Beginner questions about cross-region links

[DanielCoffey 2]

Hello folks. I have just taken the jump into SimCity 4... after a huge break. I last played the SimCity series back in SimCity 2000 days. Wow! Now I feel old... and I have some questions mainly to do with the links between regions.

I understand that the key to growing your smaller regions is to link with their neighbours and either produce something that the neighbour wants or consume something they generate. I get that you can trade utilities between regions and I see that if you link regions together with a transit network then goods and people will move between them but my main question is this... how far do these links extend?

Imagine a strip of three small land-locked maps in a row. Towns A, B and C, say. If A is mainly residential, if B is completely empty (apart from a highway) and C is mainly industrial, will sims and goods go between A and C via B or does the link only work for direct neighbours?

In addition, does the simulation keep running in all your regions while you are playing in one city? Will fires break out, budgets drain or swell, power plants age and so on in the cities you are not currently looking at or are they static?

My next question is not to do with regions but to do with mods. At the moment I have a clean copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe from Steam. I am considering switching it over to Left Hand Drive since I am in Ol' Blighty and I have seen that the NAM installer has you choose between LHD/RHD when installing. I have seen some reports of post-switchover players having issues and I wondered if I will be excluding myself from any major mods if I do this. Should I switch now before adding anything or just get used to driving on the "wrong" side of the road?

Finally I have seen reports of some user-created bug fixes that I should consider... something to do with the Opera House and Crime problem? Are these fixes I should address now before I start playing?

I am sure I will come up with other questions... especially when I start looking at the texture replacement mods and new buildings but that is probably enough for now.

Thanks for the assistance,

Daniel.

[DavidB_ 83]

For a start, the cross-city transport simulation is awful! There is one particularly annoying problem, where if you connect three or more cities in a loop, sims will come from one city and travel straight through to the other, as the game forgets their city of origin. This is know as the Eternal Commuter Bug. Also, although goods do appear to leave a city, they do not carry on. To be honest, you should almost forget about integrating cities at times. It's a joke.

I live in England too, but I primarily use the PowerPC Mac version, which is locked into RHD, I believe. There are sometimes issues with NAM and LHD, as well as other plugins occasionally, so I would personally leave it in RHD. Just remember which side of the road you're on when you return to reality

These pages below are useful for finding out more about mods. If you have any more questions, don't be afraid to ask!

  Edited October 8, 2012 by DAB_City  

[Jasoncw 12,060]

Hi

imo the region system in SC4 gives a false impression of how connected the cities really are. From my understanding, the cities only know how many extra jobs/residents are in the neighboring city. So in City A, there's a sim that needs a job, and there's a job in the adjacent City B, so the sim commutes to the border. At the border the sim just kind of disintegrates and joins the rest of the sims who become a new number, which is the number of sims coming from City A. When you re-enter City B, those sims find new jobs and the commute pathfinding happens. The cities have absolutely no awareness of what's going on in the other cities, everything is abstracted at the border. It reminds me a little bit of the black hole information paradox. It's like the border of the city is a black hole and everything that goes into the border is just compressed into a new number and all the information about its past is discarded.

The way that it deals with commute time, is when a sim goes to the border it just adds a flat number to the commute time to account for the distance they will presumably be traveling in the neighboring city. For this reason your commute times will probably be longer if the sims have to cross the border to find jobs.

Maxis advertised the region feature of the game and suggested building single use cities (one city being industrial, the other residential, etc.) but the way the game actually works that's not a good idea. It's better to have a good balance in each city.

The links only work for direct neighbors. So between the border of A and B, extra jobs/workers will be abstracted into general numbers. And then at the border between B and C extra jobs/workers will also be abstracted, but they'll happen independently of each other. City A doesn't know that City C exists, and even if it did, it's not aware of any of the transportation network in City B to know if it could actually get there.

The simulation only goes when you're playing that city. So one city might be at year 500 and the other at year 15. If you don't go into a city for a long time there might be drastic changes in demand the next time you enter, so it's good to periodically go into all your cities and let the simulation run for a little while to let everything balance out.

I'm pretty sure that most of those fix modds can be put in at any time. I think the worst that would happen is you'd have to demolish and rebuild something. Modds in SimCity 4 are pretty flexible.

[DanielCoffey 2]

Thanks for the replies, folks. I had hoped that it would be a bit more intelligent but I can imagine the pitfalls of having to run all cities in a region for trades and commutes to be accurate.

So, if I understand it correctly, Sims in City A will look at the Demand Summary for City B, see that there are jobs available and will commute to the border. If they get there in good time they count as happily employed and drive home at the end of the day and if not they go home and sulk in front of the TV. I presume that if I visit City B I will see random Sims appearing out of thin air at the border, driving to the employers and going back to the border at the end of the working day.

It sounds like a good idea to keep the game in RHD mode to avoid future mod issues. I don't want to exclude myself from enjoying some of the excellent mods that members here and the other sites have worked on. I am reading about SPAM (and its necessary dependancy) at the moment.

Once again, thanks for the help.

[Shortsonfire 67]

Do you mind if I add questions to this?

If cities A, B and C are waterfront tiles, and A and C have seaports, are goods transported or are they blackholed? Ferries lead to the never ending loop right?

Similarly, how do airports work across a region?

[arozarker12 51]

Enjoy yourself! I like the SPAM program for the variety of farm crops and the irrigation to mostly because I like how it looks as well! Easy to please I am! I also added a few homes, apartments and business because the standard maxis ones get really, really repetitive to me. Just take baby steps and try out a few things at a time until you are happy!

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Do you mind if I add questions to this?

If cities A, B and C are waterfront tiles, and A and C have seaports, are goods transported or are they blackholed? Ferries lead to the never ending loop right?

Similarly, how do airports work across a region?

All freight (goods) goes to the big bit bucket in the sky once they reach either a seaport or the edge of the city. There is no intercity trade, only employment.

Airports are eye-candy but do give the C cap a lift.

  Edited October 8, 2012 by A Nonny Moose  

[Shortsonfire 67]

All freight (goods) goes to the big bit bucket in the sky once they reach either a seaport or the edge of the city. There is no intercity trade, only employment.

Airports are eye-candy but do give the C cap a lift.

Oh... That's slightly disappointing. I guess that's the game! Thanks for the information.

[KonstantinII 1,106]

You also need opera house fix for the opera to function correctly

[jdenm8 362]

Sims can actually travel form City A, through City B and into City C when the NAM is installed (the capability is there for it to happen Vanilla, but the travel time limits are set far too short to allow it to happen), but more often than not, the Sims will end up Eternally commuting. If you want to try it, open City C, zone your Commercial/Industrial, build a connection to City B, wait for the commercial/industrial to be built and then save and close the city. Open City B, run the road to connect with City A, wait a few in-game months, then save and close the city. Then open City A and zone Residential, wait for it to build, then save and close it. Reopen City B, wait a few months, then save and close. Open City C again and commuters "from" City A should have found jobs in City C.

There is no trading of goods at all in the game. Once a freight traffic unit reaches either a Seaport or a Neighbour connection, it is marked as resolved and the game does nothing more with it and it is not added to the availability tables of neighbouring cities. Commuter traffic is handled much the same way, except it's added to a table in the neighbouring city's savefile, which tells the game to create X number of commuters of N Travel Type at the associated neighbour connection.

  Edited October 9, 2012 by jdenm8