New to SC4?

[Caelem 4]

So I got sc4 3 days ago. I find it hard lol . I was looking up how to have a successful city and one of them said to place a waste thingy and a environmentally friendly energy thingy.. how do I do that? When I place industrial what's built is random. Also why do the people in hospitals always go on "walks", even with high pay? Thanks if anyone helps 

[Jasoncw 11,839]

The advisers are going to tell you to do a lot of things but I wouldn't pay much attention to them, unless you can tell that they're notifying you about specific things happening in the game. For example, pay attention to the ones saying that a civic building is about to strike. But some of them will always have random generic things to complain about. 

It's hard to tell exactly what in the game you're talking about but it sounds like the advisers are talking about building cleaner utility buildings, not industry. Industry is a job type, similar to commercial. Dirty industry (low wealth industry) creates a lot of pollution, while high tech (high wealth) industry creates a small amount of pollution. Utility buildings can be found in the utilities menu which is also where you find water pipes and power lines and things like that.

For waste, the best thing to do is to build a waste to energy power plant, and then reduce the funding to zero. It's cheating but you basically get free garbage removal. These will create pollution so locate them far away from residential and commercial zones. 

For power plants iirc the descriptions are pretty accurate. There are trade offs between cost, power output, and pollution. Coal is the cheapest, so start out with that. But since it makes pollution, put it far away from residential and commercial zones. You can put it right next to the waste to energy plant.

The funding slider for civic buildings adjusts the capacity of the building. But if you have the building at max funding (max capacity) it's still possible for there to be too many sims and for that building to go over capacity. When that happens the building will strike. Unfortunately once it's striking, even if you increase the funding it will still not be at its normal max capacity, but regardless to get it to stop striking you need to provide enough capacity. You can do this by building more buildings. For example if your hospitals are over capacity then you need to build more. You can also reduce the number of sims going to that building by reducing the radius. If you can't afford to build more hospitals, reduce the radius to try to get the number of sims it covers to within capacity. It means that sims outside of the radius will no longer get service, but it's better than the building striking.

If you have a big city you'll find yourself plopping a lot of duplicate civic buildings because the default maxis buildings don't have a high capacity. But there are a lot of buildings on the STEX that you can download that have bigger coverage radiuses and bigger capacities, and many of them are more realistic looking than the maxis buildings. 

[Caelem 4]

Thank you so much for taking your time to write that reply! How far do they have to be away from eachother? The dirty industry and commercial/residential? I had a city that had a river. One side for residential and commercial and other industrial. I destroyed it with the disasters after the RCI demand  said too much residential and more industrial or less air pollution I guess? I know I sound stupid but it's just hard I guess. My city (well town) had over 8000 people in it. Also I was wondering if it's a good idea to build other transportation types (like railway) at the beginning like as you expand your roads and city also add on more tracks. Thanks again for your reply 

[BugeyedDragon 412]

1 hour ago, Caelem said:

Thank you so much for taking your time to write that reply! How far do they have to be away from eachother? The dirty industry and commercial/residential? I had a city that had a river. One side for residential and commercial and other industrial. I destroyed it with the disasters after the RCI demand  said too much residential and more industrial or less air pollution I guess? I know I sound stupid but it's just hard I guess. My city (well town) had over 8000 people in it. Also I was wondering if it's a good idea to build other transportation types (like railway) at the beginning like as you expand your roads and city also add on more tracks. Thanks again for your reply 

normally you'd wait until traffic becomes an isuse before you use subways rail bus etc. buses are the most effective i believe

[rsc204 21,804]

There is no hard and fast rule that residential or commercial should be away from industry. For example low wealth sims and shops can happily coexist with dirty industry. By and large, when you start out, you will have demand for only dirty or agricultural industry. Of course sims living around that won't have a high quality of life, neither will the value of the land ever increase by much. But, as you progress through the game, mainly by providing the essentials, such as education, healthcare and fire/police protection. Demand will start to pick up for R$$/R$$$ sims, who'd be unwilling to live near dirty industry. Thus if you want have those, you will need to zone in nicer areas. The same applies to Commercial and Industrial (High Tech also requires low pollution). But at the same time, however nice it gets, most of your sims will always be R$, or poor. Whilst pollution does affect their life expectancy, you can think of this as a necessary "Industrial Revolution", required to kick-start a better world in future.

The overall point is that pollution isn't necessarily a barrier to growth. In order to create a nice high wealth city with low pollution, it's necessary to start with something less pleasant. It doesn't sound to me like you failed, so much as you didn't give the game long enough to get going. A new region can be quite slow to build up demand, especially when balancing budgets. But once you get one city working well, regional demands will make expanding connected cities easier too.

My advice, if you haven't already, spend some time with the tutorial cities, if nothing else these provide some very useful tips. Following on, here's a really great guide that taught me the basics of region play and how to keep things growing successfully.

Also remember that SC4 is a reactive game, it responds to all your little tweaks, however minor. Sometimes if you try to rush it too much, things get out of whack. If you zone a little, wait for some growth, check demands, zone a little more based on these demands, you'll get a more stable economy. However, if you try to build huge swathes of buildings in one go, it's going to be much harder to keep on top of everything. Rail can be useful early on, but budgets are tight to begin with and you won't have congested streets/roads yet to necessitate better transport. I'd wait until you've got a decent cash flow, avoiding any unnecessary costs to begin with, is a winning strategy. Of course, your sims/advisors may complain, but much of this noise can be safely ignored.

[Caelem 4]

1 hour ago, rsc204 said:

There is no hard and fast rule that residential or commercial should be away from industry. For example low wealth sims and shops can happily coexist with dirty industry. By and large, when you start out, you will have demand for only dirty or agricultural industry. Of course sims living around that won't have a high quality of life, neither will the value of the land ever increase by much. But, as you progress through the game, mainly by providing the essentials, such as education, healthcare and fire/police protection. Demand will start to pick up for R$$/R$$$ sims, who'd be unwilling to live near dirty industry. Thus if you want have those, you will need to zone in nicer areas. The same applies to Commercial and Industrial (High Tech also requires low pollution). But at the same time, however nice it gets, most of your sims will always be R$, or poor. Whilst pollution does affect their life expectancy, you can think of this as a necessary "Industrial Revolution", required to kick-start a better world in future.

The overall point is that pollution isn't necessarily a barrier to growth. In order to create a nice high wealth city with low pollution, it's necessary to start with something less pleasant. It doesn't sound to me like you failed, so much as you didn't give the game long enough to get going. A new region can be quite slow to build up demand, especially when balancing budgets. But once you get one city working well, regional demands will make expanding connected cities easier too.

My advice, if you haven't already, spend some time with the tutorial cities, if nothing else these provide some very useful tips. Following on, here's a really great guide that taught me the basics of region play and how to keep things growing successfully.

Also remember that SC4 is a reactive game, it responds to all your little tweaks, however minor. Sometimes if you try to rush it too much, things get out of whack. If you zone a little, wait for some growth, check demands, zone a little more based on these demands, you'll get a more stable economy. However, if you try to build huge swathes of buildings in one go, it's going to be much harder to keep on top of everything. Rail can be useful early on, but budgets are tight to begin with and you won't have congested streets/roads yet to necessitate better transport. I'd wait until you've got a decent cash flow, avoiding any unnecessary costs to begin with, is a winning strategy. Of course, your sims/advisors may complain, but much of this noise can be safely ignored.

Well I started a new city. It has over 7000 people. I just got a school so there's still little commericial. There's a massive, and I mean MASSIVE demand for dirty industry. I'm making profit. I also thought that pollution came just from dirty industry, but I'm starting to see that even the busiest roads give pollution (from cars I suspect) I have trains and all that. Also a lot of electricity. I'm scared to get more schools because that means loads will loose jobs cus right now there's little commercial. There was a time where the energy to power and then my other power station went weird and I couldn't get electricity even when funding both.. everyone left my town and demands went bad but that's ok now. I would prefer to have commercial because it's less dirty and makes less sims complain. Also when it says "pavements don't breathe: we need trees" I place trees yet nothing happens.. so I have to place a lot? There's still plenty of car crashes especially on the avenues leading to and from the bridge. I'll probably make a bypass for that. I can definitely see the game getting harder because of how much people live in it. Many houses are turning into what I think are apartments. I would like to see skyscrapers soon 

[CorinaMarie 29,558]

First off, welcome to Simtropolis!

This is a delightfully wonderful site with knowledgeable, friendly, helpful peeps. (I just joined near the end of March.)

 

1 hour ago, Caelem said:

Also when it says "pavements don't breathe: we need trees" I place trees yet nothing happens.. so I have to place a lot?

As best as I can figure you get that statement (quite often) when there are many more Roads (the dark black ones) compared to the Streets (light grey ones). No amount of trees will make the advisor shut up about it either. Ignore it the sames as the other silly, useless messages. As you play more and more you'll see which ones are important.

 

1 hour ago, Caelem said:

I can definitely see the game getting harder because of how much people live in it.

Oh, yeah. It will. There's a learning curve to it. When I started I'd play one region for about a month then delete it and restart on the same one. (I'd saved a copy of the whole region right after I terraformed it.) I did that like 4 times cause I kept learning more and more from Googling up stuff. More times than not I found my answer here on ST and decided to join. As has already been mentioned, take it slow and try to keep things in balance.

 

1 hour ago, Caelem said:

I would like to see skyscrapers soon 

The really tall ones take a while to get. There's a certain regional population and demand caps and such to get past before you'll see them. The techy peeps can explain that in more detail. (I play mostly rural farm tiles with small towns so that's why my suggestion is vague.)

 

As you experience more of the fun (and frustration) you might want to post pictures from your game here. Host the pic on an image site like imgur or photobucket or the like and then paste a direct linky in your post. (Ask if you have questions about that.) There will likely be things you'll want to ask about and a picture showing your city will help others understand what you are describing.

You might also find some useful information in my Freight Path Mini Tutorial. I wrote it for someone who was new to the concept.

[rsc204 21,804]

Pollution caused by traffic can't be helped unless you use the Ordinances "Clean Air Act" & "Automobile Emissions Reduction Program", in which case it's vastly reduced. It's likely though, that right now the cost of them is not justifiable by your budget. Of course spreading out your sims so they use different roads (bypass), is another good tool to keeping things running smoothly. But sims won't take another route just because it's empty, it has to provide a more efficient path to where they work. If you don't have the NAM, you might consider installing it. The updated (fixed) traffic simulator can greatly help with your game. It basically improves the pathfinding that sims use to get to and from work. You can always choose later if you want to add all the bells and whistles.

Better educated sims can still work in menial jobs, they won't become unemployed if they have jobs that are "beneath them". It just means that demand for better commercial and industrial jobs will be created, because you'll have a population that can support them. Conversely, failing to educate your sims will prevent you from ever gaining the demand required to get traction here. Tip: Want to speed up your sims education, use the "Pro Reading Campaign" ordinance.

Commercial might be nicer than industry, but the game doesn't allow you to pick one or the other. Industrial (or at the very least, farms) are needed to provide jobs for your sims at first. You simply can't get demand for more commercial, without industry (or farms) which bring new sims into your city for work. Once you've managed to get I-M, I-HT or higher level Commerce, you can reduce the dirty industry greatly.

30 minutes ago, Caelem said:

"pavements don't breathe: we need trees"

Whilst the message does relate to the air quality, just placing some trees may not resolve the issue. Personally, with a region with just 7k sims, I would ignore it. Think of the advisors as eternal optimists, who blindly argue their corner without a thought to any other concerns. So the environment advisor will always tell you that you can make things nicer. But they are an advisor to you, the mayor. You have overview of what the budget and future direction entails for your city. If you just do what the advisors want, you are going to have a hard time, simply because they are too demanding. Sure it would be nice to have a perfect city from day 1 for your sims to live/work in. But, how is it going to be paid for, cities take a long time to blossom, the pollution is just a necessary part of getting your economy going. The only way to bypass this is with farming, instead of dirty industry, providing the bulk of jobs in your new region. However, Industry provides a much quicker path to success, in much less space.

[matias93 7,535]

"Think of the advisors as eternal optimists, who blindly argue their corner without a thought to any other concerns."

Well, that's a pretty good definition of any bureaucracy.

[Caelem 4]

My population reached 12,000 when things went outta hand. The population was dipping now from 12k to 9 or 8k. It it was weird. There were many abandoned buildings. I just reset the city, again. I'm honestly finding this so hard but I won't give up on trying to have a successful region 

[matias93 7,535]

Maybe some trash crisis? I've been there a lot of times: you leave the game going on maximum speed, go to take a glass of juice and when back, everything on your city is littered, all buildings are abandoned and the population plummeted, just because some incinerator went obsolete or the trashyards went full. All infraestructure buildings can cause this kinds of problems, so keep a hard look at it, and dont imitate me, play the game on a slower speed.

[Caelem 4]

It wasn't to do with trash at all. If I placed commerical many moved in and many out. Same with industry. 

[Jasoncw 11,839]

So this isn't related to your current problem but it's a good trick in general. 

If you zone a bunch of industrial zones and get a bunch of dirty industry to grow, you can raise taxes on dirty industry to 20%. Demand for new dirty industry will become super negative and your advisers might complain about it, but the existing dirty industry will not abandon, and you can make tons of extra money from them. At this point if you want to grow new dirty industry you would lower the taxes and then raise them again after more dirty industry grows. 

[Caelem 4]

Thanks a lot, this'll help with profit a lot. So if less people want dirty industry they'll want commercial? I aim envious of people who can make successful cities. I guess it's cus this game is so old, people have been playing for years. 

[Caelem 4]

But would you mind telling me how you place your buildings? What happens is well really, I mean to spread things out. But eventually it's just like one huge area of industrial then a huge area of residential. I don't like that but it ends up like that for me. Would a city work if spread out? I heard the distance they're willing to go to work is bad. Also I heard of this NAM mod or something like that, i'd like to download it, but I went to install the latest version and it said it was deleted. 

[matias93 7,535]

Let's say we don't play exactly by the rules: most nice cities you see in the forum are carefully built models, but not functional simulations. Most of the high buildings are plopped, many of them cannot even grow. Residentials, though, are another story.

[Caelem 4]

Oh right. I seem to always end up building something that looks ugly in my eyes.. it's annoying. I've restarted maybe 10 times 

[rsc204 21,804]

You'll have to accept that unless you install a lot of mods, the vanilla experience is limited. For better variety and visuals, many mods are required, but rushing to install lots of mods will be your downfall if you're not careful.

Not sure what problem you are having downloading the NAM, try here:

 

[Jasoncw 11,839]

For me I only have industrial in my cities when they're new. When the city is big enough that commercial buildings can provide enough jobs then I demolish my industrial, except for a few small industrial districts for aesthetics. But for you it would be easier to keep industrial because it's easy to get a lot of jobs to grow. There are different ways of playing the game that can result in a successful city. 

My cities are usually avenues lined with commercial zones, with residential side streets. And then downtown is just commercial. You are right that's it's not best to have each zone be completely isolated because of long commute times, so mixing them together is good. 

I think for now instead of focusing on making a city that looks good you should focus on learning how to play the game. Once you're good with the game you'll be able to manipulate it in order to make better looking cities. And like Matias said, most of the amazing cities you see here are not "real", and aside from that they're very talented and spend a lot of time, so not very many people make cities that look that good. Mine don't. 

[fredinno 54]

6 hours ago, Jasoncw said:

For me I only have industrial in my cities when they're new. When the city is big enough that commercial buildings can provide enough jobs then I demolish my industrial, except for a few small industrial districts for aesthetics. But for you it would be easier to keep industrial because it's easy to get a lot of jobs to grow. There are different ways of playing the game that can result in a successful city. 

My cities are usually avenues lined with commercial zones, with residential side streets. And then downtown is just commercial. You are right that's it's not best to have each zone be completely isolated because of long commute times, so mixing them together is good. 

I think for now instead of focusing on making a city that looks good you should focus on learning how to play the game. Once you're good with the game you'll be able to manipulate it in order to make better looking cities. And like Matias said, most of the amazing cities you see here are not "real", and aside from that they're very talented and spend a lot of time, so not very many people make cities that look that good. Mine don't. 

JASONCW? YOU'RE ALIVE?? OMG!

[Caelem 4]

Ok so I had a town which reached to 40k last night. It got stuck in saving though, so after 10 mins just turned my laptop and went to bed. This morning though, I thought of a new way to stop pollution annoying the rest of the city. I worked out how electric, rubbish deals etc work. Also how you can connect different areas of the region with roads and all. So I chose a medium sized square with 3 small squares around it. The medium was mainly for residential. Then, I connected it with road to one of the smaller squares. Thats where I put all my dirty indistry. I then placed some coal and waste to energy plants and connected the power to the medium square. So now, the pollution from the industry doesn't affect my residential areas whatsoever because it's in a different square. The other 2 small squares of land are for agricultural,  commercial. Or industry if I run outta space. I also mix in some commercial with residential to reduce commute time. But what does agricultural industry do? Does it do anything else apart from employ a tiny number of people? 

[rsc204 21,804]

Farms were only really intended as a way to get the game going. In fact, when your education level is high enough, or you have 30,000 farming jobs in a city, all demand will cease forever.

There are mods out there, notably SPAM, which are designed to redress this. Because farming is a large part of the real world, since we all have to eat. Although Maxis figured that most users would want to create a metropolis with large skyscrapers. Some of the prettiest scenes show off more rural areas. As such I think farms are good for realism and done well, for making cities look more attractive too.

[Caelem 4]

I installed nam and extracted it and moved it into the plugin file. Nothing changed after game. No new road curves or anything. Did I do something wrong?

[rsc204 21,804]

Sounds like you need to run the installer application you extracted from the downloaded file.

[Caelem 4]

Ah ok. Thanks. Once I get the hang of things I'll slowly download some mods. 

[Jasoncw 11,839]

16 hours ago, fredinno said:

JASONCW? YOU'RE ALIVE?? OMG!

I never died! Other than a few exceptions now and then I've posted a few times a week for over a decade.  

[Caelem 4]

Ok so I have a problem. There's a huge demand for residential zones, yet there's loads of "no jobs due to commute time". The demand for industrial and commute is way below. Why more residential even if so many don't have jobs? My population would go from 15k to 13 k to 16 then 10 it's just weird. Idk how my other city got to 40 k it's almost impossible for me to do again. 

[fredinno 54]

5 minutes ago, Caelem said:

Ok so I have a problem. There's a huge demand for residential zones, yet there's loads of "no jobs due to commute time". The demand for industrial and commute is way below. Why more residential even if so many don't have jobs? My population would go from 15k to 13 k to 16 then 10 it's just weird. Idk how my other city got to 40 k it's almost impossible for me to do again. 

Use the NAM traffic controller if you don't have it (in most cases, this removes the vast majority of cases of this... If you do have NAM, then make sure traffic congestion is low.

 

Sometimes, it happens because the arrow in the zone view is not pointing at a road/street/avenue- meaning noone can get into the building.

2 hours ago, Jasoncw said:

I never died! Other than a few exceptions now and then I've posted a few times a week for over a decade.  

You never really seem to mod nowadays tho..

[Caelem 4]

7 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Use the NAM traffic controller if you don't have it (in most cases, this removes the vast majority of cases of this... If you do have NAM, then make sure traffic congestion is low.

 

Sometimes, it happens because the arrow in the zone view is not pointing at a road/street/avenue- meaning noone can get into the building.

You never really seem to mod nowadays tho..

I have nam, and the pointers are facing the road. I just don't know. 

[matias93 7,535]

Can you show us some images of your city, to know how your lots are distributed? Take them with Ctrl + Shift + S, find them on \Documents\SimCity 4\Albums\ and upload them on some image server, like imgur or photobucket; then paste the image link (ended on .png or .jpg) here.