jmusacha

Yes in my experience where I have "daisy chained" garbage through several tiles into one terminal "garbage city" tile I have found it helps to keep handwritten notes on how it's structured. Also, you should periodically check on the garbage transfers to make sure nothing has broken down. One pleasant side effect of this is that some of your cities in the middle of the "daisy chain" can end up making money every month just from sending the gargage down the chain, such as buying garbage at 0.82 simoleans per ton and selling it at 0.85 per ton.

Hello. I took a three year break from Sim City 4 and just re-installed the game and all the plugins/mods that I had. I was pretty up to date on everything in 2010, like with NAM, industry quadrupler, etc. I was wondering if there is anything that I need to know that has come out in the last three years. I haven't kept up on new info at all or this forum also since 2010. I'm not interested in cheats, just what new mods I have missed, if any. Thanks.

Thank you for the help. I am also interested in water mods and terrain texture/grass mods. I tried searching on STEX but I am not too good with the search function. The Sim City launcher looks really interesting; they didn't have those back in my day.

Hi everyone. I was a regular SimCity 4 player for years so I know all the basics and a lot of the advanced techniques in the game. I took a break from SimCity 4 in 2010, and saved my built-up "Timbuktu" region on a flash drive, which had about 3 million sims. All of the tutorials at the time of saving had been overwritten for years as new cities, and some of them had grown up to be quite large. I re-installed the game today and reloaded the Timbuktu region in the appropriate Documents sub-folder. When I opened up the region, everything appeared properly just as I left it in 2010 except for that each of the tutorial cities appeared in default state in my region. I checked the flash drive and sure enough, none of the city files that replaced the tutorial tiles were in the region folder that I had saved back in 2010, but each of the tutorial city files were saved. I know for a fact that the tutorials had been overwritten years ago and those tiles had been built up along with the rest of the region. Now I have big open gaps in my region (Terraforming tutorial, big city tutorial, etc) where once-thriving cities were. Do you know how this happened? Has this happened to any of you? How can I fix this? Thank you.

Yes thanks for the tip, I tried that just now. I think that the files may have somehow saved improperly on the flash drive back in 2010 however. I don't know how that might have happened.

I'm pretty sure what the OP was talking about is putting a metropolitan area into one region, not a "state" as we think of them in the USA.

Zoning a row of 1x2 medium density residental along a street sometimes (rarely, in my experience) leads to the construction of a row of the "pastel row house." Does anyone else find this to be immensely aesthetically pleasing? Much more so than your regular middle-class apartment buildings that normally grown in an area zoned such. Does anyone know of ways to encourage the growth of the Pastel Row Houses?

So like when I installed sc4 on my new computer, these characters appear in my smoke and fog, and over my cursor highlight, kinda like cyrillic characters, or a bunch of 0's and 1's. How do I fix this?

In my experience, God mode trees are much less aesthetically pleasing than the regular (mayor mode) trees. The god-mode trees seem to plop a lot of pines and scrubby-looking bushes and small trees. With the mayor trees, you can fine-tune where the trees are planted, and can pick from oaks, maples, spruce, and palm.

Ok, I bought a brand new computer. Can I re-install SC4 on there? Or does the license only cover one installation? Furthermore, how do I copy all the files I need so I can play my old region where I left off on the old computer. I installed a lot of mods like cycledogg's trees, landmarks, and NAM... Thank you.

I am the OP of this thread. Thank you very much for the advice; I transferred all the plugins and the regions via one 4 GB flash drive and everything is working perfectly. So consider this thread closed, and once again, thank you all! On a side note, its funny how my brand new computer, with an intel dual-core processor running at 2.66 GHz with 6 GB of RAM still cant play SC4 smoothly at the highest detail settings! But no worries...

Thank you. And what directories do I need to copy to get my regions and cities into the new computer?

Can an island city have a neighbor deal to import or export trash/rubbish? I know in SC3000, all you needed was a seaport to export rubbish to your imaginary neighbors. But what about SC4? Do you need a seaport to do this? It would be a shame if all island cities had to manage their own rubbish disposal, as most island cities tend to be short of land space anyway. In your responses please don't answer with advice to download some kind of trash-chute or other device. I'm looking for a solution based on non-modded gameplay.

Ah, I've never been worried too much about crime at the airport. To me, it's an accurate reflection of real life. Airports are rife with crime and are organized crime and smuggler magnets! Ever seen Goodfellas?

Be sure to put the connecting piece under the original road. Plus, i think it helps if the entire area on which the underpass/road lies is completely level.

Another thing you can do is name your mayors after the cast of your favorite TV shows. Like I've had Mayors Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Mr. Mackey, Timmy!, etc.

Zone some medium density industrial directly adjacent to your residential zones (touching a road) and see what happens. Sometimes people don't move in unless there's some jobs/businesses there first.

I respecfully disagree with the above post concerning pedmalls and industry. I have had no problems growing industry with no road connexions, using only pedmalls. Then again, this may be because the industrial structures were within a certain distance from a road (as industry does not need to be directly facing a road to grow).

When you are interested in tracking the garbage decay in a landfill, click on the "garbage" graph in the graphs menu. That will show the actual tonnage of garbage currently in the landfill at the given moment. Play the city and track the graph to see the rate of depletion.

I second that SCBoy said about the arrows not mattering. I've done a lot of experiments with pedmalls myself since I love walking, always walk anywhere I can rather than drive, but anway.. Also, pedmalls can work in the REAR of residential zones, kinda like an alleyway. use the route query and you can verify this easily.

I tend to play my regions in "clusters" of inter-related cities (such as like cities A,B,C are connected and trade with each other, but are not connected to D,E,F, who are interelated to each other only, etc). So like I tend to pick comically stereotypical German names for the mayors of a particular cluster, French names for another cluster, ridiculously British names for another cluster, etc. I also, and you may find this silly, re-name my mayors as time goes on to so and so the II, the III, the IV, kinda to show time passing, much like the "mysims" die and have their descendents succeed them. I also have named my mayors after famous dictators, like Francois Duvalier (Haiti), Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, especially if I'm intentionally playing the city "bad."

Ok what about 14 x 14 grid -- Each side has three (3) 4x4 high-density residential squares, with a one-tile space between the three. The middle of the 14x14 zone is thus left an unzoned 6x6 tile square, into which you can nicely fit 4 large parks or large flower gardens, or whatever you want really.

what about a winding, curved, haphazard street system, with even some hairpin turns, diagonal streets, and traffic circles at the end of dead-end streets? Then zone some low-density residential touching the streets. If you have demand for R$$$ then you can try zoning 3x3, 3x4, and 4x4 low-density zones (holding the CNTRL key) and estates will pop up. Leave a one or two tile gap between your zoning and fill those with trees, with a few plops of PEG's seasonal trees to liven things up.

I'm not trying to hijack this thread or anything, but I have gotten the "Bureau of Bureaucracy" through normal means, and no cheating. What "well funded health and education system" REALLY means is that both systems must be funded at above 100% globally. Do this through the general funding menus under your "budget" options. The reason the bureau doesn't come about too often is that most players have their health and education systems strategically underfunded. Funding both at over 100% is really a huge waste of money, but that's what you gotta do to get this reward. After you place the reward, you can revert the budgets back to however you want them and you will not "lose" the bureau.

Another explanation is that your utility structures (water pumps/power production facilities) have aged to the point where their cost per unit of utility produced has risen. The last 1/3 of a power plant or water pump's life will cost you a tremendous amount of money for very little production.