I've posted before about a more intuitive search function that's baked into the GTHQ. I think it's a great idea to help the quality of life of the game because it lets us mayors spend more time developing our cities and less time playing a city building game centered around searching. The most important thing to remember about the GTHQ is that it's driven by what SimCity BuildIt mayors offer to other mayors. If mayors fill the GTHQ with few items and gahbage like tons of Hamburgers, then it's a bad searching experience all around for the rest of us. I typically make a point to fill my Trade Depot with 8 (my maximum) items before advertising items.
Your comments about income have been a point of contention with me as well. Correct my math if it's wrong, but I have 831,825 citizens in my city. At a tax rate of 20%, shouldn't I be making 166,365 Simoleons each day verses the 20,792 that City Hall says my city earns in a 24 hour period? Of course, my math is based on each Citizen being valued at 1 Simoleon each, per day... In that case, 20% of 831,825 is indeed 166,365 Simoleons per 24 hour period. Not 20,792.
[scratches head in confusion]
Maybe my city is paying taxes on my Citizens tax payouts... My city must be paying the SimNation Federal Government 145,573 Simoleons per day. I guess that seems about right. Right? I can't wait to get my Federal SimTax return... I'll have millions in the bank!! xP
Also, with regards to Income, have you ever been away from your city for several days and return to find that you've only earned what appears to be a single days worth of taxable income from your city? Why not a compounded amount of Income? I should be able to leave my city alone for a week, should I chose, and have the additive amount of daily income for each day that I've been away, yet I've never seen that happen.
I don't have any issues with Parks requiring access to roads. (Most of my citizens ride the bus anyway. xD) I have always wanted more options for additional, natural features such as trees/forests, ponds/lakes, and hills but I think that should be a terraforming feature and not necessarily a Parks feature. Maybe there could be a much larger Park item that's the size of the larger Specialization Buildings. I'd be happy with that.
Regarding the appearance of buildings, I don't always want the randomized, "determined-by-the-adjacent-buildings" style that SimCity BuildIt currently uses to style the Residences. I'm currently struggling to coax the game to produce certain styles of buildings for my neighborhoods and it's quite frustrating. I would love the option to transmog the style a fully developed Residence to any of the max level buildings in its set. That's a reasonable perk to developing Residential Zone, in my opinion. Granted that means you couldn't make top their buildings look like lower tier buildings, but I'm fine with that too.
I've yet to need to upgrade beyond 4 Lane Roads as long as I can manage the length of the road and the direction that a Residential building may be facing. Thoughtful city planning can go a long way. 🙂
YES!! Those Gift Bubbles are very hard to see sometimes. They flat-out blend in as if they are trying to hide from us. I'm sure that once the winter snow has melted they will be more visible, but there are so many blue color tones in many cities that make this Gift Icons hard to find. Intentional? Why not just make it a bit Gift Box with a different colored ribbon and bow instead of being a monotone-colored image contained in a cloud?
I haven't made it to level 40 yet [39.5-ish], so I can't comment from experience on the Worship Specialization Buildings, however a meager 20% boost in population for a structure that costs 40 keys? Sorry citizens, you'll have to commute to another city to get your worship on! That's just not an efficient use of resources to encourage this mayor to plant any of those buildings in my city.
Troy, I am afraid you are correct and that why I mentioned we will never see the most ideal supply and demand driven trading in this game, but I do wish out of suggestions there floating around that at least they would consider to add filter on number of the same items to be displayed at any given time. And Sheppard I definitely agree with your point that what we get to buy in GT is what others are selling, but judging from my experience what you see is driven by your level, and definitely we see only a fraction at a time of what is actually offered. It seams as it goes through cycles, one week half of the items are burgers, another lamps, right now I am stuck with bunch of wood and steal. As for income, there is definitely some fractional formula I understand it wont give one coin per citizen, but at least it would make sense if I get 20K for one million citizens I should get 40K for 2mil, and not just 3-4K more, makes no sense.
I like your idea of transforming from one building to another, at least between those that already require specialty items, but we know that's not gonna happen 🙂 The answer there will be bulldoze and build a new one
What do most people advertise, and why?
Typically Items in low demand, often hamburgers, beach parts, metal/wood. Why? Because they are slow to sell, it keeps people coming into their shop to buy other unlisted items.
Whilst this is good for the seller, it's bad for the buyer. Buyers often get a GTHQ full of items they aren't after, and have to resort to city hopping to find what they do need. This is by far the biggest issue, Ain't nobody got time for that!
1 Solution? The GTHQ could show more than just the 1 item. I would suggest the 1 item + 3 more. Sure there's space constraints on mobile devices, but there are solutions such as holding your finger down on the advertised item to reveal more items.
Another solution, which is probably the better choice: The game could take initiative and self-promote high demand items that the seller didn't advertise (providing they already have opted in for advertising an item first).
It's most annoying for a high level player to see a GTHQ populated with 50% Metal/wood. It would be good if the game could give a better spread of listed items from different industrial/commercial.
EA can't blame the players for the current state of the GTHQ, there's many solutions that could be implemented to solve the issues.
I'm sure EA is hoping that people will get frustrated enough with the GTHQ and buy simcash to get items needed for expansions or upgrades instead of doing dozens of searches in the GTHQ. Of course another alternative is that people will uninstall the game out of frustration.
If EA thinks they've implemented the trade system that brings in the most revenue, they're probably not going to want to change that system.
