SimCity 2000 Scenarios Vol. I: Great Disasters (357)

Maybe you are reading too much into it, maybe you aren't

But in any case, I don't think I ever played on into the arco age. The game simply loses all appeal at that point in my view. The greatest thing about it for me is building a working infrastructure while carving out small microcosms, individualistic niches hidden in the city. With arcos, everything becomes the faceless same.

Agreed! I guess the reason for this is mostly that just having lots of money simply is not as fun (or at least as satisfying) as having an actually working and thriving city. Just take a look at the usual candidate for a million dollar ripp-off megalopolis and compare it to a carefully planed village with a future. Yes, the latter might be scraping by but simply seeing all those nice buildings and looking at the good health, education and wealth ratings feels a whole lot better and more motivating on the long run.

Maybe there is a lesson to be learned from this for real life too, maybe I am reading too much into it.

Ah, I must have spent countless hours on creating the perfect city. How I tried to please everyone by putting up everything my citizens asked for. But it was always just a matter of years (sometimes months) until St. Bankrotti (how I almost always used to call my cities back then) lived up to its name and went broke.

Now the strange truth about this game is that the less you care about what people are saying and the more you just pull up taxable buildings, the more you will be swimming in money. A couple of years ago I almost broke the game by just making areas as large as I could afford, putting up a coal power plant and play the min-max-tax game. Things get even uglier when you get arcos. To fill them up forever just raise the taxes to 20% and for some strange reason everyone and his cats will flee into the arco.

Great game nevertheless, but like with so many things in life: Once everything is just about money (like when you have too few or too much) things are not just fun anymore.

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Water isn't necessary to start a city, and this is mentioned in the various help files and manuals multiple times throughout. From what I understand, it is absolutely required for high density zones and seems to boost low density ones via increased land value. The implication is that lower densities use wells.

...I think you may have too many pipes. Pipes actually affect a lot of squares around them, so it's generally considered a good idea to put them under the roads.