I haven’t touched a ‘Sim-’ game since the original Simcity, for the Commodore 64. I imagine much has changed, but I remember the big that that bothered me was that natural disasters were not random. You had to kick them off yourself. Are they now random? Do you always have the risk of fire or reactor meltdown or whatnot?
How in the hell do you get your commercial zones to develop in this damn game? I have about 500 people in my town and about twice the number of fully developed residental zones as I have laid commercial zones. There are about 4 stores in my entire commercial zone.
This game is REALLY hard and starting off id fun but I know my town will be broke in a day or two and I Will have to start over.
They should have made a difficulty setting for sure for noobs like me.
You might want to hold off a bit on those commercial zones. Try industrial zones for jobs in the beginning.
As far as disasters, they occur both randomly and by choice. The random ones are mostly fires, though.
If you click on the RCI bar, it’ll give you a graph that breaks down demand for the different types of residential, commercial, and industrial, by wealth.
You always start out with high demand for industrial, especially agriculture. You’ll need a much larger population than 500 people to get any significant commercial demand. Unless you want a farming community though, don’t lay down too much agriculture, because you get no tax money from it. And, it’s a heavy water polluter. Either lay down some medium-density industrial, or connect to a different city and build your industrial zones there.
And about the disasters – none of them really occur randomly. Fires are semi-random based on how flammable an area is and how much fire protection is nearby. And pipe bursts will happen semi-randomly in your pipe network if you lower funding to the water department. Reactor meltdown is devastating (and impressive), but it only happens if you treat your nuclear power plant badly – set it on fire, cut funding too much, or let it age too long.
All the other disasters are completely player-controlled. Not only do you decide when it happens, but you control it as it’s going on – you can drag a tornado around, move a meteor towards its target, decide where a volcano will erupt and how big it’ll be, etc.
The budgeting stuff is driving me nuts. It seems like I can make more monet by not building any improvements and leaving my town a shithole.
Of course, using the meteor as a strike buster is pretty cool 