Running SimCity in the background
I've found that a lot of this game involves simply waiting for money to roll in. It would be really nice to be able to build a city up to a point where it is 'stable', and then simply let the city run in the background accumulating wealth while I do other more productive and interesting tasks instead of just staring at my bank account increasing while occasionally dealing with the every now-and-then disaster. Even more importantly, before I learned the importance of education, my first nuclear power center had a meltdown rendering basically half of my city uninhabitable. Evidently, the radiation is supposed to eventually disappear, but only after some 20 or so odd in-game years, something I really don't want to have to actually wait through.
Unfortunately, I've found that even in windowed mode, as soon as the window loses focus, the game seems to pause itself. Has anybody found a way to alter this behavior so as to allow the game to run in the background?
Solution 1:
Having learned that what I initially observed was not true for others (that is, others were able to have SimCity run in the background), I went back to play with it myself and found that whether or not SimCity pauses depends upon how the window loses focus. It seems as if if you minimize the window, the game halts, but if the window loses focus for any other reason (e.g. you alt+tab or click on another window), the game continues to run in the background.
Solution 2:
I've found that even in windowed mode, as soon as the window loses focus, the game seems to pause itself.
This is untrue. I run in windowed mode. The game continues running even when I switch out of it.
Solution 3:
Not sure why you're unable to run SimCity in the background as it works for me just fine. One thing you could try is hitting alt+enter in combination to switch it to window mode without pausing.
Another thing you can try is this 3rd party app which will run SimCity in fullscreen windowed mode. http://www.pcgamesn.com/how-get-simcity-running-fullscreen-windowed-mode
I found this 3rd party app from this reddit page: http://www.reddit.com/r/SimCity/comments/1a2ou0/border_less_window_mode/
Good luck and also, trees help with cleanup!