Troubleshooting Hi, Im Jakethedane and Ive been a member here for about a month or so. I have finally managed to get through some of the starter problems of building a city, now I have no problem getting over 100 k pop. But would I would like to know is, how did YOU solve the pusle and mysteries? How did you zone? Where did you zone? What - in your opinion - is the best tax rate? How many parks and green areas should be build? And where? Please lets help each other here and I hope we can get some really useful informations exchanged here.
Hi Jake. Here's some methods i use when building cities. First of all, to me personally i like to have a city with distinct districts. The districts will vary in Wealth levels and density. This to a large extent controls how i use parks and civic buildings. In the places i would want to have wealthy sims living, perhaps in some foothills or on the waterfront, i would use a large amount of parks - as much as 10 tiles per block of about 40 tiles. I would provide the wealthy areas with health facilities as the city grows larger, and income increases. Poorer areas i still provide with a scattering of parks to pump up desirability and mayor rating aswell as demand. Commercial areas, especially downtown districts should have plenty of plazas to attract high-wealth offices. I usually provide the whole city with education using something like a City College which covers the whole city with just one building, and when it grows bigger, i would supply certain areas with more education facilities like libraries or museums. Taxes i usually just leave as they are for most of the game, apart from when i want to encourage a certain wealth level and/or zone in a particular city - for example i would lower the CO$$ and CO$$$ tax rates in the city that houses the downtown area. Transport is something i haven't come to any conclusions about yet. I often have just one, maybe two, highways running right through the whole city, and even maybe a belt-line highway for much larger cities if there is room. I almost always have heaps of busses. Usually 1 bus stop per 1 or 2 blocks. Trains often take up too much space, and subways are much too costly for smaller cities. Also very important to do it "plan for the future". i.e. leave corridors of easily clearable land in smaller cities that can be used when the city is larger for a motorway or a train line to cope with the growing traffic volumes. That's about all i can think of at the moment...
Hi Sam. Once again I like to thank you for your help. You have given me a lot to work with and some of it is already paying off. I usually start by making a huge grid, each block is 5x5. I make 5 of these in one direction and 5 in the other, surrounded by avenues. I then make 4 of these in a square, with lots of space for commercial and place for civic buildings as well. I know that in the manual they say that you can build a neighbouring city with all the industrial zones, power plants and such, and it did work for a while. However I soon grew tired of switching back and forth all the time, adjusting this, increasing that. So I generally put my industry in the outskirts of the map. I been playing for a month or so now, I have one region so far with 4 cities: Capitol City, Sleepy Hollow, Castle Rock and Hope. Capitol City is the biggest with ca. 65k. But, the problem is the same: Even though I make plenty of space for the future in terms of commercial space, it never seems to be enough. So how much is enough, bearing in mind that I use 25 5x5 grid in each area. Hope to hear from you soon.
Hi Jake, I agree with everything that Sam advises and especially confirm that SC4 traffic is a mystery. You describe laying out grids of 25 block and surrounding them with avenues. I have tried something similar to this myself and frankly it does not work ... sure it looks pretty and if that's what you want then I'm not telling you to stop (I do it myself all the time!) But avenues cost cash to build and to maintain so it makes sense to put em where the sims are actually driving. Sims, it seems to me, have no idea at all which roads are the quickest to travel on. If you lay out a standard grid and with a mixture of streets, roads and avenues going N/S and E/W then start checking the actual routes that sims use and you'll find the twits crawling along a congested street for 6 blocks before making a right and a left to travel one block down an avenue that could have been used for the whole trip! Go figure! Even so, I guess that Sims aren't any more dumb than most people Extra tip for upgraidng roads to avenues/highways. Always pause the game before starting work. Why? If you take a route out of use for too long then the Sims will find an alternative route and your expensive upgrade will be wasted. (At least that's seems to have happened in some situations that I have seen!) Buses are definitely the first way to go! I place stops on every block (lately I have taken to always plopping down bus stops in the NW corner of the block -- I always leave the NW and NE corners empty when zoning. Guess where the subway stations go? ) Note that by grouping transit stops on intersections gives sims more travel choices. Its also easy enough to drop a rail depot and a parking garage on the north side of such an intersection giving car, bus , subway and rail access to a substantial area! Good luck!
True traffic is hell, in SC4. As described in my original thread, the town called Capitol City, th ebiggest one, has recently started to grow, like, really grow! Before yesterday it had 69k ppl. I then build a working city right next to it, carefully and slowly deleting the industrial zones, minimizing the airpollution, watched as demand for R and C rose to an alltime high, then build 2 completely new areas(about half of the entire city size, and behold! Within 18 months I had upgraded my landing strip 2 times, got the golf course and filmstudio reward, and pop. climbed to 125k. pretty good, eh? And the best part is, that I have only used a quarter of the maps size. Bus stops: I too place these almost every block or so, in the furthest corner of the block, and Im currently making some 4000 simoleons a month just from buses. Avenues: What can I say? I like them. Even though my city has become a bit tight around the waiste, I only have traffic jams 2 places, and they arent even red yet. I would love to see some of your cities some day. Maybe we could post some screenshots from our fav. cities? I dont have a lot of imagination when it comes to making the map interesting, so show me what you got?
Hi Jake! I just took a look thru my SC4 directory and I found these pics that I took a little while back to chronicle the development of a new city, Mira Valley which was the 3rd or 4th city in its region. As you can see I like to place down a few basic roads first to connect to neighboring cities. I try to copy real life in that roads tend to follow land contours or else go pretty much straight toward the "action". After the roads are down the rest follows pretty much in a grid-like pattern (due to SC's limitation of plot orientation grids make better use of the land compared with the more organic style of european urban development street plans). Once a small city is established further growth is guided by a mixture of personal choice (mine! ) and city-generated demand ... eg. congested routes demand early widening to avenues and redevelopment to commercial (high traffic=high customers). Anyway here are 4 views: First year - basic layout Thirtieth year - downtown emerging. Population - 140,000 Close up of downtown central area (before remodelling to improve traffic flows ) Same area a few years later and the rail line has been diverted (its in a tunnel ) I have saved the best buildings and got a better traffic flow. It just occurred to me to mention this. Looking at the pics I notice that traffic roundabouts are rigged for right-hand drive ... even tho I live in left-hand drive UK. I changed the game's setting deliberately back to right-hand drive because all the traffic lights and signs are set up for right-hand drive and cannot be changed ... I found this irritating to look at and I don't really care what side of the road I drive on so loong as all the other traffic is keeping to the same rules as me (TOP TIP ... never drive a car on the Mediterranean island of Malta ... )
I have recently been playing like a madman. I wanted to see how quickly a city could become a metropolis. My goal was 250 k.... in 5 years! I started with the grid as I always do, this time making it 3 times the normal size, filling half of the map(biggest). Then industrial cities next to it, 3 in all, and just waiting. May 18. 2003 I had 200 k, with skyscrapers I never seen before, and by November 2004 I reached my goal: 250 k within 5 years. Sad to say that traffic was murder(Duh!) and the cost of runnin the city was immense. I took a photo, but I try to locate the snapsots in the SC4 files afterwards, but I cant open the files. Im afraid to break something. But when I know hos I show you some of my screenshots.
Jake, if you take pics you need to save the game before exting otherwise the pics will not be saved to the city's album. You'll find the pics in C:\My Documents\Sim City 4\Albums\{name-of-city}\ The pics have filenames like "City Name-Jan. 1, 18108981063.png. As high resolution PNG files they are quite large. (around 1.5 - 2 MB for full screen) so you'll probably need to "optimise" any pics before trying to post them ... any suitable graphics software can do this (even MS Paint that comes with all versions of Windoze).
