Robotica

Wow this is amazing, truly inspirational. When I make cities in SC4 they look so boring and dull until I tediously paint them with flora and plops. I see so much of the items I have sitting in my library perfectly drawn into your pieces here I am so jealous! It really makes me want to open SC4 back up and work on something... But, as of lately I have been feeling meh about it, and really no matter what I do I can't get my cities to look AWESOME like this! So jelly!!!

I use oil in just about all of my cities, as coal just isn't enough. I never have problem with the costs, as it seems cheaper than running 5 coal plants to equal 2 oil.

Just my 2 cents.... Now forgive me if you have done some of these already, but it's hard to tell from your pics... First off, and obviously, make sure you have a good, functioning mass transit system in place. Make sure that whaever transit system you have in this tile you also have in all the other tiles in the region as well. Also make sure that you are using ALL of the transit options, not just one of two of them. As mentioned above though, avenue placement and connections is key. Also having good intersections is quite helpful but isn't so effective without one way roads. I just about finished a city this morning that is a tourism, gambling city with around 300k citizens and all HD buildings. The traffic is massive at certain points of the day and honestly I don't think there is much you can do about rush hour traffic, but following the tips that Trooth mentioned above, I am able to have the city manage the traffic fairly well. Really it's all about placement. Making sure that the areas where congestion does occur doesn't effectively destroy your city. For example in my tourist gambling city I have the whole area sectioned off to where all the traffic it makes is totally away from all the jobs, industry and services, so when traffic get's hectic during rush hour the city can still function properly. Sims don't loose their jobs, and freight can still get shipped around. If you do something like place the heart of the traffic at the center of your town (pretty much like in your pictures I believe) you are going to have issues because the traffic has to filter out through your whole city, rather than being forced to be in cetain area. This is really something you learn more or less from practice and figuring things out from experience. Best of luck to you, there are tons of tips online about combating traffic.

If you need freight, you can get it from the trade depot. If traffic from the trucks is a problem, you can plop the advanced depot and use it's rail connection and cargo ship for importing/exporting freight. Just make sure that your Industry city has one as well so that it can get it out of the I city and into your RC city. That's probably the best way, but even then it's not perfect. I really don't believe that cities are intended to be made like that. This game isn't really intended for solo regional support. Instead, it's supposed to be each city is run by a different player, and because of that each city needs to have all th essentials like RCI and what not. even sharing resources like water and power don't work very well, and if you have let's say 3 or 4 large cities drawing those resources from a central hub, you will have quite a lot of issues. But hey, give it a shot, could be I am missing something.

Nice city! Now, the intersection could use a little work. What you have there is almost like a clover stack, but since we don't have one way roads it's not quite the same idea. In my cities I usually run avenue around the edges, and where the avenue from the entrance and the avenue from my outline meet up I usually make a half clover stack intersection. Rather than have the 2 avenues intersect, I run one stretch a single notch above ground (as if you were making a bridge) just enough so that it's still attached to the ground but obviously raised. Then I take what would be the intersecting avenue and run it a few notches down (as if I was making a tunnel) and the road will usually form a tunnel under the raised avenue. Then, I take the raised avenue and bulldoze it and lay flat avenue back in its place so that it's no longer raised. Now you have a good starting point to make the intersection. Next, because makinjg a real clover stack without one way roads is impossible, and because laying the roads in a cloverstack style doesn't really work properly, I make a half stack which works okay. This is basically connecting the intersecting avenues by two roads. Imagine the intersecting avenues in 4 parts just like the planet. There are the western, northern, eastern and southern sections of the intersection, which basically forms a + sign, but remember the two roads are not actually intersecting they are on top each other. So, it's basically just connecting the west and southern avenues by a road, and the north and east sections by another road. This works well because the connections are fairly long, enabling a good bit of traffic to get backed up in it before it causes any backup to the main avenue. Also, my main avenue always only has a few connections. This makes for a lot less traffic on the main intersections. Ill usually never have more than 2 entrances/exists on any given stretch of avenue, and I typically try and avoid zoning/plopping anything on the avenue itself. So, to be honest, I don't know how people have success with anything other than a grid layout. The tiles are so small, ploppables are so big and the size of HD buildings require so much space that I have the best success from grid layouts as they maximize space, maximize traffic flow options and maximize your chances of having all HD buildings. Just have to do like mentioned above, and make sure you don't connect everything, because that is how your city get's congested.

First off, Cities XL would probably be my preferred city builder right now if it ran properly. Apparently the game was written originally in LUA and rather than being rebuilt in an appropriate development environment, they just continue to patch up the current engine... The problem though is that they are not able to fix the massive memory leeks, like ever, so it will never work properly. It's great for smaller type cities, but as soon as you get a decent sized city going you have to restart the game every 10 minutes or your system drops to like 5fps and it becomes unbearable. However, it is a great game, and basically has all the features that this game left out (large maps, realism, modding, offline mode, etc). But, in a lot of ways, I somewhat prefer the look of the new SC. Now, about map sizes. It's true, you can't really build a big, immersive city in this current installment of SC. Which really sucks, because as we all know, once you make a handful of cities you have just about done everything there is to do in the game and there is no room left to build onto any of your existing cities. There are no real comsetic features apart from some parks and the trees along the road, so after you layout all your roads and have all your RCI developed the tile is finished and there is nothing left you can do. No fine tuning, cosmetic additions, or anything really... It's basically game over, and all your left with is a boring simulation of agents moving around on the screen... It really sucks because at that point all you have left to do is either stare aimlessly at the screen and watch the agents roam around, or start a new tile and build the same exact city all over again but only slightlty different... Or with a different "specialization" which is nothing more than a few different ploppables. So yea, the small regions and lack of deep customization really, REALLY put a major drag on this game... But even still, I love it, and I love what this game COULD be. In a lot of ways SC4 is boring, as it's regions can be a bit too expansive and the building aspect becomes rather tedious (especially when building highways, (RHW I am looking at you)). Usually I will play SC5 for a while, make a region of identical cities and get bored with the lack of customization so I will then go start playing SC4. But, then in SC4 I spend a week building just a quarter of a region and I get tired or the tedious boring and rather sloppy nature of SC4. Not to mention the cities in SC5 do look drastically nicer, even if they are not realistic. but yea, just my story

There is no fix to commuting, so there is no real solution for single player regional play like I had been expecting in the upcoming patch. The only regional suppor that this patch offers is for the GW, and to be honest the GW is my least favorite thing about the game because it is so incredibly detached from being anyting custom or unique to my city. Every GW looks the same for every city, so really the GW is something I rarely even bother with. But hey, this new SC isn't about making expansive awesome cities, its about making a tiny little village in an hour with 4 other peple online all doing the samething. All building the same exact little city, with all the same things, only each city has a different ploppable or two... wooww....

Greetings everyone, I would really like to get some insight into you guys's opinion on terrain and maps. Generally I find my maps look nicer when developing on flat land, and if not flat then really smooth and very little variation in elevation. Unfortunately this has the side-effect of looking really boring, and also somewhat unrealistic. I have been working on some maps that have quite dynamic terrain, and while the maps are super beautiful and look very real, the roads are really difficult to work with (especially with a restrictive slop mod) and I usually end up flattening the area I intend to work on. So, what are you guys's opinions? Do you build on rough terrains or do you always flatten the land? If you work with non flat terrain, how do you get your development to look nice and smooth?

Greetings everyone, I am hoping to get a little bit of help finding a mod. I hope this isn't a silly question as I am still fairly new to SC4 and to be more specific modding of SC4. I am running the latest NAM and a handful of other plugins, textures, etc so I have definitely gotten the hang of finding and installing mods. The one specific mod I am looking for shows a data overlay of the traffic flow. I'm not sure that it's a data overlay or what exactly, but it puts arrows on all the streets to display the direction of traffic on that road. How can I get this? is this part of NAM or a separate mod? I have done some searching, but I don't know what it's called to search for. I have seen it on a few tutorials and SC4 vids, so I know it's out there And, on a side note, if you have any suggestions for making the game look better or more realistic with either mods, textures or whatever, I would love to hear them. Thanks!

Great responses guys! Its pretty clear that this is a very opinionated subject, some people will like it one way, others another. But it is good to hear what you guys think because for me this is one of my biggest sticking points. I constantly go between working on flat maps and getting bored to working on rough maps getting annoyed. Terring your pics are much appreciated. The one you posted with the road pieces spotted around, that looks like a good idea for somewhat leveling a map while not just flattening the whole thing. So, for you guys who do work on rough terrains, what are some examples of things to keep in mind? Any tricks of the trade like Terring posted? Also the idea about laying out the track first is also a good one I might have to give that a try. Which slope mods do you guys use? Im using one by someone whos name starts with an E I believe, its the smoothest option in their package... Im not at my house to look and see, but its super restrictive, but super smooth and looks great. But, are there good slope mods for rough terrain? Also, do any of you know of a good map for working with rough terrain? One of my biggest issues with working on these rough terrains is that since a lot of them are scanned in maps or whatever, their landscape does not really match up to the SC4 angles. So, when doing something like working on the edge of a shore or whatever, it may work out where I can't get the road on an angle to match the angle of the terrain, and you get this terrible uneven looking layout with your roads that just look silly. So, I feel like if there were a terrain made where it utilized the same angles as SC4 it would be highly beneficial. But I don't really see any maps like this exactly. Im not even sure if you guys know what I am talking about lol. Anyways, thanks again, great responses so far!

Thanks so much for the help guys! What I was looking for was the pathfinding options on the extra cheats.dll file. Funny enough I already had that mod installed, I probably should of done a bit more research first Anyways, thanks again guys.

Thanks so much for this! I'm pretty new to SC4 and I have been wondering how people make cities with flora like this, I knew it had to be a mod of some kind but I wasn't sure what. Anyways, I installed all the mods you linked I am well on my way to painting a beautiful city. Thanks again.