kentsfield14

Thank you all for the replies! It sounds like I will need to use NAM at some point so I guess I'll just stick it out for now. Though I have heard of people successfully building large cities without it. Hmmm... I find that hard to believe. If road capacities suddenly go from 1200 to 12,000 and congestion problems can be ignored until much later as a result, I'd say that's a prime example of disrupting game balance. I'm not really so much interested in building a city as I am playing a game, and I feel like the capacities and such were balanced in a way that forces the player to put thought into their transit networks in order to succeed with a larger city. The idea that an external addon makes this mechanic easier/ignorable feels almost like cheating to me. That's my concern.

Hello all, I picked up SimCity 4 on Steam recently and have been enjoying it a lot. Initially I had a lot of problems with traffic because I didn't know what I was doing, but after doing a bit of research I was able to allieveate most of these. One thing I noticed while I was looking around the web is that everyone seemed to highly recommend getting NAM because it made the traffic simulator much better. So I got it, and installed just the traffic simulator (want to become more familiar with the base game before diving into the other mods.) I made it a point to put it on the Classic setting because I do not wish to disrupt the game balance. Pretty much right away I noticed that NAM made traffic a lot easier to manage. This was nice at first, but soon I found my myself disappointed that the challenges of traffic management I was enjoying previously seemed to be no more. Traffic certainly behaves more realistically with NAM, but it also makes the game feel less "game-y." It feels like I can just connect all the roads to each other and let the sims do their thing, rather than having to guide them with a well thought-out network. Now, I haven't gotten very far at all, my biggest city is only about 10,000 people, so maybe I'm missing something here and if I am please show me. My question is, is it possible to proceed far into the game with the vanilla traffic simulator? And if so, is there any other reason to use NAM if I'm enjoying the vanilla simulator?