Sim City 4 Oddities

I recently borrowed a copy of SimCity 4 and after successfully playing
both SimCity 3000 and SimCity 2000 in the past years, I'm having problems
with this game. For one thing, the save options seem to be drastically
limited or maybe I'm missing something. It doesn't appear that you can
save a game, proceed and go back to a previous saved game at a point
before you screw something up. I downloaded the region of Chicago and it
puts in in C:\\My Documents\Sim City 4\Regions directory. No big deal.
However, I started a city and totally messed it up but for some reason I
couldn't just delete the city and start over without screwing up the
region map. I had to delete the entire region and then regenerate it
which was a PITA. This time, however, I made a backup copy of the
directory outside of the game so hopefully the next time I can just use
the backup and not have to regenerate. I would have thought that this
should have been easier to do from within the game.

Another thing, this entire region concept, although it seems nice, seems
rather daunting when beginning. I still don't understand how to work on
two cities at once. If I start and work on a neighbor city and start the
clock, what happens if a fire happens in my other city and I'm not there
to put it out or if some sort of budget crisis occurs. I'm still
confused about that. I wish there was a beginner level like they had in
the other Sim Cities but it appeared that there is only one level of
expertise in Sim City 4. I wish they had a region that played much like
in SC3000 where you just have to worry about 1 city and the computer
generates the other 4 neighbors. This would be nice for us who are
trying to transition into this new version.

In Sim City 3000 there were all these strategies about laying out zones
in various grid patterns. When laying zones in SC4 the game
automatically puts streets through the zoning, which may or may not be
located in the right place. This is kind of confusing and I wonder if
any of those SC3000 grid strategies even apply to this version.

These are just a couple of my beefs. Right now the game has been
frustrating for me even after a lot of start up tutorials and strategy
tips on the web. The graphics of this new version appear awesome however
and they did make some marked improvements -- like being able to
explicitly zone out farms.

That's not right - I can't tell you what the problem is but you really don't
have to do that.

Best wishes
Maxon

"Mark Anderson" <mea.RemoveThis@nospambrandylion.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1c302a015d10ecb0989830@chi.news.speakeasy.net...
> I recently borrowed a copy of SimCity 4 and after successfully playing
> both SimCity 3000 and SimCity 2000 in the past years, I'm having problems
> with this game. For one thing, the save options seem to be drastically
> limited or maybe I'm missing something. It doesn't appear that you can
> save a game, proceed and go back to a previous saved game at a point
> before you screw something up. I downloaded the region of Chicago and it
> puts in in C:\\My Documents\Sim City 4\Regions directory. No big deal.
> However, I started a city and totally messed it up but for some reason I
> couldn't just delete the city and start over without screwing up the
> region map. I had to delete the entire region and then regenerate it
> which was a PITA. This time, however, I made a backup copy of the
> directory outside of the game so hopefully the next time I can just use
> the backup and not have to regenerate. I would have thought that this
> should have been easier to do from within the game.
>
> Another thing, this entire region concept, although it seems nice, seems
> rather daunting when beginning. I still don't understand how to work on
> two cities at once. If I start and work on a neighbor city and start the
> clock, what happens if a fire happens in my other city and I'm not there
> to put it out or if some sort of budget crisis occurs. I'm still
> confused about that. I wish there was a beginner level like they had in
> the other Sim Cities but it appeared that there is only one level of
> expertise in Sim City 4. I wish they had a region that played much like
> in SC3000 where you just have to worry about 1 city and the computer
> generates the other 4 neighbors. This would be nice for us who are
> trying to transition into this new version.
>
Time stops in any cities you are not currently playing, so there won't be a
problem with stuff happening when you're not there.