The MAX-POP SimCity...

[@jackiespaceman]

“Babe, wake up! …oh right, this is why I’m alone”

[@ambiguousamphibian]

I hope it gets better for you

[@DKArmstrong]

Very good.

[@bigbootros4362]

You're not alone, we are here with you. I'm in you ceiling...

[@unknownuser5895]

Ouch...

[@jiru331]

Same,same, alone gang😊

[@anortalot]

Self-actualization is found through filling the metaphorical square mile with 187 million Sims

[@hitmanTilliMDeaD]

I finally see 👁️👄👁️

[@Kanal-ns4sq]

EINS ACHT SIEBÄÄÄÄÄN

[@rustyshackleford1508]

I will rebuild my father's megacity

[@kathrynroitz]

I very much thought this was "max poop" when i clicked

[@ambiguousamphibian]

Show me that video

[@redfoxdog1]

as another commenter said. "this is just Los Angeles"

[@greedyProphet]

In some ways, it is!

[@ambiguousamphibian]

Does LA have a poop problem?

[@Dan55888]

I came here just to say "I read the title wrong" lol

[@eleventy7]

"Sir, some bad news. The plans for an ecumenopolis have yielded a dense, concrete sepulchre incongruous with human life." "Troublesome." "Also, we'll need to revist our ordinances. A recent court ruling stipulates our rats and pigeons have enough sentience to qualify for personhood." "Will they pay taxes?"

[@SpookyBees]

What are you quoting it goes hard

[@joshuaturner4659]

@@SpookyBees it's about Stellaris, but idk the actual reference

[@rustyshackleford1508]

This reads like a Futurama bit

[@eleventy7]

@@SpookyBees Just some late-night, addle-brained comic improv. Not from anything specific. I may have listened to a review of Blame! recently, that may have influenced things.

[@Dell-ol6hb]

⁠@@joshuaturner4659 Stellaris didn’t invent the concept of an ecumenopolis you know

[@TheBraecki]

I'm in love with frog man playing games

[@ambiguousamphibian]

Love you back

[@stevenknauer6234]

​@@ambiguousamphibianThe frog man in question!

[@JakeRuzi]

It’s the froggy philosopher to you!

[@šokolataSK]

Where do you want to marry him? I can reserve place for you both :D

[@RexxyRobin]

Aint no frogs here. Just hard-to-identify amphibians.

[@cubicinfinity2]

Be careful about "Save and exit to region". That has a small chance of corrupting your region in SC4. Save first, then exit without saving.

[@jayswarrow1196]

^^ The wisdom of a man, with several *decades* of EA experience.

[@cubicinfinity2]

@@jayswarrow1196 Not a fully deserved complement. I know this from other veterans.

[@nicholasbradshaw]

^^ The wisdom of a man, with several **decades** of "being humble and awesome" experience.

[@mel0dicHarp]

True in regular Sims games too… 😢

[@ginomctony6773]

i think its sort of a common thing in maxis games that the save function is cursed.

[@SneedFeedAndSeed]

>hear of a new city being built called "MegaCity 1" >it's managed by a mysterious man named AA >use up all funds to move in >there's smog and abandoned buildings everywhere >weeks later hear that AA bailed out to build MegaCity 2 >money stolen

[@nerdlingeeksly5192]

That 1 city holds about 1.33% of the current worlds population. To put that into perspective, the single most populated city in the world is Tokyo Japan with about 37 million people.

[@kahlzun]

Outside the walls, the Cursed Earth. Inside the walls, a Cursed City, an unbroken concrete landscape. Megacity One.

[@4thSurviver]

Megacity One is one big meat grinder. Bodies go in one side and meat comes our the other. And Ambiguous Amphibian? He just turns the handle.

[@kahlzun]

@@4thSurviver how dreadful!

[@lasttrueviking3687]

​@4thSurviver this got me 😂

[@discofeverish]

Man really hit us with the "THENCE" at 2:13

[@Fishnuke14]

This is just Los Angeles

[@ambiguousamphibian]

I'm told they have a poop problem?

[@jacob4189]

@@ambiguousamphibianthat’s San Fran. Wouldn’t surprise me if LA does too though. Thats just how they roll in Cali.

[@Rynewulf]

@@jacob4189not exclusively a Cali thing, here in the UK lots of people in the West Country region of England got mysteriously sick and it turns out private water companies are pumping sewage poop into their drinking water. Then paying themselves big bonuses. Even the new government isnt investigating it. Once again Im sorry America, you just inherited your worst parts from us

[@Tundra.]

@@jacob4189 Shtt rolls downhill, and LA is definitely south from San Francisco. It was inevitable.

[@Domedwho]

@@jacob4189haha good one. goofy

[@ItsJabo]

Ambiguous Amphibian and Sim City - yeah today’s the day!

[@enderblazex2718]

Ayyyy Jabo!

[@darthypr]

A wild jabo has been spotted!

[@rytb09-gaming]

You been pumping out them Fallout vids huh?

[@Qmeister044]

Damn, there's no city on earth which comes close to that kind of population density besides Malé, the capital of the Maldives, which greatly exceeds it at 281k people/sq mi (107k people/sq km) and that's only because they crammed 212 thousand people onto an island less than a square mile (~2 sq km) in area. Manila is at second place with around 43k/sq km.

[@olivercharles2930]

holy shit

[@flowersandwater666]

yo, I'm from Malé, can confirm, we aplenty

[@Yonkage-ik5qb]

Kowloon Walled City was like 1.3 million per square kilometer.

[@DMXRUSER]

⁠@@Yonkage-ik5qbbut then it got DEMOLISHED

[@-force-2339]

11:40 "... and just blew up every dirty industry in the town" Proceeds to destroy only manufacturing industry buildings in the background 😂

[@BierBart12]

This is truly a way to play this game I've never even considered. Back then, I just played until everything ground to a standstill, fell apart and the Earth was torn asunder by hundreds of alien motherships

[@Alternatevil]

You can hold down alt to alternate which street the zone faces, also shift and control for further control of how the zones are laid out. I wish the game would tell you this

[@dezdanna9297]

Seeing the full picture of the endless expanse of grey with a single square of inprisoned green at the center filled me with dread and made me realize just what abject horrors cities really are. Grey expanses filled with inequity and despair.

[@lechking941]

Tbh humanity is a fucking menace. We will need inhuman mega cities were a entire fucking family line will never see the sun or breath surface air n order to keep any form of life on earth that's not human. Or ya know mega zoos of pure artificial existance. For life with still inhuman cities.

[@purple_menace6604]

Ever heard of Magnasanti?

[@HansLemurson]

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

[@kajmaklover]

That's just shitty ones. Literally the perfect example of what a lack of urban planning does to a mf

[@massimocole9689]

Ever heard of Amsterdam?

[@amshermansen]

"from deep in the red to well in the black" Funny. It looks like you're still losing money every month, so not quite sure I can agree with that statement. :D

[@xyz.anonymous]

most honest city developer

[@cubicinfinity2]

Time to raise the debt ceiling.

[@logan_wolf]

1:10 Oh god, the Megacity reminds me of some of those sci-fi horrors with the really tall, really dense skyscrapers, casting shadows everywhere, and little robots zipping around through the smog. Gives me the willies, man.

[@harryshuman9637]

My record from about 18 years ago was 11k residents living in a single high-income building. Vanilla Rush Hour game too, no mods. Couldn't keep it up for too long, eventually it would level off around 8500.

[@ram_stick_samurai]

now the least population city.

[@ambiguousamphibian]

OK Mr pepe thinking face

[@Porabany]

​@@ambiguousamphibian didnt you do that already?

[@adamk.7177]

@@ambiguousamphibian can it just be one guy named "Mr Pepe Thinking Face"

[@ram_stick_samurai]

@@adamk.7177 and the textures hacked so he is pepe with the thinking face.

[@ajwash3247]

Anyone else find it incomprehensible that a single amphibian is capable of such complex matters of mass societal construct?

[@strogonoffcore]

you underestimate amphibians

[@tyler.__.g3923]

11:14 HE SNIZZLED THE SCHNOCK

[@Fqllen0ut]

fr that was outta pocket

[@jeyendeoso]

the jump from dirty industry to full manufacture/high tech industry is what i like to call "leap of faith": save your game, raise dirty industry tax to max (like 20) and then bulldoze everything, leaving only manufacture and high tech to grow. Also Network Addon Mod is mandatory. Period.

[@rjayx1539]

This! AA could have so much fun playing with the NAM. Makes the game better than either Cities Skylines game.

[@KlausWulfenbach]

7:02 That voice crack cracked me up. Could AA have some past teaching experience?🤔

[@aberrantwhimsy]

I really appreciate how you always link back to and name your inspirations and resources. It's really nice to see a big channel help uplift others, and show how no one works in a vacuum. I wish more big channels would do the same

[@gregh378]

500 years is a long time for a mayor to wreak havoc

[@punkyroo]

Crazy as it sounds, CO/Paradox could have learned a lot from Sim City 4 to improve Cities Skylines 2. :D

[@crossmr]

Best they could do was look at Simcity 2013. It was the newest so it had to be the best right?

[@Yonkage-ik5qb]

The Skylines series will forever be hampered by their addiction to the agent system. It's a nice idea that doesn't work in practice and immensely inflates the complexity of the game calculations because each agent interacts with each other agent, rather than just with the system, resulting in quite literally exponential complexity whereas SimCity is linear.

[@rambojohn272727]

I did something similar to this years ago, I was able to accomplish 125 million ish people in 250 ish years through low taxes, adequate city services (no public transit), and lots of farms scattered across the map so that logistics didnt become a nightmare of trying to haul food from off map through each tile to get to the center tiles, clogging up highway systems and making the cost of living astronomical to where no one could live there. I think the farms were the biggest factor to its success. I also had a mega center of dirty industrial in the center of the map (along with a few scattered areas of industrial) so that manufactured goods could travel from the map edges and the center of the map to where they needed to go. Basically, the best way to do it is to have essential industries (agriculture and dirty industrial) scattered across the map so that the goods dont have to travel far to get to the cities. This also allows more people to move in because there are jobs for low educated people close by.

[@danielhale1]

"nothing bad happened" Well, the first four cities were nuked from orbit (it's the only way to be sure) for being too stupid and smelly. I suppose you got the tragedy out of the way from the start, so the final city could rise from their ashes and/or be built on a solid foundation of bones, which is a very good foundation actually. Ghosts raise your pop count!

[@JessWLStuart]

Now take the successful city and introduce Godzilla!!!! "Dinguses who shnizzle my shnonk!" - AmbiguousAmphibian, 2024

[@cooldude8570]

Lunch and dystopian hellscape

[@šokolataSK]

Like LA

[@thespacedisland5746]

Same

[@TheHylianBatman]

Man, I missed this style of video. I'd be quite happy with a series like this.

[@jondorthebrinkinator]

Inspired by your video highlighting this megalith, I decided to sit down and try to build something similar myself. My one takeaway so far is that your first city is always going to suck. When you start with a region with zero population, all you have to work with is the background demand that exists to make sure growth can at least start. But once you have some demand going, you can hop to the next tile over and start building a proper city.

[@Gridlock3]

So basically a Megacity from Judge Dredd.

[@ThePaperKhan]

I remember first time I played the very first sim city. I built a huge city, but didn't have enough money for fire fighters. The whole thing blew up instantaneously and spontaneously one day. Didn't play it since.

[@susangoaway]

You can edit the region file with a simple paint tool. That's how you get regions with only big tiles... and also infinite regions that could technically be larger than Minecraft's world.

[@lechking941]

I doubt you can get minecrafts world size close but eh. If ya say so.

[@Pakistani890]

@@lechking941 no actually you can by importing a big heightmap..

[@LoneWolf343]

AA's simmering hatred of his citizens is getting hotter with each episode, apparently.

[@jayjasespud]

The next big City game (sad Skylines 2 doesn't seem as good as 1) should slowly shift the buildings to a more Blade Runner-esque dystopia look as population density and pollution increases.

[@deathgun3110]

0:32 Hydrogen power plants in a game made in 2003? Dayum.

[@galacticboy2009]

"I began in the far corner of the city.." *immediately selects the LEAST far corner* Gotta love that near corner.

[@Mr.Rogers91]

I lived in NYC for the first 30 years of my life and if you 7x the amount of people I would have never stayed as long as I did. It's already more insane then you can imagine.

[@RickrollFoot]

Another Day, another Ambigious Dystopia

[@inikim6199]

The frog man brings us the Hong Kong experience.

[@šokolataSK]

Frog man. Now make it in real life! :D

[@Faethorne]

Up next, AA figures out the smallest possible map you can play while having a functional poop volcano. 🎉 wait wrong game franchise

[@onedeadsaint]

this might the start of a new speedrun category and i hope i can see more videos like this.

[@stylesrj]

A year or two ago I actually was trying to make a megacity... I called it Coruscant and had it run by Emperor Palpatine. Didn't exactly get too far before giving up. I also had a couple of old mods sitting around to help with some aspects like pollution. I also found that when starting a new region the all-water region has a different region layout to the all-land. I think there are more mega plots available or they're in a better connected position compared to the land?

[@stylesrj]

Also also, when I started making my megacity, I played the game normally and built a city how I'd normally build a city... badly with poor zoning but I built up an entire corner of the mega plot until I was raking in so much money I could build the outer edges out the way I wanted to then demolish the old badly-zoned city. I think the KZbinr Sips called it best when he was playing Planet Coaster. He wanted to build crazy, wacky rides, etc. but the park wasn't making money so he made a "Dumb Land" that only existed to make the guests happy and to make money for his wilder projects. He put in a few basic rides and stores and no decorations, etc. and it worked... So yeah, just like that I built a "Dumb Land" for my city before building what I wanted.

[@thediethrower1803]

Imagine being the first city's neighbours and having to deal with all the "waste" being sent your way.

[@velocitydreamer]

AA for President 2024, he uses big political words like "schnizzled," "dirty industry," "gentrification," & "peasants!"

[@steverempel8584]

Sim City 4 is very much a Region based game. You can never really make only one successful city. You always have to make several connected to each other, and work on them altogether, going back and forth between the cities. I made one successful Region, I worked through different levels of Development, and had to start new cities for the old ones to develop more. Here's a basic set of my Development levels: Level 1: Build all farmland, make sure the farm plots are smaller, as you make money from the buildings, not the farmland. When you just zone farms automatically, you can usually divide each farm plot into 4 manually. If you do this you can be 4x more efficient. I use mostly wind power, and build some small communities of light residential, or dirty industrial, while filling the map up with farmland, to be converted later. Very small amounts of commercial are needed, only sprinkles some on the busy roads when the demand shows up. Level 2: This is where I start to build the real city, I have light/medium residential, commercial, and dirty industrial. The farmlamd is still there, acting as my "Empty Space" I'm building into. Water is important, keep industry away from residential at all times. Keep police services up, but hospitals are optional, and you really want to keep schools at a minimum. If you start building large zones of medium residential with few services, you can make lots of money. This stage you want to build your cash up for later stages. My cities look sort of like normal cities with normal boundaries at this point, with the farms being the countryside outside of the city. Level 3: The full city, make sure to build lots of cash from Level 2. Here I really start to build infrastructure. Highways and Railways get laid down, and I start making the main structure of the City I want. Fill up with proper Medium Density Residential, Commercial, and Industrial. I get rid of most of my low density suburbs here, and replace all the farmland. Education and Healthcare should be provided now, but don't overdo it, you need smart and dumb people. You can start really specialzing cities here too. You can make a city pure industrial, so the pollution isn't a problem at all. The bigger cities can still work by having commercial buffering residential and industrial. Level 4: I start throwing in Airports, seaports, Dense Zoning, city ordinances, highly educated workers, make cities specialized only for dirty industry, or only high tech industry. I set the tax rates to maximum to exclude either dirty industry or high tech, depending on the city. You can have pure commercial cities here too. Each medium sized city can have only one zone type at this point. This is also where you start to be able to have those giant commercial downtowns, and commercial starts to outstrip industry. Level 5: Finishing the city. This is making my final city with pure High Density Zoning, and going between all the cities so the higher development of the Neighbor allows the city to grow more. After the city is built, I need to spend time running all my cities for a few years in game, to stimulate thier growth, and I just cycle between them like this. At this stage the city is mostly Residential/Commercial, and the Industry zones are just supporting them. I never mix High Tech with other industries. And usually all my dirty industry is in it's own cities at this point. Farmland demand is zero, and I can never get any to grow, even if I try.

[@KenoBeatZ]

I don't want to sound demeaning, but from an ambiguousamphibian's perspective, this make sense. I mean, frogs do not build empire tile after tile. They just conquer a pond and... that's its. Great effort anyway !

[@vincentlocas6399]

Having just one tile is a big handicap. With multiple tiles you can exploit the mechanics of the game.

[@PointsofData]

...he specifically said he wanted to focus on one tile because one was complicated enough. Like, he explained that it was only gonna be one tile.

[@MichaelfromtheGraves]

One railway with 64,000 passengers just passing through the corner of your map = $12,000 in monthly revenue

[@kubaGR8]

@@PointsofData Yeah, but vincentlocas6399 SPECIFICALLY said that having just one tile is a big handicap, and with multiple tiles he can exploit the mechanics of the game.

[@GG_1318]

MAGNASANTI

[@AngryTas]

IYKYK

[@Pakistani890]

fr

[@strogonoffcore]

yes! i came to say that

[@oasntet]

"hydrogen power plant" just shows how seriously they took this game when building it.

[@nicknevco215]

But where they get it from

[@CardboardChick]

One of the better, no facecam youtube channels. ❤

[@BenjaminBruhEveryHandleIsTaken]

You're one of my favorite KZbinrs, thanks for the great content!

[@Bizub4]

The best part of connected cities in SimCity 4 was building all of your polluting industry in another city, then all your residental and commercial in another city map.

[@seankuhn7452]

My favorite amphibian returns, peace at last!

[@HenryXLII]

After previous ventures, I misread the title as "Max Poop", and was about as equally on board.

[@rjayx1539]

AA, I think you should check out the Network Addon Mod for your next SimCity4 playthrough. It massively upgrades the game's old traffic simulator to what the devs originally intended, and adds a ton of new optional road and highway pieces. Love to see you playing SimCity 4 21 years later!

[@maddy3852]

Where's all the water to dump our poop into???

[@Bruno-xz4xj]

I read max-poop, and saw its a vid from our loved amphibian, so i didnt question it.

[@Cooltigerrrr09]

Thank you Mr. Frogman, I'll make sure to recreate this in real life.

[@dogwithsunglasses4051]

You turned an okay day to a perfect one my man, thanks for your hard work

[@skylordthe1st]

"If your dirty your gone" - ambiguous amphibian 2024

[@BincoisSleepy]

This must have taken forever gg

[@aaronburns2858]

I just got a big box copy of sim city 4 from a thrift store so sounds like a good opportunity to give this a shot

[@sirsage3311]

You had me at 'Schnonk'

[@elijohnson8007]

Man taxed the industrial world and lowered taxes on the people and science for a eco friendly city. Why isnt he president yet? 😂

[@dasLlamas_94]

Nexts step: download the NAM mod to unlock better ways to integratf the region. Another thing: it's kind of known thing to SC4 community to never create connections on the edge of the map, the game can't compute the demand from other cities while playing on one, so aometimes you can create a loop of infinite demand or just doom some cities.

[@xpsu1319]

"Accumulating, expanding, all the while continuing to *edge* out"... nice

[@danwilson9684]

AA, just out of curiosity, do you make hand written notes on what to improve on next playthrough? I noticed your style is "do it bad, then improve on it next time around, rinse and repeat", I probably would like to get into this style of gameplay as I am often too afraid of failure to enjoy a games ups and downs.

[@Shigerugal]

I always adore your voice and random videos. Seeing you play the SimCity brings me back to all the other sims games I used to play. Would you ever play any of them? Like SimTower/SimPark/SimCopter/SimFarm/SimSafari/SimTown/SimLife/Streets of SimCity? I used to play those more than the SimCity (my mother would hog up SimCity whenever she was at the computer 😂)

[@jerrylim6722]

the first attempt was a little ambiguous, but at least the amphibians got there at the end... maybe the true Mega City was the friends we made along the way

[@Bedinsis]

I have a suggestion for a challenge (the challenge is not complete, but it might inspire you or someone to write a more complete challenge/mod to enforce the challenge): In Rollercoaster Tycoon, how high value park can you reach if you severely limit the amount of pathways that isn't queue pathways you may place? I'm thinking something like only 20 pathway tiles in the entire park. If you mod it, you could make each pathway tile extremely expensive to enforce the challenge even if there theoretically is no hard upper limit. Oh and also: queue pathway tiles may not be used as regular pathways; they must be for queueing.

[@smugshrug]

the frog man's very own MAGNASANTI

[@Lunchboxdx]

simcity 4 still being played? hell yes!

[@pauljs75]

Really hard to get that far in SC4 without network add-on mod. NAM is a must-have though since it effectively fixes most things broken or missing in the game. (You can use it to cheese things, but it can also balance things better than default too.)

[@Revy_1995]

You should do this again but with the staring map, no landscaping

[@romeishereable]

"monthly tax revenue went from deep in the red to the black" .... Still is losing money. I love AA

[@jackdanielsization]

just started replaying simcity 4 the last week or so myself total poggers

[@Cherryifeelsospecial]

i love you please don’t get killed by a falling piano

[@Angelofdarkness48]

09:28 he’s talking about Detroit? I think he’s talking about Detroit

[@Akideoni]

You can literally create custom regions by editing the .bmp in the gamesaves it basically allows players to resize the region and the city size to one’s liking. Do these adjustments before starting any cities though. I even have a copy of my not very well aged custom region(it doesn’t work well natively after windows 10, odd resolution aside) As for city building, that’s the fun I wouldn’t spoil you why government of earth have a thing called “budget”, this is one off those game that teaches people to minimax almost every single item if you want a non red budget.

[@logan_wolf]

13:45 You sound like Kermit! 🤣🤣🤣

[@colinharter4094]

I know the scale is very different, but just for reference, The mega City with a population density of 80,000 per square kilometer is still 15 times less dense than Kowloon walled City

[@Khaisz.]

No Simcity playthrough is complete without Schnitzeling the schunks.

[@Margonite]

That "dirty fumes animation" is amazing 😂

[@Stressymessy]

I had a really bad ear infection when I first started watching your videos so I associate your content with using a neti pot, struggling not to laugh as my nose burns tears out of my eyes. I have an allergy thing going on and just bought a new neti pot, bring on the frogman play game videos!

[@manueleggers1168]

You're a lovely person! Keep up the good work! Be ambiguous as always!

[@astingilbert582]

You know this is a feature that I forgot and now I miss in Cities Skylines. If they will ever make a third, or even maybe just a new Sim City, A single map with regions would be cool.

[@theblode1337]

max soda city, depending on the dialect

[@stevewalsh1935]

"There it is, Megacity 1" I could only hope there was a little digital Judge Dredd wandering around in there somewhere

[@DMGDfxdIT8336-n1f]

you might have just cracked the code for building a civilization with this video.

[@animekitten321]

i feel like "those are just farms we can safely ignore them" is how we got ourselves into a lot of real world shit

[@burnouter2934]

Dear AA please note that I love you and your channel

[@wadesherman-e2e]

It’s so poetic my dude! Honestly I was waiting for a meteor to drop lol

[@graduator14]

Ah, yes... Magnasanti, the most beautiful place on Earth, where we all aspire to live! There's certainly not a gun being pointed at my head!

[@empirius4088]

Frog Man upload video means no sleeping yet

[@NeonNijahn]

Life is good. AA makes it even better.