SC4 The First Challenge

[Ken]

Okay, here is the first SimCity 4 challenge. It was created using SC4DE, but maybe it will work with plain old SC4 as well.

Rather than being just one city, this first challenge is an entire region on a small chain of islands. It consists of 16 named and incorporated city areas.

Your objectives are:

1) highest single city population for any city.
2) highest regional population (objective year based on oldest city)
3) highest city population for a given named city.

Objective years are: 50, 100, 150 & 200. Cities need to be stopped and posted on January 1 for objective years.

RULES:
1) No new land masses can be created via the "God Mode"
2) No new cities can be created.
3) Cheat codes may NOT be used.
4) You must start your cities from the base files in the zipped region files attached to this post.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Download the attched ZIP file and unzip to the folder "\SimCity 4\Regions\" in your "Documents and Settings" folder. You can then open the region from SimCity.

[Ken]

Comments about your game play of this region can be posted in this thread.

As I just purchased SC4DE, I hadn't played it prior to creating this "region." I have found game play between it and SimCity 3000 Unlimited to be vastly different. SC4 is so different in fact that they aren't even the same game.

I will say I REALLY like SC4 especially with the Rush Hour addition. If you have been debating whether or not to buy SC4 or stay with a previous version of SimCity, buy this version it is a lot more fun. Best of all, you can keep both your existing version of SimCity and SimCity 4 on your computer. Driving around my streets is a lot of fun and I'm slowly learning how to not crash into things. The thing I crash into the most seems to be cement trucks.

I started playing this region on Isleboro (see attached graphic above). I picked this island city, because it was small and my inexperience with playing this version of SimCity would have the least impact on the overall region if I started with a small city.

Before creating this region, I went through all of the tutorials. I found them very helpful and I strongly recommend that everyone go through all of the tutorials at least once.

One very important strategic difference between SC3KU and SC4DE revolves around budgets. SC4 is much harder than SC3K from a budgeting standpoint. I thought that SC4 was very generous by starting with $500,000 instead of $100,000, but I was wrong. I burned through that startup capital very rapidly and found it very difficult to balance budgets. Managing costs is extremely important and at least in the beginning you might find it necessary to reduce spending on fire protection and health services to such a level that you will live with constant worker strikes.

The SimCity reference guide and tutorial strongly encourage players to start off with low density zoning and then to rezone later to save money in the initial phase of the game (grow out before growing up). At least with cities that have limited land areas like Isleboro, this is a futile strategy and will result in the wasting of large sums of money to bulldoze and rezone later. Because of the limited land area, this rezoning becomes very necessary very quickly. At least with cities with limited land area (like Isleboro), I strongly recommend starting with dense zoning.

Oh, I have personally found windmills to be a very effective form of electricity generation on small hilly island cities like Isleboro as you can fit them in places that you can't zone or do anything else with. In fact, I am exclusively using wind power on Isleboro.

SIDEBAR: For those who are curious how I came up with the names of the cities in this region, they are named after towns, cities and islands here in Maine. In addition except for Mayor "Defacto," which was a mistake, the last name or full name of all of the mayors are also the names of towns and cities in Maine.

[miquinones]

When does the first SC4 Chellenge end? Are there any prizes?

[Ken]

No end date announced and no prizes yet. I haven't ruled out prizes, but I have to figure out how they would be rewarded and what they would be. One thing I'm pretty sure I want to do is create little badges like the advisor badges to place under the member's name. I was thinking of at least a badge for the highest regional population and highest single city population. These badges would be rotated to the member who currently holds the lead.

Most importantly this challenge gives us an opportunity to pit our skills against each other and gives us a common objective that should provide for some good strategy discussions.

I am worried that if I create any tangible or monetary prizes, it would give someone too much incentive to cheat, which wouldn't be fair to everyone else.

If I do offer any prizes, they will be based on a competition that ran for several months. You must remember that I have to pay for all prizes out of my pocket. In time, I might shift from doing monthly drawings to giving away prizes for competitions instead. I suspect, however, that this would result in the same people winning all of the prizes because they are more skilled or have more time to play than other members.

I will update the initial post in this thread with who is leading the competition.

[Infernus]

I've already started, this is fun. It's different though, I'm not used to doing this, I haven't played SC4 seriously for months. Something I noticed, objectives 1 and 3 are the same, just in different wording. Oh well, I'm trying to reach all of the goals anyway.

[Ken]

I've already started, this is fun. It's different though, I'm not used to doing this, I haven't played SC4 seriously for months. Something I noticed, objectives 1 and 3 are the same, just in different wording. Oh well, I'm trying to reach all of the goals anyway.

Actually the objectives are different. One objective is to see who can get the best population for a specific city (e.g. Swans Islands). The other is to see who can get the biggest population for any city.

By the way, on the small island cities, you will need to chew up lots of money simply leveling or creating land mass. Hint, if you use the water pipe view, you can get an idea of the contour of the earth beneath the water. If you raise the shallowest land first, you can increase the size of islands with less money. Also make sure you use the land leveling tool to raise and level islands don't use the hill tool as your land mass won't be level.

I've been playing Swans Islands this evening. I learned a lot from my attack on Isleboro yesterday and tonight went much better. I'm fifteen years into this city and its population is around 5,000. I do have some high rises, but my Sims are upset by the lack of land. I almost have my budget balanced but I've had to seriously raise taxes and cut city services to accomplish this, which the Sims aren't too happy about.

My strategy is to play each city for about ten to fifteen years and then move to the next city. I'm hoping this will improve the overall economic strength of the entire region thus allow my cities to grow larger.

[miquinones]

Can we play at whatever starter level of difficulty we want?
Easy: $500,000
Medium:$300,000
Hard: $100,000

[Infernus]

No, because the cities are pre-made and you can't add or change them (except for building). Ken already incorporated the cities, so the difficulty is already set. I think it's at easy for all of them, but I've only started building in a couple maps.

[miquinones]

Yes, all the maps are at easy difficulty. I've started playing the city Litchfield and currently have a population of 5000 sims at 2 years. I'll be posting more stats about my cities and region later in an update post.

[Ken]

Okay here is my status report. I've started playing four cities (in order of start):

Isleboro - Last stopped at 1/24/14; Population 13,167; Cash reserves §4,880. This was my very first SC4 city. I made some tactical errors which wasted a LOT of money. Also since it was the first city in the region, it had nobody to trade with, which limited growth. Wind power is the only source of energy. I started this city with a seaport and car/passenger ferry.

Swans Islands - Last stopped at 2/5/15; Population 15,530; Cash reserves §33,138. I started better with this city as I had learned a few things from Isleboro. Due to constant terrain leveling and land creation, the road system is a mess and inefficent. I've also wasted a lot of money rebuilding and changing the road system. Wind power is the only source of energy. I started this city with a seaport and car/passenger ferry.

Vinalhaven - Last stopped at 3/9/17; Population 23,766; Cash reserves §11,076. Before laying any roads or doing any zoning, I spent over §200,000 on leveling and creating land. This gave me sufficent space to begin building the city. I worked harder at laying out a better road network, but still had a few problems. I started this city with a seaport, but not a ferry. This may have reduced it's growth during the intial years. The next time I play it, it will have a car/passenger ferry terminal.

Kennebunkport - Last stopped at 3/26/08; Population 19,358; Cash reserves §34,968. Having taken what I learned from the first three cities, I first leveled some of the low laying land and straighted out much of the eastern shoreline. I didn't mess with the high hills as this would be too expensive. I then laid out a perfect grid system of roads with 6x9 zoned areas. All inner roads are one way with the direction alternating every road. The perimiter roads are two way roads to facilitate driving.

I started with a car/passenger ferry terminal and a seaport. This city sprung to life extremely quickly and within the first couple of years determined that windmills were not going to cut it so I invested in a gas fired powerplant and then a waste to energy plant. Another thing I did from the beginning was to jack up taxes on the value residential and dirty industrial as a result, the dirty industry did not take over my industrial areas as it has in my other cities. As a result, this is the only city that does not struggle to keep a balanced budget where as my other cities do.

Once I have played Kennebunkport for around 15 years, I will shift my focus to Portland and play it for 15 year. This playing of each city for about fifteen years should help strengthen the region's overall economy and help all cities grow more rapidly.

For those who don't feel like doing the math, the overall population for my region is 71,821.