In: Games, SimCity 4 Regions

Sim City 4 play session – Sunspear

Including play session screen shots from my first custom map and musings on forgetting the best way to layout cities in Sim City 4.

What’s the worst thing you can do when starting to play Sim City 4 again?  Questioning the 4×4 grid and forgetting the advantage of doubling up roads that’s what.

OK it’s not actually all that bad to forget those things as it can make for more interesting city layouts than the usually mundane – but highly effective – 4×4 double road – or avenue – grid system.  As this was my first time playing a custom map created by me for me I decided to play with some alternative layouts.

Sunspear Region Overview - You’ll notice I haven’t filled every zone. I usually don’t. Boredom sets in at some point when things don’t go my way OR I find out the map isn’t that great. It’s a recurring theme. Also I usually use comedy names.

Weyland-Yutani Beaches - Commerce and Residential zones like the coast and open spaces but the large number of smaller roads make traffic noise and pollution an issue.

Weyland-Yutani education center – Having a University near both Residential and Commerce zones helps boost demand. That alone though isn’t enough, just check out the empty houses right near the ocean because of – again – busy roads.  Also notice how sometimes a Commercial buffer to Industry can backfire.

ExoGeni the cheat-scape – Yes I used the services cheat here by using this city to power, water and clean up my major city. I don’t use it often but sometimes it speeds up play. Using the cheat will also mean you need the business deals. Ekk radiation!

ExoGeni Center – A lot of the time a ‘cheat’ city like this one can actually have a nice population. I also liked my cunning use of the X road system. (^_^)

Cruciform Center – Not really too much to say with this one other than I had a nice time laying out the roads. One thing I will note about the above and below screen shots is that although elevated rail looks good, it really doesn’t work as well as standard railways.

That’s all I’m going to show you from this play session. I’m never going to show you every city in a region because, well, some are just plain boring. That or they are farm cities and lets face it once you’ve seen one farm city you’ve seen them all.

Few things to note here: Single two way roads cause havoc to a cities traffic once the population rises. Not leaving enough open spaces means cities can only grow to a certain size beacuse they become undesirable. And finally putting down infrastructure you don’t need – railways, parking, hospitals etc – will eat you’re money super quick.

Posted: Friday, September 26th, 2008
Tags: 4x4-grid, Games, play-session, screen-shots, simcity4, sunspear