spacecadet77

In the original version of sim city it was perfectly feasible to build a city without any roads. The residents would love it too as there would be no congestion or pollution. I tend to build a lot of public transport into my cities and get a large majority of the sims onto buses and subways. Can't remember the exact percentage, will have to have a look when I get home tonight

ok - people follow jobs, so the problem here is that you've created an economy and the high end of the economy (CO$$$ and CS$$$) has no where suitable to set up, so everyone who's got rich goes else where to spend their simoleans. A bit of redevelopment to create a CBD (central business district) might be in order. A few parks and plazas and any commercial rewards will help raise desirability. Keep a close eye on air pollution. have culls of delapidated buildings, if you bulldoze them then something smaller and more suited to the local economy will be built in its place. Hows your garbage? this should be zero if you want good development. check water levels and pollution police coverage should be comprhensive Neighbouring cities of a decent size will help spur on further growth The only taxes i ever adjust is the manufacturing and dirt industry to prevent those from developing, the rest all stays at default. I've never seen anything to be gained by trying to tweak taxes. I very rarely have the terminal growth problems you've described, even playing on hard difficulty setting. If growth does slow down or reverse then there is an explanation for it, be it poor traffic conditions, garbage, police... sometimes there is nothing for it but to pause the game, bulldoze and redevelop. With enough cash in the bank you can get through the tough regrowth stage. In one city I ended up with more subway tunnels than roads in the CBD just to get the through put of workers to offices

Originally posted by: Dukat I also clearly remember Sim City on the Commodore 64. Here it was a common tactic to build the whole city at once, repeatedly hitting F7 to get another 4000$. Then you left the game running over night, and the whole city was nicely developed when you came back from school next noon. Accordingly I guess they didn't want that to happen again in later releases.quote> Ah the good old Sim City 1 days... I had that on an Amstrad CPC 464 almost 20 years ago I seem to remember that random earthquakes would hamper any plans for leaving the city unattended.. although i might be getting confused with the SNES version. It was the original Sim City that taught me how to place high polluting industries and power plants at the edge of the city. It was also very neat how you could build a city without any roads

Originally posted by: jamicha I'm actually having the same problem and I have NAM installed. My tax rates are fairly low but my city is doing the exact same thing. I don't actually know how to compute commute times (I'm just a silly newbie) but my congestion map shows all green and I have plenty of subways to accommodate. I'll be stalking this thread to see if anyone has anymore ideas.quote> Have you got rush hour or deluxe sim city? there is a toggle for the congestion map, which switches between normal view and density view. The density view gives you shades of blue, the darker it is the more traffic there is. Check the air pollution, high traffic levels generate lots of nasty air pollution which is obviously quite bad. This can be countered with parks and trees but you will also need to take steps to reduce the volume of the traffic. Again, rush hour/delux only - use the network "?" tool to see what paths people are taking Once you've identified the problem areas check how your public transport coverage is. If you're just using buses then add another mode of mass transit along those popular routes. Using the car parks you can actually encourage a sort of park and ride system so commuters entering your city from neighbouring cities park up when entering and hop on the subway or mass transit system to get the rest of the way to the office. Most importantly, experiment with different modes of transport. Changes to the city aren't final, you can quit without saving if something doesn't look like its working too well

I'm in the process of building mine, only get a proper chance to work on it during the week when i'm holed up in a hotel Hopefully I'll have my first update on friday

in the pop up menu (usually top right) you can select morning or evening commute It won't change according to the time of day

I used to stick with a few English city/town names I've just started a new region though which I've called Namaste. All city names will be Lost themed and then i'm planning to do something special with a certain little island off the coast

Originally posted by: PiggeeWeiSoon 1st : I hate the news box which comes out if the demand for Commercial services, Industrial, and home are very high, it keep saying crap and it pauses the game until you close that message box <.<... .quote> You can stop this happening in the setup options Originally posted by: PiggeeWeiSoon 2nd : Sometimes when doing the U Drive - It mission, I click accept, and the police car landed just RIGHT in front of a industrial lorry, and caused my car to spoil instantly, and made me lost my mayor rating T_Tquote> UDrive is generally crap and to be avoided at all costs, just think of it as a "fun" addon to stop the less intelligent gamers getting bored Originally posted by: PiggeeWeiSoon 3rd : I half gave up when I ever try to make a perfect city with everything, because when I put a sim of mine into the city, surely the message of "Commute No Go" "Bermuda Triangle to the Sim" "Lost job" thing will come out, its frustrating T_Tquote> The biggest gripe I have with the sims is that they don't stay where you put them, If i plant a sim in a specific building then i want them to stay there so i can find what is bad (or even good) about that area and make it better. Instead the selfish little git goes off, gets an education then gets a flash condo in a nice part of town. Originally posted by: PiggeeWeiSoon 4rd : I hate the speed thing, because unlike The Sims , The Sims 2, you have to use your mouse to click the time T_T I rather have it to the keys 1, 2 and 3 for Turtle, Rhino, and cheetah speed.quote>There are shortcuts for most of the functions, check the user manual

Shooshie: 20 years!!! You're the 1st one on this site that I've seen make that claim besides myself!! Did you start with the DOS verison?? And SC has come SOOOOOO far since then. I've played a bunch of pc games, but SC is the one I always come back to. And with a new pc (in a week or so) I might actually become a B.A.T.ter and make some of my own content. I look forward to many more years of playing SC, in whatever form it evolves to.quote> You can add me to that list of life time simcity fans, I first played it on the Amstrad CPC464 back in 89/90, had to wait for 10 minutes or so for the tape to load (and some kids now complain about loading times in playstation games ). One interesting feature with the original sim citys was that you could build a completely road free city and rely only on the metro system for transport. Played it again on the SNES. Unfortunately a lack of suitable hardware left me cold turkey for about 10 years until I finally got a home PC and picked up Simcity 3000 and now simcity4 deluxe I still find it incredible how watching a city grow and develop can soak up hours and hours (very handy when working away from home) back to the topic in hand Crashes - although i'm used to working with slightly unstable software so frequent saving is good practice Fiddly issues, eg school and hospital funding. It would be so much less time consuming if min/max and auto grow parameters could be set on the schools, eg start of with $20 funding per month, and always stay 10% over funded to a max of $300 per month. highway, rail, monorail junctions, sometimes they connect ok, sometimes they don't. But one thing you know is that you will end up building and bulldozing many times before it actually builds the system you want. And even with practice it doesn't get better/easier. Lack of proper 3D or curved roads or lots, I'm getting sick of building grids! And since the landscape isn't grid shaped i would like my cities to fit into the landscape better although I don't mind substituting realistic graphics for a faster and smoother running game Roads going into tunnels for no real reason except for a little mound in the map No easy way of building underpasses for roads or trains (although there is the elevated to subway station which works quite well Bridges - pain in the proverbial to build a satisfying looking bridge Water based plots, eg, ports and beaches, again very tedious waiting for the lot to turn blue so it can be placed, and then it's never where you wanted it to be built Parks, ok these are fine but i think that they are slightly too expensive Hard level - I think that the game was difficulty tested on five year olds with learning problems. ITS NOT HARD!! Even on hard level I can easily get a $1,000,000 surplus before starting to build a proper city (ie just farm land and a few low density residential areas) Land generation, as far as I can see there is no method for auto generating landscape as there was in the earlier editions, a sad loss.