TheJackalope

http://simcityds.ea.com/ states in history that as of sometime on 2007 17 million copies of the series had been sold. One person puts sales at 2 million original, 2 million SC2, 5 million SC3000, and 2 million SC4 which is 6 million short of where it was in 2007. This powerpoint from Lucy Bradshaw in January 2002 puts original at 1.2 million Sc2 at 3.4 million Sc3000 at 4.6. That means eight million copies between SC4 and post 2002 sales of the other 3 titles. SC4 has had massive staying power. It sold 294k boxed copies in 2007 making it the eighth best pc game of 2007 FOUR years after originally released. It also has continuously popped back up on NPD top 10 rankings in years since especially around gift times(November and December). It's the only older game I continually see in stores like Best Buy and Walmart(who sure don't put stuff on their shelves that doesn't sell). In may of 2009 it's bundle with Societies( a move to boost Societies sales) was 14th for the month http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24061 That is Six countem SIX years after release!

Dont worry you passed me because my graphics card imploded and they dont support ATI Radeon 5700 series cards. Screen is nearly always blue fractals.

Everyone added as friends

Jackalope on Prospero

PO subscriber Avid SimCity player of all versions Hated SCS Classic Wow top 25 US raid guild class leader(decided to have a life) BF42 and CoD player

Build the general services building? It's low cost and goves you a bit of all the utilities. they only cost 5k in maintenance so either you are building several utilities or pollution or a lack of resources is shutting down your industry.

They dont elliminate pollution but provide a positive environmental boost that helps offset pollution.

What they probably should do is regulate the guts and liberate the eye candy. In other words focus on allowing graphics and name mods with balanced stats to the game. For example let people submit to a download section their designs for low density elite houses that have the same stats as the vanillas. Then people could swap them in and out etc. The serious problem they have with PO is that lots of SC4 stuff is not at all balanced with the economic model of the game. That's fine in singleplayer but can play havoc when tokens and cashflow come into play. Another interesting option for them is to have contests for the design of a landmark or exceptional buildings they have predesigned and balanced the effects for. Also they could form groups to recreate different architectural styles. Never could figure out why they wouldn't go to some cities and offer to put their landmarks/architecturally significant buildings in the game for the cost of modeling them all. I'm sure New York would do it.

Pros 1. Curved roads and Bridges. 2. Farms work well 3. Ability to specialize city 4. Trading 5. Nice preloaded maps and more options compared to vanilla SC4 6. Good service system(better than straight radius) 7. chalenging 8. Good graphics 9. free form zoning tool 10. I have the biggest city on Prospero(flexes epeen) 11. Park fill in tool 12. resource system Cons 1. Maps generated from actual planet terrain would have been nice. 2. Why not use Earth cut up into 10x10 squares? Tech exists for this. 3. park tool frustrating 4. lot sizes need more variation. 5. bad mouse sensitivity 6. big city token trading pita

I agree. I think what would be useful is the ability to set buy and sell levels and a price that could be updated automatically. For instance you set that you want to buy up to 20 water for a price of up to 35c each. Someone could then sell you 1 to 20 for that price. If someone sold you 1 then your buy order would drop to 19, if they then canceled it would go back to 20.

Cancel your trades.

30k positive cash flow isn't nearly enough to maintain a highway network. Make sure to check the maintenance cost of stuff before you build it or you will sink the whole city. The 500k threshhold is one of the hardest since you have access to many new expensive toys but don't have large numbers of elites and executives paying taxes to afford all of them. I would really suggest not trying to bulldoze a city to put a highway through it. Instead loop it around the exterior and then run it to the edges when you have the cash. Try and build a good road network early without a highway.

Look at the individual demand bars for each resource to see how much your city needs. What I have seen is that for each 5000 in maintenance one token is produced before modifications for lack of input resources(neg), lack of full employment(neg), or landmark/industry building modifiers(positive). So small is 1, medium 2, large 4 assuming you have fuel and people for them.

Put the +environment landmarks with their radius covering your first elite neighborhoods.

Originally posted by: lots Can't you just manage your trades in planet mode before jumping into your city? That's how I do most of my trades anyway, since "in game" trade seems alot slower....quote> Correct. I'm at 11 million population and have a surplus of about 1300 office. Before you enter the city you just trade for a bit to get everything where it needs to be. On a very large city you have to run a 40 or token deficit for it to hit orange and start negatively effecting stuff. I can run a 100 token surplus on office and still be green.

Originally posted by: nataklug Originally posted by: TexDave81 I have Acre on Prospero. 2.6 million no manufacturing or heavy industry. Makes 200k a turn with all tokens even or positive. Satisfaction in the mid 60s across the board.quote> I have visited your city about 2 minutes ago and its over 5 million people... I have two questions: 1) what are thos builds you made on an island to the west (there are a bunch of the same building lay down the road)? 2) Do you have services like hospitals, schools, leisure and so on? How can you manage this and how is the overall satisfaction with this services? In solo mode this is really dificult to play...quote> It's at 7.1 million now 1. They are Holiday Hotels. You have to space them out since they consume Holiday area when you place them. I used it and the farm area as my primary cash generators until I got the high tech and office multiplier buildings. 2. I do. I bulldozed the lower efficiency services when I got the bigger buildings. Health and Police are the easiest to keep high since their buildings are very high efficiency. These are in the 40-60% satisfaction. Leisure is in the low 20s since it appears you can literally pour money into it without much improvement. I felt since they all aggregate focusing on the services that have the highest efficeincy to cost ratio would be most efficient. I still do have some. I haven't touched taxes. My elites were largely placed near +environment landmarks which really helped a lot. High density jobs may actually be the key because taxes scale dramatically not only with the actual businesses but with the resident classes. As an example my population breaks down like this 1 3% 2 27% 3 45% 4 24%. My residential taxes rise dramatically with each class. Elites taxes by themselves cover all my services. Executives taxes about cover my transportation links. In other words high density jobs are multiplicative because they not only generate more tokens and taxes but also supply jobs for more tax producing residents. My traffic is actually pretty good because I focus on putting jobs near execs and elites to keep their traffic ratings up.

If you were short on passenger service or oil either of those buildings would have increased the profitability of businesses using them.

By meaningful I meant where a sizable as in 15% or more of the populace uses mass transit exclusively to get around town. intercity rail and bus or single person pickup I don't consider mass transit for game purposes since what we are talking about is systems that reduce auto use. SC4 you could plop down a bus stop in a low density neighborhood and half of them would take it to work, which is not realistic.

Didn't play beta I'm at 4.1 million in my city. Acre on Prospero if you want to check it out. Friend me, tag is Jackalope and ill check your city out tommorow. What will destroy you in this game very quickly is building something as soon as you unlock it. Don't. Keep pollution far away from your elites. I don't use heavy industry or manufacturing in my city but my waste and power plants are half the map away from my elites and execs. UQ and Q are used as buffers. When you unlock landmarks that give an environmental boost put them down and build your elites around them. Also go overboard on avenues to keep traffic down. Eventually you will get landmarks that raise satisfaction of elites and execs and this will help a great deal. My elite satisfaction is actually higher than any other right now. The best early industry is tourist hotels followed by farms since unlike oil and water they do not cost money and also don't pollute. They get much better prices than offices as well. Just build a road through your tourist area and spam them. Then sell the export for cash. Same goes with farms. Survive until you get the unlocks that give the massive production bonuses and your golden.

trading for workers won't make them work in your city so keep that in mind. For resources production keep in mind that some industries get production modifiers from other buildings. All have at least a 30% increase building that unlocks later. Also they each consume another type of resource so the cost of these should be taken into account. However one issue is the opportunity cost of selling an extra uneeded unit.

I have Acre on Prospero. 2.6 million no manufacturing or heavy industry. Makes 200k a turn with all tokens even or positive. Satisfaction in the mid 60s across the board.

Yes you can see how a bridge or street will be aligned before clicking again to complete it. It's part of the regular build tool. it will light up green or blue if it is valid.

The danger in leaving it on for hours is that if lots of contracts get cancelled you can go into free fall when the businesses that use those resources get inefficient and then cascade through all the other industries. This probably most likely to happen in smaller cities where you are dependent on a few trades since the game measures availability by percentage of need filled. If you need 4 and a contract for 1 gets cancelled its a 25% drop. If you need 100 and 1 is cancelled you get a 1% drop. It's why some of the large cities can run fine with a 20 token shortfall.

Think he only buys in stacks of 5 so you hae to have a suplus of 5 to sell to him.

I haven't tried it yet. The profitability usually denotes a over supply. Can you screen shot your industry supply tab? May need to trade it away or build an industry that consumes it. At low pop levels you can get very wide swings in profitability since it works off percentage consumed.