Next_rim

A more realistic economy. I know it's all about building cities, but financing construction and development is an entire department IRL that is grossly overlooked by SC3000 and SC4 (haven't played others so idk). 1) Separate commercial jobs and government jobs - control size of government. Not just talking schools and hospitals. Actual mayor's office, courts, clerks, financial police, central bank. 2) Separate government loans and private investor loans. Have different types of banks and interest rates. 3) More sources of income - issue licenses, control advertisement regulations, alcohol and tobacco policy, customs and inter-regional trade regulations, police fines and fees. 4) Separate fiscal and monetary policy. Taxes don't just raise money for government budget. You can run a fairly simple simulation engine in HTML, I'm sure you can integrate it into a game. 5) Do something with the money in your bank - raise wages, deposit into commercial banks, launch specific industry subsidy programs. I'm personally always filthy rich in my SC games w/o any cheats and on hardest settings, and it becomes boring to just sit on billions of cash. 6) More taxing options - income brackets, VAT, import/export taxes, quotas, different fees.

I installed NAM, managed to squeeze in ~40k more people, up to ~320k +/- 10 (it fluctuates wildly for some reason). Almost every road is green now. True to my SC3000 habits, I put residential way too far from C and I. Guess it doesn't work in SC4.

I think it all comes from sims walking to bus stops and subway stations actually. I will try the addon, thanks for suggestion.

There are few uses for adjacent tiles I found in the game: 1) Trash bins - put dirty coal powerplants and trash burning factories there to eat up your trash and supply you power. Pollution doesn't travel between tiles, so you export pollution. Use small tiles for this because you only need couple squares to fit those 4x4 plants, one road and a power line. This is kind of cheating though, and I dislike doing it despite it being very efficient. 2) Job hubs. Put a highway connection into an adjacent city and just zone it with tonnes of I/C zones. 3) It's easier to manage traffic if you specialize tiles. For a 3-tile play that I'm doing right now, I have 1x R-C-I tile (mainly R and C), 1x 100% I tile and 1x 100% C tile. Works very well so far. You can make a 100% C or 100% I zone completely self-sustainable, but it's very hard to make a 100% residential zone and make it self-sustainable in terms of money (poll booths, but it's so broken, I wouldn't do it personally to keep up the challenge).

Ok, I'm still a bit stuck. Attached is some info. My city won't grow above 300k, although there is clearly capacity in the zones (houses are half empty, like 4k residents/8k on each). Demand seems to be there. When I go to either of my satellite cities to make jobs, zones don't really develop. When I go to main city, there are commercial skyscrapers abandoned due to "low demand". As if my sims don't match the jobs that are out there. Is it traffic? Should I bomb ferries and hook up all zones with subway? No cheats, no mods, running vanilla deluxe game on hard. And profitable. It's hard though. Almost no loops, unlike SC3000.

Thanks for answers, really helped. One more thing - if I'm exporting trash to neigboring city, do I need to keep the sanitation budget? Because it appears huge in both cities, part of me thinks one of them should be 0.

1) Had an elevated highway connecting a 100% commercial region to a commercial + residential region. I was messing with some roads at the map edge and accidentally deleted the highway connection. Then saved over it. Commercial demand plummeted down. I restored the highway, but demand never went back up. I added more connections since then (another ferry route, a railroad, an avenue, nothing helps. 2) For commercial demand boost with inter-city connections, does it matter where to put the highway? Does it have to connect commercial zones in City A with commercial zones in City B, or I can just have couple tiles in the map corner? 3) Does intercity connection demand boost depend on how much traffic goes through the actual connection? Because 90% intercity traffic goes on ferries for me. 4) How do I boost industrial demand? Freight is low, taxes are very low (3%), education is next to 200, yet my sims only want 12k or so high-tech jobs. City population is 265k. 5) My residential demand is sky high for all incomes, but commercial and industrial demand is rock down (commercial soared after events in Q1, industrial never went high). There is huge capcity for either jobs in connected regions, and traffic is fairly good (commute time ~110). Yet city won't grow above 270k citizens, and new residential zones don't develop. Thanks in advance, cheers!