With us doing city sharing again, I want to explain some things.
Because SC4 isn’t a truly multiplayer game, there’s some quirks everyone should be aware of. When you start the game and enter your city, all the cities and regions touching your city are saved in memory. Whenever you go to save your city, it also overwrites these cities with these copies from when you loaded the game. This is done to update neighbor stuff, like electricity and water sharing.
However, the problem here is that if someone is building in a city next to you at the same time, and you go to save, it’ll overwrite their city with the adjacent city info from memory from when you started the game. All their progress is reverted back to when you first started the game.
It’s perhaps easier explained with a pic:
Lets say I’m working in Solidus Central. All the cities touching it’s borders are marked red and cannot be worked on at the same time as me.
If you look a little to the west, though, you can see another city in green (I named it pilcrow in MS Paint). This city would be fine to work in, as it has a border city between it (Caret, plus a few unnamed to the north).
In fact. When no one is working on Solidus or Pilcrow, one could go into Caret and connect the east and west of it’s borders with pipelines, power, or roads. In this way you could then do something like import power from Solidus, and export power to Pilcrow. That way the 2 cities can share things by using an intermediary. Again, though, it’s very important no one is in Solidus or Pilcrow while working in Caret.
I don’t care if someone wants to build nearish to me. It’s just really important we don’t share borders.
2 other things important to note:
The colors are jacked up. Before you start a city, you should go into all the regions that border it, and then save (while in God Mode, don’t start the new city part). This will fix the colors. More importantly, once you go into your city you can reconcile borders. If you don’t take this step, it’ll “reconcile” your borders with all water. So: save the adjacent cities in God Mode (don’t reconcile them), then go to the city you want, and reconcile it. (This is why all the border regions of Solidus have color.)
One last, very important point: Don’t delete stuff in dropbox! Everyone has full read/write permissions to the folder in order for the game to work. If you don’t want the space taken in your dropbox, just remove yourself from the account (unshare yourself) or ask me to do it if you’re unsure. Deleting the folder or any contents will delete it for everyone.
