The SimCity Thread of Offline Play

[Tornado]

How many Sims are in your city?

[EmmBee]

Last I checked it was around 7000. I'm down to around 100,000 bucks now.

[Tornado]

If your police station is in a centralized area, just ignore the advisor when he bitches about funding. Your city is still small enough that you don't really need to worry about crime anyway. How are you supplying power and water?

[EmmBee]

I think I had two pump stations within the city, since apparently the one I had was in an area with high amounts of pollution.

As for power, I tried to take down the funding for the one plant I had, and suddenly the whole city begins going dark and I have several people screaming at me to either increase funding or put down more plants. I just ended up making two extra plants.

I'm wondering if wind power would be better.

[Tornado]

It's much, much, much more expensive to run multiple power and water plants at low funding than it is to run one at regular funding. The only time you do that is if you want to export to surrounding cities but don't want to take away from your city's utilities. Bulldoze the extra power plants and adjust the funds of the one remaining to 50% more than your power needs (as shown by the when you use the Question Mark button on the plant). Build the coal plant instead of the more clean varieties at first, then switch up to the natural gas plant at around 15,000 people (so long as you have the funds) Bulldoze the water plant in the polluted area and connected the water pipes to the one outside the polluted area. 7000 people means a small pump house would be better than a water tower.

 

 

Stay away from wind power until you have around 30 thousand or so people in your city, because at that point you'll have enough to raise taxes slightly to offset the drastically higher cost per watt.

Edited March 17, 2013 by Tornado

[MykonosFan]

Also if you're playing it vanilla, you may want to look into the modding scene. I hear that SimCity 4 was launched quite bugged deep down, but fans polished it right up.

[EmmBee]

I've got Deluxe, which has Rush Hour included. So I'm probably good.

[Badnik Mechanic]

Isn't there some kind of traffic mod for Sim City 4 that everyone raves about?

 

Is it worth downloading that if you have the rush hour expansion? If so, what/where is it?

[Tornado]

The Network Addon Mod.

[EmmBee]

I'm not going for mods just yet. I'll see how the base game holds up and then see if it's worth modding to me.

I did everything you said, demolished the extra plants, water pumps, and other things I may not need, but I'm still at around 3000 dollars income and 8000 dollars in expenses. At least agriculture seems to be in demand again.

[Tornado]

Hm... can you give a screencap of your city?

[EmmBee]

I'll have to get back to you on that, my game has crashed twice because I zoomed out for some reason.

I was down to about half and half before it crashed, though. I was told to cut spending, and I'm kinda hesitant to do so since the last time I did that my city went without power and water randomly.

[Badnik Mechanic]

Oh my god... yes they did.

 

[Patticus]

Beware the machinations of The Maxis of EAvil™.

[SIXTH-RATE SOMA]

That is the most astoundingly Japanese thing I've seen all day, and it isn't even Japanese. Bravo.

[Thrippa]

I've also gone back to Simcity 4, and it is hard to set up a new city.  There are so many things it seems like you ought to add, but the trick is to wait until the people tell you you need them.  As the game itself says, the advisors are advocating for themselves, not just for the city.  And police and fire stations sound like important critical things . . . but they do draw down your funds, fast, in the early stages.

 

I'm too used to remembering the big cities I used to have, where the fine tuning was more esthetic than survival.

[Patticus]

Here's the latest, from Lead Gameplay Scripter, Guillaume Pierre:

 

Hello, Mayors! We’ve been busy collecting your feedback since the game launched, and I wanted to show you some of the changes we’re currently testing.

One thing that you’ve made clear was that traffic has been a frustrating issue in many cases. That’s why we’re making it better. In his blog post earlier this week, Stone Librande, our Lead Designer, mentioned how our congestion avoidance system works, with roads being weighed based on 25%, 50% and 75% congestion rates. Although this system was in the game at release, it was tuned a little too low.

Here, you can see an example of the new tuning, where vehicles pile up on a dirt road on their way to the stadium, until I build avenues around it, relieving traffic coming from the regional highway:

Finally, emergency & service vehicles such as fire trucks, ambulances, coal trucks, buses, etc… will now have priority when they leave their garages, so traffic in front of their building will stop to let them on the street.

Keep checking back here for more updates.

http://www.simcity.com/en_GB/blog/article/simcity-traffic-update-uk

The congestion avoidance system was in place since release? D:

 

Incidentally, the Civitas Kickstarter fund has been cancelled, as a source of private funding has been located. More info through the link.

[Tornado]

So, in other words, they've restored two more things that SimCity 4 already did to their oh-so-advanced all new Sim behavior engine.

[Patticus]

Just be thankful that they're not making you pay for it, like they do all those features from the Sims series that they insist on expansion packing anew in each new game, even though they already had those features down in the last game.

[Remy]

Shame too. I think the Simcity "Traffic Avoidance Pack" has a nice ring to it. How much do these packs go for, liker 10-20 bux? Missed business opportunity. 

[Patticus]

Depends what it was packaged with - if they added larger city sizes and some extra miscellaneous stuff, they'd probably ask us to pay $39.99.

[Tornado]

SimCity: Pedestrian Education. MSRP: $30

 

 

 

 

Expansion Pack New Features: Pedestrians are no longer treated literally the same as shit by the game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It even sounds like the kind of title they would give their expansion packs for the regular The Sims games.

[Patticus]

SC: Metropolis Pack (Larger city sizes, larger regions, new buildings.)

SC: Meteorological Mayhem (Proper weather added, along with in-game weather forecasting. Traditional four season cycle for certain regions, others going by the rainy/dry cycle.)

SC: Geology Pack (Terrain editor added, at long last, along with new terrain types.)

SC: This Time It's Personal (Ties in with The Sims 4, allowing Sims to move into and around your city, telling you what they like and dislike etc. They can also visit at will, on vacations and whatnot, if TS4 is installed, without moving in. Also gives you the ability to create your own Sims-sized town in SC just to import into TS4.)

 

And so on. Oh and your choice of free game is between....

 

 

I wasn't expecting them to actually put SimCity 4 on there!

[Remy]

Eeeeeh, I'd get most wanted. 

[Tornado]

Oh my god did they seriously put SimCity 4 in there? I can't stop laughing.

 

 

 

 

 

And I wonder if it's the good Most Wanted, but probably not.