Simcity 4 tips and Tricks

[hazo2010 0]

Do you want a few tips for your simcity game? Well here's the place for you.

If you have a few tips of your own post them for other people to read! Even ask questions and i will try and answer them. If i can't then you can try and answer it for them.

Hope you have a few tips or tricks.

Hazo2010 

[joshriddle 29]

Here is one of my tips:

Keeping things realistic not only beautifies, but keeps the city running smoothly. It has to function just like an RL City to get the best usage and functionality of it. Like commercial is zoned along the big avenues, and the small streets or roads branch off from that avenue, and off of those roads or streets is where residental goes, avenues, lead to highways, highways lead to downtown etc etc...

I have also found out that (with me at least), a lot of times the metropolises fail harder than the suburbs or rural towns should they happen to fail.

But usually failure these days is impossible considering almost all of us probably know the cheats, and use cheat mods or things that make running a town easier (e.g, the NAM helps traffic issues tremendously).

[hazo2010 0]

I don't use cheats but my biggest city had a population of about 500,000!

Thanks for replying!

Hazo2010

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The No. 1 tip is to make frequent use of the Omnibus.  There are years of experiential data in there.

Now, as a playing tip, Josh is right.

If you try to do something artificial, like restricting a city to a specific zoning, you will have a hard time.  The game is programmed to prefer balance.  Anything else, and you are fighting the game's paradigm.

If you are starting up a city, think about where cities come from.  Often they start as a cross-roads village in farming country and grow from there.  Sometimes they grow up around an industrial complex, or a port, or a communications nexus such as the intersection of two highways.  Pick an origin, and set it up, then grow your city naturally from there, following the demands, and ignoring, for the most part, the advisors who have their own agendas for their aggrandizementl.  Every one of them is after the mayor's job.

[joshriddle 29]

You're right on that one.

Usually my rural farming/forest regions have small highways running through them. The one I am building right now has a highway that stems from suburbia, across 10 large city tiles to a mountain, crosses over the top, goes back down, takes a turn out west, goes straight to arctica. The highway covers the entire region. Also there are smaller highways, and in the places these highways intersect, I build a crossroads town there.

Usually where the main highways of the region come together in a Y-Stack or a 4 way major traffic interchange, is where I start suburbia. Then once the suburbs are done, I simply tear out some of the suburbs, zone high density, if conditions are right, voila. Downtown.

Speaking of high density, you should never worry about high density residental, especially high wealth and high density residental. I have found that high density residental is completely contrary to what the program wants you to build.

Another thing too... you'll see CJs all over the place now days that consist of mostly or entirely rural communities. When Maxis let out the game, we had metropolis in mind. While none of us wouldn't appreciate a small downtown area in the center of our suburbs from time to time, still, ruralism is more popular then urbanism among us now days.

The reason for this is because the SimCity 4 Community is hooked on custom content, and I have found a giant portion of custom content is dedicated to ruralism, and having said that everyone is hooked on custom content, that sets it up like that.

[Mikeaut1 261]

There have been some articles published in the Omnibus from SC4ever.com that offer some pretty good tips and tricks. Check the new articles out here!

[hazo2010 0]

Thanks for all your tips and Tricks!

I will try them out.

Hazo2010

[dghh70 5]

Use mass transit in the beggining so sims use them. Make a small network first and then over time increace it. Eventually you'll be making lots and lots of money from it

[donkey_kong_jack 0]

I agree 100% with A Nonny Moose about the advisors. Don't follow your advisors advice. They just want you to spend more and more money on services.

Also my advice is to plan your traffic routes. I like to place a zone and then surround it with an avenue. Not planning your traffic routes can lead to some major problems later on.

e.g. You have to tear down a bunch of houses to build an avenue because a different road is completley overcrowded. This can become very frustrating.

Don't follow what Maxis suggests to do in the beggining of the manual. Your city will completely fail. (I've tried what they suggested several times and all of those citys failed.)I suggest using Peg's hydrothermal power plant available on SimPeg. This is because it is inexpensive, produces a fair amount of power and no pollution!

One more thing: Don't build dirty industry in a city where you want $$$ residential, there will be so much pollution you will never get your hgh wealth. That is all I have to say. Good Luck everyone!

[DahMayorDefacto 1]

Don't underestimate standard rail. It's awesome when it comes to transporting fast, cheap, and with high capacity, but if you want many smaller stops then you should go for commuter rail. If you have downloaded the Elrail-Standard rail changer, you can have elrail or subway in your downtown and change to heavy rail further out.

Often, my city goes trough a ''boost era'' aroud 150,000 inhabitants, were the high-density development really sparks off, and i usually get profits of up to 6000! Use this profit to balance, when removing all of your dirty industry, removing the pollution, and then if you think that your city is readym rezone the industrial and you should get much mor hitech and manufacturing industry.

[z1 566]

There are various references in this thread to what the program wants you to build.  I certainly think that they're correct regarding the vanilla SC4, and what the advisors say even makes a lot of sense there.  But I got into modding because the program wouldn't let me build what I wanted to, and I found that I could change that.  Specifically, I was trying to build a faithful replica of Chicago, with its large, spread-out zones.  As people have noted, the program will fight you hard on this issue, and the advisors will argue against it.  I found that the main part of the program that was preventing me from what I wanted to do was the traffic simulator, which is why I built what has become the NAM traffic simulator.  Now large zones and multi-tile commutes are quite practical if you are careful about how you build your traffic system.  I also discovered along the way that a large portion of what the advisors recommend is designed to allow your city to function properly with the Maxis traffic simulator.  Using the NAM traffic simulator, this advice is no longer necessary, and can be ignored.

Originally posted by: joshriddle

Speaking of high density, you should never worry about high density residental, especially high wealth and high density residental. I have found that high density residental is completely contrary to what the program wants you to build.quote>

This is one area where the CAM turns out to be very useful.  I use it in all my cities, and I have no problems generating high density, high wealth residential areas where I want them.

More can be done here, though.  The game's census and workforce drives are skewed toward low wealth.  This was necessary when using the original Maxis traffic simulator, as the endemic "abandonment due to commute time" tended to lower the wealth level of cities overall.  But it's no longer true with the NAM traffic simulator, which is wealth-neutral.  An option to adjust the census and workforce drives to be more wealth-neutral would open up a whole new rang of possibilities for this game.  And it wouldn't be that hard to implement.

[donkey_kong_jack 0]

Hey everyone, I'm back with a few more tips and tricks.

Place parks! If you want to see those high rises then build lots of parks in your residential area. In an area where you have zoned for $$$ residential, but are only seeing those ugly brown box condo things, place a few parks in the area, advance in time a bit, and watch the high rises grow. Works for me every time!! Also do the same in your Commercial zones, except use plazas. Always remember that water is not the only thing you need to get high wealth, you need to provide your sims with plenty of services too. In one city, right off the bat I zoned for high wealth, built a school, a medical clinic, several parks, a bunch of different transportation options, and water, and got high rises almost right away.(Don't do this though, it cost a fortune. Just an experiment.)

I quote this line from the ea games simcity website under the "Getting Skyscrapers" Section:

"You need to build your city wider before you can build it taller".

This is not nessiscarily (sorry for the spelling) true. I've found that if you force your sims to build up by only zoning a small amount of residential, it works! Try it!!

If you are making way more income than paying expenses, lower your taxes. This will greatly increase your demand.

A good way to make a lot of income fast is to zone a lot of dirty industry, then set the tax rate to 20% or something like that. The industry doesn't seem to go away, so it's easy money. (Your City Planner might complain a little but who needs him.)

Another way to make a lot of money is to do the U-Drive it missions. They will put money into your bank acount, but lower your mayor rating a little bit.

DON'T TAKE OUT LOANS!!! Loans are very bad in the long run because they constantly drain money from your bank account. Not Good!

This is all. One again, Good Luck!

[joshriddle 29]

Place parks! If you want to see those high rises then build lots of parks in your residential area. In an area where you have zoned for $$$ residential, but are only seeing those ugly brown box condo things, place a few parks in the area, advance in time a bit, and watch the high rises grow. Works for me every time!! Also do the same in your Commercial zones, except use plazas. Always remember that water is not the only thing you need to get high wealth, you need to provide your sims with plenty of services too. In one city, right off the

bat

I zoned for high wealth, built a school, a medical clinic, several parks, a bunch of different transportation options, and water, and got high rises almost right away.(Don't do this though, it cost a fortune. Just an experiment.)

Parks or plazas are both good. Parks and plazas are exactly the same thing to the game. Parks and plazas have the exact same effect on the city, except they look different.

I quote this line from the ea games simcity website under the "Getting Skyscrapers" Section:

"You need to build your city wider before you can build it taller".

That is what many people screw up at. Actually, people who go for urban from the start may succeed, but then in the long run thsoe cities will fail so hard.

If you are making way more income than paying expenses, lower your taxes. This will greatly increase your demand.

True. However don't go so low that you lose too much income.

A good way to make a lot of income fast is to zone a lot of dirty industry, then set the tax rate to 20% or something like that. The industry doesn't seem to go away, so it's easy money. (Your City Planner might complain a little but who needs him.)

Correct there, too. I do that all the time. And also, trash the City Advisor, he is a filthy dirtbag just like the rest of them advisors

Another way to make a lot of money is to do the U-Drive it missions. They will put money into your bank acount, but lower your mayor rating a little bit.

Most UDriveIt missions unlock rewards. If you truely want them, use the You don't deserve it cheat. These though will cause your mayor rating to drop drastically.

DON'T TAKE OUT LOANS!!! Loans are very bad in the long run because they constantly drain money from your bank account. Not Good!

Personally, the game is against loans. I tried it once and even still, it caused my city to last 5 game years longer before it came to it's dark age and failed.