Introduction from a "new" user

[earthengine 18]

Hi everyone,

I am NOT a new user although I am pretty sure most of the people here don't know about me. But I joined this forum in about 2007 (I was playing a pirate copy at that time), then I has been busy on other things. I hasn't been playing SC4 very often, actually I stopped for a while after I upgraded my PC. However since I bought the steam version, it is very easy to get it back on to my computer.

This is what happened recently. However, since I have been left from the game so long, I need to research to gain my memory back and find all the modern mods I would need. This bought me back to this forum. I am so glad to see there is even a serial of video tutorial created just last year, and the mod creators are still productive!

Now I will talk about my experience of the game.

I am an expert of neighbor deals. My main cities does not have power plants, water pumps or garbage facilities, they are all handle with my neighbor cities (namely, they are "resource" cities). I never need to worry about budget because I earn too much from neighbor deals (I usually earn more than $10,000 in the first month in game, and later on that can easily reach $20,000,000). If anyone want to know how I achieve this, let me know, I will be happy to share my experience)

I was not so good at layout design, and usually struggle with traffic problems. That's the area that I need help with.

To build my ultimate "resource" city, I need to unlock the hydrogen power plant. I don't care about the monthly cost or building cost because I am rich; but this one have the highest power output/area ratio therefore I can build a city full of it and so it can serve my whole region. Unfortunately in a new region this is too far away to reach. Instead, I end up achieve this by UDI. Even this is not easy because I have to unlock Area 51 and it takes a lot of effect.

Also, I prefer to build my cities that can be easily join together - that is, a limited set of city terrain that will be able to combine any two of them without "reciliate" the border.

That's all for my "first" post (it should not be the first, but my old posts long ago are lost - I couldn't find them any more).

[City_Slider 2,716]

Welcome back earth,

Sounds like fun. I´ll take a Ticket and sit down.

Oliver, the crazy German

 

[CorinaMarie 29,866]

9 hours ago, earthengine said:

Hi everyone,

Hiya, individual one. Welcome back to Simtropolis.

 

9 hours ago, earthengine said:

To build my ultimate "resource" city, I need to unlock the hydrogen power plant.

Depending on how you feel about using cheat codes, there is an option called you don't deserve it which would make that available without having to qualify for it.

See the PDF attached here for details.

[earthengine 18]

Hi Admin,

I do know most of those "cheat"s, and I am actually the "unknown source" of one of those cheats - yes it is the neighbor deal glitch (or I would call it neighbor deal boost?).

Quote

Money from Neighbor Deals

When you make a city, connect it to at least two cities; one with water or some other major resource and another that needs it (water works best). Do not have that resource in your city or the glitch will not work (for example, water pump, power plant, etc.). Make the connection to these two cities using your city and go to "Neighbor Deals". Under the deals, select the resource to buy, then the other city to sell to. Then, cancel the buy, but not the sale.Follow this exactly. Select the pull down menu and reselect the resource you are selling to the other city. If done correctly, the dollar amount should Significantly increase.You can now reselect the resource to buy. After a few months, the game will reset the dollar amount but you can do glitch again. When using water, it is possible to get all the way to 1,000,000,000 Simoleons. (Source unknown)

I am not the first one that found the bug that could make those neighbor deals funny; however this bug was generally thought that has been fixed in Rush Hour. It was me that proved that it is still exist in the Deluxe version of the game, and developed a reliable way to replicate the glitch and get benefit from it.

I am pretty sure it was me because the procedure above is what I wrote in a post in this forum. At that moment, my knowledge is still limited so only recommended to try "water". Today I have much more experience of this glitch, so I can easily make it also work on power and garbage (a bit harder and the factors are still unknown).

The key to understand is the algorithm is trying to simulate the economy concept of the demand and supply law. If you only have 1000MWH of power to export, surely you should sell it for a better price than when you have 10, 000 MWH.

The game is actually preventing us from exporting something we don't have - if your city grow, and your spare electricity is insufficient to export now, you will observe electricity shortage in your city. However, before you hit the confirm button to make your deal effective, it is not checking how much electricity you can actually export. Therefore, if you cancel the deal from the city you bought, your supply becomes negative and the price becomes crazy.

This is why (although the exact calculation is still unknown) I advised in my old post to try on a city that don't have resource supply by itself. The less amount of supply you actually have, the higher chance to trigger the crazy price.

For garbage, the calculation is more fun - it seems not only depends on how much garbage your city can handle, but also depends on how much garbage is actually in your city, and how much garbage your city produces each month. So a dirty city seems should be able to trigger a crazy price more likely, and a big city without any garbage facility can also trigger.

Another fact that was not in the previous text, is that the period of "neighbor deal review" is exactly 1 year, counted from the time you confirm the deal.

---

You might ask why I don't skip the steps towards the hydrogen power plant - I don't want to use a feature that explicitly designed as a "cheat" but I am happy to use the glitchs/bugs that worked for me. For example, type a cheat code to plot a building is not in my allowed list, but use the "hold the right button" to plot multiple buildings is acceptable, because the late seems like a bug and the former is obviously a designed feature.

---

There is other cheats that is not even in the PDF - I can "clone" a city to boost up the region population, by

1. copy the region you want to clone to a backup

2. import the city from that region

3. restore the original region, now you can import the same city again, effectively duplicate the city.

In this way you can easily double and double your region population, very easy to test your design.

---

Let me stop from here, maybe I should start a post in the "journey" forum and share my progress.

 

 

[City_Slider 2,716]

Nice, but to much Work.

Try it this Way

 

[CorinaMarie 29,866]

Re-Hiya, Member.

That's really cool. I wasn't previously aware of this extra income neighbor deal scenario.

For the garbage, there is another factor on the price which is related to the available capacity in the receiving city tile. It has 4 breakpoints iirc. So, the buying and selling costs are altered based on this. The more available capacity, the lower the cost. (I personally modded mine to be a constant price which makes it easier to balance the budget when doing garbage deals.)

[City_Slider 2,716]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

(I personally modded mine to be a constant price which makes it easier to balance the budget when doing garbage deals.)

Would You share it with moi Cori?

[CorinaMarie 29,866]

3 hours ago, City_Slider said:

Would You share it with moi Cori?

Yeah, that is my intention to share it, but I have to get documentation written up to explain it and there's no time for that right now.

[earthengine 18]

On 2/11/2021 at 3:34 AM, City_Slider said:

Nice, but to much Work.

Try it this Way

 

Yes I can accept to use mods if it makes the game more fun. But I have to say my fun of neighbor deal is not just for money - it is a complete different way to play. In such a way you would frequently switch between cities to maintain imports and exports, but there is no trouble for resource facility maintenance - which is sometimes a headache.

In particular it makes your finance report less accurate - your facility will expire but it is not represented as you cost, so even your finance advise is happy because you have positive cash flow, you end up losing  money because you have to buy a new power plant.

Neighbor deal introduces another trouble - if you play with a normal price and keep the export maximum and import minimum (to maintain financial balance), you end up in a situation that your resource capacity would be too narrow, so your city can easy grow and your city run out of resource. Keeping this balance is a huge challenge.

Challenge is not a bad thing, it gives us the fun of playing the game. But these two challenge are very different.

On 2/11/2021 at 4:06 AM, CorinaMarie said:

Re-Hiya, Member.

That's really cool. I wasn't previously aware of this extra income neighbor deal scenario.

For the garbage, there is another factor on the price which is related to the available capacity in the receiving city tile. It has 4 breakpoints iirc. So, the buying and selling costs are altered based on this. The more available capacity, the lower the cost. (I personally modded mine to be a constant price which makes it easier to balance the budget when doing garbage deals.)

I am very curious how would this work in some complicated situations I have created. I have created a chain of 20+ (empty) cities with neighbor deals, and avoided using the glitch. But the last city's price is still end up crazy.

this is because, the normal export unit price is always a little bit higher than the import, which makes sense because you should be able to gain a little bit profit, as long as it is not too much. However, this also makes the price grows exponentially when the chain extends.

I would like to know how your mod would work in this scenario.

[City_Slider 2,716]

I never got any kind of Problems to getting the Cash Flow up. After i Start a new City, i have always a positiv Cashflow. I never got in Trouble, with the City Treasure.

*Edit* like you can see here:

[CorinaMarie 29,866]

2 hours ago, earthengine said:

I am very curious how would this work in some complicated situations I have created. I have created a chain of 20+ (empty) cities with neighbor deals, and avoided using the glitch. But the last city's price is still end up crazy.

this is because, the normal export unit price is always a little bit higher than the import, which makes sense because you should be able to gain a little bit profit, as long as it is not too much. However, this also makes the price grows exponentially when the chain extends.

I would like to know how your mod would work in this scenario.

Mine is based on one of @cogeo's Neighbor Deal Mods.

From there I allow even smaller quantity deals for buying or selling to accommodate the rural tiles I create, but also I allow over-buying/selling by ten times so chained deals don't require so much back and forth faffing about. The profit margin is increased to 33% just like his. And then I ironed out the price breaks for garbage such that there is fixed dollar amounts which no longer changes based the receiving city's available capacity.

I suspect for your long 20+ chained deal this would actually become worse price-wise as the chain is extended. There would also be the question of how it would affect existing deals if installed while those are already established. It could wreck havoc.

I've only tested a bit in a new region so it's definitely an alpha version which CB and I do have installed, but for the most part we handle power, water, and garbage in each city tile and forego the neighbor deals which means there's only been a wee little bit of investigation.

[Kiwiwriter47 472]

On 2/9/2021 at 8:25 AM, earthengine said:

Hi everyone,

I am NOT a new user although I am pretty sure most of the people here don't know about me. But I joined this forum in about 2007 (I was playing a pirate copy at that time), then I has been busy on other things. I hasn't been playing SC4 very often, actually I stopped for a while after I upgraded my PC. However since I bought the steam version, it is very easy to get it back on to my computer.

This is what happened recently. However, since I have been left from the game so long, I need to research to gain my memory back and find all the modern mods I would need. This bought me back to this forum. I am so glad to see there is even a serial of video tutorial created just last year, and the mod creators are still productive!

Now I will talk about my experience of the game.

I am an expert of neighbor deals. My main cities does not have power plants, water pumps or garbage facilities, they are all handle with my neighbor cities (namely, they are "resource" cities). I never need to worry about budget because I earn too much from neighbor deals (I usually earn more than $10,000 in the first month in game, and later on that can easily reach $20,000,000). If anyone want to know how I achieve this, let me know, I will be happy to share my experience)

I was not so good at layout design, and usually struggle with traffic problems. That's the area that I need help with.

To build my ultimate "resource" city, I need to unlock the hydrogen power plant. I don't care about the monthly cost or building cost because I am rich; but this one have the highest power output/area ratio therefore I can build a city full of it and so it can serve my whole region. Unfortunately in a new region this is too far away to reach. Instead, I end up achieve this by UDI. Even this is not easy because I have to unlock Area 51 and it takes a lot of effect.

Also, I prefer to build my cities that can be easily join together - that is, a limited set of city terrain that will be able to combine any two of them without "reciliate" the border.

That's all for my "first" post (it should not be the first, but my old posts long ago are lost - I couldn't find them any more).

Greetings to you.

You have definitely figured out some realities of budgeting. 

We do similar things in Newark, believe it or not. Our Watershed provides water for several communities between Lake Pequannock (the watershed) and Newark, directly on the pipeline. We bill them for this service. Needless to say, this was a problem when we had the lead scare, but the lead lines are in the direct pipes to homes, not the main pipes.

We found 18,000 such pipes in 2019. Through a bond program with Essex County, we have swapped out 17,000 lead pipes with copper ones in TWO YEARS. If we hadn't done the bond program, it would have taken us THIRTY YEARS. Yikes.

We will be done by June 2021. The new copper pipes also have better water flow than the lead pipes -- they're wider.

Electrical power comes from PSE&G, which has traditionally had its corporate headquarters in Newark, so we also get that massive tax ratable and source of employment for everyone from executives to executive washroom cleaners. It has a secondary impact in that everyone who works in this massive building has to go to lunch, and a third in that PSE&G is a corporate sponsor of numerous cultural and educational programs in Newark.