Andersen

Have you checked to see if there are enough jobs for everyone?

This a city I've been working on for about 2 weeks. The only mod I used was NAM, and a few BAT files. This medium sized city that started from a small town. How did I grow this urban area? Easy I kept my dirty industries as R$ buffer zones for future wealthy citizens. As my city grows in numbers I must hatch more overlords to control them. WHAT?! Wrong game. Now really, when my fresh R$ pops up the previous R$ have moved out into R$$ and R$$$ roles through a good eduction system. This allows new R$ to come in and fill in those vacant DI jobs left by the smarter sims. However, you can always be a tyrant and restrict your sims to being dumb R$$ by not building colleges. The turn card on that is, you will need more hospitals and police forces. Think of industry as supply depots, residential as your forces and commercial as your results. (I am a SC2 player yes) You can see I have the main bulk of my dirty industries outside in separate regions, outside the main region. I also have a dedicated population region to the east of Clapville. What happened there was when I first layed down my R$ there, they already had DI jobs to go to. I gave them education and that allowed me to build up Clapville into higher wealth. In summary this strategy along with well planned transit systems, has allowed me to build up a city with no cheats, with a minimal population of about 250k. I hope this helps give you some ideas.

Hehe, look at Las Vegas its just a dense dot. Its all that bling bling.

That's a ton of development you got there. Is this part of a larger region?

Kansas City: 441,545 Metro: 2.1 million

My parking sucks period. SC4 parking is just there for looks, you will have to just imagine the cars driving in to parking lot and parking perfectly unlike me.

Right now I'm working on a city/region with only 250k people and already have 2 of the largest stage 8 buildings. (Just using NAM) This is something I have never been able to do this until I learned the art of planning out my city ahead. The endless loop of putting down industry, residential and commercial as my city grows requires good management and proper zoning. For example: When you first start out you lay down industrial and residential first. They pop up as R$ without education. When your sims are educated they move into R$$ and R$$$ roles in your city. Eventually all your sims will become well educated and fill in zoning with higher wealth structures. Think about this, the amount of R$ you have in your city right now is the potential amount of R$ and R$$ you can have in your city once they are educated. The more R$ you add into the pool the higher those populations can rise. The trick is, you must figure how to zone you DI and MI without it affecting your R$$ and R$$$ population centers. If you have all the population covered in education will all educational services, it takes about 30 years for them reach education level 150 which is about the amount you need to start zoning Hi-tech industry. R$ is the entry point of citizens in the game tied with DI. However if your mass transit system is crap, then all this spiel is for not. I hope this helps.

Yes, this one!

The steam version has had less bugs then the CD version, so I'm liking the steam version.

I've fixed the commute time with NAM and efficient mass transit. When SC4 first came out the traffic simulator was so unrealistic that I stopped playing until NAM really got going. The thing I hate most about Sc4 is sometimes I will be playing for awhile, get a great city going then BAM! SC4 freezes then I have to restart my computer because it seized up my entire system. SC4 has done this 3 of my PC's. So now I save every 3 minutes. My ctrl+s is getting worn out!

Nice shots of your region What program do you use to get those different shot angles of your region?

When starting out, I take a look at the whole layout of the region then decide which cities will be what. I have it to where I can control which types of RCI goes in which city. I will almost always put my dense dirty industry in a separate small region then build my main cities around/beside it. I prefer having 1 large downtown every couple of regions apart to give a sense of visual realism. I love to put my downtown on hills or crazy elevations to give it some variation. I don't know if any of you have been to my hometown Kansas City, but that downtown is built on a hill, and I try to mold my downtown accordingly. I try to think of my regions as not just a city but a country or a state. If I could rename sc4 I would rename it Sim nation because of its large scale. I also like to have farms in between my major city centers. This helps alleviate the popping up of R$ when I expand my major city centers. I've learned that you can actually limit certain types of growth through education and taxes. Sometimes I will purposeful not get a college and painfully raise R$$$ taxes so that I will only get R$$ and CO$$. I can be a dictator on this game, if I get ticked off at one of my cities I just lay down the wrath of God with all the disasters.

This one for Maxis landmarks Thank you, that will help.

I am looking for the functioning landmarks mod. Does anyone know where the durn mod is?

Here is the Kansas City skyline. Downtown KC is actually built on a hill, which gives some of the buildings a stairstep look to them.

Here's a technical question. Ya know those tall R$$$ skyscrapers that appear in large cities? Well those tend to never be filled with R$$$ citizens. In fact, from the moment they are built, a big no job zot pops up. Does anyone else have this problem. It Seems to be only these tall buildings and not the medium sized ones.

Ya i get bored with SC4 sometimes. It usually happens when I've wanted to create something and it doesn' t turn out the way I wanted it to. And yes the abandonment issues turns me off big time. I just wish sims would stay put. They are such fickle creatures.

Some Americans say "Why don't you like us? We saved you".quote>Perhaps this is a response to the amount that the U.S Spent on the war. I don't know the exact number of American lives lost, but it was astronomical. To me they are saying, "Lot's of cash and lives were spent on helping you kill Hitler's regime. You should be more thankful and not complain!" Maybe we stayed to long. What does everyone else think?

How a about Streets of Simcity Mp3's?

I actually have a few steps in setting up a Region/City Step 1: Use Landscape Designer to create a random gray scale bitmap for a realistic terrain. I also use it to create a config file for the regions squares and I usually set them up in specific geometry geared for my city style. https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=12679&download=http://www.stex-server.com/lots/greyveil/greyveil_landscape%20designer%200973%20beta/LDsetup0973%2Ezip Step 2: Import my Gray scale terrain into SC4 TerraFormer and use it to add any terrain details that I want and compile the region. https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=12679&download=http://www.stex-server.com/lots/greyveil/greyveil_landscape%20designer%200973%20beta/LDsetup0973%2Ezip Step 3: I am a realism player, so I like to go by a city grid system. So, I group my region squares into governing entities. Depending on the size of my region, they could be States or Counties. Then I narrow down my scale to roads and I number and name them in a grid format. Number streets are always North and South. Name Streets are East and West. Basically, what my region looks like is in the end are a bunch of cities scattered about with definitive boundaries. There are usually 2-3 large population centers, and then dozens of farm towns.

Will Wright and Maxis focused on SC5.quote> Maxis: That name brings back good memories, too bad they're under the greedy EA umbrella. If Maxis wants to do it, EA will come in and mess it up like they've done with these other Simcity Cop out games. (except SC4, which like you said would be nothing if it wasn't for the more intelligent modders. )

Hi there. I'm here off and on, but I've played the Sim city series clear up until now. SC4 makes it easy for you to make layouts by the fact that it draws roads for you. If your going for an agriculture town, I recommend using Google earth to get a good picture on what a rural town is like. Rural towns range different shapes and sizes. What I like to do is design a strip town. Meaning 1 road for your commercial with residential branching out and your farms and industries on the outskirts of town. Or you can do the town square approach, where you build around a main focus of your small town. I usually like to build around civic buildings and schools. I know many towns like Platte city MO has built their entire infrastructure on their county courthouse and law offices. Again just look a city map layouts on a map, it'll give you some ideas. Just be aware that not everything in Sim city, happens in real life.