RedImperator

Originally posted by: YoshiMX3 If only they had put that much effort toward making Expansion packs for SC4.quote> Yeah, it is pretty annoying that EA abandoned SC4 so early. I guess the sales weren't up to projections; I've actually never looked at that information, now that I think about it, but it makes sense. SC4 is essentially a niche game with a steep learning curve, especially for players who have no prior SC experience. Still, it's frustrating that the game and the playerbase was entirely abandoned after one expansion pack, especially when there are some obvious mod ideas out there (a seasons mod, for example, or more transportation options, or a regional terraformer). The modding community has done great work, but I can't tell you how many times I've been futzing around for the nth straight hour with puzzle pieces, wishing Maxis had just included streetcars as a transportation option. I don't begrudge the Sims 2 or its player community all the expansions and support they recieved. It's understandable that EA/Maxis is going to give a lot of attention to the best-selling PC game of all time, and TS2 has its own community of talented modders who obviously love the game and have done a lot of work to make it better. Frankly, it's a really good game. It's not really my style, but it does exactly what it sets out to do (I do enjoy designing houses, but I get bored after that). But it would have been nice of SC4 had gotten a little more attention than it did.

The problem for North American style suburban sprawl is that it relies on cheap oil, and the horizon on that is about ten years, if that. Then you're not looking at $4 or $5 or $6 gas. Then you might have to deal with $10 or $15 or even $20 a gallon--if you can get it at all (since the first priority for civilian petro-fuel has to be farmers). In that environment, even hybrids are uneconomical. Straight electric cars consume power off the grid, and without a substantial increase in production and transmission capacity, there just isn't enough electrical power for them to replace gas-burners, even if you could roll them out fast enough. In that environment, the suburbs WILL contract. One thing that's been overlooked in this thread is the value of small cities. Nobody thinks about them much because they're typically places which were left in ruins by deindustrialization, but in a post-oil future, they're a good compromise between suburbia and densely packed mega-cities like New York. Frankly, without cheap oil, those mega-cities will have to shrink, too. It's very hard to imagine how you can get enough food into a city of 8 or 10 million to feed everyone without cheap diesel for trucks. The rail capacity certainly doesn't exist and probably never did. The future may lie with small and medium sized urban centers, strung out along railroad lines like strings of pearls. As long as it's on a rail line, even a small town is perfectly sustainable.

Originally posted by: Sypr54 Yes, it's somehow what stupid what EA's doing. It smells like someone wants a little pocket money by selling the expansions. I hope EA's not gonna realease dozens of expansions because I really hate those things. You only get new stuff and that's it. Simcity4's expansion added some new gameplay, so I don't mind those expansions for SC4. EA should corporate again with Will Wright and make a game that mixes up the Sims and Simcity with Next-gen graphics.quote> Um, all the Sims 2 expansion packs added substantial functionality. Together they change the game FAR more than Rush Hour changes vanilla SC4. You might be thinking of the stuff packs, which WERE ripoffs.

I've been getting great use from my GLR network--over ten thousand sims a day on one line. Get the T-RAM expansion to the Network Addon Mod and it won't take up any extra space.

I like 6x4 downtown blocks, with buildings facing the long side. I've found this size block to be perfect for placing public transportation and making "walkable" cities.

This is the single most annoying bug in the entire game. My problem isn't the no-road zots that appear over freshly created residential zones--those go away in time, as others have said. MY problem is later in the game, when large residential buildings are constructed, get no-road zots, and then abandon for lack of road access. Sometimes the building will reoccupy after the zot goes away, sometimes I have to demolish it, and sometimes I just have to give up and build a park or zone commercial because the lot just won't work.

China is running headlong into very serious trouble--global oil production peaked in 2005, and will go into terminal decline sometime in the next decade. Once that happens, China won't have access to the cheap petroleum needed to maintain their export economy, the West won't have the money to spend on vast piles of disposable luxury goods, the government will be unable to keep their growing middle class supplied with Western luxuries like automobiles, and (perhaps most importantly for China) the price of chemical fertilizers and pesticides will soar. Of course, as an American, I have no room to gloat: the United States is even less prepared for the future.

Frankly, virtually every city in the United States has been a victim of terrible planning since the end of the Second World War. We spent fifty years sprawling out into suburbs scaled for cars instead of people while we bulldozed entire city neighborhoods to accommodate highways, and let the best railroad system in the world disintegrate along the way. And none of it is the least bit sustainable--most of it is going to have to be abandoned before the middle of this century, once global oil production goes into terminal decline.

Fun fact: In SimCity 2000, the developers increased the speed and power of fire in order to make the Oakland Hills scenario a challenge. As a side effect, every little one-tile fire was a threat to spread and burn any city to the ground, and if you got a disaster that started many scattered fires, like an earthquake or the monster, you were capital-S Screwed unless you had a ton of firefighters and were fast with the bulldozer. Slightly off topic: the disaster I REALLY miss is the hurricane. Rebuilding after one of them was a real challenge.

Originally posted by: Ambleboy22 That 'gravel pit' there may be the crash site of United 93. Although I could be wrong.quote> You are. Shanksville is several hundred miles west of Philadelphia, and anyway, United 93 didn't blast a deep, steep-sided crater into the ground. Just a shallow gouge. Even in a full power vertical dive (which United 93 wasn't in), a plane doesn't have all that much kinetic energy, compared to how much energy it takes to move dirt--they're mostly aluminum and air. There ARE actual gravel pits and quarries in the area. I can't tell where the one shown in the CJ is without seeing it in a wider context, but there are plenty of uses for the stone that underlies Montgomery County.

I had this happen to me once, too. In my case, it was triggered by a catastrophic economic collapse in a neighboring city. The neighbor city had a very large high tech sector and a small population, and was providing jobs to a substantial number of R$$ and R$$$ residents in the main city. When that industry collapsed, the entire south side of the main city was a sea of No Job Zots. I ended up losing about 1/3 of the population of the main city, leaving entire neighborhoods abandoned. A few game months later, a lot of R$ and a few R$$ residents repopulated those neighborhoods. The resident income graph took a nosedive almost exactly like MasterDNA's. I suspect the cause of the crash was poor environmental management on my part. I had about half a medium sized city zoned industrial, which initially developed high tech. However, I didn't adjust the tax rates to discourage polluting industries, and a few I-M and I-D factories popped up in areas with lower than average I-HT desireability. All it took was a little nearby pollution to tip I-HD desireability in neighboring blocks off the precipice, and a chain reaction spread through the city and wiped it all out, taking thousands of $$ and $$$ jobs with it. Needless to say, I'm much more careful about managing and monitoring large areas of high tech development now.

I use a combination of Roman provinces (I name my Civ IV cities after them, too) and New Jersey counties with "Park" as a suffix. So Gloucester Park, Monmouth Park, Bergen Park, et cetera. You could use just about any state in the Union for that, as long as it's not something tiny like Delaware or Rhode Island. You must be the guy who named Halifax's streets! Around Dalhousie University there is a neighbourhood where every street is named for a tree (Larch, Beech, Cedar, Chestnut, Walnut, Cherry, Oak and Poplar).quote> Philadelphia is the same way. The downtown streets go South (formerly Cedar), Pine, Spruce, Locust, Walnut, Chestnut, Market (main east-west drag), Arch, Cherry, and Vine (there are smaller streets that run in between them, but they're mostly just alleys).

Originally posted by: jfksc12 I think they should add a way to form neighborhoods by economic wealth. I hate how you can have 5 mansions in a row and then some $ shanty. I think the zoning tools should be expanded so not only do you zone for density type (l,m,h) but for wealth ($,$$,$$$) it would make the game look more pleasing. Unlike density, the house must specifially be of that wealth or higher. Think of neighborhoods of high wealth, low wealth, medium wealth. It just makes the game so much more realistic.quote> If you want to do that, what needs to be improved is the way the game treats property values. In real life, one room shacks aren't built next to mansions because the land is worth too much for a poor person to afford the mortgage, and even if he could, he'd do better selling and building a nicer place on cheaper real estate. Zoning for wealth is not only totally unrealistic (no city on Earth, at least in the parts of Earth that don't suck, specifically zones "No poor people"), but it would add a new layer of pointless micromanagement. Do you really want to have to rezone a neighborhood every time the desireability goes up or down? I agree with you about the basic problem, but there's a better solution.

I'm sure this has come up before, but for those of us who like to build dense East Coast style cities, mixed-use zones would be tremendously helpful. The strictly segregated RCI model is accurate for California, but in cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, there's block after block of rowhouses and brownstones with retail space on the first floor and apartments above. The corner store is a staple of life around here, and there's no easy way to model it in SimCity currently.

Date: 7/7/2005 1:31:13 PM Author: Pepster Don't you think, that a bad city isn't just one with declining population, but also with out eye candy appeal, a square city, with a boring grid, and kinda boring, quote> By what measure is this a bad city? Grids are efficient and waste no space. That's why they're used in real life. Diagonal streets look neat, but have you ever tried navigating a 5, 7, or 9 point intersection? And it's worse in SC4 because the game isn't smart enough to turn the buildings diagonal to match the street. By this standard, Manhattan north of 26th St. is a bad city because it's an unbroken grid all the way to Harlem (except for Broadway). lacking of parks, and even for the sims no mather how digital are they, consider the city boring and with out diversions and such things like landmarks to increase the land value and desirability, lol...quote> Depends on the kind of city you're trying to build. Obviously, if the goal is a reasonably balanced community, you need to boost land value. But suppose you're trying to model a gritty mill town? Or an industrial city that frees its neighbors from building dirty industry? In those cities, parks are a waste of space and money. so i thing a bad city should be broadly rated by several factors, not just economic and demografic ones, after all declining population in a central city, con be compensated by surging sprawling suburbs, and that turns the city in to a suburbanization phase, more than a economic decline. P.Polariquote> The most important factor is and always should be, Does this city work as intended? Total demographic collapse followed by bankrupcy is a failure no matter how you slice it (I invite you to tell the residents of Buffalo, Detroit, Youngstown, Flint, Newark and other Rust Belt cities that the state of their central cities does not, in fact, represent an economic decline), but past that there should be different measures. If the city of Industry City is all belching smokestacks and sky ghettoes, it's a success. If the city of Parkside Heights looks the same, it's a failure.

Date: 9/23/2005 11:51:24 AM Author: sharkbait16 I think the best advice is to look at some CJs and see what they do, then take what you like from each. Also, someone was having problems with zoning, so here's a few shortcut keys to know while zoning: Ctrl -> makes whatever you zone one huge block, not very helpful for bigger than 4x4 cause nothing will grow bigger than that Alt -> rotates to corner section to the other side Shift -> removes all streets that like to appear when you zone. Other good keys are Home and End which rotate any item that can be plopped. Hope that was helpful!quote> Hey, neat. I didn't know about two of those features. If only there were some kind of book included with the game which listed all the in-game features and how to use them. Some kind of user's manual, maybe. Maybe EA could include one in the next version.

Medieval cities were absolutely nothing like modern ones. A SC4 Medieval mod would be nothing but eye candy--you'd need access to the source code to make the game to even bear a passing resemblance to a realistic Medieval city simulator. Really, for something like that, it would be better just to code a new game from the ground up. Now, if you just think Medieval architecture is cool and want a city full of stone castles and thatch huts, then an eye candy Medieval mod might be worthwile. But a real Medieval city simulator is out of the question without access to the source code. And for the love of God, the word is Medieval. M-E-D-I-E-V-A-L. Merriam-Webster.com is your friend. wafgking: I don't know what your beliefs or non-beliefs are, but I'm an atheist and I don't get my panties in a knot over religious signatures, and I especially don't show up on somebody else's board and demand, in my very first post, that all such signatures are taken down. Don't be a douchebag. It makes the rest of us look bad.

I use a 4x6 grid with closely spaced transit stops. The result is lots of pedestrian traffic. I grew up in the Philadelphia area. A large city without a rigid grid just doesn't look right to me.