As someone who's played SimCity for many years, I'm super impressed by this. Although he didn't use cheats, SC3000 was the best cuz it had a cheat where you could place a specific building and have it be there permanently--without any worry of abandonment. SimCity 4 is much harder because there are a lot more variables to deal with, including the fact that you can run multiple cities in a region.
Huge SimCity nerd back in the day here - his city design is impossible in SimCity 4; the new game requires all lots be connected to some kind of road. The secret to his success is that there are no roads, every single tile is connected to a subway station that's impeccably designed. There's no traffic congestion of any sort.
Personally, I think SC4 teaches people a bad lesson - that cars are an absolute necessity to urban planning.
It's not so much that roads are necessary, but that every single lot must be directly adjacent to one - it's entirely reasonable in real life to have large complexes that are pedestrian primarily, connected via some kind of mass transit, where road density is greatly reduced.
This is impossible in SC4, since every single building must be directly adjacent to a road.
Also, because of the city size limit increases between SC3000 and SC4, the pathfinding algorithm used for transit calculations is really barebones - your sims will only ever travel towards their destination. Even there was a direct subway line to their destination right behind them, they won't take it. This makes transit in the game a complete pain, since the model the game follows is counter-intuitive to the max.
The trick of course is, with a grid road network, this pathfinding works really well. This only compounds the problem - since a subway system, no matter how well designed, has a hell of a time competing with a road network - and in no time at all you have citizens screaming about congested roads, and a perfectly good subway system that's sitting at 5% capacity.
There are ways to "trick" the game - mostly involving designing your road networks in such a way that you create disconnected islands between demand zones. In essence, you're creating a ludicrously broken road network nobody will ever use just to get people onto mass transit. But it's worth it (in the game, and IMHO maybe real life also) - the capacity and density of rail mass transit blows the crap out of driving, and allows you to get people much further, much more quickly. Air pollution becomes a complete non-problem
An apartment building is effectively a large grouping of houses that are not directly connected to a road. People carry couches, or TVs. Maybe apartments are not like this where you live? Where I am, there will be a couple of square blocks of buildings that are all considered one complex...inside of that complex is a parking lot, and you walk to your building, then your apartment.
You mean an apartment complex, not an apartment building (at least that's how it's called here).
A couple of square blocks? But still I'm sure there are roads in between the buildings. And you have to transport the couch in a car or truck at least to the general area don't you?
No one builds buildings that have no road access whatsoever, and the only travel is via subway or walking.
I haven't played SimCity since version 1, but in those days I thought it unrealistically penalised any city without a huge rail network.
But I think the idea of a city without roads is unrealistic, except in the case of Venice where canals take the place of roads for delivery and construction purposes.
