soldyne

I have been experimenting with mass transit for many months now and I must say that subway is by far the best option. it is expensive to lay down a decent network, but once it is up and running it will be most highly used form of transit (perhaps second to car) in your city. I have built cities with rail, monorail, subway, bus, highway and everything else I can find and subway always beats them all, even monorail, for useage. what makes subway the best IMHO is that all the subway line is underground on its own system. It so great that it does not even compete with the water pipes for space. with rail and monorail you need to use up valuable realestate on the surface and that can cause lots of planning problems. also, subway lines can make 90 degree turns (although this does not happen in real life, the game says its ok, so its ok with me). monorail and rail need more space to make turns which makes intersections take more space. I dont want to say that rail is not good. I use it extensively in my industrial areas and those residential neighbors which feed the industrial demand. when working with industry rail serves two goals; moving commuters and moving freight which makes it more useful than subway (it is also really cheap). I have never had much luck with monorail. so many people use subway in city that monorail simply gets neglected. It could be my monorail design but, like rail, it is hard to work with sometimes as it is all above ground. If you want to use rail then I sugest learing how to make tunnels with hole digging lots (or do it by hand either way). making tunnels will save space but can be a pain in the neck when you need to come above ground to service a station. if you have little experience wth mass transit then start with bus as it will use your already placed road system and then add in subway. and thats my 2 cents!

drat, I was afraid of that. I guess I will have to ban beaches in my city. at least jeronjis seawalls look good. I would like to use beaches and only take pics in city view, but My CJ is about the entire region and I like to take region shots for every update. I guess the in story explaination would be that the waters are generally too cold and no one really wants to go to a cold beach. thanks for the replies, I guess I will uninstall the beaches too since I no longer have a use for them...

well since this topic was doing well before and I have some more farmland from Newtopia Valley ,I shall revive this picturesque topic with some pics of Timber Vale: http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/1601/timbervale6lf.jpg align=baseline> http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/1900/downtowntimbervale3sh.jpg align=baseline> http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/5620/newtopiavalleycurrent6pn.jpg align=baseline>

nice pic and good post now the question is what are commute times like? I am certain that if your city starts to grow more and you have medium or high density zoning you will see your mass transit system start to make a profit. In my 250k carless city my transit system was making 4k profit every month.

in the modding section there is a file called the Network Addon Modification. this is well known as the NAM. when you install the NAM it will give you options for commute time mods, transit capacity mods, and transit speed mods. as well as a bunch of other stuff. With that said. you really dont need to use any commute time mods if your city has a sufficient mass transit system. as a quick suggestion start with buses and then put in a subway. bus and subway seem to be the best two mass transit systems IMO. I have even built cities where more people took the subway than drove to work. if you still have trouble with commute times then go ahead and try the commute mods.

wow, I have never even seen a riot. try raising education and you should have less crime. lol, I guess your rioters were really serious about the poor conditions in your city. perhaps they broke the barricade because they convinced the police officer about thier side of things!

what you are refering to is called making a mosaic. mosaics take some practice but here are a few tips. before taking pics in game you should set your graphics and game settings to the highest quality. also make sure that variable speed automata is on. this will make all the moving things like pedestrians and cars stop moving when you put the game on pause. now put the game on pause. this is where it gets tricky. you should try and select a spot as an anchor spot. put one corner of the camera square (say the bottom left corner) at this spot. take your pic. when you go to take your second pic first make sure it is the same size as the first. then place (in this example) the top left corner of the camera square at the anchor spot. the trick is not to get more a few pixels of over lap. any overlap may be noticeable. when you go to post your pics just post them one right after the other. there should be no vertical border so the pics should run right together. if your pictures have little to no overlapping then they should look like one long pic. remember to host off site and make the individual pics no bigger than 800x600. good luck. like I said this will take some practice. but when you are done it will look great. post us some test shots so we can see how you are doing.

Unfortunately Newtopia Valley is still young and struggling to become financially stable and we are not able to compete this year. I am not even sure how this SimOlympics even works. what are the entry qualifications? I guess I will have to keep watching to find out. this sounds very facinating.

yes it is possible for commercial to develop facing a Ped Mall. I am pretty sure that was the whole point of developing the Ped Mall tiles in the first place, so we could create malls of shops for pedestrians only. ped mall tiles are specifically for commercial. you cant develop res (or industry i think) facing a ped mall tile. with that said you can build your city with all your commercial facing ped mall tiles and use subway stations to get your sims to work. I have even made a 250k population city which is nearly carless. yep only 60 people acutally use their car to get work in my city. all commercial faces a ped mall and industry is connected by train and bus. I can post pics if you dont believe me but it can be done.

I dont show utility buildings specifically in my shots of Newtopia Valley because everyone already knows what they look like. the point of the CJ is to show new and unique things not common everyday things. if someone made a new lot or BAT for a power plant or water pump then I am sure they would show case it in a CJ. <edit> a few of my shots do have coal plants but they were wide angle shots and so it got a picture of a lot of stuff </edit>

the reason you dont get skyscrappers till 100k pop is because that is exactly the way the game was programmed to work. it is called stage caps and is a fundamental part of SC4 game play. the higher your population the more big buildings you can have. Think about it for a second. if your population is only 5k you cant really have tall sky scrappers since each sky scrapper can hold 3k-5k people. your entire city would be in a single building! starting a new region is the most difficult thing to do IMO. one way to lower pollution for ID is to build a neighbor city next to your main city and have all the ID buildings in that new city. you dont need to have all three types of zones in every city. the sims are able to commute to neighbors to get work just as easily as driving down the street. some quick tips are: export ID and IM to a neighbor city. start with education early to increase commercial and IHT demand. zone out before zoning up. you dont need farms. only build farms in neighbors or if you really want to. read my post on money saving tips hope that helps and dont give up!

I would like to chime in and give my two cents (and a few duckies ) about downloads and plugins from the STEX. I have nearly 1GB of plugins that I use. Whenever I get some new buildings I always try to find a way of making a new city and testing the buildings before I put them to use in an important city. with that said I would like to suggest some safe BATers which have given me no trouble and who really are concerned about the game quality of the buildings they make: simgoober BSC team members Dusktrooper J Myers Deadwood Gascooker SFBT Pegasus (PEG) the NAM this is by no means a complete list of excellent BATers (or mods) but this should allow you to find enough bats and lots to get your cities fairly diversified with little negative impact. I would also suggest only downloading bats and lots from the last two years. much earlier than that and the BATers were not yet aware of the problems that the lot editor was causing. do a search for those names and you should be fine.

Well I already posted to similar topic but it appears that this topic came first (and the other one was closed by a moderator). so I will post my pics here as well. These pics all come from a city I created to be entirely R$. 130k R$ sims all working in ID and IM. no schools, no police. everyone is working so hard they are too tired to commit crimes! you can see more pics like this in my city journal, Newtopia Valley : http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/9125/pppsoutheast4er.jpg align=baseline> http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/6848/pppnortheast3hm.jpg align=baseline> http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/3183/pppsouthwest3tf.jpg align=baseline> http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/2434/pppnorthwest5yi.jpg align=baseline> http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/3504/pppclose6oe.jpg align=baseline> its really not that bad of a city. low pollution, no garbage, zoo, majory league staduim and lots of good jobs. hope you like em.

I never need to use them. just put your pumps in a non polluted area and you never have to worry about it. if the pollution does not creep into your pumping stations they will never get clogged. I usually put pumps on the oppisit side of the map from the power stations (the polluting ones anyway) and give my pumps their own wind power station. I have never had problem with water since. you could even make a neighbor deal for water and not worry about it all.

isnt there already a topic like this somewhere? anyway, my highest pop is 500k in a large map. I am still learning....traffic is my bane. but I have some new ideas that should help with that.

I think the best thing to concentrate on would be RAM and lots of it. about 1GB should be good if you plan on downloading a lot of plugins. The game has to load all your plugins into memory so the more memory you have the better. the next thing you want is processor power and then graphics card. I say this because even though there are alot of graphics in the game most of the power of SimCity is what is going on behind the scenes. it has to do so many calculations about so many different things especially traffic, education, health, water, power, desirability, demand, it boggles the mind. I just built my PC not too long ago and I have: 2GB RAM 3000+ AMD 64 processor (OCed to 2.0 GHz) EVGA Nvidia 6800GT SLI graphics card (I also play City of Heroes and City of Villians, those games have a lot of graphics demand) I play with the NAM, better pathfinding and all my settings on high with about 1GB of plugins. it takes about two minutes to load the game but it plays really smooth. even though graphics is not a priority DO NOT get an integrated video card with shared memory. shared memory means that the graphics card will use some of you precious RAM as its own. this is bad. it is ok for PCs that are not game machines, but you need something better than that. hope that helps. <edit> wow that is funny! when I clicked to reply to this topic there were no replies. when I submitted there were like 4 people ahead of me. talk about timming </edit>

Date: 12/30/2005 12:57:07 AM Author: hamsterTK yeah, that happens a lot. Its even funnier when they do that in a cul de sac... quote> ask and ye shall recieve... So who's idea was it to play follow the leader any way? http://img376.imageshack.us/img376/1050/followtheleader4wj.jpg align=baseline> this went on for about 10 game years i think. good gas mileage on those cars!

an interesting experiment. If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion though: you can reduce maintenance costs and increase revunue if you zone over the power lines with commercial or residential. zones will transmit power just like power lines and will eventually generate money for you. of course, if your design is part of the experiment then disregaurd this suggestion. also, if you have not already done this yet, you can lower the maintenance costs on the power station. you dont need all 6000 mega watts of power for such a small city. also, you can put in an incinerator and reduce the monthy costs to 0. it will still burn garbage but produce no power. it is a free garbage disposal with some pollution. I do it all the time. good luck and I will certainly keep checking in to see the updates.

Nardo69 has some good advice. I would like to add to that advice and perhaps reitterate some of it as well. Before I do I would like to say, Welcome to Simtropolis! I woud like to say that SC4 is one of the most complicated city building simulations which ever graced our presence. with that said, dont take any of our advice as being negative in anyway. many of us here on Simtrop have been playing the game so long that complicated ideas like laying out mass transit and playing regionally have become second nature. You are doing well to have a population of 80k and your problems are common to beginners. this is good news for you as the answers are easy to come by. 1. you definately need mass transit. start by placing a bunch of bus stops at every other corner. make absolutely sure that you have bus stops in both the residential and job zones (commercial and industry). a sim can only enter a job building as a pedestrian or a car. if they walk to the bus stop from home then they will need a bus stop at work to get off at. this is true for all mass transit and basic transit systems. this is what nardo meant about your avenue. if the avenue does not connect residential with jobs then it is just eye candy and serves no purpous. when the bus stops are in place, start saving a bunch of money and begin making a subway network. in my experiences with all forms of mass transit subway is by far the most used by the sims. it is also one of the fastest and the most expensive, but the savings on commute time is well worth it. dont go crazy with mass transit though until you understand the mechanics of the game more. subway and bus are your two best options to start with. 2. parks, parks, parks. one the newer concepts in SC4 is the idea of demand caps. your city will only grow to a certain size regaurless of desireablility or land value if you have no demand cap relief. relief is different for each developer type; residential want parks and recreation; commercial wants neighbor connections with transit and industry wants short frieght trips out of town. the two best things to use are the large flower garden and the large plaza. both have decent demand cap relief for a small city and they give great desireability too. the two best residential demand cap relievers are rewards, the minor and major league stadium. with both of those you can build a city up to about 500k before your demand starts to dwindle again. 3. industry. again nardo is correct when he talks about sims not all wanting to work in the same place. in SC4 you dont just have sims walking around you have low, medium and high wealth sims all at different levels of education. there are actually about 12 different combinations of sims in any given city and each one demands a different type of job. your R$ sims will mostly demand Industrial Dirty (ID) for low education and Industrial Manufacturing (IM) for higher education, your R$$ sims will mostly demand IM (at low to moderate education) and Industrial High Tech( IHT) for higher education. The R$$$ sims demand a little IHT but mostly like CO$$ and CO$$$ (business is where the money is at). This is where region play comes in. you dont have to have industry in your city at all. you can make a nieghbor city which has all your industry and then the residential sims who wish to work there can commute (assuming you have sufficient connections). I like to make one neighbor with ID and IM and a seperate neighbor with IHT. IHT has the same desirability factors as Residential which means no pollution and lots of parks. 4. Zoning advice. for your city size as it is dont zone for High Density yet. I would stay at medium and low density for a while. you can actually make more tax money per sim with lower density than higher density. and please DO NOT CONFUSE density zoning with sim wealth level. many new people to the game confuse the two and they have nothing to do with each other. a high wealth sim can easily build in a low density zone just as a low wealth sim can live in a high density zone. density determines the size and capacity of the building not the wealth level that lives there. 5. Civic coverage. your hospitals seem to be doing well. all the red you see in the map is actually caused by all the abandonment you are getting. those two things dont seem to relate but they do. when a building abandons all the sims move away. when new sims move back in thier health and education stats are all reset to 0. so when you have a section of town which is constantly abandoning due to commute time (or because they dont have the proper job type to work in) that section will always show up as red when looking at health or education. the first goal is to stabalize your region, and then it just takes time to get everyone into the green. I have so much more advice to tell you. I love to share my experiences with new players (and old alike). but most of this advice and much more can actually be found in the Omnibus section right here on Simtrop. there are a ton of guides written by people on this site full of lots of great info. just keep playing the game. dont give up. infact dont be afraid to start multiple cities and experiment. experimenting is how I learned about the game. good luck and let us know if any of this helped.

very impressive looking region. nice job. I am glad our comments were helpful.

I used to make my goal to build large cities as big as I could get them. I feel that big cities are just one of the many goals that a player can make in the game. for my CJ, Newtopia Valley , I am trying to concentrate on realism. right now it is just a bunch of farm land with some industry moving in. no high density anywhere. I do plan on getting some high density areas when I start working on the downtown area though. I also like to build large cities as test cities when I test out new mass transit designs. If a large city can handle the design then any size can.

to take a screen shot of graphs and charts press and hold CTRL-SHIFT-S on the key board and the camera square will come up. then you can resize it with space bar and take pics of menus, charts, graphs, and route querys. hope that helps. took me a while to figure out too.

Date: 12/29/2005 5:42:15 PM Author: Elegnaim Hey, Dweller. In my game, non-contiguous segments of road don't count as connected. That is to say, if I have to stretches of road and build res zones on both, if the roads aren't connected, none of the residential zones register having road connections. What're you doing different :| I'm assuming you have some sort of mass transit layout going, but, er... also, how did you generate such a high commerce demand so fast O_o My commerce demand usually peters out around three buildings, in the beginning. quote> I assume you are addressing me. my name here is Soldyne. Dweller is my rank given to me by Simtropolis for having 200 posts (or something like that). simple mistake I guess. anyway, what you say is true if the road with res is not somehow connected to jobs in anyway. if you look closely at my previous pics further up on this thread you can see that I use a bus station to bridge the gap between the streets with res and the streets with industry. the bus station is considered to be a transit enabled lot which allows sims to use it to get to work. but in order to get to work they have to pass the bus station thus turning them all into buses. about commercial demand. I dont know what you mean by generate such a high commerce demand so fast. the city I was talking about was nearly 100 game years old. it is true that commercial demand is very slow in the beginning. in a new city and new region you need to concentrate on industry first, and then raise education and then your commercial demand with take off. I would say more but this thread is about carless cities and using ped mall tiles and I dont want to get off topic. if anyone wants some pics and details about my 250k carless city just ask.