SimCity 4 - Massive City - Over 3 Million Residents
BackI think this may qualify as the biggest city posted on YouTube (though, certainly not the biggest ever created). I played on medium difficulty on the largest city size. I did not use the NAM mod or anything that radically altered the game. I did install an unofficial patch that fixed some of the lingering bugs after EA's last official patch. I also installed a mod that made the computer seek the fastest, most logical transportation routes (previously, it used a less CPU-intensive search algorithm that produced some very unrealistic results -- the new path search algorithm is much more realistic. I'm guessing EA didn't use it because in 2003 it would have seriously taxed even higher end computers). Other than that, everything is vanilla -- no subway/bus stations on the road, no commercial plops, no demand mulipliers, nada. I put the vast majority of my industry and commercial lots in neighboring cities and thus funneled all the citizens into the main city. This helped avoid the problem of pollution but it meant long commute times. It seems that if your Sims are on the edge of a map, even if industry is on the edge of the map in another city, it will mean a long commute time. This means, at the end, I had commute times over nearly two hours. That's where almost all of my building desertions came from. However, since everything else was pretty good, it didn't hurt too badly. As you can see from the traffic data view, it is heavily congested. I used a massive amount of mass transit, but that could only do so much. Cars only made up roughly 13% of the traffic, with pedestrians making nearly half and the subway being the second most popular option. One good thing about mass transit is that I was making $280K in fares from all my bus and subway stops. Even better, when that network was connected to neighboring cities and they installed some stops (just a few, since commute times seem unaffected by mass transit in other cities), I could make a lot of cash from them. My big commercial/industry feeder had 1-2% taxes because it was making so much money from fares. Health and education were ubiquitous, with 83 hospitals, 36 large elementary schools, 17 large high schools, 11 libraries and a variety of other buildings. I used three hydrogen power plants and 6 large water pumps and used neighbor deals to take care of my garbage. All ordinances except for the youth curfew and legalized gambling were enacted. Education levels were between 180 and 190 and resident age hovered around 95. I reserved a place in the middle of my city for a lot of the special buildings and the airport. It's much better than having to bulldoze roads and zones to fit something new in. Despite this size, it could have been even better. When I started out, I didn't think the main city's need would outstrip the capability of the surrounding cities to supply it. However, it did. I simply ran out of places to put commercial and industrial zones. If I could do it over, I would have my large city connected with bigger neighbors. I believe it's possible for it to be connected to 4 large (256x256) cities and 6 medium cities (128x128), which is much better than what it is now (1 large, 6 medium, 6 small). I think 4 million is certainly within the realm of possibility, perhaps even 4.5 million. Again, the only significant mod different from the original game is better transportation route finding, which is actually not that useful since most citizens are working in other cities which automatically creates a long commute time. I'm feeling rather proud of my city so if you have questions and can ask them in an intelligent manner with decent English I'm willing to help.
Category: Games
Uploaded: July 6th, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
Author: stealingjoy
Length: 04:21
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Views: 2,325
Tags: big city million sim simcity vanilla
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