Pinstar

I am torn, I've been starting and restarting my new region a few times to test out mods and I'm genuinely 50/50 on the CAM mod. I have not developed my regions to the extent to where I'm starting to see stage 9+ buildings... but I don't want to get that far and find that I don't like the dynamic. For those of you who have built up a CAM enabled region enough to start seeing those buildings in action...what are your thoughts? Do you think your region is better off for using the CAM? Or are those massive buildings poorly balanced and make the game either too easy or too hard? If I didn't use the CAM, I'd probably use the Industry and CS doubler to help bring their jobcounts in line from vanilla. Bonus question: If one were to do a city journal, do you think the presence of the CAM mod would help/hinder/not impact the entertainment value of said journal.

Please stop me if this mod already exists... but I have an idea for a mod and want some feedback on its viability. The idea would be: The Region (as a whole) needs food to grow. The residential demand cap would be replaced by a regional demand cap. Rather than be lifted by things like parks, hospitals and stadiums, Residential demand cap would be lifted by I-AG. Each tile occupied by an I-AG would provide X to the residential demand cap. Higher stage farms would provide more demand cap relief-per-tile than lower stage farms. The Farmer's market and State fair reward buildings, and the seaport would provide demand cap relief as well, and would be the only plopables that do so. Residential demand caps would apply equally to all three wealth levels. So if you have a demand cap of 1,000,000, you could house 1,000,000 residents of any wealth level combination. Once your population hits 1 million, demand for all three wealth levels would hit 0 until the cap was raised. Demand for I-AG would be directly tied to how close you are to bumping up against your limit, rather than how well developed or educated a city was. The closer you got to your residential demand cap, the higher I-AG demand would spike for ALL cities in the region. Commercial and other industrial demand caps would be unaffected. The Residential demand for a region would start at a decently healthy level (100k maybe?) to allow you some initial growth before having to start laying down farms. The main purpose is to help players craft more realistic regions. For every ultra-dense residential city center, you're going to need some pretty healthy acreage of farms to feed them all. Since the farms feed the entire region, they don't NEED to be located in the same plot as major city centers, allowing for the development of natural city centers, with suburbs and rural spaces.

Is there a mod that says exactly how many jobs of which wealth level a given building provides? So rather than it saying "65/67 jobs" It would say "11/12 R$ jobs" "42/43 R$$ jobs" "12/12 R$$$ jobs"

I also want to give a shout out to the maker of this fine game, Paradox Interactive. If you like this game, also look into their other recent titles...especially Crusader Kings II. (Yes it is a completely different genre of game, but does not shy away from complexity and may be of interest to the type of players who like a good complex city simulater.) I'm waiting for my bank account to recover a bit, but I'll certainly have this game on my watch list!

Another reason not to do the endless landfill/never play again gambit is that whatever city plot you designate as your hell hole... it is likely that your region will grow up and around it. You may start to find that the real estate that it sits on might be helpful to continue your region and having an area that you aren't going to touch blocks you from doing that. I personally don't like making region deals further than 1 city away. If a new city is too far from my power or garbage center...I make it a new center. This makes me make some dirty sections every few cities, which helps keep my region diverse.

Overthrew the former king of France to take the city in Crusader Kings II TNP will state their favorite Pony

I'm playing a city that has some decent sized plataus dotted around the map. I came up with an way I want to develop those without making a mess of them by trying to draw a road up to them, causing me to lose half their land as the terrain adjusts to the road. I want to create a single subway stop and surround it with pedestrian mall tiles, and have all the commercial zones up there grown off the pedestrian mall. The subway would then lead down to the main road network and have a station down there next to a bus station and car park so that sims could arrive by bus or car. My question is as follows: I know that R$$$ love to drive, but hate to take mass transit. However, the way I have it setup... you cannot reach those zones without taking the subway. Will this cause my R$$$ to be unable to work at these zones, or will they bite the bullet and take the subway to get to work since they have no other choices to complete the final leg of their journy?

Add "To make" at the end of the article title and you see what I think really happened. Yes, a gigantically complex simulation is hard to make and balance... but doesn't automatically mean the game itself will be less fun. Consitering that it came out in a half-finished state... WITH the change in design philosophy, I would immagine that a polished game with the original design would have taken several more years, something that EA wasn't willing to pay for.

How does ground rail (The vanilla stuff that industry likes to use for their freight) compare in terms of speed and capacity compared to Elevated Rail. Is that what you mean when you say "Heavy Rail"?

The original Sim City had hospitals and schools that would pop up on their own that didn't cost you anything... granted...they didn't DO anything, as the simulation hadn't become complex enough at that point to worry about health and education levels. They were just for show...and to unlock a reward building in the SNES version. I guess you could call them private?

I had a few crashes when I first installed NAM 3.1, but after doing a fresh reinstall with an updated plugin pack (the 3gb one that includes NAM, CAM, SPAM and a bunch more) I haven't had a crash yet.

Going back to the topic of ID... I find that keeping a section of ID is handy even after a city starts to mature. Whenever you zone brand new residentials, they will always start out with a very low EQ...even if you have a supurb education system. IT will take them a few years to catch up with the rest of the city. In the mean time, those uneducated workers will be looking for uneducated jobs... and having a bank of ID will keep them happy and employed without causing CS$ to build everywhere. It also keeps ID demand fulfilled, so that that burst of new uneducated workers doesn't suddenly cause ID to start growing in your I-M and I-HT sections. I like to build them next to my dirty utilities since that area is going to be a polluted hell-hole anyway.

EL trains cost less to maintain IIRC. That aspect can be huge as it isn't just the initial construction costs you are building. If you are running a line through an area where space isn't at a premium, such as a medium/low density residential suburb or maybe an industrial sector...it would be more cost-effective to have EL trains rather than subways. The benefit of EL trains is that they can become subways when they need to. So you can link a bunch of low/medium density suburbs with EL-trains and have them turn into subways when they reach the high-density downtown area...where space IS at a premium. EL rails are inferior to monorails, which are much faster but take up about the same amount of space...and ground rail, which is much cheaper AND can handle freight traffic as well as passengers at about the same speed. The main thing EL rail has going for it is its ability to turn into subways and back without passengers having to exit the rail system during their trip.

So far so good. The Commercial zones are getting regular employment. The buildings on that plateau continued to upgrade in wealth and density. On last check, 800 people were using my subway station. That sounds like pretty much all the jobs offered by the buildings up there, more or less. I also found another way around this that doesn't involve subways. Since ped malls don't deform the terrain, I run a line of it out to 1 tile away from the main road system. I place a bus stop in between the road and the ped mall. People take the bus to plateau, get off the bus station and hop on the ped mall behind it. So I can accomplish this without a dedicated subway system.

Experiment completed. I'll let the screen shot speak for itself.

I had SC4 + Rushour installed on my machine originally from the CDs. When EA's free game thing came out for those who fell for 5imCity, I got SC4: Deluxe just to have a backup version in case my disks ever became broken. However, when I bought it, it installed itself on top of my SC4 CD version...and I"ve been having some odd behaviors with my plugins since. I want to do a total rip-out uninstall and clear out every trace of SC4 from either install so I can do a totally clean re-install. Simply running the uninstaller didn't do the trick...what else am I missing?

Just as a note, running the windows uninstaller for SC4 AND clearing out all the SimCity4 folders in the documents folder did the trick. I re-installed and re-imported my stuff and everything seems to be clean now.

Banned for lack of capitalization in their username.

Just as a little self-plug in this pony-related post, I've updated my Equestria Region. A new pony, better size-scaling and now with cuitie-mark hills!

The amount of good the NAM does is worth a DLC...but unfortunately a large part of that good is mostly in the realm of bug fixes/balance changes, which should never be DLC. Here is what I would really like to see and would be more than willing to pay for in DLC 1. An interactive in-game tutorial showing me all the new NAM puzzle pieces as well as explaining the improved traffic logic. 2. The CAM mod, with a direct feed to the STEX which would auto-download/import new 'community approved' buildings as growables (And by Community approved, I mean peer reviewed to make sure that the building looks decent and that the residents/jobs provided matches the footprint and stage level of the building properly.) 3. An optional multiplayer mode that would allow SC4 regions to go to the cloud and be played in a co-op manner. The difference between this and 5imCity's online is that it would be OPTIONAL. Regions would be controlled by whomever created them. Controllers would set what mods/plugins would be used for that region and which players could build in which plots. A seperate set of plugins for region play would be loaded...so that your single-player plugins would not have to change based on what the region used.

I bring my absolute favorte joke out whenever the topic of being bilingual is talked about. This requires at least one of the people in group you are talking to know both English and a 2nd language. Me: Oh you know *foreign language* as well as English? Well I'll have you know that *I* know every single language in the world, except Greek. Bi-lingual person: Oh really? *normally with some doubt in their voice* Me: Absolutely. Go ahead! Try me! Bi-lingual person: *says something in their other language* Me: That's Greek to me! It almost always gets a chuckle out of the group.

For every city I found, I have a stated goal in mind. And that goal is not always "Fill map with elevendy billion skycrapers and max my population". How well a city fills my stated goals is how I judge how close to perfect it is. I value how good a city looks from the region view more than any of the hard and fast numbers that the charts might give me. IF your goal is to min/max your city and push the limits of your transportation networks...then by all means! That is a perfect city for you. But SimCity is really about setting your own goals.

I've found mixing I-M and I-H to be bad. The pollution from I-M (while not nearly as bad as I-D) still drops I-HT desirably. This leads to either abandonment in I-HT or distressing (not abandoned but only filling half the max jobs. If I'm going to have an area/city with my dirty utilities focused, I'll focus on I-D. If I want a polluting area but don't need dirty utilities, I'll focus on I-M there and if I want I-HT it'll get its own city to iteself, with 20% taxes on I-D and I-M to ensure neither grow there. (Once the region has enough educated workers to support a large sector of I-HT EDIT: One other use I have for I-M is as a border zone for R$. Yes, Going against the normal conventions of Sim City, I-M makes a pretty decent neighbor to R$. It employs quite a few sims (especially with the industry doubler mod which I can't live without) allowing you to divert your commuters away from your main lines of travel if you find a paritular travel corridor to be getting too congested. The pollution will spill over to the R$ but not too badly...and hey, R$ has to live somewhere.

My region is less than 10k in population, no I-HT, just I-M, I-D and some smattering of Commercials. I have a 2 city industry-Res/commercial setup with plenty of links to each other .NONE of my roads are congested at the moment. Yet... about 1/3 of my R$$$ mansions are coming up with the no job zot. None of my R$ or R$$ houses are having this problem. The only demand-altering mod I'm running is CAM...is this normal CAM behavior?