No matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to get away from SimCity 4. After taking a break from city building games, trips to Chicago in the spring and Boston in the summer spurred my interest in returning to the genre. I have Cities: Skylines on both PS5 (the PS4 version) and Steam, so I decided to give it another try. That game itself is 10 years old at this point, but offers several upgrades to the over two decade old SimCity 4. I've always thought that games in this genre were better with a mouse, and now that I have a computer that can comfortably handle the resource needy game, I decided to give C:S yet another try. One of my favorite parts of SC4 is its large modding community. C:S also has a large modding community through Steam, which is hugely appealing to me. On a side note, the Steam community is pretty nice. If I weren't so engaged in the Playstation echo system, I would likely utilize Steam as my main gaming platform. At any rate, with my motivation from visiting Chicago and Boston, along with my new computer and its ability to play C:S on Steam, I gave the game another chance.
I fully expected a learning curve with C:S and was OK with that. I have SC4 down to a science, and had accepted the fact that my city on C:S would likely struggle. I started my 4th or 5th version of the city of Steveland. One of the hardest parts of any city building game is coming up with names for your cities. A play on the name of Cleveland, Steveland was the city name I had been using to play and learn C:S. I had a decent city going, around 10,000 people, when all of a sudden people in my city started dying and my population dropped to under 2,000 people. The reason was because my water supply had become polluted. In C:S, you have to pump drinking water upstream and dump sewage water downstream. This feature doesn't exist in SC4, but I was aware of this part of the game in C:S and that is how I had my water system setup. Other than setting up your water system in this certain way, there was no other clear explanation on how to fix this issue that I could find. I also found that mass city death waves were common in C:S. Once this happened and I couldn't find a clear solution, I once again decided to quit C:S and go back to SC4. Steveland had never been built in SC4...until now!
There's a small number of maps available on SC4. You can download user-built maps or edit existing maps, but I decided to build Steveland on the New York City map. It's a map that I've only used one other time to try to recreate NYC. That didn't go well, mostly because of how the map divides the region over Manhattan. Anyway, given that Steveland is purely fictional, I started building the city in the NYC region but without attempting to recreate any one particular city. The last city I tried recreating was London a couple of years ago, and it has been quite some time since I built a purely fictional city. Instead of placing Steveland in Manhattan, I decided to build it where Brooklyn exists in real life. While it is fictional, you will find inspiration from some of my favorite cities in its design, including Chicago, London, and Boston. Using the NYC map, I even included some design elements from New York. I'm excited to build this hybrid city and grow the entire region. In my next CJ post, I'll share what Steveland looks like in its current form. I have big plans for the city, including some first-time building and design strategies that I've never done in more than two decades of playing SC4. More to come!
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