My Experience so far

[crunchysnacks]

Hi! I am one of those "set it and forget it" players. I will build up the first few settlements myself.. but then I prefer to assign a mayor and leave...

Things I have noticed:

• The new City plans, mostly, do not start out with any generator. Instead, it has a municipal plot designated to be a power generator. Which, in theory, is fine, but when the settlers inevitably decide to build up the Entertainment plots first before anything else... the municipal plot doesn't get created... so the recruitment beacon is never on, so the population sits and never increases. I have had to come in later and throw up a small gen and attach it to the beacon to get things going. This is multiple settlements.
• The settlers are obsessed with the entertainment slots. They will gladly starve themselves and leave the farm plots alone if it means they can build up an entertainment plot instead. Unless I come in and manually force a settler off an enterainment plot and assign them to the farm... the settlement will sit at 0 food until they are eventually no longer allied with me due to unhappiness....
• The amount of "bar" filled up (talking about the need bars in the lower left of the UI) by entertainment slots is significantly less than any other plots. Like by a factor of 4. For example, a settlement with 15 settlers and 2 farm, 2 commercial, 2 industrial, 2 defense (plus some turrets), 2 municipal, and 5 entertainment slots... all bars are full except for entertainment, which is a bit over half full.... is this by design?

Overall I am definitely enjoying a lot of the new features... though I do wonder if SS2 is actually too ambitious for the engine it's trying to do all of this in...
Thanks for all the hard work...

 

[Iirly]

Now that I read this, I understand why my settlements never went any where and stayed at 0 on the ones I had plans in (sunshine, tenpines, oberland and Sanctuary) but where I worked with Jake (red rocket) was thriving so well I kept having to send settlers other places. I'll plunk down a generator on my next play through when I do a plan.

 

[crunchysnacks]

I would like to add that power lines are definitely an issue with the city plans.
Even after running the "Run City Power Lines" or whatever it is called from the desk, I usually have to go and connect several buildings / power poles to get everything up and running.

 

[Deleted member 10215]

The "entertainment" gauge seems to just be counting the percentage of your settlers with assignments to Recreation plots; it doesnt SEEM to matter for upgrading purposes, the overall Happiness however definitely does.

 

[crunchysnacks]

The "entertainment" gauge seems to just be counting the percentage of your settlers with assignments to Recreation plots; it doesnt SEEM to matter for upgrading purposes, the overall Happiness however definitely does.

Hmm. Ok. So maybe I am getting to hung up on "maxing" that bar....

 

[Deleted member 10215]

Hmm. Ok. So maybe I am getting to hung up on "maxing" that bar....

I mean, I am just going off how it seems to work to me. I guess its so you can tell at a glance that you could build/upgrade some more Training subtype plots or something?

 

[Disupter52]

If I had to guess, it seems like you need a bed for every settler and also an entertainment plot. I could very well be wrong.

 

[Deleted member 10215]

If I had to guess, it seems like you need a bed for every settler and also an entertainment plot. I could very well be wrong.

From my own fiddling around, as long as Happiness is high enough (i think 90+ is as high as Simsettlements cares about) they dont ALL need a Rec Plot assignment - although putting more people on Training subtypes isnt really a bad idea anyway. Unless the higher end of the 'tech tree' does need it, I havent gotten to the 'end' yet.