Sim City 4

RakuraiTenjin

RakuraiTenjin

Tank
Joined
Jul 17, 2003
Messages
8,099
Reaction score
-2
Who plays this? I got a nice region going now with about 110,000+ pop and several cities.

I still havent mastered creating an effective freeway system across the region between cities. But my cities now thrive economically and aren't abysmal failures anymore.
 
I've played a good amount, fun game but I can never stay into it for long.
 
I'm about the same as Vegeta, but I've mostly stopped due to the constant crashing and weird design bugs. For instance, citizens are incredibly resistant to using buses. They'd rather WALK TO ANOTHER REGION than bus there.
 
You may as well play 2k then. 3000 is an easier, prettier 2k. Yawn.
 
I used to play all the time with Rush Hour and all the community improvements to traffic flows and stuff. But I stopped playing because it never holds my interest for long. I really want a Sim City 5 though, one that doesn't continue the process of dumbing the game down.
 
If you download the NAT or CAM (Colossus Addon Mod) it solves a lot of the transportation problems and glitches with vanilla SC4. The CAM also adds about 12 or so more stages of growth to your cities. You end up with actual realistic cityscapes and massive developement.

It also mods such as $ businesses will employe 95% $ wealth, and 5% $$ wealth residents. $$ employes 95% $$, and 5% $$$ and so on.

It makes for a more realistic residential/commercial mix of buildings and employment (including where they decide to work, etc)
 
Hmm. that CAM thing sounds pretty cool.

One of the things I really want though honestly, is a coop sim city game, that plays out much like sim city(albeit improved). I want to be able to hop in with vegeta or viper or anybody else and sort of work on a city project together.
 
Ugh don't get me started on the new buildings. At one point I downloaded gigs worth of new buildings, and in the process I just overwhelmed myself. Every building I saw, I wanted to have.
 
Heres one of my better cities. Better as in planning, realism, and stats (environment, government expenses, happiness, etc etc)

I go for that stuff rather than max pop, or else the city gets to be full of garbage and crime. Needs some actual planning. This city has 4 others immediately surrounding it and the region has a network of about 9 cities total. My high tech industry demand is skyrocketing now so one of the neighbor cities is all high tech industry. Trying to get the space port in the neighboring one!

Here's Hunton



Uploaded with ImageShack.us
 
I always sucked at Sim City 4... the whole connecting regions thing and having a farm region and a industry region and so on... I liked it more when you'd just make one place and go with it like in all the previous iterations.
 
Well whenever I tried I sucked... I'd build farm land and it would be like "HEY GET MORE ****ING FARMLAND" and then my entire map is farmland and it's like "**** YOUR FARMLAND"
 
You're not supposed to have just a little bit of farmland in a region. If you want to build farmland, you're basically designating that region as a farm region. And that's pretty much how it works IRL, so, I don't see the problem.
 
What I wish Sim City 4 had... was no regions. I want a super gigantic region. My computer can handle it! But Sim City 4 code cannot
 
Vegeta897 said:
You're not supposed to have just a little bit of farmland in a region. If you want to build farmland, you're basically designating that region as a farm region. And that's pretty much how it works IRL, so, I don't see the problem.
Click to expand...

The thing is, I don't... but my farmland bar will be like negative 400 and I will have spend a million dollars on plots of farmland for nothing. I guess I was never patient enough to figure out what the game wanted me to do to be successful, so I quit.
 
StarBob said:
I always sucked at Sim City 4... the whole connecting regions thing and having a farm region and a industry region and so on... I liked it more when you'd just make one place and go with it like in all the previous iterations.
Click to expand...

You dont have to play it like that. It's just that when you get say... high education in one region, it will boost the high tech demand in the other regions.

If you get a lot of commercial going, it will boost the demand for residential at the $$ and $$$ levels, etc etc.

It doesnt necessarily have to be one city industry, one farm, one residential, etc etc.

Think of it like an American metropolis. Let's take Phoenix or LA for example. The Phoenix metro area is "Phoenix" but its actually made up of many different cities.

greater-phoenix-map-425.gif


Everything from Buckeye to Apache Junction is considered the "Phoenix metro area"

This is the same concept Sim City 4 sought with the "region" of many cities. The goal isnt necessarily to have one city with each classification of buildings, but to build several cities with their own downtowns and infrastructure that eventually build so large they merge into each other and use trade (Selling water, garbage, power, etc)

Thats the point of the freeways and highways as well in SC4, quicker travel times between the cities in a large region.
 
RakuraiTenjin said:
Heres one of my better cities. Better as in planning, realism, and stats (environment, government expenses, happiness, etc etc)

I go for that stuff rather than max pop, or else the city gets to be full of garbage and crime. Needs some actual planning. This city has 4 others immediately surrounding it and the region has a network of about 9 cities total. My high tech industry demand is skyrocketing now so one of the neighbor cities is all high tech industry. Trying to get the space port in the neighboring one!

Here's Hunton



Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Click to expand...

That looks extremely unrealistic....show me a single American city that takes in more money than it spends!
 
Ridge said:
That looks extremely unrealistic....show me a single American city that takes in more money than it spends!
Click to expand...

It wasnt for a long time. I had $500,000 to start and was in the negatives before I finally got positive cashflow going and made some surplus money :LOL: Damn airport I decided I had enough spare money to build very early on in the city's life :LOL:

I had to cut money from parks, gvt, and fire dept budget to make do just like IRL US cities! lol
 
You cant cut government!! Just keep laying off policemen :) Its the American way!
 
Ridge said:
You cant cut government!! Just keep laying off policemen :) Its the American way!
Click to expand...

I actually did that first and it made my city ghetto ($$$ residents started abandoning homes, $ demand shot up and the others bottomed out)

So I switched to cutting fire. They didnt need a goddamned fireplane airstrip! lol
 
Oh shit, son. Sim City was one of my favorite games on the SNES - super addictive. I never had a PC version.

I don't suppose they have a multi-pack featuring all editions, because that would be sweet. I'm going to have to pick these games up.
 
Sim City 4 is pretty cool.

I like creating little city-state countries with my regions and playing dictator. Jacking taxes up, over-funding law enforcement, etc.

Which reminds me, I'd like to give Tropico 3 a try one time.
 
I wish I hadn't seen this thread because of the time killer this game is. I've been playing sim city since the 2000 days on Dos, by far one of my favorite games ever. I haven't played sim city 4 in a few years but I'm getting an itch to install it. I know that once I do I'll spend waaaay too much time on it. I've had a city that was over 500,000 people from what I recall. But since it was on my old 3700 processor it would lag like crazy, I wonder how well it would run on a quad core (actually now that I think about it it probably won't run all that great since the game wasn't designed for multiple cores).
 
No Limit said:
I wish I hadn't seen this thread because of the time killer this game is. I've been playing sim city since the 2000 days on Dos, by far one of my favorite games ever. I haven't played sim city 4 in a few years but I'm getting an itch to install it. I know that once I do I'll spend waaaay too much time on it. I've had a city that was over 500,000 people from what I recall. But since it was on my old 3700 processor it would lag like crazy, I wonder how well it would run on a quad core (actually now that I think about it it probably won't run all that great since the game wasn't designed for multiple cores).
Click to expand...
There's a way to run games that only support single core CPUs on a quad core by forcing the processor to use only one core. I can't remember how anymore though. I think you have to adjust the settings in the BIOS, but that would be a pain to do every time you just want to play SimCity4.
 
But I think the problem is they can only use one core at a time since they don't have a way to offset certain tasks to different cores. That kind of functionality actually takes a lot of planning since in programming timing is very important (one thing often needs to take place before another) and as a result needs to be programmed inside the application. Windows will run the game no problem, but it will only use one core since it doesn't know how to divide the tasks up.
 
No Limit said:
But I think the problem is they can only use one core at a time since they don't have a way to offset certain tasks to different cores. That kind of functionality actually takes a lot of planning since in programming timing is very important (one thing often needs to take place before another) and as a result needs to be programmed inside the application. Windows will run the game no problem, but it will only use one core since it doesn't know how to divide the tasks up.
Click to expand...
So what your basically saying is that if you can't run the game on all four cores, then you'd rather not bother?
 
I like building realistic suburbs. You do require a few mods to boost radius's and capacities but it's good fun and makes more sense than having a school every few bloody blocks. NAM is an absolute must have http://sc4devotion.com/nam.html
 
Dr.Demento said:
There's a way to run games that only support single core CPUs on a quad core by forcing the processor to use only one core. I can't remember how anymore though. I think you have to adjust the settings in the BIOS, but that would be a pain to do every time you just want to play SimCity4.
Click to expand...

well, you don't need to do that. You can open the TaskManager and set affinity of an application.

win20504.gif


taskmanagersetaffinity.gif



A better way would be to edit the game's options, or the game's .ini or .cfg, if it has such a setting.


EDIT: For the most part, I don't think you need to bother. A game designed a single core should* run fine on a multi-core processor.
 
Is there anyway to make a decent city without having to take the hugest squares and making them 90% agriculture???
 
OH GOD this game is worse than wow :(

The game runs ok, too bad it doesn't have a large enough resolution setting.
 
So can someone walk me through creating the zones? I'm reinstalling my copy from a few years ago (incl. Rush Hour pack), and I wanna make a GOOD city...
 
MorganFreeman911 said:
So can someone walk me through creating the zones? I'm reinstalling my copy from a few years ago (incl. Rush Hour pack), and I wanna make a GOOD city...
Click to expand...

The mistake I always make is imagining a large city from the get go. Think about a small country town and start from there. One main road with shops and low density residential around it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

MFL
Fascinating look at the ongoing psychological evolution of flat hieirarchies.
Replies
2
Views
2K
Tollbooth Willie
Tollbooth Willie
B
Community Interviews: Tony Newton, co-creator of Redemption
Replies
0
Views
5K
Barnz
B
Omnomnick
Left 4 Dead: Getting The Gang Back Together
Replies
5
Views
8K
DEATH eVADER
DEATH eVADER
-smash-
Valve and The Road to GDC 2015
Replies
10
Views
44K
Engineer123
E
S
  • Locked
Ask me anything about St. Louis
Replies
11
Views
1K
kineaesth
kineaesth
Back
Top