Transition between Subway and Rail in SimCity 4

There are several things that can cause a deal to be canceled:

• The Customer (the one with the trash) does not have a minimum amount of money in the bank.

  Something like twice the cities TOTAL budget for a month. If you're out of money, your only option is loading from where you saved the city last, or taking out a loan. I have had this kill cities before.

• Service Provider (the one burning the trash) does not have enough capacity.

  Note that when you are playing as the Customer, the Service Provider's info is locked in: the capacity for each month and the total trash collected DO NOT CHANGE no matter how many months you play as the Customer. This means there's no chance the Service Provider's land fills are full, but rather that the customer is making too much trash each month for the Service Provider to take.

• The connection is broken.

  Simple enough, the roads/powerlines/pipes have been demolished due to a mis-click or disaster or something.

In any of these cases, the deal is canceled automatically. You will have to open both cities, check that everything is OK, THEN re-initiate the deal. Also, I believe you sometimes have to run a month in either city for any correction you've made (such as building more landfill) to be recognized, and allow you to restart the deal.

Cities XL's big feature was the online multiplayer, but that has been shut down now. Cities XL's gameplay allows you to build cities that are more varied in appearence than those in Simcity 4, with features such as curved roads and different types of zones (linear - think inner city with houses on edge, freeform, curved (good for suburbs), compared to Simcity 4's grid. Some of these can be replicated manually in Simcity, like the linear zones, while others like the curved and freeform zones can't be.

However, Simcity 4 is the more in depth of the two in most aspects with features such as garbage disposal and pre-game terraforming, but there are a few cases where Cities XL has more detail (specific bus routes as opposed to just plopping stations everywhere).

For the less casual gameplay then, I'd go with Simcity 4, but Cities XL isn't entirely lacking in depth either.