SimCity 4 - Who's still playing?

[Ziggy]

I've been meaning to reinstall SimCity 4 for a while now, and finally did last week.

I can play this game for hours on end without realizing it, and it's so much worse then any other game I've ever played. Well, maybe except for other Sim City games. It doesn't phase me how much time is passing while I'm playing. Hours go by but it feels like minutes. I had to train myself to keep an eye on the time while playing.

Who else is still playing? Share your stories! Maybe even city pictures!.

I never realized how easy they made it to add custom content to the game. There's a plugins folder that you can just drag and drop mods into. So naturally after realizing this, I started to look into mods. Here's what I have so far:

Functional Landmarks: All the landmarks work as normal, but they also have jobs. It always bothered me that the landmarks didn't have any jobs, which is why I never really bothered to even use them.

Crime Doesn't Pay: It's suppose to fix a bug in the game, but I think all it actually does it lower the crime rate city wide. There's a bug in the game that causes the airport, university and country club to have ridiculous crime. Even if you surround them with police stations, they stay red. This mod DOES fix it so they have lower crime rate, but like I said, I think it just lowers crime city wide.

Space Port Fix: The Space Port claims to add high-tech jobs, but apparently didn't do shit. This fixes it so it actually boosts high-tech industrial. Then there's another version of the mod that tweaks some of the specs a little.

Wendy's: Adds a Wendy's burger joint. Has a ploppable version that's non-functional as far as jobs go. But it also has a growable version for low wealth commercial zones. I was trying to farm one before, but I haven't been able to get it yet.

There's a lot of cool stores to add, but I wanna try and find a pack of them rather then getting them one by one.

Ghostbuster House: Gives you the Ghostbuster's house as a landmark. Awesome.

Lottery Ordinance: Does what it sounds like, you can get some more cash every month ($5k or 10k). It might be cheating, but most places have a lottery. And the game doesn't give you much income from city ordinances. Just legalize gambling, it is only $300/month which is pretty lame.

Solar Panel Power Plant: A small 1x1 solar panel power plant. I don't wanna cheat with any of the power plants out there that supply a million gigawatts but only cost $100. But this little solar power plant seams like it's on par with the other stock power plants.

Black Hole Waste Management: OK, this one might be cheating a little. Basically, you build this small structure and your garbage disappears. It'll even eat up landfills that you have so you can regain that space. This is cheating, in my book, since you can pretty much eliminate garbage in your city. But after the map is filled, this is a nice thing to have to squeeze a little more out of your city.

Power Plant Degradation Mod: Changes the life span of the power plants. Double, quadruple, or basically infinite. I went with double the life span. Again, I don't wanna cheat at the game. But a lot of times while a city is on track I like to keep it on the fastest speed for a while, doing this causes my power plants to become worn down too fast.

What mods/plugins are you guys using?

I wanna try the Network Addon Mod, "NAM," it seems ridiculous. It's an .exe file though, which scares me because of shit like this. It's rather large, too. It unzipped to over 800MB. Norton File Insight said it was alright though, so I'll probably go ahead and install it.

edit: Here's a snapshot of my current city:

city copy.jpg

Nothing special, just something to get back into the game with. I started a new city this morning, and it was coming out great. But then the game crashed and I never saved.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Ya know I might start up a new city here soon.

Shout out to Aspyr for the Mac version. Supports widescreen and high-dpi natively with no tinkering or any of that stuff.

Only mod I ever really used full time was functional land marks.

[Tanooki]

I have it but I've never really committed to it. The game was at half price books being cleared out so I snapped it up as I heard it wasn't pure awful like SC3K was (bought that one new, regretted it.) I really should give it a shot eventually as I'm sure they made it less overbearing, tedious and annoying in design, managing waste/underground, tunnels and bridges, and ordinances. SC2k was always a happy balance to me between the original and 3000 as it didn't take things too far to make it a hassle.

[Ziggy]

So I installed the Network Addon Mod. It's ridiculous. It adds dozens of transit items. It seems like it would take forever to learn everything. It comes with manuals, but there's a lot to read. Luckily, it doesn't take anything out of the game. So if you install it, you can pretend it's not even there, and learn all the new stuff at your own pace.

I heard it wasn't pure awful like SC3K was (bought that one new, regretted it.)

Is that how Sim City fans view 3K, as being awful? I had 3K for a while before 4 came out and it just never really clicked with me. I love Sim City on the SNES, and I spent a lot of time with 2K on the PC. 3K was a nice visual update, but I was never drawn into it like the other games. I got rid of 3K when I got 4, and at this point I barely remember 3K at all. Is it really like the black sheep of the series?

Shout out to Aspyr for the Mac version. Supports widescreen and high-dpi natively with no tinkering or any of that stuff.

The Mac version didn't have a widescreen resolution out of the box? I have the PC Deluxe Edition version, and although not set by default (this game did come out a while ago) there is a widescreen resolution.

Ya know I might start up a new city here soon.

You should! And post snapshots!

[Tanooki]

I never said I spoke for SC fans, just me. I bought it when it came out and was all hyped up that it would be fairly like the last one and it was and wasn't, and the wasn't was a bad way. It was supremely anal about elevations and land grades both with tunnels and especially bridges. I'd find that if something was off like even a .1 of a inch or whatever th measuring was in there, it would just unintuitively say NO, but not why. Eventually I'd just dynamite an entire city block and maybe more around where the bridge would hit land, and even then sometimes had to dick around under a river to get it ok for a pylon costing a heap of added cash. Tunnels were almost as bad too, you'd think boring a hole in a mountain and putting an opening wouldn't require clearing away the ground outside by a good bit. And a bunch of the ordinances were a pain to manage and trash collection was a never ending repetitive annoyance that didn't ever want to really self manage. The whole game became a costly chore.

[Ziggy]

So I've been playing a LOT of SimCity 4...

I never knew how much connected cities work within a region. I knew that you can connect roads, water, electric, etc and make deals like importing/exporting garbage, power and water. I guess I was just so use to 2K and I never bothered to read the instructions for 4.

I never knew that all the cities in a region work together, almost as one giant city. Since I started playing recently, I made one city then another right next to it. I don't think I've ever done that before. I realized that a lot of residents commute from one city into the other for work. You can have heavy polluting cities, then rural cities with all farms, and all connected and working together. I never knew this, it makes me look at the game in a whole new way.



The Network Addon Mod (NAM) is fucking fantastic. For anyone playing the game, you need to install this if you haven't already. There's too many things to list, but I'm gonna try and post a few pics as examples of some of the awesome things you can do.


The other night, I was playing for about 3 hours when the game crashed. I didn't save, so I lost 3 hours of play. I'm not sure why, but SC4 will crash to the desktop every so often. I never had that happen before. So since the last time it crashed, I just use my cell phone to sound off every 15 minutes, reminding me to save.

[Tanooki]

Make that two of us, I had no idea you could do that either, but the copy I got doesn't have a physical manual so I tend to ignore paperwork when they do that crap.

I think that would be most enjoyable to make a few light industry/commerical rural residential areas and then make a big industrial complex elsewhere and setup some bus/train depots between the two.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, it's pretty neat. I just don't know the full extent of it. Like right now, I have two cities right next to each other. By looking at commuter paths, I can see that a lot of residents travel into the neighboring city for work. But does that help boost the population? I don't know. It's still pretty neat either way.

In the past, I never bothered to build a rural city. When I thought all cities were just isolated one-offs, what would be the fun in creating a boring low-density city. The two cities I have going right now, EVERY thing is zoned for high density. Now that I know how they all connect though, I'm definitely gonna use a flat, inland area to make a giant farm land with all low density housing. Then in between that and my sky scrapper cities, I'll have a couple areas that are mostly medium density.

Building some low and medium density cities will also allow me to use some great mods that people made. I downloaded a Wendy's commercial zone, and it looks pretty neat, but since my two cities are all zoned for high density I rarely see it. It might pop up when I first zone some commercial areas, but it quickly disappear into a larger building and eventually a sky scrapper. But if I keep cities restricted to low and medium density, they'll stay around.

There's a few I'd like to download. There's a really nice looking McDonald's that I saw, a Domino's, etc. But the one I really wanna get for my rural areas is this Target:

http://community.simtropolis.com/files/ ... percenter/

There's an even bigger Target lot, but it says that it requires a shit ton of dependencies (other files that are required for it to work) so I might be too lazy to get it working. It's basically the first Target that I linked, but with detached Chili's, McDonald's, a bank, some other building, and another strip of stores. Looks very authentic to shopping centers around here.

That's what I love about these mods that people make. You can add so much realism to your cities.

[Ziggy]

I took some snapshots of one of my cities to show some things you can do with NAM...

This one shows a center double-turning lane in roads and avenues:


It's pretty unrealistic that all roads in SimCity 4 have double yellow lines. You can only make left turns at intersections? And all avenues in SC4 had islands in the middle. Again, you can only turn left at intersections? Double turning lanes are all over the place around here, so this makes it look so much more realistic.

Speaking of turning lanes, I forgot to snap a picture of something. If you use the standard avenues that come with SC4 and make a 4-way intersection, NAM adds in turning lanes: Left turn, straight, straight/right turn. Again, adding more realism.

Traffic circles (aka roundabouts):

NAM implements traffic circles. They really do help out with traffic congestion at intersections.



The above picture shows a traffic circle for avenues. In the middle is a subway/bus station. NAM is very popular, so a lot of people have made things to work with it, such as pieces to fit traffic circles. This one was specially made for avenue traffic circles.



The above picture shows traffic circles for single-width roads made from one-way roads. Again, they really help when intersections become too congested. Also, you can fit a 1x1 tile object in the center of them. So parks, plazas, police kiosk, subway or bus station. And like I said, people have made things to specially fit the circles. In the above pic, the traffic circle all the way to the right, I have a subway station that I downloaded. In the middle is an air purifier, which kinda functions like a park on steroids (really helps out in heavy polluting industrial areas). And all the way to the left is just a standard police kiosk (I wanna try and find one that's fitted for circles).

I haven't grabbed much yet, but I've found a ton of stuff specially made for traffic circles. Mostly parks and stuff. Some fountains and statues/sculptures, which are more realistic to find in the center of a traffic circle.

Also in this pic, in the bottom-left corner you can see a 4-lane single-width road. It functions like an avenue, but it's single width instead of double.

Pedestrian tiles:

I never realized that commuters will WALK to mass transit stops. So in this pic, right in the corner of the intersection is a 1x1 subway/bus stop (it comes with NAM). Behind it and on the other side of avenue are 1x1 pedestrian tiles (NAM comes with a few flavors of these). The bridge going across the avenue is a pedestrian foot bridge. This way, commuters can easily walk to this subway/bus stop.

You can do some cool things with pedestrian tiles. You know how zones need to be facing roads? Well you can make them face pedestrian tiles instead. This only works for commercial and industrial. It only works on the rear of residential zones though. I think I would only do this if I was making a low-density city. You could make like a boardwalk kind of commercial area.

Wendy's:

Like I said in the above post, the Wendy's will quickly disappear because everything is zoned for high density. But it'll be nice when I make low density cities, along with other real life places I plan to download.