Money and Custom Airports

[Evil.Iguana 4]

I've decided to take the plunge into creating a reasonably nice looking custom airport. Obviously getting it right is going to be a long process. There are so many options that it's a bit intimidating just figuring out how each piece fits together with every other piece. My plan is to start relatively simple and add details over time, the main first step being to get a runway that is properly scaled for the game and the aircraft that are using it.

The problem I'm running into, though, is cost. My city is around 190,000 sims. My previous airport, the AC functional airport (stage 4 I believe) was quite affordable. The terminals and tower I'm using to replace it are also reasonably balanced cost wise. But runways, taxiways and ramps are both prohibitively expensive to build and hugely costly to maintain.

I'm really confused as to why this should be the case. The pavement systems are, as far as I can tell, purely visual flare to satisfy people such as myself who want a realistic looking city. I don't understand why they have any cost whatsoever. As far as I can tell, my airport with just a few terminals and a tower is performing it's intended function perfectly well. Why is making it look good so expensive? Is anyone aware of the rationale of the content creators in making these lots perform this way? Is there something happening behind the scenes that justifies these costs? Furthermore, how do you folks with these huge airports in your cities afford them? Is it just assumed that everyone will use cheats?

[GMT 389]

do you have but the slightest idea how much building an airport from scratch costs in real life?

several billions.

the piece of disgrace they're working on in Berlin at the moment is already well established in the billion euro regime, yet rising. and this ridiculousness of a misplanned piece of self-monumentation of Berlin's major was already built on top of an existing airport.

But I must say, for an eye-candy-only use of the lots, especially since it takes oh so many of them, you can at least ask the reason for it.

The only advise I can give - apart from cheating the money - is practicing and tweaking the layout of your airport on a completely unrelated city tile, with cheated money, thus streamlining the creational process and lowering costs once you go "life" and build the airport in the city you actually want it to have.

That said, I never mind about the money, I cheat my way to it anyways, I'm beyond actually playing sim city 4 since day two and accepted playing it more like a virtual model rail road, creating "worlds" to my likes rather than facing the economic and social challenges of running a city.

  Edited September 14, 2012 by GMT  

[jacksunny 741]

If you want to avoid cheating, you can use the "moolah" cheat to take out a "loan." What you do, is you use the cheat to add some money into your account. Keep track of how much money you take. Then, later on, you can begin repaying it. Use the moolah cheat again to lower the amount of money you have, and subtract what you took out off the loan amount. For example.

You have 500,000 in the bank, then add 1,000,000 to get 1,500,000. Save the amount you borrowed, so 1,000,000, in a .txt file.

Now let's say that 10 years later, you have 2,000,000 in the bank and want to repay 100,000 of this loan. You would type moolah 1900000 to lower the amount of money you have. Then in the .txt file, you would change the number to 900,000 because this is now what you owe.

Sorry if this was confusing. If you don't have it already, you will need to download the Extra Cheats .dll.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

I think you could actually get it done without cheats.

My advice to you is to practice with the pieces in an empty 'test region', and fully plan the layout before you start building. Build a whole replica of the airport, and familiarize yourself with things like piece rotation to minimize bulldozing. If you do all this, and avoid major mess ups (save as often as you can) you can probably build a fair size custom airport for a million or two.

[Evil.Iguana 4]

The vibe I'm getting is that, basically, what I want to do isn't possible. The sets were apparently not designed to be used with limited money or by anyone whose city isn't already "done." Why the builders decided to make them cost anything, given that there would really be no downside to making them free, is what confuses me.

The last sandbox-y sort of game I played was Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. That game also had a vibrant mod community. Standard operating procedure for visual items that had no gameplay effect was to make them free or really really cheap. Not doing it that way just seems illogical to me. I guess what I will have to do is start learning how to edit these things myself so I can adjust the values in a way that suits how I play. The downside for that is that, with a nearly 9 year old game, a lot of the useful information on modding has probably gotten lost.

[jacksunny 741]

Actually, there are still a lot of people who mod this game. I'd ask about that in the Modding forum.

The reason the price is so high is because, as mentioned before, real life airports cost quite a bit to build. It's just more realistic that way.

[chimeran 208]

The vibe I'm getting is that, basically, what I want to do isn't possible. The sets were apparently not designed to be used with limited money or by anyone whose city isn't already "done." Why the builders decided to make them cost anything, given that there would really be no downside to making them free, is what confuses me.

The last sandbox-y sort of game I played was Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. That game also had a vibrant mod community. Standard operating procedure for visual items that had no gameplay effect was to make them free or really really cheap. Not doing it that way just seems illogical to me. I guess what I will have to do is start learning how to edit these things myself so I can adjust the values in a way that suits how I play. The downside for that is that, with a nearly 9 year old game, a lot of the useful information on modding has probably gotten lost.

use ilive reader to tweak building cost, link to the tutorial is listed

3.7)Analyser: this button accesses the “Exemplar Analyser” window and displays a certain file type in this window (which can also be displayed in the Main Window of the Reader). With this Exemplar Analyser window, there is a whole range of other items [of which some will be explained further below]. This Exemplar Analyser window is what most people would be most interested in, generally speaking. This Exemplar Analyser window contains many (exemplar) files that contain a lot (not all though) of the games data for the; buildings, building costs, building/lot properties, items, effects, tools, props, dataview/datamaps, graphs, MySims, Advisors, Budget, and many more items.

http://www.wiki.sc4d...Beginners_Guide

  Edited September 14, 2012 by chimeran  

[Magneto 316]

It's easy task to modify plop and maintenance costs. Either with reader as Chimeran pointed out, or which is even easier for that purpose.

That said, it might take some time to edit all runways/taxiways costs to your likings, there's a bunch of lots...

Still Moolah tchnique will be faster, I'd personally go with that option but on the othr hand getting the grips of basic modding never hurts

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing, you must realize the impossibility of creating even a "proportional" airport for major aircraft in a tile that has a maximum dimension of 5.7 Km (diagonal). Most runways these days are much longer.

[chimeran 208]

Still Moolah tchnique will be faster, I'd personally go with that option but on the othr hand getting the grips of basic modding never hurts

i agree w/magneto .... using moolah is always fast and i have to use it w/all the content i have

[airman15 4,111]

That or you could use the ordinance tweaks which will add (an insane amount) to your income. These can be found on the STEX..

[Zodicus 34]

do you have but the slightest idea how much building an airport from scratch costs in real life?

several billions.

the piece of disgrace they're working on in Berlin at the moment is already well established in the billion euro regime, yet rising. and this ridiculousness of a misplanned piece of self-monumentation of Berlin's major was already built on top of an existing airport.

But I must say, for an eye-candy-only use of the lots, especially since it takes oh so many of them, you can at least ask the reason for it.

The only advise I can give - apart from cheating the money - is practicing and tweaking the layout of your airport on a completely unrelated city tile, with cheated money, thus streamlining the creational process and lowering costs once you go "life" and build the airport in the city you actually want it to have.

That said, I never mind about the money, I cheat my way to it anyways, I'm beyond actually playing sim city 4 since day two and accepted playing it more like a virtual model rail road, creating "worlds" to my likes rather than facing the economic and social challenges of running a city.

This is what engineers do in real life. They build scale models of structures before the actual construction phase. I certainly recommend doing it like this, that's what I did That why they call that sandboxing. Go play to your hearts content!

[GMT 389]

The downside for that is that, with a nearly 9 year old game, a lot of the useful information on modding has probably gotten lost.

Au contraire!

The modding community is SO strong, they still find new possibilities today.

Needless to say that almost everything found yet still works and is still practiced regularily.

I suggest you take a deep breath and plunge into the 9 years of modding and experimenting practiced...

[airman15 4,111]

The downside for that is that, with a nearly 9 year old game, a lot of the useful information on modding has probably gotten lost.

Au contraire!

The modding community is SO strong, they still find new possibilities today.

Needless to say that almost everything found yet still works and is still practiced regularily.

I suggest you take a deep breath and plunge into the 9 years of modding and experimenting practiced...

Spot on statement! We still see guys messing with the inner workings of the game. Even something simple like adding new automata still counts as a modd

[Evil.Iguana 4]

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing, you must realize the impossibility of creating even a "proportional" airport for major aircraft in a tile that has a maximum dimension of 5.7 Km (diagonal). Most runways these days are much longer.

Shouldn't be a big issue. I'm not going for absolute realism, just for something better than the pathetically short runways that are included in the game. At any rate, it will be quite a while before my city needs something that can handle max take off weight 747s. I'm really aiming for something more modest at the moment. I want something that looks like it can handle private jets and moderate sized airliners. I think part of why I'm running into problems is that I'm building something for a growing city rather than trying to improve a basically "finished" city that has enormous surplus income.

The downside for that is that, with a nearly 9 year old game, a lot of the useful information on modding has probably gotten lost.

Au contraire!

The modding community is SO strong, they still find new possibilities today.

Needless to say that almost everything found yet still works and is still practiced regularily.

I suggest you take a deep breath and plunge into the 9 years of modding and experimenting practiced...

I agree that the modding community is definitely strong. My concern is mostly with the fact that a lot of resources for self help that used used to exist may have gone offline in the ensuing years. Just for an example, the original Maxis SC4 website with modding tools and info is long gone and it took me a little while to find all the resources from it hosted elsewhere. The wiki that Chimeran linked also makes references to images that no longer show up. There are other instances too, but I think you get the idea. That doesn't mean the information isn't out there, it just means it's a bit harder to find for a person like myself who doesn't want to annoy too many people asking questions that could be answered through a little research.

Actually, there are still a lot of people who mod this game. I'd ask about that in the Modding forum.

The reason the price is so high is because, as mentioned before, real life airports cost quite a bit to build. It's just more realistic that way.

In the real world every piece of equipment and infrastructure has a purpose. Very few of the airport pieces we're discussing do anything but look nice. Furthermore, there is no conversion rate for going from simoleans to dollars to compare prices and the game does not closely mimic the real world in how infrastructure spending affects the economy. The bottom line is that realism is immaterial in this case. The realism I'm interested in is visual, in that I am trying to replace an ugly asset (default style single lot airports) with a nice looking one that has the same function (custom multi-lot airport) but am being hampered by the fact that the latter is hugely more costly than the former. Ultimately I think that the decision of the creators to build the content in such a way is illogical, but I will ultimately correct the problem.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The best route is to just eliminate the financial constraints. If you don't have it, download the Extra Cheats .dll, place it immediately under your Plugins header (no sub-folders), and use the command:

moolah <amount> where <amount> is any unpunctuated number up to 9999999999. This number replaces the balance in your treasury.

You can do this as often as needed. I generally use increments of 500000. That is, if the treasury is showing 123,456 I use moolah 623456.

  Edited September 16, 2012 by A Nonny Moose