Sim City 4 questions

The Game Room
1

I’ve had this a while but never reallly got too far with it. Well I dusted it off and have spent longer than I should have playing it today. I’ve built my city up to the 75,000 population mark on a large square. I am trying to take things to the next level, and have a few questions for anyone who’s experienced with the game.

Things were going pretty well, I’ve been monitoring what’s in demand. The main thing right now is the Sims are screaming for low cost commercial areas. How do I get these? I built up a ton of low density commercial, but the demand is still pretty high. I’m guessing low density is different than low cost, so how do I influence low cost commercial development?

Does the placement of landmarks make any difference? I put most of them around the edges of the city, due to limited development space. Should I put these more towards the center of town, or doesn’t it make a difference.

At this stage (75,000 pop), should I be focusing on replacing low density zones? I have high and medium zones sprinkled thoughout the city, do you need some low densities around, or can I replace most/all of them with higher densities to pack them in tighter?

I have a small grid of roads running through the zone, but I mostly have streets. Traffic density is almost all green, although the pollution from some roads is in the yellow. Should I be putting in avenues or higher? Will that get people to travel further to work? What about public transportation? I started to put in a bus network with parking garages next to each bus stop.

Water is getting to be in short supply. I have 2 water stations, but the capacity is much larger than “actual capacity”. I’m not selling any water to my neighbors, why is my actual capacity so low?

There’s still some demand for medium and high wealth industry. I’ve tried to put my industrials on the edge of town, but I’m still having problems with air polution. How do I reduce air pollution? I tried building industrial zones in neighboring cities, it says on the static screens your Sims will go to another region to work. How do I get them to go work elsewhere?

What else should I be doing to get into the higher end population targets? I have tried to make sure I get good educational and Emergency coverage (fire, police, medical), and raised taxes on dirty industry so its on low demand. I don’t have any power issues, I built a bunch of power plants in a neighboring region and pay them for juice.

2

The way to your solution lies outside your borders. Build a road connecting to your neighbor. Build ONLY farmland on that property. Let it all build up (build a fire station and demolish them when needed) and let it coast if you want cash. You should probably get a Farmers’ Market and a State Fairground if you get enough of them packed in there. When you have truckfuls of cash, increase the taxes on the farmers as high as it’ll go (20%) and start building high-density commercial. Build until there’s no demand, and then drop the taxes to a tiny percentage and drop them some more. Go back to your other city and see what’s what. The business should go to the neighboring city (which is what you want). Next, connect road to another neighboring plot of land. By now, you need water (if you built up the farmers, they probably needed water too, so you could do this part preemptively). Build only farmland and repeat what you did for the previous plot of land. This time, build big water pumps in one corner, and in the farthest corner, your trash and power solutions. After you’ve got more then enough, go to your original city, pay for power and water from the new place and blow up your towers, pumps, and power plants. Do the same for that commercial area. You’ll notice that you’re getting some nasty traffic. What’s the solution? Well, it’s something you should have already done. If you have one road from your commercial area to your residential area, you’re going to understandably have a wicked bottleneck. When I build roads, it’s the first thing I do. I lay it out as a grid, putting up bridges where needed and connecting the road to the neighboring city right away. I make sure the land is divvied up into 4x4 plots. It’s not very pretty or imaginative, but it works. That’ll dissipate your traffic and you’ll never have to worry about traffic. If you ever do, build subways and parking garages to the areas of high traffic. Throw a Sim in there and see what the Sim wants. I build parks in the intersections (to explain it better, wherever a road meets, I bulldoze enough road so it can fit in there and just have one road going to it. Then I try to pack as many folks in there as I can).

At this point, you’ll have to worry about schools and hospitals. That sucks because you want to try and get growth rising at a decent clip. If you do what I tel you and let the computer run for a while to bank more cash, you’ll have different baby booms. You’ll have to plan appropriately for each.

Let us know if you have any other questions.

3

Looks like I knocked this one out f the park already, but the most efficient use of fire departments, police departments, and hospitals is to build them in a cluster around the board. Make it so their radii are touching, but not intersecting (unless you need a new hospital). Don’t forget t adjust the budget of each hospital and school you build. You may be bleeding money when you shouldn’t be.

Th expound upon the previous post, bounce back and forth between your neighboring cities when your main (residential) city needs commercial or industrial. Trash, power, and industry all pollute, so you will probably want to get them in their own community as well. Make sure to not build water pumps there, because when they pollute the pumps (and they will), you’ll wish you didn’t. I like to have my industrial portion my power and trash portion as well, which isn’t so much contrary to the previous post as it is a clarification or a choice you can make. Your industrial city will probably never have cash problems, so in order to take advantage of that, have the water be pumped in the clean farmland, sold to the residential, and then resold to the industrial (and probably commercial, too). You’ll generate a little extra cash for the residential area by doing this. Make sure you build enough water pumps, because the demand goes up really fast when you’re building high-density stuff.

4

Well that’s very interesting. I was wondering how demand carried out between city areas. Looks like Powerville will be doing a bunch of farmland zoning. :smiley:

I’ve been keeping up with my funding and neighbor deals, so I always have 2-4k more coming in than I’m spending. I’m sitting on around 640k, which will come in handy later on for big renovations. I think the city is pretty well planned out but space is getting to be a problem. Commercial demand is going through the roof, offices are all I’ve been building lately.

5

Demand flows between cities, provided they’re connected by road. Unfortunately, this game teaches you to rape farmers and poor folks.

6

Do you have Rush Hour? For low cost areas, you need to add the zoning to some place that is not desirable some how to higher income residents. For Low cost residential, I zone some residential near the industy or noisy roads where the polution and noise will keep away the rich folks. It is not easy, because I keep education coverage high so there has to be something nasty or it goes to the middle and upper income residents.

7

Oh, most items have a nimby and yimby radius. The guide has details, so it can be quite important where things are placed.

8

NIMBY effects are sharply reduced with my methods. All you have to really end up looking at is whether or not the stuff you’re placing jives with stuff you’re trying to bring into your city.

9

Ok, I’ve been trying to implement your strategy and not having much luck with it. I’ve rebuilt the same area 6 or 7 times, and keep having to exit without saving.

In one large region is my main city. North of this is Powerville. Maincity has been developed to about 75,000, with mostly commercial and residential zones, with some manufacturing and high tech industry on the outskirts of town. They ship all their garbage to Powerville, which has a waste dump or a landfill or something (I forget exactly what its called). Maincity also buys all their juice from Powerville.

Powerville has 7 power plants, a bit of dirty industry and med commercial, with only a few residential zones thrown in (I figured someone’s gotta maintain the power plants. What I’d like to do is add the expensive water plant and supply all of Maincity’s water as well as their power. I’d also (eventually) like Powerville to supply a few other neighboring regions with water, power, and waste removal.

I tried applying your strategy to Powerville. I dezoned the whole place, and filled most of it with agricultural zones. Those need water, so I filled in some water pipes. I lost money hand over fist. Exit to region without saving, try again. And again. And again. I’ve tried leaving the existing development in Powerville, and just adding farms to what’s already there. I’ve tried not putting in plumbing. I’ve tried getting rid of all power plants but one (and canceled the deal with Maincity). It doesn’t seem to matter, Powerville is going to lose money. Sometimes it loses thousands of dollars a month, sometimes just a few hundred, and once in a while I can get it to actually make money. But it’s a very small amount of money, and fluctuates month to month, with some months making small amounts, some months losing money.

The only thing I can think of is to start a 3rd zone adjacent to Maincity, and try your farms/commercial development example. But one of the major issues is, I want Powerville to make money, or at least not lose money, since they’re going to be supplying zones on 3 sides with trash, power, water, etc. Any suggestions?

What’s the purpose of the farmland? Your post seems to be using them as cash makers, but all the farms I’ve put in are money sinks. They require a lot of power and water, and don’t really make much money. I’ve had slightly over half of a large zone covered with farmland, and only got about $400 a month from it. Am I doing something wrong or missing something?

10

Either I’m missing a step or you are. When I start a city, I pave the roads for the entire thing in a grid so there are 4x4 boxes to build in. Zone the entire map with farming. Build a power plant. Take it off of pause and let it grow. Drop the taxes down to a tiny amount to draw farmers in, and then kick it back up to 7 or 9 or so to draw in big cash. When you want to start throwing some other zones in there, jack the taxes up to 20% for farms and just rezone where you need to. You may also want to drop the taxes for whatever color of zone you’re trying to entice. Of course, only building that zone helps too. Build that color zone until the demand for it is gone. After that, go back to your residential city and let it take in the fact that there’s a ton of the other color zone waiting to be used in the neighboring city. In the beginning, don’t build water pumps or towers. Water is expensive. Build water when your growth levels out/when people demand it.

Do the same for the industrial component, but let that one be the power supplier to everyone. Sometimes the neighbor deals are hard to initiate, but I think that’s because the game is smarter than I am and knows when it’s simply not feasible to enter into a deal for resources because they’re not available.

If you want, try it again and let me know. If it doesn’t work out, I can start one up and email it over to you/send you screenshots to better illustrate what I’m talking about.

11

If I’m understanding you correctly, it sounds like all of your residential areas are getting covered by big McMansions and not leaving any space for smaller residential homes. This frequently happens around 70k, once you’ve got some services up and running and there is some appeal to $$$ residents. The problem isn’t so much density but zoning structure. It’s gonna be hard to explain exactly, but I’m gonna try.

When you zone, it allows you to just drag a square over a huge area and it places some connector roads, make each “parcel” 1x2 or 1x3 depending and has all of the parcels packed in perfectly next to one another. The problem comes once your city starts getting more improved and attracting wealthier residents. Once they show up, they buy several connecting “parcels” and turn them into one big house maybe 2x6 or 4x3. This displaces lots of your lower income families, but since their jobs are all there, they still desire housing.

The best solution to this it to self-design your residential neighborhood streetage, and line it with parcels that are 1x1 with a band or section of unzoned land in the middle. You can also put 1x2 spaces, these bring in $$ residents, which are your bread and butter. Just make sure the richies can’t build a 3x4 house where you’ve zoned. This is how to design suburbs.

You could alleviate some of the need by zoning some higher density apartments, but your need at 70k is still pretty low, so they would probably take a while to develop and fill, and they stand a good chance of sitting empty and worthless in your downtown. And while you need to zone larger contiguous blocks for effective high density, there’s a chance some rich squatters might just move a Mcmansion on there in the meantime.

12

I was also going to add that you have to learn how to share demand between neighbors. The only way to get mega-cities with millions of people is to have cities dedicated to certain aspects, small residential, heavy industry, power generation, trash disposal, commercial, high tech, farming, high density. Some things go well together (res/high tech) or (heavy industry/power/trash) but you’ll eventually start running into all kinds of trouble trying to get farming and high density housing to sharing one water supply.

People are willing to travel to any connecting city, just no farther than that. Use one city to drive demand in another, don’t be afraid to crank taxes to 20% to prevent any undesirables from moving in where you don’t want them.

13

Grids are evil! They lead to the worst traffic pattern!

When I start a city, I have the train and roads come in and cross the whole city, like a #. Within the sections, for residential areas I build little branching section of street that empty onto the main roads, the goal being as many streets as possible without overloading them. I put bus stops on the streets about half way up, and try to make it so the bus stop is on one street and the back is touching another. The patterns I make remind me of the distribution of blood vessels. Aside from the main drag, you want to avoid completing circuits.

The goal is not to make it the most connected city ever, but rather to channel traffic efficiently, and preferably into mass transit. Never mind that you would hate not being able to drive to your backdoor neighbors without going out onto the main drag, that may be a PITA to drive, but it means fewer squares of streets of roads serving the same population with less congestion.

14

So I should be doing something like Sierra City-Building game pattern, where for the most part intersections are evil and cause problems and should be avoided? Have connections for long-movers, but long, isolated streets for locals?

How do subways and rails fit into this?

15

Subways are just roads on a different plane, they operate pretty much the same way. Intersections are pretty evil, because they produce tons of congestion, much like real life…in general, you want to design a system that a) has your sims moving constantly, not sitting at traffic lights at intersections and b) moving as short a distance as possible.

For b), you just want to intersperse residential zones with job (commercial and high tech), so they can walk/have a short car ride. If you go with high-density, you’ll need lots of bus stops and subways and whatnot even with this method - there are simply so many people.

For a), you want to coax your sims onto high-capacity transport (aka highways), sending them to their jobs. Intersections are pretty much unavoidable, but you can at least make sure most of your sims’ time is spent moving, not sitting at a traffic light. You need to do this even if you do the aforementioned also, because you need dirty jobs, and you want those in a different city to your residential/commercial/high tech.

How you do all this depends on whether you want maximum efficiency or you care about aesthetics. For the former, it’s been a while but I believe the most efficient system is smallish grids of res+com+high tech in one city, with a highway system the only route into another city with dirty jobs. The reason the highway is the only connection is because SC4’s pathfinding isn’t that hot (understandable, good pathfinding for millions of sims would be slow as heck), so they tend to congest along a little road even when a highway is next to them. So you force them to take the right path.

Oh, and bus stops. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of bus stops. They make you money, and ease congestion hugely.

16

I agree with the bus stops. If you get some good bus stops, you can make some serious bank.

17

Subway stops are like bus stops, only rich people will use them too. Build subways between places that people drive too to bleed people off the roads.

I repeat, smallish grids are very bad.

So, after I lay my # and running water pipes, I put an elementary school and a clinic on the road near and fill in the streets for the residential within their circle of influence. I then zone up the entire circle in residential except for commercial near intersections. I put industrial somewhat apart from this area due to pollution. When I unpause, usually it builds up immediately and is profitable. A four way stop (+) is better than two T stops near each other, but intersections should not be all that frequent. As traffic gets heavier, I find upgrading just the first square of a street next to a street/road intersection cuts down on congestion.

Always put tollbooths near the road exit to the edge of the map. Easy money. Put parking garages near transfer points to mass transit, but be prepared to bulldoze those that do not get used. They can boost ridership. Ferries are great. passenger and car.

18

lee, do you use a tree-like system with highways as the trunk and roads as branches? And how do you use trains specifically? I never did get the hang of trains.

Hmm, getting the urge to re-install it now :>

19

Farms don’t need water, they need power. Farms have their own wells.

Also, farms and industry don’t always go well together. Farms hate air pollution. Paradoxically, they’re one of the heaviest generators of water pollution. I tend to have a power/industry/water feeder and a farm/$-residential feeder, and then my proper cities are a mix of $$ and $$$-residential and commercial, with low densities for the suburbs and high density zoning for the big one in the middle. I don’t make all-residential cities, that just lowers the demand for the metro area.

On a middle-sized map, I’m generally good with freeway in a + config, with a belt of avenues going around it, roads coming off the avenues, and streets coming off the roads. Grids are good for the metro area, as long as you’re making very efficient use of mass transit and one-ways, but will kill your commute times if your blocks are bigger than 4x4, or you get more than a couple zones above low density. Think fractal. Streets have the houses, and lead to the road. The road goes only to the avenue, and the avenue goes only to the freeway. Don’t make the streets longer than about 15 houses, or you’ll start to see yellow on them. A road shouldn’t supply more than prox 10 streets, or you’ll see congestion again. It takes a fair number of road feeders to clog up an avenue, as long as you don’t have any avenue-avenue intersections, and I’ve never seen congestion on a freeway using this method. When I do use mass transit, I like to place train and elevated rail stations and bus stops near every other road-avenue intersection. I rarely need subway in this config, tho I use it extensively in my metro area

If you do decide to cluster your res and comm on the same map, be sure to keep the comm areas near the intersections, and closer to the freeway the higher the density. Don’t let your sims deviate from your traffic pattern… the comm areas will become destinations, don’t give them a choice about how to get there. If you can’t keep the comm near the freeway, consider isolating it to all but mass transit (HOV roads and elevated rail are my faves).

If you put any industrial in your main cities, don’t do it until your education is good enough to support manufacturing and hi-tech, then use the clean air ordinance and taxes to keep the dirty industry out. Also be sure to use feeder roads into the industrial areas, then block those roads to truck traffic. Force the industry to use a railyard or seaport to ship their goods, otherwise they’ll pick the nearest road to get out of town, and clog that route something fierce.

In general, don’t build or buy water until you’re ready to expand past low-density zones, and if you aren’t going to do that, don’t worry about water. Also, don’t rely on the capacity graphs to manage your trash, use the area map. You can go a fair amount over “capacity” before the trash actually piles up, so there’s a bit of money to be saved there. Use fire stations to raise land values, but if you don’t care about land value, then it’s more economical to just rely on the smoke detector ordinance and dispatch from the other side of town where you do care about land value. Consider toll booths, where the traffic levels allow - they’ll bring in cash, but cause congestion, so save them for roads and avenues that are well under capacity.

20

Can’t speak for lee, but I like using that config in my lower density cities. It doesn’t work so hot for a metro area, there I use a grid of one-way avenues and roads, and oodles of mass transit.

In the suburbs, I generally stick with buses, trains, and elevated rail. I place the train and rail stations at the intersections of roads and avenues, and then run the train tracks in a loop following the avenue, with the el rail going to specific destinations where the traffic gets the worst.

In the metro, I use the same pattern for mass transit as I do for surface roads in the suburbs. Buses go everywhere, of course, but I let the lower capacity rail options feed the higher ones. Saves money, and keeps the subway from clogging up. If you just run subway in a grid, it’ll go over capacity rapidly. I don’t remember, but I think there’s a high-speed rail option that I used in a ring just outside the middle of the map, with a branch heading to each edge of the map. Then I used subway (high cost, lower capacity, less realestate) and el train (lower cost, higher cap, more surface area) as appropriate to feed the high-speed rail. I stopped using surface train in the metro except for low-cap feeders from the suburbs.

Get the NAM add-on, if you haven’t already. It’s got several rail-over-road pieces that can save space, and a smarter traffic AI.