Stackolee Ravine was once a thriving community. It wasn’t the biggest, or the richest, or most advanced, but it was a good place. A place you’d be proud to call home. A place you’d be proud to raise your children.
And then I - its trusted mayor and public servant - was overcome with that most base emotion: greed. When I bulldozed all my industrial buildings to make processor factories, I told myself I was doing a good thing. I was replacing dirty, dangerous smokestacks with the clean industry of the future.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. The lure of ever increasing profit was too much. I shut down the only commuter train in and out of town to make more room for freight trains. Those idyllic communities I spoke of - the ones with the kids and the dogs and the families - burned to the ground so I could open yet another factory making cheap TVs. The ritzy downtown, full of skyscrapers and highrises, is now the site of a nuclear power plant needed to power the assembly lines. I have replaced a green and vibrant community with a dystopic future where police helicopters pull men and women whose only crime was protesting the fact that I replaced parks with endless miles of concrete from their homes.
Don’t get me wrong - there were good times as well. I held in my hands the kind of wealth and power other men only dream of. But it is not worth your soul.
In penance, I have opened the Ceciltopia Development Fund with the express purpose of disbursing 5 million simoleans to the mayors of other cities in the region so that they do not fall into the same trap that I have fallen into.
If you would like to do something to make Ceciltopia a better place and you need simoleans to make it happen, let me, the mayor of Stackolee Ravine, know.
I also started building an Arcology up in the corner by Stackolee Ravine. This thing is truly staggering in cost. Here’s the breakdown:
It costs 1 million to start + 60k TV crates + 2,800 tons metal + 1,000 tons alloy.
TV crates are 200k per 1k crates = 12 million
Metal is 30k per 10 tons = 8.4 million
Alloy is 50k per 10 tons = 5 million
So, including parts, you’re talking over 25 million.
Plus, when I turned on sending resources to the arcology, it completely hosed my economy because all my trucks were too busy shipping things to it rather than delivering the alloy and plastics I needed in my electronics factories.
This is one of the reasons I haven’t started the solar farm, yet. My economy won’t survive if I send all the materials to build it. What I might do is build up a very large buffer, something like at least §1M, so that would leave me §500k to weather some time of not selling processors and such.
If you can get onto the NA East 2 sever, I’ll invite you into Ceciltopia. There’s one slot available, which I’m giving out to whomever claims it first.
I haven’t been able to connect NA East 2. It looks open, I click Resume city, but it never completes. I have no trouble with other servers.
My Sapleton Forest is making a huge profit when I left it, like $12k per hour. I’m willing to throw some money at another city if anyone wants to do a massive raze and rebuild. I assume I can send money to anyone in the region and not just mine own cluster?
Okay, I think I successfully abandoned Plainville, but I need another invite to get back into Ceciltopia if anyone gets a chance to send one to me (Keeene). Hopefully it will let me reclaim the same location.
Backed up sewer lines spread disease and misery in the Terminus Wetlands. Don’t let this happen to your city!
It started with a few tourists getting sick. No one thought much about it. After all, they were mostly gamblers from out of town; they weren’t expected to be particularly healthy. The fine doctors at the medical clinic would check them out, give them some meds, and send them back to their slot machines.
And then residents across Broad Street started falling ill. At first it was attributed to the general feeling of malaise during the sultry days of summer. But vomiting and diarrhea had never been a part of the “Wetlands Woe”. The disease spread slowly across the south side. Afflicted denizens clogged up the clinic, overwhelming the beleaguered medical staff. Researchers from Podunkton Tech - on hand to install a new wind turbine - attributed the disease to ground pollution, but could offer no explanation as to the source of the contamination.
Summer turned into winter with no end in sight. Then the disease made the jump across the Maxis Creek. Terminus Wetlands was facing a city-wide epidemic.
The answer came when the mayor’s second cousin’s hairdresser tried to flush his toilet. Raw sewage bubbled up out of the bowl, completely ruining his Prodo shoes. “My Prodo shoes are completely ruined!” he wailed.
Technicians at the sewage treatment plant discovered that it had been running at a slight overcapacity. Not enough for the tanks to overflow, but enough to back up sewer lines all across the city. For months, raw sewage had been pooling under the streets, buildings, and parks.
Officials quickly installed a new treatment tank and sewage is once again flowing under the city. They assure the public that the ground pollution will slowly dissipate and Terminus Wetlands will once again return to its pristine state.
And now I have a big factory fire. I need the upgraded fire station, but I have neither the money nor the room to build it. I wonder if someone would be so kind as to send some HAZMAT teams my way?
Hazmat teams kind of work. They head there quickly, and put out the fire very fast, so you don’t have to worry about spread.
But the building switches to abandoned-fire for sale for ever until is falls down from neglect. So the only thing I do is blow up the saved building as soon as the hazam team leaves, to get it back in rotation as soon as possible.
The Fire Marshall really is sweet. He does solve the problem by visiting them in time. Without him, the largest density low tech industrial complexes burned down every 2-3 days.
Nope, never saw that. Kept getting the “HAZMAT fires threaten the city” messages and the green fires burned & burned & burned until the buildings exploded.
Not much action in Ceciltopia last night, probably because no one could actually get on the server. A tweet yesterday from Maxis indicated that NA East 2 would be taken offline “soon” for a hardware upgrade. However I was able to get on this morning and poke around a bit. (My firefighters successfully put out the factory fire, even without a HAZMAT team. Hah!) There hasn’t been any word on whether the server was actually upgraded (and they’re usually good about keeping these things up-to-date).
If and when people want to move to another region, let me know and I’ll set up another one. Any opinion on which region - same one or different? I’m actually about ready to move on myself, though I would like to see that arcology go up.
Incidentally, when I click on the “Great Works” button, it only takes me to my local site. I can visit another Great Works site from region view, but it doesn’t let me contribute anything (not that I could).
I’m ready to for a new Doper region - probably one of the large ones is best. I feel like I never got to contribute much to Ceciltopia since both my attempts bugged. But I’ve been practicing elsewhere so I have a pretty good idea what I want to do now (I like the Trade specialty myself). It’s also incredibly helpful to have other cities in your cluster to share things like police, fire, trash and health services with. It’s hard to do all of those yourself for a city of any large size.
Having returned to work after hurting my back, and with over 170 other games on my computer vying for attention, I’m finding it difficult to keep playing. The game is good but it’s also a mess for now. Lots of the specialty stuff doesn’t work as intended and some of the regular stuff doesn’t, either. The bar to upgrade HQs are currently set way too high and turning off the global market likely exacerbated the situation. I’ll have to see if Adams Bay on Slugsworth can stay in the black without specializing.
I’ve been playing Oolite for the past couple of nights. Really close to getting a bigger ship!
Unfortunately, all the 16-city regions have the cities grouped into 4-city clusters. The 11-city region has these clusters as well. (Very lame!) We have to go down to the 7-city Reflection Atoll to get all the cities linked by road. Lute Skywatcher’s Slugsworth is actually this region; there’s currently only three of us rattling around in there. With permission, Lute, I’ll invite a few more Dopers into the region.