dylansan

Those grassy/dirt tiles near the rail, did you plop those? I have noticed that the rail doesn't like to construct next to those, so maybe try removing the ones close to the rail, dragging the curve, then replacing the dirt. I think what happens is, when those tiles get placed (in my case it's often the Ped malls from NAM), they sort of fix the terrain in place, so rail or other construction which needs to adjust the terrain cannot do so and fails to work. If you use tiles like that a lot, you may find you need to demolish them before constructing near them, but they should be able to be placed again afterwards.

As it turns out, it is possible to make the farm crop tiles produce income, and it's as simple as giving them a "building value" in their exemplar. I had actually tried that and given up until I found an old mod doing just that. My mistake was editing the wrong files... I can confirm that the change works consistently. Not to go too off-topic here (I'd PM you but it doesn't seem to work—am I too new a user?), but I'm curious whether it would be problematic to release a mod specifically overhauling a lot of the SPAM mod, considering I wouldn't have any permission to use or share the work done by others to create it. I mean I know it's not being supported so it's unlikely to ever get any updates otherwise, but I don't want to "steal" anything, so to speak...

This section of land has filled out nicely with farms and villages. Soon the county will begin plans to plat a town just west of here, to serve as the county seat and make room for the growing population.

I definitely like the change to these colors. It appears that, with black text on these backgrounds, all these colors have a contrast ratio above 10:1, well above the 4.5:1 standard for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. (It also reminds me of rainbow sherbet, which has me craving some sugar)

Haha, I can tell you're using SPAM. Do the query sound effects ever start to bug you? I'm not sure how much more I can tolerate the distorted cries of "E I E I Ooooooo" I just noticed the "Rubbarb" mistake yesterday, too. SPAM is great but there's a lot that could be improved. One thing that might be helpful to know (if it hasn't already been mentioned) is that while farm buildings and fields all provide jobs, only the buildings themselves produce any tax income. I believe this is true with or without SPAM. It doesn't look like you're having any issues with money but it's a further piece of the strategy puzzle when it comes to farming.

Thanks @CorinaMarie for the kind words and the excellent example images. I wanted to ask you, now that I think of it: when I created the mod, I copied Ltext files from your mod and used "generate new instance" in iReader on all of them. I would think with how few Data View Mods there are using the same Type and Group, it's unlikely there would be any conflict with anything, but I'm curious if I should pick specific Instance ids that I know are unused to avoid any future issues. I'm not sure how iReader generates things but I can't imagine it knows what values have already been used not only in SC4 but in other mods as well. Also, with the amount of high EQ residents you have, do you ever run into issues with Agriculture demand being too low to expand your farmland? From what I understand, only EQ1 Sims of R$ or R$$ wealth generate any demand for farms, at least in the vanilla game (according to the Prima Guide). I've reduced the effect of education buildings in my game for that among other reasons. That way it requires a lot more effort to get fully educated Sims, and hopefully there will be more variety of EQ levels across cities/regions.

This is a really cool idea for a mod and I look forward to seeing how it develops. Total realism is a difficult goal, but anything that creates interesting strategy as far as building choices and placement sounds like fun for me. I wanted to ask if you were aware of the SPAM irrigation canal mod, which includes a water wheel as a small power supplier (as well as a windmill-based water pump, and a small water treatment tile). I'm curious whether you think those could be made to fit with AMPS with some overrides to change the behavior if necessary. I'd like to try using AMPS at some point in the future, but I'd like to be able to continue using the irrigation canals even if the three included utilities are changed to match.

My avatar is indeed Pluto! Just splashed with some color for the heck of it. Right now I'm trying to reconcile the massive number of farming jobs created by SPAM with the reduced farming demand dictated by CAM. (I don't have CAM installed per-se but I'm using some of it's exemplars to try and get some better balance... I'm going to spend a lot of time tweaking lots of pieces from lots of mods before I'm happy.)

Oops! My bad. I posted an updated pic in that thread and had trouble removing the original picture from it, so I deleted the attachment altogether. I forgot I posted it here! Thanks for attaching the pic!

I've been working on some Data View mods, mostly for my own sake while I mess with some balance stuff, but I figured the clearer information could be useful for anyone, so I want to share them. The Education Data View is the most usable of them at the moment, but before I upload it to the STEX, I wanted to get some feedback to make it as usable as possible. Education Data View The goal here is to visually differentiate the four EQ ranges that sims can have, which are used by the game to determine what kinds of jobs they will demand. For example, EQ1 R$$ sims demand Dirty and Manufacturing Industry, while EQ4 R$$ sims demand High Tech. It's important to be aware of these effects, as educating your sims can completely change the demand for jobs. It can be useful to strategically avoid educating areas of sims so that they will continue to work in the existing industries and businesses. Color scheme: Red/Orange: EQ1 Yellow: EQ2 Green: EQ3 Blue: EQ4 Purple: Maximum Education (200) Colors are inspired/borrowed from Cori's Parks Aura, for the sake of consistency. Here's a sample screenshot. And here's the .dat: dylansan_DataView_EQ_0.1.dat dylansan_DataView_EQ_0.2.dat Feel free to try it out and share your thoughts and feedback. I expect to tweak the colors a bit to make the boundaries more obvious. A colorblind-accessible version is theoretically possible but I'm not sure how well I could create four distinct color gradients that don't overlap at all.

Here's a sample of the Education DataView I've been working on, to help differentiate between the four EQ levels used by the game to determine job demand.

Hello everyone! I've been a fan of city building games since around SimCity 3000, and I remember coming across Simtropolis around the time of Cities XL, and seeing a huge community who were doing pretty amazing things in SimCity 4. I've started playing SC4 again and taken a huge interest in it. After installing NAM and other mods, I've been digging into modding in order to understand the game better and to modify it for my purposes. I think there is a lot of room for improving the balance of things like desirability, for example the effects of land value, parks, etc. In my digging I've come across some weird things, including what may be an overlooked bug. For the sake of helping understand what's going on in the game I've also made a couple of Data View mods that I hope to share as I expect they might be helpful. As far as actually playing the game, I guess I aim for something between realism and efficient strategy. I whiz around google maps to get a better understanding of how cities and towns are arranged. I've also been inspired by the idea of Transect-based zoning, and I've roughly translated the SmartCode guidelines into a more appropriate SimCity scale. My current city is slowly growing on a map of Cathlamet, Washington, which is a challenging place for expansion. After a few false starts I've been going slow and trying to think through things before doing any large construction. I want to preserve some rural landscape even when the city starts getting more dense, and I've gotten a lot of inspiration from some of @CorinaMarie's farm-centric regions. Anyway, I'd like to share some of what I work on, and hopefully some of you enjoy it, as I've enjoyed seeing what others do in these games. I look forward to talking with you all!

(I wasn't able to find any information or discussion about this, so if you know of anything, please point me in that direction) According to the Prima Guide for SC4, proximity to certain buildings has a desirability effect for each developer type. For example, Commercial Service has a desirability penalty if far from Offices or Residents of the same wealth level. This concept is supported by the game data itself. In each developer exemplar, there are the following properties: Proximity Effect:R$ Proximity Effect:R$$ Proximity Effect:R$$$ Proximity Effect:Co$$ Proximity Effect:Co$$$ For Commercial Service $$ for example, the R$$ proximity effect is assigned value pairs from 0,0 up to 255,-20. This implies that if R$$ buildings are very close, there will be no desirability impact, but if they are far away, there could be up to a -20 desirability penalty. Similar values are assigned for the Co$$ effect, with a maximum penalty of -10. However, while looking into all the desirability factors in an attempt to balance things, I noticed that these values never seem to matter. Here's a snippet of a Query.txt from a Cs$ building. ... | Desirability equation for Cs$ | desirability = base value: 35 | + land value effect, f(value: 1): 4 | + slope effect, f(value: 3.0): 0 | + R$ proximity effect, f(0): 0 | + R$$ proximity effect, f(0): 0 | + R$$$ proximity effect, f(0): 0 | + Co$$ proximity effect, f(0): 0 | + Co$$$ proximity effect, f(0): 0 ... Notice that all the proximity effects are zero, and they are all calculated from f(0), implying the game is calculating the distance to each of these types as 0. In reality, the only R$ buildings are across the map, and there are no Co buildings at all. In fact, in every query I've ever taken, I've never seen the calculation do anything but f(0). For residential buildings, this results in an actual desirability effect: +5 for being near residents of the same wealth, and -5 for being near each of the other wealth levels. The net effect is -5 for every residential building no matter where it is or who is located nearby. I considered whether this could be related to the NAM, as I know that affects calculations of distance, but even after removing all my plugins, I get the same results. All proximity effects seem to calculate proximity as zero, making the effect totally meaningless. Can anyone help me confirm that this is the case, or offer counter evidence that shows this value does actually do something? I like this concept in theory and I would even like to try strengthening it to require more strategy when zoning. But if it doesn't work at all then there's nothing to strengthen.