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I'm not completely sure whether I already posted these in the previous thread, but here goes:  
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Mar 9, 2013 09:40
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:12 |
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I've been meaning to make a replica of my town in this game, but my current plugin set is a Japanese one. I recall some years ago there was a program that allowed you to use different plugins for different regions, does anyone know if it works properly now? Last time I used it, it hosed up my region and I had to start over.
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Mar 9, 2013 23:06
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Breetai posted:Ladies and gentlemen.... I think I'm going to work on my biggest ever dirty industrial city yet, just going for maximum pollution. I kinda miss those factories from SC3K with the vats of green goo, they looked cool. By the way, if you press G you'll get rid of that grid on your land (it'll still appear around your cursor so you can work with it).
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Mar 12, 2013 09:37
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KillHour posted:The only other one is SC4 Devotion, which has such a horrible community that I'm pretty sure even the server they run it on has autism. Didn't one of the admins once threaten a guy with a lawsuit for the crime of having an alt account?
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Mar 12, 2013 10:26
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I don't recommend grids, in my experience it's not actually very efficient. Residentials want: low pollution, low traffic, services Commercials want: traffic (customers), land value (high demand, high land values and released caps are what prompt skyscrapers) Industry wants: not much, preferably good road access and a railway with cargo depot In other words, you want traffic away from residential areas, instead have it pass by commercial areas and end up at industrials with as little pollution and traffic jams as possible. In a grid, most of the roads will go relatively unused while traffic will tend to concentrate along certain roads, usually ones that you don't want. Instead, build a residential zone which has access on one side to a large artery. Residentials really don't need a strict grid, and your city will look livelier without a grid. So build a highway, and let an avenue intersect it with a passover and onramps. Then connect some roads and streets to the avenue (so that low capacity roads connect to increasingly high capacity ones) and fill them in with zones of varying size. Having variety in lot sizes helps, since not all stages of development rely on the same sizes of lots. Build your commercial zones along the avenues and some of the roads, they like being in high traffic areas. Build a big central business district too and just fill it up with coms. On the other side of the city, build your industry and connect it to the highway and some public transportation. Always build big, just build a shitload of zones across multiple cities and things will sort themselves out. And of course, manage the budget of your services, and build lots of those. Also, I disagree with the many people who insist on going slow and going from low tech to medium tech, and ultimately to high tech. It's actually much, much easier in terms of finance and hassle to rush straight for high tech with high education. Just crank up the taxes to dirty and manufacturing so they don't hog the industry zones while you spawn intelligent employees.
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Mar 13, 2013 22:19
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Koesj posted:While your advice does make general sense it's not the fastest way to get to the biggest skyscrapers in vanilla. I have to admit I barely remember what the vanilla game even plays like, was it really that hard though to get the biggest skyscrapers? I remember I just kinda goofed around in the beginning and eventually got there by just building a huge expanse of megacity over multiple cities. But seriously, I would try to get some mods working. If NAM doesn't work for you, try CAM or some convenient ploppables.  I whipped up a basic layout of how I tend to build, I'm not sure if this would work in vanilla I suppose.  I took a region shot while I was at it. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Mar 13, 2013 |
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Mar 13, 2013 22:49
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Dice Dingus posted:Woah woah woah woah back the gently caress up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHOv0HmQ7TQ There's a link to that dome and some other stuff in the description of this youtube video. There are actually many more really great Japanese mods out there by the way.
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Mar 14, 2013 09:49
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benzine posted:Time to recreate this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon). That's a nightmare for me, driving into an unfamiliar city in Europe and finding myself confused and stuck on some indescribable gordian knot of roads while an angry British driver yells "gently caress off wanker" at me. e: woops didn't mean to double post
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Mar 14, 2013 09:59
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Fewd posted:Then you get all depressed and panic because of the wanker shouts and start driving right because oh god someone help me I can kind of see what they were going for, they wanted a two-way roundabout, but imagine you're some wheel-clinging pensioner and suddenly this thing comes up. I'm also guessing it looks rather ugly.
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Mar 14, 2013 12:53
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My country does it that way, I vastly prefer roundabouts in most situations because it's easy to turn around if you've taken a wrong turn. But then they make insane variations like this:  I regularly have to navigate one of these fuckers, they really feel quite dangerous because if you're in the central lane, sometimes you have to cross other lanes to take a right turn, but in most cars it's quite difficult to see if any other cars are coming from that angle. Fortunately mine is slightly less convoluted than this one, but it's still weird as hell when you first encounter one.
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Mar 14, 2013 14:01
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I'm going to say it again, even in vanilla you'll have an easier time budgetwise if you rush for HT. Large low income populations are the hardest to manage while $$$ cities are easiest. But yes, do build out a lot. A well budgeted high school helps with this rushing, so I'd recommend building it and just keeping its budget down to minimum. Same with libraries and museums. Plus, they seem to help with getting the university, which will allow you to build full HT industry cities.
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Mar 17, 2013 20:32
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SourceElement posted:Sometimes your neighborhoods go horrifying. That's the town of Almere in Holland.
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Mar 20, 2013 22:37
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Imapanda posted:So glad SC4 thread is taking off again. Download a mod for the Brandenburger Tor and plop some generic german buildings around it in a 100m radius. Then build 3 adjacent casinos next to that.
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Mar 21, 2013 14:37
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The problem I generally see with patterned cities is that they are patterned. I'm not an urban planner and I'm sure patterns are more efficient, but all of the strongly patterned cities i know of are cities i wouldn't like living in (Almere comes to mind, but also the grid of Kyoto makes the city less charming to me than Tokyo is) while the cities I enjoy the most are the chaotic, messy ones (Tokyo, Granada) while those cities never struck me as particularly inefficient, at least not in a way that I experience as negative. In Simcity 4 I always deliberately create a mess for this reason.
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Mar 25, 2013 00:45
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Baby Cakes posted:Any tips for making dirty industry look good? I always fall into the "commercial buffers industrial" pitfall. I've been mixing R and C to make things organic but I end up making a giant industrial section isolated from everything else. Also, is there a guide to bus station placement? I'm using the Old Fashioned pack. Buffer industry from low density R with a nice looking traffic artery with greenery. In reality, industry usually really is separated from the rest of town in the way you describe, in a boring grid pattern (which is why they often teach people how to drive a car in industrial areas, they feature lots of intersections without much traffic).
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Apr 7, 2013 11:47
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Imapanda posted:Is there any mods which just expands the available options with SC4 highways? I don't like RHM. Same for me really, I don't really get the appeal of RHM. I've made huge, complicated cities with tons of mods and NAM stuff but the RHM is way too finicky for even my taste. Mostly I'm concerned that I'll misplace a puzzle piece and render my highway useless. NAM has some good interchanges for the maxis highway though.
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May 9, 2013 22:17
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Yeah this is more or less how I build too, except when I want to build some giant multitile metropolis, then I build the highway first since it's a pain to plan any kind of layout in an already developed, FPS-destroying megacity. The key to pretty and realistic cities Simcity 4 is to force yourself to build in a random faashion rather than going for efficiency. Just think of what kind of industry would fit a certain area of the map, build some industry and infrastructure there and start building some nice houses for the workers. The city will eventually create itself.
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Jun 7, 2013 10:31
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*PUNCH* posted:Yeah, you've gotta be pretty OCD about reading readmes for dependencies, etc. There are only a handful of things that depend on load order, but then again there are quite a few things that depend on installation order. Fortunately all that work has been done for OldFashioned, and again NAM is standalone, so adding things is relatively simple. I've started work and will cull from the STEX/LEX everything that's thematic and looks good made since like January. A whole bunch of new buildings have been released, so I'm kinda excited. Even more flesh to the pack's bones! Reinstalling game.
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Jul 23, 2013 08:10
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Avocados posted:Is it possible to (eventually) replace all dirty industry with high tech industry? Or does dirty industry need to exist in some certain quantity? Also, if possible, whats the best way to turn a massively polluted industrial sector into a high tech one? You can start out straight with high tech as long as you educate your workers early on with every school, and provide facilities and boost land value a bit in the industry zone with a plaza or something (this is what i always do because low tech cities are a pain in the rear end to start out with because of low income). Dirty and manufacturing do not need to exist, I don't know if they enhance high tech demand in any way though. And Simcity 4 is the best Simcity, I could never go back to 3000 even though it was a decent game.
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Aug 7, 2013 00:09
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SC4devotion is a weirdass website in general. I think they once considered suing somebody for making a second account.
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Sep 14, 2013 08:09
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The only part of SC4 which I still treat like a "game" as opposed to a landscaping tool is the efficiency of traffic. I basically ignore money because it's a joke to become super rich anyway. Making traffic flow effectively gives me something to build around in a non-haphazard way. I've said it before but the only way to get something better than SC4 is probably some kind of serious kickstarter open source project. It would need very little resources as long as it is readily moddable. Even the 2.5D graphics of 4 could be preserved as long as it means modding is easy. Mostly it would need to have a good terraforming engine and better handling of things like water, regional traffic and resources.
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Sep 20, 2013 10:17
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*PUNCH* posted:My dream is basically SC4 updated for modern gameplay: gridless, free camera, with advanced terrain tools and the like. Full 3D would be awesome, and I think computers are finally getting to the point where computers can handle that with a good level of detail (so long as the simulation isn't brain-fuckedly resource-intensive like SC5.) I actually think the region system in SC4 is really cool, if poorly executed; in an ideal universe I'd like the tiles to be a bit irregular, like a county map: I'd like the game to be basically grid-based, since regular measurements make it much easier to make buildings fit against one another (as opposed to the swathes of green space in SC5 as the result of a lack of a grid), I just want to be able to turn off the grid for certain things and build in freeform. Full 3D is nice but it seems like a kind of zero sum tradeoff between that and playability. 2.5D was a perfect solution for its time since it allowed great detailed graphics on a large scale with limited hardware, and I think it's probably still the best way to go about it.
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Sep 23, 2013 20:13
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*PUNCH* posted:I reject the false choice created by EA's lovely sequel! There are other games which have pulled off non-grid based layouts effectively; it just requires effort, which EA seems to have spent on their awful agent system. Yeah I agree the system you're describing for generic buildings should be used somehow, especially for residential suburban areas where I don't care much about customization and variety and just want a lot of lots to grow into my street plan.
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Sep 24, 2013 00:05
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On the topic of the silliness of the SC4 community, this makes for a funny read: http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=1445.0 quote:We terminated the membership of "He Who Will Not Be Named" (we assume that is his real name as well as his nic) for reasons I will, as noted above, not go into. Several weeks later, a new member nic'd "Tyreal_56" registered. Yesterday, Tyreal_56 posted this. Every building a modder crafts for SC4 drains a little of their sanity. Entire skyscrapers have the potential to drive their builder mad.
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Oct 13, 2013 13:20
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I was going to make a great big Japanlike region next time I play this game but now I don't have to anymore. Asian cities are easily my favorite in this game, but I think I should try to go for a different flavor some time, maybe Polynesian or South American or Middle Eastern something, can probably be done with the right plugins.
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Jan 13, 2014 07:38
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It's the gathering place for the local cult.
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Jan 26, 2014 03:55
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NAM and other mods have pedestrian tiles, but as I recall (I might be off though) it's problematic to build zones next to them since the game doesn't link them up to the road network properly, so you can only build ploppable lots. This in turn makes it really hard or impossible to build residential stuff, since these cannot be easily plopped - the only way I know is to wait for a building of the appropriate size to grow naturally and then plopping the residential building you want on top of that - it's extremely difficult to build a completely pedestrian only city, though a European-style pedestrian downtown with shopping streets is feasible.
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Jan 26, 2014 05:43
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It also helps to look at google earth with 3d buildings for inspiration on how to build things, especially if you want to build in a certain regional theme. Just look at where buildings and highways are actually placed and build like that.
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Jan 30, 2014 08:44
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Anomalies posted:Close, but not quite. The pedestrian tiles allow commercial and industrial zones to grow facing them, but not residential at all, due to some quirk in the game's coding. Also, the pedestrian lots must be "activated" by having a mass transit station connecting them to the road network, otherwise they won't be used. So, for example, a bus station next to/touching, or replacing, the pedestrian tile that touches a road. There's a better explanation (with diagrams) in the NAM's documentation. So yes, it's mostly for older-style downtowns. Oh yeah that was it, I've only really used ped tiles for commercial zones. I wonder if they could make a pedestrian road which works with all zones by just adding a very slight capacity for cars, lower than regular streets (would be pretty realistic anyway, since cars often drive in the pedestrian malls in European cities), and turn them into directional puzzle pieces?
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Feb 3, 2014 04:36
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Just buck RHW and use the rest of NAM instead with the stock highways. RHW is a pain in the rear end and doesn't even look that much better and is generally not worth it.
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Feb 3, 2014 05:03
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For me also the game runs faster in hardware mode, but don't ask me how or why. I think I even run it at full settings on a pretty old core 2 duo computer, so it might be a cpu quirk or something.
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Feb 9, 2014 12:58
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I think when I play this game again I'm going to go for a brutalist theme.
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Feb 13, 2014 14:24
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Jyrraeth posted:What's the diagnosis for a widespread unemployment in a region? My RCI demands a lot of low-wealth residential, and not much commercial or industrial. Its hard to tell exactly which classes are needing jobs, but I know I need more. Most likely that means that there are plenty of low wealth jobs (although low wealth R always seems to be requested) and not enough jobs for high wealth residents. Maybe try setting up a high tech neighborhood (raise dirty and manufacturing taxes in the city to keep out the dirty jobs, provide enough services in the residential area to attract the appropriate workers), high tech industry employs a lot of $$$ citizens and is very lucrative in terms of tax revenue, and ultimately much easier to maintain than the lower wealth industries and citizenry.
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Feb 14, 2014 05:39
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Keetron posted:Had a nice weekend, played a lot and build out my favorite town in Fhuzo quite a bit. Try raising the land value of that industrial zone, put down some parks and stuff. Even if RCI shows no demand sometimes it will jumpstart growth, attracting workers to the new plants which in turn drive demand for more HT. HT also seems to benefit from landmarks but I'm not sure exactly how.
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Feb 17, 2014 12:50
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Poizen Jam posted:Does anybody have some tips on developing realistic industrial parks in the game ? I've kind of grasped a lot of the philosophy of realism and proper city design for commercial and residential zones, and breaking away from the grid; but I'm a little lost for industrial parks. For cool little towns and villages I always put small areas of relatively clean industry right next to light commercial and residential, for big cities I put them apart a little and usually near a harbor, with relatively gridlike streets, though not quite a grid. Simcity has taught us to separate industry from everything else because of the rather excessive way it handles pollution, but in real life a factory is often just a building along a main road, often a single isolated building rather than vast stretches of factories. It makes for a more decentralized infrastructure if you just put (high tech) industry in various smaller spots across town rather than in a single place, which tends to spread out traffic more. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 12, 2014 |
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Mar 12, 2014 21:10
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It's generally a good idea to open google earth, find an industrial area (or whatever youre trying to build) near your house and see what it looks like from above. I'm not playing this game right now, but when I play it again I'd like to build a 1930's Sheffield-like place with dirty industry close to housing, everything jumbled together. Dirty industry is difficult to build right and use realistically, also because building a dirty city is more difficult than a clean high tech one in terms of tax money and stuff. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Mar 13, 2014 |
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Mar 13, 2014 18:45
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Do you guys still give your cities "serious" generic city names? I used to but now I just go with Pooptown, Gayville, and other classics like I used to in my SNES Simcity days. Coming up with a serious name for every little square of the region map is a pain in the rear end anyway.
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May 5, 2014 21:35
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triplexpac posted:I set up SC4 years ago with some version of NAM and a pack... I dunno though, I'm considering wiping it clean and starting fresh. Is there a go-to download pack these days? Definitely wipe it clean and download the latest NAM and whatnot. Personally I don't like or use packs because you get too much stuff you won't use and might not get as much control as you want over the look of your city.
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May 29, 2014 17:25
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triplexpac posted:Hmm what's your process like then? I kinda like downloading a pack because it throws a bunch of stuff at me that I might not have otherwise thought about. I'm not super great at planning a city, so I kind of figure it out as I go. I usually (or well, i've maybe restarted the whole game 4 times or so) just think of a region or setting that i want to build (like japanese, or polish or dutch or whatever) and then just look for individual mods on sc4devotion that match what i want to build. It takes a while but it makes your cities feel a lot more like something you yourself built.
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May 29, 2014 18:14
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:12 |
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Starhawk64 posted:So after grabbing this off of Gog.com, I'm interesting in making a profitable and amazing region. As someone whose Simcity experience comes from 2000, what's the best way to make profitable yet pretty cities? Also, what's the best way to take advantage of region play, that's kinda confusing me at the moment, there's a huge different in building one city in a vacuum like in previous games vs managing multiple cities. Are grids still viable? If you want profit, just go straight for high tech industry. Crank service budgets down to the minimum (check hospitals and clinics and turn down the slider so that it can take care of just enough patients, same for schools, check every so often and turn them up as required), that will save you a shitton of money. To get high tech industry, just build all of the educational services and trim their budgets, also build hospitals, police and fire departments, add some parks to your residential area and crank dirty/manufacturing industry tax up to the maximum. Wait a while (do some missions for money if you need it) and your citizens should become educated enough to make high tech industry pop up. Place commercial areas along high traffic roads (usually the commute roads between your res and ind) and they should grow profitable offices and stuff. Most people who start out and want it easy make the mistake of building few services and going for lots of dirty industry, but high tech is actually easier and more profitable. Connecting cities in the region will make them grow a lot more. The easiest way to play is to start out in one city, stop as soon as growth stagnates or your budget becomes a problem, grow an adjacent city and connect them, and revisit your previous city to see growth pick up again. Grids are viable but boring. Build arterial highways and avenues! This is mostly an aesthetic game, the challenge will disappear pretty soon. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 16:46
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