OrSpeeder

Oh, yes, the developers intended for pollution to drive away residential, but I don't tweaked pollution curves yet, I DID tweaked a bit of the amount of penalties for excessive pollution, but to get there requires a absurd amount of pollution anyway. Pollution curves have an excessive amount of values to tweak, and I don't know reasonable thresholds, I will see if using the cheats dll I can figure stuff better in that department. Currently the "proximity" that can affect a zone is: residental wealth levels, commercial wealth levels, and office wealth levels, the game current rules is that residential of the same level attract others of the same level, the intentio nis probably create for each contiguous zone a "solid" block of same wealth, commercial business and offices attract each other (ie: a business attract an office, an office attract a business). Probably with the opposite intention: create more mixed places instead of boring uniform rows of shops and then rows of skyscrapers.

As for what the police do: First, there is a variable on the crime simulator (not on the police stations) that calculate how much crime declines based on police station coverage, in vanilla game even with excessive coverage, clime only declines 50% (meaning that in vanilla you might have a case of runaway crime on poor cities, no matter how crazy you are in station dropping). I put it now to decline 97% (not 100% because there is no such thing perfect police coverage, someone always slip somewhere). As for the curves, I made that in general many things generare slighly more crime, including I put that high-EQ rich citizens still commit crimes (vanilla high-EQ of any ealth level don't commit crimes... but e know that IRL high-EQ high-wealth people for some reason insist in commit crimes even if they don't need to, so I added a tiny amount of crime, instead of zero). And made unemployment generate crime much faster, so you cannot go crazy building residential zones everyhere for their tax income and forget to provide other zones and neighbour connections. I am... still trying to fix the mansion problem My hard-mode test city I had to manually bulldoze all mansions, because after the city "got going" well, suddenly all residential zones got overran by mansions, this is a side effect of SC4 rules: buildings can only be replaced by higher density buildings OR by wealthier buildings, meaning that a low-wealth building for 3000 people can be replaced by a mansion. This CAN be disabled (the wealth replacement part) but I believe this will break the game badly instead. There are several options about desirability in relation to zone nearbyness, I intend to see if I can use that, but unfortunately, there are no such options related to industry... The problem of not having a way to tag residential undesirable near industry, is that something funny can happen: my first industrial city (it is a city saved with 800 people and 20k industrial jobs available, made to give jobs to commuters from my main city) has a tiny residential zone that is in the middle of the dirty industries and look like a slum. As soon as I provide water, they turn into mansions Thus population drops, and looks VERY silly (seriously, a bunch of mansions IN THE MIDDLE of a dirty industrial area?) So... yeah, I am still trying to figure a way to stop mansions from overunning your city, they are really annoying (because they tend to look out of place, and cause population drops when they replace tall buildings of lower wealth).

I am... "genre wandering" trying hard some genres for each time. Now I am in city building, in March 26 Pillars of Eternity will come out, and I will go back to RPG. But before this I was into Factorio, before Factorio I was playing with Stalker: Call of Pripyat, before that it was Gnomoria, before that it was a survival roguelike... Anyway, I entered the "City Builder" genre for now, and although Tropico and Anno are really good (I played them the last times I had a City Builder itch), they are... different. Sim City series (and now cities XL) has a very unique theme, and SC4 (and SC2000) are the strongest games in the genre, when regarding "current-day" cities, but I feel like SC4 could have lots of gameplay modding love. Finally, by the way, I started my own mod, and had a blast playing it... still has lots of issues to be fixed though, it is sort of wonky in some areas. But biggest changes so far: 1) Fire is "fixed", in the sense that insted of being just a nuisance that you need to click to put out, it is a real threat now, specially if your fire coverage is not enough, or underfunded... Maxis, trying to fix the problem of fires being too annoying (I guess it was their reasoning), made some retarded workarounds (most notably, fires STILL start near fire stations, player never notice because fire stations automatically put out fires with 1000% efficiency), I figured that the original programmers, like the traffic ones, knew what they were doing, and that tweaking could make fire behave like... fire. Indeed it is true, and now fire can spread, and be dangerous, in a city without fire department at all, a fire can burn your entire city down (like SC1 and 2), with realistically placed fire departments, you can put it out, but if your roads have shitty planning it might happen to the fire destroy a building or two before that. 2) Instead of taxes having a boost on easy, now they are "normal" on easy, and have penalties as you raise difficulty. 3) Mayor rating can go down, and WILL go down if you don't care for your sims properly, you cannot have a skyscraper city with zero schools and hospitals anymore. (but initial villages with dirty industry and shitty services are still possible, of course...) 4) NAM-related fixes: NAM makes all commute times become permanently short, this gave several "Free bonuses", among them mayor rating, land value and desirability, now "short commute" (ie: NAM default if your city is reasonable) don't give you a bonus, but "long commute" (ie: areas where you did exceptionally bad planning) still get a penalty. Also NAM makes traffic much easier to manage, thus again, "low traffic" stopped giving bonuses, but bad traffic give penalties. 5) Crime fixes: police now is more efficient and really stop more crime (akin to "Crime doesn't pay" mod), but I changed some crime-related curves too, and there are more crime if you have zero police, and more negative opinion because of crime. 6) Budet changes: Start with less money (including zero money on Hard, like SC2000), loans are more expensive (but take longer to pay too, otherwise hard mode would be too hard). 7) Riots and pipe bursts are easier to happen... theoretically, I never saw a pipe burst, riots need some tweaking (sometimes a riot happen right when you start the city, this is NOT supposed to happen). It is easier to control facilities budgets: Now the mininum value to avoid strikes is 75% instead of 90%, this is to make reduced budgeting a viable strategy, like it was in older SC games (instead of the only solution to always be raise your income). All these are in SImulator exemplars, and some Development exemplars, if anyone has any ideas of what else to mod, shoot... Also I won't touch traffic (I leave that to NAM), or stuff that breaks SPAM, or Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately CAM changes too many things, so it is obviously imcompatible with CAM, but probably for the best (since I believe, my mod, and CAM serve more or less the same purpose, but my mod try to keep a vanilla feeling, without introducing denser population).

I discussed this topic in many forums and chats. It always amaze me, how the current SC4 community ALWAYS assume I am talking about scenarios, or winning and losing conditions. No people, this is NOT what I am talking about, at all. What I am talking about, is that the game is very weak, in the game sense, even in the simulation sense SC4 is not that impressive, it allows you some extreme freedom in what to build, and is interesting for various reasons, but it is too easy, and gets boring too fast (Banished I thought was much worse though...), you can reach millions and millions of simoleons in 3 to 5 years, even in hard mode, and then you can do WHATEVER YOU WANT that you will NEVER have problems, there are no serious disasters or consequences for your actions, you will never run out of money, in fact I found out last night that trying to lose is more fun than trying to win, in my older cities, no matter how hard I try, I never figured how to make my mayor rating go negative, or how to make my budget get negative without resorting to unrealistic tactics (ie: building 300 schools next to each other for example...) Scenarios, like Tropico maybe, would help? Maybe yes, Tropico games are fun, but senarios are only fun if the mechanics are solid, SC4 probably would still not be that good with scenarios, in the gameplay sense (by the way, I am not saying SC4 is terrible or suck, it is still better than SC1, 3, 5 and Societies, and gave me many hours in engineering RHW and pretty parks, but it is nowhre near scratching the actual simulation game itch).

I am not sure this would work... this building bounding box is actually very tiny (it uses some heavy overhand hackery to allow multiple services in a single building... It is in-game actually many buildings) But thanks for the suggestion, I will check that tool too. EDIT: I could not make it work with PIMX, like I said, the building uses overhang hackery to its graphics, PIMX think it is really small, also I could not make PIMX put it in the category I wanted (it is just listed as "eyecandy landmark"). I went back into reader, and tried starting fresh again (ie: a file without any of my changes... specially because my changed file was crashing PIMX too), and added ONLY the demand created, without changing anything else. The good is that it indeed worked, and makes NAM interesting to watch. The bad is that it does not affect RCI in a good way (it makes RCI lists more unemployed people instead).

How I make a building have jobs? I got that really nice and shiny building from STEX, the City Central Services V3 The building looks cool, and is not too unbalanced, being very expensive to run, but one thing bugged me: A building this size should generate a insane amount of traffic, of the sort that makes NAM cry in a corner, but it does not... So I decided to put jobs on it, on the "landmark" piece. I did lots of trial and error, tutorial reading, and copying and pasting from other mods (most notably RHLandarmarks) So what I learned: First, jobs are decided by an Examplar of type building. Second, jobs can be affected by two variables: Demand Generated, and Capacity Satisfied, the second is intended RCI buildings Third, the two previous variables are affected by the building Purpose, for example I could only make Capacity Satisfied generate office buildings when the building had office as Purpuse. So, why I need help? Well, first, I noticed that demand generated, and capacity satisfied both has a funky format, and that changes a lot, yes, theoretically it is a simple list of pairs, but I saw a version of demand generated where pairs were summed (example, instead of having a pair for medium wealth, and a pair for medium amenities, it had a simple pair, where the variable that means medium wealth and medium amenities were summed into each other... Reader don't even understood it, I noticed by the number being a obvious sum). Second, I am unsure if the variables I mentioned are the only ones involved. Three, no matter how hard I try (I used both types of job creating vars, with various settings), I cannot create medium wealth jobs, only hi-wealth. Four, the only time it worked, it was only for one type of job, I wanted to know if is possible to have more than one type of job at once. Fifth, one of my attempts was making the game crash every first day of the month after the building was plopped, since it always crashed on the same day, and I noticed the game always lags on the same days, I assume it calculate specific parts of the simulation on specific days, thus I guess that I did something that broke day 1 simulation, I would like to know what Sixth, I tried using iLives building tweaker to make the jobs, but it mess-up the variables instead (example: when I tried to put CO$$ jobs the building tweaker added SEVERAL entries with the amount I wrote, not just CO$$)