.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.

I would love to have draggable tram-in-road and tram-in-avenue, since that's my favorite network. Great idea!

I have never been patient enough to see a building recover after being "abandoned due to lack of water". Honestly, a temporary interruption in water service and the Sims would rather I bulldoze the whole building than move back in?

Well, the NAM team have included such an interchange pre-fabricated with avenues. It does not handle huge amounts of traffic, but you can use transitions to connect it to RHW. Otherwise, your best option is to build your own T-intersection in RHW; the angles are different, but there are a few elegant solutions available.

The problem may be the demand cap on CO. In order to check, make 1-2 highway connections to 'SimNation'. Then run the game on Cheetah speed for a few months. You can exit without saving - this is just a test. You can plop the Convention Center to raise CO$$ and CO$$$ demand a lot. Or the problem may be education. If your residential population increased drastically and recently, those Sims may not be suitable for $$ and $$$ jobs. In this case, improve the EQ of your city and be patient for a few game years.

That's definitely a top-ten grievance about the original, unmodded SC4. Power plants IRL have much more capacity and aren't simply duplicated every few years. Here's the mod I use: From the creator's README file: The power mod will multiply the capacity and monthly costs of all the basic Maxis power plants by 10. Wind power is only multiplied by 5. This enables large cities to run off of one power plant instead of several, at the same cost. I would advise you to demolish any exsisting power plants before putting the mod in to avoid having any problems. Then rebuild the power plants after re-entering the game. Building New Capacity New Monthly Cost Coal Plant 60,000 2,500 Oil Plant 70,000 6,000 Gas Plant 30,000 4,000 Wind Plant 1,000 250 Nuclear Plant 160,000 30,000 Solar Plant 50,000 10,000 Hydrogen Plant 500,000 100,000 Waste to Energy Plant 50,000 10,000 Don't worry, you can use it with existing cities by pausing, demolishing, and rebuilding your power plants. And you can use the funding slider to fit any budget.

Yes, if you want to remove a Lot from your plugins folder, you should first delete all instances of that lot from all your cities. The good news is that you can temporarily restore the plugin files, delete the buildings from your cities, and then remove the plugin again, but that is a little frustrating.

As an experiment, you can plop down a big reward lot such as a Stadium, University, Research Lab or Zoo, or even a Large Plaza or Flower Garden. These all provide thousands in demand cap relief. If you see instant improvement, you know that's the problem. Then you can quit without saving and find out which methods you want to use to bring cap relief (neighbor connections, airport/convention center, many small parks, etc.)

The bars on the demand chart don't have to be perfectly aligned all the time, nor do you have to satisfy any demand for the simulation to work. However, if you're seeing -1000 or more demand in any area, it may indicate a problem. Perhaps you zoned too much, too soon. I find the best way to start out is to let some jobs develop (C or I, it's up to you), then zone a bit of R. Something like half of the default zone size, if you hold down the mouse button on one square. If all the green zones turn into houses, then it's time to create more jobs. After a few of these cycles the city is usually profitable and I look at adding some services or upgrading transportation. It's a foolproof method as long as you aim for a 2:1 ratio of Sims:jobs.

I got the game in 2008, when it was in the bargain bin. I joined simtropolis in Jan. 2013. It was my own stupidity that brought me here: while trying to re-install the game, I kept running the game with the wrong disk. I turned to google for help and was directed to these forums. Everyone is so nice that I keep coming back!

I always considered this one of the game's most annoying flaws, and only recently did I find out on another thread about this mod: It raises the requirements for R$$$ (and R$$) so they are less likely to grow in places with lower desirability -- like your medium-wealth suburbs. This leads to less abandonment of those inappropriate buildings, but the way it accomplishes it is great for the problem you're having, too.