Mogwai1313

I set up my high tech areas almost the exact same way I set up my commercial zones. I pop in lots of parks and greenery and they seems to like that. Low pollution and high education is a must, as already stated. If you have ever seen the area around Google's HQ, just copy that.

As for you disabling the U-Drive It mode, go into the My Sim mode and the option is in there. I am with ya though, I hate those brown buildings too.

The cold hard truth of the matter is that you cannot download full, prebuilt cities. With all of the mods, BATs, and everything else out there, it just makes it too complicated. If you were to even try to download a custom city and you were missing even one of the key mods used to build the city, the area you downloaded would not function correctly, if at all. I hope that answers your question.

I would also stay away from taking out loans as much as possible. They will eat you alive. It also seems backwards but when your money gets low, spend a lot of it on IND and RES developements. The more people in your city, the more tax money you have. Never stop growing.

For my upcoming CJ that I am working on, I need to get Area 5.1 and the Missle Silo. I know you need to go bankrupt to get the silo and I did that but I accidently destroyed it while staging some stuff for the CJ. Is there anyway I can get it back? Second, I need to get Area 5.1. I know that you need to do the car (evil ice cream), the rail, and the zombie crop dusting mission to get it. My problem is that the town that it needs to go in is extremely small and I do not have room for the airport or railroad. Is there any way I can cheat to get Area 5.1? I would not want it save for my CJ and for that reason, I am willing to be a little underhanded as to how I acquire the lot. I am not using any cheats in any other spot on my region but for the sake of a storyline, I need Area 5.1. Any help you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

Ahh, the evil has been wrought and I feel better. The town that I am working with is very small and really the only reason I am toying with it at all is to further a plot line in my upcoming CJ. The way I am trying to do everything is to get a bank of screenshots, and storylines pre-written so the actual process of CJ building does not take that long to complete when I do updates. I already have one story line pretty much done, I just need the pics for it. All in all, I am looking forward to peoples' reactions when they see the CJ here hopefully within a week. As for red light districts, I have pondered those too. Without getting graphic, they do add an element of...intrigue...to a city. Hmm....

I like how two of the trees in that pic with the castle/temple are tp'd.

I like the CJ so far, keep it up! I am a big fan of the domes that you have been using and the different direction you have been approaching the whole CJ concept from. Good work!

I do agree that the amount of choice, especially in BATs can be somewhat daunting. After I re-installed SC4 this time around, I did not get back to playing it for almost two months. Largely, this was due to the fact that I am a micromanager and was considering lot choices, map choices, and all of that stuff, without actually playing the game. The easiest way for me to play SC4 is to do so with minimal planning early on and massive planning later in the game. I probably waste a lot of money and time with my approach, but I am the kind of person that can plan something for months before doing it. Remember, this is a game and it is supposed to be fun. I know I have to keep that in mind or else I would never be able to play it.

In the unlikely event the SC5 sees the light of day I really only have a few requests. 1) Tighten up the coding of the game so it is not such a resource hog. I understand that the amount of math processes required to make the advanced simulations such a NAM and whatnot work is no small task, but the game is rather bloated and has been from day one. 2) Add the option for standing water so that players can build lakes, rivers, etc. on their own without going to a mod ot help them. 3) Implement seasons into the game. I think it would be cool to see the city change over the course of the year. 4) Add in a folder setup that allows for easier sorting of customized content such as BATS. One or two BATs are no prob but when you have several hundred, it can get annoying to sort through. That is pretty much it for me. I figure the Simtropolis community can do the rest. We have for the past couple of years anywho.

Howdy all, I have a question. I have been playing this game since the first day it came out and I have no problems getting good-sized cities. But, they are usually ugly. I am trying to build a region to use in a CJ and I would like to give my city a bit more personality than the cookie cutter cities I have been churning out for over a year now. I have implemented many more BATs and customed content and I have been trying to plan out where I am going to build downtown areas and so on and so forth. The problem I keep running into is heavy industry. I have one city in particular that I would love to have no industry in, at least not the high polluting heavy variety. Now, I know that Sims will commute to other cities for jobs but how realistic is it that all of my Sims that work in that field will commute out of city to their job? Another thing I am running into is that it seems that Industrial areas are not utilizing the railroad for shipping. I have two cities connected by rail and I have a shipping railyard but nothing seems to be getting shipped via that shipping station. Any ideas? The third question I have is this, are there any things that really attract High Tech Industry to the cities? I know a high number of educational facilities helps but is there anything else? Right now, I have an above average IQ for my Sims and I have the taxes set very low for High Tech but not many companies seem to be moving in. If you can help me out with any of these problems, I would be greatly appreciatve! Thanks in advance.

My sims will happily take mass transit, I was just curious as to how many would use the system. I have now started my region over and am implementing a highway system from day one in all of my cities. It is spendy, but so far it has worked very well. More to come later!

Thanks for the responses, I have the latest NAM installed and I also am utilizing freight trainstations. The problem I have is that when I query the station, it shows that it basicaly isn't being used and I cannot for the life of me, figure out why. Either way, I think I am going to start my region over and implement some new strategies I have come up with and see if that helps. Thanks again!

I like those apartment buildings! It is crazy how different Asian apartments are from Western apartments. In the US, the building better look new, clean, and spacious or else the rent better be dirt cheap. Where I live now, looks like a Cold War era nuclear bunker and while I like my apartment, the rest of my building could use a thorough scrubbing inside and out. Anyone who has been near the Den Den Town area in Osaka will agree, the apartment buildings are kind of creepy looking. Very Soviet-esque blocks with patios on all sides so people have a place to hang laundry, much like the above apartments only not as good looking. Simply, floor after floor of tiny apartments (by Western standards) stacked on top of each other with very little consideration for asthetics.

I am trying to install a custom map for a region I have just made and the bugger is not working. I created the region, copied over the config file to the regions folder, and went back into the game, loaded the region and made sure the config loaded properly and it did. I then press ALT-SHIFT-CTRL-R and brought up the menu to load the map and when I located the map and hit ok, the game doesn't do anything. It doesn't bring up the screen that says its generating the terrain, it doesn't do anything. The game is not locked up, it just doesn't want to load maps. I have been the playing the game for a while and I am not really new at this and that is why this frustrates me so much. The only difference between maps I have previously loaded and this time is that I am playing the game on a different, newer, laptop. I do not think it is a laptop issue because the laptop exceeds even the recommended requirements for the game. Any help here would be greatly appreciated, I want to play my Simcity!

That 6x6 suburb block is great. I must say, that block makes where I live look like the ghetto. Then again, I do kind of live in the sticks.

Do you have the East Asian language pack installed on your Windows? If you install that pack, you should be able to see most Asian character sets. Just go into "Control Panel" , "Regional and Language Options", click on the "Languages" tab, and check the two boxes in the "Supplemental Language Support" box. Windows will do the rest.

As for getting some of the custom UI windows to show up in Japanese in the English games, I think you would need to edit the BAT itself and replace the Japanese with English. If you want to put Japanese characters into the English games, I am not sure how you would go about doing that. The way Windows XP does it is by added language modules to the OS, I don't think Simcity has that ability.

Cool deal, I will give it a try. I figured most of the lots off of here would be okay but I will double check to be sure. Thanks.

Its interesting to see roundabouts in use, I am from Idaho originally, and there are very few roundabouts in the state. I have noticed in my travels throughout the United States that the further East you go, the more of them you find. Oddly enough, the further East you go, the more roadside signs you start to see. Anywho, keep posting these pics, I love 'em!

I agree with you, hamsterTK, if he isn't a modeller by trade, he should be. SOMY, if you ever check in on these threads, you rock!

Pnorrell was considering what our next step should be in sorting out all of this Japanese BAT business and an idea occurred to me just now. Perhaps, we could go through the STEX and start sorting all of the Japanese BATS we DO have and maybe providing a set of links to those in a sticky or something, somewhere in this thread. We could create a sticky for buildings, rail accessories, props, seaside stuff, and parks. That would make getting at the stuff we have a much quicker process for those looking for specific items. That and if we start sorting or providing links now, it would be much quicker than if we decided to do this later on, when we have more files to deal with. That is one avenue we could start pursuing, any thoughts?

The creator of the E-Rail and Monorail stations is named Rougetsu. It means December in Japanese, which is funny because I say December a different way than that but I am going with the dictionary definition on this. Perhaps, 2ch.net simplayer can correct me if I am wrong. BTW, where are you at in Japan, 2ch.net simplayer? I live in Fukuchiyama, its about two hours away from Osaka by train. If you are in my area, maybe we could hook up sometime.