Sim City 4

I don't want to get in the habit of posting every little patch that comes down the pipe, but for those of you who are playing SC4, you might be interested to know there is a patch available. Frankly the patch process - which takes place entirely through the website, with NO intervention from you - scares the bejeebus out of me.

- Elysium

Vierd.

I couldn''t get into the police boat on the end of the level after I applied the patch, can someone help me?

Is there going to be a demo for this? Also, how many places is CandC Generals demo available for download?

Also, how many places is CandC Generals demo available for download?

As far as I know, it''s a Fileplanet exclusive, which is why it''s only for members. It''s also being pulled today.

- Elysium

Any reason why it is being pulled?

Nothing specific, but it''s been planned as a limited offer. Probably so it won''t be around next week at release.

- Elysium

Man, I really want to play Generals and SimCity 4. I don''t think I can hold out much longer on upgrading my PC.

Now that I have beaten Splinter Cell 2 times (second time with only mission objective kills) I am bored like no other. I still might pick up Morrowind for Xbox.

Arise! 10 year necro!

Farms I use in the beginning because it's the most reliable source of jobs early on. You use farms to drive up residential demand, then take advantage of rising population to jumpstart industry and commercial interest. Lower tax rates right off the bat for them too.

Elysium wrote:

I don't want to get in the habit of posting every little patch that comes down the pipe, but for those of you who are playing SC4, you might be interested to know there is a patch available. Frankly the patch process - which takes place entirely through the website, with NO intervention from you - scares the bejeebus out of me.

- Elysium

It's cute how worried you were about streamed updates back then.

Elysium wrote:

Frankly the patch process - which takes place entirely through the website

If only we knew then what we know now...

EDIT: Bah, Certishausered!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Farms I use in the beginning because it's the most reliable source of jobs early on. You use farms to drive up residential demand, then take advantage of rising population to jumpstart industry and commercial interest. Lower tax rates right off the bat for them too.

Which difficulty? I usually just jump straight to medium density industry as farms aren't very efficient. 6 jobs for a 8x6 area? Really?

Also, I found out today that building progression is completely gated by city population. This means you won't reach higher density buildings (and thus more citizens) until you cross certain thresholds. Not sure why this seemed like a huge revelation since pretty much every unlock in this game is population based.

shoptroll wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Farms I use in the beginning because it's the most reliable source of jobs early on. You use farms to drive up residential demand, then take advantage of rising population to jumpstart industry and commercial interest. Lower tax rates right off the bat for them too.

Which difficulty? I usually just jump straight to medium density industry as farms aren't very efficient. 6 jobs for a 8x6 area? Really?

Also, I found out today that building progression is completely gated by city population. This means you won't reach higher density buildings (and thus more citizens) until you cross certain thresholds. Not sure why this seemed like a huge revelation since pretty much every unlock in this game is population based.

Medium. As I recall, the other industries are all far negative at the start, so that's the reason I build farms in a new city.

Nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your first 1000+ occupant skyscraper.

I saw this thread before I started derailing the 5 thread, but didn't want to necro it. Now that that's done though...

So a coworker told me today about a network mod that was really invaluable back in the day. What sort of fixes does it introduce?

Yonder wrote:

So a coworker told me today about a network mod that was really invaluable back in the day. What sort of fixes does it introduce?

I believe the main changes are a rewritten pathfinding model, higher capacities for the Maxis transportation options, and they add a plethora of new network types.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Medium. As I recall, the other industries are all far negative at the start, so that's the reason I build farms in a new city.

Ah. I think most of my saves are on Easy which is probably why I'm able to jumpstart industry so easily.

Nothing quite like the thrill of seeing your first 1000+ occupant skyscraper.

I admit that I never quite got to that point with any of my cities. I remember the original release was brutally hard and couldn't get a city out of the red. I don't think I've ever played for any extended period after I got Rush Hour installed, although I've been dropping into it for 30 minute sessions every couple of days as the discussion about the new game made me nostalgic for the older titles.

Also, this game had some great music. I certainly like it a lot more than the "cinematic brass/strings" stylings of the samples from the new one that are on iTunes. A quirky and more eclectic mix seems more appropriate for most Maxis titles since they're fairly lighthearted.

I added a bunch of mods in years ago and now I can't remember what they were. There's some for different types of roads, like snazzier curves, double high elevated rail, some new beach tiles.

I believe the most popular mod is the Network Addon Mod (NAM).

Yonder wrote:

So a coworker told me today about a network mod that was really invaluable back in the day. What sort of fixes does it introduce?

The Network Addon Mod gives you more transit and infrastructure options and makes improvements to A.I. pathfinding. (The traffic was actually broken in a similar way to the new one.)

Also, the game tends to have problems and crashes on modern multi-core systems, so it's recommended you add this line to the launch options:
-CPUcount:1 -CPUpriority:high

Wow weird, all the fun with sim city 5 made me go and install this the other day. Works great on my current pc. The only problem I encountered was trying to start the installation using the second disk (disks, how quaint)

Other then the curved roads, new graphics and the online regions I'm not really sure how much is new.

SC4 is difficult. Getting and keeping a city running (even poorly) in 5 is much, much easier. 4 forces a lot of builder order BS because it's so easy to run out of money. It's a lot of pause game, spend money, unpause and wait.

Norfair, you can download curved road mod packs. Sadly they are not super easy to use.

kuddles wrote:
Yonder wrote:

So a coworker told me today about a network mod that was really invaluable back in the day. What sort of fixes does it introduce?

The Network Addon Mod gives you more transit and infrastructure options and makes improvements to A.I. pathfinding. (The traffic was actually broken in a similar way to the new one.)

Also, the game tends to have problems and crashes on modern multi-core systems, so it's recommended you add this line to the launch options:
-CPUcount:1 -CPUpriority:high

Yes and yes.

The NAM is pretty much mandatory.

I haven't tried the launch option approach for turning off one of the cores. I do manually through Task Manager.

Norfair wrote:

Wow weird, all the fun with sim city 5 made me go and install this the other day.

You're definitely not the only one. SimCity 4 is currently the 2nd highest downloaded title on Amazon. Right behind the new one.

EDIT: 27th best selling title currently on Steam too

I did the launch option and it seemed to fix my crashing issue. Played for 2 or 3 hours straight!

Here's something I've never been able to get right in this version: taxes. What's a good threshold for taxes to earn money without driving everyone out of the city? I remember in SimCity 2000 the general rule of thumb is to not go above 8-9% and 5-7% was usually a good target to encourage people to move in.

My residential taxes rarely go below 9%, while my industry commercial taxes vary depending on my job requirements. I generally try to make money through residential taxes (aren't I just an evil f*ck?) and keep the others around 5%, adjusted up or down for demand. Except for agriculture, which I keep around 12%. Ironically, my taxes on the poor are higher than my taxes on the rich (evil) because the low-income demand is so high.

And I thought I was the only one to boot SC 4

It's education that quells demand for farms, and boosts demand for 'clean' jobs in the commercial and industrial sector.

So my strategy is to chill out with a elementary school and high school until the manufacturing and high tech industries start being interested. Once they are interested enough I start boosting the taxes on dirty industry a lot, so that the demand for them plummets. Depending on how impatient I am I'll then go around bulldozing blocks of dirty industry so the clean stuff replaces it faster.

That worked great for me at first, but then in the later game (college now too, have had it for years) I spotted a dirty factory! I start looking around, and sure enough they are dotted around my cleaner industries. Whatever, if you want to give me 20% of your revenue for the pleasure I suppose I can handle some fumes in my industry sector.

I think I've hit the point where 3000 occupant skyscrapers have forced me to change my city design entirely. In other words, replacing roads with avenues, making longer blocks with fewer intersections.

Yonder wrote:

That worked great for me at first, but then in the later game (college now too, have had it for years) I spotted a dirty factory! I start looking around, and sure enough they are dotted around my cleaner industries. Whatever, if you want to give me 20% of your revenue for the pleasure I suppose I can handle some fumes in my industry sector.

Enact the clean air ordinance. I was playing for a spat last night and my city coffers had been in the red for too long (probably due to my tax rates being set too low) so I canceled a large number of ordinances. Once clean air ordinance went away dirty industry started creeping back in.

I'll have to try that once I return to this city. Right now I'm crammed in with 33k people in one of the smaller slots and I'm having trouble balancing the budget (10.5% on the segments I'm not chasing away).

It's the only city in the region, so I'm hoping that by starting a new region next door I'll be able to help this one out a bit when we get some trade going.