DanielCoffey

Oh for goodness sake... LOOK at the spec! It is in kbps, not KB/s. There is an eightfold difference. A 256kbps connection is only four times faster than the old 56kbps dialup modems. It is barely considered broadband at all. Even if you downloaded something flat out at 256kbps you would be lucky to get 100Mb in a full hour... and SimCity will only be using it for authentication, saving your city and dealing with the odd bit of region-wide data such as crime, pollution and job details. It is more an online handshake rather than a full file download. The cheapest Mobile Broadband will probably be advertised in the region of one to two mbps in rural areas and even if you only get a fraction of that, 256kbps should be perfectly attainable. So what if you have to wait half a minute before you can start playing while it handshakes over your mobile connection? Once that is done the data transfer should slow to a trickle.

If they named the game SimsTown Online, at least it would be honest... but remember - none of this stops us continuing to play and enjoy SC4.

I suspect it will be like the release of From Dust on Steam... Sold on Steam, downloaded from Steam but registered and hooked into OnLive from Ubisoft. EA will allow Steam to SELL SimCity but it will be registered and hooked into Origin.

Thanks for the replies, folks. I had hoped that it would be a bit more intelligent but I can imagine the pitfalls of having to run all cities in a region for trades and commutes to be accurate. So, if I understand it correctly, Sims in City A will look at the Demand Summary for City B, see that there are jobs available and will commute to the border. If they get there in good time they count as happily employed and drive home at the end of the day and if not they go home and sulk in front of the TV. I presume that if I visit City B I will see random Sims appearing out of thin air at the border, driving to the employers and going back to the border at the end of the working day. It sounds like a good idea to keep the game in RHD mode to avoid future mod issues. I don't want to exclude myself from enjoying some of the excellent mods that members here and the other sites have worked on. I am reading about SPAM (and its necessary dependancy) at the moment. Once again, thanks for the help.

Hello folks. I have just taken the jump into SimCity 4... after a huge break. I last played the SimCity series back in SimCity 2000 days. Wow! Now I feel old... and I have some questions mainly to do with the links between regions. I understand that the key to growing your smaller regions is to link with their neighbours and either produce something that the neighbour wants or consume something they generate. I get that you can trade utilities between regions and I see that if you link regions together with a transit network then goods and people will move between them but my main question is this... how far do these links extend? Imagine a strip of three small land-locked maps in a row. Towns A, B and C, say. If A is mainly residential, if B is completely empty (apart from a highway) and C is mainly industrial, will sims and goods go between A and C via B or does the link only work for direct neighbours? In addition, does the simulation keep running in all your regions while you are playing in one city? Will fires break out, budgets drain or swell, power plants age and so on in the cities you are not currently looking at or are they static? My next question is not to do with regions but to do with mods. At the moment I have a clean copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe from Steam. I am considering switching it over to Left Hand Drive since I am in Ol' Blighty and I have seen that the NAM installer has you choose between LHD/RHD when installing. I have seen some reports of post-switchover players having issues and I wondered if I will be excluding myself from any major mods if I do this. Should I switch now before adding anything or just get used to driving on the "wrong" side of the road? Finally I have seen reports of some user-created bug fixes that I should consider... something to do with the Opera House and Crime problem? Are these fixes I should address now before I start playing? I am sure I will come up with other questions... especially when I start looking at the texture replacement mods and new buildings but that is probably enough for now. Thanks for the assistance, Daniel.

I have two bad links to report in the OP at the top of this thread... The links in : How to Fix Missing Props and Buildings and in I see all the props on a downloaded lot from the STEX, but the building, why is this happening? are broken because Apple MobileMe is now closed.