SimCity 4 (and 3000) - almost perfect classic city building games

SimCity 4

That game is the closest thing that allowed me to make my imagination draw some well functioning cities including sprawling regions with enough precision and the interface was pleasant enough to do so. Even if the UI is a bit outdated, it absolutely has its early sim-esque charm, and the lighting, nature and buildings look gorgeous.

For a long time it was my favourite game ever. The god mode tools are fantastic, the terrain can be sculped freely to create sharp mountains, deep canyons or gentle hills. In SimCity 3000 the terrain was much more gridlocked, which had some benefits as it was very obvious where the slopes were too steep to build something. The nature looks super natural. With built-in waterfalls creator it would be even more perfectly natural. Catastrophies are spectacular, volcano ftw. the cones after volcanos are awesome decorations for the city terrain. The completely vanilla version was good, but after a while the game gets too simple. The absolute must have mod is NAM, the package of various transport modes and enchanced traffic stats.

Small palms can be planted in the pot. I lost most of my nice regions for some reason and the only thing I got is some lame screenshots, or photos.

Technical issues

It's not ideal though, even though the vanilla game crashes quite often and made me the habit of manually "auto-save" my cities once in a while, the NAM puzzles caused a lot more complete program shutdowns, at least on my PC. The puzzles was puzzling to use, such a shame they new types of interchanges can't be just draged like the regular roads, and it forces you to use 'tab' all the time. After some unsuccessful attempts to build tram lines, I cease to use all NAM lines and I just sticked to build regular types of network and just build NAM advanced buildings with much greater capacity. Bus and subway stops inside the road tile are great, but unfortunately can't be placed in front of the buildings because they cut road accessibility to it.

The one tiny annoying thing happened on a regional transportation map, when I saved my city and go back to the region, the map of said city might change the color of the roads into black, instead of white which looked odd, you can even see this on my map of the palm island, all roads are black and don't fit to the rest of the map. It gets back to normal after one or two savings but it's still annoying.

Music

Music in SimCity 4 is this kind of background noise that is instantly recognizable and brings me to the careless hours of meticulous planning of rail networks that will be somewhat utilize way after 50 game years of grinding. It's the flawless mix of melodic jazz and city noises.

I unfortunately forgot much of the music from SimCity 3000, it's probably because I spent way more time playing the next version of SimCity, maybe I'll add the 3000's music to SC4.

Integration with The Sims 2

One feature that I haven't explore to this day is the ability to create your own neighborouhood in SimCity4 and export it as .sc4 file into The Sims 2. There are so restrictions, only small tile cities works and I guess no other objects than straight roads can be planted (not even diagonal roads). These restrictions initially discouraged me to even try to make my custom neighborouhood as if only moulding the terrain was not enough of an incentive, the default terrains were fine. But if exporting buildings from SimCity 4 were possible, even as just decorations, oh my god, that would be awesome. Anyway, maybe some day I'll try to lay some roads.

SimCity 3000

I didn't play SimCity 1 and 2, but SimCity 3000 was very much playable but much more limiting than the forth version. I once tried to install SimCity 3000 and I was bundled with custom building editor, which I found very impressive, although the game itself after hours and hours of SimCtiy 4, 3000 is just a downgrade in a technical sense. The 3000 however definitely has its charm when it comes to style and features that I really enjoyed and kinda miss from SimCity 4. Much more restraining grid terrain mesh was easier to precisely shape and I like the random terrain generator with clickable tiles and sliders to get desired results.

Why I like those games and what I would add

One big feature that I wish exists in any city building game is what I would call, Planning Mode. The addon that would allow to place all the buildings and transport networks without building them, just holding the place to build them later, when the money is available. I just wished to be able to hold place for bigger schools, hospitals and so on, so when the city grows enough, no buldozing would be required.

The big part of why I want this whole Lankarta app happen is that it could possible bring new life to that game for me, as the Network Map functionality could allow to create custom non-grid like regions where cities could be linked wheather or not they stick to each other.

Is SimCity Societies or SimCtiy 2013 relevant

No.

Only the true remake of SimCity 4 can save that franchise, no cap.