One of the biggest problems people are having with the game is the massive traffic-jams that seem to clog the entire system up. Now, this is responsible for the ineffective coverage of ANY traffic-based services (Fire, Police, Garbage, Medical, Education, Mass-Transit.) There are also a number of smaller complaints that may also be directly related to how Glassbox handles traffic.

"Workers aren't commuting."

"There aren't enough workers, even though I have plenty of population."

"Tourism is broken."

"Emergency services are slow/unresponsive/broken."

The agent system that is used for utilities (power, water, sewage) seems to be identical to the system that handles traffic.

The problem is that, just as power can sometimes take a ridiculously long time to fill the entire map (because the "power agents" just randomly move about with no sense) traffic and workers can do the same thing. Workers leave their homes as "people agents." These agents go to the nearest open job, not caring at all where they worked yesterday. They fill the job, and the next worker goes to the next building and fills that job, and so it goes until all the jobs are "filled." So, when you have all your "worker" sims leaving their houses for work in the morning, they all cluster together like some kind of "tourist pack" until they have all been sucked into "jobs." They don't seem to care if the job is Commercial or Industrial, only that it's a job.

"Scholars" are handled exactly the same way. As are school busses and mass-transit agents. This is why you see the "trains" of busses roaming through your city, and why entire sections of town may never see a school bus, despite having plenty of stops... Once all the busses are full, they return to school and stay there until school is done for the day.

Now, here is where it gets really good... In the evening, when work and school lets out, they all leave and proceed to the absolute closest "open" house. They don't "own" their houses. The "people" you see are actually just mindless agents (much like the utilities agents, as I said earlier) making the whole idea of "being able to follow a 'Sim' through their entire day" utterly POINTLESS!!"

The reason traffic problems cause so many other side-effects, is because EVERYTHING relies on those "people" who are stuck in herds trying to go to whatever closest "slot" they can fill. Casinos go bust because "tourists" are just "shopper agents" from out of town. You MUST put casinos RIGHT next to the entrance to your city if you want them to succeed. Placing street-car stops by the casinos can actually cause more harm than good! Why? Because the "shoppers" will board the streetcar stop (because it's the closest open slot) and be shuttled to a shopping district instead.

Sharing resources and services gets to be a joke, because all the vehicles ("agents") get bound up with the busses at the entrances to cities.

TL;DR: Fixing the way the game handles traffic and "sims" will fix 90% of the problems plaguing players!

@*edit (03-12-2013 @ 17:12 GMT)* Changed title to better attract attention to the issue.

http://twitter.com/cynicaldriver if you're interested.

Videos showing some of the problem... http://www.youtube.com/user/CynicalDriver

EA! We are drawing attention!! Please respond!!

Tero Kuittinen article on: Fox News Website and Yahoo! News

Article on RTS Guru

'Kotaku" Picked it up: here

*Note: It seems like the developers made a small improvement at some point. Traffic now does sometimes take an alternate path, but the majority still stay clogged up behind "stuck" agents.

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Update 1.7



• Traffic Improvements: Tuned traffic congestion and fixed some intersection traffic issues.

- We shall see how these "tunings" work out.



• Traffic improvements: Emergency Vehicles will drive in empty lanes to get around traffic at intersections.

- This should have been in from the start... Now, what if there aren't any empty lanes???



• Traffic improvements: Emergency and Delivery vehicles get priority over regular traffic when leaving garage.

- This also should have been in from the start... What if they are coming into a traffic-jam?



• All units and buildings can now be demolished using the bulldoze tool.

- They couldn't before? We need more detail on this one!!!!

- Do we now have to delete individual units on our own?

- Is that why our ambulances never return after bulldozing a clinic???

- MORE INFO NEEDED!!!



• Performance improvements for low spec systems.

- This should not be a priority.





• New Server: Asia 2 will be released Tuesday afternoon (PDT)!

- I wasn't aware another server was needed, but ok... Not going to complain.

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