HI all, just played gog version of SC4 for the first time. Spent about an hour on the getting started city. saved it several times, and exited. When I come back and restart the game the building I'd done is gone, and I can't seem to find a save game.

I'm on Win10. The game is installed on my D:/ Program Files (x86) / Galaxy Client / Games / SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition folder.

I can't locate any save games anywhere in that path, and can't find anything on my C:/ Users / *userid* path either.

Not sure what to do as it makes no sense to have to restart from scratch each time. Any suggestions appreciated.

First thing, I would not recommend installing games, especially older games, into Program Files. Since Windows Vista, Program Files is a special protected folder (I think it is part of DEP) and what it tries to do is prevent alteration of the files in the game installation folder after the installation is completed. Whether this is the root cause in this instance I cannot say, but it is certainly a consideration. Personally, I use a Games folder that I create myself in the root of the hard drive (my old PC it was C:\Games\, my new one it is E:\Games\ on my second hard drive).

Next thing, especially as you have installed into Program Files, is to try running the game as administrator, as doing this can sometimes re-point the location for the save games (usually to the game installation folder in older games).

Lastly, if I remember correctly, SimCity 4 lets you save your city file anywhere on your hard drive, so you could use your own folder or a My Documents folder or something. If you create a new city and then save to a custom location, you should easily be able to check, upon quitting the game, that the file has been created, and subsequently edited afterwards. If it is, then the game save functionality is working correctly.

fwiw for anybody who searches this in the future, it looks like the save file saves inside your user folder inside the region's folder as follows:

c:\users\[userid]\documents\SimCity4\Regions\Timbuktu where Timbuktu is the region. The savegame extension is *.sc4

From what I can tell there is no way to set the path from the save city option in game, and it doesn't show the path at the time of saving.

The game that I "lost" was the "getting started tutorial", and it is nowhere to be found. I didn't rename it, so maybe that would've worked if I'd have changed the name. When I instead selected a different square and saved a new city under a different game, the file was saved in the path shown above.

Anyhow, I'd seen a few other posts on this thread w/ the same issue, so that's what I've found out so far. I screwed up my Region and created a flat square at that spot trying to load a city in (I'd also seen this in a few posts also), so maybe I broke it myself, not sure, but it's nowhere to be found regardless.

Ah yes, it's SimCity 4, so it saves the region rather than just the one city. That was something new to SC4, and as such you won't get a prompt. It's the same kind of thing as they did with The Sims where you saved the neighbourhood rather than the individual plots.