[Nehkara]

Taken from Reddit:

Education

• Educate your population with schools and they'll put solar panels on their roofs. They will generate energy during the day.
• You can build a self supporting university town.
• School buses can travel to other cities and pick up high school students. (grade schools are only for your own residents!)
• HS graduates transport themselves to available colleges/ universities in the region.

Police and Health Care

• If your ambulance made lots of trips to your neighbor's city while you were offline, it will leave your city periodically while you're playing. (because the game is asynchronous)
• Why are the emergency vehicles not able to go around traffic?
  It's part of the game. If you want to, you can always use 4 or 6 lane roads so that they can more reliably pass.
• Police cars extend the coverage of your police station ("making more of the roads green"). they have the effect of suppressing criminal acts around them for a little while, as does the police station. Which means you can extend the coverage of your police station by adding new vehicles. It is not always necessary to built new police stations. Cars are cheaper, enabling more patrols & more opportunities for capturing criminals.
• The police responds to a zombie apocalypse.
• Crime can spill over from other cities.

Streets, Zoning and Traffic

• Can rich sims be on low density roads?
  Sure, you can get mansions, fancy boutiques, high tech industrial on low density roads. Wealth and density are independent.
• Can large cities be built on dense narrow street grids with transit? Or wide roads only?
  Sure, either one. If you use avenues, you can upgrade to light rail. On the narrower streets you are limited to buses.
• Highways can't be built nor One-Way-Roads.
• Streets can't be named.
• When you put a road through terrain, it edits it as necessary (or puts in tunnels & bridges)
• Traffic lights have an default timer, but will switch if there is no opposing traffic.
• If you destroy an intersection with sims/cars (agents) on it, agents attempt to hop to a nearby road. Failing that they'll re-spawn at their source. Failing that they'll be killed.
• Rich sims have nice cars and some will speed.
• Highways will eventually clog. You'll need to add busses, ferries, trains, etc.

City Specialization, Economy and City Sets

• What city specialization/big business generates the most income?
  People have been making lots of money with casinos. Oil, coal, ore, etc. depends on what's going on with the global market.
• If you buy the deluxe version, you can play with players who don't own it, they are able to see french/etc buildings.
• Can you mix the American, German, French and English tile sets on a map?
  Yes, but it's not recommended (uses a lot of texture memory).
• Can you have a culture specialized city without having to purchase the deluxe edition?
  Sure, there are cultural attractions in the base game.
• Tourist stay in the hotels built in the commercial zones unless you put hotels on your casino, in which case they will stay there instead.
• Each building has a tax value, which gets modulated based on the tax rate the player sets
• Eventually (and it's a long time) a region exhausts its oil or coal, at which point it can import from the global market.

Weather, Seasons, Enviroment

• Will there be weather in the game?
  Just rain and haze. Pollution will make things murkier, too.
• Will wind be variable direction & speed?
  Yes it does -- there's a range of +/- 60 degrees from default.
• Since the game have seasons and months, Will the color of the sky of sunset change accordingly to it?
  No, we played around with that, but decided to just keep the day/night cycles constant.
• Tree's remove pollution. They'll also die if they're in a heavily polluted environment. They don't affect land value, though. You can plant trees.
• Did you notice that new buildings have small trees, and as they age the tree grow? Tree size shows you a neighborhoods stability.

Disasters

• Will there be mini disasters like vehicle accidents? Yes, but not car accidents - more like fires, criminal acts, sickness, injuries, etc.
• Disasters effect cars, but they won't crash into each other (physics was too expensive at a full city scale).

City size, Population etc.

• How big are city maps?
  2k on a side
• This is tiny! I'll be finished with the game in minutes.
  "We've already had people in the dev beta spend weeks on their cities, there's stuff to do! [...] sophistication of the simulation is the most important thing."
• Is it possible to implement bigger city sizes later down the road? They can't make any specific promises about it. They know that this is an issue for many players and will probably look into this problem, but not for release.
• What is the rough max pop you're seeing at that size?
  "Biggest cities our testers have made have been in the 800,000 to 1m range."

Always online / Region

• It is possible to see neighboring cities in the distance. If someone is working on it, one can see it changing.
• Biggest region map currently supports 16 cities.
• If my internet goes down while I play Simcity and accidentally close the game, i will lose the save game?
  In that scenario, you city's save point would be when you were last connected to the Internet.
• If you're already in the region you can claim a city that another player has abandoned.
• Sims will move to or leave your city based on its own merits. Cities don't compete for sims.

Misc

• Does putting down a ploppable sign have any effect outside of aesthetics?
  Casino signs attract more tourists, the rest are purely for aesthetic benefit.
• City Ordinances were converted into modules that you append to the relevant buildings (e.g. fire marshal module).
• Dumpsters actually "fill up" as an indicator of the buildings trash level.
• You can daisy chain parks, but ultimately one needs road access, otherwise no Sims could get there, no power, no water, etc.
• Things in the beta looked good but not this good. Did the textures/rendering of screenshots get another pass or something? These look *really good!*
  Nope - straight out of the game. These are the exact same textures and everything as in the beta. That's just playing with everything set to High or Ultra.