Spinmaster

I'd second this one! Not just "if" though, but the actual last time I downloaded it. Perhaps highlighted in red if it was since updated. In fact, I would think an "updated" list (similar to Favorites) would be useful, showing a list of all content that a) you have downloaded and b) has been updated after the last time you downloaded it. Frankly I suspect I have a large number of such things, but I have no idea which ones they are. Only way I find out now is if I download something new that depends on it, then I might look at it, most likely try to re-download it, only to discover I already have it, then try to figure out if it's newer, and often give up and just re-download and reinstall it anyway "just to be sure." Finally, after all that, I then discover... I'm not in the mood to play the game now!! Well at least it'll be there next time... if I remember it.

Sounds like CJ time. As for fares, yes they do pay. It's a very small amount, but that amount is per tile crossed. So the more distance a sim travels on it, the more you collect; it's not based solely on how many sims use it. Yet another fine example of how "balance is the key" in this game - keeping in mind my earlier post, that the transit must be shorter than driving to be used vs. "the longer the better" for taking in fares. For what a subway costs though (and NAM increases it even more I believe, for realism - subways are very expensive), I'm not sure 100,000 people is enough really. Maybe for one line that gets used heavily enough, but you need serious use of a subway system in order to start seeing it pay for itself. At best you might be able to afford the expense until then. Well you be the judge, it's your city and subway, Mayor.

"because I saved almost $1,000" That says it all right there, actually. Those % preference for mass transit numbers are influences, not hard limits. That is to say, if driving is shorter than a subway line with too many stops along the way (and involving too much walking to get from home and to work etc...), it will always win regardless of the "preferences." Saving money on the rebuild means you probably have shorter routes and/or less stations, not to mention more strategically-placed stations. Think of it like demand vs. desirability, they both have to be "just right" for certain buildings to grow. No matter how much demand there is, nothing will grow where there isn't enough desirability. Likewise nobody will use mass transit if it "costs" too much time-wise, even if they have100% preference for it.

Given the particular setup you have there, I'd go with an ordinary tunnel. Looks like you have plenty of open land on either side to ramp down smoothly. An alternative (and more realistic) approach might be to elevate the highway and roads over the railroad. You can do this with Elevated-to-ground transitions, or if you have enough room (looks like you do) use land ramps to do it. The main difference between the two is the transition pieces would only be as wide as the road or highway, whereas the land ramps would be 6-wide; 2 for the highway, 1 for the road, 1 for that space in between, and 1 each on either side of it all... plus I'm guessing 2 more for another road and space on the other side of the highway, out of frame. Would look pretty schweet I think!

I don't think there's any such thing as a mod to prevent garbage, but lots of ways to deal with it. There are a couple mods that speed up the decay rate for landfills, meaning a smaller landfill can handle more garbage. Here's one of them. There are also plenty of lots with high capacity to deal with it, some realistic, some not so much. Pegasus has garbage docks, which look great and are a very realistic way to handle garbage. He also has garbage chutes that just dump garbage off the edge of the map. Realistic? On a round planet, no. But the sims live in Columbus' worst nightmare. If our world were flat we'd probably dump garbage off the edge of it, too. There's even the default waste-to-energy plant. Reduce its funding to zero and it will burn garbage for free. Well, if you don't count the gargantuan amount of air pollution it spits out. There are other similar incinerators available though, some with less pollution, higher cost, etc.... If all else fails you could easily grab the best-looking (or smallest and least visible) one, and tweak it yourself to have high capacity, no cost, and no pollution.

Don't confuse demand with desirability. Both are needed for something to grow. Demand means that the game will grow whatever is in demand - but desirability determines where, and if there's no place with high enough desirability, demand be damned, it simply won't grow. Garbage does not cause air pollution. Garbage does cause garbage pollution if it's not being handled. Your landfills seems to be handling it fine, so that's not the issue. But those same landfills are very UNdesirable for high tech industry on their own, and they lower land value in the immediate area. They're basically a one-two punch for any of the high-wealth buildings; even if you had demand for high-wealth residential or commercial, it wouldn't likely grow in that area, either. Notice that you do have *some* high tech, and it's as far away from the landfills as it can be. Under data views there's a view for Desirability (bottom left), and it can be filtered for which type of RCI, including I-HT, aka high tech industry. Check that view, with I-HT selected; it probably looks quite similar to your Land Value, but worse.

In addition to starting money, there is also inflation of tax revenue and demand in medium and easy difficulty. I think it's +10% for medium and +20% for easy. In other words, if on Hard you would have $1000 income, in medium it'll be artificially boosted to $1100 and easy $1200. Demand is similarly inflated - which is probably why Hard actually seems a bit easier, particularly with a well developed region. The demand inflation can cause some big population swings. If you only have 50000 residents anyway, an extra 5000 ~ 10000 doesn't seem so bad, but when you're on the scale of millions of residents, a 10% or 20% artificial boost can get out of hand and actually make the game harder. Prior to Rush Hour/Deluxe there was no "difficulty level." I suppose the game was rather daunting back then though, particularly for casual gamers or anyone new to the series, so they added Medium and Easy for RH/DX, and the original settings - with no boosts - became Hard. There really wasn't much development work focused on these "modes", they were more an afterthought and a response to new and casual players who thought it took too long and was too hard to get the "instant gratitude" of a big city fast. Adding a simple calculation to the money and demand was a relatively safe way to add them without much effort or testing of the code. There are also a few more advisor messages in the ticker, and you tend to get more advance warning about civic strikes before they happen, as if the game simply waits an extra couple months to strike, vs. Hard where you're liable to get a strike within the first month or so of going over capacity on a school or hospital. Again, things that were simple to add and didn't require much additional QA effort.

From what you describe, I hate to say and hope I'm wrong, but you may have run into a bug. I saw this once myself, a brand new region, not a single resident anywhere. I laid out and zoned one small city, the whole thing, roads, power, civics... everything...paused the whole time... then let it run. After less than 100 people and only a dozen or so factories, I saw almost the same graph you're showing above, demand making no sense, nothing developing, and no clear reason why. Definitely wasn't a commute issue, it was a single medium tile zoned with a balance of everything, plenty of good roads, all the utilities including water and garbage handling, even had a few parks. Even let it run for 100+ game years... no change at all, as if the whole demand & growth simulator had simply given up. Even went so far as a save-and-reboot... no change. I finally just obliterated the "ghost town," and started over on the exact same tile, doing almost the exact same thing, complete layout and all (a slightly different pattern of course, but generally zoned the same, main road and rail networks, civics and utilities in about the same places)... and everything was fine. Never did figure out what had happened the first time. The point is what you're showing above really "does not make sense" - with almost nothing built, there should be at least sufficient demand for something, enough to see development.... but nope. Low-wealth residential AND dirty industry should almost never tank at the same time, especially in a relatively new region. If you have a lot of uneducated low-wealth residents there will be high demand for dirty industry. And if there are a lot of vacant dirty industry jobs, there'll be high demand for low-wealth residents. Both tanked would normally only happen on a highly-populated region with lots of education. And even then the mid- and high-wealth residents would "take over" the low-wealth residents, driving low-wealth residential demand up, in turn driving up dirty industry demand if they move in (before their education kicks in anyway). A lot of the suggestions above would be correct under normal conditions, but what you have just looks curiously to me like the same nonsense scenario, which I chalked up as a bug since obliterating and re-doing almost the same thing resulted in normalcy, for no apparent reason. Even taxes don't seem to be the issue. When I experienced this same issue, I dropped all the tax rates to 1% just to see if that was an issue... didn't help at all - demand did not change, nothing developed, just a dead city. It was almost as if the game got confused, it had so many undeveloped zones to work with, it got stuck trying to figure out what to do where. I have no real idea if that's what happened under-the-hood, but I do know it wasn't really meant to be played this way, by laying it all out before letting a single thing grow, so the possibility it wasn't fully QA'd "like this" is high. You didn't do it to the extent I had before, but you do similarly have a lot of zones laid out in advance with almost no development (in my case de-zoning didn't help, either though).

Agriculture: no Medium-density dirty industry: no High-density dirty industry, all manufacturing, and all high tech: yes Note if you use CAM: many agriculture and even medium-density dirty industry lots DO require water. This can also be true of any custom lot, but rarely do they differ from above. Pollution-wise: agriculture and dirty industry are horrible - bad enough to shut down water towers and pumps almost immediately. Manufacturing is bearable - and you can usually get away with a tower or pump nearby. High tech doesn't usually pollute much more than a commercial lot.

If you bought it, no, you can do as you please with it provided you don't actually share its content with anyone. However, there is a rather strict policy about discussing this type of thing in these forums. Doesn't matter if we're talking about something that IS legal, if it's even questionable then it enters that "gray area". I'm betting a moderator will emphasize this before long, so umm... let's keep this thread out of the gray, huh? Another option - and there is no legal gray area with this - is to actually buy another retail copy somewhere. Granted they're not "everywhere" like a recent game might be, but it's still fairly easy to find SC4 on a shelf or at least order it online e.g. from Amazon. And wherever you find it... well if it's anything over $25 it's robbery. Even Amazon, as of today anyway, is selling it for $15. Buy an extra copy and stick it in a safe... right alongside your other most valuable possessions. It is definitely worth doing whatever you feel is the best way to protect it though. This game isn't going anywhere for a good long time. Try - just TRY to imagine what you'd want in a city simulator, WITHOUT comparing it to SC4 (and please don't write it out in here, there are enough threads on that topic already). It's virtually impossible. And most of what we don't like in SC4 isn't about missing gameplay elements, but simply some bugs and simulation limitations. There's very little "it really needs [this major thing] added to it" other than stuff that's already been added courtesy of various teams (NAM et al). Even the new Cities XL 2011... looks like there may finally be another city simulator worth playing, but so far I don't get the impression it's really even competing with SC4. A semi-decent alternative perhaps, but I see no compelling reason to drop SC4 for it. Admittedly, I haven't tried it yet, so that's only an observation based on what folks have said about CXL on this site. I do plan to try it out eventually, but only out of curiosity, not anxious hopes that it's better than SC4. And there doesn't appear to be anything even remotely interesting on the horizon for this genre, unless someone's keeping a really good secret.

If you bought it, no, you can do as you please with it provided you don't actually share its content with anyone. However, there is a rather strict policy about discussing this type of thing in these forums. Doesn't matter if we're talking about something that IS legal, if it's even questionable then it enters that "gray area". I'm betting a moderator will emphasize this before long, so umm... let's keep this thread out of the gray, huh? Another option - and there is no legal gray area with this - is to actually buy another retail copy somewhere. Granted they're not "everywhere" like a recent game might be, but it's still fairly easy to find SC4 on a shelf or at least order it online e.g. from Amazon. And wherever you find it... well if it's anything over $25 it's robbery. Even Amazon, as of today anyway, is selling it for $15. Buy an extra copy and stick it in a safe... right alongside your other most valuable possessions. It is definitely worth doing whatever you feel is the best way to protect it though. This game isn't going anywhere for a good long time. Try - just TRY to imagine what you'd want in a city simulator, WITHOUT comparing it to SC4 (and please don't write it out in here, there are enough threads on that topic already). It's virtually impossible. And most of what we don't like in SC4 isn't about missing gameplay elements, but simply some bugs and simulation limitations. There's very little "it really needs [this major thing] added to it" other than stuff that's already been added courtesy of various teams (NAM et al). Even the new Cities XL 2011... looks like there may finally be another city simulator worth playing, but so far I don't get the impression it's really even competing with SC4. A semi-decent alternative perhaps, but I see no compelling reason to drop SC4 for it. Admittedly, I haven't tried it yet, so that's only an observation based on what folks have said about CXL on this site. I do plan to try it out eventually, but only out of curiosity, not anxious hopes that it's better than SC4. And there doesn't appear to be anything even remotely interesting on the horizon for this genre, unless someone's keeping a really good secret.

Hmm... nobody else mentioned this? That $0.005 fare is per tile crossed. That would be like paying a measley half-penny to ride the bus... but for every 16 metres you travel. So it's not so terribly far off after all; it's as if that £2 takes you up to a little over 6 km. Not "as the crow flies" either, but with every centimetre of asphalt and brick the bus rolls over along the way. In other words, it's not just how many people ride the mass transit, it's how far they go on it. I have two small cities, about 6500 residents total between them. 1500 commuters travel by bus from one to the other - but they go most of the way across their origin town, then almost all the way around the perimeter of the other to get to work (it's an industrial town, on the other side of a channel, and the only bridge skirts the northern edge of the city). Both cities make a KILLING on mass transit - and I haven't tweaked a thing! In fairness, bus doesn't incur the costs of track maintenance - that's why it's recommended to start with this until your city grows large enough to support the tracked types. But the point is the same. If you have 10,000 people on the monorail, but they only go a block or two, it's a waste. Send half of them across town, however, and just watch the money roll in!

Also, be sure you're understanding the difference between "ploppable" and "growable" buildings. Some custom buildings e.g. the twin towers indeed can be plopped e.g. built by mayor's choice (contingent on reward requirements, if any) - which means there's a menu item somewhere for them, usually in the landmarks menu. Some buildings, however, are only growable. They grow on zones, just like most of the buildings that come with the game. These have no menu item, so you won't even know if they're "in the game" until the conditions are just right for them to grow, namely stage limits, demand, and desirability. Even then, if you have multiple buildings that meet the criteria (including any "came with the game" buildings), which one of them actually is built isn't generally under your control. Well, ok - there are some files for blocking all Maxis content; if you do that in addition to removing all other custom buildings of the same size and requirements, then yes, you can force one specific custom building to appear. But it still won't grow unless it meets the conditions for demand, desirability, and stage limits. Point is, if it's only a growable building, you may never know if it's actually in the game unless it grows somewhere, and forcing it to do so can be a challenge. Some - but not all - custom buildings come with both ploppable and growable lots.

Sims absolutely will travel through not just one but possibly several tiles to get to their jobs. But it's not easy, you have to work with the unavoidable fact that stripped down to its parts, it's "just a computer program" and conform to how it actuall works, and of course there are limitations. First of all, the transportation must be speedy; nothing less than highways, subway/elevated rail, and monorails will do for crossing anything larger than the smallest tiles. Second, demand does "bleed" into neighboring tiles. When you open up one city, the populations in immediately-surrounding neighbors are used to extrapolate influences in demand in your current city. But this effect is only between immediate neighbors. In order to "pass along" that demand through one tile to another, you have to open the tile(s) in between and save each one. If you have: A-->B-->C-->D Residents in A, jobs in D. For city D to see the demand for jobs being driven by the residents in A, you first need to open B (so it sees the residents in A) and save it; B now also sees demand for jobs. Now open C and save it; now C sees the jobs demanded from B. Now you can open D, and it will see the demand for jobs coming from C. "You" know that demand inevitably came from A. But note that at no point does D see anything about A. Doesn't even know it's there. You had to pass the demand on, yourself. As far as D is concerned, the residents demanding jobs are in C. But that's all it needs to know to grow the factories and offices. There's a caviat though - the demand doesn't matter in a city with no RCI zones. So cities B and C each need to have some RCI. Not a lot - a single 1x1 developed RCI zone of any type is sufficient, but something. Otherwise when you save the city, the neighbors won't see any demand at all coming from it. Now, to actually get the sims from A to travel to D... you have to let D develop, then do the open-and-save dance in reverse, so C sees the jobs in D, B sees the jobs in C (even though they're really in D), and finally the residents in A will travel towards D. But again, only "you" know they're going to D. As far as the game knows, the residents in A think they're only going to B. And after all that - yes, it's still very possible if your networks aren't up-to-snuff or congested, that the residents in A will see the jobs in B as "too far away" and refuse to go. Or the commute time across B or C is too much. The whole bit does work, technically, but only within reason. Finally, watch out for the "eternal commuter" bug. If the edge of a tile offering jobs is closer than any job in the current city, the commuters will go to that neighbor. This is how the above works, to enable commuters to travel to and even through multiple tiles. But it also means if you're not careful, your commuters can end up going in circles, entering one neighbor only to find the nearest jobs are in another neighbor, and possibly end up in the same city they started from - only to head for the neighbor again, and round and round they go... until you have mass unemployment and abandonment. Now after reading all that... forget about it. Yes, I said forget about having the sims travel long distances across the map. Can it be done? Yes. Is it practical? Not really, not more than one or two tiles apart. Is it realistic? Well, plenty here will disagree, but they're the ones with hour-plus, very long commutes. But in general, no, it's not realistic to have a majority of the population commuting such long distances. Even folks with "very long" commutes wouldn't actually have those jobs without highways and/or some other fast transportation, unless they literally had no other choice than to drive 2 hours on low-speed roads to get to work (I have done that, actually - but again, not by choice). It's actually best to keep your cities somewhat balanced, not "all residential" vs. "all jobs". It's more realistic to have jobs and residents mixed around each other anyway. Even the largest, most dense cities in the world have huge populations of residents amidst and surrounding all the giant skyscrapers (half of which are residential, themselves). And even the worst of the worst suburban sprawls have everything from upscale legal offices and shopping malls to greasy spoons and gas stations scattered about. There are very few places where residents and jobs are strictly separated into "cores" of any kind. Might be large blocks of factories, bank towers, or housing developments/projects, but your zones data view should never be all one color, and usually more green than any other (except for farms of course, which often take up much more space than even thousands of low-density housing does).

Originally posted by: Ryan123220 strange, easy for me is 1 star (i normally play easy) And ive always wondered about the stars but i never bothered to ask, but at lease now i know!quote> Nope, you were 100% right, I and Korot both had it backwards. 3 stars = hard, 1 = easy. I updated my post.

Easy, 1 star: start with $500,000, also a 20% "bonus" (above what the simulator calculates) in demand and tax revenues Medium, 2 stars: start with $200,000, and a 10% bonus Hard, 3 stars: start with $100,000, no bonus for taxes or demand Some rewards are only available via normal "mayor play" in hard difficulty, but they can also be earned via U-Drive It missions for any diffculty level (e.g. space port).

Freight thick-headedly routes to the nearest edge of the city tile, period. It has no preference for a freight station or seaport vs. good ol' road. In fact, since there's a small cost to transfer, if you have a road and a rail going out the same edge, the road still ends up usually being faster, even if the truck passes a freight station on the way. There is no way to change this behavior, but there are a number of "blockers" on STEX, which you can plop, e.g. at the ends of the roads, which prevent freight trucks from passing, effectively preventing them from using the roads to get out of town. You can also run rail in direct contact with the industrial zones. Any industry touching it will automatically dump its freight on the rail. Not always practical to hit all industrial zones though, if you have a lot of densely-zoned industry.

The only thing required for higher-stage farms is more farms, takes a few thousand farm jobs before the stage-3 (max) appear. You might wish to download some custom farms, ihaka has a nice add-on set for convenience. Without any custom farms, stage 3 means just one farm: the infamous Pedriana's Plants. It's actually not so terribly ugly, but when you have a town full of nothing but those it's just hideous. Stage limits (for all, including farms aka "IR") Farms are sensitive to traffic, but that's about it. They don't require water, fire protection, or any other civic services. Note: there are some custom farms which do have more requirements, including water and even parks, but most of them are part of the CAM.

The extra cheats dll - because it's a dll - won't work on a mac, period. The good news is, very few plugins are dll's ... in fact this is the only one I can think of. There are a few utilities around which of course only work on Windows, but those don't need the game running, so you can run them anywhere e.g. in a virtual machine, emulator, etc.... Farms do initially grow on their own, but they NEVER upgrade. If you want to see a newer, higher-stage farm, you have to zone for it (once you have enough farm already established to warrant the higher stages... which isn't very hard anyway) or bulldoze an existing farm. Note that the latter could in theory drop your farm population below the stage limit you're trying to reach in the first place though.

More like an "undo" actually, but right.