I suck at SimCity 4 Deluxe...

Remove all ads!

...and it vexes me. I'm terribly vexed.

I can never seem to get commercial areas to grow where I want them. Any time I try to lay my cities out with any semblance of order I'm met with a bucket of fail. I've only ever gotten a city to about a medium size (where I start growing a few skyscrapers) and then any nice buildings I have start to delapidate after a minute or so due to low desirability. When I try to retrofit my developed city for mass transit, I end up having to do it slapdash, and whenever I try to plan it out ahead of time the idiot sims never seem to use it much.

Argh. I love this game, but I suck at it. Help, or, sigh.

 

I only had one good city on the SimCity I played (3000). I have no clue how I was inept every other time, but it was exciting. Ultimately my demise was wanting to have a theme park REALLY badly, so I took out crazy loans and my city fell apart. The end.

I also REALLY wanted to share that for some reason

 

I love SimCity 2000. It's one of my favourite games, one I spent countless hours on... and I never did manage to get a functional city. And that's even when I followed guides and did exactly as they suggest. I'm sure there's some secret reason why people are good at the game, but I've never found it.

 

Cheats?

 

Have you considered asking for a government bailout?

 

Cheats? Never!

I always ask for government bailouts, and the government inevitably stops giving me money because I'm spending it too inefficiently

 

Having neighbours and good traffic connections between them is essential in development. Also you should start planning for a masstransit system early on. In the beginning people might not use them but in that case you can just cut the funding to minimum and wait for the population to grow and then increase the funding gradually. A mass transit system usually works well when the income is enough to counter the rest of the traffic budget (with the possible exceptions of ports and airports).

EDIT: Also a very fundamental problem I have in the game is the unwillingness to demolish anything in order to expand the masstransit system, especially monorails which become important on larger maps when even the subway is way too slow to transport people long distances. Generally however one should just unemotionally let even the largest skyscrapes fall in the way of progress. It's difficult I know, but sometime's it's just necessary to let go.

 

I always loved Simcity! I remember playing the first one on an old-school mac Havn't played SC4 in a while though, whenever my city got too large, it would just take too long to scroll (REALLY bad computer ) Hopefully getting a new one soon so I can start playing again!

I think the most difficult part is knowing when to add Police and water. The city can actually go A LONG time without it! BTA and Morg are right though, connecting a number of cities actually makes the game a lot easier

 

As fate would have it, I suck less now.

I tried the suggestion from BTA and Morgoroth about really focusing on connections. For some reason I thought it was dumb; I want one cool city in the middle!! Not lame cities all over, I would say. Turns out, I'm kind of a dumbass. City connections appear to be the bread and butter of the game mechanic.

What I've tried doing is creating a new region, building up modest working-class cities in the smaller region plots, and connecting them all with freeways and railroads. With each new city, demand for higher-wealth areas would shoot ever higher. Then when I finally got around to the extra-large tile in the middle, I started gettin' me some skyscrapers.

It's not perfect, though - I'm still having efficiency issues in just about every city, and I still can't get my commercial areas to grow worth a damn (and on the rare occasion that I do, it's a complete mystery as to why that particular area was in high demand). Trudgin' on....