Realism Mod Project

[cpsof95 0]

Modding SimCity 4 to Achieve Ultimate Realism

As great as SimCity 4 already is, it needs a nice touch of added realism. So it's time to start modding!

So I'm going start working on a mod, which would make the game economics much more realistic. Please note, that I'm not going to modify any visual effects or anything like that, only the numbers in the game.

The goal is to achieve ultimate realism and make it possible to face challenges that mayors face in the real life.

Things to fix:

- unrealistic building and maintenance costs

- larger coverage areas for civic buildings

- traffic and mass transit issues

- everything that we come up with in this thread

So where to start? The main problem in the game is that most buildings are way too cheap to build. You don't agree? Well, let me explain.

Example: Hospitals

Let's take a hospital for example. It costs §1100 to build. If you look at your tax income, tax rate and the population graphs, you can estimate the income level of your sims. Your poor sims earn about §1 per month, while rich sims earn well over §10.

So we could think that §1 equals $1000 or €1000 in real life. I will use dollars from now on, although I live in Finland and we have euros here (euro sign may cause problems to some). I also assume that $1=€1, when I look for the real-life costs, just for the sake of simplicity.

How much should the hospital cost then? I did some googling, and found out that real-life hospitals may cost 25 million or even 200 million. If §1=$1000, the hospital should cost somewhere around §25,000-§200,000. That's a bit more than §1100, don't you think?

Now what would happen if a hospital actually costs maybe §100,000 in Simcity 4? It just doesn't make any sense to build a hospital in a little town with 3000 people, as it does now. Obviously, schools, fire stations, police stations etc. would be a lot more expensive as well.

Some might think that huge building costs would make the game unplayable, but I don't agree. For example, if I have to take a §100,000 loan to build the hospital, I would have to pay §700 interest each month. But if you city is big enough, you should expect a higher raise in your net income even when the maintenance costs of the hospital are taken into account.

And of course, the coverage area (and capacity?) of the hospital would be a lot larger than it is now (maybe even infinite). So you don't need hospitals in every corner anymore.

Example: Traffic

Let me take another example: railroads. Recently a new railroad was built in Finland. The length was 63 km and total building costs were 331 million euros. That would be 5250 euros per meter, that's §5, right?  I think we can assume that one tile in SC4 is about 50 meters long. So each railroad tile should cost §250. At the moment, it costs §8!

In Romania they're building a highway: 151 kilometers and 324.6 million euros. That's 2150 euros per meter. So a tile of highway should cost about §100 in SC4. Surprisingly, that's about as much as it does cost in SC4!

But not everything in SC4 is too cheap! The maintenance costs of all the road types are too high, especially for the avenues and highways. In SC4, you must pay §1 per highway tile each month, while something like §0.1 might be more realistic. If someone has some data on this, I'd be happy to see it.

Power Plant Issue

Well, here's something I've been wondering a while already: As we build a power plant, why do we have to keep funding the plant? Do the sims get free power? The power plant should give profit! And the same question for the water system. Shouldn't the sims pay the expenses as they use water? At least that's the way it goes in Finland. City-owned power and water companies make profit!

Bus Dilemma

And another problem, the simcity1.dat file shows that buses are faster than cars. Although that might be good for the gameplay, it's not realistic. Buses are always slower than cars, unless they have bus lanes to drive past traffic jams. Making buses slower would make sims drive more, but hey, that's the way it goes in real life!

Let's do this together!

Well, here are some early thoughts of mine. I hope this project would attract a lot of interest. Discussion, criticism and suggestions are more than welcome. If someone wants to do some research to find out realistic costs for some services in SC4, that would be great. Please provide a link to the information source if you do that.

By the way, have you noticed that it takes §2 to bulldoze about 50 meters of road, but §3 to plant a tree?!

[Sim shady 12]

well written out ideas there. One thing you should take note of is that there are several mods that address building costs and coverage out there, though none cover the detail you are talking about. I wish you luck on this project

[oceanmariner 0]

Sounds great! I'm especially with you on the bus issue. So far, I can't think of any other problems. If you know how to make a modd, I say go for it!

[opiq 0]

nice, it sounds very nice.. btw, i think 1 tile is not 50 m, but 16 m..

[Porter 68]

Sounds interesting! I'd like to see this possibly come into play!

[Andreas Roth 629]

Well, while your calculations about building a hospital etc. are right on the money (pun intended ), there's one issue that you have to take into account: At the beginning of a city, you need a lot of money to build and maintain a minimum infrastructure. Usually, I have millions in my coffers in later stages of a city, but within the first few steps, I'm always near bankruptcy. Your mod will only work if you provide enough cheap alternatives for schools etc. And while you're right that the sims should pay for the power they get, you have to take into account that they pay taxes, which is your primary income. The game can't be made infinitely complex, so I think Maxis just assumed that "taxes" is the combined amount of money a sim has to pay every month, regardless if it's actual taxes, power, natural gas, water or whatever. If you think about it, most taxes are paid to the state, and not directly to the city, so it's not very realistic per se. The reason why buses are faster than cars is very simple: Since the pathfinding engine always looks for the fastest connection between a residence and a job, it would never choose public transportation if it was slower than a car. If you set it lower, buses will not be used by most of the sims anymore.

[patriots_1228 51]

all the transit issues have been fixed by the NAM....thats there turf. rest sounds good though.

[cpsof95 0]

Thanks for the comments! Andreas pointed out a few issues I should consider:

1) Yes, early stages are difficult. This mod should force people to use clinics, small fire stations, police kiosks etc. But I think it would be realistic to let the city have about 3000 residents before these services should be provided. Yes, you get a lot of whining and moaning from the sims, but that's just the way it goes. Of course, I must make sure I'm not making it too hard to get the city to grow. I'm going to set starting funds on the hard dificulty level to zero, so you must aggressively take loans to get your city going. And the later stages shouldn't be any easier. Maybe things should just get harder and harder as your city grows.

2) The tax rate in SC4 is only about 5-10%. This rate doesn't make it possible to provide free energy, free water, free education, free healthcare etc. to everybody. The tax rate should be well over 20% to make that possible. So the sims must pay at least for some of their services, which means lower maintenance costs as the service fees offset the costs of providing the service. I haven't tested it yet, but if some sims will use buses although they are slower than cars, then we shouldn't have a problem. Most trips should be made by car even in the poorest cities.

And to patriots, NAM has fixed some flaws in the transit, but not all of them. I'll come back to that later in this project.

Because now it's time to take the first step in this project. And that would be power plants.

A little experiment showed me that sims use about 0.1 MWh of power / month in their little residences. Quite surprisingly, this is pretty much the same as in real life.

Next step was to gather some data for different kinds of power plants. How much do they give power, how much did the plant cost and how much does it cost to produce power in such a plant?

Let's start with wind power plants. Medium-sized power plant's output power is about 1 MW, which is 700 MWh/month (200 MWh/month in SC4). The price of a power plant is about $1000/kW. So the medium-sized power plant would cost about $1,000,000, that's §1000 in our game. Annual maintenance costs are low, only about $20/kW. So we get $1700/month for our plant, that's §1.7/month. I think we can safely ignore that, and set maintenance costs for wind power plants to zero.

Note: To ensure stable power production, some wind power plants have diesel engines. Since wind power plants work reliably in SC4, we can assume that they have diesel engines. This increases the building costs by about 50%, which is taken into account in the table below. Wind power plants can only be used about 30% of the time. The remaining 70% must be covered with the diesel engine. I assume the maintenance costs of diesel engines to be 25% higher than for the oil plants, since small engines are less effective.

Before I move on, it should be noted that the other power sources are mostly high-capacity solutions in real life (except solar power). But on the other hand, the plants in SC4 don't take much space, so we can assume that they are very small units. So we should compare the output power of real life plants with the investment costs and maintenance costs. Once we find that ratio, we can set the plant capacity in the game to a level which would be good for the gaming experience.

Here's how I calculated the costs. I found data how much it costs to build a plant relative to its output power ($/kW). Let's take §2/kW, for example. Since the unit of power in SC4 is MWh/month, we want to calculate how much it costs to build a plant which produces 1 MWh/month, if the investment costs are §2/kW. First of all, §2/kW equals §2000/MW. There are 30*24=720 hours in a month. So to give 1 MWh/month, the plant's output power should be 1/720 MW = 1.4 kW. So if the investment costs are §2/kW, this plant would cost 2*1.4 = §2.8 to build. Then we set a desired capacity, 5000 MWh/month, for example, and it would cost 5000*2.8 = §14,000 to build this plant. The maintenance costs were calculated with the same principle.

Here are the costs (in § in relation to the output power that I found out by searching the web. In addition, the normal capacities of such plants are mentioned (MWh/month).

Wind

Investment costs: 2.1

Maintenance costs: 0.06

Capacity: 700

Natural gas

Investment costs: 0.7

Maintenance costs: 0.025

Capacity: 250,000

Coal

Investment costs: 1.4

Maintenance costs: 0.03

Capacity: 150,000

Oil

Investment costs: 0.5

Maintenance costs: 0.07

Capacity: 125,000

Solar

Investment costs: 3

Maintenance costs: 0

Capacity: 100

Nuclear

Investment costs: 2.8

Maintenance costs: 0.01

Capacity: 500,000

How about hydrogen plants then? The hydrogen plant looks like it's using fusion power (not the hydrogen power used in some cars already). As there are no fusion power plants yet, there's no data either. So these figures should be adjusted so that they're good for the game, yet somehow "realistic". Here's my suggestion:

Hydrogen

Investment costs: 2

Maintenance costs: 0.005

Capacity: 1,000,000

These plants produce a lot of energy, so they don't cost too much to build in relation to the output power. The fuel is inexpensive, so the maintenance costs are low.

Note: The capacity of the solar plant is in relation to the size of the solar plant lot in SC4. It would be great if every plant would have a reason to use it, that is, no plant should be better than another one in every scenario. Unfortunately, I don't think we can do that with solar plants, though.

Observations

1) A new city should start by using wind power. Other plants are just too large. This is realistic too. A small town in the middle of nowhere is not supposed to build a coal plant to produce energy.

2) Natural gas plants are relatively cheap to build and maintain. These plants should probably be large to make other plants useful.

3) Coal power is quite expensive to build, but relatively cheap to produce, and the plants shouldn't be too large.

4) Oil plants are cheap to build, but very expensive to maintain. These plants shouldn't be too large either. Coal and oil are sort of opposite solutions.

5) Nuclear plants are a high-capacity solution. They cost a lot to build, but they give very cheap power.

6) Hydrogen plants would be the ultimate solution for energy needs.

Suggestion

As the plants in SC4 are small in size, the plants should probably only produce about 1/5 compared to the capacities in the table above. Since the sims are supposed to pay for the energy they use, the city would only pay for the energy it uses (street lamps, bureaucracy, hospitals, schools etc.) Let's assume that the city only pays for the 1/5 of the energy produced. After some rounding, we would get these costs for the plants in this mod:

Wind

Cost to build: §1500

Monthly cost: §8

Capacity: 700

Natural gas

Cost to build: §35,000

Monthly cost: §250

Capacity: 50,000

Coal

Cost to build: §42,000

Monthly cost: §180

Capacity: 30,000

Oil

Cost to build: §12,500

Monthly cost: §350

Capacity: 25,000

Solar

Cost to build: §300

Monthly cost: §0

Capacity: 100

Nuclear

Cost to build: §280,000

Monthly cost: §200

Capacity: 100,000

Hydrogen

Cost to build: §400,000

Monthly cost: §200

Capacity: 200,000

What do you think?

Edit: Fixed investment costs for natural gas and oil.

P.S. It seems that coal power is always a bad choice compared to natural gas. Probably the monthly cost of natural gas should be increased, and decreased for coal, reflecting the fact that gas may sometimes be hard to get, while the supply of coal is virtually endless. Any other ideas?

[cpsof95 0]

Could someone tell how much energy a "full-sized" city takes in SC4?

[Andreas Roth 629]

It depends very much on the structure of a city, and if you use custom content that might have skewed stats (many older BATs are using the default values the Plugin Manager assigned, and they are not always comparable with the in-game stats). A fully developed city with lots of skyscrapers might need around 100,000 MW, which is roughly the capacity of the nuclear power plant that you suggested.

[Za 164]

Getting away from power plants for a minute.....Ever notice how even if it's only a few blocks, the sims complain about their commute? The average commute time is from 8 to 15 minutes in my cities. My dad drives well over 15 miles (maybe more) to his work, as I'm sure many do. It takes him about a half hour to get to work, while the sims are mad if they have to walk/drive several blocks. What i'm getting at is: Is there any way of re-setting the 'long commute' time to make it more realistic?

[cpsof95 0]

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to adjust commute times, since NAM does that already.

Anyway, I have made some tweaks to the power plants, and here's what I came up with:

Wind

Cost to build: §1,200

Monthly cost: §50

Capacity: 600

Natural gas

Cost to build: §38,500

Monthly cost: §1,250

Capacity: 50,000

Coal

Cost to build: §25,000

Monthly cost: §400

Capacity: 18,000

Oil

Cost to build: §3,500

Monthly cost: §400

Capacity: 7,000

Solar

Cost to build: §210,000

Monthly cost: §50

Capacity: 10,000

Nuclear

Cost to build: §225,000

Monthly cost: §900

Capacity: 80,000

Hydrogen

Cost to build: §500,000

Monthly cost: §1,200

Capacity: 120,000

I decided to make coal a reasonable choice by making the plant a lot smaller than the natural gas plant. I also made coal a bit more cheaper to produce.

Nowadays oil plants are only used as power reserves. In SC4 power reserves are unnecessary, so I made the oil plant very small, so it could be used as a short-term solution before buying a bigger plant.

With solar plants you should think that the city has built a big solar plant somewhere out there. As in reality, solar plants cost a lot to build, but the maintenance costs are lower than for any other source of power. If you have some extra cash in your city, solar power is the way to go.

For nuclear and hydrogen plants, I tuned down the capacities to make the plants useful even without regional play.

The mayor should face at least these decisions when building power plants:

1) As a small town, should I go with wind power a long way and then build a coal plant to get cheap energy? Or should I build an oil plant early on as it's very cheap to build?

2) Is it better to invest in coal power in medium-sized city, or should I go for a more long-term solution with natural gas?

3) With a big city, do I want to take the risk with nuclear power, and is there enough energy usage for a hydrogen plant? Or do I have tons of cash and a few solar plants would solve the energy problem?

Overall, every power plant should now be useful in some scenarios. Any comments?

[cpsof95 0]

Does someone know how to edit the maintenance costs of transit network (roads, rails, highways etc.). I could only find a place to edit the building maintenance costs.

I've been working on the transit costs today. There will be a huge increase in the mass transit costs. It's been way too cheap in SC4. For example, a subway station costs

[crazyyaya 4]

This project is overall a good project, but I don't think you should change all the costs in the game. If you change the costs of the maxis lots or roads, what about custom lots, all of a sudden, the custom lots are going to look very cheap compared to the maxis buildings. If you have a way around this, I would gladly download this mod.

[cpsof95 0]

Unfortunately, that is so true. I don't think there's any way I can mod the prices of custom lots.

It all started when I realised how ridiculously cheap it was to build a hospital, and then I found out that almost everything is too cheap in SC4.

Probably I should make separate mods for each sector: power plants, transit, civic buildings and others. There shouldn't be any problem only using some of the mods, as you can't substitute a road with a hospital.

Another problem is that I don't really have any experience playing with large cities, so some buildings are quite unknown to me. I guess I must do a lot of testing before my mod is working well.