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MacGamer.net - SimCity 4 - God Mode | |||||||
After clicking a plot of land without a city, you are given the power to change the land to your liking WITHOUT COST. Beware, because once you engage Mayor Mode, God Mode becomes extremely limited and nearly worthless. Plan your city now before you make some mistake that you'll regret once in-game.
If you choose to raise your land, there's a variety of ways you can do so. Create cliffs to mark sheer raises and drops in altitude; make several to create a stair-step effect. Mesas raise a circle of land and top them off, giving a nice area to plop down a landmark, but denying direct access from the bottom. Mountains are just that, and you can make them as tall as you want; to get a mountain range, just slowly drag the mouse across the landscape. Steep hills and gentle hills are self-explanatory. Lowering your land is pretty fun too, and lowering it enough makes bodies of water. Shallow valleys, valleys, and steep valleys give downward slopes to your land. Craters lower the land at the center of the tool but also steeply raise the land at the tool's edges. This creates a nifty little in-mountain lake or something. You can also add shallow or regular canyons, which lower land in a very small area. Leveling your land is not a one-option affair, either. Using the plateau tool lets you make an area all the same altitude with extreme edges. Plains level the terrain too, but the edges will be gently sloped. The quick level brush allows you to easily get your land all the same altitude with extreme edges; useful if you made a mistake. Erosion gives your beaches and cliffs a rocky appearance, whereas the soften tool makes those beaches and cliffs smoother. Adding trees gives your city some personality from the start. The more trees there, the bigger the danger of fire, but the less pollution there is. Adding animals is pointless, because as soon as you go into Mayor Mode, the animals disappear... I suppose it can be neat to see animals roaming your land before your sims take over.
This is optional; you never HAVE to reconcile edges. If you do want to but don't want to bother hitting the button, there's an option in the options screen called Auto Reconcile Edges, which does what it says it does. The reconcile edges option is one that is still available in Mayor Mode.
This tool stays in its entirety even after the city has been established. VOLCANO: A miniature mountain springs up and erupts lava. The lava will flow down the hill and burn up everything in its path, including buildings. You get to choose where you want the volcano to appear: just point and click. If you ever get ticked off, make a volcano appear in the center of downtown! FIRE: The basics are back. Point and click, and whatever unlucky object you choose catches flames. Fire leaps from one flammable object to another, so trees and buildings are all subject to heat. COMET: Summon a flaming comet from space. On impact, it will set fire to a bunch of stuff and make a small crater in the ground. If you throw a couple down before the city gets established, you'll have a pretty nifty land shape. ROBOT ATTACK: Servo is fed up from doing all the chores for all the lazy sim families. He's managed to make himself 10 stories tall (that's like 70 to 100 feet, you math whizzes), and now he's launching grenades randomly. You can control him yourself and direct him to specific parts of the city you want to level. TORNADO: Content authors note: "I live in Xenia, Ohio. We got hit by a couple of rather devastating tornados in the past 25 years, but luckily nothing was ever this bad!" You can change the tornado's direction to send it to different buildings to take it out. Although it sets some things on fire, its primary purpose is to cause destruction. LIGHTNING STRIKE: This is a quickie. Summon a bolt of lightning to any object you choose, and that object will catch fire and/or be destroyed. It's like the fire disaster, but it's a little more precise. EARTHQUAKE: Point and click to make a tiny tremor. Or, for more fun, click and hold the mouse button for a few seconds, THEN release. That will rip the map apart, sending buildings flying and sims screaming. Woo hoo!
Also, buildings will get lit up at night. Call me a sucker, but seeing from a distance a huge skyline all lit up is one of the greatest sights in existence... SimCity 4 does a darn good job emulating it, but I digress. You can keep the passage of time, or you can elect to force the city to spend all its time in daylight or nightlight. The night brings beautiful graphics, but the day lets you see what you're doing better. If you're working on a lot of zoning, you may want to leave the sun turned on until you're done. No matter what you choose here, the time will still proceed. It just affects what you see.
Sims both like and dislike hills. Houses build on hills or mesas are automatically valued more due to their view. Windmill power plants also produce just a LITTLE more energy the higher they are. However, sims hate driving up and down steep slopes, and if you make your cliff too steep, it can't be traversed at all. Water is a slightly different issue. Sims love water as much as they love hills. Property values around water are higher, which leads to higher taxes, and lakes can easily be driven over or around. Oceans give you access to seaports, which help industries, which add money. The problem is that for every tile that is occupied with water, that's one less tile for something else, like a house or road. Unless you have some specific strategy in mind, you need to find a balance between aesthetics and efficiency. A couple of lakes, a few gentle hills, and one or two steep hills in an otherwise flat area is fantastic. Having a little of everything lets a lot of different sims be happy, and as they say, variety is the spice of life. That's not to say that specific strategies are bad. If you want to make an island, you'll have to give up a lot of land to do it... but maybe that's your idea. Your city is your city... just make sure that whatever you do in God Mode won't bite you in the butt later. As long as you know what you're doing and what you're limiting yourself from, you'll be fine. The only thing I always recommend is trees. Trees won't catch fire by themselves, and they'll cut down pollution from the start. It doesn't cost that much more to build things over trees (there is an added cost to compensate tearing the trees down), and it costs absolutely nothing to zone over trees (because the land owners will cut their own trees down). Besides, trees add land value too. If there's any space on your map that has no trees, you don't have enough. |
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