Spinmaster

If you're asking how to make deals with "SimNation" the answer is, you can't. You can only make deals between established cities. Without another city - that you created - on the other side of a connection, the connection does nothing at all. (Exception: road connections to nowhere/SimNation do have their demand-cap relief effects, but still nothing to do with "deals").

Your computer specs are fine, more than good enough to run SimCity 4 even with a good load of plugins (within reason). Not to say you couldn't benefit from some extra RAM though, yes 2 GB might help, particularly for large cities ... or a lot of plugins. I'd start by looking for unnecessary programs running in the background. Start with the system tray - anything "always running" for no good reason? Fine examples, various media players when you're not actually using them... they can consume memory and CPU. Even if just a little, if you have many such "little things" running in the background, it can really take away from intense programs like SC4. Really shouldn't have anything more than a virus scanner "always running" (and even that, if you're savvy enough, you can disable - but disable your network connection first). An on-demand virus scan wouldn't be a bad idea either, just to be sure. Also, check the 1st and 3rd posts in the Bugs & Technical Issues forum. Some useful tips there which may help you. Finally, note that with a large bustling city with lots and lots of people... you may just have to accept the game will slow down to some extent in any case, even if everything else is perfect.

"SimNation" is just the game's way of saying "the next city over which doesn't have a name yet." YOU have to establish and name that neighboring city yourself, in order to create deals with it. "They" ... is you.

Originally posted by: prince_of_sims Ahem. I present to you, the ability to switch plugin folders without having to move the My Documents folder. Ta Da! https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=3683.0quote> Pardon me whilst I bang my head on a wall (why don't we have a smiley for this?)... I read that post about a week ago, even copied it just in case it ever disappears, yet completely forgot it.

Problem is, if you're talking about trying to move the plugins... nobody has found the answer to that yet. SimCity 4 insists to put it in \My Documents\SimCity 4 ... and it's very thickheaded about it. If you know how to move the "My Documents" folder to the new drive, that might be your answer (and no, a shortcut TO the SimCity 4 folder won't work). Moving the game itself won't save much, only about 1.3 GB. If you still wish to do that though, then uninstall/reinstall is your safest option - uninstall won't touch the \My Documents\SimCity 4 folder nor anything in it, nor will the reinstall overwrite anything there (if anything is missing, the reinstall will put it back... but it won't overwrite anything that's there, even if it's original content e.g. the original regions, they'll stay as they were before you reinstalled). Outside chance (if you're registry-hack inclined) ... you might get away with copying the game files and updating the HKLM\Software\Maxis\SimCity 4\ "Install Dir" registry key. If you understand that, ok... if not, then it's something you shouldn't do anyway - do the uninstall/reinstall (which won't take much longer than copying 1.3 GB of files from one drive to another anyway). I haven't personally tried editing this registry key, maybe someone who has will chime in with success/failure. But by then, you could've just uninstalled and reinstalled anyway, I'll bet. And none of this addresses the "how do I move the plugins" issue, which is probably your larger problem anyway. See above. In any case, backup your plugins and regions folders. Even if you decide not to move anything, backup your plugins and regions folders. If you do move it all somehow, backup your plugins and regions folders. Every once in a while when you have a few minutes to spare, backup your plugins and regions folders. This should be done from time to time anyway, just in case "stuff happens." So... backup your plugins and regions folders (have I mentioned that? )

NAM walks in loli'm still thinking that in order to get the IHT demand i simply needed more R$$$ residents right? ok well i won't talk about what is required for R$$$ residents but i will say that one thing stopping me was traffic congestion i think. i've built a few cities since this first one and the bigger and better ones were only achieved with the help of the NAM.quote> Careful not to confuse wealth with education. Hi-tech needs highly educated people, but not many rich. This is a common mistake (made it myself for the longest derned time). IHT is almost entirely mid-wealth sims, but high education. Rich sims only make up 10% of the workforce in IHT. Only CO$$$ employs more, being 15% R$$$ ... still overwhelmingly stocked by mid- and low-wealth sims, though.

And whatever you do, do NOT dezone small pieces of the empty landfill at a time. Always leave minimum 2x2 sections even if there's no trash on part of it. There is a well-known bug, if you leave an odd-shaped landfill e.g. 1 x n, it'll *never* decompose. I don't know if it has been proven about the incinerator. There seem to be two schools of thought on it: a) it does burn trash *from* a landfill or b) it simply burns all new trash (i.e. none from the existing landfill), so no more *goes into* the landfill, allowing it to decompose as if the roads were cut off. If anyone has definitive proof of either, please by all means share. The incinerator can, however, be run at no cost. It won't produce electricity, but if you drop the funding to $0 it will continue to burn garbage... and produce plenty of pollution, too.

Originally posted by: mal7798 What is the deal with the annoyance with the music? I've never had the music on at all. Is it difficult to figure out how to turn it off?quote> Curiously, I've had the opposite experience recently. Always played with it off, watching tv in the background. Then my laptop blew up. Only place to play is a desktop in a room with no tv, so I tried it with the music. I never knew what I was missing, the music is great! Ok, maybe the same mix of songs over and over will eventually wear on me, but one can add stuff easy enough. On-topic, two things I've always hated. The stupid, stupid, stupid freight system. "Shortest route to nearest edge" ... means if there's a freight station/seaport across the street, they'll drive 20 miles past it, if the tracks/water doesn't get them to the nearest map edge. I wish freight was persistent between cities, at least with a "get it out of the region" strategy, i.e. a seaport, tracks, or roads that "connect" to a region edge. Would make planning out an entire freight system... well, necessary, nevermind worth it. Other thing is education having the same degree of effect for everyone it touches. If you give your sims enough education to become rocket scientists, you end up with a city full of nothing but rocket scientists, who then yell at you and flee because there ain't enough rockets. In the real world, not everyone has enough brain to learn. Some become rocket scientists, sure, but many more end up flipping burgers forever, no matter how much school and opportunity you give them. In SC4 you have to deliberately hold back education to keep enough less-than-geniuses to make a city functional.

Also commercial zones won't do anything if the residents aren't demanding commercial jobs. Check your demand graph - are they demanding commercial jobs, or only industrial? A sim won't just take any available job. A sim will only take a job that matches his/her (its? do the sims have gender anyway??) education and wealth level. An educated sim won't work on a farm. Similarly, low-wealth, uneducated sims will almost exclusively work in farms, factories, and low-wealth commercial service jobs. Edit: just saw your mentioning the super demand mod. I don't personally use it so I don't know much about it, but from what I do understand, it does what it says - artificially increases demand. That's fine for getting buildings to grow, but doesn't do anything to match sims with those jobs. In this case, if anything, I'd almost suggest ditching the mod, at least for a bit, to see what your demand really is - as that's based on what the sims actually want/need, depending on their education and wealth. That mod seems to me would mask that. Again, fine if you just want an eye-candy city full of buildings, but if seeing your sims actually take the jobs matters to ya... I don't get the impression that mod is a good idea. And there's a common misconception about the x/y capacity numbers you see when you query a building. It's not showing how many jobs are filled vs. available. It's showing how many jobs the building does offer vs. how many maximum it could if desirability conditions (customers, pollution, land value, etc...) are perfect. So a building showing 32/41 doesn't mean there are 41 jobs and only 32 workers. It means if everything is "just right" the building could offer up to 41 jobs, but everything isn't just right - so it can only offer 32. There's nothing in the query to show how many people actually work there, unfortunately. The route query can help, to see how many people travel to it for work, but it's not very reliable.

This isn't about deleting them, but restoring them. Nihonkaranws has the answer - the originals are in \SimCity 4 Deluxe\Regions. Don't delete the entire regions folder under My Documents\Sim City 4\ though ... you'll lose any non-standard regions, too. Just copy/paste the regions from the originals folder (and if somehow you lost that, I'm pretty sure they're easily copied straight from the original CD as well, if memory serves).

There is an excellent thread about this in the Game Experiments forum. It's a bit old originally but it's been updated frequently (recently as today, in fact). https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=38&threadid=70600&STARTPAGE=1

If, when you hit Enter "it does nothing" i.e. the text box stays there, then you didn't type or spell the code correctly. This goes for all of the cheat codes, if the command is typed correctly, the box disappears and whatever was supposed to happen (usually) happens. Not sure what's happening in your case though, if you're entering the command whererufrom ... no spaces, and yes, it's "ru" not "are you" ... should work fine. I just tried to make it screw up with odd quotes and characters in the name... but no issue found. I even tried using characters that shouldn't be allowed, such as the colon and backslash : and \ ... since the city name becomes part of the actual file name, these shouldn't even be allowed in the city's name... but they are. I didn't want to see what would happen if I tried to save the game at that point though. Anyway, all I can say is make sure you're typing whererufrom correctly. Only other thing I can think of... do you have Rush Hour or Deluxe? Or the original, pre-Rush Hour "vanilla" SC4? I don't remember if the codes worked in vanilla. I'm guessing probably "yes" but I only have Deluxe, so I can't test it to find out. Also possible the "SKU-1 update" had something to do with it, did you apply that (from the official site)?

Check ebay. Lots of people trying to dump it off already. And a few "buy it now" options for as low as about $20. EA doesn't really care about "learning the error of their ways" ... the more $ they get, the less of an error it was. I agree it's not as bad as many - including myself - make it out to be, when taken as its own game. But still not worth full-price, in my opinion. That is what they "feel bad" about, if anything. Not the negative reviews and scathing opinions, but simply the fact that after only a few months, SCS is already a bargain-bin item... while SC4, released 5 years ago, still sells and could probably still fetch near-full-price (though rarely found at more than $20 these days... I'm just saying it probably would still sell even if it was $40). That's what they clearly missed out on with SCS - a long-lasting profit margin.

You don't need the extra cheats plugin for this particular cheat, it's already built-in. CTRL-X, whererufrom ... if your new city name has spaces, you'll have to put it in quotes (or just always use quotes anyway). Example: whererufrom "My Sweet New Ghetto" The extra cheats plugin is still highly recommended for other cheats (e.g. "moolah"), just not required for this particular one.

I'd kinda like to see "advisors" in CU, but not like they were in SimCity. Actual useful people ... call them commissioners or directors or whatever ... that can actually handle some of the more mundane things, like micromanaging school and hospital budgets month-to-month; plan out and propose new transit routes based on where people are coming from and going to, and how best to get them all in one route; increase funding for the power plants and water pumps as-needed until they approach full-capacity, then show me where to put a new one to have the least negative impact on the city; show me where new water pipes should go for optimum and most cost-effective coverage, and if I approve, put 'em where proposed, without me manually laying them out... things like this. In short, I'd love to see those "advisors" turned into useful tools, not just annoying messages. Of course, how much help they provide should also be controllable, with the player able to disable them completely or configure limits for them (e.g. don't fund schools more than 10% over capacity, and never more than $nnn). "Easy" = all on with no limits. "Hard" = all off, not even messages from them. Medium = messages on, all non-maintenance actions off. I never hated the advisors in SC4, I just hated that they always passionately told me I screwed something up, but they could never do a simple thing to just fix it for me (especially when the fix was nothing more than moving a slider). This would also serve the "it's too complex" crowd by letting the game optionally almost play itself with the more tedious issues, with the mayor doing only what most mayors do... approving and disapproving projects, and kissing butts and babies.

CO$$$ employs 15% R$$$ sims. High-Tech, 10%. Everyone else, much less (and CS$, IA and ID ... none at all). Might also wish to check out the Less Abandonment mod, see if it's for you. In a nutshell, it raises the necessary desirability threshold for R$$$, preventing them from moving into an area which they'll immediately abandon anyway. It sounds like you have that situation, possibly due to roads. You have an area with mostly low and middle sims, most of them taking mass transit. Suddenly the rich swoop in and take it all over. Well most of the rich sims prefer to drive, not take mass transit. Now the roads are clogged, traffic sucks, and there's a lot of traffic noise. The rich don't like that... so they leave. Low and middle-wealth sims fill in the vacuum, and take mass transit again. And 'round and 'round we go. Improve the road network, plant some other nice amenities e.g. parks, and perhaps they'll stick around. Or use the above-mentioned mod, and they won't build there in the first place until you do raise the desirability enough to outweigh the sudden traffic issues.

I said this elsewhere, but it's relevant here, too. I don't fault TM for taking the contract, and if they did have objections, keeping their mouths shut about them. EA would've just tossed 'em aside and given the contract to someone else. What would you choose? "No, EA, we don't want your money because (blah blah blah)" or "Sure EA, we'll rebuild the wheel for you, for all the $$$ you're giving us, we'd be nuts to say no (to self: even though your design ideas are utter garbage)!!!!" No, they did the right thing for their own sake, and to their credit they did a great job with the blueprint EA gave them. They created a very beautiful and well-polished square wheel. That SC4 "outsells" SCS in November doesn't mean anything, as someone pointed out, because SCS wasn't even released for most of that month yet. December won't help because of Christmas. I'll be curious about January, but we'll have to wait a month... or get a souped-up Delorean. But that SC4 is still ON that top-ten chart FIVE YEARS after its release speaks volumes - for all the whining and moaning about how "complex" it was, it worked. Now they release this "square wheel" aka SimCity Socities. I'll be very surprised if it goes anywhere except over a cliff.

You can get it on Amazon.com. I have seen it in some stores, but rarely, and none lately. But I'll echo El Burro's suggestion, just wait a few weeks for City Life 2008 to come out. If it's out in Europe then, I doubt it'll be far behind in the US, and might even also be available on Amazon. I'm not sure it's a "nice alternative to SC4" though, from all I've seen and heard it doesn't even come close... but to each their own. I've been curious about it though, myself, from the perspective of just wanting to see what MC did before, and thus how much hope I wish to build up for Cities Unlimited. I'll probably buy 2008 for that reason alone, once it's released.

I wouldn't blame Tilted Mills for "botching" SCS. They did a great job with it, I think. The fault lies with who gave them the job - EA. They were basically told to reinvent the wheel, but this time, make it square, because round was "too hard." Well they did a fine job with that, made a finely polished, nice & purty, square wheel. It's no surprise it's not going anywhere, but it's hardly their fault. Had they rebutted to EA with all the same thoughts much of the SimCity faithful had, it's very doubtful they'd have gotten the job to begin with. Better to just suck it up, build the square wheel, and get paid for it, no? Now that the exercise-in-futility that is SCS is over with... maybe with luck EA will realize that, despite the increasing difficulty, SimCity classic through SimCity 4 worked. Will TM be involved in the next incarnation, if there is one? I wouldn't be upset if so. I have tried out SCS. Ignoring the "it ain't what I like" feelings (not easy, but I tried), the game feels fairly well-written. Graphics are decent, not exactly 5-star, but good for the type of game it is. Everything seems smooth, the interfaces take a little getting used to but are more-or-less intuitive, most of what I've seen "works as designed"... from a QA perspective, I'd give them an A. I still hate the game, but it's by no means due in any way to TM's development efforts. If someone cooks the most scrumptious chicken livers in the history of the world, I'll still hate them quite passionately. Part of me sincerely hopes Tilted Mills is involved with the next SimCity. I believe they could do a great job with it, if they're given the original formula to work with, instead of blueprints for another misshapen wheel.

Originally posted by: tahill79 hahayoudied did you even read the post? go back to his post and read it again and look for the 5th word in the paragraph. but idk what the problem is its not plugins or dependencys. mine show up so try to uninstall then reinstall itquote> And you might wish to check the last word in hahayoudied's post: update. It's a fair question whether or not Dragonator has applied the official update from EA; it's not as automatic to some as it is to others, to check for updates after installing a game. I'm not sure what help if any that update will give him though, I don't recall it having anything in it relating specifically to highways or the region views, but bug fixes... well it does sound like a bug. Only other thing I can imagine is graphics options, if his machine is underpowered or the graphics settings for the game are set too low. It's also possible he did apply that update, but as so many other people do, forgot to reconfigure the game's graphic settings (the update resets them, usually to lower-than-necessary specs).