NorthWest Coastal Metropolis

This has interesting insights into the thoughts of the SimCity Mayor as if you really are the in-game person in charge of the city's development rather than someone outside the game. Are you able to grow those tall buildings because the region population is 101k when you start? See, I haven't ever gown the big buildings yet in mine as I favor rural settings with mostly farms.  Did you unlock most of the rewards? Your city seems to be thriving. Is it self sustaining (other than rebuilding utilities as they wear out)? I don't see dilapidation all over it so I'm confuzzled why it's "Game Over, Please Try Again..." after Stage 3.

Your comment is so rich with detail, whether I mostly reply technically or artsitically, its requires a bit of essay writing.

The higher level rewards in SC4 are more so determined by the foundational design the user applied, that is, whether you began with the plan to build a primarily commercial, industrial or agricultural city, as well whether you decided on high or low tech, etc.   As you probably know, If you do not start early with agriculture, the demand for it will fall to zero so you will not get the rewrds related to agriculture.

In my demo session I got most of the rewards relating to commerce and industry, and population does seem to determine a lot of the rewards.  I was going to publish the stats at each stage, but the storytelling aspect of this presentation became more so my thing so to speak, so the stage 3 picture was taken after I re-installed my plugins folders containing the mods and cheats I use for graphic and content production and/or for relaxed and more comfortable sessions of gameplay.

Tall commercial buildings are mid to high wealth requiring a focus on commerce as the foundation.  Most of the tall buildings are residential as the easiest focus is on industry.  The city is essentialy industrial, but a balance of heavy and high tech., so I didn't get to launch a shuttle. 

The city is functioning in a state of flux in which it is thriving, so yes, only basic maintenance is required.  I can set it on turtle speed and go have lunch and not come back to mass destruction, but I do not play with disasters enabled.

Game Over, Please Try Again... refers to what we used to see in the arcade after dropping a quarter into a machine and surviving as long as possible without having to put in another quarter and try again.  The machines were kind of money hungry, so it became a challenge to balance real money with gameplay.

SimCity: The Motion Picture.  Coming soon to a theater near you?   I think it could be a billion dollar blockbuster.   Otherwise, if you haven't tried it, I think you would enjoy SimCity 5 as you have experience with role-playing games.

I enjoyed at least a few evenings where it was truly a beautiful thing co-ordinating, co-operating, and collaborating with several others online, constructing a regional metropolis.   Hollywood could not make a movie as beautiful as the real thing we call human civilization.  May it live and advance forever.

Vanilla Simcity 4; without any mods would be nice to play as a competition at a LAN party, otherwise it´s to borring, disatisfying and time consuming for me !

Easy game level is harsh let stand the others, do like the structure of the zoning system but economics are much less rewarding, rewards aswell mostly imposed.

Arcade style , basic gameplay, indeed no comparison to the way eerything around Simcity 4  has evolved and how the game is considered today, well done !

1 hour ago, kschmidt said:

well done !

Thank-you.    It is very time-consuming, but I run it at cheetah speed and stay at that speed most of the time, at some point a lot of things start happening very fast, so its more engaging.   As a competition I agree that would be awesome to give maybe a time limit and see who can build and get the most stuff.   Cool idea.

3 minutes ago, RandyE said:

Thank-you.    It is very time-consuming, but I run it at cheetah speed and stay at that speed most of the time, at some point a lot of things start happening very fast, so its more engaging.   As a competition I agree that would be awesome to give maybe a time limit and see who can build and get the most stuff.   Cool idea.

Accomplishing, basic game goals by setting speed is fine except for game control avoiding basic disaster like fire´s, yet layour zoning of land iphysicaly costing time and money, Aquiring a reward in drive-u are aswell so. It isn´t that simple !

40 minutes ago, kschmidt said:

Accomplishing, basic game goals by setting speed is fine except for game control avoiding basic disaster like fire´s, yet layour zoning of land iphysicaly costing time and money, Aquiring a reward in drive-u are aswell so. It isn´t that simple !

Right, so some kind of structure to the setup of the game has to be applied, especially if we are talking about a more competitive or engaging personal play of the game.    So below is the first few notes I made of how I set up the game for this demo.

======
Stage 1
======

City Simulation Setup
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Start New City:
 - cover entire large tile with trees in god mode
 - go to mayor mode
 - disable disasters
 - enable daytime only
Play Options:
 - disable auto goto
 - disable urgent advice
 - disable U drive it
Taxes:
 - set dirty industry to 10.5
 - set agriculture to 1.5
 - set all other taxes to 9.5
Begin Construction:
 - start in pause
 - plop coal power in corner
 - plop small water pump at safe distance from industry
 - layout water grid for stage 1 construction
 - layout a few zones, keep industry safe distance from residential
 - zone low density commercial and plant trees to reduce pollution
_____________
Start Simulator:
 - start in turtle speed
 - plant trees to stimulate growth
 - switch to cheetah speed once growth and positive cash flow are realized
 - on first fire locate center of area of most risk of fire and plop small fire station
 - locate center of area most at health risk, add small medical clinic
 - locate center of population density and plop small elementary school

---------------------------------------

The rest of list of notes of actions I took is quite long, but the above is the very basic beginning of the game.

   Very cool entry , I found it interesting , the way of presentation was awesome . It has been so long ago , playing the game in the flavor of vanilla . I kinda forgot about how it used to be before mods . I have never had the game suggest that I run for senate . But that was because I played on my son-in-law's PC many moon ago . I'm not one to boast , but budget management was my goal to success . I loved how you went about your story . I can't remember if I had looked at your latter entries , darn sometimers gets to me every now and again . I will go back and check them out as well and give my two cents . Keep it up , I'm enjoying your CJ as of today and we'll see what tomorrow brings . You have found another follower .  

On ‎2016‎-‎10‎-‎31 at 10:10 PM, raynev1 said:

You have found another follower .  

Thank-you.  It is enjoyable sharing these experiences with the game and there's so many different perspectives in the CJs.   I have ended up using vanilla mostly because I do a lot of graphics and making lots.   I thoroughly enjoy testing the game as well as testing a variety of mods and lots to ensure they work as intended.   

I was surprised at the budget management I did achieve in this demo session.  I went back to my plugins folders a couple times to ensure they were empty because I couldn't believe that my strategy was generating so much income and profit.   Interestingly, after playing this game so long I seem to know more than I know that I know about it.   So it helped making the notes as I went along to record what I was doing.

Do you find that successful management requires a constant adjusting, fine-tuning, the expenses, taxes, etc.?    I go around and constantly adjust the sliders to squeeze as much profit as I can so I can afford to build more faster and sooner.

I went over my notes looking at the management strategy I use and generally what I see is that I keep the city on the edge of collapse, keep riding the simulator like surfing a wave, always staying just slightly ahead of the crest where the wave breaks.    At some point the wave becomes bigger than the surfer and you really can't lose, you just glide into the shore and sit back and enjoy your virtual success.

7 hours ago, RandyE said:

Do you find that successful management requires a constant adjusting, fine-tuning, the expenses, taxes, etc.?

I'm uncertain if it is required. However, in my early cities which ranged in size from 10k to 100k population I found it useful to slowly tweak the tax rates to level out the demand for all the Res, Comm, Ag, I-M, and I-HT to right around +2000 demand and I'd keep I-D about -1000. I use the little medical clinic for every small cluster of houses and always turn off the ambulances and then adjust their capacity to slightly over the number of patients. Budgetwise I could have, say, 5 clinics to cover the same area which 100% ambulance would cover while doing it cheaper overall. Same for schools.

In my current playing I'm doing almost all AG and low Res so I extracted the Budget Tuning Parameters exemplar and set the TaxMultiplier_IAG to 5. This lets me plop enough fire stations to insure full coverage without needing to build huge, dense cities to afford them. I also extracted PZ1x1_Grass_4ab05a13 (Open Grass Area park) and set its maintenance cost to -1 per month. So far I'm liking this setup for my play style.

You mentioned that strategy of eliminating the cost of ambulances and school buses before, I think maybe in PM, and I've stored it in the back of my mind for my next major session of gameplay.  Your preference it seems is for agriculture and I'd love to see a large tile example of a successful rural development, especially since several of our colleagues do enjoy the beauty of SC4 graphics.  

The easiest game is using dirty industry as the primary economic engine, keeping it at a safe distance and using tree barriers to reduce pollution and traffic noise.  You also have mentioned, again I think in PM, that the water pollution in SC4 from agriculture is not realistic.  So Cori's mod for agriculture realism is also something I'd love to see.   Just before Mary got taken away with RL activities, I had started a large tile focused on Ag so I could test her props and lots, and I will do the same now in appreciation of your work.

When I was playing SC5, the players seemed to agree that population was the objective of the gaming aspect.  If you can celebrate a functional city of a million sim persons then you're an expert.  What I'm thinking now is high population based on an agricultural engine as per your interest.  That is a challenge that I will enjoy.

Cori, I think we need an SC4  Game-player thread so we can discuss with others our strategies of gameplay.  I think you were hinting in PM that I release the rest of my notes on gameplay, and I have to admit I'd love to.

7 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I also extracted PZ1x1_Grass_4ab05a13 (Open Grass Area park) and set its maintenance cost to -1 per month. So far I'm liking this setup for my play style.

Hope I don't get 'cited' for bumping, but glad you are familiar with  PZ1x1_Grass that you may have loaded in either LE prop, iReader or SC4 tools.   That's where we will begin in Lot Editor when you are ready for the next adventure.  

7 hours ago, RandyE said:

What I'm thinking now is high population based on an agricultural engine as per your interest.

I believe feasibility of that will depend on the value ascribed to high population.

Farms take up a lot of space and they don't employ a super large bunch of Sims. I did post a pic in the Farm Thread, but you can't see it right now since photobucket went out to lunch and hasn't come back yet. (Which also means all my Shoppes are borked too.) Basically all I was showing there is that the farmers worked around the trees rather than felling them and pulling out the stumps. It would be interesting to see how many Sims would populate a no industrial region. Like just farms and commercial. Maybe elementary schools and libraries only for education? Aside from terrain related texture mods, I'm vanilla plus the two mods I created for income and MCP Water Treatment.

I've seen it mentioned several times that Ag demand will fall off later in the game. I'm uncertain if that is based on population or education or a certain number of years or some combination thereof.