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I was able to get a city up to 1,000,000 without NAM or any mods a few years ago! Lower taxes and build plazas, parks, and other rec stuff, just make sure your budget can handle it. Place residential and commercial close together in blocks. NAM makes growth much easier as sims are much more likely to be able to find available jobs, even if not close by. Regional play is a must if you want to get your city to 1,000,000. Neighboring cities will help demand for all RCI.

I have an existing region that I'm playing but I want to modify the borders of some of the cities, combining some cities into larger ones. Is there a way to preserve the buildings and stuff while changing the city borders with SC4 Mapper? Or do I have to start all over again? Help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Thanks to everyone for the help. After some experimentation, I figured it out. As people said, you can't preserve the buildings and such if you modify an existing city and redraw borders. However you can change the borders of cities that have no buildings (or you don't care about) into anything you want. This is what I was looking for as I had unplayed land that I wanted to make into larger cities. I previously had only one "big" city on the entire map, but now I have 4 thanks to SC4mapper. This is a great utility, thanks to the creators New Horizons Productions Berethor ♦ beskhu3epnm ♦ blade2k5 ♦ dmscopio ♦ dedgren ♦ emilin ♦ Ennedi ♦ Heblem ♦ jplumbley M4346 ♦ moganite ♦ Papab2000 ♦ Shadow Assassin ♦ Tarkus ♦ wouanagaine

The game is seriously bugged. As soon as you get the "pollution rising" notice, your region will fill with pollution and there's absolutely no way to get rid of it. Check the SimCity forums. People have demolished all buildings and roads and planted trees, then left it on cheetah speed and the pollution does not go away. It never goes away. As soon as the message pops up, pollution will come out of nowhere and fill up the region without any source of the pollution. It just comes and never goes away.

You can't master the game because those issues like traffic and profitable enterprises can't be solved with the tools given, thus a broken game. Yeah people have found workarounds to the bugs, like building only T sections, never build a 4 way intersection, but that just means you are forced to play a certain way. You can never make a cities with the diversity you can find in SimCity4. Cities without 4 way intersections? And as already mentioned, there's only a few ways to make money. Build TVs. Try other industries and you'll go bankrupt, therefore you are forced to play in a certain way and forced to do the same things over and over again. This is a shallow, broken game.

All saves require you to be online. You can play with a hack mod offline, but you won't be able to save. Then again, even if you're online you might not be able to save due to server issues. SimCity5 is broken, not due to the online only requirement, but due to pathfinding and core mechanisms that don't work well. It looks pretty, but once you try to play for more than 2 hours, your city will self destruct due to traffic, pollution, crime, disasters, fire, or a combination of all of the above.

Once your population gets bigger you'll always have unemployment though and businesses demanding workers even if you have enough due to poor pathfinding and the way the agent/sink system works. Since workers go to the nearest sink and then the next and the next until they are all filled up, some will run out of time and go back home before they get to that last open job. They then will not have enough money and the workplace will have no workers. The game's fundamental core mechanism does not work well.

Seems like a solid build for a $300 computer. What you really need though is a new video card, there are solid video cards for $100. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html The Radeon 7750, GeForce GTX650 and GeForceGTX 650Ti (for $130) are all solid options.

What are your education levels? Sounds like you have a lot of medium wealth sims with moderate education. At the highest education levels, high tech industry and commercial offices will be more in demand, but CS$$ will always be very high because you have so many medium wealth sims running around (as should be). I have around 900,000 in my region with one city having 600,000. High tech industry seems insatiable, same with CS $ and CS $$. Unless you have abandonment with your CO $$$ and CO $$, there isn't really a problem, that will create more demand for sims through open jobs and that will allow your cities to grow further.

I got to 1 million residents in my main city years ago before I discovered NAM. I did it with no mods. What you have to do is build commercial around your residences and surround high wealth areas with flower gardens. Have good transportation like heavy rail to your industrial sites. You city will grow slowly, but it's possible. I'm using NAM now and am up to 600,000 people currently.

I noticed that all your tiles are the same size (region view) and are of the smallest size. I like to vary my tile sizes so some tiles will be very large, others medium, and the rest small. That creates even more variety and sets the stage for different growth patterns per tile. My biggest tiles are for epic cities while smaller tiles can be rural towns, farms, suburban neighborhoods, resort areas, or even slums. SimCity4 seems much better than SimCity5 by the way. You can't terraform in SimCity5 so no rivers and waters that you can create or mountains.

Don't worry your profit won't last long and your city will eventually be bankrupt. By all accounts, the casino/tourism is bugged. You have high initial profits, but later on, especially if you reload the saved region, profits will drop without reason and it's irreversible and incurable. Death is the only path (or bulldozing the entire city and starting over). Be happy now, it won't last.

NAM readjusted the game so that people would walk further though this is the furthest that I've ever seen anyone walk. NAM assumes that you'll put in bus stops and so forth so that in a real game you won't see the above problems,

As a SimCity 4 fan who has played all the SimCities from the very first, I think SimCity2013 would be a good game if the core gameplay could be fixed. Unfortunately, I think the way they choose to implement their ideas makes it very unlikely that these issues can be fixed. The agent and Glassbox system is core to how SimCity2013 works and it's also the main reason for the majority of gamebreaking failures. If the game is to be fixed, agents, specifically the people, have to operate differently than they do now. They have to stop trying to go to the same place to fill up a sink and then move on en mass, The police and firemen have to operate more as individuals instead of going to the same place. The visitor traffic has to be managed better and the game has to be set so that R, C and I depend upon each other like in former SimCities. These are huge fixes and I'm not sure if it'll be possible.

I don't think it's the micromanagement that's the problem. The problem is that no matter what you do short of extreme situations (like R and parks only), there are problems that cannot be solved. No amount of public transportation or good layout can stop traffic problems once your city gets big enough. No amount of fire and police stations will stop firemen and policemen from dealing with one crime or fire at one time, leaving the rest of the city to be burned down and looted. It's these features that stop the game from being fun. When you have no control, you feel as if you are just an observer and it's not fun.

It seems that most of the issues "fixed" in these patches are cosmetic and make no difference whatsoever to gameplay mechanics. The sewage issue is the only one. It just continues to confirm my suspicions that the core issues CANNOT be fixed. Police cars will always follow each other in a line, etc.

Sims can use crossings and do walk, but walking is so slow in the base game that it often makes sense for them to drive. In real life, my friend won't even walk a block to the grocery store, he always drives there. I haven't seen the particular issue you've posted in your pictures, but then again I'm not an expert. I'm sure there's some reason why they are taking the long route, some path is blocked or it violates some specific rule. NAM is a mod that changes the traffic simulator of the base game. Sims will walk a lot further with NAM and there are many other changes as well that make the game better, not necessarily easier. There was an old thread that described the traffic simulator and how it works, you can search for it.

I think that some buildings require a certain layout in order to grow. I've played the game on and off for years now and I still don't know all the permissible (buildings will grow) layouts. For example, I just found out that a 4 wide, 2 deep (4x2) for commercial leads to a building. I also know that you can do 3x6 for residential, 3x5, but not 5x5 (at least I haven't seen anything grow there yet. You can do 6x6 on commercial, but not 5x5. Is there a site that lists all the possible configurations for R,C, and I respectively?

For games like SimCity, there's always "more stuff" you can add on. Look at SimCity 4, it's taken 9 years for NAM to get where it is at and they keep on improving it. Be reasonable, not everything can be included in the original, it takes time and effort to make stuff. Go and try yourself. The only question is if the original game is worth the price and then if expansions are worth the price. That's all.

Absolutely. I am an EA shareholder, indirectly through a mutual fund. I want EA to make quality games so that they can sell more games and make a bigger profit for me. Businesses cannot stay in business for long if they don't offer what customers want, EA has been losing money for years until 2012 which looks more and more like a blip in their streak of losses. That said, it's much harder to make a good game and execute on a plan than just stating, "We will make a good game". Execution is difficult, otherwise we'd all be perfect and all games would be perfect. I believe EA has to make lower cost games that are not meant to be for everyone across all platforms. They should make a SimCity for those who like city builder games. It will not have the frills of GlassBox and being able to see every vehicle, but traffic and the core mechanics would be good. People like me would buy that game. I think the problem with EA and a lot of other companies recently is that they try to make a game that will appeal to everyone and that everyone can play regardless of it's on laptop, console, or desktop. That really reduces the options of the developers and programmers. They have to build for the worst computers and dumbest people. They have to make sure the program can run on weak computers, which is why SimCity2013 can only use one core. The pathing algorithms could be so much more complex if they could use 4 cores. RCI is dumbed down because they wanted to make sure everyone could play and be successful. That leads to a shallow game. Not all games should be for everyone. EA has to learn this and not put so many resources into making big time games.

I have no problem either. For a good game that offers hundreds of hours of gameplay, $200 is cheap. You can't get that kind of value elsewhere, a 2 hour movie costs $10, 2 hours at the blackjack tables in Vegas will cost you far more. The reason there are DLCs is because people may not be willing to spend $200 at once, but they sure will if it's split into smaller parts. That's why many people spend more than $100 a month on coffee drinks from Starbucks because it's "only" $5 a pop. Yet they'll complain about a $60 game (not SimCity because that deserves complaints). A lot of people are not rational, or rather they are ill-informed and feel entitled.

Sorry but I feel that I really have to respond to Macvirt's post and hope he will take time to reconsider his premises which are wrong. I will address the rest of the post directly to Macvirt, no disrespect is meant. Your fundamental premise and core belief is wrong. Someone holding a lot of money doesn't mean YOU have less purchasing power! If I am magically able to produce thousands of TV's, cakes, computers and sell them for a lot of money, it doesn't mean you have less money, nor does it prevent you from working to gain more money. The fact that I'm able to sell my goods means that I've offered a superior value to the buyers, better than other alternatives so they benefit and the overall economy benefits. Another wrong assumption is that there is such a thing as enough for humans. Humans can survive on very little, but there is always demand for more and better. I could always use a larger TV, better and faster internet, higher quality food and drink, etc. etc. etc. Therefore there is always room for the economy to grow and expand and demand for goods and services. Someone who comes along and provides some service or good doesn't mean you have less ability to earn a living or provide some other good or service, or do it better than they can. It is NOT a zero sum game.

I'd be surprised if the game were to become the 2nd highest Sim City game unless major fixes can be worked out. My take is that a lot of people were duped by the great reviews and hype. I was VERY close to pre-ordering myself because the most searched for reviews (highest in order on Google) were so positive. Then I read a few not-so positive reviews, did some more digging, and decided to hold off on buying the game. Right now, I have no plans on buying the game until they fix the myriad of problems, if they can be fixed at all. I think a lot of people have heard of the problems and are not going to buy the game. This is not like a normal release where the sales can continue on like a Skyrim for example (next on my list, waiting for a sale).

SimCity 5 is a horrible game so of course it's going to be on sale at some point. And the best time is now since there's still hope by many that the game can be fixed. I'm very doubtful that it can, it seems the engine itself and the very core of the mechanisms are broken. If so, they can't be fixed without remaking the entire game practically. This was a good list. Frankly I'd rather have what's on the list than a future SimCity DLC. Few people are going to buy a DLC for a bad, broken game.

We'll see, but I doubt that marketing will be either the focus or answer to EA's problems. You can't market a bad game once word gets out. And EA already has good brand awareness, they just need to put out solid games.