Hopkins Viorel

Is it possible to add some ramdomness to the RCI simulation within the game? As far as I know, the way this system is handled is pretty deterministic and based entirely on the actions of the player. What if some random variations, positive or negative, were applied together with the player's influence to make the game a little less predictable? Maybe a sucession of negative effetcs on Industrial-Dirt could convince the player to lower its taxes for the moment, and such. I don't know how interesting this is gameplay-wise, nor do I know if is it even possible... but I would like to throw this idea around anyway just to see your opinions

This might come off as weird but... does anybody know any tips about manually terraforming a region? By "manually", I mean using the tools within SimCity 4, no import image or anything like that: just getting into the city tiles and painting the terrain. I love painting the terrain in such a way, but things can be quite frustrating sometimes. I know about the reconcile edges feature, but I still have problems with them. For example, there are a lot of times where I would love to reconcile only one edge of the map, but the tool reconcile all four at the same time. Honestly, what I'm looking for is really only abut methods and tips from those who like to manually paint the landscape like this. I will be honest with you guys and say that the edges between the tiles is my main problem, really. Even with reconcile edges, you can kind of notice them in the regional view just by looking at the topography itself; they tend to be smoother, specially with mountains (water bodies, plains and plateus are okay, big problem really lies with altitude transitions). I already opted to work with regions composed entirely with the largest city tiles; this reduces the number of edges between cities, thus reducing the effect of this problem. But apart from this, any other artistic tip is welcomed too (how to paint better mountains or lakes, where to place forests, an interesting way to create a geological feature).