Cities as Countries

[LordTarren 0]

I am wondering how many people attempt to play their cities as countries.  Not an individual one, but a cluster of them in an area surrounded by mountains or rivers that are used to seperate one cluster from another.  I've tried my best to search the STEX for maps that adequately protray this, but am still having difficulty with the concept of naming.  In such an instance, no city squares are ever perfectly seperate from others most of the time, so how do I name one that is split right down the middle and is part of two different "countries"?  Do I call it something like "West soandso and East suchandsuch" as one single name?

Or am I perhaps overanylizing it a tad too much?

[capitol1 1]

every region i make i think of it as PART of a country, because squares and rectangles arent really the best border. And for naming city i just go with something thats original, because you never see a major city in the rl with a direction in it..

[AtkinsSJ_ 7]

I'd call it the Soandso-Suchandsuch Border. But you have a valid point about the squares thing... That's only kind-of real with state borders in the US.

[Battlecat 14]

Well, when I'm creating cities, I tend to just ignore the tile boundaries, and simply draw the boundaries of cities when the terrain and whim directs me.  There's no reason why each city tile has to represent a single city. 

You could look at a country border in the  same way.  Designate a series of map tiles as containing the border between two countries and put in appropriate lots such as fences, border crossings, etc where you want the actual border to be located. 

[Daddy-O 1]

I'd call it the Soandso-Suchandsuch Border. But you have a valid point about the squares thing... That's only kind-of real with state borders in the US.quote>

...and only out West. There are many places where straight lines form borders. Canada has mostly straight borders between it's Provs. Africa and the Middle East have many straight national borders. Oz has nice boxes.

But I do have to agree that that squares are not the ideal for city boundries. The only way around that would be for the game to have had a squared region (as it does now) and then allow municipalities to start and buy up surrounding land, and maybe even smaller municipalities. I don't know how that would play. Sounds too confusing from a user and developer standpoint. In game, squares are the way to go.

A suggestion, when building irregular city borders that overlap the box provided, us a custom config.bmp that would help give this appearance. When naming that outer city consider it a neighborhood. Many cities have named neighborhoods and areas. It's no big deal.

[fate556 5]

i make regions soley as countries and in them the citys i call states

[infoscott 0]

I call the city squares "counties", similar to U.S counties within states or Ireland's counties within its country. Where I grew up in southwest Missouri, most counties had squarish borders and the names seemed at least to me to be completely arbitrary (Newton, Jasper, Osage, Texas, etc.)

In the US the sheriff's department is at the county level, and we have funding for county roads. For very large metropolitan areas, they will often span two or more counties. Example; Dallas-Fort Worth (metroplex pop. 5.9M) has the counties Dallas, Denton, Collin, Tarrant, etc. The average US county has a population of about 37,500.

[paperboy15 4]

I call the city squares neighborhoods or suburbs and the region is the city's entire metropolitan area.

[spa 968]

Saskatchewan anyone?

In my game I treat the whole region as one city. I usually name the downtown tile the same as the region. My current region is Amherstburg and Amherstburg is the name of the centre tile where the skyscrappers are. The rest are unique names that I conside boroughs and not really separate cities. It's one metropolitian area.

[nbk53rz 0]

One of the ways I like to play the game is to take a huge city tile. In the tile I actually build several cities, that way I can link them with freeways and subways and I can actually see the cars going between them.

[hamsterTK 93]

I tend to ignore the boundaries and stuff all together.

All that matters is what i put in my cj, and in my cj i can draw some city limits in photoshop and gosh darn thats the city limits no disputing that. I could say that a city is 500,000 people and in reality its only 130,000 people but unless you see the population number in a query or on a menu interface then the population is 500,000.

[jcp123 0]

I regard the region as a state, and "pretend" there's a regional governor. He has complete authority to appoint a mayor for a city within the region, and give a mandate to that mayor to build the city in a certain way.

Thus, the regional governor (you) oversees broadly how and where every city is placed, while the mayor (also you) does the day to day work. Eventually, the entire region becomes part of the greater metropolitan area.