This part of the FAQ introduces itself, along with a few of the changes to the SimCity universe.

Intro

Welcome one and all to my FAQ on Maxis's latest and greatest city building sim, SimCity 4!

You've come to this FAQ because you want info and/or strategies. Maybe you want to submit your own, which I hastily accept! For those of you familiar to my FAQs, you'll know that that's exactly what I provide. I won't go into history lessons on the franchise or company. I won't repeat the manual. I won't tell you how to click the mouse.

What I will do is provide thorough, tested, reliable information. I will provide humor here and there so this isn't a boring read. I will do my hardest to please not only you on an informational standpoint, but an entertainment standpoint. As my motto says, games are supposed to be fun, so why shouldn't the FAQ be as well?

This first part, the intro, will be short. Although I do like providing humor, I agree that too much fluff makes people irritated at the author. I strive to strike the balance; feel free to write me and report on how well I did.

Finally, if you have ANYTHING to contribute or correct, please e-mail me. Even if I misspelled the word "the" as "teh" in my 158th paragraph, feel free to write me. I won't be offended, as long as you're civil.

All right, let's get this sim party started!

Changes from SimCity 3000

SimCity vets need to take a look at this. I stress NEED. There's a lot of stuff that's been changed, and the more info you have going into situations, the better. SimCity rookies can just ignore this section entirely. By the way, I'm ignoring the simple stuff like graphics and audio and other ambient effects that always go with sequels.

Neighbors

I believe that the biggest change of all is the difference in the way neighboring cities are handled. No longer do you start your city with four surrounding cities. This time, YOU HAVE TO BUILD THEM ALL. This has major impact in strategy. No longer can you rely on a quick influx of cash by building a huge landfill and getting garbage from neighbors. You'd have to start one city, save it, exit to the main screen, start a new city on one of the original's borders, and go from there.

Budget

Your budget is now calculated MONTHLY, not yearly. That seriously changes a bunch of strategies. I used to splurge and wipe my bank clean in the first year, letting the sudden influx of people and such get me a large income for the next year. That's no longer possible.

This also helps speed the game up. You won't be waiting for 10 or more minutes for a year change just so you get enough scratch to build a darned bus stop.

Neighbor Deals

You can now initiate a neighbor deal. It's less ceremonial than it used to be; it's now a simple option from the budget screen. More on that later.

Tile Radii

In SimCity 3000, zones would grow if they were within three tiles of a road. Now, residential and commercial sections have to be directly next to roads. Industrial zones, on the other hand, can be up to EIGHT tiles away from a road and still develop, provided that SOME part of the industrial zone is directly touching a road. That is, you can build one section of road, then make a 1x8 section of industrial zone, and have it all grow.

Resident Wealth

It used to be that the denser the building for any zone, the more you got out of that building in terms of population and taxes. Not so anymore. A large building could house several hundred people, but they all work dead-end low jobs.

People and businesses are now classified into four categories: poor, middle-class, and wealthy. Generally speaking, the most wealthy buildings will house the most people or jobs, but that's not a set-in-stone rule.

Taxes

You now have much greater control of taxes, especially since the new class system has been implemented. You can now independently set taxes for poor residents, middle-class residents, and wealthy residents; poor businesses, middle-class businesses, and wealthy businesses; and poor industries, middle-class industries, and wealthy industries. In addition, taxes can now be set to the tenth of a percent. This lets you fine-tune taxes and give much subtler changes in the economy.

Shared demand

Another big change is the fact that adjacent cities share the RCI meter demand.

If a city is a bustling metropolis, there may be high farm demand. You can make a neighboring city nothing but a farm town, then connect the two via a highway or road. The big city's people will be happy with the number of farms, and the little town will be happy with the bigger city attractions.

Additional Structures

New power plants and other city structures became available only after so much time had passed. That's been done away with in favor of a prerequisite system.

For example, a new town is not going to be able to build a nuclear power plant.

Almost all of the new structures have their requirements shown, but I'll list them in the FAQ anyway so you have the info at your fingertips.

Hyperlinks

Your advising staff is still around, but now they're way more helpful. They'll report on individual buildings that are causing problems, and in their report will be Internet-esque hyperlinks. For example, I commonly build too many bus stations, and often my transportation advisor will say, "This bus stop is just not making a profit," with the word "This" linked. Clicking "This" centers the screen directly on the offending building, where I can take action to do something with it.

Local funding

You are no longer forced to change the funding of all the buildings of one type. If one school is in a remote part of town, you can individually adjust its funding to accommodate its reduced enrollment.

Game start

All cities start with $100,000 on the year 2000. You do not select your city size the same way either, but more on that later as well.

There are many more changes to SimCity 4, but none are as important, in my opinion. I'll get to the specifics as needed.

Claming your land

Hail, O young mayor! I see that you have that look in your eyes... you want to construct a fantastic city, one that is the envy of all the world! Of course, whether you want to build in order to mother it or destroy it is up to you. But either way, all cities start the same way: grabbing a hunk of earth.

The game has no formal title screen. Instead, you're thrown to the region screen. This is SimNation, a big huge plot of land that represents not one city, but a county, or state, or country, whatever you want it to be. See all those gray borders? Every single box is one place where a city can go. Yeah, regions are that big.

You could spend your entire SimCity career without touching the land, and that's fine. I was itching to get in the driver's seat and start building skyscrapers, so I ignored God Mode and such entirely for awhile. Assuming you think like that, I'm touching on Mayor Mode first. That's where you'll be spending most of your time anyway.

In the very top-left corner is a compass. Notice that north is to your upper-right, but it's not at a perfect 45-degree angle. This gives you a rather unique view, one you may curse at until you get used to it.

There are four buttons at the top. The one on the left is the Region View options. Here you can turn the grid lines on and off, as well as show or not show the city names. You can also create a new region from here, load an existing one, or nuke your present one off your hard drive.

The second button is only useful if you're on the Net at the same time. It's a shortcut to connect you to the official SimCity website, or to a site where you can exchange regions and cities.

The third button is your quit button. You're not ready to finish already, are you?

The fourth button is your options button, where you set the more mundane things like graphics details and audio volume, along with a few game assists.

In the bottom-left corner is the name of the region that's loaded, along with its mass population.

All right, now that you've got all that down, it's time to get your grass. I personally recommend that you make a new region (set it to grass), so you have a clean slate to work with. Your first town (and any other experimental towns or testing towns) you make should be on paper-flat land with no water. That gives you the most room to work and gives your sims far fewer problems from the outset. Also, by making a region and giving it your own name, it customizes and personalizes your playing experience. I'm big on stuff like that.

Once you have a new region or choose to stick with what's loaded, take a look at the borders. Notice all the different sizes you can choose. Like a lot of spam e-mail makes you believe, size does matter. However, unlike that same spam e-mail states, bigger is not always better. A huge plot of land can get eaten up pretty quickly, and it's quite easy to get carried away in this game. The smallest plots don't provide much room, especially to learn the game, so go with the second-smallest plot for now.

Once you click a plot, you're given a few options. If you had clicked an existing town, it would give a population, service, and job count, along with the town name and city funds. You can also remove it permanently from memory.

For a new town, you have the option of importing a town you downloaded, or just starting from scratch. Obviously, we're starting from scratch here, so hit that play button.

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