Simcity 4

Over the years that I've experimented with Simcity versions classic to 4 I came up with various designs for efficient cities. Pack as many people in there while still maintaining the sims happy and healthy isn't always easy, especially if it involves a tight budget.

Luckily there are mods available that provide some (un)realistic fixes to the Simcity engine. The ones I use are listed below.


The city

The city structure I came up with is also one that I would actually like to live in. It's easy to build something that's efficient and makes lots of money, as long as it's not for living in.
Requirements I set;
- good public transport, because it clears the roads and gets one home after a late office party :-)
- good road connectivity, because one does like to take a drive sometimes
- lots of green, it's healthy and relaxing to be surrounded by it

The default city block grid

This block is made to fit symmetrically into the smallest regional block so all connections between different sized blocks will fit together.

The zones are all 3x4 and can be low, medium or high density. 4x4 is possible but only when the game allows for creating zones that large in one piece.

To get road traffic around easily there are no traffic lights, only roundabouts.
The interconnecting roads are streets to keep the advisor from complaining about no streets in sight, and traffic is light enough to not have to use roads.


City block detail

One quarter of the block contains 4 subway stations, 4 commercial signs (shown here for extra income but not really neccesarily, a plaza or park is nicer) and one Iconic Infusor (see mods section).

In the centre are two large elementary schools, one large highschool, one library, one large police station (the helicopter of the deluxe version annoys me), one large firestation and one museum.
The centre is also surrounded by four large medical centres.
Shown here is also the mayor's house.

Around each roundabout are four small parks, vital to the growth and health of the city.


Educational data view

Residential blocks have (depending on the amount of sims) two elementary schools, one highschool, one library and one museum.
Colleges and main library don't have to be placed specifically so are placed on the border of residential blocks.
Unless you don't want to be a happy perverted mayor, then place a college next to the police station in front of your mayor's house and enjoy summers surrounded by elementary, highschool, and college girls. :-)

Health data view

Residential blocks have four large medical centres.
To accomodate for the large number of sims the mod for doubling capacity is neccesary. This also makes the numbers more realistic.


Crime data view

Each block has one large police station.
The city can contain one prison and is placed in the industrial zone as far in the corner as possible.


Fire hazard data view

Each block has one large firestation.
This is more than enough to prevent fires, also because it seems fires are no longer triggered when the simulation engine can't be bothered to calculate for the small uncovered parts with a city this large.


Subway lines

Subway stations are connected in a simple straight grid.
Using diagonal lines gives no advantage even though it may seem shorter travel.

Traffic along these lines, especially between cities, can run into the 10.000's, even more than 100.000 is possible.


Water data view

the Iconic Infusor is a combination of water pump and power station (see mods section). The demand for water is high enough to place four of these in each block.
Each block is then connected by a square in the city centre.


Zones data view

To spread traffic more evenly blocks are intertwined.
Keeping the same pattern in all cities means sims don't have to go far to get to where they want to go. (although it seems they are always trying to get as far as possible from their homes)


Budget

Taxes are set to 2% for all but manufactoring and dirty industrial, making sims very happy for sure.
Only health and educational ordinances are turned on, the rest don't have much impact. The lottery program mod is used mainly to build the city quickly. Otherwise it's not really neccesary.
Mass transport, health and education are set to maximum budget.


Industrial block

The industrial block contains the airport, keeping it as far away from residential as possible.
The stadiums are placed here on the borders between industrial and residential.
Placing more items like the zoo can also be easily done here without much financial impact.


Residential block

Placing trees on every bare piece of land is vital to get the city growing and keeping it healthy.


Aerial city view

One medium sized city can contain over half a million sims with two residential blocks, one commercial and one industrial block.
Using supporting cities could result in one residential city with over two million sims. Doing this on a large regional zone might not quadruple that as the centre might not contain many sims, but that hasn't been tried by me yet.

Having plenty of green and space between the skyscrapers gives it less of a claustrophobic feeling, especially with the open view across the industrial zone.



Mods

Mods used by me for Simcity;

Black hole management corp; to get rid of garbage easily and not have to deal with a special city for garbage collecting and the resulting web of neighbour deals.
Iconic infusor; for not having to deal with power stations and water pumps that don't renew automatically. (I really miss that feature in Simcity 4)
Lottery ordinance; ignore the budget while building the city
Low crime mod; reduce the crime level to more realistic levels (okay, maybe not so realistic but not every city needs a prison)
Network addon; for creating the roundabouts and other items
Rewards unlocker; unlocks all rewards for building show cities, making screenshots, etc.
Health doubler; doubles capacity of medical centres to more realistic levels
Transit bugfix; fixes several bugs in the transit system, not used by me as I don't seem to be affected by those
Industrial quadrupler; increases capacity of industrial buildings to more realistic levels
Commercial doubler; increases capacity of commercial building to more realistic levels
Stage limit mod; modifies the limit at which residential and commercial skyscrapers start to more realistic levels

These and more can be found on (among other sites) Simtropolis and Simcity Central.


Miscellaneous

To install both cd's of Simcity 4 in one go without having to switch halfway, copy the data of both cd's in one directory, edit the filelist.txt file of your language of choice to change the 2,1 to 1,1 at the bottom 8 lines (the file for UK version) and burn everything to dvd.

Change right/left hand drive (taken from the Simtropolis forum):
Locate and go to the directory where you have installed SC4, usually it is C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe.
Within this directory, you will see a folder name English, it should contain a file called SimCityLocale, if it does, you are looking at the correct folder.
Now rename this folder from English to UKEnglsh (not a typo!).
Open regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Maxis > SimCity 4 > 1.0.
Change the Language value by right clicking it and selecting Modify.
Leave it as Hexadecimal and enter 13 into the Value Data field.
If you wish to switch from the Left to the Right - rename the folder to English, and enter 1 into the Value Data field of Language instead.

CitiesXL is a new city building simulator expected in q1 2009. Looking through the info so far it looks very promising.