Can we talk about Simcity 4?

Can we talk about Simcity 4?

But more in the vein how its legit a true masterpiece in the city building genre, and sim genre in general.

Its OST is stronger than most games and its a fucking city builder.

youtube.com/watch?v=Q8HW5agFwUY

Its extremely simple, yet extremely complex at the same time, its easy for a new player to make something worthwhile, but can take serious time to make something great.

Why is there such a lack of quality when it comes to city builders, or a lot of sims in general, yet Simcity 4 reigns king so well.

It just feels like we wont ever get something like this in a very long time.

How did such a normie and casual company pump out the best city builder by far?

It's a good game.

The only Sim game I'm looking forward to is "Transport Fever". And maybe Urban Empire (made by Tropico guys iirc, so yay DLC).

Transport Fever is essentially a modern Transport Tycoon. So I can't not want it. Sims are a dying breed. I long for a return of Sierra games. I mean I tried Children of the Nile, and it just bugs. So I cheat so I can actually progress (villagers wouldn't cross river to get building materials) and then it locks everything out goes "lol u cheated so no points!". Might try it gaain some time.

Simcity 4 is the best game in the series, by far. I still play it from time to time.

Unfortunately, there's not much to discuss at this point.

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Maxis's handling of the Sim games went from passable to terrible the moment Will left. Sim City 5 never had a chance without him at the helm.

Sim City 4 is and will forever be the pinnacle of the city building genre. All these new 3d city builders might have curved roads and dynamic lots, but none of them can hope to achieve the same sense of true scale that Sim City 4 manages. You look at the new Sim City and it's more of an downtown urban core simulator, and Cities: Skylines, while better, still has massive issues with scale.

>Maxis
>normie and casual company
Maxis was pretty gangsta prior to Spore. They pioneered the city builder genre.

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I'm going to be honest with you. Sim city 4 was shit until the rush hour expansion pack. Even then the traffic AI was terrible. Thank god for NAM

Damn I'd love to see the transportation map for this.

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>play it ever since it came out
>still play it vanilla, except for NAM and hi-tech industry fix mods
>ricing shit does nothing for me

is it just me

The reason Maxis went to shit after spore was because Will Wright left after his failure to deliver the game to the standard he wanted it to be.

I play vanilla Rush Hour with those exact two mods too, along with a mod that displays the exact RCI values instead of just low resolution bars.

We're a rare breed.

thats a pretty accurate hong kong, did you use google maps for reference?

Sim City 4 is the best city builder despite the dated simulation mechanics
City Skylines just feels wierd and off, the buildings are way too small compared to the road and it doesn't look anywhere near as good

The traffic AI sucks even with NAM
you will constantly get no-job popups in anything other than a small city, unless you give them a region connection in which case all jobs are filled no matter what

Sounds like you have a shitty, unbalanced economy. SC4 is really sensitive to it, and most people aren't really aware of it. If things aren't balanced properly, you can end up with runaway unemployment despite a surplus of jobs.

Want me to talk about Sim city 4?

OK:

Its pretty fucking dated and it has some extremely serious flaw.

The first one being its small scale.

Sure the regions might be big, but the fact that there's just one, and that the maps themselves are extremely small is no fun. Basically you cant terraform without sacrificing maybe 60% of the land. you cant make nice valleys and mountains and long rivers without losing capacity for maybe over 100k population.

Theres also the issue taht the game simply cannot handle itself once things get big. Traffic breaks down, even if you have the best roads in the world. Sims will start losing jobs and shit for no reason at all.

Also, the edicts part was very under developed. There was only ONE edict which granted money: Legalize gambling, and it made crime go sky high while giving you the joke amount of +100 per month.

Its too slow, there's no effective way of making cash without using cheats.

Also those fucking trains...how do they work? Not once did I see a freight train in any of my cities and the tracks were complete.

this may be the case but just giving my city a region connection instantly makes all the job problems go away which is kind of wierd

>The first one being its small scale.
you know there are different map sizes right

>The first one being its small scale.
nigger fucking what?

How exactly do I get my cities to look like this?

I played this game for years, had pretty large cities and yet the commercial areas never built anything bigger than a department store. Never had a true high rise city like Manhattan.

Also what is NAM?

Yes faggots and even the biggest one feels ridiculously small when you terraform it.

that is a screenshot of a super modded game

>Sure the regions might be big, but the fact that there's just one, and that the maps themselves are extremely small is no fun. Basically you cant terraform without sacrificing maybe 60% of the land. you cant make nice valleys and mountains and long rivers without losing capacity for maybe over 100k population.
What. See . Regions can be arbitrarily sized. Are you upset about the single city tile size?

>Traffic breaks down, even if you have the best roads in the world. Sims will start losing jobs and shit for no reason at all.
See .

>Its too slow, there's no effective way of making cash without using cheats.
You're extremely bad. I play vanilla and never use cheats.

>Also those fucking trains...how do they work? Not once did I see a freight train in any of my cities and the tracks were complete.
The freight mechanic in SC4 requires neighbor connections.

The game makes assumptions about what lies on the other side of a neighbor connection, and they're often generous. From what I've heard, the game takes the current job count of the neighboring city tile and then assumes it grows over the next X years. You're rewarded for switching between city tiles frequently due to this bonus.

IIRC SimCity 4 is all based on travel distance and ignores fastest time completely.

>what is NAM
Network Addon Mod. It improves traffic handling, changes roads, adds new transport options, and new road shapes. It's pretty much essential.

what are you trying to make here? a country or a city? the biggest map size can fit a smallish-sized metropolis and is bigger/the same size as any other city builder out there

user those screenshots are modded. The Sims 4 only had 1 region layout. You could choose whether you wanted a land or water region but the city tiles were always placed in the same spots.

And I also never used cheats and yet found the game to be very slow, mostly because the profit for the first hours doesnt goes above 10k, and yes I micromanaged public services.

I came

I've played Transport Fever, you might enjoy it depending on what you're looking for. If you just want to make complex and beautiful trains you're better of sticking to openttd though.

>The same size as any other city builder out there.

Thats what I said after 8 years of not playing the game, picking it up, playing for 1 hour and then going to cities skyline.

Yeah...no user, the biggest map size is actually smaller than the smallest CS map size. And in CS you can actually buy adjacent land to make a ridiculously large metropolis.

Show me this on sim city 4 go ahead I'll wait

I fucking dare you to make in neo Sim City or Cities: Skylines and not have it feel horrifically out of scale.

You want to talk scale? What about the fact that in these new city builders your budget starts at the HOURLY level? Or that your town of 30,000 is full of hi-rise apartment buildings and commercial offices? Or that you need a road network ripped out of a megalopolis just to manage 40,000 people? Or that, in neo Sim City, your largest city plot can barely fit what would merely be the downtown core of a city in Sim City 4? Or that it's possible to have dense urban city center scale buildings right next to barren open fields with no development?

City tiles are placed at random though.

And you can alter tiles placement and region size by editing a bmp file on Paint

>user those screenshots are modded. The Sims 4 only had 1 region layout. You could choose whether you wanted a land or water region but the city tiles were always placed in the same spots.
You get to select what tile sizes are in the region with a bitmap file (which can be arbitrarily big as far as I know), and you can even terraform an entire region at once by importing topography as a greyscale image.

These features are built into the game.

>And I also never used cheats and yet found the game to be very slow, mostly because the profit for the first hours doesnt goes above 10k, and yes I micromanaged public services.
What services were you trying to provide? You should really only start with like fire, then cheaper education to cause higher wealth jobs to move in, then go on from there.

Now how many people actually live in that city? I'm willing to bet my let lung it's less than a million. The biggest problem with Cities Skylines and the new Sim City is the population scale. You look at that city and think "man, there must be 5+ million people living there". but there isn't there's a few hundred thousand, if that. And then you look at the outskirts of that city. You have blocks upon blocks upon blocks of hi-rises and office towers and then across the road is nothing but empty undeveloped land. Cities don't grow like that. They have outskirts and suburbs and low density zones around their built up urban zones. It looks fake and artificial.

>Sim city newfag here

how do I get a decent city going fast?

In skylines you build a road networks that would service like 10x the population that actually lives in your city, the buildings are tiny

I haven't played sim city 4 for like 10 years but didnt a gigantic city over there consisted of 100k people? Cities skyline you can easily reach 1 million. Also some people have been comparing the 2 while forgetting a key difference: Cities skyline does not have regions, it has one large city. Whereas simcity4 has several cities.

Click on the question mark icon and start clicking on public services like schools, clinics, fire departments, bus stops and shit. All of them are set to default funding which is very expensive and completely unnecessary for your current needs. Also keep an eye on maintenance costs. Do you really need that hospital? Or would a few clinics be more effective for the time being?

You've got Sim City 4 and Skylines flipped, friendo. This city only has a million people in it. Even the milestones betray that absolutely fucked sense of scale skylines has; a "big city" only needs 16,000 people, and a "megalopolis" is 80,000. Skylines is a joke.

What the fuck is that message in the bottom right?

You do realize that a simcity 4 large city is literally one quarter of that pic right?

the biggest simcity 4 map size is about the size of that blue square

Even if that's the case, Sim City 4 handles scale way better than Skylines does. Understand when I say scale I don't mean sheer size, I mean proportionality.

i fucking loved this game as a kid

i could never make a good city though because 7 year old me was not a very good city planner and every city i made ended up as some bankrupt ghetto

No its not, stop it with this meme seriously. go play vanilla simcity 4 right fucking now and you'll see what im talking about

why the FUCK is there no OpenSC4?

they're both pretty messed up, like in SC4 you can have a massive district of industrial factories and they'll only employ a few thousand people. pretty hard to play that game without using a mod to boost industry employment

only game i've seen that really nails proportions is Banished

You do realise you can download a region where it's like 40 different large squares?

Not to mention that terraforming/god mode doesn't exist in cities skylines.

Cities Skylines is Sim City 4 - 2 : Electric boogadlc

I loved SC4 growing up. Something About funnelling cars in from the outskirts, pumping them through the suburbs, and dispersing them downtown just gets to me. I would purposely leave out busses and trains to get more traffic on the roads, and was delighted when cars would come pouring in through the outside highway connections.

This being my favourite aspect of the game, I have well and truly moved onto Cities Skylines. Individual agent simulation rocks (with mods) and the freedom to build all manner of twisted, THICC spaghetti is unmatched.

gfycat[DOT]
com/LonelyImmaculateAfricanfisheagle

Inter regional mechanics are barely there in Sim City 4 tho

So it's basically there to look pretty and for you to "expand" on a city, but the single squares don't really interact with each other.

in skylines the only real road traffic is freight trucks

I dunno about that. Draw a road and place residential at one end, and commercial at the other, and you'll see traffic. That gif I posted is mostly tourists and residents doing their shiet

>dlc
Thankfully the products of the modding community make all the dlc look like fucking squat. You can just get the base game and have a vastly enhanced experience with mods at no cost.