Terminus Isle was a pretty stable industrial town, the people were more or less happy making electronics to send to the arcology. Then I decide to plop a tourist attraction and suddenly hotels mushroom all over the place. Now my residents are complaining that they can’t find shopping since they don’t stay at hotels. The hotels are complaining that they can’t find shoppers since they’re all stealing each others’ tourists. The single department store in town is making a killing selling souvenirs to all the yokels. I tear down a failing hotel and another hotel sprouts in its place. Maybe you should rethink your business plan guys.
So the university got shuttered and my town thrived. I went grocery shopping to let the bank account grow and then went on a spending spree. I now have a shiny-new nuclear power plant and am just waiting for disaster to strike. 
Phase 2 initiated: The arcology has accumulated all necessary materials and construction is underway.
Pictures of the construction and completed arcology: New Ceciltopia Arcology - Album on Imgur
Apparently the arcology is not a self-sustaining entity. We need to supply it with power and water. I’ve expanded my power and water plants, but I don’t think the server has been synchronized yet, as it was still dark and dry when I quit the game.
Los Cityville is up and running. I have a budgetary deficit but my oil products are making my city wealthy.
What should we do for a great project? The space program? I can help towards the cost but I don’t have a university, so someone will need to research it. I’m OK with the solar farm as well.
I looked at your city a bit and I have a few suggestions:
1: Get rid of your hospital. You don’t have that big of a population so you don’t need it.
2: Get rid of your nuclear plant. You already have a solar plant. It’s cheaper to expand that instead of plopping a new thing.
3: In general, it’s cheaper to expand your buildings in the editing mode than plopping down a duplicate.
4: Start up your mine again. Yes, it’ll cost you more a month but you’ll get income directly into your city coffers. Like I said in my post, I’m regularly ~1000 in a hole an hour, but I have 1.9 mil because my oil structures are keeping me profitable.
How do I get the mine to empty so it’ll operate again? I’ll definitely re-start and expand the solar plant and close the nuclear plant. That should help.
I have a university, so as soon as I get the scratch together, I’ll do the research.
You need storage at your trading facility. So enter the edit, add the storage, go into “manage global” and set your good to export.
Port Donburgh has one, and I had the same problem. In fact, my ferries look like they just go out into the water, turn around, and come back…
Lesson learned: it is not always a good idea to start the game, turn it up to maximum speed, and let it on its own for a couple of hours so you can build up some income. When I got back to the game, my city had gone from profitable to nearly bankrupt, mainly because I had a water problem right after I left that was causing everybody to leave, driving tax revenues down.
Speaking of maximum speed: is it just me, or are “>>” and “>>>” speeds pretty much the same?
Max speed is still disabled.
Rat Portage is in a tailspin.
Traffic got so bad that even with two firestations, the trucks weren’t getting to fires and buildings kept burning down. Constant complaints about crime despite having two police stations with max. patrol cars - they can’t get around town to arrest criminals. One of my coal mines went dry and the other is about to. The city is running out of water.
I planted three tourist attractions which are making money (the Arch, the Leaning Tower, and the Washington Monument) and a new casino (next to the police district, to try to keep crime in check). But the population has plummeted from 160k to 115k and I’m losing 5-8k per hour. Oh yeah I’m also perilously short on water (I had to put a water treatment plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood because the first two locations were dry). I’ve shut down a few services but I’m nervous about turning off my schools because the nuclear power plant is running on unskilled labor and we’ve had one meltdown already. I guess with my coal mines winding down I can shut down one or two of my trade depots, but that’s not going to put me back in the black. I was afraid to play yesterday so I fiddled with my new Need for Speed game (which, astonishingly, is also broken. Thanks EA!)
Skammer, place your water plant next to your sewage plant. The latter regenerates the water table for the former.
Terminus Isle doesn’t have a lot of traffic problems, even with a population of 140K (and 1.1M visitors; that can’t be right). There’s the usual backup during rush hour, but the vehicles keep flowing. I had a brief flirtation with tourism that I posted about previously, but I was actually making less money that way so I demolished the attraction and all the hotels.
Unfortunately I don’t have room next to my sewage plant unless I tear down my port and move some roads around. But with the coal running out the port is not as necessary right now anyway. Also the water table there is pretty poluted, hopefully I can afford the filtration.
You’ve plopped a trade depot but you haven’t set it to export anything. Click on it and click on the “Manage Global Market Deliveries” button and set it to export raw ore. When you have sufficient funds, you can build a smelter and make metal, which gives you even more simoleons.
Also, you have two police precincts. You really only need one; just at more police cars to it if crime is a problem. Save some simoleons and demolish the other one. Note also that one precinct has its cars trapped on an isolated road between the building and the nuclear power plant. You might want to build a road to free those cars if you’re going to keep this one. Note that due to a bug in the way deployed vehicles are handled, turn off the building first before demolishing it. That will recall its cars and you shouldn’t see the bug.
So I think I’ve got my financial problems worked out. I demolished some of the excess road, fixed the problem at the police precinct, demolished the nuclear power plant, and paid off all of the bond debt. I’m now making money hand over fist.
My only problem, aside from traffic, is that some parts of town have no power, despite producing sufficient power. How can I fix this?
MsRobyn, the electricity is propagated by agents, just like everything else. You’ll have to wait for them to travel to where they need to go. This can be be a while if your power plant is on one corner of the map and the blacked out area is in the other. Turn on the electricity data layer to see what’s going on.
Hey guys, sorry that “Swandive Cliffs” has been sitting still for so long - I got busy at work and with other commitments and haven’t been on in a couple of weeks. If that region is still a going concern, I’ll log back in and see what I can do to help.
Sam, the arcology is complete. It just needs some more power to get it going. IIRC, it needs about 80 MW to be fully functional.
I haven’t checked in on Rat Portage in a while - I was getting frustrated by the traffic. I started a new city/region and decided to specialize in Casinos, which I hadn’t tried yet. It’s going fairly well - I have a population of 300,000 and no budget issues yet, but I’m not getting many tourists so the casinos are not as lucrative as I’d like. Most likely part of the problem is that I don’t have any other cities in the region to provide tourists. Still 300k is about twice as big as any other city I’ve managed to build and the traffic isn’t noticeably worse. I have a lot more commercial and less industry; I don’t know if that’s a factor.
Hi,
I’d like to join your region if you still have some spots available. Please send me an invite (user name JayVeeJay).
Thanks.