defacto123

And note that you should directly place the connector piece on top of the existing highway piece rather than demolishing it first. Otherwise, you will not be able to connect the highway back together afterwards. I did not realize it was possible to do this for a long time, and kept wondering what the purpose of an underground road below another road was if you couldn't connect the road.

I've had my cities corrupted before. Ever since then, I've been saving a backup of the entire region every day I play. It's 50 MB so it takes 20 plays to fill up 1 GB, which I feel is well worth it.

For me, the snapshot never disappears, but occasionally the traffic view gets messed up and all roads show up as black, as in the second picture. Never caused any adverse effects other than an ugly traffic view. It's probably a NAM bug, since NAM does change the regional traffic view and I've never had the problem before installing NAM.

As long as you have the demand, it's all about desirability. Unfortunately, as soon as the desirability reaches a certain level it becomes a sea of bright green and you can't tell which areas are more desirable than others even though it does make a difference for development. But the two key things that determine desirability are 1) traffic; and 2) plazas/landmarks. CO loves traffic, and it's very hard to get skyscrapers to develop in a remote part of town. Of course, we run into the chicken and egg problem here: in order to get lots of traffic, you need very dense jobs for people to commute to, but in order to create those jobs, you need lots of traffic. Fortunately, one thing you can do is spam plazas and landmarks (this is useful even if you do already have the requisite traffic). Place a large plaza here, a Faneuil Hall there... smother the entire area with plazas and landmarks. It doesn't matter if you don't plan on keeping the plazas, this is just to make the skyscrapers develop; you can always demolish them later. (Of course, this assumes you have a lot of money to burn, but if you don't then skip the landmarks. It's only a moderate improvement over plazas alone.) What if you want a skyscraper to develop but there is surrounding development you don't want to demolish? Then demolish the roads that no building is currently facing (you can do that by going to the zones view and seeing where the arrows are pointing), and replace them with small plazas or Big Bens. Rebuild them once construction has started on your desired skyscraper. Less effective than the preceding approach, but hey, it's saved me when I wanted another level 8 to grow between my Cahalane Communications and Van Prooijen Trading. An important tip: save your city before attempting any of this. Randomness is inherent to the game, and if the strategy doesn't succeed the first time, then reload the city from the last save point and try again.

Having just bought SC2013 during the 75% off sale and played it for a few days, I still have to say SC4 is the best. My ranking is now 4 > 2013 > CXL > 3k > 2k > 1 > Societies. I generally like complexity, which explains the latter half of my rankings. I guess a big part of my preference for SC4 is the transportation system, since no other game gives you as much information or control over it. SC2013 is actually quite nice, it's just that I never have enough space to build everything (and the fact that things can only be built on roads is somewhat restrictive). As for Cities XL, it would be my favorite over all the SimCities if not for a few major turnoffs: the single lot size (which makes suburban homes look unrealistically large and ugly) and the many different widths of thoroughfares, which make upgrading roads all but impossible. Funny, I'd actually claim (with a caveat) that SC4 is the best looking SimCity of all time. SC 3000 and SC 2013 look rather cartoonish to me; though the latter has 3D, when looking at it from a single angle it is still SC4 that takes the spotlight. SC4 and Cities XL are the only city sim games whose screenshots I've occasionally confused with real life (or vice versa).

I just found a fix, though it's a bit ugly. Apparently, when you first set up the region, you must claim all the cities (before starting to play one of them). Then all the cities will be playable, at least for me. I don't know what to do once the region has already been created. I simply deleted my region since I'd be losing only an hour's worth of work and can easily reproduce what I did from memory.

I am having the exact same issue and would appreciate a solution.

I second the point about taxes. The larger your city gets, the more sensitive demand becomes to taxes. Think of it this way: The tax level affects the total demand rather than the marginal demand (the one shown in the demand bar). What I mean by total demand is that if you already have 400,000 population and have +2,000 residential demand, then your total residential demand is 402,000. When your city has only 10,000 residents, a tax cut that increases demand by 1% would translate to a +100 increase. In a city of 500,000, that same tax cut would result in a +5,000 increase. It's actually sometimes frustrating in my bigger cities; often I find myself wanting to curb CO$$$ development, but when I raise the tax by the minimum 0.1%, the demand drops from +5,000 to -6,000, causing existing offices to abandon.

If you only want low-density residential zones, then simply refuse to water them. Low-density R$ and R$$ do not require water, whereas low-density R$$$ does. (All medium- and high-density development requires water.) What if you do want higher densities? Remember that typically, a development can only replace another when it has at least the same wealth and at least the same density. (I'm talking about actual buildings; of course a R$$$ building can become distressed, but the building itself is still a R$$$ building that just happens to be occupied by R$ or R$$ Sims.) So what does this mean? Medium- or high-density buildings of any wealth cannot be replaced by villas. In my personal experience, as long as the demand is there, Sims would rather build medium-density R$ or R$$ than low-density R$$$, even in an area of very high desirability.

Agreed, I generally dislike terraforming around built-up areas. What was nice (though sometimes inconvenient) about Simcity 3000 was that the only tool allowed to demolish buildings was the bulldozer; you could raise the elevation right next to a skyscraper and know that it would be safe. Now roads, civic buildings, dezoning, terraforming, and reconciling edges can all destroy buildings in the way.

They're more obstructive, and take up more space. Sometimes you want the visual impact of the bridge, but other times no.

I am trying to make an underwater rail tunnel using NAM. If it were a road, I would just plop down FLUP ramps on both sides and connect them using transparent underground network puzzle pieces going through the body of water. For rail, I've been able to find rail to underground rail transition ramps but could not find the corresponding transparent underground rail puzzle pieces. I've tried the regular FLUP puzzle pieces, but they don't work for rail. There are plenty of underground rail puzzle pieces that function correctly, but they're not transparent so it looks wrong.

In one of my cities, I currently have 28 units of garbage, and have had that for several years now. I've tried everything to get rid of it - building more incinerators, recycling centers, landfill, exporting it, etc. I've even tried demolishing all of my incinerators, letting the garbage go up into the thousands, and then rebuilding them - it comes down to 28 again. Is there any way to fix this?

I can't believe no one mentioned Benidorm, Spain (population 73,768):

@Nonny: He is trying to get LOW-density residential, not stage 8. I've noticed the same problem with my cities, where a new area just won't develop. In my experience, the best way to address this is to plop some parks in the area. Yes, the desirability map might already be green, but these parks provide an extra boost to convince people to move there.