Commercial Supply & The Problem with the Rent Collector

It comes upon every good mayor the problem of allocating space in their city. What can we do to conserve space? One very effective method is to upgrade our commercial buildings to have more range, thus requiring less of them overall. This is all well and good, but especially in these hard economic times where we can barely feed out population, it may arise that the range covers a building that we no longer wish to supply because it is no-longer profitable or sustainable. How are we to remedy this? We could use lesser and more numerous commercial buildings, be unreasonably discerning in how we collect rent, distribute goods and place buildings, or change yet again our city's layout that we may well be happy with. But these, my fellow mayors, are clearly less-than-ideal solutions to an inevitable problem that will only get worse as time goes on and space becomes scarcer, hard times or not.

If one employs minimum effort, they can easily situate fourteen residences around a level-one smoothie bar, much as I have done, and still find that they have place for several more. That is all well and good, but our poor little level-one smoothie bar can only supply ten buildings when full. Ten! To make matters worse is the rent-collector. Now, if one were using this service one would loose potential profit in such a scenario! It robs you of profit, presumably direct to the its own pocket! We can't even blame this on not filling our commercial buildings properly beforehand. It's simply a dishonest service!

What I propose, dear mayors, are two things:

First is a way to control which goods a particular residence gets so that we may place them wherever we wish without fear of wasting valuable goods on them. Ideally, this would be done in the residence's own menu, perhaps using the already extant needs boxes as a toggle.

Second is that commercial buildings should draw directly from the warehouse by their own means without need of us to stock them, and a method to direct them not to do so should we need to conserve our goods, ideally, again, with a toggle in its own menu.

Together, these propositions allow for much increased flexibility in city-planning, profit and enjoyment for all, negating the need to selectively collect rent or fill commercial buildings, or be restricted to specific arrangements that impede fluid city functionality and aesthetic liberties.

 

I am all for improvements honey, but am having a hard time understanding what you are saying here. You would swap one button (stock commercial building) with another (don't allow warehouse to direct supply)? That hardly is any different in reality. I can see the "supply each house" thing, but again, then you'd have to click on each house not one commercial building. If you are suggesting having just one of each commercial building, centrally located, that you then allow each house to draw from....that would certainly help with space for housing and be more like real life (no grocery store every fifty feet there). However, again, that's more time and work than collecting rent without a rent collector. I don't understand about that rent collector either...don't you get the same rent as if you'd just clicked on each coin? If you're basing that on not getting needs revenue from buildings that are not covered, well, c'mon now. Please clarify if I am not getting it, because you do make a couple good points.

 

I apologize, I was sure my colorful wording could be confusing.

It's not just swapping one button for another. By taking directly from the warehouse when collecting rent, there is less clicking. The residence would still need to be in range of a commercial building. The effect of the toggle would be much like filling/emptying the commercial currently, but would likely be needed much less frequently. If you toggle needs by residence the commercial toggle would be hardly used, but the option is still nice to have. Clicking each house isn't that intensive since again, it's likely be done infrequently.

The problem with the rent collector is that in the above situation with the smoothie bar, at best, four buildings won't get needs revenue for those buildings no matter what when using the rent collector. Put another way, the commercial cannot possibly supply all of the residentials and the rent collector collects the rent without being able to restock. There is no way around this, so it's not just that the player forgot to fill the commercial. Upgrading the smoothie bar shouldn't be needed if you don't need the range. A simpler fix would be to just up the amount the smoothie bar can hold or lower the range so that this can't happen, but that is much less fun and only solves one problem.

I was not suggesting one centralized commercial of each type. They would need a bigger range for that to work and a much larger capacity to prevent profit-loss when using the rent collector. Others have suggested malls that can supply more than one good over the whole city, but if stock is limited the same problems remain.

 

Excellent suggestion, this is exactly the way I would like it to work, a big thumb up

 

Ok...I get you on the Rent Collector issue and agree. Maybe they should have a restock option like you suggest, as long as you have the products in the warehouse. Kind of like letting Residents order online and have delivered

 

The first one sounds great - especially (as suggested) if they could turn the needs-boxes into an on/off-switch depending on the needs you want to supply the given Building.

... then it would be easy (I think ) to extend the idea to both Commercial- and Production-Buildings.

and then RC could extend the in-game-services so we can MM-buy someone to distribute the goods to the Commercials-Buildings.

... sorry if I have spoiled your idea but I do believe that there has to be both benefits and drawbacks ... kind of 'tug of war'



RC versus players

 

I didn't suggest any restocking option. My idea is to eliminate it entirely. An auto-fill would probably be less efficient on resources.

I don't quite follow. Commercial buildings are already accounted for. Manufacturing is something else entirely, unless you mean repeat production cycles as has been suggested.

It's not really ruined. People have already offered to pay for a similar service and it wouldn't be a totally unreasonable thing. But if that were the case it should be combined with the rent collector. I sure wouldn't consider the two services separately since rent and needs are tied together. Paying MM for distribution wouldn't be saving nearly as much clicking/time as with the rent collector and it would still rely on what I find to be a very dated system, even if the problem with the smoothie bar is fixed. This is more a matter of the mechanics and how they relate to the game than simply being more convenient, though in all it would achieve the latter.