ZEPTOPOLIS

[chysn]

Gack, made the mistake of building a ton of houses at the start of the game, kinda pointless considering they don't fill up very fast.

I expected that would be a common first-game mistake among non-manual-readers ! As long as a Home has power, somebody will move in, at the rate of one per turn.

Businesses move in at the same rate if they have power, at least one adjacent* Road, and at least one nearby** occupied Home.

* Meaning immediately north, south, east, or west.

** Meaning either adjacent* or connected by no more than four lengths of road.

[Victim_RLSH]

Making enough profit to maintain the whole place is going to be tough, my dream of amassing enough of a fortune so I can launch myself into space on a phallic shaped rocket while everyone else languishes in poverty isn't going to happen, is it? I guess I'll just have to make sure my people have what they need to live instead...

[chysn]

Making enough profit to maintain the whole place is going to be tough, my dream of amassing enough of a fortune so I can launch myself into space on a phallic shaped rocket while everyone else languishes in poverty isn't going to happen, is it? I guess I'll just have to make sure my people have what they need to live instead...

Ha! It's not easily done. My son amassed a Treasury of about 1500, though. Prior to cassette release, I'm going to add a Tips section to the manual. Here are some of them:

• Don't build too much at once. Remember that only one Home and one Business may become occupied every year. Work on making your city stable before expanding too far.

• If you're hit by a disaster, prioritize rebuilding your Roads. If important structures are separated from properties, the impact of the disaster will be worse.

• After a disaster, wait to rebuild structures if you can. The fires will eventually go out, leaving empty land, which is less expensive to build on.

• The School is the most powerful structure in the game. A School provides lots of property value, and education improves Business Confidence. Put as many Homes around Schools as you can.

• Make use of Lakes. They count as Parks for property values, they don't cost anything, they're indestructible, and they provide some protection against Tornadoes.

[huffelduff]

I can't make money!

Its neat and I'm jealous.

[chysn]

Yeah, you're not going to be blamed for Tornadoes. You might be blamed later if it hits something important and you don't deal with it. It hurts when they hit main Roads, and you can no longer get income from previously-connected buildings.

The Satisfaction score is a composite of employment rate (tens digit) and education level (ones digit).

Some things that are adversely affecting that city are (1) your Wind Farms aren't spread out enough. (2) Yeah, you do have too many unoccupied Homes, which cost a lot of money up-front. Now you're in a situation where you can't afford your maintenance costs (3) Some Parks will help out with property values, too. An adjacent Park adds 2 value to a Home!

I was working on this one this morning. It was running a nice budget surplus for a while. It's got some inefficiencies, but it's fundamentally strong. Right now, it's in recession. Recession emerges more-or-less like it does in real life. Business over-extends, and realizes there aren't enough people to support all the Businesses. Loss of Business Confidence causes Businesses to leave the city. Then, unemployment spikes because so many Businesses left, and the residents leave. Sometimes it happens the other way around.

Now things are looking up again, thanks to a new School and a new Clinic on the west side:

[Victim_RLSH]

I didn't realize you could get away with so few windmills, I think I'm throwing way too many of those out there.

[chysn]

I didn't realize you could get away with so few windmills, I think I'm throwing way too many of those out there.

To be sure, you can check what structures are in range by selecting a property and pressing Fire. Look in the Info Bar for the Wind Farm icon!

There will be another release candidate soon. There are small balance tweaks, but the main new feature is Game Save/Load to and from cassette. There's just enough memory under the screen (six bytes) to store critical game state information. So basically, I just need to save 512 bytes of screen memory. Colors are handled after load via code. I had to move a bunch of zero-page usage into BASIC workspace to avoid stepping on the cassette's toes.

But I regretted spending a bunch of time working on a city and having to just turn off the VIC.

[Victim_RLSH]

Thanks to RetroArch it's now a mobile game too!

[Mike]

There will be another release candidate soon. There are small balance tweaks, but the main new feature is Game Save/Load to and from cassette. [...]

I would consider this a necessity for the game. See my reply in the Programming section.

The following paragraph may contain spoilers:

On another note - wouldn't it be sufficient to (mostly) zone out buildings in a 2xN column (or Nx2 row) fashion? This way you need less streets (their relative screen estate then drops from 50% to 33%) and still can connect any house to a street.

SC and SC2000 allowed for buildings to be away up to 3 squares from streets, consequently I used a 6xN zoning there.

Mark with the mouse to reveal, and please do not quote this paragraph.

Greetings,

Michael

[chysn]

There will be another release candidate soon. There are small balance tweaks, but the main new feature is Game Save/Load to and from cassette. [...]

I would consider this a necessity for the game. See my reply in the Programming section.

Indeed, I would have been annoyed if I couldn't get that bit done. I almost had a Save cost in-game money. That would be an interesting twist, but I'd wind up hating that idea.

The following paragraph may contain spoilers:

Yep.../

Also, you could lay them out as Road, property, Park, property, Road to maximize the taxable value of Parks! That's what I'm trying to do in the northwest part of my map above.

/Yep...

[chysn]

Thanks to RetroArch it's now a mobile game too! Screenshot_20210804-210910_RetroArch.jpg

What’s this?!

[Victim_RLSH]

RetroArch for Android has a VICE core and supports all the functions that RetroArch provides, such as Save State. For Vic I would prefer a portrait screen layout with stick and button on the left and right. It defaults to a Playstation style control layout which is ridiculous for the Vic.

Edit: Found a portrait config that works.

[Mike]

"portrait"

What you actually want is a landscape orientation of the display. See here: Wikipedia - Page orientation.

[Victim_RLSH]

Ah, got that bassackwards.

Also realized that your city can be disconnected. Here I'm taking advantage of lakes by starting small communities around them. Although a house just burned down north of that center lake, they aren't going to like that next year...

[chysn]

Also realized that your city can be disconnected. Here I'm taking advantage of lakes by starting small communities around them. Although a house just burned down north of that center lake, they aren't going to like that next year...

You can do that, although it's better to make a satellite city once a main one is well-established, to help pay for it. This this case, you've got 45 maintenance per year in Schools, but a total of 9 income from those Schools, so those Schools will be falling apart pretty soon for lack of funds!