As I've started playing SC4 a lot again, I've decided to make a simple guide for it based off of what I know, so lets get started. 1: Zones In SC4, there are three types of zones, residential, where people live, commercial, where people shop and work, and industrial, where people work. Each zone has an effect on each other. You need people to live and work in your city for commercial and industrial for develop, and you need industrial to make freight, which pretty much supplies commercial. Now, you don't need to have all three in a city, it just works better. For instance, you can have a city with just residential and commercial, and industrial in another, and if you have a city connection to it, no matter if its a rail connection or road, you will be supplied with it. Its better to try to have all three in a city, as it will work better, but its not needed. 2: Power, water, and garbage For zones to even start to develop, they MUST have power, but don't require water. Water is, however, needed for the zones to grow from low density to medium density, to high density. Most power plants pollute, with the exception of wind power, solar power, and hydrogen power. Nuclear doesn't pollute, but has the risk of having a meltdown, should a disaster happen at it, such as a fire. Water will always become polluted if you don't have a water treatment plant. You should only need to worry about water pollution in your industrial zones, but when your city gets larger, you might need to deal with it in other places. Be careful not to let your water towers/pumps polluted, or they will shut down until the pollution is gone. There is also garbage, which, if not taken care of, will lead to lower land values and pollution. To take care of garbage, you will need at least a garbage dump. Garbage dumps decrease the land value around them, but prevent other areas from being filled with garbage. There is also a recycling center, which decreases to garbage taken to dumps by 20%, and finally, there is garbage to power plants. These convert garbage to power by burning it, but produce LOTS of pollution as a byproduct. 3: City services There are four types of services that are needed to have a good running city, these are fire, police, medical, and education. Without these, you will face problems. Without a fire department, your city will most likely burn to the ground if a building catches fire in a dense area. Without a police department, your city will be fulled of criminals, which will drag down your land value. Without a hospital, your sims will get sick and die a lot more than without. And without a education system, your sims won't be educated, which will lead to more crimes, more sicknesses, more fires, and even lower land value. 4: Transportation Your city will need roads, as zones will only develop with them. Sims also need them to move around the city. But with roads also comes congestion and air pollution. Busy roads will surely become clogged with cars, so its always a good idea to invest in mass transit. Mass transit includes buses, which will help remove some cars from the road, subways, which provide an underground and faster way around, monorails, which is the fastest inner city transportation in the game, and elevated rail, which is pretty much the subway, just above ground. (Elevated rail and subways can be connected) And its also not a bad idea to upgrade congested roads or provide new routes to popular areas. If there is anything else you would like explained, feel free to ask.
