Beginner Tips and City-Building

[Selphy 69]

So I've always liked playing SimCity games and have started with 2000. However, I don't think I'm very good at them. Randomly got the urge to play 4 again so I bought it on steam, installed it, got NAM and SPAM farms and started it up.

I never liked the idea of building a region and so I usually tried to create a self-sustaining city which always ended in failure for me. So I looked for some tutorials online and posts on how to build cities. A lot of the videos on youtube were helpful, but at the same time don't give much detail and half the time, it's just building a giant grid in the beginning.

I found soldyne's "Making Money The Easy Way" post on the Omnibus and started to follow that, since it gave step-by-step instructions on how to develop a city and actually tried to teach you what to do. Following that, I managed to build on a large tile, a large suburban city mainly populated with 1x1 low density residential, a ton of low density commercial, and a bit of medium density HT. The city has a population of 33k people and most of the civics. It has schools, high schools, and hospitals. Police stations were never needed and only one fire ever broke out so I put a small fire station there. Monthly income was around 24k and spending was 12-14k. No dirty or manufacturing was built.

I built an adjacent city on a small tile next to the suburban city which supplied power and garbage collection. Also in that city I built a ton of dirty industry which eventually turned into manufacturing.

Now this is where things deviated from the guide. The demand for manufacturing never rose as high as it did in the guide. As such, the industrial city never took off and barely made more than it spent. About half of the tile was developed into buildings as there was never any more demand.

Demand for HT rose in the suburban city so in another adjacent tile, I built a HT city, like in the guide. Just threw a ton of medium and high density industry and hoped the entire zone would turn into HT buildings. Didn't quite work out that way. Maybe a fourth of the buildings developed and the zone was just stagnant. I threw in a couple bus stops and subways and connected them into the suburban city hoping it would attract more people to work there and provide the transportation they needed. People in the suburban city still had the unemployment symbol above a bunch of home and no demand for any industry.

Following the guide, I built a more urban area south of the suburban city. Filled it with medium density residential and commercial zones and let it run itself. Placed civics as they were needed but the zone never really took off. All the zones developed but I was still making less than I was spending and a lot of the places weren't abandoned, but didn't have full capacity of people living there.

With all that said, I managed to do better than my usual, but overall, I think the region failed. I feel like I'm missing something that is preventing me from developing my cities. Most topics I read, people say the game is super easy which makes me think that I'm just not getting something. I made a residential/commercial city free of crime and pollution. I made an industrial city to provide the jobs but the demand was never high enough to develop the industrial city. The demand for HT never rose enough for the HT city to take off. And the medium density residential/commercial city just sucked. Is there some glaring problem I'm just not seeing?

I thought maybe the suburban city was too educated and well to want to work in manufacturing anymore, but then the demand for HT never rose high enough to supply enough jobs. And the demand for commercial offices was high, but in the medium density commercial city, those zones never developed enough, only into small buildings. I rezoned some of those medium density residential zones into high density since the demand for residential in general was high. Only one giant residential building zoned, which housed like 4k people in a max of 6k.

If anyone can make any sense of this, can you help me?

Soldyne's Post in case anyone wanted to look it over and see where I might have went wrong

  Edited April 26, 2011 by Selphy  

[Vern 29]

Hi Selphy and welcome aboard! You are definitely on the right track by reading the articles in the Omnibus. Take a look at this article, too. I think if you try this method it will allow you to get a better grasp of the interactions between the different zones. It also allows you to see how transportation affects things at a very simple level. It did it for me and hopes it works for you, too.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Allow me to also add a welcome.

With the NAM and the SPAM in place, you have an opportunity to start at the very beginning and to on forever because there is no end.

If you want to create a very basic village and grow it into a large metropolis, pick a large tile and try this:

1. About 8 grid squares from the edge draw a street that runs to the edge
   
2. Now, draw another street orthogonal to the first one so that you get some squares that are about 8 x 8.
   
3. Using a road tile cursor, run about five of your street tile off the edge, so you have have exports
   
4. Now, using click and hold, create six farms in the squares
   
5. Add a wind power plant
   
6. Let the farms develop.
   
7. After you can see what's going on, add a few 1 x 2 low density residential lots directly on the farm lands (each)
   
8. Add one or two single occupancy commercial lots at the cross roads
   
9. Watch this go profitable.
   

This is an example of how cities start up in RL from farm lands. It is a little different if you have a shore line or a river, but essentially it really is the same.

After this, you might add a fire station, then, maybe if you can afford it, a school. A branch library can easily replace a school for quite a while. As long as you stick to single occupancy lots and farms, you don't need water. Water supply will give you better buildings.

How you expand this is up to you. Watch your profit and income, and only do things you can afford. It will take you about six months of RL time to build a city this way especially if you run in hard mode.

[EyeofMobius 27]

It really is just about getting a feel for it all. The tutorials are all great ways to go about this. If you have a main city on the go that is your baby dont be afraid to make a sandbox region that you can experiment with ideas that you want to try without risk to your main project. There are many places in the growht of a city where you can rightly dictate that even though the sims want it doesn't mean they will get it; examples being water and education not really needed until you have the budget to go forwards with bigger development.

Keep plugging away and experimenting and you will find your groove.

[His Divine Hand 244]

Soldyne's tutorial may not be applicable in your case due to the presence of the SPAM mod. This mod alters several features with farms that make the gameplay different than usual. In fact, you should be able to accomplish better results with just agricultural industry than the Soldyne tutorial figures for.

[Selphy 69]

So you're saying that instead of building an industrial city next door, I should build an agricultural city to supplement jobs?

Also I'm just kind of confused on the demands, and how they work with each other. In the beginning, sims want dirty and agriculture right? Then as they get smarter, they start to want more manufacturing. Then once they get longer life spans, they want HT, right? So with my city of 33k people who all have high education and healthcare and no pollution, what I'm wondering is why isn't the demand for HT as high as I'd want it to be?

Also, what factors dictate when demands for commercial offices and such go up? Increase in intelligence and longer life span as well?

I can get a tile filled with sims easily, but what I don't know is how to build from there. With a population of intelligent, healthy sims I thought demand for HT would be super high. However the demand wasn't as high as I'd like. The sims had almost max demand bars for all wealth levels of residential and $$ levels of commercial. So to deal with that and keep my suburban population crime and pollution free, I built an adjacent city with tons of medium density commerce and residential, but all the sims didn't move. The city never flourished and is barely breaking even.

Going back to the suburban city, they're still low on jobs and the city is pretty much stagnant. I want to know how to manipulate the demands. Is there some other type of city I should build to connect to? Was a 1x1 residential suburban city a bad idea?