Need help for a newbie

[Echoes2005 3]

I recently bought SC4 because I love city builders and I wanted to see what playing this game was like. I followed a very recent tutorial for downloading mods so it can run on my PC, and when I booted it up everything seemed to be going fine. However, I've noticed two things upon playing:

1: When I went to the Getting Started plot, it took an unusually long time to load despite the plot having nothing on it. Not sure if that's normal or if I didn't install a mod that addresses that.

2: I can't get past the power plant part of the tutorial. When I put one down, the tutorial did not continue and I had to exit out of it and learn on my own

I'm new to SC4 and its modding scene, so I dunno if I did something wrong with installing mods or if this is completely normal.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

Hiya,  @Echoes2005 and welcome to Simtropolis.

1: Sounds like maybe you already have a lot of plugins installed and so the first time entering a city tile is slower than subsequent visits in the same play session. To test this after a fresh computer reboot you can time how long it takes from double clicking the icon to start the game until the region screen appears. Make note of that. Then time how long it takes to fully load the city tile. Make note of that too. Now exit back to the region and then time how long to get back into the very same city tile. It should be noticeably faster the 2nd time. If so, then the it's certainly attributable to loading plugins as the delay. You can also quit the game and time how long it takes to the region screen the 2nd time. This is usually also quicker since Windoze can keep a big chunk of the game in quick-fetch memory.

2: Are you using a slope mod? It really should not affect plopping the power station, but I know for certain in the New Transportation Tutorial it will totally prevent laying out the requested Monorail.

In general, I find doing the tutorials in vanilla (no plugins installed) is the very best way.

And then also, do not later play the Timbuktu Region itself because there are some circumstances where the whole thing can get wiped out and restored with the blank original city tiles. (Not to worry tho. If you do want to play it (and we all have many times) you can grab Timbuktu Too so you can play it safely.

[memo 1,444]

Regarding 2, if you get stuck at the power plant, it's probably because you've installed CAM, as CAM replaces the default power plant. It's best to play the tutorials before heavily modding the game. Also be sure to read the documentation for what you install. CAM in particular must not be installed for a region that already has established cities (i.e. cities with names).

[Echoes2005 3]

Ok, I uninstalled all of the mods I had in SC4Pac and now I managed to complete all of the tutorials. I kept the custom launch options I had since I use the Steam version (mainly skip intro, custom resolution, and making it only run 1 CPU core) and I was able to run the game without issues. I also had a launch option to run the game in windowed mode (since running it in fullscreen screws with all of the windows I have open on my PC) but for some reason it keeps booting up in fullscreen.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 minutes ago, Echoes2005 said:

... it keeps booting up in fullscreen.

I never used a launcher, but when passing the parameters in the Target line of the Icon, it needed the other way set. Like if not using either then it was controlled by what you set within the game. If you had windowed for a while and changed to full screen with -f in the command line it would not go back to windowed by simply removing the -f. You'd have to specifically add -w to get back to windowed.