Will buildings replace themselves over time?

[cuboctahedron 0]

Something I really found annoying in the Sim-City series was that buildings kept on replacing themselves rendering a nice layout neighborhood totally unrecognizable the next time you would visit it.

I hope CU will address that issue by making building look deserted and depreciated should they not meet the criteria (real estate prices, pollution etc) of the neighborhood . The user must than manually destroy and replace the area by zoning new buildings.

I am really looking forward to this game, and these suggestions might be nitpicking to some, but I consider myself a die-hard SC player (since the first version) and would like to put forward any suggestion to make it a perfect game.

[JCS072488 0]

Yes I agree with you on that.

I was trying to make a regular looking neighborhood with regular houses and in a few minutes most houses where changed into mansions and I was kind of mad at that.

[1ajs 49]

aww thats what the make historical tool and the pause bution are for

[screamingman12 30]

Making a building historical doesn't really prevent anything from happening, it just means that the building won't change wealth level. The strategy guide even says that using it will make buildings more prone to abandonment.

[rctshack 182]

yes, less replacement... more physical changed to the current building. If a neighborhood changes, all the building don't completely change with it, the street cleans up, new paint is painted on buildings, props and lawns change, and vice versa, they don't tear down the neighborhood and build everything new... well in rare cases they might.

[crazyyaya 4]

Originally posted by: screamingman12 Making a building historical doesn't really prevent anything from happening, it just means that the building won't change wealth level. The strategy guide even says that using it will make buildings more prone to abandonment.quote>

 

I'm pretty sure that making a building historic prevents it from being replaced. I have seen histroical buildings change wealth level. However they can be easily abanded.

[Joetropian1 1]

If you get confused about where something is, you can always use the sign tool and name the neighborhood so you never get lost. Oh yeah, and I think historical buildings are prone to abandonment because of new RCI demand - rich people may move in around the building, making it undesirable for lower-class Sims, so they'll leave.

[Cob92 360]

The problem is that desirability thresholds in SC4 are too close together, meaning that one little change can alter an entire neighborhood. Building redevelopment happens in real life, but in real life, the construction of a medical clinic will not cause the redevelopment of a middle class subdivision into millionaire acres. But a massive shift in the city's economy could cause a historical neighborhood of Victorian era homes to be demolished to make way for more profitable McMansions. Besides, the replacement issues were worse in SC3K, where the whole city seemed to get rebuilt every year.

[joexcooldude 1]

Couldn't this be resolved by introducing a slider bar that allows the player to choose how frequently buildings are replaced? Therefore, when the bar is lowered to infrequent replacement, a suburban city would form more easily and when the bar is raised to frequent replacement the city would urbanize quickly.

[Spinmaster 75]

I should think a building's value - which could be influenced by age, occupancy, even environmental factors - could be the main factor in a building's "replacement." A single-family cottage is much easier and cheaper to replace than a $50 million skyscraper. Only when demand is sufficiently high such that, demolishing an old building and replacing it is actually more cost-effective than renovating it, should the building be "replaced." This to me would be much closer to how the real world works - except when good ol' "eminent domain" is swinging the wrecking ball, of course. I could see a slider or other control to perhaps weight that some though, if for some reason you actually want them to change more frequently.