Well so much for my magnificent SimCity plans. I was playing last night and I realized I had made a couple mistakes in my layouts. First of all, the city that was holding all my power plants would never grow big enough in order for the Nuclear or Fusion Power Plants to become available. Unlike in previous SimCity's, where these became available after a few years, in SC4 you have to have a certain amount of population. So my 6 coal power plants were starting to produce pollution that was affecting even the far-removed city. Then, my main city (Valley Forge) I had laid out in a grid pattern, which turned out to be waaay too dense once I had zoned evrything High Density. I had to place elementary schools at nearly every 6x6 block!! And even then I was micro-managing them like crazy in order to keep my ledger in the black. I'd have to check every school like every other month (which about a minute or two on medium speed) and tweak their student capacity and busing radius so that no one would go on strike. It was just too much - traffic was slowing to a snarl and I had no room to build any highways... So I erased the whole region, all 5 cities, and started over from scratch. Ah well. Iterative design at work...

Funny thing tho is that I had to wake up at 9:30 to do my last IGF interview, and I couldn't fall asleep until like 6am (I tried, laid in bed for like 3 hours). So when I woke up to my alarm (numerous times) I vaguely remember doing something like... I dunno, swapping out this thing or that or another - it was just like I was back to micro-managing the schools in my head. Very weird.

Ah well.. think I'm going to take a nap now, after just watching and voting for the best Star Wars Fan Film. Check em out!