.anonyman

It's due to suburban sprawl cutting into the animals' natural habitats. I recommend zoning green belts through your cities, animal crossing overpasses on your highways, and shifting towards high-density, mixed development for sustainability. Seriously, I haven't noticed this with NAM32, although I believe I set the automata to the minimum.

It is possible to have a (small) city with only R$$$ Sims living there, and 100% of them can work in other city tiles. If you want to add CO$$$ and I-H lots to that city, then most of the jobs from those lots will actually be for $ and $$ and they will need to be filled by residents from another city. But it's still possible without any mods, depending on 1) how you set the taxes, 2) where on the tiles homes and jobs are, 3) which networks connect the workers to their jobs, and 4) whether you've fixed the I-H jobs bug. It's quite a challenge, but I personally commend your no-mods approach and wish you good luck!

You don't need the extracheats dll; you can use this mod by Equinox instead: I suppose that's what you see in those videos. I use it because it's simple; it consists of only 3 DAT files, and it extends an existing tool.

Many people don't realize that SC4 works this way because most in simulation games on the market now, if you see a vehicle or a person on-screen, that object interacts with the simulation. People are en route to a destination and vehicles get stuck in traffic. Only in SC4 (in my experience) do the vehicles and Sims represent nothing at all.

After working on hundreds of city files, I can say the only corruptions I've encountered were caused by 1) deleting a plugin from the plugin folder before deleting instances of it in my cities and 2) ALT-TABing away from the program while saving a city, which often replaces the region-view thumbnail with a flat greenfield. I've never had a problem with 'Save and Exit', either; that's the method I always use when it's time to stop playing. I can imagine not wanting to track down a troublesome plugin, but I would be surprised if the game itself were corrupting files.

According to the game's manual and tutorials, neighbor deals are designed to be beneficial. The financial benefit is questionable, unless you exploit the fact that different city tiles run at different time scales and that while you're playing one city the others are paused. There isn't much benefit to growth either IMO, except that pollution can be reduced wherever you export garbage from. The main benefit is added realism; since city tiles are much smaller areas than what we would consider a city or a metropolitan area, it wouldn't make much sense to have water towers and landfills in and between every district or town. In that respect, landfills aren't realistic enough. IRL, garbage can be exported huge distances, but in the game this isn't so easy. Still, I use neighbor deals for power, water, and garbage. Like you, I think it's best to have 1-2 customer cities buying services from one provider city. It's a huge pain to manage a long chain of neighbor deals and many times I've been stuck going back and forth from city to city trying to convince the game to set up a much-needed deal. It's not worth the headache IMO, but for realism I try to limit the number of landfills and power plants. That's why I prefer modded civic utilities which have much higher capacities (and higher costs, of course).

Personally, I like playing tutorials and scenarios to simulation games. I wish SC4 had some scenarios built into it. It can be interesting to start up an existing city/region and fix the problems. Or switch to a new transportation network. And don't forget about disasters! Another user offered his/her completed vanilla region for download a few months ago. I have been converting parts of it to the mods I use, building a RHW network through it, and upgrading the rail lines. It's been a fascinating challenge and I like how each time I open a city, I see something unexpected.

That would look very realistic, but I haven't had much luck getting SC4 to build road tunnels one tile wide.

A bit off-topic but I was wondering if IRL you see many suburban/rural train viaducts. It seems like A LOT of engineering to raise the railway above a few roads and where I'm from it's the roads which become bridges. Also, is it common for cities to have viaducts or a strip of no-man's-land for the railway?

Sorry, off topic and likely covered elsewhere, but from which perspective are you defining 2 x 1 vs 1 x 2? Because I understand there is a difference, but not which is which. Thanks A 2x1 lot refers to one with 2 tiles along the street (or where the arrows point) and is 1 tile deep. The default zoning is 1x2 or 1x3, back-to-back in 4-tile-wide blocks.

How about marketing? That seems to be their core business.

I've used Grater's trick on residential streets (not intersections, though - that's clever) and it really helped prevent those streets from being congested with through-traffic. Instead, cars are forced onto your roads and avenues. The problem is that it looks terrible to have road blocks on your streets and little green-roofed buildings blocking your streets. To answer the original question: In addition to building tree-like transportation networks, where traffic is fed onto larger-capacity networks, I've had good results with ring roads. 1. You can use any type of network (avenue, highway, rail, RHW, GLR, El-rail). 2. It needs to be in the middle of your city, not around the edges (maybe 30-40 tiles across). This way Sims from both sides of it will move towards it, then get wisked around to their destinations. Think: Berlin. 3. You should leave space for it early on; that way the development seems to spread away from it rather than looking sliced in half by it. I find it fun to upgrade and replace these networks as the city grows. I'll start with avenues, then add GLR. Or switch to RHW for a challenge. It can handle most of the traffic, even in a city of 150k-200k Sims.

That's right, FAR will only apply to roads, not streets. With streets you can get smooth curves and 45-degree angles.

No, the roads stay the same. Slope mods affect the terraforming, but only instantly as roads are plopped. You can even use the different versions of the same slope mod to modify different road networks or different parts of your map, for example.

You're looking for the Real Highway mod (RHW), which is part of the NAM. Both NAM and RHW by itself can be hard to learn at first, but are completely worth it. With rural 2-lane highways, your roads can have normal intersections or merge lanes. You can also add different road markings for a realistic look.