Simcity 4 is impossible

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I try to build cities but I can't get past one year without starting again. Even reading the directions and tutorials is no help. This game is impossible for me. Is it just my game?

No, the game is just hard.

Especially if unmodded and Rush Hour is not installed, it can be brutal because of the unoptimized pathfinding. Try installing the NAM (Network Addon Mod) and most (but not all) traffic/pathfinding issues will become less severe.

Basically, the mods (like NAM) make the game a little more balanced. If you are playing without cheats I find it takes a while to make a profit in a city also. You'll find yourself micromanaging services, etc...

I can link to some essential mods/etc... if you're interested. You are playing with Rush Hour/Deluxe, right?

Correct, I play Deluxe. My concern is that my zones never fill out in the beginning. Am I zoning too much or too little? How much do I zone at a time?

Stick to low density to begin with.

Your region (not just the one city) needs to reach a certain population level before certain buildings will develop. Also your cities need to be linked together via road/rail or public transport to operate as one region instead of individual cities. So medium density residential will not develop till you have around 5000? I think High density around 15,000+ and likewise with Commercial.

Also you can encourage zones to develop by making sure they have water, electricity, education, medical and later on police. Fire isn't necessary but it does increase the safety. People prefer short commutes to their workplaces so if you have residential areas the other side of the map its not encouraging. Parks and gift buildings help such as the Church, Mayors House, Graveyards etc

Don't be afraid to run a deficit for the initial stages of a cities development. Soon as you get the population and the industries flooding in and the RCI index demand shoots up and so does your tax income.



The initial release of Sim City 4 wasn't great (nowhere near as bad as the current one but it was still broken on release) The 10 years of mods have matured this game into one of the best city builders out there.

The Network Addon Mod is an essential to fix a lot of the core problems of the vanilla game. But it also gives you access to some other helpful mods for creating diagonal roads, bridges etc that you can expand on with the vast selection of mods out there.

There are other mods out there that can help as well. One which doubles the number of jobs an industrial zone will provide is really helpful in balancing the game out. It does seem strange having 13 employees run an entire steel works or smelter

Only got back into Sim City 4 recently but i'm glad to see its still having new mods released for it.

Here is the current region I've been working on since I re-installed the game




This is the first and biggest city in the region at the moment. I'm using a few other mods in addition to NAM so you may notice at the top I have a railway yard for example. I also have parks from the BSC Exchange (a popular mod site)

As I can tell you region growth is based on the amount of low wealth sims combined with the medium wealth sims needed to attract high wealth sims.
If you don't have that your region will have abandonment problems...

so
equation = 4:2:1 low:medium:high (wealth levels)

I remember recently installing SC4 and spending an entire day making a zone of a region really nice and customized in it's terrain features. And then I rage quit a week or so later because my town was going nowhere. It looked like it would be a farming village forever.

Not sure how to make the transition from farming to industry and offices. The non-polluting kind, that is. The RCI demand bar showed that there was demand, but they would never build offices or anything. Maybe because I was playing on hard mode? Maybe if I waited several in-game years? Not sure. All I know is, it's a memorable game that I love, but I rage quit without cheats.

What are all these mods people are talking about? I looked for mods when I installed it and couldn't find any. Are they just well-hidden mods?

Hard mod is so easy. Install Network Addon Mod, increases capacity for roads and transit. Just educate the sims and give them health care. Also region growth is based on a certain ratio of R$/R$$/R$$$ sims.

More like 4:2:1

Link to tips down below
Simtropolis Commute Time Tips

Here is an example.

Education and health is key.

Well the "problem" with the game is that you can´t just build one city. You have to build at least one neighbor city. A tip is to build one "utopia" city and one "dystopia" city next to it, where you can dump all the garbage for instance.

I know education and health is key, as well as low crime rates. But my own city would just not grow. Maybe it's because I overextended and had too large of a city? I had a lot of R$. It was taking forever for R$$/R$$$ to come into my city. And I made sure to keep pollution on the opposite ends of the land.

I really wasn't sure if I was ready to another adjacent city next to mine, just to dump garbage and make other neighbor deals with. I figured if I couldn't get the one up and running, what was the point of trying to get a neighbor city going. =P

Could be that your computer can't handle the requirements. I know that custom cities require a very fast expensive computer... This is fact!

I have built towns over 750,000 sims and it can be slow at times due to the size of the city..

Great, now I wish I knew where my copies of Simcity 4 and Simcity 3000 went. Simcity 4 was cool, but Simcity 3000 was my fave.

I just downloaded and played the series for the first time, and the best city I have been able to get was through some fluke of somehow having no funding to schools having little effect on its stability, a lot of agricultural which I am slowly taking over, water being pumped from a nearby town and getting the garbage from other towns which I use for power, and just ignore the messages of car crashes, sickness and strikes. I think been able to get a million in like 46, and now trying to get some public transport, but considering to just rip everything down and rework it more intelligently, had a bit of a problem with areas being constantly abandoned, but unlike the others it is making money, and just realised I can see what demand is.

Try setting the game to run on 1 cpu. It can't run on multicore systems. This fixed the speed problem for me.