Blackadar

All I can say is... *sigh* EA/Maxis must have forgotten what the "sim" stands for in SimCity.

Given the massive bugs, online issues, lost cities, no chance of it being fixed by mods, absurd DLC and an entirely broken game engine? Hell no. I've gotten more enjoyment out of Societies...

It's been a long time since I've posted here, but I'm chiming in to agree with Ocram. I was excited about the new SimCity and willing to give it a chance, despite some of the directions they've taken (online only, etc.). But if the cities are that small, then I have very little interest in playing the game. I simply can't make any kind of decent city out of an area that tiny.

The most obvious one: fun! There's something lacking in Cities XL that makes the game a bit dry. I don't know if I can put my finger on it, but it just hasn't been able to grab me the way the SimCity series did. Things like weather, disasters, a bit more customization and maybe some changes in presentation would help. I'd also love to see some scenarios encompassing both "build a city from scratch" and a "repair this city to meet XXX goal". I agree more interchange options, an EL, an easy-to-use mod package and some more engine optimization would be greatly desired.

Originally posted by: Xtreme one i did all that, tax on R$$$ is 10.5%, the city has a LOT of parks, and traffic seems fine cuz commute time is 50-60quote> 10.5%? That's awfully high.

First of all, I salute everyone who makes the really neat custom content for SC4. With that said, I dislike dependencies. I understand their purpose and I understand why they're necessary, but I don't like 'em. Why? As mentioned above, it can be very difficult to actually find dependencies. You'll find a lot that requires one, but can't find the dependency at all or find that it's locked. Then you run into the problem where one pack replaces another...especially when a mega pack rolls up AND updates individual packs. Plus people don't always use the full or correct name for their dependencies, making it difficult to figure out if "SimMegPack 4 XYZ123" is the same thing as "SimMegaPack 4". Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Then, of course, there are the lots that you download that use a dependency but didn't list it in the first place. SimGoober's lots are amazing, but I bypass quite a few of them due to the number of dependencies they require. But that's my choice and is no reflection on his work. At least he clearly lists the dependencies...and I'm sure at some point I'll DL most of his dependencies and add 50 of his lots to my game. I just haven't gotten off my butt to do so. But if you're going to make custom content to post, you're making it to share with the community. As such, it never hurts to keep the dependencies in mind when creating custom content and, if at all possible, try to limit the number needed or stick to the most popular megapacks. But if you choose to not do so, that's you're choice and I don't begrudge it.

Originally posted by: SC4BOY SC4TF support is pretty much abandoned here.. go to SC4Devotion site and you will find a forum on "tools" down the forum list.. the SC4TF threads are there.. good luck. wrt SC4 running on Vista, many people have it running fine (but I don't know about if you have the 64bit version). You might search the ST forum for "VISTA".. there have been many posts on the issue.quote> In regards to SC4 on Vista, I tried every single solution that I could find on SC4Devotion to no avail. I tried downloading the .dil. I tried running it in XP compatibility mode. I tried this, that and the other. After two hours, I gave up - the only conclusion I can draw is that it doesn't really work with Vista. I'm sure it's a fine program and I salute the folks who put the effort into it. I can just wish it worked with a newer OS than XP. I understand why someone wouldn't try to redo it - after all, SC4 is now getting on 5 years old. I just wish the guys at SC4Devotion would post their regions using the old-fashioned .bmp files so some of us newer users could actually use those regions.

Originally posted by: prince_of_sims To fix the "Traceback" errors, make sure you have the MSVCP71.DLL file, according to the readme.quote> It doesn't matter. Unfortunately, getting these to run (especially on Vista) seems to be pretty futile.

Originally posted by: littlebo I have been trying to get sc4mapper to work with vista premium, been reading through the forum and have not been able to get it up and running. Anyone have any ideas? I dl'd the dll's, tried changing the .exe file to operate as xp, none of this works. Any help would be appreciated.quote> No, it simply doesn't work with Vista.

Originally posted by: AZUREBIRD I'm getting so frustrated! First of all, the residential areas show that there is very low education but there are schools (elementary, high school and colleges) all over the place including the libraries and museums close by. What am I doing wrong? And the resident people constantly have "no work" signs all over the place when there are empty commercial and industry zones all over. I've always have this problem ever since I bought this game. Please help! quote> Despite some of the answers here, I think you may be experiencing a bug that I've run across myself. I zoned a bunch of residential with good access to schools and libraries with the intent that this bedroom community would commute to the big city nearby. All the zones developed except for one part which kept getting the "no job" icon. Incidentally, it was the closest development to the edge of the map where I had connected to the big city. Everyone else made the commute fine, but this one zone wouldn't. Furthermore, while the nearby zones' EQ slowly climbed into the green, they stayed red the entire time. All had the same access to the educational structures and all were built at the same time. So it made no sense that the structures closest to the highway to the "big city" couldn't find jobs while the other zones (who had a longer commute time) didn't have a problem. So to test, I zoned some commercial property in the residential zone and one of the houses got a job at that commercial property. But what was astounding was on a street with little traffic, the game thought the commute time from the home to the office - which was just SIX squares away (straight shot, no intersections between the two buildings) - was "long". They took the right path, and it should have been a very short commute time...but the game didn't calculate it correctly. I finally just demolished it and built something else there. It is most definitely a bug in the game.

To start, I've read through a lot of the forum...the Omnipedia, CJs, searched threads and so forth. I really haven't found the answer to this (general) question. Also, as a note, I play on the medium-sized city maps to make the CPU load more manageable. There are many threads and articles on "how do I get started" or "I can't build a successful city". I'm not having those issues. My cities are profitable, traffic is manageable, Sims are happy and there's a ton of demand (usually for Residential). What I'm having difficulty with is "taking the next step". FYI, I grow my cities naturally with very little planning. I use mostly a grid structure for efficiency and traffic flow, but I'd love any help in moving to a more natural look. All my cities end up being about the same - 20,000 to 30,000 sims with a smattering of commercial and industrial. If I demo and rebuild I can get my city to 100,000 people. But they all look the same - I've never had any luck building specific cities for commercial vs. residential vs. industrial. Heck, the only times I've tried were unmitigated disasters that were quickly deleted. I start with a subdivision look (rather than straight grids) and build a lot of single-lot homes but realize that to get from 30,000 on up, I have to demo lots of those little homes and redo the entire road grid due to traffic load. I never know when or how to use mass transit. Highways stupify me - I've built highways that no one ever used. As such, you can swap one of my cities for another and never know the difference. I see these great CJs and can't figure out how they were made. Nor do I terraform - what's the real advantage of doing this? I wonder if the terrain of my maps, which lack significant peaks and valleys, contributes to the feeling of every city being very generic. What's the advantage of a farm city? Why should I spend 100,000 on landmarks when they look out-of-place? How do you avoid major traffic problems when two high-rises get built next to one another with a population of 2,500 in each? How do you get enough jobs around those high-rises to keep everyone employed when my best commercial buildings don't have more than a few hundred jobs, even though the buildings are large? Why is my residential population demand ALWAYS through the roof, even when I build cities that are almost exclusively residential? If it would help, I could upload a few screenshots of some of my cities for your suggestions. I'd like to take a step forward in the design of my cities to create something that's unique, beautiful and worthy of my best accomplishments in SimCity 1 and SimCity 2. I just don't think I can get there without your help, so thanks for it!

Yea, I'm going to get a couple of those mods myself. I love the way the farmland looks. Sorry Land, my old SC2 cities are looooong gone. I'm wondering if I should start a CJ for everyone to comment on / make suggestions on? Or would that not be well received?

First, thanks for the suggestions...responses/questions below. The Omnibus article "Making Money The Easy Way" is designed largely around the premise of at least some degree of city specialization (in the sense of a low-density suburban Residential and Commercial city, a strictly I-D and I-M city, some strictly I-HT mini-cities, a medium-density R/C city, and a medium/high density Commercial-only city). Give it a read through, and perhaps even follow along with it, if you're wondering about putting city specialization into practice.quote> Interestingly enough, I've tried this - I mean I duplicated it zone-for-zone - and it simply didn't work. The early residential city never could find jobs and the industrial city demand was lousy. I thought I did something wrong, so I tried again with the same results. Highways are a pain in the butt. When they're well-implemented, they're wonderful, but they can be tricky. I find that they are excellent means of getting sims from one city to another, especially if your transportation network is laid out such that they have to use the highways in order to cross borders (or, at the least, they can't use any other roads to do so).quote> Hmmm...I'm better with highways now, but I also use roads to connect zone-to-zone because it helps fuel the growth of my next city. Is it better to limit zone-to-zone connections to highways and shut down the roads? Won't the residential zones that are a bit far from the highway go jobless? As far as building out vs. building up, one of the biggest leaps I had to make, conceptually, in SC4 is that not every city needs to be one of skyscrapers, that the "goal" doesn't have to be "get as many people as I can". This is another plus of the "Making Money etc." tutorial, as the focus for much of the article is on a suburban city. This goes back a little bit to regional play concepts--instead of just having a lot of cookie-cutter urbanized cities, you can have a sprawling outer suburb, a denser "midtown", and then a smaller but high-density downtown district. This is far more "natural" than just making all cities as big as possible (after all, some towns remain just that, instead of building up), and naturalism is, I gather, your goal in making this post.quote> Yep, I am shooting for a more natural look and that's the reason I haven't built up my 20,000k cities. It's just they end up looking so generic. Now that I have a thriving region, should I just go back and bulldoze out to make them more unique? I.e., bulldoze the industrial from one, the residential from another, etc.? That depends on the way in which they (landmarks) look out of place. If the way they're put together just seems to be out of sync with the design of "regular" SC4 buildings, there's not much you can do about it. If they seem out of place because of your city's characteristics, however, well, either change the city's characteristics, or don't build them. As far as what good they do, I think they have effect on certain demand caps, and certainly have an effect on desirability.quote> So I take it you think they're worth the expense? Ah, the big question, employment, the trickiest bastard of them all. Without going on too long a rambling monologue, and equally because I'm still struggling with the issue myself, employment is affected by a lot of things, but especially wealth and education--the wealthier someone is, and the better educated they are, the better job they demand. This means that if you have brilliant sims, even if they're R$, they won't work in your l

Originally posted by: thesohappy well all those questions have simple answers! I asked the same questions a year back when I started to play Simcity! I'd advice you to read the manual head over feet! Here's the link: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/manual/index.html Tell me if it helped after reading it, but some simple facts:well you don't need to build highways if traffic's not congestioned,I dont think terraforming makes any difference but cities with seas and rivers i think r more pleasant for sims.quote> I appreciate it, but the manual doesn't help with any of the questions I've asked. The strategy guide is ok, but I'm not looking for answers regarding individual components of the city so much as I'm looking for some overall guidance regarding individualizing each city.

Originally posted by: Landwalker Yikes, secondary note: Scale down your images (there's a guideline somewhere, but I think the gist is no more than 800 pixels wide). I had no idea that one was going to be so large. Cheers.quote> It shouldn't have been a problem with any kind of high-speed internet connection. Of course, I run a widescreen monitor and if you're not, you'll end up scrolling a bit. But they're really not that big - 1024x768, jpg files at around 500k each.