Hi all,

I have recently picked up Sim City and am enjoying it (bar a few issues like small space available, issues with sewage not going to available treatment plants thus having to build several in the same area to resolve this). However, I am growing frustrated at the lack of ability to join other regions. Every time I search for a region to join the game lists full regions or ones that have blacked out slots that say they are awaiting resolution over the space or something to that effect.

Is this a common issue and is there a fix to this? I also set up a 16 slot (or whatever the maximum slot amount is) region and have claimed two of the slots, however, not one person has joined this (which seems unusual given I can not find any empty slots and my region is public so it should have had other players join by now I assume).

Also, one other side question, a citizen was complaining about the trains running through the city and the mayor should get more trains to stop there, how exactly do you set that up? Or is this a case of just adding more stations?

Thank you.

Sorry. The online interface IS that awful. Nothing you can do except have patience to click on region after region until you find an open slot, or wait until someone joins you. You can try finding others to play with on here of course. And sims will often complain about things that aren't actually a problem, so chances are you're fine on the trains.

Ah, it is a shame they have not applied filters to searches (i.e. region sizes, show only regions with free slots, map used, etc), but I guess they can patch that in at some point.

I really enjoy the game, but there are so many things going on that are busted that its frustrating as the underlying game is good, just the layers on top feel like it is trying to stop the growth of the city. For instance my first city is full now but I have huge demand for housing and industrial zoning. So in my second city I built a lot of industrial zones assuming with the two cities being connected that would aid the demand in my first city. However, this left the second city with empty factories saying there was nobody to hire but the first city had people unemployed (or so it seems, a few houses got abandoned stating no money as the reason why they were empty).

Another time I had zombies attack and wipe out half a residential area even though the police station was nearby and had been expanded, so no idea how to resolve that one. Then not long after a meteor show hit destroying some buildings. I do not get why these disasters were added, maybe earthquakes etc would make sense but these disasters just feel like they wipe stuff out for the sake of wiping it out.

So yeah, I am confused as to how to expand as I am basically just building the same cities over and over as connecting them seems to have little in benefit other than sharing trash collection or police/fire trucks etc.

@johnlocke: Yeah, what you're describing is pretty much the state of the game right now. You can't turn disasters off, and you can't do anything to counter them. You just have to watch them happen. There will never stop being demand for residential and industrial, even in big cities. The one thing you can play around with is city specialization.