agriculture/region help

[maximus1284 0]

I started building up a new region with 1 small farm community, 1 medium farm community, and 1 medium industrial community around a large city tile that will eventually be the main city for this region. In the 3 cities I've built I'm also building residential and commercial as needed, in fact in the medium farming city I've got the farmers market and the state fair. My 2 medium cities are about 5,000 people and the small one is about 2,000. My 2 medium cities are fairly well educated as well. is this a good strategy if I want to build a large city? should I avoid commercial or medium/high industrial and education in these "feeder" cities? I've actually found it to work well to slowly educate my population so that I get high wealth houses and commercial zones - it brings in more tax money.

My situation is that 2 of these 3 cities are competely zoned, while the 3rd is near it. My RCI indicates that Ag and R$ demand is still really high despite 2 of these cities being all farm for industry, and they are all connected. I expect my R$ to be high, especially since I'm building up my small/medium tiles to support a large city. but why is my Ag demand so high? For the most part, my people are fairly well educated, and I already have tons of Ag. Should I have kept the populations smaller (or dumber)? Should I connect Freight tracks and stations?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Connect to your big tile and start building.  Ignore the I-Ag demand from this point.  It will eventually go away.

If the big city provides enough C and I-HT (controlled with taxes to keep I-D and I-M out), you should be able to begin with separate communities that can coalesce.  Try connecting them with monorail.  You have a situation here where monorail can be quite useful, but don't forget that there is no parking unless you make it, so a bus system is de rigeur.

[infoscott 0]

You'll find that your rural areas make excellent bedroom communities until your population stabilizes in the large city. In some ways they will be more stable than relying on row houses and large apartment towers in the large city.

I would suggest actually building out your small and medium farm communities with more R-$ apartments and more dirty industry. Agribusiness manufacturing works better when it's close to the raw materials, this being the produce and livestock. If you have a good rail system there, then you can put up some dirty industry close to the rails and/or road junctions. If you keep the density medium and stagger around the zones you won't have any meaningful air pollution.

In these "company town" villages, you'll probably have one or maybe two larger manufacturers, like canneries or meat packing plants, and then a few or several 1x2 tile small manufacturers, like foundries and automobile part remanufacturers (you would have to rename something like "Farley's Foundry"). If you keep the medium R lots small, namely 1x2 or even 1x1, you'll get appropriate structures like walk-ups and row houses, and meaningful population densities that boost your regional population considerably.

Also, you wouldn't necessarily have to run out something like a monorail across the entire region. The bedroom communities could be linked by commuter rail or bus, and have a transit plaza on the edge of your map where the commuters switch to monorail or EL that takes them through the large city.

[maximus1284 0]

interesting...thanks for the input guys

I believe I've read elsewhere that Sims actually will commute to a different city for a job, is this true? and would it be effective to have lots of medium industry around a large city where I could focus more on R, C, and I-HT?

how should I handle education in my feeder towns? in my first post I mention how 2 of these feeder towns are Ag, and the other is I-M, all 3 with C as demand needs. I've tried to accomodate all my civs needs, and I've got quite a few wealthy Rs and Cs now. In fact, I'd say educating my sims helped me to begin making a positive income. Should I be keeping these feeder towns without education, health, police, and water? If I do educate them, will these sims commute to my large city for jobs? or could it work the opposite way?

[Bustle 0]

I think you should leave it in. High education creates high desirablity, and high desirablility creates moredemand for jobs, and that can be useful for your big city.

[maximus1284 0]

this is kind of a follow up to the last post I made

here's an interesting test I did...I haven't begun building my large city yet, but in my Ag feeder town that has poor education, good health & water, and a so-so safety rating, I decided to put a freight rail in just to see if it would be used...well, nobody used it. this city had a lot of neighborhood connections. so I demolished all neighbohood connections with the exception of maybe 1-2 that were in residential areas. an interesting thing happened...my freight rail began to be used as expected, but a huge amount of my population became jobless. now despite awful education, good health & water, so-so safety, this town has actually had a good amount of mid and high wealth Rs and Cs.

this doesn't answer all my questions from my most recent post, but it would appear to show that Sims DO commute to jobs. and although this town has poor education, I also believe that gradually introducing education into an Ag town isn't bad as long as you can afford it...but maybe there is a reason I might want to keep those sims dumb? I dunno. maybe someone can explain this better, and maybe check out some of my questions from my previous post. thanks!

[infoscott 0]

Keep education in your Ag towns, but be REALLY stingy about it. In any one village you can have an elementary school or a high school, but not both. You're going to set the busing radius to zero, and what few apartment buildings you have will be within the school's radius. You can also have one community college and one library (think "bookmobile" for the rest of the inhabitants). That's about all the education you can afford. You'll see a slow creeping rise in your EQ, enough to allow you access to C-$$ and I-M jobs.

Your Ag town can have one or two clinics and one medical center, again in the area of population concentration.

Ag towns generally don't need water in areas that are all low density. You won't have enough business to support much R-$$$. By my experiments you can support the following without water: R-$/$$, Cs-$/$$, Co-$$, I-Ag, I-D, and I-M; at least at the lower stages.

The feeder towns won't need any police, and at most one small fire station. The big town should handle all the garbage.

It terms of profit and loss, your farm taxes will pay for its share of the electric and some of the roads, the residential taxes for farm workers will pay for the rest of civic services on a small budget. If you're really frugal on the other expenses that boost desirability, you can turn a tidy profit on R-$$, Cs, Co, and I-D/M.

The Ag towns are actually a great exercises in squeezing your budget to produce the most beauty and desirability from your designs. It's also a good test of milking civic jobs. Your medical center and city college will be your larger job providers, many of them high wealth. You can use either as the anchor structure for an Ag city, wereas in larger urban areas they are just though of as another civic service.

[dgrid 0]

Max,

It sounds like you're building a city surrounded by one-tile villages/towns on each side.

That's fine, but I'd suggest making those surrounding towns more "suburbs", with education and health srv's, concentrating on lots of residential. Those residents will have a quick commute into your main city. Slowly build housing on the farms, like real life urban sprawl.

Outside of those 'burbs', I'd suggest building your farming communities, and skip the health and education. People don't want to work on farms once they get some education, so keep em in the dark if you want your farms to survive. Plus, those poor coutry folk will eventually commute into the main city for the low-end jobs. Which reminds me, lay down rail to connect all of these as direct as possible.

And don't worry about police, as long as there's enough jobs, crime will be low. Police are just a waste of money, as far as I'm concerned. Anarchy is cheap!

Good luck!

[maximus1284 0]

thanks guys, before coming to this forum I never experimented much with regions, so this setting up a region well is kind of new to me.

maybe I'll try to change up some of my feeder towns...currently the plan is to have 1 large city surrounded by some small/medium towns, but maybe I'll try to expand out a bit more. for the tiny squares, I can't see much use of them except for little farm towns though. for farm towns, what might be an optimal population size? I guess whatever I can support before sims complain about jobs?

dgrid, are you referring to passenger rail? and for your suburbs, do you suggest mixing up I-M and C$$$, and maybe just having a moderate education? or do I want to go for I-HT?

for my large city, I assume I'll want to go for I-HT

[dgrid 0]

Yes, I meant rail for passengers, but you can use the lines for freight as well. You should plan now for rail as mass transit, so you won't have to bulldoze in the future.

I'd suggest having most of your commercial in the center city, with some C interspersed in the residential 'burbs, like at busy intersections. I like to build a few manufacturing bldgs near rail on edge of towns as well. I usually build small HT "business parks" wherever they fit in, near a major traffic artery.

Roughly, this is my model for a region:

 A/R   A/R  A/R  A/R A/R

 A/R    R     R    R     A/R

 A/R    R     C    I      A/R

 A/R    R     R    R     A/R

 A/R   A/R  A/R  A/R A/R

(A/R = Ag/Res mix)

this, of course, would vary based on my goals.  I try to build organic, reflecting the region geography.

The I city would also address garbage needs for region. 

Just try to make your commercial center in the middle of your regional traffic flow. C likes traffic.

My 2 cents.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

WRT job losses after demolising road connections.  You can increase your income by putting them back with toll booths.  On the other hand you could put in a passenger rail station or more, and put some at the other end with bus lines.

[maximus1284 0]

what does WRT mean?

interesting model dgrid...what do you do about health, education, safety, and jobs in the R tiles - provide best possible? do your R-tile residents commute out of the city/use the rail to find jobs or do you mix up some C$/C$$ and dirty-I/I-M for local jobs?

I'm still curious about what population sizes to aim for my tiny/medium ag towns. right now I've got 2,000 for a tiny and 5,000 for a medium...just messing around a bit today, I got a medium Ag town up to like 27,000...but then a lot of the farms went vacant, lol

I think I've been making my cities too self-relient, even my Ag cities...I don't know if thats a bad thing, but I'll try changing it up a bit and do a little bit more specialization in some tiles

[dgrid 0]

health, education, safety, and jobs in the R tiles-

Slowly build health facilities. If it'll be a decent sized city, go straight for the hospitals when you can afford em. The small clinics not as cost-efffective.

Build elem schools to cover the area, followed by high schools, then colleges last. Libraries are cheap and effective.

I dont bother with police, but add a fire station in every town. Some people wait till a fire breaks out, but i just add em near the beginning.

If you're aiming for a suburb, let em work in connected cities. The self-reliant city model is fine, even helps with commute times, but doesn't help a commercial-only downtown city, which will need to inport large amounts of workers.

Sounds like good population growth.

The farms get abandoned cause your sims are getting too educated for farmwork. If you want to preserve em, click "historic" checkbox. Otherwise, it's just evolution.

have fun!

[habibi_Joe 5]

HOLY CRAP! I took the advice in this thread for a region I just recently completed. Instead of creating small residential cities exclusively for R$$$ I built one medium residental city with R$ and surrounded it with polluting industry. The end result is higher population growth faster, greater specialization between interconnected cities in my region, and fewer problems with industrial growth. It was always dificult before to get industry to grow at all; even I-H! Now I can control what kinds of industry spring up in tertiary cities based upon the connections made to the larger residential city. One industrial city has dirty industry because it's connected to a part of the residential metropolis with no schools. Another industrial city is solely manufacturing because its connected to the area with grade schools. Next I'll create a part of town with high schools and create a high-tech industrial center. Will an office metropolis follow the I-H, or what?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Try it and find out.  There is no real set way to go, and the whole thing is so open-ended that anything may happen.  Remember, there is no such thing as winning.  There is only satisfaction or frustration.  Cities can go on forever.  I have one that is over 500 Sim-years old.

[infoscott 0]

High tech starts to just spring up where it finds a nurturing environment. You can get even a little high tech with sub 80 education level, but you won't usually see it in high pollution, low property value areas. Thus designing a high tech industrial park becomes something of a tricky issue. It's usually a lot easier to to build just an industrial park in an optimal location, suffer with suboptimal industries there over a period of time, and then let evolution do its business.

You might think about designating your target neighborhood with industrial zones, but scatter them about sparsely and fill the gaps with trees and parks. This will raise desirability and reduce pollution; a high tech incubator. When you feel your education is high enough, i-HT demand strong, transportation is good, and pollution is not an issue, you can start digging up the greenery and replace with more industrial zones.

Don't be afraid to put these zones close to or even adjacent to residential areas. If you grow it slowly enough you won't kill off residential with pollution. I've done it on small islands, and I've seen it done for real in Orange County California (city of Irvine - the Spectrum industrial park and the Irvine Business Complex, both R-$$/$$$ and I-HT).