Rury

Got back into SC4 recently... Made this map, and been working on realistic growth of my region. Current population = 123k sims...

It means just that. It depends where you zone residential and your jobs relative to the loop. See the link CaptCity provided (https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=1444.msg143098#msg143098), if the industrial zones and residential zones were switched in that scenario, the loop bug would probably be less likely to occur. Thats why I mentioned earlier that its best to line loops with commercial, (commercial likes heavy traffic and the bug will likely be reduced) but its best just to avoid a loop in the first place.

Photoshop is a very capable, very expensive, commercial software with very strict licensing, and I believe it is only available for Windows and Mac. Gimp however is completely free, but it lacks features that photoshop has. Overall, photoshop is the better software, but I doubt your willing to spend big money on it if GIMP does the job just fine.

I am using: CPT Italia Terrain Mod from the lex: https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=1527 PEG brigantine water mod: http://www.simpeg.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;cat=26 and some CPT trees... The rest of my mods follow loosely to CSGdesign's: https://www.sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?PHPSESSID=5ad1b332629347fbc1417321be52ca4f&topic=9440.msg303337#msg303337

My old region wasn't working out to well, so I created this one... Curently: 80,000 sims Goal: 2-3 million

It seems like you need to better understand how demand and stages work in simcity 4. You have a good understanding that having low taxes and by adding parks, hospitals, and schools help attract more sims to your city, but unfortunately that is not all there is to it. As Nonny Moose and Mrtnrln already have pointed out, stratifying your population by income levels leaves poor results (as will isolating all residential,commercial, or industrial in one city). Part of this is because not 100% of your population can be R$$$ sims, only a small fraction of your population can be R$$$ sims. I believe for a new city, you initially only can have 20,000 R$, 20,000R$$, and 10,000R$$$ sims, for a total of 50k sims. As soon as you add a park or rewards building, you raise the "demand cap" and allows more sims to move in. If you wish to raise the amount of R$$$ sims in your city, you must also raise the cap for R$ and R$$ sims. Along with these demand caps in simcity 4, there are stage limits. Buildings are categorized into 8 different stage levels, where stage 1 contains one story houses, and stage 8 buildings are the tallest and fanciest skyscrapers. Like the population, only a small fraction of your buildings can be stage 8, and to reach stage 8, you must meet a specific demographic. The links at the bottom show a list of the stage limits and demand relief values. So from what you said, with a population of ~50k sims, if approximately 9571 of them are R$, and 43859 of them are either R$$ or R$$$, then expect about 2% of your residential buildings to be stage 8 (doesn't necessarily have to be, but thats the probability). Now keep in mind the stage limits are a region wide value, so theoretically you could have an all R$$$ city (if you had lots of R$ and R$$ elsewhere in your region), but then your somewhat limited by the demand caps which are not region wide. What does this all mean? Well essentially if you wish to have nice tall fancy skyscrapers, you need some R$, some R$$, and R$$$ sims. By effectively taxing a specific income group out of your population you won't meet the threshold for big fancy skyscrapers. Same goes for commercial, and industrial jobs; you can't just remove 100% of the lowest $ out of your population if you wish to see the biggest skyscrapers. I figured this out the hard way, as I use to tax my R$ population to 20% to remove them from my cities. I thought by doing this I'd have a rich-fancy-nice looking city, but I never saw the big skyscrapers. Stage Limits: http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:Stage_Limits_and_Threshholds Cap Relief: http://www.simcitycentral.net/html/cap-relief-list.html

Well for one thing, I noticed that your cities are connected in a way that permits a loop in your highways and transit. I'm not sure if you know but theres a bug regarding traffic called the "infinite commuter" bug. When you make a loop of connected cities in a region, sims traveling to the next city will go in and then out into the next city. They continue to do this forever around the loop of connected cities, and thus they are "infinitely commuting to work." This is probably why you needed to upgrade your avenues to highways. The "infinite commuter" bug may be messing with your RCI demand in other cities. Also, you mentioned that you created an all residential city. If so then this forces your sims to commute to the neighboring city which forces their commute times to automatically be "long". Long commute times will lower the desirability of a building and may also be compounding your problem of rampant abandoned buildings. These things are the likely a large part of your problems. To resolve the infinite commuter bug, its best to design your region in a branched network so no loops can form. If you wish to have a loop, then it is probably best to line the loop with jobs (commercial, because commercial likes traffic), but it's ill advised. Which cities are you having traffic problems with? (probably not YMC yard if I'm correct) Which city is the all residential city?

I tend to play at regional level but hows this?

Actually guys, I don't think EA will really publish another game like SC4. If I remember correctly, the original makers of SimCity (willright mainly) always dreamt of basically a giant mmo where everyone controlled one person. With many people playing together at once, people would indirectly sort of build a city... kind of like a virtual reality of real life. But the problem was when they started developing games, computers weren't powerful enough to make a complex game like that, so they made SimCity instead. Now fast-forward today where computers are much faster than they were in 1989... What game sounds like their original intention? The Sims... And The Sims still doesn't entirely represent what they dream of, so...

The I-90 and I-5 cloverleaf in Seattle:

I'm not sure if it was mentioned in this thread, but apparently last fall EA registered simcity5.com and renewed simcity.com. Now this of course doesn't mean anything, but why would they do such a thing ???

I find buses to be useful sometimes. I believe rich sims want to take a car to work, and not many will ride buses. However if your population is mostly poor and middle class, then your buses will be used more. I usually plop a bus stop for every 12-14 tiles in a grid-like pattern, and then take out the bus stops in areas that aren't being used. I find that in my CDT, bus stops aren't used at all, as sims prefer to use the subway. However many seem to hop on a bus in residential areas near highways and avenues, and in industrial areas. Ultimately, wherever there is a subway and bus stop, sims will prefer using the subway over the bus. So perhaps placing buses in areas without subway/elevated rail access will improve their usage. There is also an ordinance called Shuttle Service which encourages sims to use public transportation. Overall about 10% of my population commute by bus, 10% by ferry, 10% by train, 40% by subways/elevated rail, and 30% by car.

Very nice everyone! Here is my first region I have made. Just finished the terraforming. Edit: New image with water mod, thanks for the suggestion!