Welcome to the Archipelago!
Archipelago as of January 9th 2017Your soundtrack for this post.This a multiplayer region for us to play some Simcity 4.I got the idea from an old post on sc4devotion forums, which is AFAIK the only time it's really been done. Quite simply, an in-game region of cities is composed of individual city files. It's possible to sync all of these files by Dropbox while playing simultaneously. It's an ad-hoc multiplayer that's effectively play-by-mail, only it mails every time you save.
Why Simcity 4 Multiplayer?In Sim City 4, your city is part of a region, which can contain many cities, all player-made. In fact, before your city can have the biggest and best skyscrapers, you must meet hidden quotas for workers for the entire region, which are basically impossible to reach with just one city. For example, you need something like 30,000 middle-class commercial workers before you can have a middle-class commercial skyscraper. In other words, to build the biggest city possible, you have to build several cities, which I found dull doing on my own. Cities in the region will affect the demand for jobs, workers, and goods in other cities. You can also interact more directly with the cities adjacent to you by sharing power, water, commuters, and garbage services.
In addition, it will be fun to see everyone's creations come together to make one big, populated region.
To get started, you'll need to get Dropbox, get Sim City 4 with the Rush Hour Expansion (or Deluxe Edition) and go through a few short steps to set it up. Then, read the rules I've set up to make this game work.Dropbox is a free filesharing tool which marks a special folder in your computer to be synced with cloud storage. We'll be using it to automatically update save files. If you already have Dropbox, obviously you can skip this. Otherwise, go to
Dropbox's website, make a new account, and
download the desktop client too. Once you've installed the desktop client you should have a folder like "C:\users\yourname\Dropbox" which is where anything you download from dropbox will go, and anything you place in there is automatically uploaded, including any time you make a change.
Sim City 4 Deluxe can be had for $20 from
GOG or
Steam. However, it has been just under $5 on sale on Steam before, which is a much more reasonable price for a 13 year old game. It's available for less than $5 on
Ebay and
miscellaneous sellers on Amazon. You also have decent odds of finding this game at your local thrift store, or on the discount games rack at the Office Depot or Walmart- you know, along with those hidden object games and that one copy of Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand which has probably been there since it came out in 2002. Heck, maybe your dad has a copy in the garage or something. There's so many copies floating around that it's not hard to get a copy for free. Remember, Rush Hour is the only expansion pack, so if you can get that along with a copy of the base game it's as good as the deluxe edition.
First you'll have to tell me your Dropbox email so I can invite you to share the file. Then, login to dropbox.com and accept it under the invitations tab. Once you do this it will start downloading. This will take a little bit because I added some mods, which really inflate the filesize.
Next you will need to configure SimCity 4 to use save files in your dropbox folder. We're going to do this by adding an 'argument' when the game runs. If you installed a GOG/Disc copy, you're going to need to launch it from the shortcut. Right click the shortcut, choose Properties, and select the box that says "target". Move your cursor all the way to the right with the arrow keys, and then, outside the existing quotes, add a space and then the following line:
-UserDir:"C:\Users\YOURNAME\Dropbox\SimCity\SimCityB12"
Of course, you're going to change the file location given so that it leads to your Dropbox folder, but leave everything after the word "dropbox" exactly in tact. Don't forget to hit 'Apply'. If you're using Steam, you're instead going to add that line as a Launch Option: Right click the game in your steam library, go to Properties, and then choose Launch Options, a button close to the bottom of the General tab in the Properties window.
Congratulations! Once you've done that, your Simcity will look for Plugins (mods) and save files in the folder I've set up in drop box. Don't run SimCity until Dropbox is done download the Plugins though.
While you're at it though, you can add some other launch arguments. Remember they each need a space in between them.
-CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32
That's actually two arguments. Change 1920x1080 to whatever resolution you want. Keep the x32 in there.
-CPUCount:2
This makes it not crash.
-EH:off
This also makes it not crash.
-intro:off
This skips the intro.
When all is said and done, my launch target looks like this:
"B:\Games\SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CPUCount:2 -UserDir:"C:\Users\Sensei\Dropbox\SimCity\SimCityB12" -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -intro:off -EH:off
If you need help, contact me on Steam or Discord, which is a voice chat room I hang out in.
The Discord now has a dedicated text channel for Simcity 4, so feel free to use it! There are links to my Steam account and the Bay 12 Discord in my signature. However, I'd like you to follow some rules so things go smoothly, and I have some advice on playing as well.
These are the basic rules so we're not overwriting eachother's saves and stuff.
1. Don't Add Plugins to the Plugins Folder. Sometimes adding mods mid-game messes things up. Also, we have a limited dropbox filesize. Consult me first.
2. Don't save over other people's cities. You can look at them, but don't save when you exit. Remember that if two people try to make changes to the same city at the same time, the version belonging to whoever saves last is the only one that gets saved. If we really need to I can set Dropbox edit permissions so people can only save their own cities, but that's more work for me so I'd love to just keep it on the honor system.
3. Claim ONE large tile, or two medium tiles. Don't take too many of the small tiles either- try to share nicely! Save your game as soon as you've named your city so people know not to play on the same tile. Also make the mayor name your name on the forum, so we know whose it is.
4. If you start next to an existing city, use the Reconcile Edges tool! This way your terrain will match up with their terrain. If you don't do this before you start, you might not be able to do it later without inadvertently demolishing buildings. I'd like all the tile borders to match up nicely, so the region view looks nice.
5. Be reasonable about inter-city deals. Don't export all your garbage to another city if they don't want you to.
6. Save often! CTRL+S is your friend! Everyone else will see, and be affected by, changes to your city whenever you save your game. You should also be saving often regardless: SimCity 4 does not have an autosave, and it has been known to crash from time to time!
. I assume you already know how to play Sim City 4. If you don't, the brief tutorial does a decent job of explaining the basics and you can find guides online for the complicated crap, like demand caps. When you start off, you're going to want to edit the terrain in God Mode a bit. Remember, you can't use most God Mode tools after you go into Mayor Mode and found your city. I'm using a custom region I found STEX called the Archipelago, and you'll notice most of the beaches terminate in cliffs rather than nice sandy slopes, so have a quick go with the Smooth tool or you're going to have a hell of a time placing a port later. I already manually did a lot of them though. You can also feel free to add a little land for yourself or even make a new island if you're in an open sea tile, I won't judge. Just try to reconcile edges (either in your own city or in UNOCCUPIED adjacent city tiles) so the map looks nice.
If we want to make the biggest cities, then our focus will be mainly, I think, on having a high number of people employed in every different type of commercial building (there's five I think, $, $$, and $$$ retail as well as $$ and $$$ offices. Then there's needs for residents at all wealth levels too. So basically, go nuts, and try to have lots of well-educated commercial employees. You might want to make a crappy, polluted city to take garbage and give power to your main city too.
Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that I have a few mods. It's possible that I'll add to this mod list, but finding some mods for Sim City 4 can be hard now, I was looking at recommendations and there were a lot of dead links. Currently the biggest mod I'm using is NAM, Network Addon Mod, which adds a ton of road options including modular highways which can be various numbers of lanes, angled road tiles at different angles, roundabouts, and more. Besides that I'm using two bugfix mods: One makes it so that I-HT buildings create more jobs for high-wealth sims (they lost a lot due to a rounding error) and another prevents Opera Houses from ruining your educational system- apparently they're supposed to provide extra education to a limited number of people, but if there are too many qualifying attendees then it counts as an overcrowded school. All your sims will flunk out of highschool because they couldn't get an opera ticket, apparently. The last mod I have installed changes the look of the day/night cycle. Note that you can set a fixed day/night, the day/night cycle is only a visual effect in Sim City 4, it doesn't even affect solar panels.
Lastly, I've marked what's probably the best city tile as "shared". I was thinking maybe we could take turns on that succession game style, where each person plays it for a day or 1-2 hours of gameplay, whichever comes first, and hands it off, but I'll have to think about how to do that exactly.
So, go ahead and PM me or post here to get in. To add you I need the email address you used to sign up for Dropbox, and you should only PM that. If you post your email publicly, the spambots will come for your soul with their terrifying discount kitchens.
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Topic: Simcity 4: MULTIPLAYER! Same Dropbox, New Regions! (Read 16952 times)