whenever i play simcity, the roads always get clogged up no matter how many roads i build. reflects my daily commute. traffic everywhere. need flying cars

There is no possible answer other than:

"Plebs are needed."

When i first played Simcity 2000 on the Playstation, there was one game scenario where i had to deal with a fire breaking out in the city. Because this was the first time i ever played a Simcity game, rather than send firefighters to the fire, i made a highway from the fire to the airport, thinking this will help the citizens of the city escape. As a result, by the time the fire died down, the city was in ruins and i didn't have the money to rebuild since i wasted it all on the highway.

I had no clue what I was doing.
Grew figs everywhere and suddenly flood rushed in.
Build buildings but forgot wells. Suddenly fire started at a corner and burned whole city.

Btw thank you GOG for classic release. Time to add few more entry to my wishlist.

I got Zeus for Christmas back in the year "I don't remember it was too long ago". I spent the whole evening reading the manual (which I still have) and looking at all the pictures and descriptions of the buildings you could have. It was really fun.
Next morning I installed the game on my computer. Staring the the screen while it was slowly copying the necessary data. Finally it was done and I started the game. It crashed. Reboot of the computer just in case. It crashed. Mild panic. Luckily I found out there was a graphic card driver update available for my computer so that would hopefully fix it. I just needed to tell my parents about it. Back then there was still this ultra slow internet connection (you needed to dial in with a code) and the data each month was limited. And well the update was not small. But I got the go and after what felt like hours of staring at the download I could install the update.
And to my surprise it actually fixed the problem with Zeus. I could finally play it. At which point I think my parents only saw me once a day for dinner throughout the whole Christmas holidays ;-)

I was playing Caesar III as a kid and one thing that I remember a lot is having difficulties preparing to defend my city.

A good memory of this is that once I had only one barracks of javelins that didn't have all the units and I was being invaded by two armies of barbarians so I got a bit desperate that I couldn't win. Having remembered his loyal servant, Mars sent me his spirit and killed one of the enemy armies, but even with his divine intervention the battle of 6 javelins versus a full barbarian army wasn't looking good, until I found a way. There was a group of trees all together and my javelins attacked from behind it. As the barbarians got closer to my javelins I moved them around the trees, keeping my distance to attack. Eventually I won the battle and saved the day by doing this for a while but it was a very stressful and memorable moment playing as a kid, it felt epic at the time haha :)

Hahaha, I was about to post this one as well! :-P

In Simcity 4 you can create a sim to live in your city. The sim will move into a property, get a job and you can follow them on their day to day activities. You can also listen to all their feedback about how they are finding life in your new city. It's a great way to get some detailed worm-eye view information about your city.

This one time I created a sim, Sarah or something, and she moved into a block of flats on the edge of the inner city. Sarah got an entry level job at a nearby office building and started her journey, I would imagine, towards a high paying executive position and an expensive upscale apartment in one of my upmarket areas. Soon the feedback started, and it was all cheerful from this clearly upbeat individual. One bright and cheerful message after the other, about how she loved her job and how she loved visiting the zoo, the ballpark and just strolling through the various parks I so wisely spread about my city. Things were going well with Sarah. Until one day.
A short while after sprucing up my inner city mass transit system I got a decidedly un-Sarah like message from an obviously distressed Sarah. She said that she got up and went to work as usual, but when she got back her flat was gone. Actually, her entire block of flats was gone. Within the span of 10 hours an entire 10 storey building went 'poof!' and vanished into thin air. In its place? A lone bus stop and 3 small parks. What happened to her neighbours, her clothes, her new bed and of all her belongings?
Sarah moved out of the city soon after that. Whether she decided to start over in a new city with an internship at some other firm, or whether she checked herself into an insane asylum, I do not know.

I'm not really for the contest, just rambling.

Do RTS games like Age of Empires count? I like them because there you get the best of both worlds: you get to build your own base... and later to destroy enemy's base! Yes!

Anyway, from the first Age of Empires game, I recall one hard mission pretty early on in the game where, no matter how fast I tried to build my base defenses and such, wandering enemies would come to destroy it too early. I just couldn't do it.

It didn't occur to me until much later... why do I have to try to build my base to where the game is telling me to, as that was clearly quite a hard place to defend early on, with enemies coming from several directions? So what I did was to tell all my city folks (especially builders) to flee the city and head to the farthest corner of the map where I could find resources (gold etc.). So, while those wandering baddies were destroying my old town bit by bit, in secrecy I was already building a new town completely elsewhere.

So the enemy destroyed my first town, but much later before they could find my new town, I had already built a big sturdy wall, lots of archers on the other side of the wall for defense etc., making a good turtle defense. Sure enemy tried to hack my walls but I just killed them with my archers and then let builders fix the wall, while building the ever-expanding attack army of my own.

The rest is history, eventually I stormed the enemy base(s) with my highly skilled and loyal army. That mission was kind of an eye opener to me: try to think outside the box.

im in :-)

playing early levels of caesar III not jet fully knowing how to play good i ussually got into debts what resulted in caesar anger.

getting furious he used to send legions to kill not worthy provincial regent (me). they always behad like barbarians ruining buildings and killing tower guards which seemed very weak compared with legionnaires. as i often try to do in games something what developers maybe dont suppose to be tried by player, i experimented to get prepared and build as many towers as possible, literally town of towers (and induce necessary debts by it itself) cause i was curious if huge superriority of tower guards can stop legions.. or at least if legions are immortal in this case of caesars punishment/overthrowing me.

my efforts had to look very funny but i was unable to figure out if the legionaires of the punitive expedition are immortal or not, regardless how hard i tried.
i never killed even one of them and they always did complete genocide :-( :-)

so.. if somebody knows, let me know too :D

edit: removing bold

My first time I really tried to finish a campaign in a city builder was with Caesar 3. And on one map I had to build a huge wall, I think it was about 10-12 tiles deep to give time to my towers to kill the invading War Elephants. Fun times :)
It was less fun when at the third or fourth time they did break through and they destroyed half of my city until the army from my poorly placed fort managed to cope with them.
I don't even remember if I finished the map during that playthrough or if I restarted it.

I don't have any real exciting stories, but I did once have a pretty cool city going once in SimCity 3000.

Like all new Sim mayors I was having financial troubles and took out a few loans which I couldn't afford. Out of desperation I started making deals with the surrounding cities which allowed them to send me some of their garbage. Overtime they would ask to send larger quantities each month but also offered more money. Soon my landfills were full and I had to zone more. My Sims were mad at the pollution and I was barely breaking even on my budget. I tried making other deals with the surrounding cities, selling them power and water, but that only caused more problems. Whenever I started making changes or renovations in my city the game would recalculate the use of power and water, which would cause a momentary pause in how these utilities were allocated. My sims never complained but the other cities would yell at me. The momentary pause meant they stopped getting what they paid for, which meant I had to pay out thousands of simoleans for breach of contract!

Out of frustration I decided to build a bunch of power plants right on the borders of my city that would only supply electricity to these other cities and would never be part of my power grid. No more interruptions and no more fines. At first I was going to build the cheapest power plants possible as I had also put all my landfills at the borders and figured the area was already so polluted nobody would care. Then I saw there were powerplants that ran off garbage. It was perfect, these cities would pay me to take their trash then pay me again for the electricity I got from burning their own garbage. The plan got even better when I discovered these power plants were burning more garbage than I was taking in, my massive landfills were beginning to empty on their own. Soon I was de-zoning huge areas of landfill for other purposes, which also reduced pollution levels and made my sims quite happy. I eventually got to the point where this garbage-to-power scheme was able to fully fund my city. I maxed out funding to schools, hospitals, police, fireman and transportation while also lowering all tax rates to 0% and still had huge budget surpluses each year.

Great contest! My best city-building story goes like this:

"This was some years ago, maybe around 2010. I was sick and having nothing better to do, I fired up Anno 1404.

I didn't want to play the campaign or a scenario at the time, I just wanted to build a beautiful town without any strings attached. So I just generated a random map, with all the difficulty options set to easy. It was more of an excuse to listen to the superb soundtrack rather than challenge myself with a difficult scenario, but whatever....

I started with all necessities, a market, a row of houses (each one with its own little garden) and after a while, my beautiful town was thriving, the economy was good, more people were coming and I was busy planting trees, making room for parks with little fountains, paving the roads etc.

And then I stopped doing things and just followed the various little inhabitants of my town: it was the first time I did that and to my surprise, each and every human being actually had a life! Most of them were working; some were in the fields, others were fishing and some others had heavier jobs like woodcutting & stonechipping. And they all had so many little details in their animations, it was amazing! Of course, don't you think that everyone was working, no no; there were several drunk men by the tavern, drinking & singing or the occasional fight between a couple in the middle of the street (you gotta see this!).

Anyway, it was a total joy too see all this and from that moment, Anno 1404 planted deep in my heart and since then, is my go-to stress reliever and my favourite city-building game."

Good luck to all and I hope Ubisoft will consider releasing the rest of the franchise here on GOG! :)

In one of my first plays of Simcity 2000, I had built a Nuclear power plant, and without being really conscious, I settled the airport terraint just on its side.
You can just imagine what happened next... My very own Chernobyl disaster caused by a plane crashing the power plant after taking off...