How to create Realistic/Beautiful Cities... That work?

[LadySieera 0]

Hello, I'm new to this site... and other sites like this and well im new to alot of stuff. Anyway! I've been playing Sim City 4 w/ Rush Hour Expansion for a month or two now.

I have alot of free time (as my job (believe it or not) is to make plastic models that are sent to me via mail and i make at home on my own time i just have a dead line which is normally 1-5 months from when i receive it (or longer depending on the model) so when im finished i have alot of free time before i have to send it out. (Sorry i get side tracked easy))

Anyway! I've been playing for a bit now and looking around at all these beautiful cities and places. Yet no matter how hard i try i never seem to beable to make anything near what others can do. Now i know alot of them cheat and get unlimited money then make cool looking places, thats not my goal. My goal is like making a car it can't just look beautiful but it needs to beable to be driven as well. My biggest city was 365,000 people, which soon after plumetted to 2k and -100k$ but it was good while it lasted. After creating the city (even in a grid format and FAILING) i tried using busses this helped but i eventually had problems. I tried a few maps with culdasacs and circles like real cities but i ended up destroying them and making them into grids for commute purposes, then they also failed. I also had a few in mountain regions that i just ended up making into mesa's and ruined all the scenery about it...

Background information:

I can start a city and have it keep income at around 4k a month tell about 100,000 people after that i normally switch to high density and my commute times sky rocket and people leave and i lose my money.

So here are my questions:

1. Is it possible? If so, How?

2. If so how is it done?

3. Why is it then when a sim enters a train at station A and passes by Station B train he will get off at that station and get on ONTHER train just to go down the same line as Station A to get to his job?

Example: +--------+---------|

                  ^            ^

                 A            B

- = Rails

+ = Stations

| = Border

4: I see alot of mods around but havent used any, what ones are worth getting and why?

5: How can i incorporate water and islands into a city and still have the commute work?

6: I had a city that only had 1 avenue and that connected to onther avenue on a seperate city (industrial) i ran that avenue not only length wise but width wise. As a test i ran the avenue width for 6 Tiles all filled with industry. Yet no commute problems? Noone left my city and noone complained about commute times. Infact i noticed a few medium housing near a cliff edge on the ocean which i assume got water from the ocean proper? As i had none at the time?!

Ok i think thats all the questions i have. I've just noticed awesome rail yards and nicely built cities that work... I try to plan my cities and lay them out accordingly but i never seem to beable to follow alll the way through... Like i had a small city to test mass transite (which  is where question 3 came from) and i put a highway in... when i did my commute times increased!? even though i didnt destroy or remove ANY buildings!

Thanks for your time and sorry i get side tracked so easy. (girly girl and all)

PS: If possible AIM me the response ill check on here also but AIMing is easier as we can communicate much faster and get alot more information across in a shorter time. AIM = Deathina

[wouanagaine 86]

Hi LadySieera

Welcome to simtropolis

I can give you some answers, as I just finished my first regional game with quite the same goals as yours ie no money cheating and good looking.

1 : Yes it's possible, I think a lot of us as done it.

2 : Download a lot of bats/lot/mod to get a large variety of good looking building/parks etc... For the financial part, stay slowly, very slowly, and adjust the money for every civic building. A 4000 capacity school don't need to be full budget when only 1000 students come to it, don't put to much civic stuff at the beginning

3 : I don't understand what you mean, my bad english, sorry

4 : NAM for transportation network, Cycledogg colombus for the great landscaping texture it give. I also use the Cycledogg trees. The slope mod because ingame the slope are way to big. and the bridge height mod, and the tunneling and digger lot. ( you can find all of them in the STEX or in the Mod& Download section )

5 : Use ferry

6 : I don't understand your question. What do you mean by running an avenue ?

Hope it will help you

Take care!

[LadySieera 0]

Originally posted by: wouanagaine Hi LadySieera

Welcome to simtropolis

I can give you some answers, as I just finished my first regional game with quite the same goals as yours ie no money cheating and good looking.

1 : Yes it's possible, I think a lot of us as done it.

2 : Download a lot of bats/lot/mod to get a large variety of good looking building/parks etc... For the financial part, stay slowly, very slowly, and adjust the money for every civic building. A 4000 capacity school don't need to be full budget when only 1000 students come to it, don't put to much civic stuff at the beginning

3 : I don't understand what you mean, my bad english, sorry

4 : NAM for transportation network, Cycledogg colombus for the great landscaping texture it give. I also use the Cycledogg trees. The slope mod because ingame the slope are way to big. and the bridge height mod, and the tunneling and digger lot. ( you can find all of them in the STEX or in the Mod& Download section )

5 : Use ferry

6 : I don't understand your question. What do you mean by running an avenue ?

Hope it will help you

Take care!

quote>

Thanks for the answers and your right maybe i have created a beautiful city but ive yet to get over 65k people before i force myself to restart... Commute times are killing me I've started talking to people on AIM (its a messaging service) and they've said to do mixed cities then build out... (as in have all zones in one city resdential commercial industrial) but those dont work for me up to certain points. Mainly because im suppose to spread out before up... If i spread out as fast as i normally do i have 50k and the map is used. Which means if i expand up two problems occur... first Commute times sky rocket as i didnt leave or need mass transite or bigger roads such as avenues or highways the 2nd problem is my schools and hospitals get over crowded even using the biggest ones. Ontop of all that they demand industry which is already on dense and they want more commercial which also is already on high density.... so either it fails due to loss of money for more facilities or it fails because of commute times...

What i meant for number 3 was simple. If you have a sim at Train station A traveling to Train station C he wont go DIRECTLY from A to C but will stop at B get off the train THEN go to C.

Example: A--------B---------C

                

Why?

6: I had a city that only had 1 avenue and that connected to onther avenue on a seperate city (industrial) i ran that avenue not only length wise but width wise. As a test i ran the avenue width for 6 Tiles all filled with industry. Yet no commute problems? Noone left my city and noone complained about commute times. Infact i noticed a few medium housing near a cliff edge on the ocean which i assume got water from the ocean proper? As i had none at the time?!

And on number 6 i had a avenue like this.

^  = Avenue keeps going through 4 more cities

* = Where one city ends and onther begins

                        

                             ^  

                             *

                             |

                             |

                             |

                             |

                             |

                             *

                             |

                             |

                             |

                             |

============*|

                           

So people say why dont you plan out a city? Well first off as much as griding sounds like the best idea im personally against it its great for the game but where is the beauty in it im sure you can make non gridded cities that still work... My question is how do you make commute times stay low? If somone has the time to get on AIM and message me i have a few questions that are probably simple to answer but there are alot of them and i dont want to post them all for fear they would look intimidating and go unanswered.

[wouanagaine 86]

Ok I think I understand this time

3 : How do you see that it goes out of the train ? Do you mean that your station B is not connected to anyother network ? You can see some pedestrians infos using the traffic query tools perhaps because they works at the station.

6: So where do they go ? Click on house with the traffic query tool to see it. For the water, your sims only need them to get higher stage. I'm quite sure that without water there won't be any R$$$, but R$ and R$$ can live without water.

I hope I get the correct point.

[Aleutiandude13 0]

Hello LadySieera, If you want to incorperate islands build a ferry system or make it so you can connect them to bridges. My city is 800,000 and it works fine

[Peorth 18]

It seems you're being plagued by commute time issues. First of all, you should realize that there is a true commute time issue, as well as a false one.

True commute time problems occur when sims find the commute to their workplace too long; I believe the value is around 150 minutes. The most common reason for this excessive traffic congestion.  The solution? Simply do some traffic management schemes. Use avenues, highways, buses, elevated rails, subways, etc. Advance planning will always help. For example, if you make a core of high-density commercial (downtown), be prepared to put high capacity transport networks since a single 4x4 C building can easily employ thousands of sims. Cluster a few of this together and you'll realize roads won't simply cut it. When doing advanced planning, the golden rule is that sims will always take the shortest path to work.  In real life, people take the path with the shortest commute time but the SC4 simulator is overly simplistic and will force sims to use the shortest path regardless of congestion and the subsequent high commute time.

A false commute problem is one wherein a your commute time is low and a route query shows that your sims have near workplaces. Despite this, you're getting "abandoned due to commute time" problems. This problem is often associated with R§§§s. To solve this, you need to control your high-wealth population. Always keep your R§§§ taxes the highest. Do not drop your residential taxes to very low levels as this has the tendency to draw in more sims than you can employ, leading to a mess of dilapidation and/or abandonment later.

You mentioned earlier that you like to make a realistic city. Well, in real life, most downtowns with their looming skyscrapers are built as grids. You shouldn't be averse to them as they do exist in real cities. Another common real-life approach is a sort of semi-grid arterial system in which high capacity networks (e.g. highways) progressively branch off into smaller and lower capacity networks (avenues, roads, streets). Once suggestion I can make is to make your downtown as a grid or semi-grid while you make your suburbs more natural/organic, with diagonal roads, lots of parks, low to mid-density housing etc. This basically conforms with many large cities.

Finally, I would suggest that you get the Network Addon Mod (NAM) from the STEX. Not only will this allow you to expand your transport options; you can also choose the level of pathfinding, and your transport network speed and capacity. This will help you in solving true commute times issues

Welcome to Simtropolis!

[zane900 1]

Sim city takes time. You won't learn everything in one second. This is something that everybody learns who plays sim city. Only after you have been playing sim city for more then 15 years you will get sities with things like skyscrapers.

[LadySieera 0]

Thanks for all your inputs and i have been looking into these very issues quiet throughly. Infact i emailed my local city hall and got a layout of the city from top down of only the roads and it seems alot of utah is grids, not just the city center. I live 45 minutes from the center of downtown (shortest/fastest route) and we have roads that are clearly named 6200 south 5400 south 4800 south... so every 600 units is a street... and it goes east to west as well.. 5600 west 5000 west.... and alot of highways just run through my state and were not made for normal city traffic on them but they built the city around the highways anyway and now we have 4 highways interconnect just south west of downtown... I like to call it my concrete jungle...

I downloaded alot of buildings and plugins. I got that network add-on as well as a few others but my problem IS not getting cities to work or RUN together its to keep them going... I can get to about 150k people before i start building upwards but even from light to medium density makes my places over crowded... It seems i just dont place my trains etc... properly Ive read tutorial after tutorial guide after guide to no avail anymore pointers?

Thanks for all the help! Yours truly,

Sieera

[hamsterTK 93]

Only after you have been playing sim city for more then 15 years you will get sities with things like skyscrapers.quote>

You must really suck then if it took you that longn

[mayormot 4]

Well, here's what I know about #3 (the thing where Sims get off the train and get back on to continue their trips).

The Maxis-supplied transit buildings require ZERO travel time - as soon as the Sim reaches the edge of the train station, he is instantly teleported onto the train (which is assumed to be there at the station, ready to depart). Yet, the train station is 2x3 tiles - a Sim who is already on the train when it pulls in can exit the train at the near side of the station, and instantly re-appear back on the train at the far side of the station, continuing his journey. Since this is faster than traversing the 2-3 tiles of railroad track, it's what the game does.

You'll notice this with the Maxis bus stops sometimes, too. Especially if you place the bus stop on the inside of a corner - Sims will cut the corner through the bus stop, rather than travel through the intersection, because it's a shorter trip, because the bus stops also take zero time to traverse, and function as small teleporters.

If this cut-through behavior annoys you, then we have something in common. I found ways to prevent the station cut-throughs, but it's an advanced topic as it requires some modding. I'll go into it if anyone wants, but it makes pathfinding take longer, and the default behaviour doesn't hurt anything (other than the silly route-query results) so it's OK to leave alone.

[LadySieera 0]

Thanks Mayormot! That makes alot more sense now! And I've just planned out a city center that should work perfect but ive yet to start using it as i found it might not work as great as i thought due to the fact that sims from farther away wouldnt be passing through the city center besides one trains to get off the map to their jobs... Ill post pics later.

[Keiran Halcyon 0]

mayormot - Wait, you say it doesn't hurt anything? Won't that decrease the effective capacity of the station in question? I thought I saw an experiment somewhere that demonstrated that effect....

[mayormot 4]

You're right, KieranHalcyon - those cut-throughs will increase the usage statistics at the train station.

The reason I said it doesn't hurt anything is because the stations have zero travel time. So when they get over capacity, and the game starts using its travel time multipliers to account for the congestion, well, anything times zero is still zero. You'll get whiny news ticker messages about the station being crowded, but as long as the rails themselves are still below capacity, there's no true penalty. And commerce loves being near a high-traffic transit station.

If a person really doesn't want this behavior to happen, there is an easy, no-mod workaround: Where you're going to place a train station, run a siding parallel to the main line and connect it to the main line at both ends. Make sure that the "siding route" is slightly longer than the main line route. Put the station on the siding. As long as the siding is more than 3-4 tiles longer than the main, it'll still be faster for through traffic to stay on the main line, and only local traffic will use the siding.

There are solutions involving modding (which is what I do) but I've noticed that all the modding solutions seem to add a noticeable load on the pathfinding engine. The EXE expects certain paths to be possible, and when they aren't, it has to try every alternative way to do the same thing before it gives up and does what it has to. Mess with commute stuff at your own peril - make something impossible that the EXE thinks should be possible, and you'll throw it into a grind.

So really, letting the Maxis weirdness happen is the "best" approach I've found from a default game play and performance perspective - the station usage makes commerce happy, and the minimum number of tiles are used by transit, leaving more for income-producing development. Next is the siding thing, which makes it easier to see how much "thru" traffic there is and which commuters are using the local station. But this costs you the tiles, and the commercial boost from the crowded station.

As for modding, messing around with the commute system has far-reaching effects, and whatever "hurt" the overcrowded station causes, the mod-arounds "hurt more." Everything being relative, that's "doesn't hurt" to me. Again, I modded mine, but I'm also willing to wait two real-time hours (or more) for the regional commute paths to fully update.