husher

I've been getting a bit fustrated of late, i do some work relativly close up on a city and then save it (most of the time) then i go to zoom out using the mouse wheel and guess what: crash to desktop! I have a relativly modern PC its only three years old and this has begun to happen more and more; i've tried using the games zoom button as well with a one in three chance i'll get A CTDT. is it a sympton of an over clocked graphics card or processor or is it the game playing silly devils just for the hell of it? I've got a dual core 1gb processor and Navia graphics driver built in, is it anything i should be concerned over? any advice would be appreciated

Ok i can build cities and get them running, but there's a problem: there's never enough electricity to go around! You have to wait a while to get the wind farms which seem to make little differance no matter how many you have and the games single power plant consumes money but dosen't generate much power. Is there a way to fix this? a mod or something, i'm having loads of trouble making my resource meter turn green for more than a few seconds, water and oil are fine and i've plenty of farms but its a case of 'all sinking an' no power!!' One good thing though i took a bankrupt city and turned it around, now its in profit! great, i've definatly got the lobes for business!

Hi all, i'm just joining up as a new player after a time on SM4 and having watched a lot of XL on you tube i thought i'd give it a try. Well just how different it is! couple of minor niggles getting going though: 1) whats the best resolution to play on? 2)the main task bar at the top of the screen is slewed over to the left and i cant keep an eye on my finances, how can i fix this? 3) some of my roads have small green triangular patches in then like the rendering isn't complete is this fixable? I'm playing XL platinum on windows 7 other than that is a great game.

i don't have any mods, only a patch which installed the day i got the game, will F1 still help me adjust the top bar to the centre of the screen instead of being over to the left?

For me its a regular dose of real sci fi(not that useless channel that shows wrestling!) but real science fiction; at the moment is (what else) Blood and Chrome the latest Battlestar Galactica installment, i love this whole story and i remember the original from so long ago; the new take is just what we imagined it would really would be like.As with many of the fans i'm trying my hand at writing an adventure set in the genre, so far it tops 280 A4 pages and 111k words, and i'm in the second revision.. well its a work in progress! Then there was sanctuary and all the other space shows but not SG universe i thought the story was dying towards the end of Atlantis. I'm eagerly awaiting Game of thrones series three, what a show: real medival sword and scorcery; being English i can appreciate the dark ages feel as my countryies history encompassed such times. But since both Fox (all right i watched Terra Nova too, i was sorry to se it fall by the way side)and Sci-fy both cancelled all the good shows i sent my digi box back in protest and cancelled my subscription and (for England)my TV licence, thank goodness for things like (cough)E-mule

you could try this: i built a goodly sized one yesterday using this method. On a medium tile follow this procedure hit pause (very important) 1)set up a network of avenues creating a 3 x3 grid of spaces 2)make sure you put tool booths on the each avenue just before it goes off the tile. save it 3) zone an area of medium or high residential to one side put the industry and as close as you can put in the commercial, fill the rest with agriculteral land and a small airport. 'weakness pays' replenish your money. 4) put in the power water and waste, use the black hole corp water and waste and the star wars turbine, nice and cheap. 5)Put in the water pipes just make a simple grid across the tile. replenish your money save it 6) Put in essential services; use the police admin building, treasury and the customs house; put them more or less in the center of the commercial district. 7)Put the education complex in the middle of you residential district and the medium default hospital next to it, . Replenish you money and save it Thats all you need do for now building wise go to you finances block and reduce the funding on the airport to 40%, set the safety funds to just below the white line, you wont need ambulances or school buses yet so don't fund them, set the services as above and reduce government spending to around $40. save it one more time and then let the games begin. Its bang and crash but it works for me; you've got to be quick to keep up with 'moaning murtle' but its worth it. The results were good last night 120k sims, positive demand and loads of money.after 5 game years. Good hunting!

Peaks like this means you have lots of demand for basic residential housing so you can go ahead and zone for low density housing,you also show slight demand for medium density commercial and lots of demand for agriculture so zone for farms and add in a small medium density industrial zone.. The rule of thumb is peaks above: there's demand, peaks below demand has fallen off, keep an eye on this graph throughout the game usally at one year intervals and zone accordingly, also check out the tutorials in the game they will help you along..

Oh definatly the Flood from Halo, ive got no problem fighting the Aliens, its the flood i hated, the programmer who designed them was a real sadist! Mind you Space Marine is a real pain i've been stuck there for ages.

M.a.d never worked that well any way neither does appeasement , North Korea is in a total shambles; communisum has all but destroyed any semblance of civalised life now they are a threat to any democracy within range. Its just like Iran if a religious nut job has a bomb; THEY WILL USE IT, because they have no moral consionce not to like the more enlightened nations. All this will eventually come to a head; either North Korea will collapse under its own failings or they'll go out in a so called 'blaze of glory' As for the Chinese; they have a choice; invade and occupy north Korea which will draw the self important Americans in to it or sit back and do nothing to stop the far east burning. There are other opinions; here's a good book to read on this subject: Dale Browns 'Battle Born' he had a different take on this but its just as relavent.

The hardest level in a video game? Without doubt it would be Tomb raider 'Underworld' the level in mexico, all the inca traps, bugs and living dead, it was hell to play and i never did get it exactly right. Second only to that is Tomb raider anniversary 'St Franiss folly'; i just got through it; IT TOOK SEVEN HOURS OF VERY NERVOUS GAMEPLAY!!! God's dammit, that was hard work. Funny thing is i thought TR 'Legend' was easy by comparison.

You think Dinnozo? SC4 will still be going when SC5 fails spectaculary!, 4 is the superior game and a lot more interesting, from what i've seen on you tube i'm not that impressed with 5 so i'm staying put. Besides i'm saving my money for the new Tomb Raider.

There are indeed larger schools available; the Education complex is the same as four elementary schools in one lot, it covers a vast area and caters for up to 4k pupils, there's larger high schools and colleges as well, they may be expensive to run but they're well worth it, just keep the teacher pupil ratio to 1:10 and the bus service as tight in as you can to your residential areas and you'll have no problems. Just type 'schools' into the search function in the stex and you'll find all you need without any tedious page by page searching. As for dependancies; they're a fact of life i'm afraid so just 'keep calm and carry on' collecting them and sign up for SC4 Devotion when prompted its well worth it.

transport connections do matter and they do carry over; on the region i'm building i have a grid of avenues streching from top to bottom of the region so traffic can flow freely from city to city, don't worry about rail it dosen't work like that, the next step for me will be a region wide subway system, i wonder if that will really get things moving, keep up your roads and avenues across your region and connect them all up in a logical fashion and then watch your sims go on a road trip!

Strange; the last dozen or so small cities i built i put in a grid of avenues but no buses; my sims still get to work ok and the city grows normally. I just wonder if buses are all they're cracked up to be. Thankfully my unemployment rate is very low, so i must be doing something right after all.

You're still using coal?; no wonder! coal power plants are only one step up from 'banging two rocks together' i stopped using those ages ago.the only coal i use is for the coking plant which feeds my steel mills, all my power comes either from the 'sky tree plant' or the 'star wars maxi generator', both are totally cheap, they give mega amounts of almost free energy and no pollution to boot. As long as you use these you'll have no power shortages and a lot more money to play with.

I've been checking out the posts on you tube and i'm a little disapointed, SC4 is deep, complex and a pain to play but its well worth it. Now looking over SC5 i think its either not finished or there's loads missing; i like setting out the water network, creating road systems and building complex cities but SC5 seems to be rather minimalist and restricted by comparison. So i'm sticking to what i have untill they sort out the bugs and get the servers working properly and,besides, i'm not working atm so i won't have the money to waste on a new game that dosen't seem to work properly.

Up till now i've always had trouble getting industry to grow; that is 'till i tried some thing new: Instead of growing from a small village i set out a grid of avenues and zoned for high density residential and commercial, and the industry went in as an after thought,I set the building timer to one year change and hit 'build all styles at once' . Ok lets go: i hit start and lo and behold a miracle happened: industry started to develop; on its own!!! Dumfounded isn't the word. now i regulary get 30k plus sims, loads of office blocks and lots of industry; fantastic! and this happens even on small tiles, a medium tile yielded 160k sims and lots of industry, i'm playing fairvile again and its only one quarter full, lots of space to go, maybe i'm finally doing something right at last!.

Here i go again; trying to get industry to grow; it just refuses to!, i picked up the customs house and the RCI query mod's yesterday in a hope that it would perk up my industry demand. oh well, like all politican's you ask but nothing happened, i don't understand it; I've got well funded schools, transport, every facility that the sims would possibly need but industry still refuses to grow, if i want an industrial center then I've got to plop it, rather than it grow spontaniously, is there anything i'm missing?

I know how many feel; i was working on a city on friday, it went from 10k to 80k sims in four hours , most of the land got taken up by commercial properties, i haven't had demand like that for ages, mind you i wish it be industrial demand that would do that! oh well, 'keep calm and carry on'

How did you manage to get such large industrial zones, i'm struggling to get ANY industry to grow despite nothing short of major surgery! what's your secret? I must admit i'm a tad jelous, all i get is commercial and agriculteral. How did you manage to get such large industrial zones, i'm struggling to get ANY industry to grow despite nothing short of major surgery! what's your secret? I must admit i'm a tad jelous, all i get is commercial and agriculteral. How did you manage to get such large industrial zones, i'm struggling to get ANY industry to grow despite nothing short of major surgery! what's your secret? I must admit i'm a tad jelous, all i get is commercial and agriculteral.

Hers a few pics of my most recent city, as you can see theres not much industry growing oh, the pictures didn't come out, sorry the picture was too big to up load, oh well

I've got just about every factory, both high and low tech that i could find in the STEX, and all their dependancies, there are way too many to list; i'm working on a test city right now, following nonny's advice its got 30k sims, and a large industrial area which is composed of a few oil refineries, a coking plant and coal mines and the lucky strike mine which are plopped on. But not much else has grown, there's still a lot of empty space in there, the demand is at negative 400 for Id and Im there's no demand for high tech. Other than that i haven't been able to find any mod that would increase industrial demand, in this case the games vanilla, despite the amount of factory mod's.

I just had a look and it dosen't say what version it has,the only thing i can find is the serial code on the disc:MXX08004179D2 as for any mods:the only ones i can find that would affect the industry are the RCI query mod and the customs house; i thought i got the industry jobs quadrouper but i cant find it so that's it apart from all the factories some such i added in, but no other jobs or demand mods.

oh boy what a can of worms, sorry i was not very clear was i? well here goes: the demand for Ri and Rii is fine, commercial demand is also lo but it builds anyway, its the demand for industry that i have problem with, no matter how i site the residential weather its next to industry, seperated only by an avenue to promote mobility, or with commercial between them industry just refuses to grow. If i want to build a decent industrial area i have to plop every thing, but i do include road, rail and bus transport in the sector, the whole tile is watered and there's plenty of power and the waste is dealt with, education is usally about 160, they have both fire cover and police, and clinics to promote health and still demand is low. It's strange; generally if you want a technological society you need infrastructure to support it, the game seems to ignore this and concentrates only on residential and commercial, but how can you have both with out industry to support them? I generally build on everything flat land and have even tried putting parks and trees in the industrial sectors to no avail, i just wonder if the games got stuck in a rut and needs upgrading, mines the rush hour delux pack i bought a few years ago, i see people on here who need to find new versions i just wonder if i need to do the same; question is will it help?

I actually think a little stagnation is a good thing, once a city stabalises then you can concentrate on your infrastructure, keep an eye on expenditures over this period and tailor your budget to demand. Don't worry about bottomed out RCI bars, my industrial demand on those has been zip for ages so i plop all my industry or limit it to agriculture or sky farms, watch the RCI demand graphs in the menu if a bar is short there's demand just build a small area and see what happens. It sounds like your trying to do too much too quickly, don't; slow down and start small. Remember the old addage: a candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long!