SimCity

[Reliant121]

Simcity 3000 was incredibly fun. I have never played Simcity 4, but I enjoy Societies. I tend to play sandbox modes where its a case of "fuck the money, fuck the society" and i build whatever the fuck i like. I'm a bit sorta OCD'ish cause everything has to be nice and ordered, and i really dislike asymmetry for some reason.

[Tyyr]

Personally I think SC4 is just a prettier version of SC3. I don't see a huge increase in complexity from SC3 to 4 like there was with SC to SC2000 and SC2000 to SC3.

[stitch626]

My favorite part of SC4 is the Rush Hour expansion. Much more freedom, new stuff and a bunch of driving missions. And boating. And flying.

[Tyyr]

The original SC4 made it very difficult to build very large cities. Your city responded well to having large commercial, industrial, and residential centers. The downside to that is that it creates lots of traffic in one direction and that can clog streets quickly. Unlike in previous versions where you could have very spread out industry and commercial areas which made it much easier on the traffic. This log jam in SC4 makes it so that you have to use a ton of land just on excess roads and highways and even then large cities would have huge problems moving people around. Rush Hour borders on being a patch who's extra transportation options made very large cities even possible without spending a third of your land on roads.

[stitch626]

I never have traffic problems... I just have expansion problems. My OCD tendencies make expanding my cities near impossible (so they all end up about the same size... and shape).

[Tyyr]

How do your organize your transportation then?

[stitch626]

Usually I start out with regular roads and streets. The small communities (low density res) are set up in a basic grid of streets. These connect to roads which connect them to the light commercial and the main avenue (which connects them to the industry far away). In the higher density areas, I use a combination of roads and one-way roads to make for efficient traffic movement. This is complimented by a enormous subway system (when I reach a large enough population... about 30,000 if a small map, 100,000 if anything else). The subways grow as the city grows... until I get to the point where my high density and low density meet... then I can't get past the thought of restructuring. So I start again.
And yes, paying for the subway is a pain. If it weren't for the U-Drive-It missions, I'd go broke easily... on hard at least. But I usually stay in the black.

Sometimes, especially in small communities, I'll use a bus system. Once I had a highway... but that city was in my early days and had a host of problems... ending in a meteor shower.
And for transporting industrial goods from farms and dirty industry between cities, I use railroads.

Heaviest traffic I get is yellow in the intersections of the high density res, everything else green (or white).

[Foxfyre]

I enjoy the game, I get the city all built save it then smash the hell out of it with the meteors. Lots of fun

[Tyyr]

Yeah, that's the thing with SC, there does get to be a point where the cities just run out of options and you start a new one. You can keep fiddling with them to make them utopia's but at a certain point it stops being a game and just starts being a matter of time. One of the big reasons I love SC4 is that you can just keep on going, the big regions allow you to make dozens of interconnected cities so even while one city may be maxed out you can then build it's neighbors.

[stitch626]

One challenge I tried is to make one city be a huge industry base and its neighbor be a large residency...
Didn't work too well. Had no income from the industry taxes so eventually ran out of money. Pollution was low though.

One of my goals is to get every special building at some point. But I still can't get Area 51.

[Tyyr]

There are guides out there to get that kind of stuff. Most of the military buildings require you to get really down in the finances. So I'd imagine Area 51 would be a combo of high EQ and low cash.

So, a new thing to ask about. One of the mods I've downloaded for SC4 (It's the only real game on my laptop so I play it quite a bit) alters the way industry behaves. In vanilla SC4 you have to build huge sprawling industrial zones to keep everyone employed. This isn't terribly realistic as in most places industrial areas are usually concentrated with huge sprawling residential areas to house all the workers. However it did make keeping everyone employed simple. I'd lay out industrial zones on one edge of the board, then a parallel commercial zone, and finally everything else rsidential. It worked out pretty well.

This mod alters the industrial buildings to employ 4 times as many people. So you no longer need the industrial sprawl. Well this is kinda nice, until you realize that these small isolated industrial areas can result in large quantities of your population being so far from them that they can't find a job.

So now I'm looking for alternate methods of arranging my cities.

How have ya'll arranged yours in the past?