Assorted tips & tricks for SimCity 4 Deluxe

GHub Platform · Гайд · 0 ответов · 4 просмотра

Hello. In this guide I'll attempt to provide you with an extensive, but probably not exhaustive, collection of tips and tricks to hopefully advance your SimCity 4 knowledge and help you become a better player. This information was gathered from notes i took while playing the game over several years (almost 20 years, on and off) and a couple other sources, all of them provided in the "Sources and further reading" section of this same guide. For ease of consultation, information has been compiled in general categories. You're doing yourself a disservice by not learning/using hotkeys and keyboard controls, as they can save you a lot of time while playing the game (not like you're playing competitive Starcraft, but that's still a bit of optimisation). There's already a guide on Steam here that features all hotkeys in the game. Here's a couple more keyboard controls that I find particularly useful when zoning and placing buildings: Hold the Shift key to turn off automatic street placement. Hold the alt key to access an alternate orientation of lots. Use the Home/End keys to rotate a building while placing it. Make extensive use of the Chart View and Data View features. The latter is an especially powerful tool that helps you identify and locate particular issues with your city. The former is a bit of a double-edged sword, as it can very easily lead you to only consider the bigger-picture, averaged out data, making you lose focus on local situations. Somewhat related to the point above (keeping an eye on local issues), you should use the Query and Route Query tools often, as they can provide you with data at a very high granularity (down to the single building). Your city's panel of advisers is almost entirely made up of shameless advocates for their respective departments (i.e. they mostly just want more and more funding). The only exception to this rule is your city planner, Neil Fairbanks, whose advice you can always take at face value. You should really get into playing more than one city. This will allow you to extend your playing area and build up your development stage (more on that in later sections) faster and easier, all while providing you with an convenient way to offload some of your industrial production (again, more on that later). Related to the point above, you would be tempted to compartmentalise your development by zoning entire cities with only one type of development (residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural, for example). I've found that this strategy tends to not pay off particularly well in the long run, as your sims' commute times will usually skyrocket and you will often come to face severe financial woes especially in the residential sectors. You can use some keyboard controls to adjust the terraforming brushes: Press Shift + a number key (1 through 0) to control the size and intensity of the brush. Press Shift + a function key (F1 through F12) to control only the intensity of the brush Hold the Ctrl/Shift key to quickly adjust the size of the brush. Natural tree generation is dictated by a parameter that mainly takes into account terrain elevation and water proximity. You'll realise how it works if you let enough time pass on a new plot of land before establishing a city. Note that after a city is established, this behaviour is completely inhibited. You can regain access to the complete god mode controls by holding Ctrl+Alt+Shift as you switch modes. Always tweak civic/utilities funding on the local level in order to accurately match the demand for the service and the area served. This is done through the query tool. Don't be afraid to take loans if you find yourself in dire straits financially or are in immediate need of extra funds for an expensive project that will benefit your city in the long term (e.g. a subway system). Loans always carry an interest rate of 8.5%, independently of the amount of money you borrow. Monthly loan payments are always amortised (part principal, part interest) and are calculated following an almost linear formula (a §5000 loan entails a §61 monthly payment, a §10000 loan entails a §123 monthly payment and so on). In the early stages of city development you might want to enact the "legalise gambling" ordinance, as it provides you with a guaranteed §100 monthly income in exchange for what is effectively a negligible increase in crime. Make sure to set up your public transit systems early on, so you don't have do demolish and rework large swaths of your already established city later. This holds especially true for railroads, which need larges spaces in order to make turns. Public transit is directional, i.e. there needs to be stops for both boarding and exiting. The stops also need to be quite ubiquitous for your system to work at its full potential (for a bus system, for example, sims will tolerate having to walk for 10 tiles to reach the stop.). The transfer of passengers from one form of public transit to another (e.g. bus to subway) can only happen if there is a gap of at least one road tile between the two stations. If your railroads see extensive use, you may find it beneficial to separate your passenger and freight systems. This way, the two traffic volumes will not interfere with one another. Always keep an eye on road traffic, as it carries a lot of issues, among which commute lengthening, air pollution and a reduction in desirability. These can kill your city centre if left unattended. On the point of road traffic, if your main road arteries are always clogged, you can attempt to solve the issue by laying down multiple one way roads all over your city, along the main direction of travel to and from job sites. Make sure you couple these up opportunely (you should have as close to a 1/1 proportion of to/from roads) as the traffic volumes will be roughly the same in one way and in the other. You can try to deviate road traffic from a congested tract through the use of toll booths, which will encourage some drivers to take alternative routes. Road intersections always slow down traffic, so try to avoid them as best as you can especially along your main arteries. You can hold the Shift key to draw curves more easily while building roads/railways. Make sure that your airports and commercial office zones are well connected. In terms of probability, your sims' travel strategies are predicated entirely on their social class according to the following table: Wealth Mass transit, % Car, % Fastest, % Always think ahead wile establishing or enlarging your utility infrastructure. Fore example, don't put water pumps where you plan to build industrial zones later, as the pollution will render them useless. For early game or small-time developments, it might prove advantageous to sign neighbour deals to buy power from nearby cities. This stratagem can save you quite a bit of money in the short to medium term. Power is never conveyed through unzoned/undeveloped tiles and transportation elements (i.e. roads, railroads etc.). Power lines serve up to four tiles ahead and around themselves. Water pipes cover an area of 13 tiles across (1 for the pipe itself and 6 on each side). If you plan your water network accordingly, you can save quite a bit of money from not having redundant piping. You can "delete" the trash that has built up in a landfill area by cutting off all road access to it. Give it enough time and the garbage will go away, allowing you to rezone the area or let it collect trash again. Note however that this process is very slow, as the trash buildup is reduced by roughly 7% every month, up to 15t. For particularly large areas the process can take even decades in game to complete. A single garbage recycling centre reduces garbage production by 20% for up to 25,000 sims. After that population threshold, the effect is progressively reduced unless you build more recycling centres to match your population. Monthly utility costs increase with the age of t