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rob_mtl

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Everything posted by rob_mtl

  1. In this first episode, I lay out the regional plan for Honestville and the road network for the central district.
  2. @CorinaMarie I'll definitely be playing around a lot with the new rail in my upcoming Let's Play, so I'll have the opportunity to get a sense of how it works :).
  4. In the final episode of my Plantation Bay series I find a remarkably simple solution for the longstanding demand slump in the central city.
  5. The highway loop is completed as agricultural town Edgewater is built.

  6. NAM 37 works on Mac

    rob_mtl replied to countermoon's topic in SC4 Mac Users

    Ok. That's a lot of questions but I'll do my best! Train Stations: It doesn't matter which side of the tracks you place train stations. As long as the train station is adjacent to the road network and the rail network, it will function. As for where to place them, it doesn't matter which zone type. Put one station in a residential area and another where near where those sims work. Before placing rail and stations, look at the traffic data view and use the route query tool to find out where folks are travelling. Sims will take trains when roads are slow or congested. If you want to push them towards trains rather than roads, don't give them a better option! Water Pollution: I would suggest giving water to your industries (but probably not your farms). Water will help them grow denser and provide more jobs and tax income. If you can't afford a water treatment plant, don't build one yet. Make sure your pumping stations are not placed in areas with polluted water so they don't get shut down. You can do this using the water pollution data view. Ignore the "water full of filth" message until you have the income to pay for a water treatment plant. Fire and Police: The fire minigame is kind of silly, yes. Place fire stations anywhere you have buildings as soon as you can afford to. Don't worry as much about police. You can build more stations when you have the cash. Prisons are necessary. Lower their funding in the budget view (they shouldn't cost more than 20$/prison in most small cities). Farms: Farms don't work very well in SimCity 4 for a number of reasons. If you want to build them, go for it! But if not there is no negative consequence. Industrial demand is created by having sims with no jobs, just like commercial demand. Farms have nothing to do with it. Farms will only develop when you don't have industry, commercial, and higher-wealth residential (usually at the beginning of the game). Once your city has built up with those more advanced zone types, you'll never get more farm demand. Commercial demand: You will get more commercial demand when you provide some basic education. Making money: Start with dirty industry and some commercial. Only build coal power plants, water pumping stations, a dump and a fire station. Once you are making a big profit, build a small elementary school with a very small radius. If you're still making a profit, increase the radius. After about 10 years in-game, your sims will start to be more educated and you will start to get more high-wealth sims, commercial and industrial areas. Be careful not to give sims all services at once. Focus on making one area prosperous and use your poor areas and dirty industry to pay for it.

  7. NAM 37 works on Mac

    rob_mtl replied to countermoon's topic in SC4 Mac Users

    Thanks for the plug! I'll be installing NAM 37 on my main machine and doing some videos on it soon!
  8. Plantation Bay hits 1 million population!
  9. With the North side of the expressway loop completed, Rob's River expands rapidly.
  10. The expressway ring road expands in the Northeast spurring on the development of Dunberg Heights and Mount Auburn.
  11. New City is one of the most exciting new city-building games out there, developed by indie studio Lone Pine and now available in early access on Steam. Many of the long-term city-builders on this forum will find that this game continues the long tradition of SC2K, SC3K and SC4. Where titles like SimCity (2013) and Cities:Skylines have focused on graphics-intensive 3D environments, New City takes it back to the basics highlighted urban planning above all. I'm so far super impressed. Check out my first impressions:

  12. My first impressions of New City!

    rob_mtl replied to rob_mtl's topic in City-Building Games

    It is an interesting game! Keep in mind it's early access. I've had the chance to chat with some of the developers on Discord and they are very actively working on adding new features and balancing the simulation. I'll be making another video soon. Something like "Most exciting features and suggestions for improvement."
  13. Point Baja and Mount Auburn develop further with the construction of the Outer Bay Bridge.
  14. Yeah. My sense from the NAM Traffic Configuration is that the timescale of the engine is not very well implemented and that tweaking it would yield unpredictable results. Since I tend to build more European-style (or East Coast North American-style) cities, I'm not that interested, personally, in having super long commutes. However, it would be interesting to experiment with.
  15. I will definitely be addressing this in a future video. To be honest though, I'm inclined to say something like, "while Sims can theoretically travel very long distances in a region map, it's very inconvenient to encourage this." Limiting Sims movement to 8km seems like a reasonable bet for regular, non-experimental play. Side note: have you played with the time scaling parameter in the NAM?
  16. Minor update: A viewer pointed out an error in Lesson 3: Transportation. I said that sims will only travel one tile away from their home tile, which I've discovered is incorrect. It's funny how you pick up a piece of information and it just sticks with you and you don't question it. I try and fact-check stuff before I make these videos, but there are bound to be slip-ups from time to time. Interesting topic, though, the maximum distance sims will travel. Here's a transcript from YouTube for posterity. Baleur: Me: I wonder if any of you forum veterans have experimented with max travel range of sims in terms of travel distance/commute time? Also, it would be great to have the speed of various modes of transportation as a handy reference. I've seen a few around but never sure if they're up to date with the NAM.
  17. All eminently reasonable explanations. I do apologize for venting and certainly don't want to start a heated debate. The table you've made on this page is a great tool to locate files and I've seen a fair number of other tools out there to simplify things too!
  18. Hey @CorinaMarie is this why Cleanitol download links never work anymore? Trying to organize a fresh plugin folder for a side project. I have to say, I find the standard download format on the LEX to be a bit of a nightmare. Zipped archives with executable installers (which won't work on Mac without considerable effort among other things--thankfully I'm on PC these days) Most of these installers simply drop a single plugin into the Plugin folder. Why don't they just zip the damn plugins and worst case include a readme. Grrrrr. Also the endless list of MEGApacks by individual users with very similar filenames, the endless lists of dependencies with no attempt to combine them into a single download. The (non-functional) Cleanitol instructions for said packs to presumably remove packs prior to 2007... I could go on. PS. I have a feeling I'm wading into SC4 modding politics here--I appreciate modders' work despite the counter-intuitive distribution of some mods...
  19. I quite like the way RRW replaces the old Maxis rail. Viaduct rail is also semi-dragable and streets can be dragged under it too. But that's just me.
  20. Point Baja develops along a rail trench and waterfront expressway.
  21. @Durfsurn Thanks for the tip! I should have mentioned that people shouldn't alt-tab or change focus during save. I play the game in full-screen and only alt-tab when the game is paused and obviously not while saving.
  22. @SIM-ple Jack Thanks for the critique! I'm sure advanced users will have their own lists of essential mods (I'm presuming you know your way around the game based on the quantity of content of yours I've seen around the forum ). As for the NAM pieces, I also never use HSR but el-trains and subways are my bread and butter. I never got into RHW in a big way although it is certainly cool. Have you tried the NAM 37 development candidate? I booted it up on my other computer with a fresh install and it looks like they've actually pared things down a bit (and cut out some old material that's "no longer supported"). I certainly wouldn't update NAM 36 to 37 at the moment, but if you have another system to try it on, give it a spin. Fair point about spacing out the videos. To be honest, tutorial videos take a lot longer than my usual Let's Play stuff because they're tricky to make and edit--so far I've been posting them whenever I get to them, but as my channel develops a more predictable schedule I'll keep it in mind.
  23. @Cyclone Boom I'm glad you enjoyed the video! By the way, I only recently installed Save Warning and it's very well designed! As for the chapter section, I accidentally put a period instead of a colon, so YouTube didn't create the hyperlink. Thanks for the heads up!
  25. As Ventura Beach expands to the East, the regional population surpasses 600000.
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