SimCity 4

Okay guys, I gave the game a go today. SimCity games addict me like nothing else out there outside maybe crack. So this is something I was looking forward to playing. Here are my impressions:

01. Very nice looking. VERY nice looking.
02. Total resource hog, much like SimCity 3000 was three years ago. I dont think this is reasonable. I have 384 megs of RAM btw.
03. I ran the game the first time, ran okay, turned it off, then came back later and it ran really slowly. It still ran slow when I turned down the resolution (I verified this by looking at the cars, actually). I think there's a memory leak or two hiding in the program. Im starting to really doubt the quality of Maxis' programmers.
04. Seems a wee bit tougher than SimCity 3000. For some reason, my zones would be nearly empty and yet the demand bar would be positive for it (Rumpy, help me out here if you can)! And dont tell me its because simcitizens cant get to it - the roads are built automatically.
05. I really like the new features - terraforming mode, auto build of roads, and the ability to link cities more fully. The ability to place zones and roads in weird hilly regions is very good, too.
06. The interface is a lot better than SimCity 3000's. Its a lot smoother and more consistent.

OVERALL: A bigger improvement over SimCity 3000 than I thought. The old strategies only kinda-sorta work, and I have a feeling that the section-linking thing can totally change the game dynamic.

So all thats good. But the game is a big resource hog and like I said it may have some memory leaks, which is unacceptable to have in a finished product. Nonetheless I plan on giving the game a few more tries. Hopefully I will be able to make an endless urban wasteland like Los Angeles one of these days.

Yeah, I have 512MB of RAM and when running SC4 I have about 100MB free. Really slows things down if it's running in the background. I hope they patch it. It says that the zoom is hotkeyed to 1-5, but it doesn't work for me, how about you?

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Originally posted by diffusionx
04. Seems a wee bit tougher than SimCity 3000. For some reason, my zones would be nearly empty and yet the demand bar would be positive for it (Rumpy, help me out here if you can)! And dont tell me its because simcitizens cant get to it - the roads are built automatically.

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I have that problem too. Most times it's just one little chunk of a zone I made that just won't develop sometimes. Other times buildings will go up (especially Industry) and they'll leave a little square of undeveloped land. That square is too small for any buildings to go up :mad:. If you find that a certain area isn't developing, check the desirablity overlay (the button above the graphs). It'll tell you the desirability that each zone (Res, Com, Indus) has for the entire map. If that part is red for whatever you have there, they simply won't go there. Either rezone it for something that will go there are try to improve the area (for Res check police/fire/education coverage. If it's too crummy they won't go there. A park or recreation area will help too. Residential is picky. Pollution is another factor...not sure how you can help that. I know that if you raise theh tax for "$" Industry, it'll keep dirty industry out, which makes the most pollution. I don't think you can get Agriculture to go down. Seems like no matter how many I put down, the demand is still really high. No idea if it's better to put big farms down or little ones.

My problem. These damn people refuse to take the bus/train when I put them down. The bastards. I put them down in what I think would be the best areas (high traffic, near jobs) and they still don't go. I have 3 regions going. One is strong, one is turning into a shithole and the other one is thriving. I have big patches of medium class residential and commercial zones. I'm getting buildings I've never seen before. Tip: Schools are the way to go! If they're (the sims) smart, they do really well! And keep land fills away from the residential areas!

Still trying to get the regions to share desire/resources...

Wait, so you have three "towns" going? Are they divided up by R/C/I, or are they more or less like three seperate fully functional towns linked together?

I have "Genesis" (my first town), "Alpha" (2nd) and "Industrius". Genesis is a whole city, it has everything. With Alpha, I tried different zoning stratagies and it's on a smaller piece of land (I now can expand no longer there) and Industrius is exactly what it sounds like (although I have too much Res and Comm than I intended too). Genesis is in the middle of them, but I havn't really linked them together well at all. I just through down linking roads without any planning ahead, so I'm not sure if it's working that well. I found the following at gonegold.com, it's from Bill's "Night Call":

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Why didn’t I know these things to start with? Well, the tutorials are relatively useless. The manual included with the game is a whopping forty-four pages, and there is a picture on almost every page, so there are really only about thirty pages of text. There are huge pieces of what I consider critical information that aren’t in the manual at all. So I was trying to play the game like I would play previous versions of Sim City, and you can play the game that way, but all of the richness and complexity of the new version will never be discovered that way.

Let me give you an example. One way that the new engine is remarkably complex involves zoning and the process that Sims use to decide what to build. In the included manual, the subject of zoning gets less than two pages of space. In the strategy guide, it’s ten pages, and the accompanying discussion of desirability is another twenty pages. In the previous Sim City games, zoning was very simple—view demand (broken down by residential, commercial, and industrial) and create more zones of the type most in demand. Normally, you wanted Residential zones to equal the sum of Commercial and Industrial zones. I’m oversimplifying, but that was the basic premise. In Sim City 4, it is no longer so easy. There are three classes of Sims, and multiple classes of each type of building (zone ‘densities’). Buildings have population levels, so one Commercial zone may not be equal to another when it comes to satisfying demand, and simply counting the number of zones is not helpful. In addition, if the residential demand is for low-wealth Residential housing, you must also zone in an area that is considered desirable to this population type. There are literally dozens of factors involved in calculating desirability.

Let’s say that you zone an area for high-wealth individuals. If that physical location is undesirable to high-wealth individuals, no high-wealth buildings will be used, or if they are built, they will probably never be filled to capacity. A zone that is underutilized can also be eventually abandoned, and your high-wealth zone might become a medium or low wealth residential area instead. This could negatively affect the desirability of high-wealth commercial areas nearby.

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Apparently the strat guide is like 300(!) pages long. If you find a good online resource/message board for this lemme know.