EricN

I'm currently building a city with no industry or commerce at all. The interesting bit is that it's the only city in the region, and is played on hard difficulty with no cheats. All employment solely provided by civic buildings. Here's the progress after 10 years with 40K pop. Taxes are all set to 0%, since they would be a pointless addition to the budget. The $200K income is from tolls alone. Right now the roads are getting pretty clogged, so the next stage is transitioning to a 2-stage transportation network, with only subways in the residential area, and busses in the outer employment ring. I need to build a treasury capable of running the city for 18 months or so before I do this. Right now the piggy bank could only handle about half that. When filled out, this city should be rather useful for testing commercial and industrial demand effects.

I've been building cities in Simcity 4 for awhile now. One thing I can't ever seem to get quite right is the commercial zoning. The residential zones always seem to build upwards before commercial zones do.quote> Simplest solution: Don't zone medium or high density residential unless you really want the high-rise residential look. The way the game plays out, residential high-rises will just appear well before commercial high-rises of similar size. That's just how the stage-limits and demand-generation interact within the game. If you don't like the look of early residential high-rises, just zone miles and miles of low-density residential. Alternate solution: Take advantage of the fact that a single building will not build across the border of different-density zoning. If you zone residential like this: HMHMHMHMHMHM HMHMHMHMHMHM MHMHMHMHMHMH MHMHMHMHMHMH You'll end up with a nice-looking block of 1x2 rowhouses...and a much more realistic appearance than 30-story condo buildings next to a Walmart.

Date: 2/24/2006 12:48:03 PM Author: Keiran Halcyon Well, even CO$$$ is supposed to employ a certain percentage of R$ sims. Does anyone know, is that percentage per building, or aggregate? If it's aggregate, that could explain why the rich are refusing to take those jobs - they're 'reserved' for R$ sims.quote> Damn...never thought of that, but that could explain alot. I'm out of town this weekend, but here is an experiment to try: Build one nice long road in a new city in a new region. On one end of the road, plop 50 City Colleges. On the other end of the road, zone a bunch of residential. Set R$ and R$$ taxes to 20%. Power everything with windmills (provides no jobs), and give the residents water. Use parks to keep desirability up. Take out loans when the budget runs dry. Set minimal education funding ($10/month/college) Now we have a city with only R$$$ and we know exactly how many jobs are provided (and that number is static). Let it run for a while. City Colleges provide 220 jobs (80 $, 120 $$, 20 $$$). If your theory is correct, then the colleges closest to the residential zone will have close to 220 workers, while the colleges at the end of the road will have none. If each college has only 20 workers then the theory is incorrect. It's a quick and dirty test, and it doesn't account for the possibility of regular C+I jobs being treated differently from civic jobs, but validating this hypothesis could rewrite the book on dealing with the SC4 commute engine. I'll run this experiment and post the results if nobody does it before I get back.

For raising a mayor rating, landmarks provide the best effect per dollar. Big Ben provides a 7 point citywide rating boost for $150/month, and the 1x1 footprint lets you plop them anywhere. A few of these will keep your rating fixed at 100% regardless of any lacking services.

From an experiment :

Date: 2/17/2006 3:38:41 PM Author: Facelessman From what I've seen, police are very important, in larger cities - crime can have very negative effects on desirabilty. quote> Yes, lack of police coverage can have harsh effects on desirability. However, if you take all that money you are spending on police coverage and spend that on well-placed parks instead, you can completely offset the effects of crime and still have money left over. That's why police are just eye-candy. Parks are far more efficient at raising desirability on a per-dollar basis.

Date: 2/20/2006 7:43:34 PM Author: Bones1 I've seen that chart posted before (maybe it was by you?). Where did you get it from? I've been unable to find any exemplars that break down jobs like that. Is it built into the game code? Was that chart from a strategy guide, and is it still accurate? Thanks.quote> Simcity 4 chart I believe this is from the Prima guide, but I don't actually know.

R-(C+I) will not tell you the whole picture, as not all sims need a job. You need to factor in your Health Quotient. With a higher HQ, you have more non-working sims.

Date: 2/17/2006 1:00:05 PM Author: RiverCocytus I've at times observed a cycle-- involving creation of demand. When R$ demand is high, fulfilling it often drives up R$$ demand, when fulfilled may drive up R$$$ demand, which in turn when fulfilled leaves you with R$ demand again. The whole cycle isn't so simple, though-- since the demands are effected by way more than just the presence of other residents. But if you are also allowing for the development of all other things in each step, the economic growth can feed the cycle.quote> The R$, R$$, and R$$$ have no direct effect on each other. What you are seeing is indirect effects of R$ pop increasing your C+I demand, which sprouts C+I buildings that increase R$$ and R$$$ demand. I definitely recommend building a region with no Commercial or Industrial jobs at all...just civic buildings for jobs. Playing around without the interference of fluctuating demand from C+I job variance will give you a clearer picture on what is going on. For example, build a city that provides exactly 50,000 R$$$ jobs and evict R$ and R$$ with 20% taxes. You'll discover that all the hoopla about R$$$ needing fire/police/education/heath/cars/etc is a complete myth. It may be true in real life, but not in SC4. R$$$ have exactly 3 needs: R$$$ demand, R$$$ suitable jobs, and mediocre residential desirability. Contrary to real life, this is what SC4 services actually do: Fire: -Stops the occasional house from burning down and increases desirability. No non-aethetic benefit in Residential zones, because bulldozing rubble is cheap and parks provide more desirability per dollar Police: -Increases desirability. No non-aethetic benefit in Residential zones, because parks are a cheaper boost. Health: -Increases the ratio of Nonworking Residents to Working Residents and increases desirability. Good financial benefits; non-working residents are cheaper to support, and you can zone more space for residents instead of needing that land for jobs. Education: -Acts as a multiplier on HT and Co demand, which if fulfilled, will increase R$$$ demand. Also increases desirability. Barely pays for itself in the long run, but is necessary if you want to quickly transition your industry. In order of importance: Plazas, Hospitals, Parks, Schools. Fire coverage is worthwhile for powerplants, landmarks, and expensive rewards. Police are just expensive eye candy.

Date: 2/17/2006 9:03:30 AM However, what you say about the tax base is true. This mod will prevent R$$$ from growing all over your city, and that will tend to decrease your tax base (because rich sims pay more taxes).quote> I think you are missing something here...you don't end up with less R$$$ sims with this mod, you just cram them all into a few buildings that will be larger than what you had before. Just because you see less R$$$ surface area doesn't mean they went away. Having all your major taxpayers artificially crammed into a few big buildings is why this mod is unstable for large cities. Losing one building becomes a huge deal.

After testing this mod, I found that it can have a nasty destabilizing effect on large cities. By restricting R$$$ options for zones, they end up in fewer and larger buildings. When much your tax base is represented by an artificially small number of buildings, your budget can take some violent swings as your city grows, your computer bogs down, and the commute engine starts missing some calculation deadlines. If your computer hiccups when calculating the handful of R$$$ skyscrapers, your income can be halved. I don't recommend this mod if you are trying to grow large cities.

Peorth, You can see the desirability directly...just query the building. If a building or a workplace that could hold 100 people only has 78 residents/workers, the desirability is 78%. Dataviews: Increased Detail Mod v1.0 This mod somewhat helps with the minimap issue. The game stores desirability as a number from 0-127, but by default anything from 100-127 is bright green on the map. The mod shifts the color scale so you can tell the difference between 90% and 100% desirability, at the cost of no longer seeing a difference at the low end of the scale.

Hold down various combinations of Control, Alt, and Shift when you are laying zones. You'll quickly figure out how to get the zoning patterns you want with out having to each lot individually.

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Date: 2/14/2006 2:45:41 PM Author:madkingchris I've been playing SC4 for awhile now, but have just begun to successfully build a large city without losing money. I have a population of 50,000 on a large city layout. It is divided into quarters - 1/4th Industrial, 1/4 Commercial, and 1/4 Residentials in opposite corners. I'm noticing homes are not being built in the outer spaces of my Residential zones, even though the demand is high.quote> If your city is still growing, don't worry about undeveloped zones. The sims are just building bigger buildings instead of many more small buildings. 1) At 50,000K population, you have gotten past some important stage limits, so your city is really starting to grow up instead of out. 2) Residents will go for the more desirable areas first, and the fringes of a large zone are frequently less desirable for many reasons. 3) Consider that one medium condo building is equivalent to several dozen single family lots, and a Project Hope or whatnot is equal to several hundred undeveloped lots. 4) If you think the undeveloped lots are a serious eyesore, then raise the desirability...plant some trees, and possibly build some parks. Sims will grab them in no time if you have positive demand. As to your original question about Mass Transit, busses are nice to have from day one, but everything is mostly eye-candy, even trains. However, you can get some really good looking cities if you build first and then try to squeeze in a complex intermodal MT system. Just don't bankrupt your cities on the eyecandy. Hospitals and Parks are far more crucial to the economic livelyhood of your city.

With just one city in a region, 100K residents in 10 years is a reasonable target. Using neighbors just gives you the 20% bonus from extrapolation and boosts your effective credit limit, but it's not necessary.

Development speed is purely a function of demand. You can get residential demand 4 ways: 1) Wait for Commercial and Industrial to grow. 2) Build C + I in a neighbor city. 3) Build lots of Civic buildings, like schools and hospitals 4) Lower taxes. If you want your sims to stay, they need jobs, so lowering residential taxes without a creating more jobs is a very bad idea. If you want to kickstart a region, do the following: (assuming hard difficulty) 1) Start a city, take out $1,500,000 in loans, and build nothing but City Colleges, ~10 coal powerplants, and roads. Spend all the money. 2) Start a second city, take out $200,000 in loans, and lay out residential zoning and services. You should hit 50K population almost instantly. 3) Go back to the first city and lay out Commercial and Industrial zones. Use your remaining $500,000 credit limit to keep yourself from going bankrupt on the previous loan payments and wait until you are solvent. 4) Return to the second city, and continue zoning. You may need to take out more loans to speed up the process, but at this point you should be covering your loan payments and making a solid $10K/month on top of that. Using civic jobs as a kickstarter, it's pretty straightforward to start a new region and hit 100,000 residents in 5-10 years.

Land value does matter in one sense: it affects desirability, which directly influences the percentage occupancy. However, until you get to Stage 8, it doesn't matter. There is no difference between a skyscraper at 20% desirability holding 200/1000 or a condo building at 100% desirabilty holding 200/200. The larger building does use a little more water and power, and produces a little more pollution, but it's negligible. With Commercial and Industrial zones, it's much more important to maintain appropriate land values to keep desirability up, because you are more often at the top tier of development. One workplace at 100% occupancy uses 1/4th the utilities of 4 workplaces at 25% occupancy, which can be a huge savings given how much power and water Industry can use.

Neighbors aren't necessary. They help a city grow faster because of the effects of extrapolated demand, but you can get over a million sims before starting a second city. It sounds like the problem here is demand caps. Do a search for demand caps to learn more. The quick answer is to build some parks and reward buildings.

Date: 2/5/2006 12:32:57 AM Author: RiverCocytus If I were going to use a progressive tax system I would not place R$$$ over the top of the peak of the laffer curve, which is at 9% in SC4 (to my knowledge).quote> There is no peak to the Laffer curve in SC4...the top is a flat plateau because every sim has an identical utility function wrt taxes. Hugging the left side of that line is just throwing money out the window. Simcity is not the real world, and real-world economic assumptions generally fail. The model is pretty simple: -Jobs create real Residential demand (region-wide) -Low taxes create artificial demand (city-wide) -Residents move in if real demand + artificial demand > zero (displayed demand) -Residents abandon if real demand < 0 (no jobs) You can use taxes to control which cities different wealth levels live in, but you can't use taxes to get more R$$$ residents than you have real demand. Once they can't find a job, they will realize you are just faking it. The only way to keep residents is to provide jobs. It takes 7000 Co$$$ jobs for every 1000 working-age R$$$ sims. With IHT or Co$$, you need 10000 jobs per 1000 R$$$ workers. An experiment I recommend everybody try out is to start a new region and never zone Commerce or Industry. Keep every sim employed with schools, hospitals, and other civic buildings only. Eliminating the interference of C and I is very educational; you can learn how R behaves purely on it's own.

Date: 2/4/2006 12:47:53 PM Author: RiverCocytus R$ 8.3 R$$ 8 R$$$ 7.5 This works pretty good for reeling in the hotshot high rollers. quote> Lowering taxes on R$$$ will really destabilize your cities in the long run. Only a small fraction of available jobs are suitable for R$$$ sims, even if you have nothing but Co$$$ and IHT. If you lower the taxes on the rich, far more of them will move into your city than can find employment, and they will abandon the houses soon afterwards, with no-job zots. This kicks off a vicious rollercoaster cycle. Once they all move out, R$$$ demand, with the tax incentive, jumps back up, and they move back in. Unfortunately, since abandoned buildings have a hefty desirability penalty, the second wave of R$$$ will pick somewhere else to live, kicking out established R$$ sims. They keep dogpiling in because of the low taxes, can't find enough jobs, and they abandon. You will keep getting cycles like this in bigger and bigger swings until your city self-destructs. This is probably the most common frustration for new players. Solution: Keep your R$$$ taxes high...9.5%-10.5%. They will still move into your city, but only because you actually have real demand for them, not artificial demand from low taxes.

Tip #1: Get rid of Ambulance and School Bus funding entirely. If you want more coverage area, just build more buildings. You'll save a ton of money. Tip #2: Fire, Police, Health, and Education are never needed. Even R$$$ will move to an area with no services, as long as there is demand and a nearby park. The real benefits of services in residential areas: Power_______Mandatory Roads_______Mandatory. Water_______Mandatory above low density Fire________None. Fire coverage protects expensive buildings like powerplants, but bulldozing residential rubble after fires is cheaper than paying for coverage. Police______None. Dollar for dollar, parks raise desirability more than crime lowers it. Education___Some. Higher EQ boosts demand for CO and IHT, but raw population growth is more important. Health______Good. Higher HQ decreases the percentage of taxpayers that need somewhere to work. Health coverage pays for itself in the long run, as retired sims still feed the coffers. Tip #3: A sagging mayor rating is cheaper to boost with landmarks than with services. If your sims are complaining about crime, just say, Look, kids! It's Big Ben! Tip #4: Only provide services you can afford. If desirability is sagging, Parks and Trees are cheaper than civic services. If building a new school will cut too much in to your desired budget surplus, then don't build it. Tip #5: Never build a civic building or take out a loan that will put your monthly budget in the red. Have fun swimming in cash.

Date: 1/27/2006 9:51:31 AM Author: jglei701] Have you tried to run the game normally, WITHOUT taxing the richer Sims early on? And perhaps giving them the services they need? quote> It's much easier to build a large, stable, economically healthy city by artifically supressing R$$$ demand with high taxes in the development phase. R$ sims can work anywhere and appear in large quantity, boosting C and I demand. At the default tax rates, R$$$ move in far too readily and before you have enough jobs for them.

Date: 2/2/2006 12:21:03 AM Author: Peorth articularly, I was wondering why Co$$$ buildings keep sprouting even when my Co$$$ demand is lower than Co$$. Since the high-wealth commercial office also holds a lot of Co$$ jobs, then it makes sense.quote> Actually, it's more straightforward than that: CO$$$ has priority over CO$$ when they are competing for the same piece of land. If there is demand for both, then the $$$ will pop first. When $$$ demand is satisfied, then $$ gets to build, and so on. In my experience, my healthiest, most stable, and most lucrative cities have something close to the following tax rates: ___$____$$___$$$ R__5.5%_7%___10.5% C__3.5%_4.5%_5.5% I__9.5%_9.5%_9.5% One common myth is that R$$$ won't move in without full services. This is totally false. All R$$$ needs is demand and desirability above a certain threshold. R$$$ will be perfectly happy with no police, fire, education, or health coverage at all, just as long as there is a park or two nearby. I have experimental cities with 100,000 R$$$ residents and no services. However, R$$$ will not stay if they can't find a job. Every 1000 R$$$ sims of working age need 7000 worth of CO$$$ jobs. The problem is that you can't get 7000 worth of CO$$$ demand with only 1000 R$$$ sims...you need thousands more sims for that level of demand, hence the need for huge numbers of R$ and R$$. The easiest way to prevent R$$$ from moving in before you have sufficient employment is to tax them. They will have no problems moving in once the real demand is there, and you get tons of income when they do.

Date: 1/31/2006 3:09:27 PM Author:rmugabe R$$$ residents make up about 1/6 of my population, and no one commutes from my city to any of my neighboring cities. quote> Your problem is not commute times...it's overpopulation of R$$$ sims. The following chart is the most crucial piece of information in SC4: ____\_Jobs Provided Jobs_\R$___R$$__R$$$ CS$___100%_0%___0% CS$$__68%__27%__5% CS$$$_62%__30%__8% CO$$__40%__50%__10% CO$$$_20%__65%__15% IA____100%_0%___0% ID____100%_0%___0% IM____50%__45%__5% IH____10%__80%___10% You simply can't employ more R$$$ sims than the chart allows. Even if every single job in your city is CO$$$, only 15% of those jobs are suitable for R$$$. Even Goldman-Sachs or Morgan-Stanley needs janitors, security guards, receptionists, admins, etc. Not every employee is a millionaire stockbroker. The problem happens to be reported as a commute time issue because of how the game works; the last R$$$ will drive and drive and drive, but be unable to find a suitable job within 150 minutes from home, simply because there aren't any. There are only two ways to solve this problem: kick out half of your R$$$ by lowering desirability or raising taxes, or somehow get much more CO and HT into the city. Just remember that you can't build a city without lots of R$ and R$$. Not everybody can be rich. EDIT: fixed typo in chart...80% of IHT jobs are for R$$, not 0%