Simcity Guide

[Timothee Cazares]

Mytutorial is designed for beginner players or long-term players who want to brush up on game mechanics or who have maybe never understood certain aspects of the game. SimCity 4 is one of the most comprehensive city sims ever created, and there are as many ways to play this game as there are players. My Guide to SimCity 4 is certainly not the only way to play, but it documents in detail many of the tips and tricks I've picked up over the years on forums, wikis and by experimenting.

This guide doesn't focus on aesthetic design of cities--it's not a power-gaming or min-max approach to the game either (ie. how to build a city of 10 million is an hour). It aims to illustrate a few of the central concepts and mechanics of the game which can be applied in different ways to a growing city. All you'll need is a copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe and a recent version of the Network Addon Mod to follow along. Each episode includes timestamps in the video description.

Very well paced and well delivered tutorial videos @rob_mtl! I look forward to seeing more from you, especially on the subject of Sea Port mods ... an area that still scares me. I'm a tutorial builder, too, though my medium is written, rather than video, with lots of still pictures.

One minor quibble with your description of industry lots using freight rail directly. In my experience it depends on an anchor lot (the big factories), touching the tracks. Subsidiary lots touching the anchor lot might piggy back on the anchor lot's rail access, but also might not. It's not so much about number of tiles from the track, but about adjacency and the mysterious ways SC4 groups industrial lots together.

There's a similar issue with farms, the anchor lot being the farm building, which needs to be adjacent to the tracks, with the rest of the field exporting by rail through that farm building. I specifically made these farm buildings grow on the tracks (using a tip @CorinaMarie gave me), so that they'd be able to export using the rail.

Fascinating to see the demand shift on incorporating your second city in the Introduction to Region Play video. I fully expected a slightly different demand graph, simply on the basis of the neighbour connections it has, but didn't realise how much the presence of dirty industry next door would drain the dirty industry demand in the second city. I'm used to looking at the Demand graph after 10 years of city growth, so your video showed me that it's relevant even from day one!

To be honest, I don't think I ever explicitly knew about the transit adjacency bug although I think I may have just developed a way of playing that avoids it by habit over the many years. I wish I'd mentioned it in the tutorial!

I'm also going to do a video on "X SimCity 4 bugs and how you can fix them with mods", so maybe the adjacency one would be a good fit. Alternate title "SimCity 4 is broken; here's how you can fix it!"

It seems that long ago there were mods made that additionally included variables with the SUMS property and that part does indeed need DatPacking into SimCity_1.dat. The I-HT fix itself does not include those and will work fine when simply dropped in one's plugins folder. Ofc, there are a million posts (several of mine included) which say one must DatPack the fix because that's what we all believed from what everyone else said.

Hi rob_mtl @rob_mtl, Frankly, I haven't watched you lessons, But I thought they must be great since Naomi has said so, Thank you! I have no idea if these threads are what Cori mentioned, and there were other TOP 10 mods's posts somewhere, I just hope these collections could help.

Thanks so much for the feedback folks! My upcoming modding guide will focus on fixing game-breaking mechanics (rather than esthetics or flavour) with the goal that beginner players can get setup with something functional before diving deep into the STEX. I will look at these various lists and threads over the next few days. Your help is invaluable!

I think the way of having these concepts explained in different formats is very useful to people, and we each have a preference for what's the best way. For me as a visual learner, I like seeing things like this, and also illustrated guides and instructions with directional aspects in the same way.

Especially in larger cities when having lots of custom content as well, there's a known issue where the city saved file can become corrupted. To prevent this happening, it's a wise move to use the regular internal save (Ctrl+S) and then close the game as the 2nd step.

This modifies the Web button in the region view screen with 4 possible choices to prevent it leading to the old EA site which is no longer online. There's one which disables the button (and plays a sound effect for fun), then two others which alter the positioning, and another which makes it link to Simtropolis instead (complete with logo).

Oh man! I forgot to mention that in the region video. I actually did mention it in footage that I edited out and on my Let's Play series, but yeah... top of the list! What I'll probably say is that you can avoid the problem by the two-step save (save then exit without saving) or using the mod!

For the freight stations and neighbour connections. Does Industry and freight care what's on the other side of that connection? Would a tile of mostly Commercial or Residential or more Industry draw more freight traffic than the others?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm 99% sure the answer is "no". Freight needs to leave the map to provide demand cap relief (ie. allow you to generate more industrial demand). It doesn't matter what's on the other side of the tile in terms of the demand cap. It would be cool if freight was shipped to dirty and manufacturing industries, turned into products and then shipped to retailers like in real life, but SimCity 4 doesn't model that in terms of traffic on the map (it does so with demand).

To be clear though, in order to get industrial demand of the various types (I-D, I-M and I-HT), you need to have sufficient residential population in the current and/or adjacent tiles. So just placing a freight rail or road connection to a neighbouring city and having freight travel on it doesn't increase demand for industry, it increases the demand cap. The demand comes from Sims looking for the jobs.

100% agree with @rob_mtl on this. A fast exit from the map improves factory productivity, in my experience, but once the freight exits it is gone from the game. To paraphrase @A Nonny Moose and others, upon reaching a Sea Port or road/rail Neighbour Connection, the freight load "goes on to the great bit bucket in the sky".

There are all sorts of warnings that the Maxis Sea Port hinders industrial demand, so if your city leans heavily on industry, you'll need to use road/rail, or download a Sea Port mod. For just a little bit of industry, the Maxis Sea Port is just fine.

I would add to that. Even if you aren't using a seaport mod, one use for seaports is to allow you to place industrial areas away from the edge of the map. One useful way to think about water is as a way of moving the edges of the map tile, where so much SC4 traffic happens, to other areas of the tile. Ferries can have a similar function.

Generally speaking the trick to getting freight to use rail (or a port) is to deny it other options. Resist the temptation to connect industry to residential via fast routes like OWR, avenue and road. Use streets instead (and subways/elevated trains as needed). Also deny them road-based neighbour connections. That way you can force them to use rail and ports for freight. It would be cool if someone could develop a mod that only allows freight to travel on certain types of roads. In real life, large trucks are generally limited to arterial roads, collectors and expressways.

I vaguely recall from a year or three ago someone mentioning certain blockers that can be placed on networks to do exactly that. Maybe my post here will trigger someone's memory and they'll post about them.

I don't know if this is the file Corina meant, but at least they do exactly what she wrote. To restrict the traffic to only freight, you would need to use two blockers since each one blocks only one type of traffic, but in theory this is possible. It's of course entirely possible to create blockers that block more than one type of traffic, I just didn't do that to keep the amount of lots low (or, to express it more properly, not too high).

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