SIM City 5 - Actual Strategy Discussion

[SpatiallyAware]

FWIW I think the trade system has a number of bugs that they need worked out.

I've built ~5 ore mines, all with the add-ons, enough to cover all of the 'ore area' (and storage for raw ore), and I still can't produce enough to create a smelting plant.

 

[datalink7]

I agree. I think there are too few resources. It is difficult to produce enough of a certain type of resource to before you run out of it.

 

[MrSquished]

My first 3 cities I have built have been oil drilling/export cities and here are some tips. I'm sure all these would apply to ore/coal mining as well.

1) Try to hold off on expanding roads/zoning too fast because you want to get your oil drilling rig up ASAP, if you add all 10 drills in the right spot you can get 10k-13k barrels per day (it takes quite some time for the ramp up to do this as well).

2) Build your trade depots close to the highway so the trucks have an easier time getting on/off the highway to deliver the oil for maximum profit. At the same time try to keep your residential/commercial away from your trade depots and not close to the highway because it will cause massive traffic.

3) It takes 3 full fledged oil fields and 3 trade depots to hit the 160,000 profit mark to create your petroleum HQ so you can turn your oil into fuel/plastic.

4) Take your time with your city because Crime/Fire/Health issues can get out of control if you progress to fast due to moving truck traffic, never upgrade large regions all at once otherwise you will be in a gridlock.

5) From what I can tell, once you plop the trade HQ, petroleum division, etc you can power them off so you don't spend 400/month and you still get all the benefits. For example, I just added an incinerator to my gargabe dump but since the incinerator burns the garbage faster than it accumulates I can keep it off 90% of the time and just turn it on when my dump starts to get full. This saves me at least 2,000-3,000 per hour, I turn off all my departments of transportation/education/etc.

The city I made last night in a couple hours has 30k people, no traffic at all(buses really help here), I have almost a full built bus station, I get about 7,500 people riding the buses per day which is almost 25% of my population. I have 1.3mm simoleans right now and make 200k per day in oil, 10k/hour from my city, I am just stock piling the cash right now and planning out my city. Eventually my oil fields will run dry, but by that time I will be right around 20 million simoleans and will switch to importing oil and exporting plastic/fuel.

Last couple tips

1) Don't waste the 110k building a recycling center unless you have at least an elementary school because uneducated people don't recycle.
2) Traffic causes the most issues, my last two cities were less than 30k population and I had all sorts of fire/police/health issues because they couldn't get to the people. My current city has the very basic units and no issues at all, I have mostly health issues, but it is more because I am a fully industrial/oil drilling city so I would expect it to be at least less healthy in the beginning.

some good tips here. thanks. really good tips. that's what i'm talkin about for this thread.

another thing i figured out about traffic is a little trick. i bring in a short medium density avenue from the highway of course, but it's too expensive to build long medium density avenues from the get go.

figure out where you are going to put your primary residential zones and industrial zones for example. draw at least one long low density road to those farther areas in your cityspace, but don't build/zone stuff right on those long stretches at first, because after a bit your best bet is to knock them down and put in avenues as your main arteries - roads can't be upgraded to avenues so whatever you build on those main stretches will have to be knocked down. build your grid system off of them and zone 'em so stuff starts building. by the time they are increasing in density, you'll have enough money to knock the main stretches down and make them avenues, then zone' those sections.

i like having 3 of these long stretches to make avenues later, with high density roads branching off of them in a grid where i build from the get go.

 

[MrSquished]

Good lord, how are you guys able to get your pops so high? All I seem to be able to create are small towns (~25-30k) full of rich folks. Granted, I've been focusing on trying to create a Las Vegas like town - lots of gambling, casinos, etc., with a expo center or pro stadium thrown in. Haven't tried to go industrial yet.

Question- anyone else having trouble with getting the commuter rail to work? I've tried to use it a couple times now and the game always tells me that the station is not powered. I've placed it next to existing rail line and on a powered street, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any tips?

you need to build a tiny stretch of road from the rail terminal to the road. i mean tiny. i don't think it connects automatically even though its right there

 

[ViviTheMage]

Good lord, how are you guys able to get your pops so high? All I seem to be able to create are small towns (~25-30k) full of rich folks. Granted, I've been focusing on trying to create a Las Vegas like town - lots of gambling, casinos, etc., with a expo center or pro stadium thrown in. Haven't tried to go industrial yet.

Question- anyone else having trouble with getting the commuter rail to work? I've tried to use it a couple times now and the game always tells me that the station is not powered. I've placed it next to existing rail line and on a powered street, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any tips?

Make sure you have a road connected to your roads, I noticed even if you put it next to the road it will not connect, you need to actually draw a road from the rail station to your roads.

 

[ViviTheMage]

They are too small, I've already planned to spend $20 or WTFever on the 'larger cities DLC' rumored to come out.


That being said, there is probably a lot you can still do with increasing density etc. I was stuck at ~50k sims until messing with high density avenues (versus high density roads). Once that was straightened out I got to 100k fairly quickly.

You know...this is probably why I am stuck at 100k~ ...my other city, built very similarly got to 200k no problem, but all I built was avenues with street cars.

 

[HarvardAce]

FWIW I think the trade system has a number of bugs that they need worked out.

I've built ~5 ore mines, all with the add-ons, enough to cover all of the 'ore area' (and storage for raw ore), and I still can't produce enough to create a smelting plant.

I was able to do it with 3 trade depots (with 3 or 4 ore warehouses each) and 3 mining operations with 4 mining shafts each. Make sure that you don't have traffic problems and you should be able to reach the amount without trouble. If you are still having issues, you can build a couple extra trade depots, have them full of ore (accept local deliveries, even import them, but don't export them. Just after midnight, set them all to export and you should hit the threshold fairly quickly.

 

[pwoz]

For those hitting 200k+ pop, are you using parks for land value. I do this but I find it takes up a lot of room for my zoning. If I don't do it, do builings eventually get to higher density anyway? My citizens seem to always be unhappy without parks.

 

[Genx87]

From the beta I seem to remember that without parks the property value wont raise enough to get high rise apartments buildings. Also make sure to have the appropriate road if you want high rise buildings.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

For those hitting 200k+ pop, are you using parks for land value. I do this but I find it takes up a lot of room for my zoning. If I don't do it, do builings eventually get to higher density anyway? My citizens seem to always be unhappy without parks.

I build small parks at first, once I have high enough land value I reduce the number of parks and replace them with larger ones.

The biggest issue is a park takes up enough of a 'block' to prevent a high rise. So you need them at first, but then they get in the way.

Also note that you really need the avenues for 'true' high density with high rises. The regular roads will allow high rises but not as many.

 

[HarvardAce]

For those hitting 200k+ pop, are you using parks for land value. I do this but I find it takes up a lot of room for my zoning. If I don't do it, do builings eventually get to higher density anyway? My citizens seem to always be unhappy without parks.

Density is determined by happiness and is independent of wealth. You can have a low income high density plot, or a high income low density plot. Aside from happiness, you also need to make sure the plot is on a road that isn't limiting its density (i.e. attached to a high density road/avenue in order to develop to a high density plot) and that it has enough space to develop (the grids are fine for commercial/residential plots, as a square on a road grid fits one high density plot perfectly, but industrial high density plots are twice as wide).

A plot adds happiness in two ways:
1) Going to work or school; and
2) Shopping at a commercial plot or going to a park.

If you have enough commercial of the right wealth, you don't need any parks for happiness, although they definitely do help (and you'll need them to increase the wealth of the spot if you want to).

From the beta I seem to remember that without parks the property value wont raise enough to get high rise apartments buildings. Also make sure to have the appropriate road if you want high rise buildings.

As I said before, you can have low wealth high rise apartments (tenements) just as you can have high wealth high rise apartments. I am not sure if one is actually more dense than the other, but given that the low-wealth low-density plots have more population per space than the high-wealth low-density plots, I would imagine that the same is true in the high-density plots.

 

[HarvardAce]

I build small parks at first, once I have high enough land value I reduce the number of parks and replace them with larger ones.

The biggest issue is a park takes up enough of a 'block' to prevent a high rise. So you need them at first, but then they get in the way.

Also note that you really need the avenues for 'true' high density with high rises. The regular roads will allow high rises but not as many.

One not-so-obvious thing: you can go into "edit" mode on a park and build additional parks of the same type attached to that park, which can let you build parks into some unused space off of a road. If your blocks are just big enough to fit one high-density building, you may want to rethink your road layout because you'll likely have lots of traffic problems in the future.

Also, the avenue grid allows for two high-density plots back to back, while a standard road grid is just big enough for one high density plot to fit. That said, a perfect road block fits just as high a density building as an avenue does (just not two of them).

 

[pwoz]

Also note that you really need the avenues for 'true' high density with high rises. The regular roads will allow high rises but not as many.

Yeah, I have an avenue grid with a lot of high rises, but I think I am using too much space with parks getting high land value. My city is sitting around 70k right now and most of the rich people are complaining about a lack of parks (the high land value area is patchy still).

I guess if I use wider radius medium wealth parks I could get more buildings (by removing some parks) and higher average density due to the medium wealth people being happier currently in my city.

 

[TheUnk]

I really wish you could just plop buildings anywhere and then add a road to them.

Airports and stadiums, probably most large structures, can be a real pain.

My gambling city is starting well. I started slowly, 1 at a time until each turned a profit, and now have 3 of the basic ones raking in about 60k/day total. My 1st larger one, the space one, is now about -100 in the hole. At one point it was making $15k/day and then suddenly dropped for some reason.

 

[blurredvision]

One not-so-obvious thing: you can go into "edit" mode on a park and build additional parks of the same type attached to that park, which can let you build parks into some unused space off of a road.

Didn't know that, thanks.

One thing I figured out yesterday, that might be pretty obvious to others but I hadn't realized it yet, is that the parks differ in how much they cost per hour to maintain. The higher the cost, the bigger the effect radius of the park.

 

[redrider4life4]

FWIW I think the trade system has a number of bugs that they need worked out.

I've built ~5 ore mines, all with the add-ons, enough to cover all of the 'ore area' (and storage for raw ore), and I still can't produce enough to create a smelting plant.

You need at least 3 trade depots with 4 delivery trucks each, also max delivery trucks at your mines. To hit these marks try turning off export and letting the trade depots get full on ore, then at 11 PM turn them on so your first profit will hit around 12:30 AM the next day. This is the best way to hit the mark for upgrading. Trust me when you get to the 850k upgrade and 2 million trade profit this is the only way to unlock further. I agree it is buggy, but there is no way to sustain that much profit per day.

 

[KaOTiK]

I've been playing my own region (like I'm sure 99% of us have been). First city I made was around 220k population, this was just a test city for stuff that wasn't in the beta, a jack of all trades city really. Second city is around 180 and is an oil city, second is an ore city and only has a population of 35k but I currently have over 9m in the bank lol. Going to just gift myself a ton of money for the next city so I can just build all the advance stuff from the start as I layout the city.

The gifting is weird, I've sent gifts that took 15-20 mins for me to receive, to over an hour. I once had it glitch out and it gifted 400k 3 times in a row when I only did it once (and the city that gave the 400k away only lost 400k now 1.2m).

A tip for those with water problems later on. Put your water treatment plant and water pump plant right next to each other, the treatment plant dumps the clean treated water back into the water table right there so you never run low.

 

[paperfist]

that sounds just about right, how many trucks does your oil rig have? and your depot? and how many of the four depot add-ons are chosen for oil?

Do you have the oil storage in trade depot and the delivery trucks for both? I hit the 9600 barrels to get the oil HQ (or whatever it is called) and had 10 pumps going and 4 trucks. The depot had 3 oil storage and 4 delivery trucks as well.

The oil rig has 4 trucks, the depot 4 trucks and crude oil lot, processors storage lot, and freight shipping lot. Both facilities are 5 buildings away from each other.

My oil rig is always shut down because it's full. If I set it to deliver to the oil power station it functions normally, when I shut it down to deliver to there and try to get it to export the oil nothing seems to work.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

I've been playing my own region (like I'm sure 99% of us have been). First city I made was around 220k population, this was just a test city for stuff that wasn't in the beta, a jack of all trades city really. Second city is around 180 and is an oil city, second is an ore city and only has a population of 35k but I currently have over 9m in the bank lol. Going to just gift myself a ton of money for the next city so I can just build all the advance stuff from the start as I layout the city.

The gifting is weird, I've sent gifts that took 15-20 mins for me to receive, to over an hour. I once had it glitch out and it gifted 400k 3 times in a row when I only did it once (and the city that gave the 400k away only lost 400k now 1.2m).

A tip for those with water problems later on. Put your water treatment plant and water pump plant right next to each other, the treatment plant dumps the clean treated water back into the water table right there so you never run low.

Fair warning... Over the weekend I built up like 2 million (which seemed like a lot!), I gifted half of it to my other city and it never showed up... Ever. The 'gifting' city shows the neg entry on its balance sheet but the 'gifted' city never received it.

Nice tip on the sewage/treatment solution!

 

[redrider4life4]

I've tried the sewage/treatment solution and for some reason I might be missing something, my water was still contaminated.

 

[pwoz]

Water will still be contaminated if you build those two next to areas with ground pollution. All the treatment facility does is clear up the sewage produced so that it is dumped as clean water (unless it is over capacity). It won't clear up existing ground pollution.

 

[Hubb1e]

I've built 3 cities that totally failed and now I've built my very 1st semi successful city. I've got 75k people and they're educated and building higher tech industries.

I haven't played SimCity for some time and tried watching some lets play on youtube to get an idea of what to do, and they totally screwed me over. They built only one police station or firehouse and upgraded it, but when I did the same thing my city was full of crime and fire since it didn't cover the entire city. Those buildings also help with land value so everything in my city was low wealth. I've put up my first trade depot and mine and they're pretty complicated. I didn't know how all that worked when I dropped my CPU factory that couldn't turn a profit. Are there any good tutorials or lets play games I can look at to get an idea of how to get a head start on all this? It's a bit overwhelming and the game isn't that forgiving when you make big mistakes.

 

[RockinZ28]

the first SIM City 5 thread turned into an understandable discussion of yet another EA launch failure. I think it's a good idea to start a thread where we can try to avoid the failures of EA as a specific discussion, while talking about strats and yes, bugs took, but only those that affect strategy, like traffic and how to deal with it.

And while there are clearly many launch issues left and valid criticisms of the gameplay, a lot of us are starting to play it and there are strategies to discuss.

So far my more successful cities I have started focusing on coal and ore plots, mining them and smelting down to metal and alloy, then building a processor plant, importing plastic using depots, then upgrading to a trade port. The next step is to build TV and computers, so taht when my minerals run out I can be importing metal and alloy and flipping the TV and Computers back for a profit. You have to think for when after the minerals run out.

I focus on coal power first until I can get a University so that a Nuclear plant can take over with smart employees. Wind Power if I have good winds. The next plan is to try to build also a tourism industry so that when the minerals are totally gone, I have supplemental income, but it's tough in this small space to have room for these at the same time. The issue with the smaller maps is that you can really only focus on one thing, and rely on the other cities to create things like lots of Sims that can be tourists. The issue is that you have to rely on people actually playing their cities decently, and so far that's not reliable, both due to people and the server issues.

My biggest population so far is closing in on 200k. So far so good but it's very tough to maintain a positive budget. Education and Health take up massive amounts of money. The trading profit is what mitigates that and earns you good income.

What's other people's successful strategies? ANd what are some of your higher populations?

I Skipped the whole mining thing. Just laid out roads and zoning over the entire map, taking out all three bonds. Got my income up to 20K/hr. Made schools and university. Nuclear power and two recycling plants, one for alloy and one for plastic.

Make processor plant, max it out to unlock the consumer electronics plant. Build a bunch of trade depots with tv storage. Let the tv storage fill up, set to export at midnight. Build trade HQ and get the 4.5mil/day to unlock trade port. Put plastic, alloy and tv storage at Trade Port. Bulldoze all trade and electronic office buildings you had to build, along with all trade depots to get back usable space.

Should be making over 1 million/day.

Used sewage + water filter for unlimited water. City had absolutely no requirement for any imports or finite resources.

My biggest city hit over 300k at one point.

 

[KaOTiK]

I should have an arcology built later today depending on what the next step is. Just need to get the TV's made in a new city, already have almost all the metal/alloy done lol.

 

[MrSquished]

I Skipped the whole mining thing. Just laid out roads and zoning over the entire map, taking out all three bonds. Got my income up to 20K/hr. Made schools and university. Nuclear power and two recycling plants, one for alloy and one for plastic.

Make processor plant, max it out to unlock the consumer electronics plant. Build a bunch of trade depots with tv storage. Let the tv storage fill up, set to export at midnight. Build trade HQ and get the 4.5mil/day to unlock trade port. Put plastic, alloy and tv storage at Trade Port. Bulldoze all trade and electronic office buildings you had to build, along with all trade depots to get back usable space.

Should be making over 1 million/day.

Used sewage + water filter for unlimited water. City had absolutely no requirement for any imports or finite resources.

My biggest city hit over 300k at one point.

that's pretty awesome, but had you say you had no need of imports, you aren't counting the plastic and alloy you needed to make processors and then tvs?