SimCity 4 is a Construction and Management Game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts in 2003.
For the first time in the series, the buildings are rendered in 3D with high resolution, trimetric bitmaps, but the terrain was now a full 3D mesh. The assortment of civic buildings was expanded (the schools, for example, were split into elementary schools, high schools and private schools), a maintenance cost was added for all the utility buildings, and the game was designed to allow for third-party mods. However, the greatest new feature was the regional gameplay: instead of playing with isolated cities, you could now play with an entire region divided in cities, you could get all your services from another city at a fair price, your Sims could live in your city but work somewhere else, and the demand in your neighboring cities would affect your own demand.
A later expansion, called Rush Hour, added more transportation options, such as ground highways, monorail, elevated rail, one-way streets, toll booths, and there are also many third-party mods, such as the Network Addon Mod, which adds more rail systems, elevated roads, and more traffic crossings. Aside from the in-depth city management options, the player also had the option to design the region from scratch. This extended to the possibility of using real-life satellite imaging to add real world regions in game.
The .sc4 files used as save files for city layouts in this game would also be used in The Sims 2 for neighbourhood layouts, so this game can be used as an effective Level Editor for that game.
This game contains examples of:
- All There in the Manual: The manual that comes with the game is an excellent way to play SimCity 4 well, if you read it thoroughly.
- Ambulance Chaser: Instead of driving an accident victim to a hospital, the "evil" ambulance mission has you driving them to a lawyer's office first.
- Apple for Teacher: The symbol for an education building's grade is 5 apples. If all apples are full, the building is second to none, if none are full, it's garbage.
- Arcadia: Keep your city small, focus on agricultural development note , clean energy, plant lots of trees and build lots of parks and you have your own Arcadia. One reward, the Resort Hotel, only unlocks if you have little pollution.
- Artificial Stupidity:
- Drivers will take the shortest path, not necessarily the fastest one (much like real drivers), resulting in gridlock. The Network Addon Mod, in fact, makes a point of entirely rewriting the pathfinding algorithm to use the fastest path.
- Without mods, the special Sims you can place in your city will get lost trying to find their work when it's across the freaking road!
- Even worse, due to how the path finding engine works, your commuters can be caught in an infinite loop
while ignoring jobs in your own city. Ever wondered why nobody wants to work in your city? This is probably why.
- Artistic License – Law: Criminals caught by the police will go to prison even if you have no Courthouse in town, or even in the region, to give them a trial, which is a big no-no in most justice systems around the world. Possible subversion: That said, in real life it's not uncommon for the courthouse to be combined with something else, like the City Hallnote (pretty easy to get in this game) or even the police station. Perhaps the assumption is that this is what's going on.
- Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Nuclear power plants explode with a mushroom cloud and leave behind a glowing crater and a Chernobyl-tier exclusion zone, contrasting earlier editions that merely rendered the surrounding area uninhabitable. This may be deliberate, given that the effect is expected.
- Awesome, but Impractical: A lot of the rewards fall under this:
- The Movie Studio is technically free to build and maintain, but takes quite a lot of space (and is one of the last rewards to unlock, by that time the map is likely filled in), consumes relatively large amounts of resources for a relatively weak landmark effect. It does look good and adds some flair to the city.
- The Country Fair. You'll need to heavily invest in farms to unlock it. It's a large lot that increases crime and drives away residential development from its vicinity (essentially being an "anti-park"). However it has positive impact on commercial development and mayor rating, and has the most complex animated 3D models, and looks pretty great.
- The Bureau of Bureaucracy requires you to boost your healthcare and education funding to 100% to unlock... and just gives a decent landmark effect while generating lots of garbage (you can lower the funding to a more reasonable level once you have unlocked it).
- The Opera House (which functions as a school under the hood, boosting education) has low-capacity (1200), no funding slider and doesn't actually tell you about its capacity, meaning it will eventually get over-capacity without you knowing or being able to do anything about it, which will slowly drag down your city's education level. That's right, if an opera is constantly sold-out of tickets then everyone in the city somehow slowly becomes a moron. Thankfully a fanmade patch fixes this.
- Landmark buildings, they essentially are there to look awesome, increase commercial desirability, boost your mayor rating, and cost a lot to build and maintain.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The French version of the game translated the "Fire" disaster as "Tirer" (as in "fire a gun") instead of the correct "Feu".
- Boring, but Practical:
- The Farmers Market, it's literally just a Farmers Market, but it's small (3x3 tiles), it gives some residential demand cap relief and provides a passive, city-wide health benefit.
- The Smoke Detector ordinance is extremely cheap and lowers the risk of fires. Useful in the early game where you don't necessarily have the money to have fire stations everywhere.
- Coal Power Plants have the best "bang-for-your-buck" ratio of all power plants, standing at 0.04 Simoleon per megawatt. They're only balanced by their insane pollution.
- Humble streets, they cost very little but don't have high capacity or speed limits. Use them in residential areas to create quiet suburbs (where having high traffic is undesirable anyway) that feed into larger capacity roads, avenues and highways (a real life urbanism trick known as "road hierarchy").
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Yourself; assuming you are halfway competent, the city's residents will happily overlook your golfing in office hours and your toga parties. They're probably just happy you aren't the other type of mayor.
- Cat Up a Tree: Some U-Drive-It missions either have you saving them with fire trucks or hosing them down on Dr. Vu's orders.
- Church of Saint Genericus: The unlockable "House of Worship" is vaguely Christian but otherwise have no specified religion, letting the player fill in the blanks.
- Colony Drop: One of the disasters is a meteor strike.
- Creepy Cemetery: Zig-Zagged, cemeteries are unlocked as population grows, they have a strong park effect (meaning people like living next to it) and clear some air pollutions. They're also free to build and cost nothing to maintain, so there's only benefits to building them. Cemeteries will spawn zombies and ghosts as an Easter Egg, but they're perfectly harmless.
- Crutch Character:
- Every city starts with lots of agricultural demand and it's cheap to zone and provides some low-wealth jobs, which isn't a problem since low-wealth Sims are what you'll start with anyway. Farms give zero air pollution, but they pollute the water like crazy, except water pollution isn't a problem early on since you don't need water to jump start your city. And with enough farms you can unlock the Farmers Market and Country Fair. The problem is that farms take lots of space for the small amount of jobs and taxes they give and unless you want to lead a rural community of uneducated hicks you'll need to switch to another job source eventually.
- The "Legalize Gambling" ordinance, it gives you a measly 100$ per month, which is useful when you start the city and are scraping for every Simoleon, and it increases crime by 20%, but crime is not an issue anyway in the early game. The problem is that the 100$ per month doesn't scale with your city's growth unlike other ordinances, and eventually the 20% extra crime will start to hurt, so it's a good idea to cancel the ordinance after a while.
- Windmills are a perfectly viable alternative to Coal Power Plants early on to power a settlement, but they have the highest cost-per-megawatt of all power solutions (0.25 Simoleons per megawatt) meaning that as the city grows it's simply not possible for windpower to scale up to fulfil the needs of the city.
- Deal with the Devil: Business Deals are essentially this. If your city is performing poorly financially, your budget advisor will propose you make deals to build structures that generate revenue but have a mix of drawbacks and positive effects. These include the Casino, Army Base, Toxic Waste Dump, Federal Prison and the Missile Range. Unusually for this trope, it's easy to get out of the deal, just bulldoze the building, although this tends to be expensive.
- Difficult, but Awesome:
- It's a common strategy to just play on the biggest map possible and develop a large self-sufficient city on it. However, actually sitting down to split up your region into various functioning roles can result in having varied means of keeping pollution and crime very low and restricted to only specific cities.
- The Hydrogen Power Plant is effectively this, its actual cost per Megawatt isn't that great (tying with Solar as the second highest, only wind power is less efficient). However it can generate truly colossal amounts of energy. It's best used to power several cities through neighbor deals.
- Disc-One Nuke:
- All you need to do to unlock the Tourist Trap (see Lethal Joke Item below) is have at least 40,000 people in the region, 6 connected cities in the entire region and connections with 4 different cities. In a well-developed region you'll sometimes unlock it immediately when you start some cities depending on where they're located.
- With the U-Drive It missions in the Rush Hour expansion you can unlock some otherwise late-game buildings very early in the game. Particularly egregious is the Casino note which you can unlock with a Mayor's Limo mission, which itself is unlocked when you build the Mayor's House, which you get at 500 residents. Another example is the "Sick Bus Driver" mission, where you drive a bus around a few bus stops in your city (trivial to set-up) to unlock the Convention Center, which would normally require a large airport along with other things.
- Donut Mess with a Cop: One Loading Screen joke is about predicting how many pastries your city's cops will eat.
- Drill Sergeant Nasty: Press the spacebar while driving the Army Truck and you'll hear a drill sergeant yelling in Simlish.
- Dynamic Loading: The game employs dynamic loading failure to reduce memory consumption, rendering only the part of the map where the camera is focused on. If the camera moves to another part of the map, the rendered data at the first area is erased while the game renders the second area. With the proper settings, even the largest maps can be played on mid-end computers. The game will always render the ground first, before generating low-resolution copies of any objects, such as buildings, roads and trees, in the area and finally adding in all the details and eye-candy. The entire rendering process in one area can take anywhere from one to as long as ten seconds depending on how many objects are present and how much processing power and memory the computer has.
- Exotic Entree: One "Evil" U-Drive-It mission has you catching endangered fish and then serving them up for dinner to Corrupt Corporate Executives, who will then reward you with a stock market.
- Fragile Speedster: Some civilian vehicles in U-Drive It missions are pretty fast, but a few collisions with other vehicles will destroy them.
- Game-Breaking Bug:
- The Opera house has a hidden capacity value that's quite low (1200 Sims, though this is balanced by only having the oldest Sims actually attend the opera) and its funding can't be adjusted. When it reaches capacity it will start dragging down the IQ of the entire city, which can be crippling for a late game city, and if you haven't heard about this bug it's hard to figure out the Opera house is responsible. Thankfully patches exist.
- The infamous I-HT (High-Tech Industry) bug. Due to the under-the-hood calculations the game makes for how many jobs a lot gives, many of the high-tech industries actually don't hire any wealthy Sims like they're supposed to do while still contributing to increase demand, meaning the only viable option for giving jobs to wealthy Sims is with office jobs and the occasional jobs from civic buildings. Like most bugs a fanmade patch for this issue exists.
- If you have at least 3 cities that are all interconnected, due to the way job commuting is calculated, Sims can end up in a "commuter loop" between each city, never actually getting jobs. It's thankfully fairly easy to avoid this bug if you know about it, though this may require sacrificing "realistic" city planning.
- Headbutting Heroes: Many of the advisors; most specifically, the Utilities and Environment advisors despise each other.
- Camille Meadows, the Environment advisor, will go over your head and shut down a water tower if it is too polluted. Jonas Sparks, the Utilities advisor, recommends that you place a nice, noisy water pump directly outside her office as retaliation.
- Holiday Mode: If you ever play the game on Christmas Day (or set your computer's clock to December 25), cities built at higher elevations will have snow blanketing the landscape.
- I'm a Humanitarian: A U-Drive It mission for Dr. Vu has you drive a hearse to steal a corpse and brink it to a factory for it to be turned into "Simlent Orange".
- Karma Meter: The driving missions in Rush Hour can turn your Mayor Rating into one, as it will increase or decrease depending on what missions you perform.
- Lethal Joke Item: The Tourist Trap reward building. This seemingly useless llama-shaped building known for its far-spitting llama boosts the demand caps for low-wealth residents by a whopping 100,000, which makes it incredibly useful for building large cities. Although it has a slight NIMBY effect on residential zones, it increases the desirability of nearby commercial zones by a significant amount. Commercial high-rises and skyscrapers seem to cluster around it as if it were a capitalist idol.
- Made of Iron: Tanks in U-Drive It missions. They have lots of HP and can... well... tank a lot of hits from other road vehicles, meaning you can simply plow through traffic without worrying about exploding for a while.
- Mechanical Monster: The Autosaurus Wrecks is basically a T. rex (or perhaps Godzilla) made of cars, which when summoned rampages around wrecking everything it finds.
- Only Sane Man: Neil Fairbanks - your City Planning advisor - is the only advisor who is actually remotely neutral. Every other advisor myopically focuses on their own aspect of the city.
- Passed in Their Sleep: If the sim you placed in your society dies from natural causes, they will die in this way, being replaced by a Generation Xerox descendant.
- Perpetual Poverty: In SimCity 4, it is possible to build up a city and its population to a point where everyone is highly educated and live to be 90+, all industry is high tech and there are plenty of skyscrapers with offices providing jobs for the rich and middle class. The player can even enact ordinances banning dirty industry and only zone high density industrial to keep pollution away. Unfortunately, the game engine punishes the player for this: it's almost necessary to have low income residents working in dirty factories somewhere or the player loses a potentially hefty chunk of tax revenue and the city's economy will never reach its full growth potential. It's made worse when a rich and highly educated city has such high land values that new enormous opulent apartment blocks are frequently built that are completely unsustainable and are almost immediately abandoned or turn dilapidated and ugly because only poor residents move in.
- Rags to Riches: To an absurd level, give your newly founded city some water, build an elementary school, a clinic, a small police station, a small fire station and a park or two (you know, things that pretty much every normal small city has) and watch as several luxurious mansions grow in your town, since having basic services apparently makes a town some sort of utopia that the rich will flock to.
- Schmuck Bait: Confused why "Primordial Dream" is left unchecked by default and decide to check it anyway without playing the song first? Have fun playing the game while listening to the frankly out-of-place creepy track the entire game, because it will be the only one that will play if you do decide to check it!
- Shaped Like Itself: The Bureau of Bureaucracy building in is the bureau that handles bureaucracy.
- Sprite/Polygon Mix: An unusual case: The game's buildings use simple 3D models whose textures are Digitized Sprites made with more complex ones. At first, it just looks like the buildings are simply pre-rendered sprites, but modding the camera◊ reveals what's really going on.
- Stealing from the Till: If your city is profitable, Monique Diamond - your financial advisor - states that she'll overlook your Mayoral embezzlement. It's only fair, seeing as she is hinted to be doing the same herself.
- Surprisingly Creepy Moment: "Primordial Dream", an extremely creepy song... and it's only purpose? Playing over the empty barren wasteland after you obliterate the city! Here, have a listen!
- Take That, Audience!: The loading screen message "Pixelating Nude Patch" is a jab at The Sims modders who remove the pixelation effect from nude Sims.
- Useless Useful Spell:
- The Carpool Incentive Program ordinance is bugged and doesn't do anything. It's supposed to reduce traffic.
- The Nuclear Free Zone ordinance is just useless. It prevents you from building nuclear power plants, but the game is a Command & Conquer Economy so you can simply not build any if you hate them so much. It gives a small boost to agricultural demand, but agricultural demand is ridiculously easy to generate anyway, and it also boosts Mayor Rating a bit, but Mayor Rating can be raised in other ways, like playing the game correctly. On the downside it hurts High-Tech industrial demand, which is incredibly more useful.
- Working on the Chain Gang: If you build a jail, chain gangs will show up on the streets in the vicinity of the building, performing manual labour with pickaxes on the roadside. Occasionally, one of them will try and make a run for it and has to be chased by the guards.
- Wretched Hive: Due to a bug in how the crime system functions, large lots like International Airports and the Military Base are considered major crime magnets by the game even if there is technically no more or less crime happening there. Even if you surround the airport with ludicrously well-funded Deluxe Police Stations the public safety advisor will constantly warn you that the area is a den of criminals.
- Zombie Apocalypse
- Shows up as a joke. If you build a cemetery, zombies and ghosts will walk around your city. It's harmless.
- One of Dr. Vu's mission has you take a crop duster to spray zombie dust on a cemetery. It's once again harmless but you lose some Mayor's Rating.
