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Fintilgin posted:Wait, what? Farms don't like water? Think about it, what farms, anywhere, use a municiple water supply? In-game water service doesn't really mean that the property has no water whatsoever, it just means it's not on the city sewer system. Farms have lots of water pollution so it's generally a bad idea to water them in the first place. quote:When it comes to residential areas - is it better to set them up in a grid-like fashion or would going for a more "organic" look be better, finance-wise. By organic I mean something along the lines of a traditional subdivision road layout - since it seems like all my cities that I've ever built through the entirety of the SC series have been grids, and I've been getting tired of seeing it. When grids get boring, try and make more realistic cities and residential/mixed use areas that are based on many real-world city designs. Make a long axis with prominent public service buildings or landmarks at either end (City Halls, cemetaries, museums, etc.), and build nieghborhoods with a park, streets with some commercial stuff, schools, etc. And by "park" I don't really mean an actual, ploppable park but an open grassy area with some trees and maybe some ploppalbe gazeebos or whatever. In low or medium density areas it's perfectly acceptable to leave open space and fill it with trees, "alley ways" or whatever. Not only does it make the city look more realistic, it leaves room for further expansion should you need to place a large building like a hopstial or large school.
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| # ? Aug 14, 2009 23:03 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 20:43 |
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Yoshiro Mastroianni posted:
I like it. Where'd you get those seaport walls?
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| # ? Aug 14, 2009 23:58 |
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Desty posted:I like it. Where'd you get those seaport walls? i don't really remember, i've had them for a very long time, i suppose it mustve been sc4devotion.com
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 09:31 |
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I started a new region today. I'm using a Google Maps mod, a grid system, and a lot of paper to try to make things as close as possible to the real thing.  I screwed up when making the grayscale terrain and had the scale off by an order of magnitude. One tile represents 32.01 meters N-S and 31.93 meters E-W. I still have all the raw data so I'm going to make a "1:1" scale map eventually.  I'm starting with the Towson area, since that's where I live and I wanted to make my house first. I fudged a bit of industrial where there isn't any just so people would populate things. In reality everyone around here either doesn't work near here or works office jobs nearby. Need to fill in a lot more of the region before offices pop up though.  I've got my laptop next to me and bunch of paper and calculators to work out exactly where all the roads and streets go. Unfortunately York Road runs at an odd angle and most of the streets "creep" a little off the grid, so I've had to fudge things here and there. I'm aiming to have most or all major intersections within 1 tile of where they should be.  Unfortunately there's very little farmland in the area I've chosen (+/- 20km in all directions from where Google says "Baltimore" is, downtown). There's a bit on the outskirts of a couple areas that, if I had another large off to the side, would be almost entirely farmland. I'm actually glad I screwed up the scale because it means I can fit the entire Beltway in. I'm playing everything on Easy since I'm not too worried about running the game as much as recreating the city and surrounding areas. There's a lot of differences between the game mechanics and how things work around here. For example, the Elementary School I plopped down has a coverage range which doesn't even reach my house. I'm less than a mile away (and less than half a mile on this scale) and I'm supposedly still not covered by the bus. (In reality, I'd have to be another mile away to even be eligible for the bus, with as close as I am I had to walk.)  Took half a dozen attempts of importing to get the levels right for the shoreline. It's still not perfect, but I got tired of waiting around half an hour for region generation for every small tweak. Main problem is the data I used catches the bay/harbor as altitude 0 (sea level) when in reality the bay level is ~300-400 feet above sea level this far up, resulting in those cliffs where there should be shore. Also pissing me off is the game's complete inability to have water anywhere above its "sea level", meaning the reservoir is dry and I can't put any of the 3 bridges over it. I also wish I could "zone" areas as parkland and the maintenance money that would go into that would result in trees and wildlife popping up. Can't have it all, I guess, but I'll take what I can get at this point. Edit: Yes I know the NAM has fractional angle roads, the 18.5 degree road is in fact nearly perfect for York Road. The problem is you can't join anything else up to it, and York Road has junctions pretty much every 3-5 tiles the whole way down, and you need at least 7 tiles to transition from straight to FA.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 12:21 |
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I wish they would just make a new game already to get rid of the grid limitations in this game. There is no way I could ever make my town in this game because every road curves around and at odd angles. It would look really blocky and the houses would all be wrong.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 14:44 |
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Roflex posted:I'm actually glad I screwed up the scale because it means I can fit the entire Beltway in. I'm playing everything on Easy since I'm not too worried about running the game as much as recreating the city and surrounding areas. There's a lot of differences between the game mechanics and how things work around here. For example, the Elementary School I plopped down has a coverage range which doesn't even reach my house. I'm less than a mile away (and less than half a mile on this scale) and I'm supposedly still not covered by the bus. (In reality, I'd have to be another mile away to even be eligible for the bus, with as close as I am I had to walk.) Aside from the road angles and commuting calculations troubles, this is the one thing I wish they'd improve. Schools, police stations, Hospitals, etc. should have a MASSIVE effect radius, but retain the same capacities. This would make rural areas or small towns work much more realistically. Distance usually isn't a factor in building a new school, but capacity certainly is, at least in the real world.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 15:03 |
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LogisticEarth posted:Aside from the road angles and commuting calculations troubles, this is the one thing I wish they'd improve. Schools, police stations, Hospitals, etc. should have a MASSIVE effect radius, but retain the same capacities. This would make rural areas or small towns work much more realistically. Distance usually isn't a factor in building a new school, but capacity certainly is, at least in the real world. Check out some of the custom schools and hospitals. I don't remember which ones off the top of my head but there's several that cover almost an entire large city tile.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 16:08 |
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Stupid question here: I downloaded the G-G-GIGA PACK of AddOns - do I just unzip all the folders into my SimCity 4 plugins directory? Do I need to sort them in any specific way? I have an empty plugins folder, by the way.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 16:26 |
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Cojawfee posted:I wish they would just make a new game already to get rid of the grid limitations in this game. There is no way I could ever make my town in this game because every road curves around and at odd angles. It would look really blocky and the houses would all be wrong. WideRadius Curves T21 Mod Sithlrd98 Avenue Curves Gn leugim Portuguese Texture Sithlrd98 Road Curves SAP v2 I haven't used them yet, but they've all got great ratings. There's a whole buttload of them made by member Sithlrd98. Just do a search for "road curve" or his name, and you should find them.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 16:57 |
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Yes, but lots still only face four ways, and there is 20 feet of concrete between the house and the road.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 17:01 |
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LogisticEarth posted:Think about it, what farms, anywhere, use a municiple water supply? In-game water service doesn't really mean that the property has no water whatsoever, it just means it's not on the city sewer system. Farms have lots of water pollution so it's generally a bad idea to water them in the first place. This. Farmers irrigate by pumping directly from lakes, rivers and canals that connect to their land, and dig wells for whatever else they need. If necessary, they'll dig canals or build hills/berms to divert water-flows into reservoirs onto their land so they have extra water to irrigate with, and plan their drainage into the same reservoirs. One of my clients is an engineering firm that specializes in hydrology and agricultural engineering so I get to peek at a lot of this sort of thing and overhear their planning sessions while I'm working on their systems.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 18:06 |
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Cojawfee posted:Yes, but lots still only face four ways, and there is 20 feet of concrete between the house and the road. Plus trying to connect other roads to them doesn't work - the 18.5 degree FAR would've been perfect if it could make normal connections.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 18:27 |
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What connections do you want? The FAR pack includes puzzle pieces for orthogonal to FAR street, road, and avenue intersections, at least in the June 2009 pack.
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| # ? Aug 15, 2009 18:40 |
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thelightguy posted:What connections do you want? The FAR pack includes puzzle pieces for orthogonal to FAR street, road, and avenue intersections, at least in the June 2009 pack. I didn't know there was an update, I'm running a late 2008 version of NAM. Will it mess up my existing cities?
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| # ? Aug 16, 2009 02:59 |
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Roflex posted:I didn't know there was an update, I'm running a late 2008 version of NAM. Will it mess up my existing cities?
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| # ? Aug 16, 2009 04:47 |
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I've been having great fun playing this after getting it to run in windowed mode fixed my problems. However my city just hit 20k sims and now I got two crashes within about 20 minutes. I hadn't set processor affinity, has anyone else found it to fix crashing issues? I'm away from my rig now so I can't check, I'd like to know if I'll actually be able to keep playing or run into more problems. The goonpack seems to include some buildings (by SimGoober I think?) which make 3x1 commercial zones really ugly long stretches of the same building occasionally broken up by flea markets. I don't know if there's anything I can do to avoid this, it's been a pretty long time since I messed with SC4 plugins, but it's a bit annoying.
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| # ? Aug 27, 2009 13:52 |
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Setting processor affinity makes a huge difference on my machine, but there's still the occasional crash to desktop. Without setting it to one processor it would easily crash every time I play, with it checked it might only happen once in every 8 - 10 times, and usually only after a long period of time and doing something which would generally make it hang like zooming in. The best thing to do is just to get into a good habit of saving every half hour or so, or after you've just completed a particularly time-consuming glut of construction that would piss you off to try and redo.
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| # ? Aug 27, 2009 14:19 |
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Roflex posted:I started a new region today. Amazing. I've always wanted to sit down and model my hometown realistically, but have been foiled by the angled streets around the waterfront, the presence of canal estates, and just getting the hills and the scale right. But it looks like you're well on track!
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| # ? Aug 28, 2009 05:33 |
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anyone getting a lot of CTDs with this game on XP?
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| # ? Aug 30, 2009 02:46 |
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MikeC posted:anyone getting a lot of CTDs with this game on XP? Have you set your affinity to a single core? I've only had one crash since doing that (not counting the rare times when it freezes while saving), compared to two crashes in 20 minutes before. Also, I'm having trouble with my current city... I'm using the Gigapack, which includes CAM. I'd never gotten a city this far in my old days of playing, so I'm not sure what's wrong. The regional population is at around 600k. There are four cities; one is an industrial annex, the other is a commercial/residential mix with a slice of an industrial district, another is a big comm/res complex with around 400k sims and the fourth is a just-started suburb with mostly industry. Education in the comm/res cities is high. There's about 10k demand units' worth of demand for high tech, but it's not growing very fast in either city. In the larger city there's about 4000 HT jobs and high HT demand, but the high density industrial zoning just stays there. There's no air pollution, garbage is way under capacity and it's watered, so it should grow. In the larger city taxes are very high for all industry except HT, and in the smaller one they're regular (since there's lots of industry there), but it won't grow. I gave up trying to grow it in the one with the regular taxes since I'd just get a bunch of manufacturing plants. I don't know if it's related to CAM's "eternal commuters" problem but it doesn't seem to be, judging from the symptoms. Meanwhile demand for non-HT industrial is negative in the region, commercial demand is sky-high and residential demand alternates between medium-high and negative. What's wrong?
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| # ? Aug 30, 2009 13:37 |
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cctoide posted:Education in the comm/res cities is high. There's about 10k demand units' worth of demand for high tech, but it's not growing very fast in either city. In the larger city there's about 4000 HT jobs and high HT demand, but the high density industrial zoning just stays there. There's no air pollution, garbage is way under capacity and it's watered, so it should grow. In the larger city taxes are very high for all industry except HT, and in the smaller one they're regular (since there's lots of industry there), but it won't grow. I gave up trying to grow it in the one with the regular taxes since I'd just get a bunch of manufacturing plants. How's your police/fire coverage for the industrial areas? I don't think fire is as important, but the game does check crime leves before plopping. If you are looking for clean, high-tech industry, then pepper your zones with large plazas, mass transit hubs, etc. Basically, pretend you're trying to woo high commerce. Your good industry won't move in unless they have pretty places to work. It's one of the things that makes it tricky to switch a zone from dirty to high-tech. (But especially remember the plazas.)
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| # ? Aug 30, 2009 18:14 |
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Building some parks and plazas helped, thanks! It seems that was the last little bit of desirability these areas needed. I was a bit confused since everytime I'd dealt with high-tech industry before they had been more than willing to flood into any old high-density industrial zoning I designated.
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| # ? Aug 30, 2009 18:41 |
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I am having a hell of a time trying to get the NAM from SC4 Devotion. What do I need to do, exactly?
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| # ? Aug 31, 2009 00:54 |
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You have to go here and register, then login and a download link should appear on the NAM download page. Yeah, it's not very straightforward if you just hit the NAM page, and the fact they have a separate login for the forums doesn't help, but what I outlined above should work.
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| # ? Aug 31, 2009 12:40 |
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1) I'm having a lot of fun with underground highways using the terrain tools 2) Also having a lot of fun with loving around with avenues and one-way roads to make some crazy zig-zags (and do stuff like fit a 7x6 water treatment plant where a 6x6 industrial plot would go without loving up my grid) 3) Is there any way to make simcity use more RAM? I've got 4 gigs, but simcity is capping off at using half a gig in Vista. I still feel like it wants more.
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| # ? Sep 2, 2009 16:34 |
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Does the CAM make the game "easier"? As in, does it make getting skyscrapers and so on possible at lower populations? My current region seemed to be growing really fast after I started getting the first skyscrapers in the first city, and afterwards any other city in the region would start growing skyscrapers like mad as soon as I zoned high density. As a result the city turned into an ugly skyscraper jungle. Meanwhile the laptop I was playing on died so I lost the region, which means I get to start over anyway. I poked around the CAM site and found some growth stage tables, and from what I gather stage 8 seems to kick in at a lower population level than the RH base... but I don't know if CAM just "tacked on" the rest of the stages to 15 or made stage 8 be smaller buildings than the RH ones. I know people were building ugly skyscraper jungles with the normal game already, but my success with this region when all my previous attempts had always ended in cities falling apart due to commute time I'm wondering whether I just didn't know how to play back then or this mod turns on "easy mode". At any rate, people do seem to say it's easier to turn a profit, and city population certainly grows by leaps and bounds with the higher stage buildings, much faster than I remember the vanilla game being.
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| # ? Sep 5, 2009 00:46 |
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cctoide posted:Does the CAM make the game "easier"? As in, does it make getting skyscrapers and so on possible at lower populations? My current region seemed to be growing really fast after I started getting the first skyscrapers in the first city, and afterwards any other city in the region would start growing skyscrapers like mad as soon as I zoned high density. As a result the city turned into an ugly skyscraper jungle. Meanwhile the laptop I was playing on died so I lost the region, which means I get to start over anyway. Yeah, in addition to making new stages, CAM lowers the requirement for the existing one a great deal and boosts demand across the board while they're at it. Huge cities are nice, but for me, it made the game way too easy.
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| # ? Sep 5, 2009 06:32 |
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*Edit- Nevermind, I found it.*
euphronius fucked around with this message at Oct 10, 2009 around 01:10 |
| # ? Oct 10, 2009 00:59 |
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Is there any sites that offer this for Digital Download? It appears that no one has it 
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| # ? Oct 11, 2009 00:40 |
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I reinstalled this and downloaded the gigapack in the OP. But now whenever I'm in the middle of building, my game just closes with no error or anything. I'm on vista 64. Do I have to set the affinity to 1 core for the game or something?
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| # ? Oct 11, 2009 16:16 |
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SimCity just does that. They call it CTD on Simtropolis: crash to desktop. It's so common, you just have to remember to save often. But try setting it to one core for the game. I've heard that helps a bit.
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| # ? Oct 11, 2009 16:20 |
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Thanks. I put my game to run on one core now and it's working fine. But now my city refuses to build nothing but a little dirty and a lot of manufacturing industry. I can't get a single high tech in my city, my population is all educated and I just replaced my low density high wealthy with high density which built several skyscraper apartments and crashed the demand for any housing. How the hell do I get the high tech stuff to move in? I already enacted the clean air ordinance. And I set dirty taxes to max and manufacturing to 10%
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| # ? Oct 11, 2009 23:54 |
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A few posts above I had the same issue. Try building parks, plazas, etc. around the high density industry zones. They need a bump-up in desirability before they'll move in.
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 00:54 |
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When you want to switch to high tech start with a new industrial zone far away from the others. HT doesn't like pollution. It doesn't produce any so you can toss it anywhere. I also line my HT areas with parks, you need to get the land value up. And your EQ needs to get around 150 to make it desirable. Drop HT taxes to 5-6%--you shouldn't need money by this point. Once you have a HT base, go back and bulldoze all your dirty industry and put in a bunch of parks. It should grow back as HT.
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 01:34 |
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Alright I got all my manufacturing and dirty industry switched over to HT with a lot of plaza placing. But now my demand for CO$$$ is through the roof and HT is still very high. everything else is in negative demand and my CO$$$ isn't growing. I've got a couple of neighbor cities set up with industries, mainly dirty. One of them a lot of manufacturing. So what do I need to fix now?
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 02:44 |
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If memory serves, CO$$$ likes to be in downtown with high property values. Zone some high density areas, centrally located along major road arteries, with plazas and such. You might have demand cap issues too if you haven't been paying attention to that. Make sure you have some large zones too, big commercial buildings can take up whole 5x5 or 6x6 blocks. Hold ctrl to make sure the zone doesn't fragment into smaller ones.
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 03:16 |
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Grand Fromage posted:Make sure you have some large zones too, big commercial buildings can take up whole 5x5 or 6x6 blocks. Hold ctrl to make sure the zone doesn't fragment into smaller ones. I've been curious about this, it doesn't seem like there's clear guidance on how large to make zones. Back in Simcity 2k, it was simple, zones had to be within 3 tiles of a road to develop, so it was very easy - just make very long zones with a width of 6. With Simcity 4, how big should zones be? I think industrial develops out to 4 tiles from a road without having to be adjacent to a road or anything, but residential and commercial obviously require road access. If the zones are too small, you don't get any of the large buildings, and if they're large enough for bigger buildings, there may be undeveloped zoned land behind buildings that come up. Is it a matter of zoning a good mix of differently sized tiles? If so, what is a good mix of sizes to ensure even development? What's the maximum size for buildings, and how does that play with the maximum size of a zone that will get developed (for example, if there's a 6x6 building, can a zone be 18x12 with 6 6x6 tiles all facing a road and still develop)? How do commercial and residential zoning differ? AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at Oct 12, 2009 around 14:31 |
| # ? Oct 12, 2009 14:28 |
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R$ likes large tiles even though they make small houses with large, gross backyards. So you can start out with large residential tiles, but they all need to be facing a road. Commercial also needs to face a road, but I don't remember if they prefer larger or smaller, I think they just build on one tile and fill whatever is behind with parking lots. Industrial doesn't care, you can just make a road and fill a whole area with industrial zones and it will all build anyway without caring where roads are.
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 15:38 |
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There isn't really a rule about zone size like in SC2000. You can still do 6xwhatever zones and be fine, that's what I usually do. Then I sprinkle in some single-building 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6 zones for big buildings to take.
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 16:02 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 20:43 |
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For low- and medium-density residential I like making the plots between 1x2 and 1x4, with the narrow side facing the road. High-density commercial I tend to zone in 6 tile wide areas between roads, with 3x3 plots facing one side and the other. Some higher stage buildings might have larger footprints, but they'll just steal the space off other nearby buildings.
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| # ? Oct 12, 2009 17:22 |
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