bsalvatore

try this: Make a grid 10x10 blocks, with each block being 4x4 squares. In the center place: Large Elementary School Large High School Large Fire Station Small Police Station Clinic Library Museum a few parks Surround the schools/services with residential areas, then surround with commercial, then surround the whole grid with industrial. You can fit 16 of these grids with room to spare in one large map, supporting a population of 1,500,000 very easily. THIS IS IMPORTANT: Make sure you cut the bus funding to the immediate area. The trick is to have max school funding with a small area for students. If you put a few of these grids next to each other, you can put a large hospital, deluxe police, etc right in the center of the 4 grids to apply double coverage to each grid.

I currently have a region of 49 large cities (flat plains). It is over 1GB. I keep the video settings on as low as possible and it runs fairly well. I incubated a gridopolis city in a 1 city region until it reached 725,000, then imported 49 copies into the large region. When the center city reached 2,000,000 after bouncing back and forth between its neighbors, I imported it back into the 1 city region. I then imported 48 copies to fill the big region, of which there are now almost 100,000,000 residents. With everything so dense, the fastest speed is noticeably slower, but still playable. I don't think the region could get much larger, though. I have a 64-bit Windows 7 computer with Core2 Duo @ 2.0 GHz 4GB of RAM Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT

In a city of just over 2,000,000 residents I make $572,000 per month and spend $568,000 I use the Network addon Mod and the 4x industry multiplier I don't see how you can improve much beyond those numbers without cheating.