SimCity2k airports and other questions
Zachary Charles Haston
I've never had a problem doing a grid 6x1 with one or two adjacent squares
for a tower and radar. As for power, I never power any squares except up to
next to my 6x1 for the airstrip. The airstrip will therefore go in first and
all squares next to it will then be powered.
On a similar question, I have an enormous number of air crashes. In a starting
city (10K), I have had 12 air crashes in 20 years (killing 2 power plants and
a zoo from one of the fires). This is really annoying. I tried upping my
education spending but they still can't fly worth a darn. If they wax one more
power plant I'm going to torch the airport!!! Do all you mayors also have a
lot of air crashes (mind you I have only one airstrip in this city)? BTW, I've
also seen the depowering of airport zones by building repositioning.
Another question, how much does this help? Airports are expensive. Also,
many of the sea and airport buildings/pears/etc. are built more than 3 squares
away from a road. I assume they are still working and contributing - are they?
On a HARD city I've wondered if I should build a seaport. It would be nice to
have more ind demand so I could raise taxes some, but is the seaport going to
help as much as it costs?
How about schools, parks, etc. Do the sims have to drive past them to attend,
or will they come to them (ie. do I need schools strategically placed
throughout the city like fire/police depts.)?
I had a lot of rail in one city and added a sub station and sub<->rail, but
the sub station never got any passengers on it (it was the only one in the
city). Was it working? Did the passengers just add to the rail depots? Do
you use rails at all?
Finally, about building roads to adjoining cities, how much does this help?
Should I build a road or a highway?
Help greatly appreciated.
Doug Ferry
Zachary Charles Haston <has...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>
>I've never had a problem doing a grid 6x1 with one or two adjacent squares
>for a tower and radar. As for power, I never power any squares except up to
>next to my 6x1 for the airstrip. The airstrip will therefore go in first and
>all squares next to it will then be powered.
>
a lot of people have reported having an impossible time getting airports
to build while others have reported no problems ever. i fall into the
first camp but i've always gotten airports to build eventually.
the airports (but not usually the seaports) are very finicky about
where you put them. i'm still not quite sure of the criteria (maxis,
please tell us!) but i do know that once it decides it doesn't like
a site, it will NEVER build there.
i've had the case where i zone one area, given it all it needs, and
watched it sit empty for 10 years. then i zone a similar area somewhere
else and BOOM, the airport springs up.
factors i think it _might_ take into account:
large buildings along the prospective runway approach.
proximity to city. neither too close or too far (whatever that means).
alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
that way. if you zone a 2X5 in the wrong direction, too bad. if
anyone has any counter-evidence of multiple runways 90 degrees
apart (air force bases don't count) i'd like to hear about it.
because of this problem, and because airports are awfully expensive
in a small cities, i often save as soon as one is requested. then
i zone a few prospective sites (one at a time). as soon as they build
on one, i go back to the saved game and start zoning at the good
site. works every time. would this be considered cheating?
despite what some have said, you don't need to power every square in the
airport to make it work. in fact i recommend against this. sometimes
this discourages growth! i've found that in an airport or seaport with
existing structures, if they want to build an additional small building,
they will be reluctant to do so on land with a power line. seems
improbable i know. here's the experiment:
i have an area that looks like this
SSSS S = seaport with buildings on it (powered of course)
SSpS p = zoned seaport but only power line
SSSS
i watch it for several months but nothing happens. finally i bulldoze
the power line. 2 seconds later, a building appears.
i have tried this time and again with similar results. the building
doesn't always appear; just fairly often. also, i'm not saying they
_won't_ build ports over power lines, it's just less likely.
>On a similar question, I have an enormous number of air crashes. In a starting
>city (10K), I have had 12 air crashes in 20 years (killing 2 power plants and
>a zoo from one of the fires). This is really annoying. I tried upping my
>education spending but they still can't fly worth a darn. If they wax one more
>power plant I'm going to torch the airport!!! Do all you mayors also have a
>lot of air crashes (mind you I have only one airstrip in this city)? BTW, I've
>also seen the depowering of airport zones by building repositioning.
>
the only way i've found to avoid air crashes is to keep structures out
of the way of the landing approach (takeoff too i guess). within 1-3
squares of the runway i've found only trees, roads and water pumps to
be safe. small parks might be safe. large parks _definitely_ are not.
within 4-8 squares of the runway light zoning is safe. just no tall
buildings! these numbers aren't gospel, just my estimates.
of course along the _sides_ of the runway, the sky's the limit.
just my $.02 worth
-doug
************************************
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************************************
Edward Wolpert
>In article <2gn4ep$p...@nntp2.stanford.edu>,
>Zachary Charles Haston <has...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>
>the airports (but not usually the seaports) are very finicky about
>where you put them. i'm still not quite sure of the criteria (maxis,
>please tell us!) but i do know that once it decides it doesn't like
>a site, it will NEVER build there.
So I zoned near the commerce, and it flurshed. I had a bucnh of crashes when
the dense commerce was building tall buildings near the runways, so I removed
the buildings, dezoned the area, and put light residence near the runways, (2
blocks around them) and light commerce near the residence (four blocks around)
problem solved (Well, not totally, but better.)
--
Virtually,
Edward Wolpert
---------------------------------------------------------------------
|wol...@osti.slip.utk.edu | |
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|wol...@lead.chem.utk.edu | |
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|wolpe... you get the picture | |
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Zachary Charles Haston
>alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
> which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
> beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
> that way. if you zone a 2X5 in the wrong direction, too bad. if
> anyone has any counter-evidence of multiple runways 90 degrees
> apart (air force bases don't count) i'd like to hear about it.
I've had an airport destroyed by one of my many air crashes and when the
runway was rebuilt it was 90 degrees different. But all runways were
destroyed. I think it decides upon placement of the first runway. BTW, the
new runway at 90 degrees off crashed a plane into a tall building on the very
first takeoff from it. Real intelligent sims!
>despite what some have said, you don't need to power every square in the
>airport to make it work. in fact i recommend against this. sometimes
>this discourages growth! i've found that in an airport or seaport with
>existing structures, if they want to build an additional small building,
>they will be reluctant to do so on land with a power line. seems
>improbable i know. here's the experiment:
>
>i have an area that looks like this
>
>SSSS S = seaport with buildings on it (powered of course)
>SSpS p = zoned seaport but only power line
>SSSS
>
>i watch it for several months but nothing happens. finally i bulldoze
>the power line. 2 seconds later, a building appears.
I've seen this many, many times. Because of this, I only power one square.
Never power multiple squares. The basic premise I've seen is that it won't
destroy a power line that is the only source of power to a building. If you
destroy the power line, a building will be without power until a new building
takes over the power line spot. Don't forget though that I have seen buildings
reorganize to cut power to some buildings.
>the only way i've found to avoid air crashes is to keep structures out
>of the way of the landing approach (takeoff too i guess).
I've certainly seen this, but I've had a lot of planes dive that don't crash
into a building until they crash down (ie. crash into undeveloped flat land
or a park).
Mark Phaedrus
wrote:
> alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
> which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
> beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
> that way. if you zone a 2X5 in the wrong direction, too bad. if
> anyone has any counter-evidence of multiple runways 90 degrees
> apart (air force bases don't count) i'd like to hear about it.
Okay. :) I had a pretty successful city (trashed after the
Transportation Bug From Hell came up), and it had a 5x5 airport, which
developed three runways; not in the parallel orientation I would have
expected, but like this:
-+---
.|...
-+---
.|...
.|...
(With buildings where the periods are.) As you can see, the third
runway was laid perpendicular to the first two, and actually intersected
both of them. I was expecting a crash on the runway eventually, but it
never happened. :)
--
\o\Internet: phae...@halcyon.com (Seattle, WA Public Access Unix)\o\
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\o\ If you're interested in books/stories with transformation \o\
\o\themes, or in furry/anthropomorphic art, email me, or anonymous-\o\
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Galcik
>alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
> which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
> beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
> that way.
Not true for me. I didn't have both simultaneously, but I did have airstrips
oriented in both directions at different times in the game. (My original airprt
location was causing too many crashes, so I moved it.)
>despite what some have said, you don't need to power every square in the
>airport to make it work. in fact i recommend against this. sometimes
>this discourages growth! i've found that in an airport or seaport with
>existing structures, if they want to build an additional small building,
>they will be reluctant to do so on land with a power line
hm. I was about to disagree with you on this, but I have to rethink it. See, it
was my experience that my airport zones would get zero activity for 40 years,
but then as soon as I powered every square, they built on it. However, I have
been wondering why my airport isn't expanding, since the rest of my city has
been. I'll try taking the extra power lines down, and see what happens.
------------------------------ --- ------------------------------------
Greg Galcik | gal...@oasys.dt.navy.mil
An Equal Opportunity Annoyer. | tmbg - mst3k - zweblo (with umlaut)
-----------My Extremely Tiny FTP Server: spider.navsses.navy.mil-----------
Galcik
>I've had an airport destroyed by one of my many air crashes and when the
>runway was rebuilt it was 90 degrees different. But all runways were
>destroyed. I think it decides upon placement of the first runway. BTW, the
>new runway at 90 degrees off crashed a plane into a tall building on the very
>first takeoff from it. Real intelligent sims!
Oh! In fact, this just reminded me. Once, I had a large airport with runways
going boths ways, simultneously.
DAVE ROSSELL
I just got SC2K a couple days ago, so I just started paying attention to these
posts, so please forgive me if this is going to rehash much-discussed material.
In all this talk of airports, someone alluded to a Transportation Bug from Hell
that killed a city of his. What is this bug, will it occur on an LCII system,
if so, how do I kill it, etc?
For those of you with superhero sightings in your cities: does the superhero
help agains the alien monster from outer space (like all good superheroes
should)? Just curious.
********************************************************************************
Dave Rossell "When you lay your dreams to rest,
v011...@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu you can get what's second best,
but it's hard to get enough."
-David Wilcox
********************************************************************************
Rich 'mcmxciibo' Holmes
>In comp.sys.mac.games, fe...@halcyon.com (Doug Ferry) writes:
>>alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
>> which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
>> beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
>> that way.
>
>Not true for me. I didn't have both simultaneously, but I did have airstrips
>oriented in both directions at different times in the game. (My original airprt
>location was causing too many crashes, so I moved it.)
Ditto; I've also had an airport with crossing runways.
--
- Rich "mcmxciibo" Holmes
Of course, it's perpetual September for Amiga users, isn't it?
- Paul Tomblin
Mark Phaedrus
(DAVE ROSSELL) wrote:
> In all this talk of airports, someone alluded to a Transportation Bug from Hell
> that killed a city of his. What is this bug, will it occur on an LCII system,
> if so, how do I kill it, etc?
The Transportation Bug from Hell (as I called it) is pretty simple;
every once in a while, for no readily apparent reason, the required funding
for transportation will balloon by thousands or even tens of thousands of
dollars per year, with the transportation adviser always giving the advice
"You have too many roads. Remove some to save on maintenance." Even
bulldozing the entire transportation system will still leave the
transportation budget extraordinarily high. Apparently there is no
recovery from this bug, short of trashing the city file every ten years and
starting over.
Several people on the net have given the advice of saving annually (so
when the bug strikes, you just reload your city from the saved position and
keep going), but I've found that this actually increases the chance of
permanently hosing your city; the bug apparently takes a few months'
simulation time to manifest itself once it occurs (I've had city files
whose Budget windows looked perfectly normal when you first loaded them in
Pause mode, but whose transportation budget rose through the roof as soon
as I took the simulation off pause), so saving that often just increases
the risk of unknowingly saving a corrupted city. I've taken to saving
every ten years; that seems to be a good balance between avoiding lost work
and avoiding savefile corruption.
One totally unsubstantiated piece of advice that you can take as you
will; I've noticed that when the bug strikes, it usually does so to me
shortly after a disaster. I've also noticed that I've yet to encounter the
bug at all when I've had "No Disasters" checked. Perhaps the bug occurs
when a road gets damaged or destroyed during a disaster, and the disaster
code miscalculates the effects of the change. Perhaps it's merely
coincidence.
kramer donald eugene
>In article <2gn4ep$p...@nntp2.stanford.edu>,
>Zachary Charles Haston <has...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>>
[some stuff about airports deleted]
>factors i think it _might_ take into account:
>large buildings along the prospective runway approach.
>proximity to city. neither too close or too far (whatever that means).
>alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
> which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
> beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
> that way. if you zone a 2X5 in the wrong direction, too bad. if
> anyone has any counter-evidence of multiple runways 90 degrees
> apart (air force bases don't count) i'd like to hear about it.
I have had runways at the same airport running in opposite direction. One was
E-W and two were N-S. This has happened in both airports I have zone for. And
in order to get them to be built I had to run a power line from one end of the
zone to the other.
[some stuff about not running power lines all over deleted]
>i have tried this time and again with similar results. the building
>doesn't always appear; just fairly often. also, i'm not saying they
>_won't_ build ports over power lines, it's just less likely.
Again, I had to run the power line all the way across and they had no qualms
about building over my power line.
Michael_...@magic-bbs.corp.apple.com
runway, just hangars.
Are there any rewards after arcologies?
How do you build a millitary base?
and not a mere Device
last night in a city I've had growing slowly for almost 200 years. Here
are the circumstances, in case anybody out there is actually trying to
fix the TBFH:
I had just opened the saved city and was trying to decide what fun
things to do with it. It takes up a good portion of the city area, but the
pop is just at 70K...I was looking for ways to improve what I have...
and I realized that there was this short spur of highway, probably from
about 60 years into the city's growth, when I wanted a way to get lots
of sims from the city center to the river's edge. The highway was just
about 15 units (2x2) total length, with a 90-degree bend halfway along.
Anyway, I decided it really wasn't needed any more and there was all
this usable land beneath it...so I demolished the highway.
Time passed. I fiddled in the area left by the ex-highway.
January arrived, and with it, my budget window. Boom! My trans.
budget is now $6,000+! I will be losing some $3K per year at my
curent rates/expenses! Huh?
I looked at the transportation book and found that along about August,
when I demolished the highway (the saved city opens into June), my
ROAD costs jumped to $575-576 per month. As has been noted, the Trans.
Adviser says "too many roads, wipe a few out." I experimented with
subways, and demolishing roads, but nobody wanted to ride underground and
there was no change in my road expenses.
So. Did my demolition of that stretch of highway dump so many cars on
the surface road system that the maintenance costs went sky-high?
Fortunately, I can conduct some experiments to pin down the TBFH. I'm
going to try the same thing again, see if produces an identical problem.
Then I'm going to let the highway budget drop to 0% and see how long it
takes for the highway to disintegrate, and see what effect that has on
the TBFH. I'm happy to entertain other suggestions for testing the bug.
BTW, is Zoinks reading these bug reports? Is Maxis working on the problem?
D.J.Schaeffer | The Todal looks like a blob of glup. It makes
go...@world.std.com | a sound like rabbits screaming and smells
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ of old, unopened rooms.
James Thurber, _The 13 Clocks_
David_...@magic-bbs.corp.apple.com
You get one shot at a military base when your population reaches 60,000.
The government comes to you and asks if you like the idea, and if you say
yes, they look for someplace to put it. Depending on you landscape and
amount of free space, they may not find someplace appropriate. If they
don't, they go away and never speak to you again. The same thing happens
if you turn them down.
On the subject of airports, I had an airport placed far too close to my
downtown core, and kept suffering crashes. It kept being rebuilt, but at
some point the runways stopped being replaced. The only things built on
airport-zoned land were control towers...vast forests of the things with
only narrow, runway-shaped open spaces between them. Eventually I
demolished the original airport and zoned a new place for it elsewhere on
the map, and the same thing happened - control towers by the dozen, and
absolutely nothing else. Is it a bug? It doesn't seem to affect my
commercial development.
Dave
Mark Phaedrus
David_...@magic-bbs.corp.apple.com wrote:
> You get one shot at a military base when your population reaches 60,000.
> The government comes to you and asks if you like the idea, and if you say
> yes, they look for someplace to put it. Depending on you landscape and
> amount of free space, they may not find someplace appropriate. If they
> don't, they go away and never speak to you again. The same thing happens
> if you turn them down.
Interestingly enough, I've found that you can load a saved city file
that's very close to the 60,000 mark, let it run without doing anything,
accept the military's offer, and have them blow you off. You can then
reload the save file, let it run again without doing anything, accept the
military's offer, and have a base be built. So there's apparently some
randomness involved.
> On the subject of airports, I had an airport placed far too close to my
> downtown core, and kept suffering crashes. It kept being rebuilt, but at
> some point the runways stopped being replaced. The only things built on
> airport-zoned land were control towers...vast forests of the things with
> only narrow, runway-shaped open spaces between them. Eventually I
> demolished the original airport and zoned a new place for it elsewhere on
> the map, and the same thing happened - control towers by the dozen, and
> absolutely nothing else. Is it a bug? It doesn't seem to affect my
> commercial development.
I had this happen to me the other night too. A crash occurred at the
airport (which was out in the middle of nowhere, on the top of a hill);
when the fire went out, control towers started going up like crazy, and
nothing could stop them. I even dezoned the entire airport and then
rezoned it, and still nothing but a control-tower fest. Weird.
> Dave
Robert V. Blumer
>oriented in both directions at different times in the game. (My original airprt
>location was causing too many crashes, so I moved it.)
>
>>despite what some have said, you don't need to power every square in the
>>airport to make it work. in fact i recommend against this. sometimes
>>this discourages growth! i've found that in an airport or seaport with
>>existing structures, if they want to build an additional small building,
>>they will be reluctant to do so on land with a power line
>
>hm. I was about to disagree with you on this, but I have to rethink it. See, it
>was my experience that my airport zones would get zero activity for 40 years,
>but then as soon as I powered every square, they built on it. However, I have
>been wondering why my airport isn't expanding, since the rest of my city has
>been. I'll try taking the extra power lines down, and see what happens.
>
I will power every square, then once a runway and tower are built, I bulldoze
all the other power lines in the undeveloped zone. The Sims quickly fill in
the other squares. My airport is always filled this way within 2 years.
I have had runways form right angles, intersecting with each other in a 6 by 6
airport zone.
--
"I wish you peace when times are hard |Robert V Blumer
A light to guide you through the dark |rvbl...@mailbox.syr.edu
When the storms are high and your dreams are low
I wish you the strength to let love grow" -B. Leadon
Ron_Hu...@bmug.org
>>alignment of runway. i have a theory (as yet unproven) that SC2K decides
>> which way the runways will align (N-S as opposed to E-W) at the
>> beginning of the game and that forever after all runways will face
>> that way. if you zone a 2X5 in the wrong direction, too bad. if
>> anyone has any counter-evidence of multiple runways 90 degrees
>> apart (air force bases don't count) i'd like to hear about it.
>
>I've had an airport destroyed by one of my many air crashes and when the
>runway was rebuilt it was 90 degrees different. But all runways were
>destroyed. I think it decides upon placement of the first runway. BTW, the
>new runway at 90 degrees off crashed a plane into a tall building on the
>very first takeoff from it. Real intelligent sims!
I always build large, roughly sqare airports. (About 12x12) I generally
get runways going both directions. No problem. No apparent preference.
BTW, I don't bother to power every square, and never have had a problem
getting an airport to develop. I power airports the same way I power
any other area that I zone: with a power line running the length of the
zone, and sometimes another line running the width of the zone. I
generally do this to spur rapid development, so that the new zone doesn't
have to radiate slowly outward from the first powered square. In the
case of airports, I have noticed that my first runways are generally
built parallel to my first power lines, leading me to suspect that a
runway can be built only where all 5 squares have power available. So
while powering every square is over-kill, there is no point in being
stingy with power lines. They're cheap.
-Ron Hunsinger
Sue Phillips
> On the subject of airports, I had an airport placed far too close to my
> downtown core, and kept suffering crashes. It kept being rebuilt, but at
> some point the runways stopped being replaced. The only things built on
> airport-zoned land were control towers...vast forests of the things with
> only narrow, runway-shaped open spaces between them. Eventually I
> demolished the original airport and zoned a new place for it elsewhere on
> the map, and the same thing happened - control towers by the dozen, and
> absolutely nothing else. Is it a bug? It doesn't seem to affect my
> commercial development.
yeah i had this happen to me too! After all i got on my 3x9 airport i zoned
a 30x30 or about airport and it was just a forest of them, i seems to me
after you build a military base your airports will not build any more
runways. It did not affect my commercial and their are no crashs!
--
Sue Phillips
Internet: sue.ph...@mbs.telesys.utexas.edu