What was your approach to learning SC4?

[RobVG 16]

I find the learning curve steep. I'm an older player who started with (and haven't played since) SC2K. I've asked a few questions in the forum and you guys have been helpful- thank you. 

I've downloaded and installed the NAM and have gone to youtube for tutorials. Some are helpful but most are really long and the cursor zooms around so much it's often just a blur. It's hard to tell what they are clicking on.  And I've found more than one manual on the NAM as well as the Wiki. There's a lot of info to click through. I wish there was a manual in book form so I could flip through the pages and find what I'm looking for (like I said, I'm older). 

Anyway, I'm getting frustrated trying to learn how the new pieces work.

So how did you guys go about learning? Are there NAM video tutorials you would "highly" recommend? What reading material did you find most helpful? What other strategies did you have for learning. Thanks in advance.  

 

[bhmantan 2,108]

Hi,

NAM added lots of new & complex stuff to the game, so it's fairly reasonable if it's hard to grasp everything in a short amount of time.

My current approach is to pick a specific part that you want & focus on that (e.g. building GLR, highway, or just the highway interchange).
Explore all the possibilities of each menu for that part, plop it piece by piece, and try to build your city using them.

I recommend these channels:

https://www.youtube.com/@MGBNAM

https://www.youtube.com/@haljackey

https://www.youtube.com/@TarkusSC4

Also, join the discord server of SC4Devotion or Simtropolis where you can ask for assistance from the NAM team.

But keep in mind that just watching them wouldn't be enough. You'll need to give it a try in your city.
Watch a topic, practice & get familiar with it.

Good luck!

[Ulisse Wolf 4,454]

30 minutes ago, bhmantan said:

Hi,

NAM added lots of new & complex stuff to the game, so it's fairly reasonable if it's hard to grasp everything in a short amount of time.

My current approach is to pick a specific part that you want & focus on that (e.g. building GLR, highway, or just the highway interchange).
Explore all the possibilities of each menu for that part, plop it piece by piece, and try to build your city using them.

I recommend these channels:

https://www.youtube.com/@MGBNAM

https://www.youtube.com/@haljackey

https://www.youtube.com/@TarkusSC4

Also, join the discord server of SC4Devotion or Simtropolis where you can ask for assistance from the NAM team.

But keep in mind that just watching them wouldn't be enough. You'll need to give it a try in your city.
Watch a topic, practice & get familiar with it.

Good luck!

I wonder why many forget my youtube channel and that of Lucario. LOL

https://www.youtube.com/@UlisseWolf_SC4

https://www.youtube.com/@LucarioBoricua

Anyway. the best advice I can give you is to come to the Simtropolis and SC4DEVOTION discord server where you can ask the NAM Team for help and also talk to other players where you can exchange advice and help each other.

Also I suggest you create a Sandbox region use the cheat mollah to have infinite money and do the experiments with the NAM components

 

[RobVG 16]

10 minutes ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

I wonder why many forget my youtube channel and that of Lucario. LOL

https://www.youtube.com/@UlisseWolf_SC4

https://www.youtube.com/@LucarioBoricua

Anyway. the best advice I can give you is to come to the Simtropolis and SC4DEVOTION discord server where you can ask the NAM Team for help and also talk to other players where you can exchange advice and help each other.

Also I suggest you create a Sandbox region use the cheat mollah to have infinite money and do the experiments with the NAM components

 

I have a "sandbox" city but only use it for experiments so no money worries.

 

[rsc204 21,865]

2 hours ago, RobVG said:

I've downloaded and installed the NAM and have gone to youtube for tutorials. Some are helpful but most are really long and the cursor zooms around so much it's often just a blur. It's hard to tell what they are clicking on.

I totally understand the problem, when I made my tutorials everyone complained they were too long (and presumably boring). At which point I explained that I didn't care and kept doing things the way I thought best, slow and methodical, someone already linked to those (MGBNAM). I can honestly say I don't know of another series that really gets into the basics of starting with the NAM that takes it slow like I do - probably because doing so is counter-productive if you care about likes, rep, viewing figures or literally anything .

[bhmantan 2,108]

1 hour ago, Ulisse Wolf said:

I wonder why many forget my youtube channel and that of Lucario. LOL

https://www.youtube.com/@UlisseWolf_SC4

https://www.youtube.com/@LucarioBoricua

Anyway. the best advice I can give you is to come to the Simtropolis and SC4DEVOTION discord server where you can ask the NAM Team for help and also talk to other players where you can exchange advice and help each other.

Also I suggest you create a Sandbox region use the cheat mollah to have infinite money and do the experiments with the NAM components

 

lol sorry, didn't forget about you guys.
It's just considering what OP said I thought those 3 would fit the needs. Slow-paced, short, and pretty basic tutorials to introduce NAM.

Yours is more like a gameplay channel to me, although I would recommend the HRW video.
And Luc's covered pretty advanced stuff and the cursor moved pretty fast.
So, I thought it's best to just recommend the discord so OP can ask for help directly from you guys there.

[PlanetOfHats 506]

I was younger and dumber at the time, so I think it involved trying to adapt my old methods from SimCity 3000, failing, and then reading stuff like FAQ sites to come up with optimal zoning patterns. Of course I do none of that now and just play the game with so many mods that it's barely recognizable from how I played it in the old days.

[Lucario Boricua 7,049]

Over the last 13ish years playing SimCity 4, I've learned a lot, through my own experimentation, tutorials, optimal selection of mods, and even gameplay rules! I'll be posting a pretty comprehensive answer, make sure to use the parts in bold to find something suitable to your case. Here it goes!:

• Most players are obsessed with zoning too much commercial early in their city's development history. You first gotta produce stuff to sell it, so make sure to grow your cities some more. At least in my personal experience, cities start to rely more on commercial jobs, over industrial jobs, at around 60,000 inhabitants. You can still zone commercial in smaller cities, but make sure it's not a whole neighborhood's worth, only a main street's worth will suffice.
• Avoid falling into the trap of wanting to provide all services to all your citizens right from the start. You first need to build up a fiscally sound economy before adding stuff past the bare minimum services: electricity, waste disposal, and firefighting. Don't provide universal education or healthcare at first, make sure to provide it to some neighborhoods first to create a middle class, and only then will you have sufficient funding to extend it to everyone else.
• Don't ignore waste management. Taking out the trash is the easiest way to inadvertedly stagnate your city without realizing it. It doesn't have to be through landfills or waste-to-treatment plans. Make sure to look for some special magic lots which get rid of waste for cheap. Here's some classic options to use:

 

• Exploit your transportation system: neighbor connections and airports are some of the best ways to boost commercial development in your cities. Doing subway, Maxis Highway (ground or elevated) and monorail add a 100,000 commercial jobs CAP relief. You don't need to build the full networks for this to take effect. One simple method I use is changing the neighbor connections of my avenues and 2-tile bidirectional Network Widening Mod for ground highway. Concerning airports, use airport shuttle bus lots to get the airport's CAP relief effect without the size or complication of building an airport where you want skyscrapers and parks.

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=3295

 

• Adjust your transportation usage levels with transit station spacing and/or interchange spacing. From NAM 45 onwards, the traffic simulator received a really thorough overhaul. Nowadays it's far more effective at getting sims to commute using high-capacity, high-speed networks--freeways and the rail transit modes. If you feel your city's transit is underutilized, you might want to place stations closer together, add more bus stops to feed commuters into higher hierarchies of transit, or place more interchanges along your freeways. The optimized routing capabilities of the updated traffic simulator will ensure more sims are aware of these routes, making them commute in a more realistic manner. You'll also realize that the spacing doesn't need to be too low to be useful. Distances in the scale of 1/4 mile or 1/2 km (25 to 32 cells of spacing) will be sufficient to encourage a healthy amount of commuting in your cities. No longer do you need to place transit in a super dense spacing of every 1-2 city blocks.
• Embrace regional gameplay. SimCity 4 does not thrive off choosing 1 city square and developing it exclusively, you gotta form a proper metropolitan area! Make sure you set up suburbs, industrial districts, city centers, rural areas and even natural areas. This gameplay style will make your region feel more natural and life-like, and will help make your chosen main cities grow to their full potential.
• Bigger isn't always better. A lot of the best-looking cities and regions in the game aren't necessarily the biggest, unless your thing is to see numbers grow like an investment bubble. On the side of cities, make sure to leave space for water (sea, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, lagoons, ponds, canals, etc.), parks, plazas, landmarks, and pockets of lower density to make your higher density areas stand out. At the regional level, try avoiding overly large regions, unless you're very sure you can handle them. While we can get some impossibly large cities big enough to fit full-scale megacities (see topic linked below), your best mileage will be if you play at sizes in the range of 24x24 to 40x40 small cities (6x6 to 10x10 large cities). You can choose to either get a region map in this size, shrink a larger region, or get a cut-out of a spot you like from a larger region. Alternatively, get a larger region with varied topography, such that you have areas of water and rugged terrain filling up some of the space, allowing you to guide your city development into a more pleasing shape. You'll also realize that it becomes difficult to change things in cities consisting largely or exclusively of skyscrapers.

 

 

• Create periodic back-ups of your files, and be careful when saving. Make sure you do back-ups of both your Plugins folder and your city save files. Copy your Regions folder to another storage drive (portable, in the PC or cloud storage) every few weeks. This way, if something goes wrong with your gameplay files, you can at least fish out back-ups of your cities, and only lose part (rather than all) your progress. Likewise for your Plugins folder, those take a lot of effort to grow big and optimized for your gameplay and aesthetic preferences. Concerning the saving procedure, make sure you save your cities separately from exiting to region or quitting the game. If you need a reminder, make sure to get this mod:

 

 

• Learn to shape the terrain to your advantage. In real life, buildings, infrastructure and landscaping involve a lot of earthworks, to ensure the soil shape and conditions are suitable for development and drainage. Make sure to use slope mods and precision terraforming techniques to make your cities look nicer. It does take more time to develop your cities, but the results are very worthwhile! A good place to start is my Earthworks Tutorials official thread, linked below! Just about everything you'll need to learn these techniques is linked as part of the various tutorials, and the home thread.

 

• Once you get the hang of the basics, challenge yourself! One strategy I've used at times to improve my gameplay experience is to self-impose some restrictions on my gameplay. Say, if you're too accustomed to building road infrastructure, try developing a region in which you can't use any large roads--no freeways, no wide avenues, no intersections with too many lanes. You'll quickly realize you can get a lot of mileage out of your transit options, of mixed-use zoning, and of doing small towns and villages. You can apply similar techniques to this one by noticing deficiencies in your gameplay, and coming up with a suitable set of rules to break your old habits. You'll be surprised at all the amazing things you can achieve.
• Terrain mods are the easiest way to customize your game's aesthetics. As wonderful as SimCity 4 may be, its look can grow stale after a while. You can refresh your gameplay experience by adding terrain mods of your liking. Make sure to mix and match them to approximate the look and feel you want for your cities They also take a lot less effort to amass, compared to getting additional buildings, parks / plazas / landmarks, automata and/or specialized infrastructure content. The best place to start are the terrain mod shoppes, linked below!

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Set up laboratory / sandbox regions. If you want to learn how to do some kind of gameplay, test mods before using them on your gameplay cities, or master the construction of something complicated, set up one or more regions where you can experiment without worrying about the results or about ruining your precious city development. These regions can be as simple as a game-generated flat terrain region, or it can be a region with a more varied topography, to suit your needs. You can even use a mountainous coastal landscape region to test your terrain mods, or use small cities only to try interchange designs.
• Check the content of talented players for inspiration, and even for advice! You're not gonna learn much if you stick to your comfort zone, go out there and interact with others who are really good at doing whatever is it that you want to master. A really great place to start are the City Journals (Simtropolis) and Mayor Diaries (SC4 Devotion)--these are blogs whose purpose is to showcase city simulator content, either in story, tutorial and/or gallery styles.

https://community.simtropolis.com/journals/

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/forum/11-sc4-city-journals/

https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?board=478.0

 

It's a really big list, but I hope it's really helpful for people of all skill levels!

[TheMurderousCricket 5,096]

My approach was rather basic and simmilar to yours. I just created a thread where I put all of my woes and troubles so that others can participate and teach me something. It's in my signature if you'd like to browse it @RobVG.

EDIT: No it's not. Here's the link to it.

[PaPa-J 778]

I guess you can say I did things the hard way.  I created a test region where I could check out every piece and tried to match things up first before I would put in one of my cities. I also watched these video's, which helped me a lot.  https://www.youtube.com/@MGBNAM