Atelier du Grand Théâtre V01.01

veija2,
The answer to fixing the fire satisfaction problem is booster buildings. Note how important booster buildings are to boost resource production for trade or other services to improve their satisfaction levels. The one service that has no booster buildings is fire and it's the one we struggle with the most. Coincidence? Nope! Hopefully some modder will make a booster building or two for fire. Then problem solved for large cities.

 

Birk LeGlaire,
Build, build, build my friend! I can't wait until you finally see the problem yourself as you get very frustrated with the fire service satisfaction problem. Then we'll be able to enjoy your modding magic as you make the one booster building most needed in XXL.

 

Birk LeGlaire,
I promise I won't hold my breath waiting for you to get the mod done. Your assertion to veija2 that fire expense isn't too expensive only is true when cities are small. When you get past 5 million you'll see how expensive they really are. It's a matter of scale and at the very large scale services become very expensive indeed. Then you have to let the satisfaction level go low.

It will be interesting to see what kind of road and mass transit layout you make. I was able to do both very well in Flachlandstadt but even that didn't really help fire service. The metro can be rather expensive as each station costs a good deal and when you make hundreds of them you'll see metro costs become rather expensive. I do like the trams, or in the XXL standard game, the buses will be cheaper since they don't involve so many costly stations.

I definitely agree that playing XXL straight will take far more skill than playing XLN. I'm looking forward to seeing how you do although I have a very good idea of the problems you'll have to overcome. Remember that the trade income limit with Omnicorp is 2,177,800 per month, after that excess trade is wasted unless you trade with other cities.

Good Luck!

 

Birk LeGlaire,
That's an interesting test you've done. Interesting is your conclusion that traffic doesn't affect fire service satisfaction. In a way that seems to be what I saw from my early big cities where I had worse traffic than my new Flachlandstadt city but the same bad fire satisfaction. However city size matters for sure, distance and population seem to stretch out service efficiency.

Please don't mistake Monty's new mod as the only fire station you need. You will still need to build many fire stations in your city so that Monty's new Emergency Center boosts their effects for all buildings. The reason Monty's new building helped my 8.1 million city achieve much better fire satisfaction results was I had so many fire stations to begin with. Plus adding in the effects of the Paradigm cheat building helped boost fire and police satisfaction to 100% for both.

You did some interesting tests regarding the XLN Community mod. It definitely isn't easy spotting effects from the CM. I know you like the challenge of playing XXL solely but I do hope that after that you'll play XLN so you can enjoy adding in your beautiful mods as well as others to have fun with the game and make your city look totally cool the way I make mine.

That's an interesting road layout you made. I like the way you ran two large avenues/expressways right to left, I'd replicate top to bottom for maximum efficiency. I'd like to see how you'd put in a mass transit system.

Enjoy my friend and I hope to enjoy more of your modding magic in the future!

 

Well done. Thanks.

 

Birk LeGlaire,
Congratulations on reaching 10 million in population solely using XXL with no mods. Absolutely no mods? I'm sure you were pulling your hair out at times trying to overcome problems like fire satisfaction. I hope you now see the importance of booster buildings to the game. As to the game being perfectly balanced I'd have to disagree mightily. If it were properly balanced we wouldn't need booster buildings which are phony ways to increase resources to trade since resource buildings don't produce enough in the first place. Hence the need for booster buildings for services. You can see how badly fire satisfaction becomes when you don't have a booster building to overcome the effects of high population. That was a definite mistake by the developers.

That was a bit funny not building holiday hotels to keep your citizens happy so they left. Holidays are a tradeable resource. Did you build enough business hotels for your offices so they function at peak efficiency? It is a game of balancing demand and resources. Were you okay on leisure? I didn't see but one big leisure building, a stadium. Of course that becomes costly too in keeping your citizens happy.

I'm glad you told us you had to build other cities to feed your big city, especially for farm resources since farms produce so little yet take up so much land. It would be interesting to see your city statistics and other service satisfaction levels. Plus how you balanced out your income to cover expenses.

Monty indeed made a booster building for fire and police, the most excellent Emergency Management Department that gives us 60% satisfaction for both services. I hope that now that you've overcome your XXL challenge that you'll try out some mods and have some fun with the game. Try putting Monty's EMD booster building into your big city to see how that affects your fire satisfaction level, bet it really improves it so you have no more red. I've found XLN to be a lot more fun than straight XXL since there are so many interesting mods to use. I'm now up to 302 mods! If you watch some of my videos you'll see how much cool stuff I cram into my cities.

Enjoy!

 

Birk LeGlaire,
I do see you get your fun by overcoming obstacles. You are wrong about XLN not being a game of management challenges, it just gives us better solutions that were completely lacking in XXL. Most booster buildings were part of the XXL game, they were what made it possible to gain positive trade income or to increase service satisfaction.

Maps don't need the holiday resource, you actually can create it by building the environmental big parks to keep your city clean of pollution. Also building monuments, landmarks and blueprint buildings helps to create holiday spots. So as long as you don't trash your city with pollution and make it totally dull without cool buildings then you actually generate holiday resource on a map without it being put there by the map maker. On a map with holiday resource you can kill it by polluting your city too much.

Looks like you did get people fairly satisfied with leisure without building a lot of big leisure buildings. I'm curious how you managed trade as in creating trade transportation capacity. It doesn't look like you made highway connections to the map so you would have been limited to expressway map connections. I also don't see the freight and international airports which give a good amount of trade capacity for an expensive price. So I'm curious how you generated trade capacity to trade with other cities or Omnicorp.

I can see that your elites are the most happy which is odd since they tend to be the toughest to please. Personally I like to place the buildings to create cool functioning as well as looking cities. I like having all 4 worker groups at 99% happiness and enjoy the challenge of trying to make them 100% happy in all service satisfaction areas. Since I make videos I want my cities to look and function well so I can help others understand and enjoy the game better. I also like showing off mods, like yours, so others are more interested to download and use them.

Speaking of challenges you should look at the upcoming Urban Empire game being released January 20th. It has no modding support at all, just the plain vanilla game. In it you focus less on building buildings as you basically just fill out districts and only place service buildings like city hall or police stations as well as schools. It takes a player through 200 years of history from 1820 to 2020 and has 5 eras. You are the city mayor and you have to deal with a city council to get bills passed to build new districts or special buildings. It's all about management and you have to be careful about losing a vote late in the game as that will end your mayoral career as happens in European politics. It's done by Kalypso Media. I'm looking forward to it.

Enjoy!

 

Birk LeGlaire,
Here's an example of my challenge. I like to see how well I can make cities function and how satisfied I can keep the citizens of my cities by using mods. My 4.5 million Monterey city is self financing, no help from any other city. I only trade with Omnicorp for what I need. I use the minimum 10% tax rate for every worker class and industry.

Voici un exemple de mon défi. J'aime voircomment bien je peux faire des villesfonctionner et comment satisfait je peuxgarder les citoyens de mes villes enutilisant mods. Ma 4. 5 millions de ville deMonterey est moi le financement, aucuneaide d'autre ville. Je fais du commerceseulement avec Omnicorp pour de ce quoij'ai besoin. J'utilise le taux fiscal de 10 %minimal pour chaque classe d'ouvrier etindustrie.

XXL isn't a well balanced game at high population levels. XXL just doesn't give us the profitable buildings we need to afford excellent service levels.

XXL n'est pas un jeu bien équilibré à dehauts niveaux démographiques. XXLne nous donne pas juste les bâtimentsprofitables que nous avons besoin de nouspermettre des niveaux de service excellents.