ZeusAV

For me the best strategy to develop a large city (over 1 million) has been to create a region with a large tile where you want the city to be and surround it with several small or medium sized tiles. Develop 3-5 of the surrounding tiles until the total population of the region is around 150K. Afterwards I zone the large tile for high and medium density, build all the connecting roads/highways and let it go. The large tile has tons of demand for all 3 types of zoning and the population increases as quickly as you can zone things. Skyscrapers also appear quickly for me this way. It takes good planning though. I usually layout the main highways and roads across the region before I start building cities.I already have in my mind how I want the region to look.

I bought the disk version for Windows back in 2004, later used an ISO file to play without the disk after I lost the installation disk when switching computers. Once I got a Mac I just downloaded it from the Mac App Store. Had to pay for it again but with the Mac App Store I think you are free to download it again to any computer that is linked to your Apple ID.

Not much you can do now but after my Windows laptop overheating and freezing up during a save back in 2005, which eventually lead to my largest city at that time being ruined, here's what I do: - I have an external hard drive that I occasionally (once a month), copy my entire Sim City 4 folder to for backup purposes. - Have an Apple Time Capsule that does full backups Time Machine backups of my computer every hour or so, making it so that any file corruption or mistakenly deleted file can be recovered easily. I think this one only works for Macs though there might be a similar solution for Windows machines.

Been working on this region on and off for about 10 years. Actually had a setback on my old Windows machine back in 2005 where the computer shut itself down while I was saving and the main city tile would no longer load and I had to start it over. Made me quit playing the game for a good 6 months because I was so upset.

Working on my 4th region. By the way does anyone know how to overwrite the Regional transportation view colors that come with the NAM with the old blue, orange, etc. colors that I was using before? You can see some of the cities in the region still using it.

Wasn't there also some type of bug with the Space Port? I seem to recall it not being able to be unlocked normally in the game.

After all my years of playing this game one thing I can't seem to figure out is how to connect the Seaports to the rail network. Is there something I'm missing or is there some type of glitch in the game? Here's one of my Seaports and when using the query feature it gives the impression that a rail can be connected to the seaport.

I've been looking all over but can't seem to find it. Exactly where are you guys getting the mod that allows the building of these custom interchanges? I was thinking it was in the latest NAM but after installing it here are the only options I have when I click on the Highways tool.

I don't think you have any choice but to play them through iTunes. I put them in the Mayor Radio folder like I did on Windows and it didn't work so I just created a playlist in iTunes for all the songs I like to listen to while playing SC4

Thanks guys. I had been using this mod for so long that I'd forgotten that it wasn't the original Maxis one. It looks like I was missing a dependency file. Everything is working well now.

No I don't normally talk while playing unless it's cursing the game for randomly shutting down or something. I usually have something playing in my iTunes while playing so I might sometimes sing along with one of the songs.

I pretty much have some fantasy regions and countries that I've drawn years ago on paper (mainly their highways and roads). In Sim City 4 I'm simply bringing those ideas to life so normally when creating a new region after sculpting the terrain, I lay out the major highways across the region, develop 3-4 of the smaller tiles around the major city, and then finally build up the main city. Making the first city prosperous and profitable is about the only point where the game is challenging. Afterwards I find every new city I start to be well in the black on money and demand to be strong. I don't focus too much on details like which building goes where, though I do have a general idea of where I want the downtowns to be. I'm more interested in the roads and highways being accurate to the maps I've hand drawn. After the main city is in place I just slowly build on the other tiles and suburbs over time.

Can someone point me in the direction of which mod you guys are using in order to make all these custom interchanges? I love building highways but have gotten quite bored of the stock ones and the few extra ones I've downloaded so far.

I have several cities in excess of 1,000,000 without subways. They do have bus and passenger train stations though. In fact I think I've only bothered to build a subway in one of my regions. I'm more into moving sims around via highways.

I usually plan mine out. At least the region. I used hand drawn road maps (was a hobby of mine before ever even playing a Sim City game) and when I start a new region I layout the highways and other major road arteries before anything. The road/highway layout usually follows what I have on my maps as well as the locations of the cites relative to one another. The main city I usually will leave empty and develop the suburbs immediately adjacent to it first. What I've found with this is that if I develop 3 or more adjacent tiles first to a total regional population of about 100K, then once I go to build the central city the demand for all zones is already extremely high and skyscraper ready very quickly. I already have things planned as far as where the major highways intersect and the general area of the airports/seaport/downtown. Details beyond that I just do on the fly.

My first Sim City experience was Sim City 2000 on the PS1. I think it was around 1999-2000 when I played it. I still remember the song "Serious Sims" was stuck in my head.

It's just like roads. You just drag the highway to the edge of the map and choose 'yes' when asked if you want to connect with a neighbor.

Wow amazing. How did you get those noise barriers for the highway?

This one I've been playing off and on since like 2005-2006 Satellite view Transportation View Still have a lot to do with forming and developing the far western suburbs. I wanted to have an effect where those areas look dry and desert-like while still making the areas around the lake still be green but couldn't find any mods where that looks to be possible.

Yes with the NAM installed the Sims more certainly can and will use your ring roads and freeway bypasses. I'm a highway guy and much of the enjoyment I get out of this game is from designing the transportation networks. Some things I've found to work: - Whatever city that you have your ring in or your bypass, you need to have neighboring cities. This makes it so that your sims actually have some reason to use your bypass. If there's no significantly sized neighbor in the adjacent or 2 tiles away then they won't use them. - Cutback on your neighbor connections. When using freeways I design my cities so that those are the best and sometimes the only way to get to a neighboring city. Since the NAM makes sims use the fastest route instead of the shortest, this also helps get more traffic onto your highways. - Keep your design realistic. Take a look at Google Maps and observe how some real world cities have their highway grids laid out. Here are a couple examples of how I did mine. The first city 'Amherst' has a very large neighbor to the right of over 1 million, a 20k neighbor to the left and small 5k neighbors to the north and south. The second one 'Kileen' has a very small 3K neighbor to the north where the highway leaves the screen, the neighbor to the south is around 30k. Interesting thing with this one is that the sims are traveling through the 3k neighbor to the north where I have another bypass and into a 300k city 2 tiles away. Notice the 3rd city has a full ring and about 600K sims. Notice that the northwest portion is the least utilized part. That's mainly because the neighbor to the northwest is a small farm town of only about 3K.

Largest City: 1.24 Million Region: 4.23 Million Had the city population up to 1.98 Million but didn't like how unrealistic it looked with so many skyscrapers so I reduced some of parts of the city to medium density zones.

Finally got around to buying and installing the game today from the Mac App Store. I straight up copied over my files directly from my SC4 folders on my Windows 7 Bootcamp Partition. Only issue I had initially was that cities were freezing when I opened them and then I deleted the Bridge file from the NAM as suggested here. Now everything seems to be working great so far. Stable, fast, and smooth. One less reason to use Windows now. Thanks for the help here from all who posted.

I had no issues copying the regions over; that much should work well. Of course, if your region(s) utilize various 3rd party content which may or may not work...your results may vary. Plugins, well that's another issue, so you may need to do some testing. The NAM supposedly works if you remove some files (described in store detail in this thread). Sounds good then. I'm going to go ahead and purchase it. Guess I'll have to test out the mods to see which ones work and which ones don't.

Very excited to see a proper version of this game finally coming to the Mac. Question for those who downloaded already. Can you just simply copy all of your regions from the Windows version over into this Mac version? I've been playing SC4 for well over 7 years now and would hate to not be able to bring in all of the regions that I've worked on. So far I've been running the game through Bootcamp which is frustrating because I have to restart the computer just to play it. Also how are the plugins working out as far as copying them over from the Windows version? I'm mostly concerned about the NAM and other traffic/highway related add-ons. I can do without the custom buildings if necessary. Lastly, any noticeable performance boost over the Windows version running on Macs via Bootcamp? Right now I have to save very often because the game is liable to just shut down on its own out of nowhere at times. Specs on my MBP: - Late 2011 13" 2.8Ghz i7 - 16GB RAM - 256GB SSD (the current Bootcamp partition runs off this drive) - 1TB HDD