grudy

I've used the NAM for quite some time now, ever since the first one came out. Anyway, since then, I've always assumed that using the "radical custom special" setting would be most realistic. However, now looking at a city with 160k people, the size of the streets necessary just look too small (no avenues, only a few major roads and some rail/bus traffic). That being said, we all know that sc4 is inaccurate in so many respects that it is hard to really make sense of any of the numbers in the game (I mean, even w/ 10x capacity, roads hit medium congestion at about 3000 cars/day, which in my opinion should occur more around 20,000 cars/day). Then again, sc4 doesn't take into account anything besides people commuting to and from work, and not all of the other multitudes of trips that occur in a real city. I personally like to make region-sized cities, but we all know that this is a bit of a myth too, since the way pathfinding works is sketchy at best. It's even possible to say that when the game was originally designed, there were certain balances in the commuting numbers based on some obscure math, but that would allow for a reasonably accurate-looking city, even if the numbers were weird (and thus tweaking the numbers, while improving some aspects, could throw other aspects out of kilter). What are your opinions of the best settings to use? It's a pretty hard call, but I'm curious.

Weird. Even if I run an existing city of 5,000 for 20 years, the population stats at the bottom of the screen don't change. If I start a new city, the people add up just fine.

I recently downloaded the residential halving mod from the ST exchange, and applied it to an existing city with 360,000 residents, hoping the population would be halved. Indeed, my structures now hold half what they used to, and the population graph shows a drop by 50%. Weirdly, however, the population shown on the menu bar still shows 360,000, and RCI demand has not changed. What's this about?

Thanks. I've been using the ilive tweaker to adjust properties of every single maxis residential structure. I actually counted the floors and apartments of each structure and got the stats from there. For some reason, however, only some of the structures get updated when I start the game. Perhaps I need to do something special with the new DAT file??? I tried overwriting the Maxis one, but that eliminated the text for the news ticker (replaced with error message). I also tried running both at the same time. Any reason why only my smaller structures seem to have been updated and not the larger towers? Could it also have to do with the fact that I'm trying to apply this to an existing city?

One thing that I've noticed about SC4 is that you need way too much commercial space for the population of the city. In real life, one does not find block after block of completely commercial structures, and they take up a smaller proportion of the city area. Many blocks are mixed use, and just have first stories with a commercial shop or office. Sure, urban sprawl creates vast areas of commercial space, but there are far vaster areas of homes. Has anyone considered making a mod that would redefine the number of residents in homes/apartments. If there were more residential space required for a commercial district, cities would look more realistic. On another level, there needs to be a mod that takes all zone types into consideration at once, redefining the number of jobs/living spaces in all structures, to give a more realistic-looking simulation. I have the CAM, but it does not mess with the number of people in Maxis buildings, so you still need almost as much commercial area as residential.

I use high speed rail instead of monorail.

If you're talking about skyscrapers, they all look similar. In both cases they are tall boxes of concrete, steel, and glass. Sure, they all vary somewhat in basic shape, but skyscrapers are skyscrapers, an expression of industrial might, and (as of now!) offer little difference from building to building. I would have to say that for smaller, more historic structures, I find a wonderful beauty in the eastern concept of connection with the "natural" world, and the blurring of distinctions between inside and out. Western architecture seems very rooted in a need to keep nature outside and people inside. This probably has to do a lot with climate, but I think that religion also plays a major role.

Though SMS is certainly not "simcity" anymore, and it is no longer a realistic city simulation, it might be intersting see SMS as an evolutionary branch of the simcity series. While Simtropolis 1000 (or whatever the name ends up) will certainly be more what most of us want out of a city simulation, SMS could be fun in entirely different aspects, depending on how much the game actually focuses on societies. It will be interesting to see if SMS will succeed as a game, not so much in city planning as in creating a civilization. The screenshots remind me of Black and White. I don't think there is any real point in speculating what SMS should or shouldn't include. Those of us who want to create "realistic" cities will create our own game sooner or later, guaranteed, and it will be awesome. I think what we are seeing is a difference in viewpoints about what simcity was designed as. I also think that there is creative potential to throwing Human aspects into the mix, as opposed to seeing the city as a people and money growing machine. I have often felt disappointed in simcity because it seems like any creativity in designing the city (artistic expression) is purely for the satisfaction of the gamer, without any advantages in the actual game. It would behoove us to at least see what SMS has to offer.

Downloading in Firefox is fine. It's just when you go to open the zipped folder that you get an error message.

no landfill. garbage data view shows no spots with garbage.

For some reason, garbage in my 200,000 person city is stuck at 16000. It is as if simcity is reading 16000 as "0." I have 5 waste-energy plants running well-below capacity (averaging around 100tons/month each). I also have 4 recyclling centers. If I remove one incinerator, the amount of garbage in the city rises, and if I put it back, it drops back down until 16000 and then levels off. I have also noticed from looking at the graphs that over the past 500 years, I have had other periods of garbage leveling off (until the city becomes large enough and there is a short spike in garbage before I build another plant), and that this leveling off value has risen incrementally (although I don't remember ever noticing this in the past). What's the deal with this? Is there some type of structure in my city that has an associated amount of garbage with it that cannot be removed? One thought was that each waste-energy plant has a set value of garbage that hangs around it, but I don't remember this happening with any of my other cities.

Lack of realism blah blah blah, but also RETHINK THE ENTIRE TRANSPORTATION NETWORK. Things just don't add up in the game. Population should be closely tied to the number of commuters. 10,000 cars/day should be considered normal on a road. Commutes of three blocks should not be considered "long." Sims leaving a city should not just disappear off the face of the earth, but their routes should be mapped out by the program to allow accurate commute times. When moving from city to city, the # of commuters should be the same for each road (aka not look like 10,000 sims in one city and 1000 sims on same connection in another). SIMS SHOULD KNOW HOW TO USE TRANSPORTATION EFFICIENTLY, and not do stupid things like taking the ferry across the bay and then the train back across the same f-ing path!!! Finally, BRING BACK AUTO-DISASTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!************** They make the game more interesting. Having to cope with massive disasters is part of what makes city-building fun and creates an interesting layering of texture ot cities. What could be more fun than having to cope with a fault-line appearing in the center of the city? Perhaps roads would have to wind around this, or the area would become a park, or whatever. It's not as fun to have to create this variation manually by deciding when to wreak havoc on your sims. In general, disasters and dilapidation should occur more readily and create areas of cities that look more worn-down than others. It's too easy to wipe the slate clean with a buldozer in the current simcity. Previous decisions should have more of an impact, and sims should protest if you do things like bulldoze a skyscraper or a school to make way for the new avenue. This would create more interesting and realistic street-scapes As it is, simcity right now is TOO IDEALISTIC.

Yes, every person has their own opinion. The only people who have **studied** global warming are scientists, because that is their job. It is their job to explore the unknown and allow all of humanity to benefit from their work. While not everyone is a scientist, every single one of us have the ability to interpret the facts. The FACTS of the matter are that 99.999% of the scientific community aggrees that global warming is an issue. This is a topic that has been studied for 40 years, with data tracing back 650,000 years with the help of polar ice cores. It would have to be an overwhelmingly huge coincidence if this modern day global warming were a "natural" occurence. Humans have only become technologically advanced over the past 10,000 years, and the industrial revolution only in the past 250 years. Considering the billions of years that earth has been around, the chances of CO2 levels suddenly jumping to those of the dinosaur-era because of natural earth-cycles is extremely if not impossibly improbable.

Please, if any of you haven't, watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." It should clear up any misconceptions about the global warming "debate." For Hawkpride147, I am no scientist, but from what I understand about global warming, it basically screws up weather in both the cold and warm extremes. While you will get fewer cold days overall, and fewer regular snowstorms, those few storms that do occur are stronger. You will get more and more damaging freak storms, as opposed to a harmless snowfall. For example: recent ice storms on the East Coast of the US that left as many as four inches of solid ice in places. Normal weather on the East Coast is fluffy snowfall or a mixture of snow and small amounts of sleet/freezing rain.