I just picked up this game against my better judgement because I have sucked royally at the previous SC games but this one looks so good I had to try it.
Anyway, anyone have any tips for a newbie starting his first city? I tend to put too much shit down right at the begining and then my city tanks.
Anyone?
I find that scaling the “Large” services (School / Fire / Police) and decreasing their funding to what my city requires is more cost effective than the little ones. They also scale up with your city, so you don’t have to keep fitting them in.
Also, I like to put a powerplanet in a neighbouring city and then connecting the power to the tile I want to build my main city. This way, I get the advantages of the cheap dirty power sources without having to deal with the pollution. Soon enough, my main city is eligible for clean nuclear power. I put in one of those and then reverse the sharing. Since the neighbour was never played after building a bunch of plants, there is no pollution built up if you demo the coal plants right away after getting nuclear. This is sort of exploiting the game though.
ahem. don’t go by the little roads they give you when you zone a block of land. if you only crisscross the landscape with 4x4 tiles, you’ll be efficient as all hell. don’t build water/police/fire/hospitals until they ask for it.
when you start off, make your road grid. then, build your power plant (coal). after that, fill the entire map with farmland. decrease the budget for the power plant so its very low (farm doesn’t use much power). this is where you adjust the taxes. you can institute the flat tax and drop everything to about 4 or 5 percent across the board (you should be raking in piles of money right now) or, you can be ultra republican and drop taxes on the high wealth sectors to zero, the middle wealth sectors to about 1.5 or 2, and the poor to about 3 or 4. about now, your demand bar should tell you that you need homes. some people say to use low density ones and then replace it as the game goes along, but i just give em the high density shit right away. build as demand tells you to and raise taxes when appropriate.
by the way, there is a different way. you can build homes in one city…connect roads to a neighboring city, get power there, and build industry there…so you can do what the second poster did. build industry there until demand dies…then go back to the other city, build what’s in demand. you can also connect other cities to take care of your commerce, if you so desire.
if you do it a few times, it tends to get formulaic. it’s still fun trying to navigate roads and stuff around water and weird land formations, though.
Get a fractal generator like Fractint if you want to generate random landscapes. Set it to “plasma” with a topographical color map and save the file. Then open the file in a picture editor, convert it to greyscale, resize to 1025×1025, and save as a bitmap. Then in SC4, create a new region and I think you press Shift+Control+Alt+R to prompt a “load file” dialog.
That the part I like. After several unsuccessful cities (and having no problem getting profitable cities in all previous versions), I got Cheat-o-Matic to give all my cities a billion bucks so I can build to my heart’s content. I don’t think this will work with the current version.
yeah, every once in a while, i’ll get an itch to play…and i’ll play like crazy for a few weeks…and then back into the drawer it goes.
that seems to be the best part…is working around the land
The best advice I can offer is not to think of the game as though it were SC2000. You’re not really making a city, you’re making a bunch of interconnected cities. Mixing Commercial and Industrial and Residential zones in SC2K will give you a strong city. Mixing them in SC4 will give you dirty water, crime, and fires.
And remember-- farms do pollute.