ijmitchell

lol @ "Cornbread Street"

I'm having a lot of trouble not going bankrupt. I've done a couple of runs already, and each time, I fall into the following cycle: 1. I burn a large amount of my initial resources, and build my initial city. (between 1,000 and 5,000) 2. My city costs more in expenditures than I make in revenues unless I get more people to move in. 3. A surge of people move in/open businesses 4. I begin to turn a small profit of about 50-100 dollars 4. My infrastructure becomes insufficient for the current population/sim activity levels 5. I have to spend more money on more power, water, bigger roads (replace streets with roads, roads with avenues) etc... 6. Go back to step 3 and repeat. The net result is that I maybe make about 50-100 in profit over the course of 3 months, but I'm spending at least a couple of thousand in electrical and water upgrades over that same period, just to keep pace. I experience this both on Easy and on Medium difficulty. I have only the NAM mod - I'd like to keep it that way - and I use no cheats. I've tried different strategies, including both outsourcing and producing my own power, water, and garbage disposal. No matter how I build my infrastructure, everything seems to fall apart. I know not to listen to advisors, not to spoil sims with schooling, bla bla bla. I dont think it's really these things that are costing me. It seems to mainly be the one-time expenditures and infrastructure, that add up to me being broke. Help?

Are there other ways to force a certain zone orientation? Sometimes I'll have zones face one street when I want them to face the other direction (180 degrees). I press Ctrl and they turn only 90 degrees, or to some silly direction such as inwards (no road access) or something. Excluding mods, what are my other options for preventing this?

I haven't played this game in about 10 or so years... and I just randomly decided today I'd look into buying it. I'm no computer genius and I really don't know anything about... well, anything... but I am especially clueless in regards to modding and PC gaming... This is going to be the first PC game I've ever acquired (as in, purchased or downloaded), actually. Yes, in my entire life. So I have a couple questions: 1. What is the best place/method to get SimCity 4 (Deluxe), so that I can go about patching the game AND modding the game? I see it's on Steam (by the way, I didn't know what Steam was until about 2 hours ago, so go easy on me)... but Steam says I don't actually get the game, I just get access to it via the desktop application. So would I still be able to mod the game if I bought it via Steam? How good is Steam really? I only have a laptop, no desktop... and I don't always have internet. I'd like to be able to play SC4 regardless of where I was. 2. On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is successfully flushing a toilet, and 10 is building a City entirely in the maximum fast-forward setting, with no mods or cheats, without using pause, and with disasters enabled... How difficult would you say it is to get all these various mods? This includes downloading them, and putting them wherever they need to be on your computer, so that they start working. 3. I just briefly skimmed another thread and saw one of the benefits of a mod called NAM: better traffic algorithm. Could you briefly summarize some other important mods and their changes/benefits/uses, as well as where to get them? Anything else I need to know as a new player? I've skimmed both of the "New people click here" threads but granted, I didn't understand 100% of what I read. I think that's it for now ha. Thanks in advance!

lol "weattle"... I dont know why I find that name hilarious. But I do.

Wait is there really a button to shut up the advisers? I always just ignore them but I didn't know it was possible to actually silence them.

The NAM Installer itself is a massive file (850MB), and as such, it needs to be super-compressed for easy downloading (238MB). What you did is unpackaged the installer from its 7zip file. You need to run the actual installer, the actual exe file you got out of unpackaging the 7zip file. As mentioned already, you can just simply install the NAM with all of the traffic fixes (and there should be an option for it once you run the actual installer); this includes the NAM Traffic Simulator (this is the proper name; it's not called the traffic controller or traffic engine, as someone said; the term "controller" refers to something else entirely) and a set of bugfixed traffic stations (because half of the issues with the original traffic simulation actually come from the stations, and surprisingly, a lot of the stations available on the STEX aren't as bugfixed as the ones included with the NAM and in some cases can make traffic simulation even worse). lol oh... Well I feel stupid now. Thanks for the response. On a side note, that's something that should probably mentioned on the respective STEX page, and/or the various other download sites for the NAM installer, especially since those sites themselves call it the "NAM installer" when technically - and this is confirmed by your post - it should be called the "NAM installer installer." But it's all good. Thanks again, I got everything working now.

Ok I'm lost with this NAM thing. I downloaded it but I have no idea what I'm doing or what's supposed to be happening. I run the installer and then it asks where to extract to, then the meter fills, as it extracts and then thats it. I get no confirmation screen, no information, no readme, nothing. And then I get a Windows 7 dialog saying "(filename for NAM thing) may not have installed correctly" But then when I look through other threads, they mention that the NAM installer walks you through it, and that there's directions included. So why don't I see these directions or anything? How do I know if it worked?

So what exactly are you guys referring to? What happens when I press Ctrl?

Thanks guys for all the help. I'll about to go buy the game now. I guess I'll just go with Amazon, since I can't even get Steam to connect to the internet right now, and I'm not in the mood for navigating around my firewalls and router. Thanks again!