This 'SimCity 4' Region With 107 Million People Took Eight Months of Planning 103
Jason Koebler writes: Peter Richie spent eight months planning and building a megacity in vanilla SimCity 4, and the end result is mind-boggling: 107.7 million people living in one massive, sprawling region (video). "Traffic is a nightmare, both above ground and under," Richie said. "The massive amount of subway lines and subway stations are still congested during all times of the day in all neighborhoods of each and every mega-city in the region. The roadways are clogged at all times, but people still persist in trying to use them."
Proof SimCity 5 was crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously,,, If they had to default back to SC4, it shows that SC5 was not a real enough simulator and totally incapable of fielding such a project.
Grid city (Score:5, Interesting)
Building using a grid layout never changes. Back when I first played sim city on the Super Nintendo, the strategy to build megalopolis (population 500k+) was building on a grid. You build using 3x3 clusters of R, C or I but left the center of the 3x3 open. Instead you put special buildings and police/fire buildings in the center of the 3x3. To reduce pollution you built rail instead of roads. Fun game for its time and a friend and I came close to a megalopolis on stock maps without beating the scenarios, alien invasion and getting the water free map. I think we had 480-490k people.
Re:simcity 4 is best simcity (Score:2, Interesting)
SC4 was the last "real" SimCity before EA started completely raping the franchise. (They only raped SC4 a little.)
The region mechanic was a completely game-able loophole. It needed quite a bit of work, TBH.
Go to small city area, fill with landfills and a road. Go to neighboring large city area, build a beautiful, trash-free city. Never re-load the original or even think about it again lest it update its region stats and go bankrupt while poisoning the entire universe. Repeat with anything that is undesirable in any way (read: generates pollution and doesn't grow).
Is there a fire in your industrial district? Let it burn. Nothing of consequence will catch fire, since it's in a separate city from anything you actually care about. They'll rebuild anyway, and fire stations cost money. So does water. To hell with both. Keep that nice stuff for the residential and commercial areas.
God, SC4 was so much fun. I wonder if I can get it working on my 64-bit Win7 box. Last I checked, it had some problems with that.
I just keep waiting for someone to make a new SimCity that isn't fucked over by Origin. (No, CitiesXL is shit and doesn't count.) I'll be waiting a while.