How would you guys feel about a Lets Play of Sim City 4 where we assign pieces of a region to forumers and build a super metropolis or something?
With stipulations for each person, of course. Gotta make it interesting.
I'd be game. But is that even possible?
We assign or pick out sections from a region like a draft or something. To help identify each region, everyone will pick a single tileset (which means we'd all have to download them) for their sections to have so that our region will be identifiable (unless everyone decides that's a shit idea). One person works on a city for a set amount of in-game years we decide on, and they save and close. The region is then zipped up and sent to the next person, and we continue.
Edit - Also once you've worked on a spot on the region it cannot be revisited. Unless we vote on certain connections or something.
Henroid on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
Oh God I don't understand how I'm supposed to implement the region downloads from Simtropolis, they're just jpeg images. O_o
How would you guys feel about a Lets Play of Sim City 4 where we assign pieces of a region to forumers and build a super metropolis or something?
With stipulations for each person, of course. Gotta make it interesting.
I'd be game. But is that even possible?
We assign or pick out sections from a region like a draft or something. To help identify each region, everyone will pick a single tileset (which means we'd all have to download them) for their sections to have so that our region will be identifiable (unless everyone decides that's a shit idea). One person works on a city for a set amount of in-game years we decide on, and they save and close. The region is then zipped up and sent to the next person, and we continue.
Edit - Also once you've worked on a spot on the region it cannot be revisited. Unless we vote on certain connections or something.
You could have Springfield/ShelbyVille style town rivalries and everything.
SmokeStacks on
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Zxerolfor the smaller pieces, my shovel wouldn't doso i took off my boot and used my shoeRegistered Userregular
edited December 2009
There was actually a Simcity 2000 Network Edition from way back when.
Zxerol on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
I figured out the problem I was having with the region downloads. I didn't notice it wasn't saving the grayscale jpegs as... jpegs. Not the fault of the browser since other sites save fine. So weird.
Edit - And then hardly any of the spots on the map rendered at all. Fuck this shit.
Henroid on
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Grudgeblessed is the mind too small for doubtRegistered Userregular
edited December 2009
For you guys worrying about traffic in SimCity4, get the Rush Hour expansion and the Network Addon Mod, and you can go crazy with traffic management; overpasses, tunnels, ramps, turning lanes, turnabouts and lots of great stuff. There are several pathing options, making it much more detailed and realistic.
Aargh, this thread is making me have to reinstall it! I don't have time for this right now!
EDIT: checked out Simtropolis, and now there are also several varieties of railways and trams, and canals with ferries and barges
Well it was going to be like a 3D simcity with a lot of online community functions but I guess it turned out to suck and no one liked it.
That's not quite true. I enjoyed it, and there's many others playing it. There's a review at my website, but it's a bit out of date as I figured out the versions and stuff after i'd made the review.
The biggest problem with it really is that it expects you to pay money for its online functions, which is rather ridicolous. It's attempting to make a City building MMO experience, but it doesn't really have enough ground to do so. The online offer is basically a trading scenario on a world globe with other people building cities. So you can trade with other players, visit there cities, and that's about it. There's no real back bone to it, and i'd imagine once people have managed to build mega cities around the globe it would become pretty stale.
Monty Cristo is trying to resolve that by also throwing in incentives and scenarios along with the online offer. You'll get the content packs if you subscribe basically. I'd imagine that might be good later on, but it's sort of a hit and miss. The big content release they just did was bus transportation, which alot of city builders would argue should have been in the game in the first place on release. If there intention is to just add the stuff you'd expect then it's a bit daft.
The single player is fun enough though a tad shallow. It's not like Sim City 4, where you can terraform and build the areas to your will. Instead you're just offered set areas that don't change and are typical of each sort of type of terrain; rivers, oceans, plains, etc. There's also no advanced play style; laying down pipes or stuff doesn't exist.
The real juice really of the City Life and XL game is the ability to zoom right down to street level, which is pretty damn neat. You'll find yourself more inclined to build cities with some sort of structure to there streets because of the zooming ability, and you can spend a fun amount of time just zooming about the place looking at all the streets and alleys you've created.
Basically if you prefer the more advanced techniques and play style of the Sim City franchise, and don't really care about a full zoom in functionality, then I wouldn't bother greatly about Cities XL. If you're like me though and find Sim City rather complicated or not for the faint of heart, then you might just enjoy Cities XL. It's certainly worth downloading the trial of, which I think is available freely on the net. The trial will allow you to play the multiplayer for 15 days and get a grip of what it's all about.
Anyway as I said there's a full review at my website if you want to find out more, though admiteddly it's a bit out of date and I should probably really rewrite it.
Check out the bottom of the OP in the link I posted above (I know, it's impossible to find the NAM in the download section at Simtropolis, you have to go via the forums, which is retarded).
Grudge on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
Uh, how does one reset a region? Like one of the regions that came with the game? <_<
Henroid on
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Grudgeblessed is the mind too small for doubtRegistered Userregular
edited December 2009
Pulling the "virgin" region file you want to reset off the CD to overwrite the one on your HDD is probably the easiest way. There's no way of doing it in-game.
EDIT: or take the ones in Program Files\Maxis\SimCity4\region and overwrite the ones in MyDocuments\Maxis\SimCity4\region
Pulling the "virgin" region file you want to reset off the CD to overwrite the one on your HDD is probably the easiest way. There's no way of doing it in-game.
I believe if you just delete the modified region from your hard drive, the game will automatically pull the unmodified region off the CD next time you launch the game.
yurnamehere on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
Groovy.
In other news, I usually play these games on easy mode but this time went for medium when starting this one city. I figured out the benefits of putting my industry away from commerce and residential, that was cool. But I realized my town wasn't growing too fast. I had worked in a fire department, police station, elementary and highschool, clinic, and a library (I likes me some smart folks) and nothing was happening.
Then it hit me. I forgot to establish my own water system. So I put in two towers, since my town was pretty much that big as is. Work in the pipe system, and off we go.
My city exploded. Not literally, but everything grew. And at a rapid pace I was not prepared for. Suddenly, my schools are filled to the brim, as is the clinic, and people are demanding work. I was not prepared in any way to provide for this. On top of that, my road structure was fucking terrible (yet easily avoidable if I looked three steps ahead) and was costing a lot to replace. And then my retarded rail system didn't want to transport people to the industrial area for work.
And then I start getting offers from the army to setup bases and testing sites and a maximum security prison and oh fuck I'm still running out of money take out a loan shit it wasn't enough HELP.
In other news, I usually play these games on easy mode but this time went for medium when starting this one city. I figured out the benefits of putting my industry away from commerce and residential, that was cool. But I realized my town wasn't growing too fast. I had worked in a fire department, police station, elementary and highschool, clinic, and a library (I likes me some smart folks) and nothing was happening.
Then it hit me. I forgot to establish my own water system. So I put in two towers, since my town was pretty much that big as is. Work in the pipe system, and off we go.
My city exploded. Not literally, but everything grew. And at a rapid pace I was not prepared for. Suddenly, my schools are filled to the brim, as is the clinic, and people are demanding work. I was not prepared in any way to provide for this. On top of that, my road structure was fucking terrible (yet easily avoidable if I looked three steps ahead) and was costing a lot to replace. And then my retarded rail system didn't want to transport people to the industrial area for work.
And then I start getting offers from the army to setup bases and testing sites and a maximum security prison and oh fuck I'm still running out of money take out a loan shit it wasn't enough HELP.
I need to work on my gameplan. <_<
You aren't supposed to pay for any services at the start of the game beyond water, power, and maybe garbage. Keep your sims uneducated proles until you start making a decent amount of money, then add fire, police, hospitals, education, and finally mass transportation (though it isn't a bad idea to plan your city around mass transit from the get go).
You probably already know this, but never put landfills in cities you actually intend to play. Use neighbor deals. Garbage is impossible to get rid of; believe me I tried everything from fire to a nuclear meltdown, nothing worked.
In other news, I usually play these games on easy mode but this time went for medium when starting this one city. I figured out the benefits of putting my industry away from commerce and residential, that was cool. But I realized my town wasn't growing too fast. I had worked in a fire department, police station, elementary and highschool, clinic, and a library (I likes me some smart folks) and nothing was happening.
Then it hit me. I forgot to establish my own water system. So I put in two towers, since my town was pretty much that big as is. Work in the pipe system, and off we go.
My city exploded. Not literally, but everything grew. And at a rapid pace I was not prepared for. Suddenly, my schools are filled to the brim, as is the clinic, and people are demanding work. I was not prepared in any way to provide for this. On top of that, my road structure was fucking terrible (yet easily avoidable if I looked three steps ahead) and was costing a lot to replace. And then my retarded rail system didn't want to transport people to the industrial area for work.
And then I start getting offers from the army to setup bases and testing sites and a maximum security prison and oh fuck I'm still running out of money take out a loan shit it wasn't enough HELP.
I need to work on my gameplan. <_<
You aren't supposed to pay for any services at the start of the game beyond water, power, and maybe garbage. Keep your sims uneducated proles until you start making a decent amount of money, then add fire, police, hospitals, education, and finally mass transportation (though it isn't a bad idea to plan your city around mass transit from the get go).
You probably already know this, but never put landfills in cities you actually intend to play. Use neighbor deals. Garbage is impossible to get rid of; believe me I tried everything from fire to a nuclear meltdown, nothing worked.
If you build incinerators, and their total capacity is more than enough for the city's active garbage production, the excess capacity will be used to burn the trash in your landfills.
yurnamehere on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
In other news, I usually play these games on easy mode but this time went for medium when starting this one city. I figured out the benefits of putting my industry away from commerce and residential, that was cool. But I realized my town wasn't growing too fast. I had worked in a fire department, police station, elementary and highschool, clinic, and a library (I likes me some smart folks) and nothing was happening.
Then it hit me. I forgot to establish my own water system. So I put in two towers, since my town was pretty much that big as is. Work in the pipe system, and off we go.
My city exploded. Not literally, but everything grew. And at a rapid pace I was not prepared for. Suddenly, my schools are filled to the brim, as is the clinic, and people are demanding work. I was not prepared in any way to provide for this. On top of that, my road structure was fucking terrible (yet easily avoidable if I looked three steps ahead) and was costing a lot to replace. And then my retarded rail system didn't want to transport people to the industrial area for work.
And then I start getting offers from the army to setup bases and testing sites and a maximum security prison and oh fuck I'm still running out of money take out a loan shit it wasn't enough HELP.
I need to work on my gameplan. <_<
You aren't supposed to pay for any services at the start of the game beyond water, power, and maybe garbage. Keep your sims uneducated proles until you start making a decent amount of money, then add fire, police, hospitals, education, and finally mass transportation (though it isn't a bad idea to plan your city around mass transit from the get go).
You probably already know this, but never put landfills in cities you actually intend to play. Use neighbor deals. Garbage is impossible to get rid of; believe me I tried everything from fire to a nuclear meltdown, nothing worked.
I have the city's garbage out on the peninsula with the power plant far from the city itself. And separating the city from that is the industrial zone (which is way closer to the plant than it is to the city).
I started a new city (Fucklebuckle) and am having way more success because I skimmed on the services and remembered the water. The town has already become a strong education center and the demand for commerce has grown a ton. I figured out this time around that as soon as I need to expand the residential area and, as such, provide more clinical use I may as well put in a full blown hospital. It's saved me money and grief. Plus people seem to dig it.
I'm wondering if, since the demand has died down into the negative, I should level some of the industrial areas I have.
Also, can anyone confirm how rail stations are supposed to work? Is the arrow supposed to face the road, or is the rail line supposed to connect there?
As far as garbage goes I've never had a problem getting rid of it. Landfills decay slowly when not in use, back when I first started I used to build two roads around them so when I wanted to empty it I could bulldoze the inner one and cut off road access. Usually I just build incinerators now though, easier to deal with.
For growth, the really important thing is to go slow. Never build anything until it is necessary and keep growing slow and steady. Industry and then commerce are the best way to get money, residential areas will always take more from paying water/power/schools etc. than what you get back in taxes, so make sure to keep up with industrial and commercial demand.
Rail is very tough to get working right without addons. You are probably placing them right or you would see the symbol for missing road access on them. Even with rush hour the speed values for rail are such a small improvement over roads and avenues that sims won't use them until roads are on a standstill.
Try putting some bus stations if you want to use mass transit. Sims will need a way to get to the train passenger station and they really hate walking more than a few squares.
Quetzatcoatl on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
I feel like the game is making fun of me now. Right now, jobs are scarce as shit in the city.
The way to handle landfills is to just have a couple ones, and then create/destroy the roads to them. The ones without roads will have no trash put in them, and will slowly degrade.
The way to handle landfills is to just have a couple ones, and then create/destroy the roads to them. The ones without roads will have no trash put in them, and will slowly degrade.
It can get a little buggy though.. sometimes that last tile absolutely refuses to degrade.
I've had so many development projects stonewalled because of a poorly placed landfill, and had a single tile of refuse chilling out for years. If it had hands, it would be flipping me the bird.
xzzy on
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited December 2009
So in the search for an answer to my problems, I borrowed money, zoned more commerce (including some high-end since there was demand for it a bit), zoned some high-end industry, and a small bit of high-end housing since that too started to come up. Nothing was working too well 'til I remembered, again, to run water to the new places. That helped just a bit. When it was looking super bad, all of a sudden a big boom of people and jobs happened.
Then my power plant hit max capacity. No it didn't blow up.
I had to cut some ordinances and school bus funding and I prayed to reach the amount of money needed to build another relevant power source. It happened, I got it placed in...
And all of a sudden my income leaps by a considerable amount (just a few hundred bucks, but compared to what I was getting...). I take a couple months sorting out the precise energy needs, and I'm on solid ground again, finally. Once my loan payments go away I should be in a good place.
It's pretty formulaic, all you need to do is lay down streets that are boxing in sections no more than 6x*, as long as each tile is no more than 3 units away from a street they will get street access. I tend to go nuts with bus stops, at every other 6x6 box across the map, more in high traffic areas. That screen I posted, my trash heap was a 3x3 tile on the outskirts, from there the incinerators would take care of the rest.
With the 6x6 plan, you can usually lay pipes down in every other street as well for max coverage and no wasted space. Avoid railways, subways, and even highways as they're all far too expensive for what they actually manage. Just cutting out those and you will find yourself in a huge surplus. That city wasn't even fully finished or developed properly, and I was at about half a million sims, and clearing around 250k a year with 150-180k pure profit. This was on medium difficulty, since I didn't feel like dealing with the frustration and slow start time of hard.
Posts
theres videos on youtube of their launch
Didn't one of those have some flavor text about some kind of mutant creature living in the air ducts that preyed on residents?
I think it was the industrial arcology
Uh where? I just wasted too much time trying to search for that and couldn't find anything.
what the fuck where you searching for
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6RT5ooUW-g
first return to a simcity arcology launch search
With stipulations for each person, of course. Gotta make it interesting.
We assign or pick out sections from a region like a draft or something. To help identify each region, everyone will pick a single tileset (which means we'd all have to download them) for their sections to have so that our region will be identifiable (unless everyone decides that's a shit idea). One person works on a city for a set amount of in-game years we decide on, and they save and close. The region is then zipped up and sent to the next person, and we continue.
Edit - Also once you've worked on a spot on the region it cannot be revisited. Unless we vote on certain connections or something.
It sucks 'cause I found a couple neat looking maps. I'll make a giant phallic continent at some point in the future for the idea I presented above.
Ideas like this make me wish CitiesXL didn't suck
Well it was going to be like a 3D simcity with a lot of online community functions but I guess it turned out to suck and no one liked it.
You could have Springfield/ShelbyVille style town rivalries and everything.
Edit - And then hardly any of the spots on the map rendered at all. Fuck this shit.
Aargh, this thread is making me have to reinstall it! I don't have time for this right now!
EDIT: checked out Simtropolis, and now there are also several varieties of railways and trams, and canals with ferries and barges
http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=124&threadid=107897
That's not quite true. I enjoyed it, and there's many others playing it. There's a review at my website, but it's a bit out of date as I figured out the versions and stuff after i'd made the review.
The biggest problem with it really is that it expects you to pay money for its online functions, which is rather ridicolous. It's attempting to make a City building MMO experience, but it doesn't really have enough ground to do so. The online offer is basically a trading scenario on a world globe with other people building cities. So you can trade with other players, visit there cities, and that's about it. There's no real back bone to it, and i'd imagine once people have managed to build mega cities around the globe it would become pretty stale.
Monty Cristo is trying to resolve that by also throwing in incentives and scenarios along with the online offer. You'll get the content packs if you subscribe basically. I'd imagine that might be good later on, but it's sort of a hit and miss. The big content release they just did was bus transportation, which alot of city builders would argue should have been in the game in the first place on release. If there intention is to just add the stuff you'd expect then it's a bit daft.
The single player is fun enough though a tad shallow. It's not like Sim City 4, where you can terraform and build the areas to your will. Instead you're just offered set areas that don't change and are typical of each sort of type of terrain; rivers, oceans, plains, etc. There's also no advanced play style; laying down pipes or stuff doesn't exist.
The real juice really of the City Life and XL game is the ability to zoom right down to street level, which is pretty damn neat. You'll find yourself more inclined to build cities with some sort of structure to there streets because of the zooming ability, and you can spend a fun amount of time just zooming about the place looking at all the streets and alleys you've created.
Basically if you prefer the more advanced techniques and play style of the Sim City franchise, and don't really care about a full zoom in functionality, then I wouldn't bother greatly about Cities XL. If you're like me though and find Sim City rather complicated or not for the faint of heart, then you might just enjoy Cities XL. It's certainly worth downloading the trial of, which I think is available freely on the net. The trial will allow you to play the multiplayer for 15 days and get a grip of what it's all about.
Anyway as I said there's a full review at my website if you want to find out more, though admiteddly it's a bit out of date and I should probably really rewrite it.
Check out the bottom of the OP in the link I posted above (I know, it's impossible to find the NAM in the download section at Simtropolis, you have to go via the forums, which is retarded).
EDIT: or take the ones in Program Files\Maxis\SimCity4\region and overwrite the ones in MyDocuments\Maxis\SimCity4\region
I believe if you just delete the modified region from your hard drive, the game will automatically pull the unmodified region off the CD next time you launch the game.
In other news, I usually play these games on easy mode but this time went for medium when starting this one city. I figured out the benefits of putting my industry away from commerce and residential, that was cool. But I realized my town wasn't growing too fast. I had worked in a fire department, police station, elementary and highschool, clinic, and a library (I likes me some smart folks) and nothing was happening.
Then it hit me. I forgot to establish my own water system. So I put in two towers, since my town was pretty much that big as is. Work in the pipe system, and off we go.
My city exploded. Not literally, but everything grew. And at a rapid pace I was not prepared for. Suddenly, my schools are filled to the brim, as is the clinic, and people are demanding work. I was not prepared in any way to provide for this. On top of that, my road structure was fucking terrible (yet easily avoidable if I looked three steps ahead) and was costing a lot to replace. And then my retarded rail system didn't want to transport people to the industrial area for work.
And then I start getting offers from the army to setup bases and testing sites and a maximum security prison and oh fuck I'm still running out of money take out a loan shit it wasn't enough HELP.
I need to work on my gameplan. <_<
You probably already know this, but never put landfills in cities you actually intend to play. Use neighbor deals. Garbage is impossible to get rid of; believe me I tried everything from fire to a nuclear meltdown, nothing worked.
If you build incinerators, and their total capacity is more than enough for the city's active garbage production, the excess capacity will be used to burn the trash in your landfills.
I have the city's garbage out on the peninsula with the power plant far from the city itself. And separating the city from that is the industrial zone (which is way closer to the plant than it is to the city).
I started a new city (Fucklebuckle) and am having way more success because I skimmed on the services and remembered the water. The town has already become a strong education center and the demand for commerce has grown a ton. I figured out this time around that as soon as I need to expand the residential area and, as such, provide more clinical use I may as well put in a full blown hospital. It's saved me money and grief. Plus people seem to dig it.
I'm wondering if, since the demand has died down into the negative, I should level some of the industrial areas I have.
Also, can anyone confirm how rail stations are supposed to work? Is the arrow supposed to face the road, or is the rail line supposed to connect there?
For growth, the really important thing is to go slow. Never build anything until it is necessary and keep growing slow and steady. Industry and then commerce are the best way to get money, residential areas will always take more from paying water/power/schools etc. than what you get back in taxes, so make sure to keep up with industrial and commercial demand.
Rail is very tough to get working right without addons. You are probably placing them right or you would see the symbol for missing road access on them. Even with rush hour the speed values for rail are such a small improvement over roads and avenues that sims won't use them until roads are on a standstill.
Try putting some bus stations if you want to use mass transit. Sims will need a way to get to the train passenger station and they really hate walking more than a few squares.
It can get a little buggy though.. sometimes that last tile absolutely refuses to degrade.
I've had so many development projects stonewalled because of a poorly placed landfill, and had a single tile of refuse chilling out for years. If it had hands, it would be flipping me the bird.
Then my power plant hit max capacity. No it didn't blow up.
I had to cut some ordinances and school bus funding and I prayed to reach the amount of money needed to build another relevant power source. It happened, I got it placed in...
And all of a sudden my income leaps by a considerable amount (just a few hundred bucks, but compared to what I was getting...). I take a couple months sorting out the precise energy needs, and I'm on solid ground again, finally. Once my loan payments go away I should be in a good place.
With the 6x6 plan, you can usually lay pipes down in every other street as well for max coverage and no wasted space. Avoid railways, subways, and even highways as they're all far too expensive for what they actually manage. Just cutting out those and you will find yourself in a huge surplus. That city wasn't even fully finished or developed properly, and I was at about half a million sims, and clearing around 250k a year with 150-180k pure profit. This was on medium difficulty, since I didn't feel like dealing with the frustration and slow start time of hard.
I know they don't get anywhere near as much use as they should, due to idiot pathfinding, but a well designed highway system looks sweet in SC4.