Haven't played in 5 years. Any progress on these issues since then?

[Xen0nex]

So back in 2015 when the game was new, I fell in love and put a bunch of hours into it. However, with some of the cities I built, the bigger and more complicated I made them, I started running into more & more issues that sapped some of my enjoyment. Eventually the annoyance of the issues resulted in me taking a break, and now I'm curious to see how much has been addressed in the meantime, and considering jumping back in, and possibly grabbing some of the DLC.

Here are the things that were problems for me at the time:

• Not being able to view the Power / Water usage of a given building / district / zone, and thus not knowing where it made sense to apply Water / Power usage policies.
• Relevant stats / info for buildings /zones wasn't listed. E.G.:
  How much Tax Income does this building generate? How sensitive is it to Noise Pollution? How much does it increase / decrease Land Value? How power/water does it consume? How much Sewerage does it produce? How greatly is it affected by having Services available?
  Without that info, it kind of felt like either guesswork or arbitrary choosing for laying out the city, instead of weighing options and making an informed choice. (Specialized Industrial Zones did give some of this info, but not all info was given, and other Zones gave no info). To be clear, it's not that I wanted everything to show numbers to calculate with (though I wouldn't mind!), but the game didn't even give hints in most cases such as "Low Tax Income," or "High Sewerage produces," or "Greatly affected by Noise Pollution."
• How exactly do Taxes work? The game was not clear if there were any factors other than happiness which affects either the raw dollar Tax income, or what Tax Rate a given area will tolerate. Also was not clear if there were any benefits to lower taxes, other than increasing Happiness.
• What factors affect the demand for RCI? As with several of the other issues, at the time on the game forums, there was a lot of discussion but nobody seemed to know for certain exactly how these things worked.
• I forget the exact specifics now, but I seem to recall some way in which the traffic system eventually broke down once your city got complex enough, with vehicles / cims disappearing or teleporting, or the pathfinding AI breaking down and either making impossible-to-solve traffic issues, or eliminating the traffic management side to the game by the game auto-solving all problems behind the scenes. This was kind of a big one, as a big chunk of my enjoyment came from the logistics puzzle / traffic solving aspect of the game, similar to games like Factorio.

Does anybody know whether any of these topics have been addressed in patches / updates (or mods) since release? At a certain point it just started to feel like I wasn't able to get the information from the game I needed to make choices such as where to place various buildings, or how to manage RCI demand or Taxes, Traffic, etc. and started to feel more like I just make arbitrary choices.

Again, really enjoyed this game, probably my favorite city builder in a long time, just was sad that my experience with these issues made it hard for me to enjoy the game as much after that.

 

[MarkJohnson]

I too had those issues at launch, but quickly found the issues listed are so over simplified in the game, that they are really moot.

I think most stats for buildings are listed in the wiki. I just keep everything 50% in the green and don't worry about an individual building.

I've never found one instance of any policy making any difference. It fact, it always makes things worse and any bonus you get from them, they also have a counter effect. which negates the policy change to nothing really happening.

Same with taxes and budgets. I just leave them at defaults. You don't need to move them for any reason. It just throws off the balance of the game and causes side effects you can do without.

Demand doesn't exist in the game. Nothing is demanded but fulfilling employment. The game wants ~4% unemployment or higher. Cims are happy and collect full pay being unemployed.

Shopping is optional for cims, so there is no need for commerce. I think they did this from the huge freight system of the industry/commerce mechanic that is was clogging roads, so they added office for job sinks and made commerce shoppers optional.

Traffic control is about RCI balance. This is the real demand. You need equal job/worker ratios within walking distance (about 12 blocks or 1km) and worker traffic is almost eliminated.

This is definitely nothing like the old city builders. It is a simple system, but hard to master. There are many things that need balancing, and the different interactions complicating things.

 

[Xen0nex]

Spoiler: Reply

I too had those issues at launch, but quickly found the issues listed are so over simplified in the game, that they are really moot.

I think most stats for buildings are listed in the wiki. I just keep everything 50% in the green and don't worry about an individual building.

I've never found one instance of any policy making any difference. It fact, it always makes things worse and any bonus you get from them, they also have a counter effect. which negates the policy change to nothing really happening.

Same with taxes and budgets. I just leave them at defaults. You don't need to move them for any reason. It just throws off the balance of the game and causes side effects you can do without.

Demand doesn't exist in the game. Nothing is demanded but fulfilling employment. The game wants ~4% unemployment or higher. Cims are happy and collect full pay being unemployed.

Shopping is optional for cims, so there is no need for commerce. I think they did this from the huge freight system of the industry/commerce mechanic that is was clogging roads, so they added office for job sinks and made commerce shoppers optional.

Traffic control is about RCI balance. This is the real demand. You need equal job/worker ratios within walking distance (about 12 blocks or 1km) and worker traffic is almost eliminated.

This is definitely nothing like the old city builders. It is a simple system, but hard to master. There are many things that need balancing, and the different interactions complicating things.

Thanks for the detailed reply! I'm a little sad to hear these particular issues are still present, but hopeful to learn that despite encountering them yourself you still found a way to enjoy the game!

You mention about job/worker balance for eliminating worker traffic, so does traffic now stay stable enough in larger cities to plan around, instead of the disappearing / teleporting / pathfinding errors I remember? I heard that a mod (Traffic Management: President Edition, I think?) has a feature to disable traffic "despawn," do you know if something like that is required in order to keep traffic working predictably enough to play around with?

And as far as the things to be balancing, or interactions complicating things, do you have any suggestions for interesting interactions / balancing jobs I should look for in a city to play around with? Since my initial goal was to be playing with stuff like the Traffic, Taxes, Power Policy, Noise pollution, Water Usage, etc., but if those don't have much impact in the end, and there are different interactions to play with instead, I'd like to give that a shot.

Thanks again for the advice!

 

[Troyen]

Same with taxes and budgets. I just leave them at defaults. You don't need to move them for any reason. It just throws off the balance of the game and causes side effects you can do without.

You can bump all the taxes from 9% -> 12% without penalty. Higher and they'll complain, but 12% is fine. There was a myth that higher taxes would lower growth rate, but I did some fairly heavy testing when I was going for the trains scenario and didn't notice any difference.

Messing with the power/water budget can help in the early game when money is tight and you're likely overproducing water. But mid-game income is large enough it stops making a big enough difference to be worth the micromanagement, so I'll stop bothering around 8000 people or my third pump.

I've never found one instance of any policy making any difference. It fact, it always makes things worse and any bonus you get from them, they also have a counter effect. which negates the policy change to nothing really happening.

Agree on the policies. I used to use them, thinking e.g. recycling would help my garbage collection, but they all also have downsides and sometimes the downsides are not that apparent as it'll subtract from revenue instead of showing up as a policy expense. Nowadays I mostly ignore them.

You mention about job/worker balance for eliminating worker traffic, so does traffic now stay stable enough in larger cities to plan around, instead of the disappearing / teleporting / pathfinding errors I remember? I heard that a mod (Traffic Management: President Edition, I think?) has a feature to disable traffic "despawn," do you know if something like that is required in order to keep traffic working predictably enough to play around with?

And as far as the things to be balancing, or interactions complicating things, do you have any suggestions for interesting interactions / balancing jobs I should look for in a city to play around with? Since my initial goal was to be playing with stuff like the Traffic, Taxes, Power Policy, Noise pollution, Water Usage, etc., but if those don't have much impact in the end, and there are different interactions to play with instead, I'd like to give that a shot.

I only see traffic despawn if there's a pathfinding error, which is rare (unless I'm doing major road construction). Traffic seems mostly stable but it does take several months for any changes you've made to fully trickle through the system, especially if it involves the regional highways. This does make it a little tricky to gauge if reworking an intersection or adding a transit option made things worse or better, but we have more transit options these days to reduce car load, compared to five years ago.

I can't say the district/city policies themselves help much. They do things, but also have side-effects, and I find it easier to handle those problems in a non-policy manner.