Difficulty issues?

[Helenne 0]

Whenever I play, I know most things, but whenever I try - it's like the opposite of what it should be.

Whenever I aim for 400,000+ I just can't - and usualy just stay stuck around 10K-30K.

To get more, I need to build 70% of landscape as industrial.

And whenever I play, I MUST have the firemen at right spots. If there is 1 spot that's not included at protection - there's a 50% chance per minute (as I presume) it will set on fire.

Third is that it's almost impossible to gain income once you added firemen, police and water. If I don't add those then I can't play because of the spam of popups "OMFG U GET DA WATERZ NAO" for example...

But if I add, I may have like on the start 2100$ Inc and 2500-3100$ Out depending if I degrade.

Now, what really gets my mind is the difficulty now.

Easy-Medium-Hard.

What is difficulty? Everyone knows it, but there's NO difference except the fire frequency and start money.

I like to ask if it's something with my system.

#####  System Information  #####

OS:           Windows 7 Home Premium  (6.01.7600)

DirectX:      9.0c

CPU name:     Pentium® Dual-Core CPU       T4400  @ 2.20GHz

CPU speed:    2194MHz

Memory:       4096MB

Screen size:  1366x768 (32bits)

Video card:   ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650, 1024MB

Audio card:   {1}   {2}  

If it's nothing to do with my system, then is it the game? And honestly I don't know how to track patch numbers or such so...

A few guidelines may help, or suggested mods that could fix this.

Or if it's actually that I need a patch? I took some patches from the official site btw.

[SirTiggerEsq 0]

Are you using Dense Industrial zoning? The problem may be that the density of your zoning is too low, and to maintain this, you'd need to build out constantly, which you can't do because SimCity restricts this. Try zoning some medium and high density areas across all your zones. Your population should increase along with the job capacity of your industrial and commercial areas.

In regards to the income issues, remember that you have two options to make money. You can either cut spending or increase revenue. In your case, it sounds like you can't cut your spending, so to increase your income, try adding tollbooths on main arterial roads, increasing taxes or enabling business deals and gambling ordinances. Once you have a positive cash flow, it's a lot easier to expand your city.

Good luck, and welcome to Simtropolis!

[Helenne 0]

Thanks for the welcome!

But I actually do anything for the income.

When I perform 5 tax, or 20, or the default 9 - it all changes extremely (as intended) but changing back to 9 after a while from 5 may cause all the (erm... BNI in my language) to drop almost fully down at negative.

Though, I am actually very carefull when it comes to density. I have a variety of low, med and high. I usualy have low for 15min, med for about a hour and mix for about another hour, and then high... Yet, it's quite hard to maintain 100K+ at a steady income.

Maybe I'm just a *****, dunno. But doesn't explain that I'm almost forced to do everything to allow growth...

The only times I really get good income and good growth is to build a river in the middle where industrial is 100% on the first side and mix of the two others on the other side which still messes up the pendling and roads.

All other strategies tend to just screw up lol.

But to say it blankly, I think the game is actually broken when it comes to the difficulty and certain needs. As written, firemen is mandatory - water or not if theres a single unmarked spot theres a 50% chance per minute to catch fire. <_

Criminality also never stops even if I have 100 prisons and 25 police departments. (confirmed by myself using Weaknesspays)

Study is also another problem, even if I build 1 of each (H-School, University, Library, Museum, etc) in a district, they get like halffull on the study even with the light density.

Frankly I think the rates is just too high at requirements and have it hard understanding if it was a part of the game that it should be this hard even on "Easy". Though I tried "Hard" and there's actually no difference except the start cash and the rate of catching fire.

Might be a tiny theory that the difficulties is simply just messed up.

[SirTiggerEsq 0]

From the sound of things, you are doing everything right. Unfortunately that means I can't really help you as it sounds like your game is determined on being impossibly difficult. If this happens every time you build a city, my only suggestion would be to try reinstalling the game, and then just pick Easy anyway just to be safe.

If it's making the game unplayable, there are a variety of mods on this site which allow you to enact radical ordinances to stop crime, fire etc. occurring at all - while these are technically cheats, in your case you are definitely excused haha.

Good luck, sorry I can't really help you any more D:.

[Yuu Caa Sim 55]

One of SimCity 4 more unique aspect is regional play. You are now no longer limited to one city, but can play many other cities around it and build them all together. In fact, I would say that the game occasionally REQUIRES you to play with multiple cities, specifically specialized cities.

Every city can contribute to the growth of others by affecting demand in other cites, as well as providing and taking utility resources. What this means is that you can now put all your undesirable industries and power plants in another city, and come back to "clean" city and still benefit from the demand and satisfaction that industrial zones provide, without having to deal with the resources they take up directly (at least until you go back into the industrial city).

So to make a large city, you can put your industrial in a neighboring city tile and then continuously switch back and forth between these cities, growing them until your population increases. Your residential city will have higher desirability, leading to fuller buildings and more cash. This cash can then go to pay for education, health, and power from the industrial city. The industrial city gets money from the trade, which you can then spend on providing fire services without having to spend anything in that city on education or health.

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I've definately seen how fires can happen even with full water. Industrial zones have very high flammability. However, it usually doesn't light up every minute. I think there is a mod on the STEX by bones1 which reduces the amount of fires (or maybe it only reduces the amount of riots). Try searching for him and see if you find anything.

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There's usually only a moderate positive effect on demand from lowering taxes. The neutral value is somewhere around 8.5%. If you are looking only at the 3 bar RCI / BNI graph, then there may actually be some wealth types in demand, but the other wealth types are negative so much that you only see negative. You should check the expanded (12 bar) RCI / BNI graph (by clicking on the small one at the bottom of the screen) to see which wealth of RCI / BNI are in demand. Then look for places on the desirability data map for those wealth types where it is green. Zone there, and you should see some growth (provided all required services power and water are met).

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As for density, it's only helpful to zone higher density if your total region (all the cities) have enough population of a certain wealth type to grow the higher density buildings. Medium wealth is most useful after 1100 of a certain wealth type. Lower wealth (R$, Cs-$, I-D) can build high density at around 40000, but other wealth types typically have to get to around 100000 before the high density can grow. So you can save your money by waiting until you can grow higher density. You can see an approximate population for each wealth type in the "jobs and homes" graph in graph panel.

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Police can only catch criminals. Crime will still happen even with full coverage. In fact crime levels is influenced by the wealth of a sim and the education level of a sim. Lower wealths are more likely to commit crimes. Higher education levels decrease crime. If you get an EQ of 200, you should have no crime. You will find that full education is even more expensive than providing full police coverage, since in order to educate sims completely you'll also have to increase their health so they live long enough to learn a lot. Some crime is a fact of life for sims so they won't mind a low rate.

I'm also not sure what you mean by ["they get like halffull on the study even with the light density."] Can you clarify what you mean?

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The difficulty rate affects starting cash and easier difficulty also provide a small boost in tax dollars and demand rates. I don't know about the chance to catch a fire; might be interesting to test out.

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I hope this post is clear in explaining some of how the game wrote; I was very drowsy when writing this. If you need any more clarification, just let us know and someone will help you out.