robkaper

My name is Rob and I will be sharing with you one of the greatest stories ever told in the history of my country, The Netherlands. It all starts on a sunny summer day in August. I had just arrived back from Budapest, Hungary where I enjoyed the Sziget festival. When catching up on my e-mail, I noticed one message that captivated me more than any other before. It was sent to me by Sarah, an old friend of mine. She works with a group of entrepreneurs and scientists in a Dutch consortium dealing with national security. As we all know, there is great concern over climate change and the possibility of rising sea levels. A large part of the Netherlands is already below sea-level and while we are a developed nation, our dikes too might not protect us indefinitely. Her team had been searching for a new place for the Dutch to live and had apparently found one and were about to land there with an expedition fleet. At first I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I trust Sarah, but we have mapped our planet to a great extent, there is no New World left to discover. The e-mail had all the trademarks of spam, or a well-crafted forgery. Her claims were simply beyond belief. Apparently, using the most sophisticated ten-year old software they could get their hands on, Sarah and her team had discovered one of the most special and perfect islands ever seen by mankind. It was safe from global warming. It was completely deserted and ripe for development. It was economically feasible to settle from our mainland by sea and air connections. It had mountains for skiing, beaches for swimming. Bays and forests. It was too good to be true. While I wondered if Sarah was pulling a prank on me I noticed an image attachment. I opened it expecting one of those images of a crazy looking kitten and a caption calling me gullable in an unflattering way. Not quite. The image you see here is the exact image she sent me. An actual deserted island, matching all the properties they described. I was in shock. Could it be true? An undiscovered island for my grandchildren to maybe one day settle? I decided I should sleep on this to get a clear mind and would get back to her the following morning. I read a few more e-mails and noticed a second one from Sarah, sent hours after the first. Surely I was going to be called a sucker after all. And then I read the most mind-blowing words I had seen in a long while. And another, from a few days later. Well, that was a month ago. Here anyway. Believe me or not, it's all true. I have been there. Many times. I can tell this story now because I have officially been appointed as ambassador for the island to what they starting calling the Old World. All I have to do is to tell their remarkable story. Which started in Sarah's little city. So now it's up to me to ask... Would you like to see it?

My best SC4 tips: don't ever build services unless absolutely necessary for further growth (demand caps) or annoying problems (having to put out fires when you're busy with something else). play regions wisely. Especially industrial regions should be mostly isolated. They won't need education or health themselves, you isolate polution and exporting cheap coal power is way more efficient than having wind turbines in Smalltown nearby. after developing expansions, save and try-run your city a few years without saving when you add costly services or beautification. This way you can predict whether growth and budget are on the right future course and fix matters before it's too late. the radius doubler mod offers you bigger coverage for services. This allows you to use the larger service items which are more efficient, as opposed to micromanaging all the smaller ones which still will never be as efficient. get experienced. Your first region might fail in one way or the other. Accept this, learn from your mistakes and do not be afraid to start over until you have confidence you can build that Utopian world without running into trouble. Some of these tips might qualify as cheating, but in Sim City cheating is allowed. Only you get to pick the balance between designing landscape and playing the actual engine. I try to accomplish building regions with a majority of actually grown items and some of the mentioned boosts, others use money trees and plop everything into perfect detail, some might want to actually play and accept game limitations because their goal is actual gameplay over design. There is no one right way to play it, as long as you enjoy what you're doing.

I used to take shots with the Steam screenshot tool, but I think I'm going back to the in-game tool because Steam recently gives me weird blue distortion artifacts. I doubt it's a plugin (the game itself looks fine as do the internal screenshots, but some sort of setting/update/error within Steam). Anyone else experiencing this?

Such a shame this was never uploaded! If it was, if anyone knows where... these are the most beautiful canal/river walls I've seen so far!