Semi-technical gameplay questions

[MidwestSimGeek 0]

Just a couple of quick questions here that have been nagging at me...

Re. pathfinding -- I don't have the severe commuting issues some users have experienced (i.e. to the point where all their residential buildings go abandoned), but I'm still having a couple of annoyances.

Sims seem to take weird shortcuts through residential side streets (no matter how congested they already are)... rather than staying on the nice, wide avenues (with frontage roads and grade-separated major intersections!) I spent so many simoleons building for them.

They also seem quite reluctant to use highways (even where it provides the most direct path to the job), make left turns, or "backtrack" at all.  (In other words, they won't go even five or six itty-bitty grid tiles west from home to jump on an Avenue that leads to a Highway which eventually takes them directly east to their job.  Instead, they'll fiddle around on miserable little two-laners for an hour and a half, simply because it allows them to go directly eastward.)  Finally, I'm still seeing some reluctance to travel large distances (though not as bad as before I installed the NAM.)

I do have the most recent release of the NAM with the pathfinding plugins, and was wondering which ones would be most appropriate to solve my problems.  (Also, would changing to a different pathfinding plugin screw up gameplay or the growth of my region?)

The config question is (mercifully) briefer -- I recently found a nifty little region on the STEX which I wanted to download.  It's 32x32 km, but the config map is really weird, involving lots of small and medium cities.  I prefer larger tiles, as it's easier for me to maintain the stylistic consistency of my cities when there are fewer borders to interrupt things.  Would the region still function if I replaced its config bitmap with an all-blue one before rendering the region?

[tungston 19]

Last question first, no changing the colors before rendering will only change the city sizes.

The sims are going to take the shortest, and fastest route, it may take some time for the game to calculate that. Regardless which pathfinding you use, they will still fiddle around, as you call it.

As long as you don't degress the pathfinding, i.e. go from perfect to better, there won't be any damage to the city.

[Cob92 360]

I have seen this problem constantly recurring in SC4, where Sims will do virtually anything to avoid driving on a highway unless it is the only route to their job. They are obsessed with driving on backroads, rather than using the main roads and highways systems which I have probably spent well over a million Simoleans on by now.

My Solution: Don't give anything to those Sims. Build one road down the middle of the city and put a toll booth in the middle. Build all residences on one side and build all industry on the other. Put commercial in the middle. As far as I know, this is the only layout truly effective for those SIMpletons.