High tech tools cause unavoidable chaos. Even with plenty of supply, stockpiled tools are not dispatched until after a consumer’s tools have expired. This makes districting almost mandatory to manage the chaos in supply and demand once you have the tools available. When applied to the power grid, the chaos is even more pronounced if you’ve built up your city without an accurate read on the true supply, once the tools run out. Allowing consumers to request the tools early in a way similar to how the residential units make requests before resources are depleted, or allowing consumers to stock the tools, would help normalize the chaos created in the system.
Secondly, a feature allowing the user to set a cap on residential growth in specified areas would be great. Districting and traffic engineering works, but it feels like, as city manager, you should have the ability to set the limits rather than cut off supplies to achieve the same end.
Great game guys. As a former sim city fan I’m loving the complexity of this one. Keep up the great work!
Hi @RTD, thanks.
I’m not sure what you mean with “chaos”? Do you get gridlocked or do you have production problems when some buildings have not got their tool delivery yet?
Right, as with other products, there is usually some kind of buffer for the consumer – industrial buildings will stockpile the products they consume and residential buildings will as well plus they have a consumption time frame. Both of these scenarios allow time for dispatched deliveries to arrive before supply to the building totally runs out.
It seemed to me that this isn’t the case with high tech tools – I had plenty of supply with stockpiled tools which were not being dispatched until after the consumer had exhausted its supply, and this was unavoidably causing fluctuations in consumer output / efficiency. This effect was most noticeable on the power grid, which was causing small chaotic cascading problems that took me a while to figure out, and my solution was to stop supplying the tools to my generators since at that point it seemed pointless to use them to boost power output if the resulting fluctuations in power supply were just going to cause problems