Share Your Tips

[RJO]

Things you've learned, articles you've read, share your insights here!

The green heat map you see when you place a hospital shows the distance people will WALK to your hospital. Ambulances are the least efficient way to deliver health care services (or deliver people to health care services) so it makes sense to have the bulk of your residents within walking distance of health care if possible. (Learned this from lets all be mayor today)

[greyanna]

Start your city layout with low-grade roads and avenues. These will save you money starting out and can be upgraded without having to worry about recreating the buildings. They allow you to stay ahead of the service demands because buildings won't upgrade to medium or high density until you upgrade the surrounding roads. Low-Density and High-Density roads take up the same amount of space, same for avenues. Updating from road to avenue requires you delete the road and possibly screw up building placement so lay out your primary arteries early and upgrade as traffic becomes a problem.

Place services at major intersections in the middle of your neighborhoods. I've seen way too many videos of bad players putting services buildings (fire, police, etc) along the edges of their cities. The area of influence of these is circular so you lose half of the efficacy putting them along the edge and you have to use more of them. The same can be said for parks, and especially the ones with a huge influence area.

[Slippers]

The zone size that the automatic guidelines will recommend is different for roads and avenues. If you want to zone full size squares from the start, follow the guidelines for avenues.

The videos I learned the most from were from this series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75MNm34Ss9A
I can't remember everything he said, but unlike many of the people posting let's play vids, he knows his stuff. Recommended viewing.

[Slammer]

Start your city layout with low-grade roads and avenues. These will save you money starting out and can be upgraded without having to worry about recreating the buildings. They allow you to stay ahead of the service demands because buildings won't upgrade to medium or high density until you upgrade the surrounding roads. Low-Density and High-Density roads take up the same amount of space, same for avenues. Updating from road to avenue requires you delete the road and possibly screw up building placement so lay out your primary arteries early and upgrade as traffic becomes a problem.

Place services at major intersections in the middle of your neighborhoods. I've seen way too many videos of bad players putting services buildings (fire, police, etc) along the edges of their cities. The area of influence of these is circular so you lose half of the efficacy putting them along the edge and you have to use more of them. The same can be said for parks, and especially the ones with a huge influence area.

Does adding ambulance/firetruck/patrol car increase said circles size?

[Slippers]

Here's an amazing Google docs spreadsheet of SimCity tips, lots of good stuff:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...any=true#gid=0

[greyanna]

I have a few suggestions from over the weekend, but for the moment:

sewage treatment plants put clean water back into the water table as long as they aren't overworked. Water pumps will quickly drain your water table if they are fully upgraded, but if you put it next to your sewage treatment plant it uses that supply to run indefinitely.

By sandwiching my water pumping station (using regular pumps) between two sewage treatment plants. I've managed to run at 650+kgal/hour consistently and never had a problem with pollution entering the system. It helps if you line up the pumps to be in parallel so that they're each getting maximum output from the nearby filtered sewage.

The only concern is if you have only one feeder line going into your setup the first treatment plant will get all the sewage and occasionally overload. It's best to have one line coming in from each direction.