Skyro City tips opinions critiques?

[cavelltodd 0]

Here are some images of my first city in Simcity 4. I've been playing Simcity since its release on the SNES and have been horribly addicted ever since. For Simcity through SImcity 3000 I used money cheats (used a trainer for Simcity 3000 that gave me a gazillion bucks). After growing tired and bored of the game I decided to finally give it a whirl without any cheats at all. To my amazement the game became so much better and I was actually able to build lots of successful cities.

When Simcity 4 was released I didn't have a computer that was capable of running it smoothly. I was also baffled as to how to build a successful city. I ended up ditching Simcity 4 for these reasons and stuck with Simcity 3000. I was also upset that 4 didn't have any cheats for gobs of money. Well, after playing 3000 for a while and finally learning how to build cities without cheats I decided to give 4 another whirl...and this is where I am at today. I started out with the tutorials and, after several failures, have finally been able to build a city that works...so far.

My city, Skyro City, has a population of 49,766. My expenses are 11,600 and my income is 12,856...I know I'm cutting it close here. My average commute time is about 23 minutes and all amenities are in the green...except pollution and safety (just need to increase the funding at my local police station). Average income is around 51,000. My biggest demands are for R$ and High tech industry. The ticker keeps complaining about "No water, no way" but everybody has water. I have one east/west bound freeway with one exit to my city. I plan on adding a north/south bound freeway and then adding a beltway once my city grows a little more and I can make some more money. What is your average profit when your city is around $50,000? I'm not sure if a $1,000 profit is too low or just about right. Looking at the pictures and the stats I gave you what sort of suggestions can you make? If you need more stats let me know and I will provide them to you. Let me know what you think...not bad for a newbie I think!

Here are the pics

Here we have my freeway

Here's a closeup of my downtown area

Here's my city as a whole

Here's a leg of my industrial sector

here's another downtown area with a diagonal avenue

Here's the other leg of my industrial sector

Here's where Skyro City began...two coal power plants and lower wealth everything

Here's a zoomed out view of my wealthy district.

I'm using the London region and this city is built on the biggest tile of that region. I have incorporated bus stops, passenger rail stations, elevated rail to subway. All new commuter rail will be subway and the above ground rail will remain in old town. Like I said, I plan to incorporate a north.south freeway and a beltway like you see in Las Vegas and Minneapolis (I-494, 394, and 694)...can you tell where I'm from I think this sort of configuration really helps with efficiency in transportation when supplemented by commuter rail options and effective avenues.

Are my industrial zones too small? should I break away from zoning purely on the edges?

Sorry that this post is kind of manic...I'm just typing as I go. Also, sorry that my pictures aren't beautifully photoshopped...I know not how to use that fangled program lol. Anyway, let me know. If you need more info I'll be more than happy to provide it.

THANKS!

Oh yeah, thought of another question. My sims are begging me for an airport and I figure it's about time to build one. Where is the best place to build an airport and how will that affect the land value and overall desirability around the airport (especially for commerce)? Are the gains from the airport worth the monthly expense and initial financial cost? Will I see significant gains in revenue from adding an airport?

[jaris 5]

You have a really nice city there, and as far as one can tell from your pictures you've figured out your own unique style of playing the game.

You posted a lot of questions, but instead of answering them, I'll ask you some questions:

What is your goal with your city?

Do you want it to be as big as possible?

Do you want to make as much money as the game allows you?

Or do you aim for realism? Or do you want to build an utopisticly nice city?

The game offers you a lot of possibilities, you just have to build the way that pleases you

In my opinion, as long as your city isn't going bankrupt everything is fine

-Jaris

  Edited October 12, 2011 by jaris  

[cavelltodd 0]

Thanks for the reply! Sorry I didn't post in the correct forum I wasn't sure which one to post in. Uniqueness is my number one goal when I build a city. I have certain fundamentals basic fundamentals I stick to when building a city (i.e. placement of zones, parks, bus stations, and train stations). As far as the big picture goes I like to react to what my city is doing and let the game tell me where sims want to live and commute. Simcity 4 is my first attempt at building an extensive transportation system. In previous Simcity games my transportation systems consisted of only roads and rail (rail would pretty much follow all the roads)...I never used highways or subways. Now that Simcity 4 has the rush hour expansion I feel that it provides enough of a dynamic to all the different forms of transportation to actually want to utilize highways and such. So, my main goal with this city is to build as efficient of a transportation system as possible while still building a city that is unlike any other standard city layout. I would also like my city to be as big as possible.

As far as money goes. I'm happy that I'm pulling a profit but I wish I was pulling a bigger one to fund my highway project while still maintaining acceptable levels for safety and education. It seems the more I expand the more education facilities and utility buildings I have to build which is causing my profits to stagnate around 1,000 per month. Maybe as I expand even more the profit margin will slowly increase.

As far as realism goes I want my city to be realistic in the fact that my cities don't look like a cookie cutter city (perfectly laid grids, equal size zones, etc). I am shooting for a realistic layout that has elements of reactive development and pre-planned contrived development. I take my inspiration from cities like Boston, London, and other "old style" cities because those are the most interesting to me. I aim to be realistic but original at the same time.

It's a great game and it is light years better than Simcity 3000 in my opinion. The element of having more control over the funding of various items really adds a unique dynamic that hasn't been seen before. Being able to play both city and region is also really cool! My wife is a graphic designer and is really competent in photoshop; I gave her the instructions for building a grayscale region so that she can design a region for me to play that I can name after her. I think being able to do that is really cool (even if she could care less that an imaginary region was named after her lol). This game offers so many great dynamics and endless possibilities for both the creatively minded person and the cookie cutter style of play. No way is better than the other and this game rewards either style immensely. Sorry that this was probably more long winded than it needs to be. I'm new to the forum and wanted to share my opinion with everybody so they can get an idea of who I am and what I enjoy about this game. Thanks for reading!

You have a really nice city there, and as far as one can tell from your pictures you've figured out your own unique style of playing the game.

You posted a lot of questions, but instead of answering them, I'll ask you some questions:

What is your goal with your city?

Do you want it to be as big as possible?

Do you want to make as much money as the game allows you?

Or do you aim for realism? Or do you want to build an utopisticly nice city?

The game offers you a lot of possibilities, you just have to build the way that pleases you

In my opinion, as long as your city isn't going bankrupt everything is fine

-Jaris

[MandelSoft 2,769]

Here are some of my tips:

• Think big. Connect multiple city tiles to each other and let them function as a whole. In my newest region, my central city consists out of 10 large city tiles.
  
• Use a slope mod: slope mods makes building roads and railways more challenging, but it does add to realism. Slope mods prevent steep slopes from occuring in your transportation network.
  
• Prevent level rail crossings. I see a lot of them in your pictures. Level rail crossings are bad for traffic flow. Build overpasses and underpasses whenever you can and if it's a minor road, don't cross the rail at all.
  
• Use the Real HighWay Mod instead of the standard Maxis Highway: although the RHW may be more space-consuming then the standard freeway (which I call Maxis Highway or MHW) and it may be hard to handle for beginners (although there are some great tutorials on SC4Devotion.com and on YouTube), the RHW allows you to build custom interchanges and various freeway setup, adding up to the uniqueness of your city. Plus it can be aestitically pleasing. Here's an example of what you can do with the RHW:
  
  
  
• Don't leave dead-end roads and avenues. Let only streets have dead ends, but try to prevent that as well.
  
• Use smooth curves for roads. Looks more realistic and is aestetically pleasing.
  
• Only let main roads connect to your avenues and freeways. Helps traffic flow and looks a whole lot better. Example:
  
  
  
• Try to build "High Density" Low/Medium Density Ressidential Zones: What you do is zone 1x1 Low or Medium Density Ressidential. This will create small zones almost fully occupied by a building. Although you won't have skyscrapes, these areas will look quite dense and it gives a great effect.
  
• Don't try to make hard borders. Don't let your city just end. Try to make a smooth transition between rural and urban envoirments. Let low density development gradually transform into high density development towards the center of the city
  
• Zone large agricultural areas around your city. This will look great and more realistic.
  
• Download some custom buildings. The more buildings you have, the more variation and more uniqueness. There are some great buildings on the STEX and LEX.
  
• Download a terrain mod, water mod and some alternative trees. Again, more variation in trees and a more beautiful terrain and water (most cities don't have clear light-blue water. I use a dark-blue variant instead).
  

Best,

Maarten

  Edited October 12, 2011 by mrtnrln  

[Ltw 401]

Wanting too much in the beginning is bad for your financing. I agree with maarten about thinking big, but that's most of the time also at a larger time-line. You could save some space for highways and other expensive projects for later, when you can afford it but in the beginning I wouldn't be too hasty with building expensive things if I were you. You could for example save a six tiles wide part of land for your highway and if needed you could build a avenue on that place (avenues cost a tenth of a elevated highway). If the avenue doesn't have enough capacity anymore you just replace it for a highway, since you've saved a space which is six tiles wide placing ramps wouldn't be a problem.

If you want a big city it is important to keep the demand high. The RCI-graph helps with that. If you have a demand of 24.000 you build less then that. This is important because you avoid a negative demand which could cause people leaving and could even cause financial failure and debt. Not building too much is very important. Connecting your city with other cities (like maarten mentioned) is also important in this case. If your city is that big that you don't have the capacity to lower the demand you can build the needed zones in neighboring cities. Your people will travel between those cities.

Good luck!

Ltw

[EyeofMobius 27]

Another advice approach that may be helpful also is some creative tax manipulation. In your tax systems you can slowly raise and lower taxes to squeeze more money out of your sims; and by slowly I mean only by a couple of fractions of a percent per year and with sufficient happiness boosters.

When it comes to taxing your residents it is most effective to have lower taxes on the R$ average taxes for R$$ and High taxes on R$$$.

R$ doesn't give you much tax money per sim but they give you lots of money bacause there are so many of them and you can gain more money off of them using mass transit. The result of this is that the tax rate makes a very small difference on how much they give you.

R$$$ gives lots of money per sim but it is more expensive to keep them happiest. Near as I know however it is sometimes too hard to keep the wealthy out of your cities. Notch their taxes up slowly overtime and you will be able to afford all those things they want at the cost of having a bit more sprawl since R$$$ doesn't pack in tight as nicely as the others.

R$$ is basically a balance between the wealthy and poor but they can become your bread and butter to make mass transit work.

Taxing your Commercial is a little more finicky since it has 5 different things and different rules for putting it into a city. However I have found that Co$$ & Co$$$ ones respond well to higher taxes as does the Cs$$$. I find the Cs$ & Cs$$ hardest to keep in a city so many of them get marked historical and get tax breaks.

Taxing Industry is something I just like to raise slowly over time depending on the resources they are consuming. Many on here seem to like crushing dirty industry out with instant 20% taxes but sometimes they can be a nice thing to have if you are going for realism within function.