I thought it would be a great idea to start a SimCity 4 Deluxe succession game firstly because SimCity 4 is great fun and secondly for all those who can't afford or are too scared to buy the latest release of SimCity.
SimCity 4 Deluxe is a combination of SimCity 4 and its expansion Rush Hour. It is available on Steam for $20.
[B]The Basic Description:
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"SimCity 4 (SC4) is a city-building/urban planning simulation computer game developed by Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts." - [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_4"]Wikipedia
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"The game allows players to create a region of land by terraforming, and then to design and build a settlement which can grow into a city. Players can zone different areas of land as commercial, industrial, or residential development, as well as build and maintain public services, transport and utilities. For the success of a city, players must manage its finances, environment, and quality of life for its residents. SimCity 4 introduces night and day cycles and other special effects for the first time in the SimCity series. External tools such as the Building Architect Tool (BAT) allow custom third party buildings and content to be added to the gameplay." - [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_4"]Wikipedia
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[IMG_thumb]http://storeimages.impulsedriven.com/product_gfx/simcity4_ss1.jpg[/IMG_thumb]
Someone much better at the game than me.
[B]The Premise:
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SimCity 4 Deluxe allows you to copy and paste regions (each region contains room for more than 30 or so individual cities) from one game file to another, this allows one player to build a city and then hand the region on to the next player. The new player can then build their own city or build on the previous player's city, or do both. This new region is then moved to another player and that player continues to build. Each city will be played for at most 50 years in game time. Which means that the first player with just one city would play for fifty years and the second player, with their new city and the old city to play with could play up to 100 years. The third player could play for 150 years, etc.. Of course this maximum doesn't have to be reached, you could simply build on the previous city or just make your own city and pass the game on to the next player.
The end result should be something cool like this:
[IMG_thumb]http://www.productwiki.com/upload/images/simcity_4_deluxe_edition_1.bmp[/IMG_thumb]
[B]But I don't know anything about this game:[/B]
Maxis games are great for experimenting and messing around. Their games are pretty intuitive and even if you can't grasp the basics you can definitely have a lot of fun. I myself don't really know how the game works, I can get a good city going and a positive (if small) cash flow. There are people out there who can do so much more than that but super skills definitely aren't necessary. That being said, if you've never played before, try the tutorials and then if you want to join in, rather than trying to build on someone else's city (and risk destroying their work) simply found your own.
If you want a bit of a dry example of what the game is like and eventually how things work in SimCity 4 try [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGPADLGUqBE"]this out[/URL]. This is the first episode in a series of SimCity 4 play through videos.
[B]What you need to play:[/B]
We will be playing with SimCity 4 Deluxe. I am using the Steam version however this is not necessary. We will also be using two simple mods, one to fix a job issue with high tech industry and a much bigger rework of the building system NAM mod. If you have any other mod suggestions or think these mods aren't the best idea as long as the mod can be uploaded to the game without destroying a region in progress we can easily add it. As I said, I am not an expert, but the internet has recommended these mods to me so I have implemented them. You can access the mods here (the first one must be placed in the plugins folder and the second one has a windows installer):
[URL="http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/22771-ih-missing-jobs-fix-update/"]IH Missing $$$ Fix[/URL]
[URL="http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/26793-network-addon-mod-for-windows-installer/"]Network Addon Mod[/URL]
Copy and paste the files from the Dropbox (you'll have to PM me your e-mail to be added to it; additionally comment below with the name of the mayor you'll be playing as and your SimCity 4 Deluxe experience and any additional mod experience) to your regions folder (in a new folder called Garry's Dictatorship), this is quite simple to find. On Windows 7 go to Documents > My Documents > SimCity 4 > Regions and that is the destination folder for the Garry's Dictatorship folder from the Dropbox.
[B]Additional SimCity 4 information:[/B]
SimCity 4 Deluxe (released 2003) builds on the premise of the newly released SimCity containing new and additional features SimCity does not include. This was a pretty innovative maneuver by Maxis who have managed to release an expansion on SimCity (released 2013) ten years ago in 2003. The new features in SimCity 4 Deluxe include:
Modding out of the box
Offline mode
Terra-forming
Varying city sizes
The ability to save to your computer and not having to worry about other server issues presented in SimCity
Interestingly, Maxis and EA were never queried to reveal their time travel technology and why they decided to release these two games in reverse.
[B]To kick things off:[/B]
I've already started the region, called Garry's Dictatorship. I have created one city named Founder's Town. The region is all water so that we can shape (what I envisage as an island, but I don't intend to force people in a direction, do what you feel is natural) the region with a nice blank canvas. Here it is (F12 kept acting like esc and I couldn't figure out how to change the hotkey):
[IMG_thumb]https://thumbs.rapidshare.com/thumbs/1024/C50/FB3D3035620EEB61E45854FE250C2.jpg[/IMG_thumb]
(Taken after my fifty years so you can see the city already laid out)
I terraformed without thinking to take pictures until I got my base town set up. Even then they all have the escape menu in the middle until I found out about the in game photo taking feature. Knowing that knowledge is power and wanting this nation to have a strong basis in education and being generally better than everyone else, I avoided both agriculture and dirty industry jobs. I also stuck with clean energy. Creating a mass of wind power plants to provide the "juice" my city needs. My utilities adviser is obsessed with "juice". He always goes on about "juice". I'm hoping it's juice and I'm not mishearing. At least he wants more juice, not less. I'm hoping to unlock solar power later in the game as well, I'll need 3000 high income residents and a mayor rating of 60 to get there.
All these decisions lend well to a jobs market made mostly of commercial and high-tech industry zones. To discourage other industry I have raised taxes to insane heights for dirty and medium industry. You'll also notice I have an insane education and health budget. I spammed educational things. The citizenship test for Founder's Town is to manage to sit through one of those corny educational videos.
[IMG_thumb]https://thumbs.rapidshare.com/thumbs/1024/AF2/71F5B5233596BA1471C1FFDAAE35E.jpg[/IMG_thumb]
You'll also notice my starting $100 000 is suspiciously low for the small amount of zoning I've done. This is because I started by putting the residential zone near the water, but I realised that would be a waste for half of my service buildings. School buses heading into the water aren't so efficient. I had to move and rezone.
My first real problem arose when I zoomed in on my streets to see what was going on:
[IMG_thumb]https://thumbs.rapidshare.com/thumbs/1024/8C8/064BC6AA98CF88B7B2437D00D02C2.jpg[/IMG_thumb]
Cars have been exploding.
Either that or garbage. I haven't zoned for a garbage dump though so I assume it is a garbage problem. My city space is small compared to the largest options available in the region so I want to save space. The best way to keep undesirable piles of garbage away from civilisation is to put it on a pristine island that would otherwise be great for tourism. I also notice I have a high demand for housing from poor people, so I put them on the island with the other garbage too (later I added a light house to warn people of the garbage and a cemetery to put the dead garb- people in):
[IMG_thumb]https://thumbs.rapidshare.com/thumbs/1024/5EF/F7670B9F60E2396FBB12E9D02FDDC.jpg[/IMG_thumb]
(Garbage Bridge later confuses my cargo barges because they can't figure out if they can fit under them or not so they kinda just sit there)
Things go quite smoothly for Founder's Town and other than forgetting about fire stations and police stations there are no major dramas (the only fire-station is a fire-station airport for dropping stuff on fires). So the end result is:
[IMG_thumb]https://thumbs.rapidshare.com/thumbs/1024/8D4/92FB9AA9E6B8F2FAF9F14DEA6277A.jpg[/IMG_thumb]
You can see the suburb of Rich Land in the middle there, Garbage Island to the South East, High-Tech Hill in the North West and Everywhere Else is everywhere else. It's not exactly pretty but after 53 years, it's a Sim City.
Updates of this size on how your city went aren't expected. Just show us what the region now looks like, take us around your final city and mention any changes you've done to other cities.
Oh and if you stuff up someone else's stuff just reload the dropbox folder. To join, post the directions I've given above here and PM me your drop box info.
Keep in mind also, I am not dedicated to the current map, if you have a better tile layout (this is just the default one) that you think would be more appropriate we can change to that as well.
[url]http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1244076[/url]
Well I didn't expect this to be in the General Games discussion so I never looked. This thread is now irrelevant. If a mod stumbles upon this they can go ahead and delete it.
[QUOTE=gerbe1;40154010]FP Collab Region[/QUOTE]
It seems like this is more specifically one person, then the next person, then the next, rather than everyone working on the region together.
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