Thread: My experiments at building a city

Phase VII - The surge towards being a Metropolis

Since the neighboring city had a big airport, an Airport Tram service started in Bartholomew-on-sea:



Immediately the Warriott Hotel opened in the city:



The area was marked out for the Logistics center:





And the Logistics Center was built:



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Mistakes committed and some tips:

1. All execution did not go exactly as per original plan (see photo 2). Quite a few times, I had to demolish zones incorrectly allocated, e.g., commercial zones in planned residential area.

2. Highway planning did not go as per plan. Again lot of anguish of demolition.

3. Parks!!!! Build a lot of them. Sims just love parks and recreation facilities. Not talking about the theme parks -they just beautify the city but add no revenue or value addition (incredible as it seems).

4. In an ideal city that contains railways, subways and other MRT, we would expect that people prefer that. But not so in Simcity. In the beginning, the residential zone was connected to the CBD by rail link and I had heavy usage of the rail link. When the road link was built, the rail traffic dropped to almost nil. Hence I introduced a toll gate at the entrance of the city (got this idea from London Congestion Charge).

5. Start modest. Do not expect heavy influx. The entire story you see is a story of 2 centuries in Sim Life.

6. I wanted to build English style residential localities but the engine never plopped these beautiful cottages. Need to figure out why.

7. I downloaded a lot of agriculture farms (mods and plops) but never got to plan them right. In the end, I made some half hearted attempt to build farm lands some distance away from residents.

8. Citizens do not like to live near polluting industries and farm lands.

9. I never showed water treatment facilities in the city. But they are there.

10. Road should be laid out before zones. Quite a few times, I had to rework these out.

11. I wish I had ploughed a river before starting. I have some beautiful retaining walls that adds beauty to the river bank.

Mistakes committed and some tips:


7. I downloaded a lot of agriculture farms (mods and plops) but never got to plan them right. In the end, I made some half hearted attempt to build farm lands some distance away from residents.

That is the reason i was wondering about the Agri Residencies..


10. Road should be laid out before zones. Quite a few times, I had to rework these out.

The Circular Road plans comes handy..


Well i am on a mission now... will soon see something similar happenning from my Side !!!

From where can I download this game...

If you are really serious about this game, buy it. It will not be very costly.

More tips:

• The key to the successful city is desireability. Sims should feel like moving to your city. Good infrasturcture, employments, education facilities, good health care, hi-tech industries, parks, etc. increase desirability. Pollution, garbage dumps, accident prone roads, dirty industries, etc. are called NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard).
• A serious Simcity enthusiast will soon download a lot of mods (game alters) and plops (custom built houses, comerical establishments, farms, etc.). The Wal*Mart and TESCO that you see in my pictures are custom plops and so are the retaining walls, gardens, trail parks, etc.
• When you download mods and plops, they will consume a lot of memory. Too many mods and plops will crash the game.
• I have some fanstastic plops such as "Burj Dubai" tower - though it looks impressive it is quite useless for the game. It does not bring any desirability to the city.
• Some mods are not compatible with other mods.
• Use your imagination to the fullest.
• Some cheats are available. For example there is a Waterfront Casino that generates insane (and I mean really insane) amount of money for you. It is available as a plop download.
• You can play realistically but it is a very difficult game to start at first. So use the casino cheat to get ridiculous money in bank and then let your imagination fly without too concerned about money. For example, with limitless kitty, plan highways, railways and avenues and inner roads first.
• Once again: Sims prefer cars to public transport. Make them use public transport by introducing tolls on major through ways.
• Disaster scenarios exist. They are quite cool - earthquake, volcano, flood, alien attack. Try them out.
• For all information please visit Simtropolis. There is a wealth of information out there.
• and the cheeckiest of all. If you zoom down to individual houses you can see their swimming pools. Sometimes you might be lucky to find a nude sim-woman swimming but it is extremely rare.

Recommended PC Specs:

• Although the game can play on a Pentium 4/2 Gz/512 MB RAM/64 KB Graphics, this may not work when you city becomes very large.
• You will need about 2 GB harddisk for the basic Deluxe game and something more for the mods/plops. I have over 2 GB mods/plops but I use about half of them.
• You should play with Pentium Core-2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and 128 KB graphics. Higher graphics will help in bringing out minute details but not by a great deal.
• The bigger the city, the more the game engine has to do for simulations.
• Zoom facilities are available. So the larger the monitor, the better.

One thing I will guarantee you. Those who like strategy and simulation games - this game will hook you for ever.

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Phase VII - Continued ...

The Corporate Enterprises sponsored the building of a new park:



And they added pedestrian overpasses to get to the park:



High wealth Mansions arrived in the city:



Space was now premium in Bartholomew-on-sea. The RLS enterprises purchased a prime plot of land to build its mall in future:



Now Marriott decided to establish its link to the city. They chose the Marina site:

I am loving this game already trying to find my way around ... Just need some time to get used to

I searched my DVD folder... It has only "the sims" and "the sims 2- which I never played"... guess I'll have to wait a bit to start...

Originally Posted by Admin

I am loving this game already trying to find my way around ... Just need some time to get used to

Oh. It took me a month before I got the basics right. And that after having played Simcity 2000 and (a bit of) Simcity 3000 before.

Maxis have themselves agreed that they pulled themselves in a corner because the game became too complicated for beginners.

The Sims and Sims 2 is a spin off from all Sim games by Maxis (and marketed by EA). Sims concertrated on life of a person and his/her daily chores, struggles, joys, sorrows, drugs, crime, love/dating, issues with children, etc.

New issues? Please discuss here:

http://www.indiabroadband.net/genera...scussions.html (Simcity 4 discussions)

Not my own, but all these things are possible (and pretty simple):

Bravo ...... That was a very entertaining thread .. will try my hand out as soon as i get time ... have nt played this for a long time

And you should maybe relocate this thread to the videogames section...

I missed it completely

I am planning to download this game today
Hope to enjoy as i enjoy such strategy game which i can play for hours and hours

The city was rewarded with the Television studio. To commemorate the occasion, the citizens paid for the Mayor’s statue which was installed right opposite the TV studio:



High rise landmark buildings arrived on the sea front near the Marriott and the Marina:



The city had its own lush green Golf Course and the Bartholomew Wanderers got their own stadium:





Admin gets the honour of the season pass for front row seats courtsey the Mayor (just4kix):



<<< THE END >>>
Unfortunately after this, I could not capture more story as I got busy with some real work and I uninstalled Simcity 4 from my computer.

But please do comment - the good, the bad, the ugly.

For those who came late, the thread has been bumped.

Too bad I stopped playing this game long time ago. I had even made a couple of CJ's (city journals) on simtropolis.

Originally Posted by 18lama

Too bad I stopped playing this game long time ago. I had even made a couple of CJ's (city journals) on simtropolis.

I got the idea from Simtropolis. Do you have the links to your city journals?

Both of them got deleted I think when they updated ST 5.0 to 6.0 some time back. I might have my old imageshack a/c where I used to upload all my images. I'll have to search for it that too if it is not already deleted.

Found my old imageshck a/c.

Here are images from one of my CJs.













I'll post more of them later.

Your City is fantastic. Sorry, can't rep you, yet.

Originally Posted by just4kix

Your City is fantastic. Sorry, can't rep you, yet.

Thanks for the thought.

This is nothing lol...This was just the hint. I'll start my own thread rather than hijack yours. I've got hundreds of images now that I recovered my old imageshack a/c, which I can put up here, including full region screens.

Please do start your thread. I would love to see your CJ.

Originally Posted by just4kix

Please do start your thread. I would love to see your CJ.

http://www.indiabroadband.net/pc-gam...tml#post190981 (amal81's attempt at citymaking in simcity4)

please check.