RockGod92

The simulator by default will upgrade any R$ to R$$/R$$$, assuming you have demand for R$$/R$$$ and high desirability. Like above posters said, taxing R$$/R$$$ out and/or keeping desirability for R$$/R$$$ low should force only R$ sims to move in. Keep this in mind. Aside from that, it is odd that you had low R$ demand; demand for them are almost always maxed for me in my mature regions, as R$ can work literally anywhere, so there are almost always an abundance of R$ jobs. Weird.

Plopped commercial buildings do indeed pay taxes; they function exactly the same as if they were grown, I do not know if Maxis landmarks with Jobs added (I'm assuming you have the functional landmarks mod?) pay taxes though, as don't have any functional Maxis landmarks myself.

Well in America, elementary schools are for children aged 4-11. America actually has a level of schooling between Elementary and High school, called Middle School, or Junior High, for children aged 11-14. SC4 omits middle schools for some reason. High schools in America are for ages 14-18. After that, we also have the option of attending colleges/universities. This usually takes us into our early or mid 20s. On the education by age graph, assuming the Simcity 4 simulation follows the American model, elementary schools would cater to the age 1-10 bar. High Schools educate ages 11-20. Colleges/Universities cater to ages 20-30. Libraries educate all of them. I know it says only adults go to them, but I've made entire cities with nothing but libraries and had an EQ of ~80 across all age groups. Museums mostly educate your adults and older sims, I would guess 30+. Hopefully this clears things up a bit.

Zooming in and out too quickly with the mouse wheel is known to cause CTD's. Try using the buttons, or the 1-6 keys on your keyboard instead. Have you, by any chance, applied the single core trick? Simcity 4 is not designed to run on multi-core systems; doing so makes SC4 VERY prone to crashes.

The way Simcity 4 Works is the following: Elementary schools educate younger kids, High Schools educate the teenagers. Colleges and universities educate the young adults, of all wealth groups I believe. Libraries increase the education of all age groups. In fact, they are the most cost effective out of your educational buildings. As a side note, sims' education levels decrease and decay as they get older. Museums are a good thing to place because they help to slow down this decay. Without them, your older sims will be dumber than your younger ones.

Okay so I've been a long time lurker on these forums, and this is my first post, but I'll give my insight. Believe it or not, your ability to grow tall, CO skyscrapers is not directly tied to your residential population, but your Regional CO capacity. In other words, add up the number of CO$$ and CO$$$ jobs you have. You can find this out using the Jobs and Pop graph. For high density CO buildings to appear, you need at least 26,000 CO Jobs in your region. Even then, the tallest buildings won't appear until you have about 44000 CO Jobs, and even then they will appear very sparingly until your region grows even bigger. Short answer: You should start to see taller buildings grow soon. Refer to this table for more info: http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Tutorial:Stage_Limits_and_Threshholds#Commercial_Office_Stage_Limits Also, like others have said, you need a high amount of CO$$$ demand, at least 3000 on the demand graph. Finally, be careful you don't zone too much high density commercial. When demand for a zone is high, and the demand is satisfied, the simulator upgrades the smaller buildings first. So if you zone for too much high density commercial, you will have a huge, but low lying commercial zone. By keeping your high density commercial zones small and compact, you will "force" the simulator to build up, rather than out, if that makes any sense. If you still can't get skyscrapers after your city has grown a bit more, refer to this, it really helped me: http://www.simphoni.net/forums/index.php?/topic/13683-simcity-4-help-desk-faqs/ Scroll down to post #2. Honestly, that entire thread is full of helpful info. In case you don't know, building "stages" just mean different levels of densities. For Commercial and Residential, Low density restricts buildings to stages 1-3, medium density allows up to stage 6 to grow, and the last 2 stages (7 and 8 ) are your high density buildings. As for your mass transit issues, you need to download and install the NAM if you haven't already. Without it, the pathfinding is pretty crappy, and mass transit is often left unused as a result. Also, I recommend getting rid of the "No Job Zot Killer". In fact, that mod, IIRC, simply makes it so that residents don't commute to work; they just all work at home...this is could be why nobody is using your Mass Transit: Nobody is commuting, so thus your sims see zero need for it. Sorry for the long answer, I hope this was of some help.