Recommended Mods?

[sr-71 0]

So I have not played SimCity 4 in a long time. I played a while ago, and ran into two bugs that really messed the game up for me. One, I reached enough high tech jobs for the space center and it never got unlocked, which I took personally. Also the Subways never worked.

I'm interested in downloading the game off of Steam and giving it another go, but I'm really not interesting in going bankrupt trying to make public transportation work. Is there a recommended general bug fix patch that is easy to install on Mac?

[rsc204 21,808]

2 hours ago, sr-71 said:

One, I reached enough high tech jobs for the space center and it never got unlocked, which I took personally.

You may be interested to know, you could have unlocked it by completing a few UDI missions, or by using the You Don't Deserve It cheatcode, which unlocks all rewards until you exit a city. It could well be that the code that controls this being unlocked was buggy and dealt with in the official EP1 patch, which the Mac edition never received, which might explain this. Honestly, the most I've got in one city on my Mac is like 11k I-HT jobs right now, so I'm in no position to easily test this. But I know it does unlock just fine using the Windows edition.

2 hours ago, sr-71 said:

Also the Subways never worked.

One of the worst things Maxis did, probably overruled by EA's moneymen, was to bork the commute pathfinding, to ensure the game could run on PIII 500 systems, i.e. so at launch it wouldn't need a particularly modern or powerful PC to run. In short sims are always looking for the shortest rather than the quickest route everywhere, because this is less mathematically intensive. But the drawback of this system is that it's quite dumb and tends to lead all sims to the same routes to get everywhere and avoid a lot of the Mass Transit systems.

The core of the NAM mod, is fixing this oversight and freeing the game so that all the various transit types are now viable, provided you design them right. In real terms it means Sims will use Subways, Trains, Highways and you are more free in terms of how you distribute your RCI zoning, which in turn means you can make more realistic cities that actually work. There is even the included TSCT Tool, which allows you to easily customise various settings based on how you prefer to play.

Bolted onto that is around 15 years of additional networks, transit types and additions, but those are completely optional and you can choose to use as much or as little as you like.

[simster007 371]

The Spaceport unlocks in my MAC Version (Steam, but the older Version runnning on 32bit) as intended. As far as I know you have to play the city tile in hard mode to get the reward.

Concerning subways: I never had any problems getting them to work. On the old CD Version I didn´t know that NAM exists, so they were used, but not really functional as the whole traffic without NAM. In the MAC Steam Version with NAM they work as well.

[rsc204 21,808]

3 hours ago, simster007 said:

As far as I know you have to play the city tile in hard mode to get the reward.

Actually now you mention it, that rings a bell, but that shouldn't preclude being able to unlock it with either method mentioned in my previous post.

3 hours ago, simster007 said:

I never had any problems getting them to work.

Oh they work, but without NAM the difference in sims preference to use subway is night and day, I suspect that's what the OP means here.