I’ve always loved the SimCity games. Being interested in urban geography causes me to sometimes spend long hours trying to create my masterpiece of a city. Right now I’m working on one that is turning out pretty well, but it takes a long time to grow because I only work on a little bit at a time. I’m a cheater, though, because I don’t find it fun to balance the budget.
An FYI to anyone who might not know: some of the many user-created downloads avaiable on the Simtropolis site make VAST improvements to the game.
So who else is playing SimCity? Have any thoughts on the game you’d care to share?
I have it but would rather play Simcity 3000. 4 sucks. It’s work to play and takes forever. I don’t play games to micromanage idiot sims and their lives across an antire egion. I want to build my metropolis from the get-go, thankyouverymuch.
Same here, yet I still prefer 4 to 3000. I give all my new cities one billion dollars so I can start building metropolises (metropoli?) right away without worrying about driving them bankrupt.
Yeah, but it makes up for that in realism. Having a Region comprised of several cities instead of just one city on a humungous map allows for the creation of suburbs. The cities really come alive with the day/night cycle turned on. Traffic patterns change depending on the time of day. It also incorporates some of the code from the aborted Simsville, allowing the import of characters from The Sims.
Sim City 4 killed my interest in those games. I was feeling really limited by SC3000 Unlimited by the time SC4 came out. But SC4? I never got to the point where I felt like I was enjoying the game, so I quit playing it.
Yeah I suppose SimCity 4 isn’t exactly fun to play, i.e. manage all the stupid problems. But that’s why I cheat! I’m much more interested in making the cities look good than making them work well. With this version of SimCity you can make very nice-looking or realisitc cities much better than you ever could with previous versions.
What you can’t do so easily that was fun before is make insane cities with a zillion people!
I’ve been trying to play Simcity 4 (I really like the “natural” way cities turn out.) but I keep hitting a population plateau. While I’m trying to figure how to break on through to the next level of city size, I’ll get the inevitable IM of “Hey man, want to play FPS Du Jour?”
Basically, what I’m saying is that Simcity 4 and most other Maxis titles are great fun for an hour, but after that just lack any real holding power. Maybe it needs a sex and violence expansion pack?
I’ve just started playing it but like everyone else had a bugger of a time starting off. What’s interesting is that as soon as you have a modestly successful city it makes the whole game easier. I hit a population plateau at large town/small city size and started a new one in the next square over. As soon as I linked it up to the original city there was instant demand for high density everything and my zones filled in as fast (and as big) as I made them.
You only need to go slow on the first city, after that it’s cake.
KellyM and I play Sim City 4, we haven’t played in a while, but we have a region with nearly 2 million sims in it. It is fun to make strange geography and restrictions in land use. We don’t cheat. Our cities are named for Robing hood puns, llama references, and geography riffs. Do you have rush hour? I love mass transit.
Yep, the Rush Hour expansion makes all the difference with SimCity 4. For the people who actually want to talk about the subject of the thread and not just come in and pee on it and whine about the game: get Rush Hour; there’s really no reason not to. (I think it was free if you had SC4).
It’s even got a difficulty level selector for all the whiny cry babies.
I love the really big cities in the custom regions. I do think the little ones are harder to play. We have a little tourist burg named Needle for the tiny spike in the middle. We left a quarter of it to forest preserve. It is amazing how thickly the rest of it is populated. Needle is next to Knotting Hamm and Knittinghamm and knittinghamm is next to Pressing Ham. Knotting Hamm has a space port and several nice landmarks. Llama Woods is a midsized city with a large forest preserve next to Knotting Hamm named for the llamas that we saw in the woods when we were aging the city before the mayorship began. It needed significant Urban renewal after we realized better road patterns. Grids are EVIL!!! I love making funky tunnels. I also have a city with a corner set asid behind a large dike. The dike is three units thick, and do tall it appear straight sided. It is an experiment to see if it would keep pollution away from the residential.
One of our goals is to stamp out dirty industry except in some designated trashpit cities like Laas Yarn. It is great fun to go dirty industry hunting once you have the city profitbale and no longer need it.
Hint: Water treatment plants have a limited area of effect. In large cities you need them in multiple area and can’t keep them in one corner.
Before rush hour, schools did not need street access after it, they did. That was a fine mess to fix.
Rush Hour did make a world of difference. Actually I can’t remember what difference exactly, but all I know is that I can’t remember life before Rush Hour. And the downloads at the site I linked to earlier improve things even more.
Possibly the most important fix is the pathfinding/transit time fix. The folks at Simtropolis figured out how to make the mass transit a more attractive option to the Sims, so that they don’t automatically take their car no matter what. I’ve found that pretty cities tend to thrive better than other cities, because a pretty city includes all of the things that make a city great:
big arteries going to the downtown
lots of parks concentrated around attractive reward buildings
elegant/organic mass transit layout
Also, you can pack tons of people inside the service radius of your major service buildings (fire, schools, hospitals) by throwing a few square blocks of 1x1 houses, zoned light or medium, before going to sprawl mode. Add bus stops on the corners of these streets - about every seven tiles - and you’ll get up into the hundreds of thousands of citizens before you ever run into a problem with traffic. If your transit department isn’t making money for you, then you don’t have enough mass transit.
I like to start my cities with a seed park of five 3x3 parks/plazas arranged in a plus shape, wrap avenue around it in an octagon, and have a pair of one-ways (with a one-tile gap between them) at the four cardinal sides of the octagonal loop. Just like those infuriating circles in D.C., it’s amazingly attractive for business and draws lots of traffic to the commercial lots that front onto it. The single-tile gap between the one-ways allows room for bus stops, water towers, clinics, police kiosks, small fire stations, and parks.
I’m much more interested in making the cities look good than making them work well. With this version of SimCity you can make very nice-looking or realisitc cities much better than you ever could with previous versions.