Hello - dumb questions from newcomer

[LlamaCat 0]

Hello all - I recently picked up SimCity 4 deluxe ... late to the party, eh?  Anyway I tinkered with SimCity 3 so I am somewhat familiar with the game.  This site has some interesting stuff but I can't find the answers to some basic questions. I am sure they are on here, I've just given up looking   Please help:

1. What exactly is the difference between a "plop" custom building and one that "grows"? If a ploppable one does not grow in the game naturally, why would I want it?  Does it actually function in the game with residents that go to work or is it just eye candy?  And for the ones that grow, how does the game decide when to grow them and how do I spot them when they do?  I guess what I am saying is that I'm not entirely sure how you are integrating custom buildings into this game when the game is randomly picking what types of buildings to appear in your zones.

2. How do I download other people's cities? I see you have a City Journal section but that just seems to be talking about the cities. I want to download and see the entire cities and maybe play with a few. I thought I used to do that with SImCity 3 on another site but maybe my memory is wrong here.

3. How is it that I got the username LlamaCat on this site, what with the Maxis fascination with llamas?    ok that last question is not entirely serious...

thanks!

[Godzillaman 21]

1-Residential plops are just eyecandy because they don't work like the grown buildings. commercial and industrial work like normal.

2-There is no section of cities to download. You would have to have everything downloaded in that city otherwise a brown box would appear. It would be to hard for the Simtropolis server to handle anyways.

3-Yeah....I can tell.

Welcome to Simtropolis! I hope you enjoy this site!

[Nardo69 51]

Welcome to ST!

There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers ...

1. A plopped Building is a building that you out directly in the game, like railway stations, police stations, bus stops or parks. There are commercial and industrial buildings that work also as ploppable but no residentials as Godzillaman already stated.

Growable buildings grow on zoned areas - that is residentials (green), commercials (blue) and industrials (yellow). Which one is growing is mainly the decision of the simulator even though you can incluence it within some limits.

2. You cannot download cities or regions as all players have a different plugin folder (with the exception of multiplayer regions where all players use the same dteremined plugins): I use more than a dozen different plugin environments thanks to the Startupmanager.

In almost all cases you will encounter massive problems when you try to run another player's map - from which a massive occurance of brown boxes is the least garve one.

3. O yeah, Llama, Broccoli ..

Bernhard

[LlamaCat 0]

thanks for the answers! that all makes sense to me...