iiiset

In a word, yes. In five words, yes yes yes yes yes. I am grateful to simcity 4 for existing, but what frustrates me is that i can tell it is the graphics that make it perform so badly sometimes. I am 100% on board with: -transpo lines that you draw yourself -isometric map -unlimited customization -internal bat all things you said. and let me add -dynamic, realistic water -three modes, toy (everything is ploppable, no money), sim (ultra-realistic), and experimental (guts-open customizability: eg the ability to design skyscrapers with internal subway stops so you can have a road-free downtown) -and finally, a new zoning system, see below. houses residential: developers bid for tracts of land (conforming to the curves or your transpo and the terrain) on which they build neighborhoods with squiggly streets of their own devising apts residential: developers bid for land either adjoining a street to build townhouses, or more square shaped to build an apt complex tower residential: you zone each plot, on which only storied res buildings are built serv commercial: depending on size and customership, strip malls to megamalls, industrial supply stores to amusement parks, gas stations to hotels. visited by customers who use transit, shipments of goods from products industrial office commercial: depending on size and land value, isolated corporate complexes for the local minig company, or skyscrapers. traveled to by commuters terrain-based industrial: zone huge swaths of land to exploit natural resources like fertile soil, forests, coal, oil, etc. but suffer the pollution products industrial: zone parks for factories that recieve shipments from terrain ind. and put out shipments of consumer products, anything from packaged food to airplanes. and blended zones: family farms with res and agro function for small towns, towers whose first floors are service and upper floors are office for big cities popular with tourists and totally customizable government buildings. e.g. a school. how much to spend on the original facility determines school capacity and surrounding land value, how much to spend per student determines quality of education. police and fire stations whose precincts you draw. so many possibilities. sadly, i am unequal to the task of making this game, ignoring the eyecandy factors and replacing the freed-up processing with a powerful sim. but i hope someone makes it one day.

aha! thanks to you both. much belatedly, hopefully better than never at all.

"I don't think it's nuts." YES! "eloquent, well spoken, and true" thank you. don't know about true, but i try to say weighty things that make people think, even if they aren't strictly true. "I daresay we have a winner of "fewest no. of posts between joining and coming out"!" hahah! victory is mine, for now. i'm sure somebody will do it on post 1 someday. "Was that really a coming-out? He could have been out long before he joined the site." As, I presume, a straight folk, you may not realize that when you're queer, it sometimes feels like you spend your whole life coming out over and over again. "I understand what you are getting at, iiiset, but I'm not sure I agree entirely." of course not! zelgadis flattered me by saying otherwise, but my idea is completely crazy... "That is important I think, because being tolerant of others isn't enough. We need to love eachother, at least in some aspect of the word, if we are ever going to make this world a better place for our children." thank you for helping to make simtropolis a place for utopians!

Under certain conditions, I would be totally in favor of this. But there are two problems. A) By a combination of external conspiracy and internal precedent, pan-Arabic and other Muslim peoples have never learned to get along. Due to tradition in the ruling classes and a lack of education for the masses, ages-old feuds continue senselessly into the future. Political power is hard to gain in Muslim lands by any means other than violence. B) If the leaders of the new United Islamic States do not understand the following, then the formation of such a bloc would cause the destruction of humanity: the age of imperialism is over. The imperial project was a failure. In the epoch of nuclear weapons, starting massive wars based on flimsy premises to maintain some kind of international balance of power is no longer possible. In other words, I would demand that the United Islamic States make a stronger committment to peace, justice, and non-interference than previous superpowers such as the US, Soviet bloc, and British Empire did. Unfair, maybe. Necessary, absolutely. Also, genocide never solves problems. Get used to ruling fragmentary ethnic, religious, and social groups, some of which are going to oppose you, by means of civil rather than despotic authority. Were it possible to form a well-functioning United Islamic States that was better behaved than the United States of America, I think it would be the best thing since sliced bread. My own country, the USA, would be forced to end its corrupt arrangements and ulterior-motivated wars, and start paying the same market price for oil that the rest of the world pays. The Union could impose peace on the intra-Muslim bloodshed that plagues that part of the world. And there would be a better balance of power between the US, EU, Neonationalist Russia, China, and India, hopefully forcing everyone to play fair. Putting more lands under the protection of a united nation would also limit the irritating modern phenomenon of "limited" war in which superpowers fight an allegorical war in some disparaged small country. "Limited" it may be, but you're still wrecking someone's home and killing their relatives.

I am one of apparently many queer simtropolitans- in this case just a gay white guy, but that still counts as queer. So, am I crazy for thinking we seem to be way overrepresented in this particular area of interest? I don't always fit in so well with my fellow gays, and I am in a conservative region because I couln't say no to the college savings, so as it happens the vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are straight. But I only know two other Simcity enthusiasts in real life, and they are both gay (a gay grad student I dated for a while and a lesbian). And for this forum, on which there are less than 500 sociable participants (using normal out percentages, only about 10 people would be openly queer), to sustain a lively thread about being queer is to me another indication that there are more of us than usual who get a kick out of city and regional planning. And I think that's weird. Unlike, say, flight attending for gay men or soldiering for lesbians, stereotypes aren't present to drive the impression that playing with city-building toys is a good way to meet comrades in deviance. For these reasons I suspect that there's something about government-gaming that attracts the LGBTs- or at least the LGBs, as there are rarely enough Ts to make reliable assumptions. If you think the above was nuts, don't even bother to read the below, because it's considerably more nuts. I'm starting to think that my love of order, government-gaming, elegant mass transit, economic relationships, etc. somehow grew concurrently with and was predictive of my homosexuality. My first city-gaming toy at about five was a Thomas the Tank Engine miniatures set now discontinued because it was a marvelous choking hazard. I loved that thing. By nine, my favorite play activity was building giant airports, using every vaguely airport-themed toy I owned. My dad even made me a very nice runway on a large cardboard folding mat, complete with blinking lights. At that time, I was just as oblivious to the fact that my passion was highly unusual as I was to the first hints of liking boys. When I was eleven, someone I recognized even then as a fellow homo moved in down the street. We played intense all-day games of brio, carefully planning our tracks, bickering about the proper time of day for ships to arrive at the seaport, and forging a tight emotional bond. Blocks, Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, K-NEX, Erector, all were put to work in the name of my determination to build cities and model some imagined concept of the civilized world. Simcity came into my life at about the same moment I realized I was gay. For some reason, I feel a strong (deluded?) kinship with what I believe are other gays like me- clergy, eunuchs, elegant courtiers, effeminate advisers, household masters and mistresses orchestrating royal scandals, philosophers, artists, and statespeople, throughout history standing behind the kings, empresses, and generals, influencing the course of history by means of extreme social sensitivity emanating from deep inside us.

it is my impression that when education and wealth are too high in a city, and/or anti-pollution laws are passed, after awhile dirty industry demand plummets and never really comes back up again. makes sense. why is it that, at least in my observation, dirty industry promptly plummets everywhere else in the region too? even on undeveloped plots of land! if dirty industries have been driven out of a city, wouldn't they be looking to resettle somewhere nearby that was more suitable for them? i'd like to be able to make a fancy metropolis on one end of the region, with a highly educated populace that work in tall buildings and shiny electronics factories, without this preventing me from building a dirty, humble factory town somewhere else later on.