I seem to suddenly be running into all sorts of problems (at least, I think I am ;D )
I started up Sim City 4 and went into the Getting Started Tutorial city, which I've been playing on for awhile now. When I last left it, things were going ok - I didn't have much money in the treasury, but I had a good budget, at atleast +4,000 simoleons per period.
However, when I came back, I was presented with a budget that was about -2,000 simoleons, and falling fast. I couldn't figure out what was causing this, whether I had for some reason suddenly incurred more costs or what - until it seemed like the industry sector just wasn't paying their taxes. More and more industry buildings were being vacated for some reason, but they all seemed fine. Sure, a few of them had no water zots, but that shouldn't explain the sudden evacuation of a majority of my industry sector.
I looked at the water graph for my city, and I had at least 20,000 units at my disposal. Yet, several more lots were showing no water zots. For whatever reason, the pipes were deciding not to reach those buildings, even though they had earlier. More and more buildings were going dry, with not much I could do. To test out this mysterious gain in water capacity, I made a deal with my neighbor to sell about half of what I had available. The water graph did not take a hit, yet my city nearly lost all water capacity!
For whatever reason, it seems like the simulation has glitched up water capacity/usage calculations for city (please see attached). Can anyone tell me what's going on here, and how I can fix this?
EDIT: To help put this into perspective, if I look at a large water pump, things definitely aren't right. You can see in the picture that my city is clearly starved for water, yet the pump is at 0% capacity, serving only 73 units of water out of the total 200,000 it can possibly serve.
EDIT2: Also attached is a graph with me experimenting with the city's pumps. I had recently built a large water pump near the edge of my city. At point A in the graph, I had deleted the pump. Notice that the capacity falls and brings down the usage to point B, so both are at equal levels, putting the remaining pumps at maximum capacity. At point C, I place a small water pump, which slightly raises the capacity and the current usage follows, as anticipated. Finally, between points C and D, I delete the small water pump and replace it with a large water pump. This raises the capacity back to about where it used to be, yet the usage appears to fall as if no extra pump had been placed at all, leaving the water distribution at a level that makes it look like I have very little spare capacity left. I can see that my pump is connected to the grid, though.
FIXED: Welp, so I seem to have fixed it. For whatever reason, the game was simply not considering that pump as completely connected to the water grid, even though it was and things were reported as being hunky dory. I moved the pump more closer to the inside of my city, and things are slowly returning to normal. Good grief, Charlie Brown.
City environmentalists will "clamp" your pumps if water pollution levels get too high... Seeing as you had the grid covering dirty industrial areas, I would bet that is what happened. You just need to pay attention to water pollution levels and maybe build a few sanitation plants to clean it up.
Hope this helps.
Quote from: triplennn86 on July 19, 2013, 04:40:09 PM
City environmentalists will "clamp" your pumps if water pollution levels get too high... Seeing as you had the grid covering dirty industrial areas, I would bet that is what happened. You just need to pay attention to water pollution levels and maybe build a few sanitation plants to clean it up.
Hope this helps.
Unfortunately, that did not seem to be the case :\ Water pollution levels were under control at the time, and I did not hear anything about pumps getting capped.
another possibility is that your city is getting short of electricity and since water pumps needs to be powered, when the demand of electricity exceeds your city's capacity, you will also get short of water.
Quote from: figui on July 19, 2013, 08:24:31 PM
another possibility is that your city is getting short of electricity and since water pumps needs to be powered, when the demand of electricity exceeds your city's capacity, you will also get short of water.
Electricity supply was fine, I'm afraid :(
Even though you've fixed it I still wanted to chip in a couple possibilities. One would be that the new pumps aren't conected to the affected network (wouldn't likely be responsible for a sudden change though, but would account for unused capacity for a new pump in a shortage.
As for getting a pump connected, if it's more than one tile/is a custom lot, dragging the pipe network under all of the water lot's tiles is a good way to ensure connection.
Glad you got the problem fixed, whatever the problem was.
Quote from: threestooges on July 19, 2013, 11:23:11 PM
Even though you've fixed it I still wanted to chip in a couple possibilities. One would be that the new pumps aren't conected to the affected network (wouldn't likely be responsible for a sudden change though, but would account for unused capacity for a new pump in a shortage.
As for getting a pump connected, if it's more than one tile/is a custom lot, dragging the pipe network under all of the water lot's tiles is a good way to ensure connection.
Glad you got the problem fixed, whatever the problem was.
Perhaps that was it, I think I only tried one square of the large pump (when it really takes up two).
Thanks for the input, everyone!