Spinmaster

Also, keep the residential zones small, and with gaps between them. I don't think there are any (not many if at all) low-density R$$$ smaller than 3x3, not in the game's default content anyway, some custom lots may be smaller. Note that there are plenty of smaller R$$$ at mid and high density though. I try to keep my low-density residential zones always 2x2 or smaller, maybe the occasional 3x2 at most, with small 1x open gaps between them. Also makes it easy to fill in with parks, bus stops, additional streets, or even a small NIMBY or two - which is another way to discourage R$$$ from moving in. I leave larger gaps as well, at first for the same reason, slow growth with little or no R$$$, but later those larger gaps are great for schools, clinics, larger parks, rails, wider roads like avenues and highways, or just leaving a nice big green belt to keep traffic pollution down. Saves on bulldozing costs later when I try to put such things into or through already-developed neighborhoods.

Umm... sort of: NAM ... but installed correctly. My guess is you have a right-hand driving edition of the game (e.g. US), but selected the LEFT-hand driving option when you installed NAM. Look inside the plugins folder (My Documents\SimCity 4\Plugins\Network Addon Mod, assuming you went with the default path). Look for the "z_Left Hand Plugin" subfolder, and the file within it... if you have those, there's your problem. In fact, I just confirmed it by putting that folder in my own plugins, and sure enough, same symptoms. Actually I hadn't even noticed until I put that "z_Left Hand Plugin" in my own plugins, but your picture confirmed it already - the left hand turning lanes have a red "apron" or whatever it's called... the right-hand ones are white. Simple: delete that z_Left Hand Plugin subfolder

A couple of quick points: 1. There is no "could not find a job" message on the R$$$ lots - "long commute time" can mean exactly that, or it could mean they can't find a job at all - infinite is a very long time indeed. 2. Note that all jobs - ALL jobs (and this is generally true in real life if you think about it) - require a large number of poor R$ sims to develop. Think: just because a company is rich doesn't mean its employees are. Even CO$$$ - which has the highest percent of rich workers - is still only 15% full of rich sims... nearly half of the jobs provided are for R$, with the remainder for R$$. HT is only 10% R$$$. Morale: no matter how many R$$$ sims you have, if you don't have enough R$ and R$$, you won't get enough high-wealth jobs to satisfy the R$$$ residents. Note that employees of high-wealth jobs (commercial or industrial) must still be educated. That's usually the biggest challenge, for me anyway - to keep the sims educated yet still poor, by skimping on other amenities like parks and police, or even deliberately putting NIMBY's (Not In My Back Yard) around, like power plants, dirty industry, even landfills, to keep an area's desirability low despite education. Short story, even shorter: you don't need more jobs - you need more residents, especially low- and mid-wealth, educated residents.

Ironically, it's not the airport (nor any of the other oversize lots) that are the problem - it's the police stations. More specifically, the radius for the patrol cars, which is one of the unique properties for police stations, intended apparently to simulate how far away from the cars the police can patrol on-foot. For the Maxis stations if I recall correctly it's effectively set to only about 3 tiles. Which means any lot that extends more than 3 tiles away from any road - the airport, for example (the university is another famous example) - can't be fully protected. I think there are some custom stations that already have this adjusted.

Are you sure every water source is actually connected to the pipe system? Especially for some custom water towers/pumps, I've noticed sometimes the true connection point isn't where it "looks like" it should be, sometimes it's a tile or two away, though usually within the lot's footprint somewhere at least. And it'd be virtually (maybe not even virtually) impossible to notice if a particular source isn't connected to the overall pipe system by looking at the overlay unless it's the only source feeding some remote pipe... which sounds pretty unlikely in a city that size. An unconnected tower/pump would still a) cost what it costs, b) supply what it supplies (and contribute to the graph accordingly), and c) service the needs of any lots in its immediate vicinity, which would make it *appear* to be contributing when in fact it's not, not fully anyway. Just my 1/50th of a dollar.

I'd have to echo that a "trial" online offer would be absolutely necessary. I'd say 30 days though, just enough time to build a big enough city so that I'm hooked enough to think it's worth paying for. If I'm only losing a small town by not paying to continue online, then I won't bother to continue online. Thing is, I'm not sure I'd even buy the game in the first place if I'm limited - in single-player - to a single city tile. I know it seems a bit off-topic, and ties into the "what about region play " thread here, but to me they're the same subject. I won't buy a game that requires me to continually pay for it to enjoy it. WOW was used as an example... perfect. I LOVE that type of game, probably about as much as SimCity. I love the Diablo series, for example, still play it often (too often according to the Mrs). I like that I can play it single-player, offline, but I have the option to play it online with other folks. I might even willingly pay a subscription for that if I had to. I know for sure I would enjoy the gameplay of WOW. But I have never tried it, and I never will - because I already know the core fun of it wouldn't be available to me unless I pay a subscription (unless it has some single-player offline mode I've never heard of). To play online - for the sake of interacting with others' cities, and watching and hearing from (and learning from) others touring my cities - that would definitely draw me into the Planet Offer idea, at least to try it out. Maybe I'd get hooked, maybe not... depends on how much I like it vs. how much it costs, of course. But if I *have* to play online to enjoy multiple cities - of my own - in a "region" then I doubt I'd buy the game at all. All of the other "online only" features such as blueprints and city journals are "nice add-ons" that probably would attract me as an option, and if I like it enough, I'd probably be willing to pay for it (for example, I LOVE the GEMs idea - and I'd probably end up buying at least some of them, IF I buy the game at all). But region play is a core requirement for me. And if I'm forced to continually be online and pay for a "core requirement" then all I can say is no thanks.

For one thing, unlike passengers, freight does not "travel" between cities. Once freight reaches the edge of a city - no matter how it gets there, rail, road, or port - it's gone. It doesn't continue through the next city to anywhere, not a port or anything else. To me this is one of the biggest gaps in the game's realism, would be nice to design a region-wide freight infrastructure, to get freight to a region edge via rail or road, or a port, etc.... Well you can still build it, but they won't come. Also, freight takes the shortest distance to the nearest edge, period, and the game is very thickheaded about it. As in, if you have a freight station across the street from a factory, but the rail attached to that station doesn't cross the tile edge that happens to be closest to that factory ... the freight trucks will drive right past that station and stay on roads instead, to get to that edge. You can mitigate this by a) not having any road connections to that edge, b) block trucks from using road connections to that edge (there are some "truck blocker" lots on the STEX for this purpose), or c) run your rail to that edge - but it still must be a shorter route than the road, else the freight trucks will stick with the road; and note there is a time cost associated with transferring freight from truck to train at freight stations. Same goes for a port, actually. If you have a port, but the water doesn't get to the "closest edge" - or if the trucks have to go too far to get to the port - then the freight won't use the port, unless its the only choice (i.e. they can't get to that edge via truck or rail).

- Download another police station, use iLive's Reader or SC4Tool to tweak the settings to your liking (smaller radius, inmate capacity, and cost, namely), and use that. (Warning: do not alter the stats of a station you've already plopped in a city, or else you'll subject yourself to the dreaded and incurable "slider bug") That would be my solution. The kiosk is all but useless, overfunding any police station is not such a hot idea, another small police station would seem to be a waste of money, and if doing nothing was a truly acceptable option, you wouldn't have started this thread, would you?

You're not feeding your cows beans, are you?

Originally posted by: His Divine Hand Is this city the only city in the region?quote> My first thought as well. If this is your first and only city in the region, then you definitely have either a really whacked mod or a bug. First try removing all plugins and see if everything returns to "normal." If not, then aside from "obliterate and start over" I wouldn't know what to tell you. I had that happen on a new city in a new region once before, if there was another solution I don't know what it was. But with nothing in it, was less painful than spending possibly hours looking for a solution that might not even exist anyway. If you have other cities in the region... well that changes things. Demand is regional - negative demand for residents means you already have more than enough workers to satisfy the existing jobs in the region. Likewise sky-high demand for jobs means you don't have enough jobs in the region to satisfy the current residents in the region. Another possibility in either case - check your taxes. While demand is regional, it can be influenced locally within each city by some factors, taxes usually being the most dramatic. Super-high taxes in one city can drive demand negative in that city even if the regional demand is high.

On both STEX and PLEX there's an additional note in the download description - not in the readme file - you should check out if you didn't already. It's about a conflict with another plugin (more specifically a prop pack file that was included in it).

You didn't happen to notice a newsticker message saying "Dolly Parton was here" did you?

Garbage is a possible culprit. It's very easy to forget to check the graph, which is often the only way you'll know it's becoming a problem - there are no zots or other visual cues, except maybe a news message... if that. If it gets really out of hand, and you look closely enough, you might see actually see it piled up around the city, but even that's not easy to spot, especially if you have a lot of highrises. Another idea is to check your mayor rating data view (not the graph). The overall mayor rating for the city is only a city-wide average; the real thing is in computed per-lot. It's very possible your city as a whole is fine, but one or two areas are having a serious issue, causing a major drop in the local mayor rating, and dropping that city-wide average.

Unfortunately one file you do need is the official patch, which is (far as I know) only available through EA's site, it doesn't appear to be available via that pinned topic. Everything else is, including official landmarks, the Lot Editor and BAT, the buildingprop_volx.dat files, and the BAT update for nightlighting. If that is already included in the new "box" as Vincent says, that may indeed be your best bet (some of the landmarks are good, you can get those via the pinned topic; the other "buildings" he speaks of, you can live without). But look around - you might find The Box even cheaper than SC4 Deluxe!! No joke - I was in Target just a couple days ago... SC4 Deluxe: $19.99 - same price it's been for the past couple years. The SimCity Box: $16.99. It was $29.99 shortly after it came out. You probably can't get a refund now, but maybe your store might be so kind as to substitute that... certainly worth a try.

The x/y number you see when querying a farm is only for the main building. The field also employs 1 ~ 2 workers per tile.

Originally posted by: TV-VCR One thing you can do is press CTRL+X and type you don't deserve it. All rewards become available. Of course, if you're not into cheating, this would not be the way to go. If you are aiming for realism, using that cheat would be more worth it in the end.quote> This is what I often do, but I wouldn't usually regard it as cheating. The farm rewards only look to the current city for jobs and population. But if I already have 2000 farm jobs in the area - in neighboring cities - but not enough in any single one of them because I didn't want to use a multiplier or cram everything together... I think I should still be able to build the farmer's market and state farm somewhere nearby. These rewards really should've been region-based to begin with, in my opinion, for the very reason that it's just near impossible to cram 1200 farm jobs in a single city and make it look good at the same time, without using a multiplier or abnormally-high-capacity farms. I do the same with some other rewards as well (e.g. if I want a pro stadium, but I don't want it smack in the middle of downtown - I'll build it in a little 'burb next door). In a sense the only "cheating" I'm doing by this is deciding for myself what the true boundaries of my city really are, and applying the rewards' requirements to that, rather than the perfect square of Columbus' worst nightmare I'm otherwise forced to deal with.

I think he's talking about backing up his developed region though... the copy in Program Files\Regions is if you ever want to restore the original undeveloped (or semi-developed e.g. Berlin) Maxis-provided regions.

Backup the entire folder for the region. Even cities you haven't yet developed get their files written to when neighbor cities are saved. When you're ready to restore, just delete the existing Fairview region and copy your backup there in its place.

Hint: just because the company is rich doesn't mean its workers are. CO$$$ is 15% full of rich sims. The rest are all low or mid-wealth... about even if I remember right. From there down, most of the jobs employ more low-wealth sims than mid, and only a smattering of rich sims. Moral: you need poor sims... lots of them. They still have to be educated though.