Tutorial - Rob's Guide to SimCity 4

[rob_mtl 434]

Lost in the forums and looking for a one-stop shop to get a better handle on SimCity 4?

My tutorial is designed for beginner players or long-term players who want to brush up on game mechanics or who have maybe never understood certain aspects of the game. SimCity 4 is one of the most comprehensive city sims ever created, and there are as many ways to play this game as there are players. My Guide to SimCity 4 is certainly not the only way to play, but it documents in detail many of the tips and tricks I've picked up over the years on forums, wikis and by experimenting.

This guide doesn't focus on aesthetic design of cities--it's not a power-gaming or min-max approach to the game either (ie. how to build a city of 10 million is an hour). It aims to illustrate a few of the central concepts and mechanics of the game which can be applied in different ways to a growing city. All you'll need is a copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe and a recent version of the Network Addon Mod to follow along. Each episode includes timestamps in the video description.

There are four episodes in the series:

1) Basic Concepts, Zoning and Utilities for Your First City

2) Desirability Factors and Public Services

3) Transportation

4) Introduction to Regional Play

 

Feel free to ask questions in the YouTube comments area. I'm thinking about doing a video where I answer user questions soon!

I'd also love to hear comments/suggestions, etc here on Simtropolis.

Happy city-building!

-Rob

 

EDIT: My latest video on essential mods provides you with a list of mods, tools and bugfixes designed to make the game more stable and fix glaring functional issues.

 

Check it out!

 

Added 2020-08-11:

Finally got around to my NAM 37 install/upgrade guide!

 

[infamousjbe 593]

Good job!     Dropped a sub.. 

 

Feel free to return the favor under the same name. Do mostly artwork on my channel, but also occasionally live stream SC4. 

[rob_mtl 434]

Thanks man! I'll check your channel out for sure!

[Naomi57 2,985]

Very well paced and well delivered tutorial videos @rob_mtl!   I look forward to seeing more from you, especially on the subject of Sea Port mods ... an area that still scares me.    I'm a tutorial builder, too, though my medium is written, rather than video, with lots of still pictures.

I like the way you have it well structured and progressive, each segment with a title and building off the previous segments.  I just watched your transportation video, and region play video, and I'd definitely recommend them for players coming up to speed on vanilla gameplay.  Your points in favour of bus and passenger rail and freight rail, and your explanations of using them together, are all spot on.  Perfectly chosen positions for freight stations and passenger stations.  It's probably a good idea to mention the Transit Lot Adjacency Bug in that context, too—see this post for clarification, if you're not sure of what I'm referring to.

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/758676-what-is-the-best-public-transportation-to-use-in-a-city/?page=3&tab=comments#comment-1725339

Mind you, I noticed you very neatly avoided the Transit Lot Adjacency Bug throughout that Transportation video, so I reckon you probably know all about it really well.  

So impressed that you covered ferries properly.  Many people seem to ignore them, and they're really very useful for long distance commuting.

One minor quibble with your description of industry lots using freight rail directly.  In my experience it depends on an anchor lot (the big factories), touching the tracks.  Subsidiary lots touching the anchor lot might piggy back on the anchor lot's rail access, but also might not.  It's not so much about number of tiles from the track, but about adjacency and the mysterious ways SC4 groups industrial lots together.

There's a similar issue with farms, the anchor lot being the farm building, which needs to be adjacent to the tracks, with the rest of the field exporting by rail through that farm building.  I specifically made these farm buildings grow on the tracks (using a tip @CorinaMarie gave me), so that they'd be able to export using the rail.

Fascinating to see the demand shift on incorporating your second city in the Introduction to Region Play video.  I fully expected a slightly different demand graph, simply on the basis of the neighbour connections it has, but didn't realise how much the presence of dirty industry next door would drain the dirty industry demand in the second city.  I'm used to looking at the Demand graph after 10 years of city growth, so your video showed me that it's relevant even from day one!

Your mention of "Fixing problems by going to another city", is a most excellent piece of advice.  

[rob_mtl 434]

@Naomi57 Hey! Thanks for that detailed comment and review of my tutorial.

To be honest, I don't think I ever explicitly knew about the transit adjacency bug although I think I may have just developed a way of playing that avoids it by habit over the many years. I wish I'd mentioned it in the tutorial! 

For the industrial rail access, I have noticed that industry seemed to be very choosy about using rail, but never deduced that it was the anchor building that needed to be connected!

If I get enough of these types of helpful comments, I'll do a "questions, comments and corrections video".

I'm also going to do a video on "X SimCity 4 bugs and how you can fix them with mods", so maybe the adjacency one would be a good fit. Alternate title "SimCity 4 is broken; here's how you can fix it!"

The ones I have in mind so far:

• The I-HT bug (with the appropriate bugfix)
• Seaports (with BSC Functional Seaports mod)
• Transit adjacency (with the Ninja stations and other multifunctional stations included in the NAM... or by placing things across the street, or with ped malls...)
• Choosing a custom resolution in Steam or Windows launch options

Do let me know if you think there are others that newish players would benefit from! 

[CorinaMarie 29,698]

2 hours ago, rob_mtl said:

The I-HT bug (with the appropriate bugfix)

If you do include this, you might be interested in: Empirical Data shows the I-HT Fix does not need to be Dat Packed to Work

It seems that long ago there were mods made that additionally included variables with the SUMS property and that part does indeed need DatPacking into SimCity_1.dat. The I-HT fix itself does not include those and will work fine when simply dropped in one's plugins folder. Ofc, there are a million posts (several of mine included) which say one must DatPack the fix because that's what we all believed from what everyone else said.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

24 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Ofc, there are a million posts (several of mine included) which say one must DatPack the fix because that's what we all believed from what everyone else said

 

 

Hi rob_mtl @rob_mtl, Frankly, I haven't watched you lessons, But I thought they must be great since Naomi has said so, Thank you! I have no idea if these threads are what Cori mentioned, and there were other TOP 10 mods's posts somewhere, I just hope these collections could help.

Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[rob_mtl 434]

Thanks so much for the feedback folks! My upcoming modding guide will focus on fixing game-breaking mechanics (rather than esthetics or flavour) with the goal that beginner players can get setup with something functional before diving deep into the STEX. I will look at these various lists and threads over the next few days. Your help is invaluable!

[Cyclone Boom 16,982]

Great job with the videos and it's also nice that you plan to make more too.

I think the way of having these concepts explained in different formats is very useful to people, and we each have a preference for what's the best way. For me as a visual learner, I like seeing things like this, and also illustrated guides and instructions with directional aspects in the same way.

 

8 hours ago, rob_mtl said:

Do let me know if you think there are others that newish players would benefit from!

In addition to the excellent suggestions above, I'll just add two files I'm familiar with...

Firstly this related to quite an important aspect:

This is a little mod (with a few choices) which prevents the game being saved and then closed in a one-step process.

Especially in larger cities when having lots of custom content as well, there's a known issue where the city saved file can become corrupted. To prevent this happening, it's a wise move to use the regular internal save (Ctrl+S) and then close the game as the 2nd step.

What the Save Warning does is to either make this the only option to save, or warns of the risks when saving and exiting.

 

Another one I made recently is:

 

This modifies the Web button in the region view screen with 4 possible choices to prevent it leading to the old EA site which is no longer online. There's one which disables the button (and plays a sound effect for fun), then two others which alter the positioning, and another which makes it link to Simtropolis instead (complete with logo).

So just a couple more suggestions to possibly explore sometime.

[rob_mtl 434]

27 minutes ago, Cyclone Boom said:

This is a little mod (with a few choices) which prevents the game being saved and then closed in a one-step process.

Oh man! I forgot to mention that in the region video. I actually did mention it in footage that I edited out and on my Let's Play series, but yeah... top of the list! What I'll probably say is that you can avoid the problem by the two-step save (save then exit without saving) or using the mod!

[tails2489 350]

On 2020-05-11 at 4:05 AM, Naomi57 said:

 Perfectly chosen positions for freight stations and passenger stations.

For the freight stations and neighbour connections. Does Industry and freight care what's on the other side of that connection? Would a tile of mostly Commercial or Residential or more Industry draw more freight traffic than the others?

[rob_mtl 434]

30 minutes ago, tails2489 said:

For the freight stations and neighbour connections. Does Industry and freight care what's on the other side of that connection? Would a tile of mostly Commercial or Residential or more Industry draw more freight traffic than the others?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 99% sure the answer is "no". Freight needs to leave the map to provide demand cap relief (ie. allow you to generate more industrial demand). It doesn't matter what's on the other side of the tile in terms of the demand cap. It would be cool if freight was shipped to dirty and manufacturing industries, turned into products and then shipped to retailers like in real life, but SimCity 4 doesn't model that in terms of traffic on the map (it does so with demand).

To be clear though, in order to get industrial demand of the various types (I-D, I-M and I-HT), you need to have sufficient residential population in the current and/or adjacent tiles. So just placing a freight rail or road connection to a neighbouring city and having freight travel on it doesn't increase demand for industry, it increases the demand cap. The demand comes from Sims looking for the jobs.

[Naomi57 2,985]

On 28/05/2020 at 6:20 AM, tails2489 said:

For the freight stations and neighbour connections. Does Industry and freight care what's on the other side of that connection? Would a tile of mostly Commercial or Residential or more Industry draw more freight traffic than the others?

On 28/05/2020 at 6:49 AM, rob_mtl said:

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 99% sure the answer is "no". Freight needs to leave the map to provide demand cap relief (ie. allow you to generate more industrial demand). It doesn't matter what's on the other side of the tile in terms of the demand cap. It would be cool if freight was shipped to dirty and manufacturing industries, turned into products and then shipped to retailers like in real life, but SimCity 4 doesn't model that in terms of traffic on the map (it does so with demand).

To be clear though, in order to get industrial demand of the various types (I-D, I-M and I-HT), you need to have sufficient residential population in the current and/or adjacent tiles. So just placing a freight rail or road connection to a neighbouring city and having freight travel on it doesn't increase demand for industry, it increases the demand cap. The demand comes from Sims looking for the jobs.

100% agree with @rob_mtl on this.  A fast exit from the map improves factory productivity, in my experience, but once the freight exits it is gone from the game.  To paraphrase @A Nonny Moose and others, upon reaching a Sea Port or road/rail Neighbour Connection, the freight load "goes on to the great bit bucket in the sky".

There are all sorts of warnings that the Maxis Sea Port hinders industrial demand, so if your city leans heavily on industry, you'll need to use road/rail, or download a Sea Port mod.  For just a little bit of industry, the Maxis Sea Port is just fine.

[rob_mtl 434]

3 hours ago, Naomi57 said:

There are all sorts of warnings that the Maxis Sea Port hinders industrial demand, so if your city leans heavily on industry, you'll need to use road/rail, or download a Sea Port mod.  For just a little bit of industry, the Maxis Sea Port is just fine.

I would add to that. Even if you aren't using a seaport mod, one use for seaports is to allow you to place industrial areas away from the edge of the map. One useful way to think about water is as a way of moving the edges of the map tile, where so much SC4 traffic happens, to other areas of the tile. Ferries can have a similar function.

[tails2489 350]

Thank you both, I just always find my freight stations and seaports barely get any use so I thought it may be that the small neighbouring cities weren't demanding any freight be sent their way.

[rob_mtl 434]

Generally speaking the trick to getting freight to use rail (or a port) is to deny it other options. Resist the temptation to connect industry to residential via fast routes like OWR, avenue and road. Use streets instead (and subways/elevated trains as needed). Also deny them road-based neighbour connections. That way you can force them to use rail and ports for freight. It would be cool if someone could develop a mod that only allows freight to travel on certain types of roads. In real life, large trucks are generally limited to arterial roads, collectors and expressways.

[CorinaMarie 29,698]

2 minutes ago, rob_mtl said:

It would be cool if someone could develop a mod that only allows freight to travel on certain types of roads.

I vaguely recall from a year or three ago someone mentioning certain blockers that can be placed on networks to do exactly that. Maybe my post here will trigger someone's memory and they'll post about them.

[tails2489 350]

I do know that there are road blocker for no trucks or bus only but I haven't given them a try before.

[Cyclone Boom 16,982]

46 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I vaguely recall from a year or three ago someone mentioning certain blockers that can be placed on networks to do exactly that. Maybe my post here will trigger someone's memory and they'll post about them.

Maybe this file by @11241036 might be the one?
 

I've not used it before, but it certainly looks interesting, and how it works with the different NAM networks too.

[11241036 5,100]

I don't know if this is the file Corina meant, but at least they do exactly what she wrote. To restrict the traffic to only freight, you would need to use two blockers since each one blocks only one type of traffic, but in theory this is possible. It's of course entirely possible to create blockers that block more than one type of traffic, I just didn't do that to keep the amount of lots low (or, to express it more properly, not too high).

[Naomi57 2,985]

10 hours ago, tails2489 said:

Thank you both, I just always find my freight stations and seaports barely get any use so I thought it may be that the small neighbouring cities weren't demanding any freight be sent their way.

The direction that freight travels is a tad mysterious ... I've been doing experiments to figure it out.  Here's one of my experiments, where I carefully balanced the position to see where each freight route would go.  Click on the link for details.

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/758676-what-is-the-best-public-transportation-to-use-in-a-city/?page=3&tab=comments#comment-1725408

        

    

One of the factors is travel speed, with good highways to the Seaport district making it a more attractive export destination.

Surprisingly, the bigger factor for choice of export destination is proximity, as the crow flies, to the export neighbour connection (road or rail) or Seaport.  If a road or rail neighbour connection is closer, bets on that the factories will try to export there instead of the Seaport, even if getting to the road or rail neighbour connection is difficult.

[Naomi57 2,985]

12 hours ago, rob_mtl said:

One useful way to think about water is as a way of moving the edges of the map tile, where so much SC4 traffic happens, to other areas of the tile. Ferries can have a similar function.

That's one of the things I like about your videos, @rob_mtl, you see water as an opportunity, not just a barrier.

[rob_mtl 434]

11 hours ago, Naomi57 said:

That's one of the things I like about your videos, @rob_mtl, you see water as an opportunity, not just a barrier.

Well I spent a long time thinking about how to model historical cities in the game. Prior to rail and expressways, travel by boat was often safer and/or faster than travel by road, so cities would develop along waterways. The ferries in SC4 are indeed very useful for moving sims around the map before putting bridges in place.

 

20 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Maybe this file by @11241036 might be the one?
 

I've not used it before, but it certainly looks interesting, and how it works with the different NAM networks too.

This is super cool! I'm very tempted to try this out soon.

[vetram 221]

rob_mtl i was really suprised in a positive way from your videos that i have just seen !....Congratulations indeed !  Personally its a huge help for me ,  and i believe this is the -by far- the best tutorial for SC4 in Youtube and for sure not just for beginners..!  Most of all i liked the way you make "things" simple without entering in depth details , but although keeping the bare bones ( hope it the right phrase in english found it in dictionary ) of the most critical mechanics of the game.   I am going to watch also and your other videos series "Lets play SC4"  , but please make a favour for all those whose english is not their mother language  and speak a little slower !  Needless to write that i subscribed to your channel 

[rob_mtl 434]

@vetram I'm really glad you enjoyed the tutorial. I will definitely try and speak slower in the future for non English-language viewers. That's a helpful tip. I will be working on more tutorial videos soon!

[tails2489 350]

@rob_mtl dude you weren't kidding about the Functional Seaport dependencies. Almost there though.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,445]

Could use detailed tutorials on the installation and use of some of the peripheral programs for this game, like Ilives, DAMN etc. None of the pros around here are talking.

[rob_mtl 434]

5 hours ago, tails2489 said:

@rob_mtl dude you weren't kidding about the Functional Seaport dependencies. Almost there though.

The bright side is some of those dependencies are useful elsewhere, but yeah.

[rob_mtl 434]

3 hours ago, SIM-ple Jack said:

Could use detailed tutorials on the installation and use of some of the peripheral programs for this game, like Ilives, DAMN etc. None of the pros around here are talking.

I'm going to do a modding video soon, although I don't use DAMN or Ilives so I can't help with that

[tails2489 350]

12 hours ago, rob_mtl said:

The bright side is some of those dependencies are useful elsewhere, but yeah.

I get about an hour a day to play while my kid naps so hopefully can finish those up today (Day 3) and then get back to playing tomorrow. I never ever plop bus stops or jails in my cities so I'll be going through my region and upgrading the seaports and plopping bus stops and jails as well. Kind of a tedious process but hoping for some nice results. Great tutorials and I'm enjoying going through your Plantation Bay videos also.