city by building a dam in the wrong place. If people don't like living in your city, they'll simply leave (or die if you pump sewage trough the water mains).
I think stuff like this might be added by CO at a later date though, but remember, this game was made by a team of 9-13 people. They focused on a good core game for release. More fluffy content might be added in future (Free or paid) expansions based on player feedback.

There's already a mod for 'spreading fire' in the workshop

Lastly, is there any chance regions will be implemented or at least influence the requirement of districts if we want something like turn an area in to a suburb or farming community while you turn the other areas to an industrial complex, etc and RCI demands will differ from an area and the will tie in with the situation of another area?

You can already build districts with separate policies to give a boost to a specific part of RCI (or a penalty if you want).

Full region play? maybe in the future, but I doubt it. SC4 was a statistics based simulation (basically some excel sheets with fancy formulas), where you could develop different cities asynchronous. This is likely not going to match with agent based simulations (where everything is persistent).

People already have a WIP version of the 81 tiles mod available on the workshop (check out Reddit to keep up to date). I think that's as large as it's going to get for a while, but hey, the modders have been showing seriously impressive stuff already in a single month, and again, if there's enough player feedback that a lot of people want stuff like this, it might be placed on CO's to do list.

Hope this helps.