calm_blue_sea

Although performance is certainly a limiting factor for many users, I think the traffic simulation places an ultimate limit on the size of the city tiles that can support viable cities. As we all know, Sims look for new jobs and new homes every day. Rather than dispersing, all the Sims follow the same path, resulting in a 'conga line' of vehicles. I can run a city with a large populace on my computer without any appreciable slow down - however, traffic becomes a problem. Even though I plan my cities (in an often unintuitive fashion) to fit the simulation, I am certain that traffic would grind to a halt if the cities were any larger. As the population increases with increased city size the length of the 'conga line' will increase to the point where the Sims are unable to find a residence or a workplace during a traffic cycle. If this happens, buildings will be abandoned and the city will die. I suspect when the game goes offline modders will be able to increase the tile size. If you have a powerful computer you may find that your frame rates don't drop much with larger cities, however that becomes a rather moot point if none of the Sims in your city are able to move.

OK, so you’ve started a city, got yourself horribly into debt building roads and other infrastructure, taken out three bonds, and you have no income. Yes, you’ve done a dumb thing! The game pauses and tells you there is no way to proceed until you fix the situation. The problem, however, is that you cannot fix it because of the interest on the bonds! Raising taxes won’t help and shutting off buildings simply won’t do it. You can abandon the city, but when you reclaim it the situation is unchanged. You can gift money to it from other cities, but because the simulation is paused the money never arrives. There is a solution! Gift money from another city and then initiate a disaster in your problem city. The disaster allows time to advance and the money will arrive (eventually). You may need to enact a few disasters to allow enough time to pass for this to occur. Of course you will need to progress your other cities to the point where you have money to send and have activated at least one disaster. Initiating an earthquake in an undeveloped portion of the map is likely your best option. Please note that this is not my idea - I found this solution after an extensive Google search and have not been able to find the original post again. It saved my region though and I thought it was worth sharing. Kind stranger, whoever you are, please step forward and claim your recognition. Of course, if the game saved the files on MY computer I could have just deleted the appropriate city file. And, if the game was a little better, I might actually be interested in continuing the region.

A vector direction is by definition a line drawn between two points, where one point is the origin and the second point is the destination. A single point (or tile) thus has no direction. A single tile is a begining but nothing more.

Ahhhh, just as a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, that journey has no direction until the first step is taken... So, did I win?

One other thing. I'd love to be able to add on to my schools, hospitals, etc. as the need arises. This could be done with puzzle pieces - for example you could add a new wing to a hospital. As I alluded to before, an expansion could be paid for by a local business or wealthy resident - there would of course be strings attached. This has been done to some extend on the STEX - i.e. someone (bless their soul) made school portables.

I'll be honest, I haven't gone through and read all these, so I'm sure I'm repeating a few people, but here's my wish list: 1) The ability to draw out roads etc in freehand at any angle. The way Railroad Tycoon did this with railways would work quite nicely. 2) Having the game form lots that fit my crazy angles from number 1... now that's the tricky part! 3) Having a regional 'federal' government. Federal taxes that are collected from everyone (based on population) and redistributed as you see fit - i.e. you would be able to siphon money from a rich city and give it to a poor one. 4) Climate systems - air pollution would travel downwind, orographic rainfall, etc, Tropico had this! Weather would be cool. 5) I'd love to see the concept of developers/contractors. For example, you sell a large plot of land to a developer and he builds a residential subdivision for you. Likewise you could sell a plot of land to an industry (a car manufacturer for instance). They would build a plant which would grow over time and serve as the lifeblood of the town. You would need to supply a workforce, power, water, rail connections etc. They would give you pollution and jobs and perhaps the occasional hospital wing. Removing them would involve a huge lawsuit and massive unemployment (deal with them carefully). 6) Better traffic simulator. There should be a central business district (cbd) which intrinsically draws traffic. Airport, malls, stadiums, etc should also draw traffic. 7) Multilane custom highways and custom on/off ramps. You should be able to drag and add lanes to a street or highway and to build your own intersections using puzzle pieces. Cultural/ethnic areas - difficult to implement in a PC fashion, but it would be great to see a Chinatown, Greektown etc pop up and grow of its own accord. 9) Social stats etc. Maybe it's just me, but I want more graphs and charts! 10) Resource based gameplay. Being able to mine mountains or clear-cut a forest would be neat. Imagine watching railway cars carry ore to a steel plant in another city and watching the steel emerge as automobiles at a car manufacturing plant. Watching your Sims transform the land (just as the miners dug pits in Tropico) would be rather neat. What about a landslide if you oversteepen a slope or install a shoddy retaining wall? I suspect Maxis/EA will lean towards a more 3D approach (they had originally planned this for Simcity 3 I believe). I imagine incorporating more aspects of the "The Sims" might also be in the works (a new take on SimVille perhaps). Although I think it would take away from the scope of the game (so that you don't need a super computer), cruising around a city (as per Streets of SimCity) might be a neat idea. I'm sure we will see more integration of The Sims and SimCity next time around.

Well, I'm a biologist and I will quite often use Latin species names for cities (yes, I'm also a nerd). I usually start a region by placing a port (a place needs a reason to exist), so my first city is quite often named Newport (or Founders). I have a lot of fun naming my mayors. I have different mayors for each city and I name them depending on the populace (e.g. a ritzy suburb will have a mayor with a really snooty sounding name while a dirty low wealth town will be lead by someone with a rather blue collar name). Sometimes I name mayors after people I know. Another thing I quite often do is to consider each 'city' as a county or borough instead of an entire city. For example the city of Newport might be sourrounded by suburbs named North Newport, East Newport etc (all of which generally have the same major). Part of the fun is making up your own stories. I've named inlets, rivers and whole cities after explorers I've made up for myself. You can really get carried away with this and start naming parks, monuments, schools etc. after your hypothetical hero.

Make a copy of your plugin folder (the one in 'My Documents" will contain your regions). Uninstall the game, install the deluxe version, and then replace the plugins folder with the one you saved. Everything will be there when you start the game. If you have mods etc installed in the second plugins folder (in your "programs/SimCity..." folder if you followed the default install path), you can do the same with this folder. I always save all my "save game" and/or pluggin files for all my games - that way if I uninstall the game I can always reinstall it later and continue where I left off.

Very nice!

Yes, it may be a heat alarm that comes on when your video card is overworked, in which case cleaning could help (make sure your video card and processor fans are running alright too - you can check the rpms in the BIOS as mentioned). I had a similar thing happen twice to me for two different reasons. One time it was due to a short in my motherboard (I hope that's not your problem...my motherboard died a few weeks later). The other time it was due to a loose keyboard jack - the computer would beep repeatedly and then shutdown. Wiggling the jack would stop it (this of course was not game specific though).