hi guys! who here plays any simcity game and became successful mayors? i hope i'm not the only one. newbies are welcome in here too and feel free to ask me questions about how to make your city the best it can be. lol. frankly, i like simcity games than the sims coz controlling a single family is so boring.
I've been playing simcity 4 + rush hour for about 4 years now. I've actually only ever built one city without using any cheats at all. That city is medium size and now has a population of about 240,000. It does have full and extensive education, health, fire and police coverage. But I always have troubles with crime rates at the airport. The environment is not too bad too. I was pretty lucky that I lay out the city in a 6X6 grid fashion to start with, so I could easily transform most of the streets to one way once it gets congested. Also I am still half way through building an extensive subway system, it's quite expensive so I have to do it bit by bit. The land value is quite high for the whole city, and around 2/5 of the city is R$$$ and CO$$$ and CS$$$. Usually I'd use cheats. Mainly the "money lot" cheats where you put a park and you get something like $10000000000. I find it a lot more find having unlimited amount of funds because you can do whatever you want. Demolish stuff, put expensive highways and subways everywhere. Plop high capacity infrastructures whenever you want. I also sometimes use the "you don't deserve it" as well as the cheat where it artificially generates huge demand for R$$$ when you place a landmark. My largest cheated city is a large sized one, and has a population of 3,200,000. I've managed to combine a high speed monorail system with the full coverage subway system. But I still have quite a lot of "abandoned due to commute time" problems in my city. Actually the commute time thing is the ONLY problem that I have in ANY of my cities. I actually use those cheat air purification plants and those cheat water purifications too. The game itself is the problem. The people are actually driving at one mile per hour on a road. And it takes them 20mins to travel 10 grids. The stupid commute time problem has a huge flow on negative effect on my city. R$$$ are always the first ones to go abandon. The sudden drop in R$$$ causes a huge drop in demand for CO$$$. Then the CO$$$ goes abandon due to low demand. Then more R$$$ goes abandon from lack of jobs. I wish maxis could mix up the commute time problem. I mean a small sized city is 1km X 1km. So a sim should be able to walk on foot from this side of a small city to the other side in 15mins. Anyway I think I'm finish having fun posting here, I'll come back later
lol. well i can't really relate coz i've only played simcity 3000 coz my cd-rom is busted and i don't have enough money to have it repaired. i never even tried cheating coz i don't know any cheats so i'm forced to create a city out of scratch. i have made 6 cities and my largest city so far has a population of around 2.6 million but i already ran out of space coz most of my city is water. traffic congestion sure is a problem in a big city so i made lots of mass transits. well, i guess that's my advice. build lots of mass transits and don't worry about the money coz it will come.
I've played SC3000 too. I must say 3000 is a lot easier because there's a lot of things that doesn't require monthly maintainence cost, like parks and stuff. And the maintainence cost for transportation, education and health is also a lot lower compared to SC4. In 3000 lots don't tend to go abandon as often as simcity 4. Because as you said it, mass transit tend to solve all the problems. But in SC4 things are very different. A subway line can only handle 2000 passengers per day. And it takes them 1 hour to travel a mile. Anyway I'll rant more about SC4 The game too "Americanized", especially with the zoning and transportation systems. That type of orthodox layout doesn't suit a high density city. That's on of the thing I love about simcity 3000. because zones don't have to "face" a road or street, it just needs to be within 4 (for R) and 3 (for C) squares to a road and it'll function, even though I lined up the entire edge of my street with parks. And the good thing about 3000 is that you can place schools and hospitals anywhere in the city and it'll work. In simcity 4, schools and hospitals need to be placed like police stations because they have a "coverage" area that they can serve. Back to the topic about transportation problems in SC4. The streets and roads layout is still too inflexible for a dense city to function properly. And those highway interchanges takes up too much room. There needs a be a better intergration system to intergrate the zones and roads with a coast line, or the unsmooth terrain. A road only has a max capacity of 1000 cars a day, I'm pretty sure a road can handle more than that. And even my mass transit systems are highly congested. High wealth residents will not tolerate a commute time above 30mins and they'll go abandon. It's very annoying to have a dark, ran down skyscraper right in the middle of the city. Then the low wealth residents kick in and my Ong Condos down has 20000 occupants. Gosh I'll stop now and come back more when I feel like it
I occasionally play SC3k, I have a few cities with fairly large populations and incomes... I wish they'd get around to making a "lighter" (read: easier) and perhaps more flexible Sim City. Something that is just fun and not so tedious later in the game.
