Ok, I released the latest Pocketcity. It was just languishing.
Now on to the complaints, and how can I fix them.
1) I originally downloaded what was the “stable” version .17, and I had color. After running into some of the snags that I will mention below, I decided first to dowload the update which warned that it would have bugs. Well, I lost the color. I have a Tungsten T3 running on Palm OS 5.2.1. Actually, the color shows when I view the map, but the city is now in black and white. I tried deleting the game and re-loading the first “stable” .17, and I still have B&W. Patch available?
I don’t think this exists in the 0.17 release version, it sounds like the user uploaded one of the -bw tilesets.
2) The tax rate doesn’t seem to have any impact on the rate of development. I tested raising it and lowering it to see if population, factory growth, and commercial growth would (as they should) be stimulated when lower… no connection it seems. Here’s one way to have a big bank account… raise the tax rate sky high! They won’t move out! 🙂
True, the tax isn’t influencing people. I still have to get the feedback loops working properly.
3) It doesn’t seem to matter how many Military, Police, or Fire Stations I build… I can only have one unit deployed to fight monsters.
3a) I kept trying to get more units deployed because fighting them doesn’t seem to kill them any faster than just letting them run their damage unchecked. I thought if I could deploy more than one tank, I could stop them. I also tried deploying one tank, and one police car… still no apparent effect except that they seem to sometimes divert course.
Unfortunately you need to surround the monster/fire to nullify it. I need to change them to area effect items.
4) Deploying a firefighting unit seems the surest way for the fire to spread. Instead, I learned to pause the game and bulldoze all around the fire and just let it burn out. Early attempts to use the fire fighting unit ended in exponential spread of fire.
Same problem as 3, it’s not an area effect item.
5) Rate of development slows down a lot if I try to build a seperate “colony” further down the river. When the game starts, it’s really cool to see it grow. I expected that adding the same config. a little further down or even accross from the river would yeild a similar rate of development. It seems as they are all tied in to a reduced growth rate once population hits a certain level.
This is the distribution algorithm acting up again. I’ll have to re-work it to make it deal with this situation a little better.
6) Looking for ways to stimulate population growth. As indicated in item #2, Tax rate doesn’t seem to stimulate. I tried trees and water, and no apparent stimulus there. Roads are a must, but after that, I haven’t seen increased paces of development from the addition of PD’s either. Thought more would move in with better police presence, etc…
Problems with feedback circuit.