Mainland Marauder

http://www.simcitycentral.net/buildinglist/ Are you looking for something like this?

You are probably running low on water. High-tech industry needs water. If you have a lot of abandoned residential or commerical high rises then water is probably the problem as well. Your water pumps wear out with time; when your city grows big enough you can build a large water pump that has 10 times the capacity of a regular one. Then demolish all your old ones and the maintenance cost should pretty much level out. Then make sure all areas of your city where you want high-wealth (including high-tech) development has the wet stuff. If that's your problem, then there's your solution.

Try zoning some low-density commercial after dropping the taxes for low-wealth commercial service. Also, $ and $$ residents will still live in cities with dirty industry, and you can tax the industry up to about 10% before the demand starts going away (unless you have a lot of industry in an adjacent tile). Forget detailed services for this low-rent city of yours - just stick to an elementary school, clinic and a fire station or two if you have industry. I wouldn't even necessarily bother with providing police or water. Water attracts rich Sims, which you don't want to do if you are trying to concentrate them somewhere else.

On its own a city needs 28K for the residential high-rises. This number does come down depending on how much residential demand you have in neighboring cities. You can build suburbs of ~50K or possibly more on a small region tile.

My city of ~380K has a few skyscrapers but most of the tallest ones are really residential....my commerce is kind of decentralized. I could turn one of my mini-CBDs into a high-tech industrial complex or something. My residential demand is too unstable for more high-wealth high-rises and I don't want any more of those ugly brown apartment blocks that are usually your city's first mid-rise.

A lot of things could be coming into play....desirability, pollution, taxes....are you building one-RCI-type cities or mixing it up? Commercial seems to develop a little better in polluted areas than residential. You are not going to have skyscrapers next to smokestacks though.

It's a pretty good idea to put ramps on both sides of your elevated freeways if you want to get the most use out of them. If you drag a road underneath a elevated freeway and there is room, it will automatically ask whether you want to place those ramps. Trucks, regular people, everyone uses them.

This is awesome. I have a similarly-laid out city that is much smaller (300k) - do the landmarks help the big commercial skyscrapers go up?

I too enjoy the complexity of SC4, although I think it shouldn't be too much more complex than it is (with Rush Hour). That said, the change in direction with Societies might not be a bad thing. If it doesn't work out, then there just might be another....I guess we can use the term "oldschool" now....SC title. 2K was great for its day but was very dated by the time 3K came around. My problems with 3K were more performance-related than gameplay, which I liked. And without Classic we wouldn't be having this discussion or this forum. I was actually introduced to SC on the Super NES. All of the console SC2K ports were horrible. Some things just need to stay on PC.