SC4DLX Frustrations - trying to decide what to do?

[MarkShot 631]

From 1994-2001, I was PC air combat/racing player.

From 2001-2016 (end), I was a PC war gamer.  At various scales ...

Right at the start of this year I decided I wanted to do something other than killing stuff and blowing something up.  I wanted something relaxing, non-trivial, that would be engaging.

So, I decided on city builders.  It would be SC4DLX and CS+DLC.  I picked both as I love classic games, and it seemed that both games had their strength and weaknesses.

I have been playing SC4DLX for a while now (mainly 2 mods NAM 35 and CAM 2.1).  I am on about my 5th restart of the NY region map.  I have read the manual, Prima Guide, and one very well written player's guide.

I saw city builders sort of a form of interactive painting.  You paint and lay many things out, and at the same time the environment itself is alive and dynamic.

I understand that the region/tile concept of SC4 was mainly a compromise between CPU/GPU and scope of the early 2000s.  To some extent SC4 tiles gives you greater absolute control than CS districts; but then, CS districts are a richer construct than the tiles.

---

I am reaching the level of put it down frustration with SC4DLX.  Issues:

 

(1)  Transportation and the eternal commuter bug.  No, I have not run into it as I was well aware of it.  So, I followed all the recommendations to avoid it.  I believe I have based on the fact that (until a few hours ago [subway], I only had various single cross tile highways).  The amount of commuters on the network were no where close to the population of the residential tiles.  Because I did do some partitioning of residential and employment areas.  So, I don't have the bug, but I find what I need to do to be careful to avoid the bug makes for unrealistic play.  I like how in CS I can put up transportation and tear it down easily to experiment as I try to manage flow.

 

(2)  CAPs are driving me crazy.  Constantly, hitting these arbitrary limits ... which treat growth as quantum states.  I know parks and other doodads will act as seed crystals for growth while at the same time elevating the CAP.  But what you really need to do is get a CAP busting building.  But the game has no tech tree or other structure which one can easily follow.  So, I spend a lot of time simply fighting with it over growth.  It seems in many cases, I need to first fill the map with low density residential in order to start meeting criteria for what I want to do with the map.  I thought I might avoid CAP busting by using one of the EXTRA CHEATS that gives you immediate access to rewards.  But the CAP busting affect does not seem to come with the building, simply by plopping it.  It seems you, at least, must meet the criteria.  So, this feeling of fighting the game over 1,000 residents ... is disturbing.  This is slowing down game play for me quite a bit.

 

(3)  Commute too long abandonment ... was frustrating me.  But I realize this is a function of:

(a)  Density

(b)  Having residential and industry in different tiles

(c)  Not growing the transit network with the population

Although irritating, I believe I will manage this with experience.  Also, the more I learn to use NAM, the higher transit capacity I will have.

 

Originally, it seemed money would be a problem.  But I am playing the entire region as a single economy and using a cheat to transfer funds from one tile to another tile.  In any case, getting an early cash cow is all you really need.  From there money snowballs.

 

Where to go from here?  I can live with the transportation bugs.  But this CAP busting is driving me crazy.  I don't mind jumping between tiles.  I might have in 2003, but with a fast PC saving/loading isn't an slower than another other game which allows frequent saves.

 

Thanks.  (help me find a way to play with SC4DLX and not in opposition to it)

[Handyman 789]

You might want to try the RCImulti - MODpack for SC4 Delux/RushHour 1. It has various .dat's that you may find helpful. Read the Readme file carefully. You can find it here here

[PaleoCardio 150]

I haven't played CS so I don't know it's benefits over SC4

1. The eternal commuter bug can make for some unrealistic play, but then as you are well aware of it you can mitigate for it. The branching of your connections (as you have previously shown) is a very good way of beating it and isn't too unrealistic as to make the gameplay suffer.

2. This seems like your worst issue and can be solved by a couple of things. Always making sure population levels are at a 2:1 ratio to jobs. A mod or two might help, including the industry doubler might help as well as the mod that Handyman suggested. But I think the golden rule is still to keep that population level cranking upwards and zoning correctly for it. 

3. This is a pain, usually the mid to wealthy residential homes abandon for me because they are either too far away from their jobs (I-HT) or there are not enough nearby CO§§§ jobs. You made the key points, but try to mix residential and commercial as much as possible, especially medium/high density. Industry should be away from your residential, but get them bus stops, subways and anything else that will simplify their journey to work, including good road access as the high wealth peeps really love their cars.

As far as money is concerned, use this simoleon generator for starting your tiles and then remove it for the gameplay (as it messes with taxes). If during gameplay you need ore money, just transfer it back into your plugins and your taxes will easily generate masses of spare cash for you. There should be no reason to transfer money between tiles then.

Also, just a suggestion, try to do as little as possible in the beginning. Trying to learn and solve everything at once will make you rip your hair out, it did for me. Just concentrate on one aspect and trying to learn and get that right before jumping in to another. Slow gameplay is often the most fun I've found.

Hope this helps a little at least

Good luck 

[CorinaMarie 29,881]

1 hour ago, PaleoCardio said:

As far as money is concerned, use this simoleon generator for starting your tiles and then remove it for the gameplay (as it messes with taxes).

I'm not familiar with this one, but the messes with taxes part doesn't seem too exciting. I believe most peeps prefer to use the Moolah <value> code to set the amount on hand to whatever they want. That's part of the SimCity 4 Extra Cheats Plugin.

Personally, I like a small infusion of cash each month so I found the Money Park 10.5. It has ploppable Gnome Towers which generate 5k, 20k, or 100k simoleons per month. You can plop multiples of them to get whatever amount you need.

[Handyman 789]

What I read on the page seems to say, " Put the mod in your plugins folder, start your city, save and close your city and then remove the mod and reopen your city and you will have the start up cash and no further affect on your city. That was my understanding.

[CorinaMarie 29,881]

3 minutes ago, Handyman said:

What I read on the page seems to say, " Put the mod in your plugins folder, start your city, save and close your city and then remove the mod and reopen your city and you will have the start up cash and no further affect on your city. That was my understanding.

You read more than I did.

I got hung up on the put it in, take it out part. It seems to me the Moolah command would be easier cause the .dll doesn't need to be removed. (Same for the Money Park I mentioned.)

[PaleoCardio 150]

1 minute ago, CorinaMarie said:

You read more than I did.

I got hung up on the put it in, take it out part. It seems to me the Moolah command would be easier cause the .dll doesn't need to be removed. (Same for the Money Park I mentioned.)

You are right, it is a little tricky the money cheat I use. I do like the sound of the money park and of course the .dll cheat is a very easy one to use. I will have to check out the money park.

[Handyman 789]

I think I will have to give them all a try.

[MarkShot 631]

It does seem that rewards added via cheat works to break CAPs.  (hard to easily test)

I think my general structure is going to be triplet of tiles:  Industry Residential|Heavy Industry|Wealth City (include HT, CO/CS, and residence).  I think Heavy Industry will have a Jupiter like atmosphere and provide garbage and power services to the other two.  No one should enter the Heavy Industry Tile without a HAZMAT suit and respirator.

I see as I get into high density, just car traffic fouls up the air pretty bad (even with ordinances enabled).  But when you are rolling in cash subways make redoing infrastructure easy.

I will do special areas for agriculture and tourism/commerce.

As I get more adept at the game, I would like to do customized communities within tiles.

This may be harder than it sounds.  As someone mentioned elsewhere, but not in these words:  the rich and well educated are a very invasive species.  It seems you can zone a no services LD area on the opposite end of the map ... despite that the rich will just start plopping and building mansions.  One thing I really like about this compared to CS is setting the tax rate per tile.  In CS, you can only assign intensives for districts.  Here tiles are absolute.  But you would have so much more control if you could adjust tax rates for zones.

BTW - NAM allows the building of 10 lane highways ... how does that work with pollution?  Do you need a huge tree buffer around your highways?

Thanks, forum members and SC4 community ... classic games would not be nearly what they are without their communities (I mean Internet; not in game).

One other thing about SC4 game play, it tends to make you resolve problems, since you are in a tile ... the rest is suspended.  In CS, you are my inclined to be trying to a million things at once.

In some ways, SC4 reflects the popular culture of 2000; do one thing at a time and do it right.

And CS, reflects the smart phone generation, multi-task and don't let anything hit the ground.

[PaleoCardio 150]

1 hour ago, MarkShot said:

BTW - NAM allows the building of 10 lane highways ... how does that work with pollution?  Do you need a huge tree buffer around your highways?

I usually put a 1 tile buffer of open grass and then a sound barrier up against highways. Adding trees around the highways will also help a lot, but 10 lane highways start to pollute most when they get really busy, but by then you have your grassy areas and trees in place. 

[MeMyself&I 379]

The single most efficient way to avoid lots of traffic pollution is to have plenty of alternative transportation options in place for your sims to use.  Subways, elevated and normal rail, bus lines, ferries, pedmalls, etc.  Never underestimate how many trees or parks you need.  You can never have enough in any city tile and they help stimulate growth as well as control pollution, especially for all residential and commercial zones.  It also helps to not run 8 or 10 lane highways through towns or cities.  They're better suited for the outskirts with bypasses and spur lines of 4 or 6 lanes to run through developed areas and re-connect.  There are some great videos on YT about the RHW.  @Haljackey has probably the most extensive and innovative highways in his cities so check out his stuff both here and on YT and also check out the "Show Us" threads here on ST for ideas and inspiration for pretty much every kind of development, especially highways and interchanges.

[MarkShot 631]

I realize that the automata are simply an abstraction and not 1:1 mapping to some simulated quanta.

With the above said, I think maybe I have too many buses on the road.  How do I reduce the number of buses?  (In CS, I could reduce stops and/or the bus budget.)  Here there is no bus budget, but I could greatly cut down on stops.  I am using NAM 35 defaults, and I am quite impressed with how far sims will actually walk.

Thanks.

[APSMS 1,893]

9 hours ago, MarkShot said:

BTW - NAM allows the building of 10 lane highways ... how does that work with pollution?  Do you need a huge tree buffer around your highways?

The game's default air pollution fixing ordinances don't actually reduce car pollution. The NAM includes a parameter to change the Clean Air Act so that it reduces your car pollution by 60%. There are also other ordinance modifying mods on the STEX (the OOM comes to mind), that adjust similar parameters to make the ordinances actually work the way you expect them to.

A tree buffer works in theory, but in my experience the game default trees seem to lack necessary parameters to reduce auto/network traffic and pollution, so the don't seem to work as well as surrounding a similarly polluted industrial park.

Recall also that traffic is the determining factor in generating pollution. If a network doesn't produce traffic and therefore congestion, it won't make pollution but it also won't cause business to get customer traffic. This is why you get the weird effect of exceptionally busy El-Rail and monorail lines, all electric train services, being just as polluted as a heavily trafficked highway; the traffic helps contribute to customers, and reduces the slightly deleterious effect that a totally pedestrian city might cause due to lack of commercial customers.

[MarkShot 631]

Thanks for the tip about OOM.

[matias93 7,535]

6 hours ago, APSMS said:

This is why you get the weird effect of exceptionally busy El-Rail and monorail lines, all electric train services, being just as polluted as a heavily trafficked highway; the traffic helps contribute to customers, and reduces the slightly deleterious effect that a totally pedestrian city might cause due to lack of commercial customers.

In any case, I get the feeling that aerial pollution, in-game, refers both to noxious gasses and visual contamination: elevated metro (in RL) is widely considered as undesirable because of the loss of privacy it causes, particularly on residential zones. Tram/GLR shouldn't be subjected to the same effect, but as it is modded as basically a SAM override, it is not an option.

[MarkShot 631]

Well, subway was easy.  About half my traffic is going by subway now, and think pollution was reduced.

Let me ask two other things and how:

(1)  Can I connect RHW 6C (ground) with a Maxis highway (straight hook up)?

(2)  How can I make an RHW 6C (ground) turn?  I cannot find a turn piece to mate with it.

Thanks.

[matias93 7,535]

Look in width transitions in the highway menu, there should be an RHW-6C to 6S connector, and then, some TAB strokes after, the 6S to 4 connectors. Sure, this will create a bottleneck, but it's the way to connect then.

[rsc204 21,866]

30 minutes ago, matias93 said:

Look in width transitions in the highway menu, there should be an RHW-6C to 6S connector, and then, some TAB strokes after, the 6S to 4 connectors.

Another solution would be to create a set of on/off ramps using the D/E type ramps from a 6S network. Those will convert the 6S to RHW-4 to transition to the MHY as part of an interchange.

[APSMS 1,893]

6 hours ago, MarkShot said:

(2)  How can I make an RHW 6C (ground) turn?  I cannot find a turn piece to mate with it.

There is support for direct, non-smooth 45 degree turns. The RHW-6C is too large to support quick 90 degree turns. You will need to drag it out in the unshared tile method, where the diagonals of the RHW-2 underlayer all occupy different tiles, much like dragging out the TLA-5 45 deg turn or the OWR-5 turn or even two parallel RRW lines that both make a 45 deg turn at the same time.

You could also use the FARHW pieces, to transition first to FARHW-6C (using the puzzle pieces), and then to diagonal RHW-6C, but I would still recommend that you leave the 45deg drag pattern because there aren't any starters for the diagonal RHW, nor are there fillers for the C networks. To do a full 90 deg turn you would just repeat this puzzle piece FARHW arrangement on the other side, though again I would advise using a bit of space because sometimes the override can deconvert if it's not long enough. You would of course be able to simply do the non-smooth dual-45degree turns to make a 90degree turn, but it looks hideous.