Cities XL

I have Dragon Wolf Lair. I an a total newb when it comes to sims games. I always get owned by the economics aspect and end up running my city into the dirt.

I currently have like 1900 people in my population. TB comes in and within 10 minutes he has 5000 people.

 

I can see it now...imminent domain and all my property is gone.

 

Who knows? I can't even get people to move into my city, let alone trying to get them to build roads to another!

 

Actually I thought I had a good layout. I placed all the streets first in a nice square pattern. Then I built industry to one side, retail in another and offices on the river. I guess I need to build bigger and faster.

 

From what I can tell, with my very limited knowledge of this game, cities only really interact at this point by trade. When your city is producing more of something, like heavy industry,money tourism, brussel sprouts, zerglings, etc., you get a token for your excess production that you can then trade or sell to other cities that need more of that for their city.

You could, for example, create a super-massive landfill, and then sell your landfill space to other cities so they can dump their trash in your town instead of them having to build their own. They might in return trade you their excess fuel or whatever you might need to run the galaxies largest landfill.

There are also things called blueprints, but I don't know what they do.

 

I needed lots and lots of unqualified housing along with lots of heavy industry to get my city moving. I built my industrial complexes well outside of town because they create so much air pollution. Don't worry too much if you get to where the game tells you that your city has too much heavy industry for its size; once you open up manufacturing, that will consume some of your heavy industry. And later, once you get high tech industry, you can build that much closer to your residential zones as they don't create air pollution.

The big thing to watch is what each industry zone requires for workers - make sure you are laying down sufficient residential zones to fill the jobs that will come online once businesses fill those industry zones. Its helpful to watch the population tab; it will tell you how much each worker category has of available jobs, and unemployment. If there are vacant jobs -build more housing for that segment. If unemployed, zone more industry.

 

Excellent info, Aet, thanks!

 

Sorry for slow response times...I've been out of town...still am...anyway...

If you look on the different industry zones, as you hover over the icon, it will tell you what types of workers each zone requires.

Low density Heavy INdustry requires only unqualified workers
Med. Den Heavy Ind. requires half unq. & half qualified

Low dens. Offices are staffed only by qualified

Low density manufacturing is 50/50 qualified/unqualified

I don't recall what the other industries & densities are. I did open up low density high tech, which may be only qualified workers, but I don't remember...it may be qualified & executives.

Again though, if you just hover over the zone type - it should tell you the worker requirements

As for transportation & distance -

I haven't been able to tell yet how the distance to work affects the workers job satisfaction, although I'd guess that it does degrade that.
They can and do though, at least for me, fill the jobs at places seemingly far away. You do need to make sure, at least I decided to, create multiple roads leading to the industrial areas as my single road was getting highly congested.

Another thing I noticed with regard to roadways and zoning:

You probably want to leave some extra space between some of your lots for larger roadways that provide extra capacity. I don't remember, but I think the game opens up larger roads as you pop increases like it does for other buildings and zones. I had access to a 'large avenue' that had 80 cars/minute or somesuch which required a more space than the single lane road i had been using.

Also - I'd suggest places your zones so that they are oriented parallel to the roadways (so that the long side of the rectangle is flush against the road) as placing them perpindicular will prevent two lots from being laid next to each other due to intersection restrictions on the road. This was only evident when I moved to the higher cap roadway. [oh...this is only applicable when placing zones using the leftmost option of the three...i forget what its called...block zoning maybe]