Show us your - Game Experiments

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

Show us your - Game Experiments

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Please use this thread to show us your Game Experiments, especially if it is something short and you only have a few pictures to show.  

If you have a larger or ongoing experiement or project then please feel welcome to start a new thread. 
 

[kj3400 178]

Is that SC3K?

Corection: Is that THE Sim CIty?

Could be!

That is what you get if you put Simcity Experiment in to Google images - XD, I thought it was a nice pic to open the thread!  Go retro!  - abcvs

[Craig-Abcvs 1,595]

Getting the Sims to use rail freight.

I have found the best way to make sure that the sims use rail, instead of road for freight is to not make road neighbour connections.  I just take the road to the edge of the tile but do not make the connection.

This village does not have a road connection to the next tile and even the railway connection has been cut off...  

The farms are forced to use rail to export their produce...  the freight trains have to exit the tile across the viaduct and the other side of the tile...

[XenesisMayor 0]

I'm trying to build a heavily populated, somewhat realistic city on a large map. I was wondering what system (grid layout, suburban style, etc.) would be best suited for High Density Development.

[Canadian Trooper 0]

i used a 16x16 layout with avenues. basically it has an outside boundary that consisted of 1 side of the avenue, with 14 inner spaces for me to do whatever i wanted with it. along the outer edg of the map i had a road replacing the one side of the avenue. so far has worked really well.

[padwan 0]

Think of the city as a tree trunk that gets less and less dense as it grows out in rings.

The centre of your city (and thus the first area to be developed) should be gridded. I use 1 avenue for every 2-3 blocks. The blocks themselves can vary in size - my current city has 6x6 at the very centre of town. This opens the space up for the REALLY big commercial office towers later on. A bit further out, it changes to 4x8 to allow for smaller high rises and hi-density residential developments. After a couple rings of that, I'd keep the avenues in larger grids and zone low density residential on the inside, with winding or non-connecting variations on the grid pattern with commercial spaces or medium density residential along the avenues.

[hawkpride147 1]

grid it...the suburban style will lead to way way way too much congestion. look at the massive downtown/dense areas in the US...all are gridded for this reason...

[Darth Apple 54]

try this:

put one way roads about 6 tiles apart from each other and put one subway or station or one bus stop in each square - then try to get eather exactly that or close to that in every block and be creative with the avenues , rails , and highways - let me show you what im talking about(this is the base grid)

heres the image of a city (early in its development)that used the base road system:

[Jawzz 0]

I use to do the manhattan layout:

Avenues from north to west and streets to east to west...

Highway/Free way as the middle avenue and oneway roads between the avenues...

I hope this will help - it really works good! Ps put subway and bus station along the avenues.

[Milliano 0]

Originally posted by: XenesisMayor

I'm trying to build a heavily populated, somewhat realistic city on a large map. I was wondering what system (grid layout, suburban style, etc.) would be best suited for High Density Development.

quote>

Only a small fraction of almost all large, real life cities is high density development.

If you want to emulate a typical street grid, try making 4x9 blocks. These can be 18x18, subdivided to 9x9, to 4x9, or even 4x4. This would be reminiscent of Chicago. A Manhattan street grid would be like... 4x14 (three blocks makes a square)

On Simtropolis, most cities I see have an extreme amount of high density, in really strange locations, next to single family homes. This isn't realistic. It's also very common to use square shaped city blocks, which isn't realistic either, except maybe for CBDs.

[JamesDwho 13]

I think the best ways to increase the population of a city is first to zone most of the city area with High Density Residential, Commercial, Industrial. Second decrease the taxes down to about 2.0 for $, 2.5 for $$ and 3.0+ for $$$. Having lower taxes will increase the number of Sims that come to your city and usually its mostly $ but as long as you keep the taxes low your Sims will continue to come into the city and save money, once a sim has enough money they can move up a class to $$ then after a while they become Rich!! All of the $ High Density building will be destroyed and wealthier building will have more of a status in the city. As long as you keep supply demand to your people the population will continue to grow.

[IsaacTham 0]

In my whole life of playing SimCity, I have never gotten a city with a defined CBD with all skyscrapers in it. My development is all spread out. SO how?

[metarvo 710]

For some reason, I got tired of upgrading a street to a road just to make a neighbor connection, so I came up with this:

That diagonal street connection really works. This RES city is connected to an IND city. I put a My Sim in that house where the green arrow starts, and he takes the street connection to work! Other than the border, everything else in this pic is straight out of the game.

[Kittani 1]

Don;t have any pics, but I've been experimenting heavily with demand radii and transportation radii across regions.

The Setup.

SC4D, NAM W/ Best Pathfinding installed.

6 Medium cities, side to side.

1 Regional Highway across all 6 cities, right in the middle.

Residential zone w/ power at one end and a single on-ramp from an avenue. 20x20 size

med industrial zone at other end with power, same size, same on-ramp. The two areas are mirrored, basically.

The results....

Demand traveled easily across all six tiles, but even with a highway end to end, the sims would not commute. The result was alot of jobless and abandoned residential, and alot of empty jobs. SOME sims did make the commute, about 10

% if I figure right. The rest squatted and then left the city. Moving the industrial city closer by one city each time did not alleviate the issue till only one was between them, then i got about 20% to make the drive. Placing them adjacent got me 100% to commute, but everyone, even the ones on the edges with what would be in real life going between two exits, still had long commute times.

Something I noticed with NAM, placing the industry adjacent to the residential, within walking distance, and a direct path down the street, only netted me a medium commute. I removed Nam and it went to short on the same path. Apparently you cannot trust what it says with NAM for commute time since it should have said short.

Conclusion, Spreading out a region is awesome for demand, it affects every city that has a transport connection to it, but the sims will only barely work in adjacent cities (think the distance of a medium map as the crow flies in your region). This means you can build a region with far spread out cities, connected by highways, just make sure your sims have jobs within one medium cities distance to them. To get the maximum sprawl space for a contiguous city, place three green in a row and then two above and below centered for a roughly circular shaped city. Don;t try to make a city far away and expect people to commute across the region, regardless of how good the networks are between them.

Hope this experiment helps you figure out why sims in your residentials won;t work in dirty industry on the other side of your downtown. We do it in real life, but i'd hate to think about how much CPU speed would be used up with the sims trying to find a route to a job in every city in your region. They should have based it on blind edges. Essentially a sim will commute from a city (gaining long time automatically) and then finds a like path into any other city that has an open job. (IE he leaves on a highway, he arrives on a hoghway if they are connected) and the time calculation is based on the combined commute of the start and end cities and ignores the regional traffic)

Thoughts?

EDIT: fixed a few things, also, further experimentation in an agricultural group of cities made commute time hellish to the point where sims would not work in an adjacent city at all.. even if there was no traffic and a direct avenue between them.  I'm removing NAM and going back to vanilla.  Commute time is less important than having your sims willing to travel ten tiles across a city line at all.  IMHO region play, while a wonderful concept in city building, was very poorly implemented in SC4 (Being the first attempt at this you really can't fault them, they can't think of every scenario) 

I'll be working on a new group of city clusters with compartmentalized demand between them.  Each region zone will have a specific setup to generate specific on a regional basis, but ignore neigbor demand outside thier own zone.

[Slashback 136]

I've been experimenting with some ditched along my RHW-2's. Should i continue making them?

- Feedback is very appriciated!

[nathanthemayor 1,261]

Cool tutorials everyone!

[Josh6 873]

ImVhOzzi: I think those ditches are a really good idea. It adds realism. The only hard thing is to get them to look like theyre dirt ditches.

[Josh6 873]

As far as the CBD discussion above, this has worked for me.

Before

Before I allowed any growth, I planned out my CBD with avenues. I noticed most Skyscrapers are 4x4 or smaller so that plan fit.

I also have a pretty complex subway line. If you can get around the expensiveness of subway, this works.

After

[avrelivs 24]

@Imvhozzi - you could try using 'brown rye grass' and 'marsh' at the base and then make a layer of green rye grass surrounding it...or you could use ploppable farm fields to make the base texture look like mud....one question though how did you get the dutch farm to grow? ive downloaded it but ive never seen it grow.

[Slashback 136]

@Josh6: Thank you for the comment and yes, it's hard to make them look dirty, I must try some different setups with the RRP.

@avrelivs: Thank you for the comment; I already use the brown and green rye grass, and I think I'll try adding some marsh. If you want the Dutch farms to grow, you'll need to lot them in Lot Editor. I've just edited some excisting Maxis farm lots, and my farms grow quite often.

Happy new year!

[nathanthemayor 1,261]

My first-ever elevated avenue/parkway: