How do I get Sim City 4 running on it. I bought Sim City 2, 3, and 4 from GoG a few years ago to play on my then work PC.

No longer have a PC and got the itch recently.

Her MacBook is considerably more powerful than the pentium 4 I had back in the day, though the old Cd-roms won't fit in it no matter how hard I try.

Can I Use my GOG Purchase and what of mods and the like. Not a serious player but I remember they'res several hoops to jump through even on PC and this time I'm on Mac.

Hello! Can I rename the region I have setup in a Multiplayer server in SimCity 2013? It's set to public so there are two more players who have joined. Thanks!

So I reinstalled SimCity Societies fro the ea app on too my pc and the game only let's me start the base game. If I try to launch Destinations, it just says I need to update and restarts the EA app. I remember fixing it before using a cracked exe but I can't seem to find it any links or solutions?

Any help is appreciated. It seems all I can find is our favourite funding advisor.

How often do you guys bulldoze a correctly built part of your city. Like, do you bulldoze part of the city if it would make for a good road, even if you were satisfied when you originally built said part? Or do you build around it?

Hi all,

I have a city that is doing great but I am scared to take it to the next level and break it! It is a resort/casino-styled city. I have left it alone for a few hours and it just keeps going steady, 45k an hour.

I was just curious if anyone had any suggestions. I have almost logged 500 hours and never had a city produce this much with so little effort.

Here is a video, I tried to move slow to give a good view of everything. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sHrmbKbLR4yWXa4AIHAdZLQOnW2-gAaS/view?usp=sharing

Tourist 180k/480k

L 1.7k/1.7k

M 87k/167k

H 78k/480k

Thanks!

Hey Mayor, join me in SimCity BuildIt and bring your city to life. Use this code to add me to your friend list: H7BPVF

I know this has been asked 100000 times in 1000 places, but I'm struggling here for some reason.

I managed to figure out how to rotate Zone configurations by using my Start (alt opt) key. That was a big relief, and allowed me to up my game. But I'm still struggling on how to rotate buildings and transport pieces (both Maxis and NAM).

FN + Home/End doesn't work for me. That just moves the map around.

I've tried so many different suggestions. I'm running a MacBook Pro (2019), but I'm using a Logitech K850 keyboard when I play.

Does anyone have any suggestions that will help me? I basically can't do any RHW building until I know how to do this.

Hey Mayor, join me in SimCity BuildIt and bring your city to life. Use this code to add me to your friend list: VZNM96

Hi there, I'm new to this game, I don't really know what to do, so add me and let's play together: QZZMZF

Hi! Been playing a bit - want to add friends :) RXJPCS

Hey there people, I got hooked ^^ and would like some friends to mooch items from your city and vise versa, my code is: KLHFMG

EDIT: I added more complete information about water towers and the weather system.

I recently picked up SC2K again, and in scouring online resources to see what I can find to improve my knowledge of the game's inner workings, I've discovered that there's a shockingly low amount of detailed information regarding its water system. In fact, there still seems to be a ton of conflicting information and flat-out myths that have persisted since the 1990s, and not even reputable strategy guides (like "SC2K: Power, Politics and Planning") have entirely accurate information. Since I've had an abundance of time in the past month, I felt like experimenting on my own to see what I could uncover for myself once and for all, and I'm sharing the end results here so that any of the dozen or so people who might appreciate it can see it. If you happened across this post years into the future from a late night curiosity search and found it useful, or if you happen to be able to expand upon any of the details I couldn't hack out on my own, I'd love to hear about it. :)

(I've done the majority of my testing on the Win95 version of the game, with a little bit of verification on the DOS GoG version. There's always a chance that some of the following info could vary on other versions of the game.)

​

tl;dr

• A fully functional water system increases your city's land value, reduces crime, and allows zones to develop more densely.
• The output of a water pump increases in cities at higher sea levels, when the pump is placed next to fresh water tiles, and during inclement weather. Of these three factors, the sea level actually plays the biggest role.
• Desalinization plants are generally less effective than water pumps in similar circumstances, though this can vary.
• The stated in-game capacity for water towers is not accurate. They can hold a little more than 7x the amount of water that they purport to in the query window. They receive and supply their water in large amounts at a time that are subject to various rounding issues and, ultimately, are also usually not worth using in place of additional water pumps.
• Water treatment plants reduce the overall pollution level of your city, but this isn't a factor that scales. Either you have enough plants and their effect is successful, or you don't have enough plants and they won't have a visible effect on your city until you build enough of them.

​

What does the water system actually *do* and should I even bother implementing one?

The water system has one direct effect: the land value of any given tile drastically increases when it is watered.

You might be thinking "that's it?", but this has a few additional downstream effects that are pretty important. First, SC2K tightly ties land value to crime rate. RCI zones with significantly lower land values produce significantly more crime. So, providing water to your entire city can cut down on crime quite a bit all by itself, and it's the most cost-effective way of doing so because water pumps and pipes are a one-time expense. Police departments and city ordinances require yearly funding, and you might be able to make due with fewer police departments if your city has a significantly higher average land value than it would have without a water system.

The other notable effect that you can observe is that a fully watered city will develop its RCI zones more densely than a dry city would. I can't give an exact formula for this, but I can share my testing method. With money cheats, I filled an entire flat map with a pre-built city while keeping everything paused until I completely finished its construction. From corner to corner, everything was planned out and constructed before I ever un-paused the game even once to let anybody move in. The city has pretty much everything that you need: dense RCI zones (in the proper ratios for a high-population city), power, roads, enough ports/connections to satisfy commercial and industrial development, enough recreational facilities to satisfy residential development, just enough hospitals and educational buildings to maintain an A+ rating or close to it, some treatment plants to reduce pollution, and enough police departments, fire departments, and prisons to keep crime at a moderate-low level (lower-to-mid 20s) and to prevent the city council advisors from nagging me for more services. All city ordinances except the Finance group were also enacted and the property tax rate was kept at its default level of 7% across the board. I did not build any arcologies.

I then saved two different versions of this city: one with enough water pumps to supply water to 100% of the city, and another one with no water pumps at all. From here, it was just a matter of observing how the two different versions of the city developed. For the first two years, both cities developed almost identically, but they diverged after that. The dry city hit a population cap of about 200k after 5 years, then fluctuated about 10k from that in either direction in response to fluctuating zone demand and economic conditions. The watered city, meanwhile, reached about 250k population in about 7.5 years, and it then held to this population at a much more steady rate, barely changing from year to year, and maintaining very high demand for all 3 zone types. So, I'm pretty comfortable to conclude that in a city whose population stems primarily from dense RCI zone tiles (no arcologies, no light zones), a fully functioning water system can allow the city to develop about 25% more densely than a dry but otherwise identical city would. The land value of the watered city was also about 70% greater than that of the dry city.

Of course, if you don't really care about maximizing your population density or maintaining low crime and high land value, then sure, you can go without a water system. But I feel like most players would value those first two factors at least a little bit.

​

What about the "phantom water pump" trick?

This is something that's been known since the mid '90s that you might come across online if you're looking for tips. In short: if you construct a single water pump, connect that pump to the power grid, but do NOT connect the pump's water output to any other tiles in your city, then the game will operate under the impression that you have a water surplus. The graphs window will report a 100% water surplus, the status window will no longer nag you about "water shortage reported," and the newspapers will not spend any ink complaining about the issue. The reason for this can be better understood once you break down the formula used for the graph window:

(TotalOutput - WateredTiles) / TotalOutput

where TotalOutput is the number of tiles that your water system (pumps, towers, and desalinization plants combined) is currently capable of supplying, and WateredTiles is the number of tiles that are actually being watered. It rounds up to nearest percentage point.

Note that nothing in this formula takes into account the un-watered tiles in your city. If your pumps are only connected to a portion of your city but are outputting more than enough water for that specific portion, then the graph reports a surplus and you cease to get complaints about water shortages. This is why the "phantom water pump trick" behaves the way that it does.

In reality, all that this does is eliminate the nag messages related to the issue. It does not make your entire city function as if it's actually watered. All of the dry tiles in your city will still exhibit the same lower land values, higher crime rates, and hindered growth rates as normal. You actually have to connect your city to a functioning water supply in order to reap the benefits.

This trick can still be useful if you just don't care about developing a water system and just want to get rid of the nag messages. Just be aware that you're still living with the effects of a nonexistent water system even if you're not receiving complaints about it.

​

How can I maximize the output of my water pumps?

I'll cut to the chase on this one. The monthly output of a water pump can be precisely calculated with the following formula:

SeaLevel * 5 + BorderingTiles * 10 + Weather

This will give you the exact number of city tiles that the pump can supply water to over the course of the following month. There are 3 factors that feed into it. From most to least significant, they are the following:

• SeaLevel ranges from 0 to 31 and is fixed in place once you start the game. (The default terrain editor settings will set this to 4. If you started building on an automatically generated map and never adjusted your sea level in the terrain editor, then this is probably what your city's sea level is set to.)
• BorderingTiles is the number of adjacent fresh water tiles to that pump. (min 0, max 8)
• Weather fluctuates every month within a range from 0 to 14 in normal circumstances, with 7 being the average. In rare and especially severe weather conditions (blizzard/hurricane/tornado warning), this value can rise to 22, and in even rarer *sustained* severe weather, it can max out at 30. (SC2K Network Edition does not appear to have varying weather; this value is seemingly always stuck at 7 in that version of the game.)

The game takes the result of the above formula and multiplies it by 720 to calculate how many gallons of water a pump produces in any given month, and this is what is displayed when you click a pump with the query tool. However, it turns out that the water consumption for a single city tile is precisely 720 gallons per month, so I prefer to talk about water pump output in terms of tiles than gallons, since it keeps calculations simpler and easier to follow.

What should jump out to you the most here is how drastic the effect that the sea level has on the output of a water pump. Assume that you've built a single pump that is landlocked (no bordering water) and is operating in average weather conditions (weather = 7). Compare the performance that you'd get from it in 3 different cities with 3 different sea levels:

sea level 0 = 7 tiles of water
sea level 4 = 27 tiles of water
sea level 31 = 162 tiles of water

That is an insane difference. On average, a landlocked pump will perform about 600% as well at max sea level than it would at the default sea level. At minimum sea level, it would only perform about 25% as effectively as it would at the default sea level.

Now instead of a landlocked pump, consider a pump that is built on a neat and straight lakeshore so that it is bordering exactly 3 tiles of fresh water. I think this is what most players would typically gravitate toward when trying to place pumps optimally:

sea level 0 = 37 tiles of water
sea level 4 = 57 tiles of water
sea level 31 = 192 tiles of water

This gives a significant boost to a water pump's output at the default sea level and an *extreme* boost for cities that have the minimum sea level, to the point where I'd argue that building the pumps adjacent to water is a requirement for the latter. On the other hand, if you're building on a city with the max sea level and don't have any pre-existing fresh water tiles to build next to, then it's more worthwhile to just build landlocked pumps than it would be to terraform extra water tiles for you to build next to.

Also note that it's possible for any of the 3 contributing factors in this formula to be set to 0. If you have a pump built on a city with the minimum sea level, bordering no water tiles, and experiencing an especially harsh drought, then it will produce literally no water. That is brutal, and it is something that I have personally observed in testing. On the opposite extreme, if you build a pump on a city with the max sea level, bordering 8 water tiles, and experiencing an especially long and harsh hurricane warning, then it can produce enough water to supply 265 tiles all on its own. That is an incredible range.

Conclusion: If you intend to build a fully functional water system while also really trying to optimize your land usage, then it's advisable to use the terrain editor to create a completely flat map at the highest possible elevation and highest possible sea level. If you think flat maps are boring and want more varied terrain, then you'll have to lower the sea level a bit, which will nerf your water pump output to some degree. The more fresh water tiles you surround a pump with, the more you increase its output, but this effect is more important in cities with low sea levels than it is in those with high sea levels.

And to be honest, the way in which the sea level affects water pump output strikes me as either a mistake or a bug. This is actually something that's corroborated by the PPP strategy guide. On page 63, PPP claims that one of the factors that influences a pump's output is the pump's *elevation* above sea level: the greater the difference in height between the pump and sea level, the less effective its output. But it seems that in practice, instead of "difference between pump and sea level," the programmers just erroneously made this variable "sea level." Elevation above sea level actually has no influence in the game itself. (For what it's worth, PPP claims that this was a bug that existed in "early versions" of SC2K, but I've been doing almost all of my testing in the Win95 version, which came after Mac and DOS. I also checked the Network Edition, which had to have been one of the last versions of the game released, and this behavior is the same in that version as well. If anybody out there has observed different water pump behavior regarding sea level or elevation, then let me know what version you're playing on. I'd be interested to know if any of them actually did fix this.)

​

How do desalinization plants compare to normal water pumps?

Normal water pumps can work anywhere and are simply more effective when placed next to fresh water. Desalinization plants will *only* work when placed next to salt water. So, they're only ever useful in cities that have a coastline. The formula to determine their monthly water output is actually quite a bit simpler than the one for normal water pumps. It's just:

BorderingTiles * 20

where BorderingTiles is the total number of adjacent salt water tiles. What complicates this a little bit in practice is that this calculation isn't run just once for the entire plant, but once for each individual tile of the plant. Don't think of a desalinization plant as a single 3x3 tile building; think of it as 9 individual buildings working together, at least when it comes to calculating its output.

So, if the plant is placed right on a very even coastline, where 3 tiles of the plant's edge each border 3 tiles of salt water, then the total number of city tiles that the plant can supply water to is (3 + 3 + 3) * 20 = 180.

If the plant is placed on the corner of a coastline with a sharp 90 degree angle: (3 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 3) * 20 = 340. The tile of the plant at the very corner of the coast borders 5 salt water tiles instead of 3.

If three sides of the plant are covered by salt water: (3 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 3) * 20 = 500.

Theoretically, a single desalinization plant completely surrounded by salt water could provide water to 640 city tiles: (5 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 5 + 3) * 20 = 640. This does not account for the single water tile that you'd likely have to sacrifice to run a raised power line, which would reduce the maximum output to 580 tiles.

(You can verify these tile-based calculations for a desalinization plant by using the magic eraser trick to erase specific tiles of the plant. Furthermore, you can erase all the tiles of the plant that don't border salt water, and you'll lose no output in the process. Pretty nifty, if the unsightliness of the magic eraser's effects doesn't bother you like it does for me, that is.)

Desalinization plants are not affected by the sea level of the city or by any changes in weather. Because they're not affected by sea level, this increases their usefulness in cities with extremely low water levels but makes them borderline useless compared to standard pumps in cities with very high water levels.

To be frank, though, my overall impression is that a single desalinization plant will rarely ever be as useful as 9 water pumps placed in similarly advantageous terrain. Let's compare 9 pumps placed along a straight lakeshore (each pump borders 3 fresh water tiles) versus 1 desalinization plant placed along a coast (3 tiles of the plant each border 3 salt water tiles), both in a city with a default sea level (4) and in typical weather (7):

9 water pumps = [(4 * 5) + (3 * 10) + 7] * 9 = 513
1 desalinization plant = (3 + 3 + 3) * 20 = 180

In such a city, you would have to surround the desalinization plant on three of its sides with salt water before you start to get the same kind of output as you would from these 9 water pumps. And instead of going to the trouble of finding or creating such massively advantageous geography for the desalinization plant, you might as well focus your efforts on terraforming more advantageous geography for your pumps.

Let's try to tilt the environment as much in favor of desalinization plants that we can and see what we get. Imagine the same comparison above, only this time in a city with a sea level of 1 (the lowest possible that still gives us a saltwater body to work with) and in an extreme drought where the weather won't help our water pumps at all:

9 water pumps = [(1 * 5) + (3 * 10) + 0] * 9 = 315
1 desalinization plant = (3 + 3 + 3) * 20 = 180

Even in this case, the desalinization plant's output doesn't compare very well. Only when you compare a desalinization plant surrounded by salt water vs water pumps that do *not* border as much fresh water do you start to observe cases where the desalinization plant produces more water than the water pumps. So, I think it's safe to say that in most cases, you're going to get better results out of water pumps than you would get from desalinization plants that take up the same amount of real estate (unless you intend to take advantage of magic eraser shenanigans). I would only build desalinization plants in rare cases where the pre-existing geography gives you a ton of bordering salt water tiles to work with. Any manual terraforming seems to be better spent increasing the output of normal water pumps.

Finally, in any city whose sea level is 13 or greater, a desalinization plant will never produce more water than 9 water pumps in any circumstance.

9 water pumps (landlocked, drought) = [(13 * 5) + (0 * 10) + 0] * 9 = 585
1 desalinization plant (optimal conditions) = (4 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 5 + 3 + 4 + 2) * 20 = 580

PS: You might notice some extra details in the query window for desalinization plants such as "capacity," "salt/tons removed," and "employees." Absolutely none of the information here has any influence on the plant's output; it's all useless and seemingly random.

​

How exactly does weather impact monthly water output?

(This section is really only here to provide context for water towers, which are discussed later.)

Weather in SC2K varies from month to month, and it has a direct effect on how much water that your pumps can produce. There are 12 distinct weather conditions, but when it comes to their influence on the water system, they can be categorized into 4 different levels. In the Windows version of the game, the current weather condition will be explicitly named in the status bar, but in other versions of the game this is usually represented by a visual icon instead. Here are all of the weather conditions, categorized by their impact on the water system, with a description of (most of) their corresponding icons:

"Dry" weather:

• Cold - sun plus thermometer with cold reading
• Clear - sun
• Hot - sun plus thermometer with hot reading

"Normal" weather:

• Foggy - lots of clouds
• Chilly - cloud plus thermometer with cold reading
• Overcast - cloud

"Wet" weather:

• Snow - snowflake
• Rain - cloud plus rain
• Windy - cloud blowing wind

"Severe" weather:

• Blizzard
• Hurricane - palm trees in harsh wind
• Tornado - tornado

These weather conditions occur with slightly different frequencies. Normal, Dry, and Wet weather will each occur in roughly equal frequency (perhaps slightly weighted toward Normal), while Severe weather will occur very rarely (maybe one month every few years). When weather changes from month to month, it tends not to shift by more than 1 level of severity at a time. If the weather is Dry during one month, then next month it'll likely either remain Dry or shift up one level to Normal, although there is a small chance that it might jump up two levels to Wet.

Each of your water pumps receives a monthly weather bonus for how many tiles that it can supply water to. In persistent Normal weather, this bonus is equal to 7 tiles of water. In persistent Wet weather, this bonus will reach 14 tiles, and in persistent Dry weather, the pumps will eventually receive no bonus at all. It takes several months of persistent weather for this bonus to shift all the way to either extreme. What happens when the weather changes each month is that the simulation looks at the previous month's bonus value (which will typically be any number between 0 and 14), then the next month's target value (either 0, 7, or 14 depending on the weather category), and settles on the midway point between the two values to calculate the next month's actual bonus.

So, for example, if the current month's weather bonus is 7 tiles, and the next month's weather changes to one of the Wet weather conditions, then the weather bonus will increase to either 10 or 11 tiles, as that would be the midway point between the previous month's actual bonus (7) and the next month's target (14). If the month after that remains at the Wet level, then the bonus would increase to about 12 or 13. If the weather remains at the Wet level for several months, then the bonus value will eventually reach 14 tiles and stay there for as long as the weather stays in the Wet category. If the weather then sharply drops from the Wet level to the Dry level and stays at Dry for several months, then the bonus would be cut down from 14 to 7 in one month, then to about 3 or 4 the following month, then 1 or 2 the next month, and eventually bottom out at 0.

The Severe weather conditions will only appear very rarely, and they seem to have a target weather bonus of 30 tiles. It is extremely unlikely that your pumps would ever actually achieve that output, though, as this would require a sustained period of Severe weather that lasts for 5 months or more. In practice, Severe weather very rarely persists for more than 1 month at a time, and in my testing I've never once seen it last more than 3 months. In my observation, I noted a bonus of 14 in a Wet month, followed by a bonus of 22 in a Severe month (the halfway point between 14 and 30), then 26 in another Severe month (the halfway point between 22 and 30), then 28 in *another* Severe month (the halfway point between 26 and 30), and then finally the weather subsided to one of the lower levels. If it's possible for Severe weather to last indefinitely, then I would expect it to cap at a bonus of 30 tiles per month after 5 months based on that trend.

(Note that the Network Edition of SC2K does not appear to have varying weather conditions, at least not concerning its influence on the water system. In brief testing of that version of the game, I never observed the water pumps producing anything other than a bonus of 7 tiles per month. It never once shifted in either direction from there.)

When building your city's water system, you should take weather into account accordingly. Ideally, you should ensure that your system can consistently output enough water to cover the whole map even in sustained droughts. In cities whose water supply is handled solely by water pumps and nothing else, this means constructing enough water pumps to provide for the whole map even in months where the weather bonus for your pumps is 0 tiles. If you add water towers to your grid, however, then this means that you'll be able to store some surplus water during wet months to cover deficits experienced during dry months, which means that it might theoretically make more sense to settle on the number of water pumps required for *average* weather conditions rather than worst-case weather conditions. (Spoiler: Don't get too hopeful about that last statement.)

​

Can water towers actually make a water system more efficient?

Water towers exist to store water acquired during surplus months so that they can cover deficits that occur during droughts. Despite what the query tool tells you, water towers do not store "40000 gallons." They store "400 tiles of water." Each tile in the water tower carries 100x the capacity of water that would be consumed by any other building tile. (If SC2K was consistent in its reporting, then it would say that a water tower stores up to 288000 gallons of water, not 40000.)

Calculations concerning the water tower seem to always operate in exact multiples of 100 tiles and will round results to the nearest 100 when relevant. If your pumps are providing a monthly surplus of only 40 total tiles, then nothing will be added to the water tower. But if your pumps produce a surplus of 60 tiles of water, then SC2K will round this up to 100 and fill up your water tower by 1/4. Water shortages affect the tower in much the same way. If your pumps experience a deficit of 40 tiles of water for the month, then your water tower will cover this shortage without actually depleting its reserves, but if your pumps are running a deficit of 60 tiles of water for the month, then your tower will lose 100 tiles of water. (This rounding behavior can have rather strange effects in very small cities where 50 tiles is a significant percentage of the entire city. You can observe cases where the water tower will never fill up despite your pumps consistently running a surplus, as well as cases where the tower will never deplete despite your pumps consistently running a deficit. This quirk becomes less commonplace as your city grows in land area.)

With their function and behavior explained, now we can consider the strategic justifications for building them. Since this is a question of efficiency, our goal should be to design a water system that can supply water to the entire city at all times without ever being subject to a drought, while also dedicating the minimum amount of land area to such a water system. On one hand, we could rely on nothing but water pumps to hydrate the city, forcing us to do all of our calculations to account for the worst-case scenario (months in which we're in a drought and can't expect any weather bonus for our water pumps). On the other hand, we could use a mix of pumps and towers designed to produce enough water for the average-case scenario (months in which we're experiencing Normal weather with a bonus of 7 tiles per pump per month). It would require fewer pumps to produce enough water for the average-case scenario than the worst-case, and we can use that saved real estate to build water towers that handle the water surplus and deficit. We should also theoretically be able to take advantage of the rare Severe weather conditions that produce massive amounts of surplus water that would be wasted if we didn't have water towers.

I'll spoil the conclusion: Water towers are never worth it. As far as I can tell, it always makes more sense to build more water pumps in their place, so long as you're building them on optimal terrain and terraforming as necessary. Feel free to scrutinize my work below and see if I might have overlooked something.

For starters, because the sea level does not affect water towers like it does for water pumps, the capacity of a water tower becomes increasingly irrelevant at higher sea levels. Once you get to a sea level of 20 or higher, it never makes sense to build a water tower. At that level, a water pump is always guaranteed to produce at least 100 tiles of water per month, usually more. So, why would you ever build a structure that can only store (but not produce) 400 tiles of theoretical surplus water when you could instead just build a 2x2 grid of extra pumps that are guaranteed to produce that amount?

Since the capacity of a water tower is irrelevant at high sea levels, then it would stand to reason that it would be most relevant at the minimum sea level. This is also the case in which the weather conditions would have the most influence on the output of our water pumps, with more pronounced swings in surpluses and droughts, and would thus be the sort of situation in which water towers would be most needed. So, let's do the remaining calculations at minimum sea level to see if we can find a situation that justifies them.

Consider a very large city that consists of 9900 tiles that can be watered. (This would cover about 85% of the map when accounting for roads.) Now, let's carve out a corner of the remaining space to build a water system to serve the whole city. Turns out that a 19x19 grid that alternates between one column of pumps (P) and one column of fresh water tiles (W) will provide exactly 9900 tiles of water even in the worst-case drought:

P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P

190 total pumps
total output in sustained Dry weather (0): 9900 tiles
total output in sustained Normal weather (7): 11230 tiles
total output in sustained Wet weather (14): 12560 tiles

Because the above matrix of pumps does not have any water towers to assist with surpluses and droughts, that means that it has to have enough pumps to cover the whole city, even in long dry spells.

Now, let's see if we can design a system that targets Normal weather conditions, using fewer pumps and filling up the remaining space with water towers. Here's the same 19x19 grid altered to remove the last two rows and replace them with water towers:

P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P W P
T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T
T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T T

170 total pumps
9 total water towers
total output in sustained Dry weather (0): 8820 tiles
total output in sustained Normal weather (7): 10010 tiles
total output in sustained Wet weather (14): 11200 tiles
total water tower capacity: 3600 tiles

On average, this grid produces 10010 tiles of water per month, which is enough to clear the 9900 city requirement when it's consistent. In a harsh drought, the water pumps can only provide 8820 tiles of water for a city of 9900 tiles, a deficit of 1080 tiles per month. The water towers can provide a combined 3600 tiles to cover that gap, but it only takes 4 months of consistent drought for the supply to be completely exhausted. Unfortunately, droughts of 4 months or longer aren't particularly rare in SC2K, which means that this configuration just isn't good enough. I've tinkered with adding or removing more towers while still adhering to the 19x19 boundary, but no combination of pumps and towers seems to be able to completely avoid a drought. Severe weather conditions do not occur frequently enough to really matter in the grand scheme of things.

So, ultimately, I'm left to conclude that there's not really a practical use case for water towers.

​

Water treatment plants don't actually interact with the water system, but I'll talk about them for the sake of completeness.

Treatment plants don't actually interact with your city's water supply. They just lower your city's overall pollution levels. PPP recommends building 1 plant per every 20k citizens. In practice, I've built at least one city that seems to be fully satisfied with 6 treatment plants for a population of over 250k, so I'm not sure if PPP's math checks out here; there might be additional factors other than population that make a difference. In any case, it doesn't take much effort to determine the proper number of treatment plants for your city. If you haven't yet built a single water treatment plant, then just open the graphs window with the pollution line visible, build a treatment plant, and wait one month. If your pollution level drops by multiple percentage points, then it means that your water treatment network is doing its job and is not over capacity. If you don't observe a change, then build another plant and wait another month, and keep repeating the process until you finally notice a significant drop in pollution. If pollution ever spikes again, then it means that you might have to build another plant to reduce the pollution back to lower levels.

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