Vivicas X. Strom

What effect does open spaces have on this i wonder? I only have a moderate amount of leisure centres, one of each type and few tennis courts but i have heaps of wooded and plaza areas dispersed through my city and i have very minimal issues with leisure (maybe one or two property lots deep within a populated neighbourhood).

Yeah same, i lost all my downtown offices and workers to the resources needed, this then cause my entire finely balanced economic system to sink into a deep depression with one sector falling one after the other until the project canceled on itself. Hmm.. sounds familiar, some real cities get themselves into serious financial trouble trying to build over the top projects. 500,000 might sound like alot but not if you're trying to build an olympic stadium.. think 3 million plus in a real life situation. Maybe that's why they made it so hard...

Blah - I've played SC4 for 7 years now, with NAM, my own custom Casino money cheat, a billion attempts at region play and strategies... Conclusion? The only SC4 city that actually plays well in regards to transportation is a mathematically perfect geometric design that becomes messy when trying to incorporate regions and saps all elegance from one's aspirations. Boring as Dogs!#$! CXL11 offers a chance to build with pure aestheticism in mind. I've got one city with 99,000 people with only one bus route and no one is complaining about stupid commute times because i have designed the most beautiful system of avenues and expressways that also encourage green corridors, giving rise to excellent regions with touristic appeal (i have green hotel zones right at the junction of my CBD - beat that traffic riddled SC4!). Also i find that there's plenty of randomness in the buildings that grow - thank god they left behind the plop and drop method where after awhile you lose all sense of originality! It ain't perfect but it puts SC Societies to shame - which was just rip off from CityLife the original anyways. And as for SC4 - it was great but i've gotta move on to something visually more satisfying...

Ok, so all the veterans of SC4 will already know this so i'm aiming this at relative newbies (adventurous newbies who don't mind learning a bit that is..). I'm always reading about people wanting more money etc. So apart from various plugins one can download, i decided to make my own because i just wanted so much money that it would never be an issue again..without causing issues. Using iLive Reader, i simply changed the exemplar value of the casino to a ridiculous amount. Since the Casino pays you $300 by default you just change the 'Budget' value in the exemplar list to some ridiculous hex value. Save it as a DAT file, insert in plugin folder and voila! I now get $1,148,017 per month, every month. By the way, don't have a Casino already built before you insert the DAT file. And don't have the 'Coffers Protect' plugin either. Anyway, i just reckon it's the easiest solution to every problem, unlimited money.

yeah...point taken. nice city. there's alot of nice cities. I just don't think my skills are upto the task of building what's in my mind. So my whinge is over. SC is what it is.

I went back and had a look, and no, it doesn't look too bad at all. Maybe i should use your tree theory in future. Oh...god...do i start yet another city? Probably.... You know...i just thought of something...and i yes i am digressing from my own topic...just a bit. Has anyone realised how the great cities in the CJ section are light years beyond the ordinary ones? Apart from the obvious BATS and LOTS to beautify a city, i reckon some people have trouble with the scale of the game. I truly believe some of us are just SO much better at grasping how far everything should be. Think about it. The way you perceive the distance in the game greatly influences your building of it. I look at the centre of my city to the edge and think..'Wow that's a fair way away'...and yet it's not really. Melbourne's CBD (total city pop of 3.5Million for those unfamilar) is exactly 1 mile in length as designed by Hoddle in 1837-8. That's 1.64 km in length which is basically half (close enough) of the largest Tile in the game. I would be lucky if i zone more than 500m in length for the CBD. If i zoned half my tile commercial from the get go, it would look ridiculous. I could expand the commercial boundaries of course but that means pushing residents to other tiles and that would take careful management to get right...management which i think i may be over! Of course i have seen Mega cities where the Skyscrapers cover several tiles...but that's just not my thing....15,000,000 people cities in SC4 looks yuk as opposed to the organic growth and look of real mega cities like Rio, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, New York..etc I dont know if i have the energy for it anymore actually. That 'City Life' game looks good....might look more into that...

personally MrFingers, i have never like the Region idea only because it doesn't work well in SC4. I can never get the demand right, or at least what i mean is i'm constantly going in and out of one city to the other reconcile growth. Opps...everyone going over there...opps...everyones coming back...argh! it drives me nuts and i spend all my time trying to balance it out. So have dedicated cities you say... Done that. When you view the region it looks terrible! For one, you can't see the adjacent city so you can match the look or transition of one city to another, and it looks so obvious the difference when you separate RCI. Real cities have irregular combinations of all, not just this big 4km invisible line. I'm not against region play but the whole landscaping, dynamics...etc..etc in SC4 is just a pain in the butt. Oh...and lets not forget...leave one tile blank with just a road joining two opposite cities and no sims will travel. Is that genuine Regional Play? To me, it's like Maxis said lets just give em a few city tiles to play with but in theory they'll actually be designed for strictly independent play. After 3 years of playing, i'm thinking of spending more time with my girlfriend and maybe getting a new hobby! LOL

Whilst not taking any respect away from the Bali bombings, it is human nature to feel for those we are familiar with. Honestly, the death of these guys shocked me far more than 88 strangers. I'm sorry...it's just human nature. Actually forget 88...what about the 250,000 in Tsunami? Eh....it's just a numbers game with some people. 88 piss pots on a cheap holiday in Bali or 2 great people that acutally touched hundreds of lives? (if not thousands....) Yeah, yeah...i know...every death is tragic.

I asked this question on the back of a related topic in another catagory but got no answer and the curiosty is killing me.. So..what if you had a Region of just one Large tile (which we know is quite do-able), how does that affect the economy? Since you no longer have to go to the next city to reconcile travel times, demand and general region demand, how does the city react being connected on all 4 sides to the 'outside' world? Has anybody done it? Does it work well? To me it would be more like SC3000 but without any neighbour deals available.

i've only read the last page. I've been playing SC4 for 3 years now. I have never 'finished' any region. After reading all the suggestions on how the 'simulator' could be.... I just want to place my head in my lap and cry. No matter what we do to SC4 it will suck compared to these ideas. Mum...i don't think i want to play anymore.....

Very well said MayorVieira. You hit the nail on the head with that one.

I'm not american or canadian, i come from the city of Melbourne in Australia, so i'm neutral on the Patriotism. I have to say though as stoic as the former towers were, they were impressive. This proposal is weak and lacking in any defining statement. Earlier this year, we in Melbourne had our tallest 'scraper completed. The Eureka Tower which stands at 92 storeys...I implore all of you to Google some images of it. Now that's what i call a Tower. Eureka by the way was a revolutionary event here in our state from the colonial days, so naming buildings after patriotic calls is nothing new. It does depend on the sincerity of it...Freedom tower sounds tacky.

ok..apart from newbies, everyone knows it ain't gonna happen...but i have a question. So you make a region of just one large tile and nothing else...that means that all 4 sides of the city are connecting to the "Outside" world. How those that affect growth? Since you'll never have to reconcile travel and growth with your fellow cities. Anyone done it?

I think everyone has made some great points here on a topic that causes many of us to 'start again'. The biggest thing that helps me is Terrain. Few cities are built on absolute flat land, but land with features. When i build on flat land, yeah it all goes Grid. When i build on varying terrain i find that i follow the 'flow' of the land. I'll make roads and avenues hug a slope as opposed to just tear right through it regardless of the ridiculous incline (San Fran excepted of course). There's a feature on SC4 that i love. CTRL + SHIFT + C. This highlights the land contour and is a great place to start when setting down a city's foundations. Hopefully i've added something to this conversation.