A funny thing happened on the way to OilVille's supervillain based demise: inexplicably, against what I was sure was all odds, it became profitable. Really profitable. It has been running so well that I turned the police back on and got crime down to zero crimes committed per day, I plopped VuTower anyway, added a school, added a lot of components to that school, and built a small monument to city bus transportation by plopping the municipal bus terminal and adding the maximum number of buses. Eventually, I was doing well enough to plop the Eiffel Tower.
I believe it had a bit to do with SimCity's new multiplayer functionality and a bit to do with dumb luck. I upgraded the streets and density went up immediately, increasing the city's tax revenue. My colleague's son has a city nearby which sent police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances to help make up for some of the basic services I'd turned off while my city experienced its teething problems, and at some point in the night, it clicked for the city. Setting down Dr. Vu's tower somehow lowered the crime rate and actually brought in tourists, because it serves as an attraction as well as an evil lair. It may have served the purpose of collecting all of the criminals into one place and telling them to stay put before letting them do anything.
I also added an oil HQ and another oil rig facility. Looking back on it, I'm not completely sure what this did and I've since shut it off in an effort to save some money. The rig continues to run, along with my new second trade center.
It wasn't long before I was able to turn on my own police force again, which pretty quickly brought Oilville's crime rate down to 0/day. There were of course several criminals running around town, but they never managed to accomplish anything. Unfortunately, most of the folks in town haven't stopped complaining about the crime rate.
Once I turned my city hall back on, I went ahead and upgraded it with a department of utilities, a pretty necessary upgrade to curb the amount of sewage outflow pipes and water towers I had to plop. One of the reasons I designed Oilville with so much green space is I didn't want to dedicate as much room to infrastructure as I had before. Better infrastructure is often better than "more" infrastructure. Plus, a fairly consistent road layout has meant that I was able to plop bus stops and school bus stops just once. Speaking of buses, once I had turned the police station, city hall, and health clinic back on, I was doing so well I decided to plop this monument to public transportation.
Incidentally, that happens to be both a bus terminal and a London double-decker bus terminal. Oh yeah, I was doing well enough that I added a well-needed school to the equation. I didn't know this until later on but the double decker buses do actually hold twice as many people as the regular "municipal" ones do. I haven't yet found out if there's a difference in the limit on the number of buses you can have. In the background, you can also see the Vu Tower and one of the larger housing facilities that have since developed.
One of the things that I would like to be improved in the game is control over certain aspects. I think it's great that you can control how much of a given resource you have by adding or removing components, such as classrooms to school or extra buses to a bus terminal, but it would be great to be able to do things such as control whether or not certain elements were in use, without destroying the components you've added. A good example of this in my city is that I had a peak of 35,000 or so residents, and a whole lot of children to educate. My elementary school spent at lest a full year running at over 100% capacity. Now, however, I'm using only 250 or so of its 750 desks. I would love to be able ot turn off a few of the "spare" classroom modules without having to re-buy them if I have another population boom.
Another thing I'd like to be able to control is illustrated well in the above two images: If you follow one of the transit buses around, they seem to just wander around between stops, and I have no idea what's controlling them or why they're doing this. I haven't received any notification that the stops are inefficiently placed, so I'm not sure if it's just because of the way the GlassBox simulation is running (i.e. the bus goes to the stop that's closest to the highest number of sims' ultimate destination first, and so on down the line until it's ultimately empty, or just forever) or if it's related to the order in which I placed them. A very cool ability would be once the stops were placed to trace routes beginning and starting at each bus terminal. Even better would be the ability to run (and charge for) the bus system dynamically based on the number of people using it. A parked bus costs less than one running down the street empty.
My next play-session (which is technically already happening) is likely to be a lot less exciting than this one was. I got a lot done and achieved a lot, but at the beginning of the next session, there's a less clear direction. I can't significantly expand the city without re-working a whole lot of things, and I can't necessarily do that until I've reached peak oil and it's time to re-specialize the city. When that happens, I believe I'll be re-laying the main road that runs from the entrance of the town down along the edge toward the coast and around the coastal edge of the city as a streetcar avenue and plopping a lot of tourist attractions. This will help alleviate the issues my buses are having keeping up (and I have something like 30 of them in operation for a town of "just" 23,000) and will of course help along with the tourist attractions. I can only hope that there's a way to retain the Eiffel Tower and Vu Tower (both of which are reasonably nice tourist attractions) along the way – but I suspect that this transition will very much be a new beginning for Oilville. Perhaps I should start saving money, rather than plopping Big Ben just yet.