Few questions in regards to regions

Hi @AnubisLaKingDon - All great questions. Planning is important - hopefully I can help a bit.

First, some things to know overall. There are some features that work very well between cities in a region, and there are some things that never really worked the way the developers intended. Since SimCity is now a legacy game, there are no devs and no way that any of the remaining bugs will be patched or redesigned. We just have to be aware of how the game works now. If you keep that in mind, I think it's a very fun and enjoyable game. 

The 3 biggest things to keep in mind:

1. Workers, Shoppers & Students DO NOT properly commute or share between cities in a region
2. Utilities (Power, Electricity, Sewage) and Services (Fire trucks, Ambulances, Police) DO properly share between cities in a region
3. Traffic management is extremely important - probably the most important thing in the entire game

Keeping those things in mind -

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@AnubisLaKingDon wrote:

If omega is build in one city, does this also mean that if i start a second city, it will automatically gain omega? 

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Not automatically - you can send Omega trucks and drones from the first city, which will convert the buildings in the 2nd city to OmegaCo franchises without having to do anything else in the 2nd city. The receiving city will get Omega profits from their converted residential and the sending city will get a percentage of the regional profits. But if you want to build OmegaCo factories in the 2nd city, you will need to unlock it in every city. (This isn't difficult - you really only need 7 industrial buildings and 14 commercial buildings to unlock the factories)

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@AnubisLaKingDon wrote:

If create a city pure based on population, second city on shops and industry and education, then a 3rd city

to focus on factories etc, will those 3 work together? Reason i am asking  

is because i wanna get one town full of only people, one town focussed on pure water, and energy supply for other towns, and one town that will supply all the materials for all the great works. 
Meaning will the population start working at the shops and factories in the second and 3rd city? 
Will the people become students in the second city? Or do i require a bus stop for that, that allows multiple city travel?

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So, this is where knowing about the current limitations comes in. No, you really can't do any population-related sharing successfully. The unfortunate truth is that the devs wanted this type of regional sharing, but were never able to complete the programming successfully to allow it to work. What ultimately happened is that each city will read a need and in regional view it will look like sims are commuting to other cities. And the game will send sims away from your city, so it will look like they're commuting. But the game itself loses the tracking of those sims, so once they leave your city they never come back.

Handle your sim population on a per-city basis and don't plop regional transport bus stops. You can get shoppers and tourists in by plopping a regional bus terminal, for instance, but I use them without any bus stops. Build bus terminals near wherever you want these sims to go, and plan for them to walk (for instance, build a bus terminal near a casino to get tourists to walk directly to and from the casino). As soon as you can, eliminate all elementary school buildings and bus stops, and plop community colleges near residential areas to take care of educational needs. The best way to handle population & traffic is to try to build things so the majority of sims can walk to them. 

Sharing utilities works really well, though. Keep in mind that the available utility that can be shared is split among all the connected cities. So, for example, if you have 3 connected cities & your utility city is producing 3,000 mw of power, each connected city can buy up to 1,000 mw. This applies even if there's only one city buying power. 

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@AnubisLaKingDon wrote:

If i unlocked the university and researched everything, then demolish all schools, will i still have can i just plop all those schools in a new second city, having all researched? 

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I'm not certain I understand this exactly, but researching at one university will unlock the researched thing for that city's region. If you demolish all the universities, then you won't have the unlocks available. You can, however, plop a university in a different city in the region and it will have all of the researched items in it, but you'll want to do that before you demolish the other one.

The bottom line is that the requirement for the unlocks includes a line that you need a university with the proper research available in the region. So you don't have to move the university in order to get the unlocks in other cities, but you do need to have at least one city with a university that has researched the item.

I think you may be interested in reading THIS THREAD about regional sharing, and THIS THREAD, about traffic, as they have additional tips, hints and discussion you might find helpful.

I am a huge fan of Skye Storme's entire Let's Play series. For Omega, he has a section that takes you through and completely explains the process. The Omega section is in 4 parts. It starts HERE - each part is about 15 minutes long and can give you a bunch of insight into the whole process.

I hope this helps - Happy Building!

Thank you for your educative response. 
If there are no more dev's isn't there a way to get people the source code, 

so the community can make community patches to fix these bugs? 

If these bugs could break the game eventually, do you recommend, i might pick up city skylines? 

Also about education. 
So if u understand you right, correct me if im wrong, but if i pop down the first school...

then get the second school, i pop that, i remove the first school, then unlock the 3rd school, pop it down, remove second school, 

then unlock university, plop that down, and remove the 3rd school, does this mean that any and every new citizen becomes educated thru the university, 

even tho they did not attend any of the previous schools? 

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@AnubisLaKingDon wrote:

Also about education. 
So if u understand you right, correct me if im wrong, but if i pop down the first school...

then get the second school, i pop that, i remove the first school, then unlock the 3rd school, pop it down, remove second school, 

then unlock university, plop that down, and remove the 3rd school, does this mean that any and every new citizen becomes educated thru the university, 

even tho they did not attend any of the previous schools? 

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Oh, I understand what you're asking now, sorry for the confusion. All students are educated by all school buildings - you do not need to use any elementary or high schools at all, you can just plop a community college or university if you want. Students will be educated by any of the schools. Elementary & High schools raise the educational level of your sims; Community College will educate the students and also increase the tech level of nearby industrial buildings; University educates the students, increases the tech level of industries & gives the ability to research different technologies.

I generally start with an elementary school, as it's the cheapest option and satisfies the educational requirements for students. Once I get enough money, I demolish the elementary schools and plop community colleges around the city. This will further increase the education & get the benefit of cleaner, high-tech industry. If the goal is to have a University, then I would demolish the elementary schools and plop 1 university to gain access to the research. It's much better to just have one type of school active in the city at a time, so definitely demolish other types once you can move to the University.

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@AnubisLaKingDon wrote:

Thank you for your educative response. 
If there are no more dev's isn't there a way to get people the source code, 

so the community can make community patches to fix these bugs? 

If these bugs could break the game eventually, do you recommend, i might pick up city skylines? 

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There are a few different mods from the community, available in the mods section at simtropolis.com. Since SimCity 2013 was originally an online-only game, there were no mods allowed at launch. I don't believe there is any way that a modder can dive deep enough to rewrite the entire simcity code, to "fix" regional issues. I don't have a lot of experience with mods, so can't give you any specifics. I generally do not play with them, unless it's to fix an issue. The one mod I do use is the Extended Worker Data Mod by MaxisGuillaume, who was one of the SimCity developers. I find that particular mod invaluable, because it gives you info on each building's occupants. 

I've never played Cities Skylines so I can't really give an opinion. There are some people who like it a lot and feel it's much better than SimCity 2013. I personally feel that SimCity 2013 fits my playstyle better - I enjoy the number crunching, the planning, and the overall management of cities. I believe Skylines is more focused on the buildings and making a city, where SimCity is more focused on the city management aspect. 

My recommendation would be to play with SimCity for a while and see how you feel about it. Just keep in mind that you want to manage each city's population within that city and the rest is the fun of the game. If you find you don't like all that city management, then you can always try Cities Skyline. Happy Building!