My first city... how bad is it?

[MayorTim 16]

Its pretty bad....

JK!!!

It is not bad at all. VERY good for a first city. Your zoning plan is a bit random and you used the auto zone tool, but those are all minor things. The pollution isn't too bad, though you may want to try moving your industry to nearby cities eventually. To raise demand and wealth even more, you may want to add parks and plazas to some of those empty spaces, just make sure you don't break your budget.

Continue upgrading your residential zones to medium density within that highway, and you could easily turn that into a downtown core. Keep adding commercial near residential whenever you get demand, and add industry far enough away from everything else to keep pollution to a minimum.

Your traffic looks fine, but you may want to upgrade a few of your roads to avenues before you get high density, that way you don't have to demolish as many highrises later. The highway is fine, but when you build in adjacent city tiles add highways branching off of the existing one into them. Thing of it as a tire with your current highway being the hub and spokes running off into other areas of development.

Most of my concern right now is that landfill. Where it is currently located it will bring down wealth and hinder development, and cause you some real problems in the future. I suggest cutting off road access to your existing landfill and start another one further from town.

Hope I helped!

EDIT: I just noticed that you got rush hour. Some things you should really consider downloading are the NAM (Network Addon Modd), The Light Rail Modd, Cycledogs Terrain Modd, and plenty of nice BATs. BATS can be found on the BAT section of the STEX (go figure! ) Cycle Dogs Terrain modd is on another site, do a forum search for Lewis and Clark and you should find his city journal with pictures of it and a link to download. On the homepage, scroll down to where it shows recent news. There should be an article taking about the newest version of the NAM and it will give a link to download. I can't remember where to get the light rail modd, but try searching the forums for topics related to it.

Sorry for so much info to read, but most of this stuff will REALLY help you.

P.S. Welcome to Simtropolis!

[nealos101 20]

Page 2!!! lol!

Man, I wish I had those much comments, anyhow...

 

5/10 for creativity

8/10 for planning

6/10 for presentation

extra special 8.9/10 for giving us the data views...

 

Overall I rate your CJ 7.1/10. That's good - but it needs some more work! Look at other CJ's and see for yourself...

 

Nealos101.

[MayorTim 16]

Date: 6/22/2005 7:56:39 PM
Author: nealos101

Page 2!!! lol!

Man, I wish I had those much comments, anyhow...

5/10 for creativity

8/10 for planning

6/10 for presentation

extra special 8.9/10 for giving us the data views...

Overall I rate your CJ 7.1/10. That's good - but it needs some more work! Look at other CJ's and see for yourself...

Nealos101.

quote>

Honestly I don't think you should have even rated this journal. He is new and this is his first city, so of course presentation and creativity are going to be lacking. ITS HIS FIRST CITY! He isn't used to the grade of excellence most journalers achieve, and he hasn't prefected his building style. He hasn't mastered the game, and he isn't ready to start building very realistic cities. Everyone in the community has started similarly, and a rating so early just doen't help him.

Instead of a rating, give him help and support.

[JayStimson 212]

Since you seem to have some of the basics down ... I'll dispense with the rudimentary and offer some strategic thoughts that might help. Keep in mind, it takes a lot of experimenting to finally decide on what your personal perferences are for style and technique.
So here goes ...
1. read tutorials (there are many very good ones out there)
2. install deluxe ( it's simpler than installing RH separately and you avoid some headaches I've seen others endure)
3. install the NAM (it makes up for much of the transportation shortcomings in the game out of the box)
4. review other peoples CJ's (you'll get lots of great ideas

and lastly ... my personal preferences:

Strive for realism. Anyone can build on flat terrain and somehow it never really looks realistic (my opinion). Use a real map and try to build within the lay of the land. This is how real cities developed. Decide early on where your major transportaion lines will go (highways, avenues, rail lines and stations, seaports, and ferries). Use the push pin markers and decide where industrial development, commercial office buildings, and residential areas will go. Download and use custom content to add variety and realism as well as to provide tools for modifying terrain. Pick and choose what works for you. Your own personal style will develop over time.

Here's a suggested list of custom content to download and try:

NAM
Pegasus' Stuff (search the STEX using Pegasus as a keyword)
BRF Slope Mode
SimGoober's Stuff
NDEX stuff
Smoncrie's Hole Digging Lots ( I find these are a must)

It's a start. Eventually you may want to get the Lot Editor, BAT, and Plugin Manager so you can create you own custom stuff. Good luck.

[timotheus4 39]

It looks rather like a city that I'd make. That's not a compliment, by the way. The data views, however give it supreme originality. I think a person could get quite a following in a CJ by simply posting data views, with nothing of the city itself.

[P-Dolo 0]

Hey I really appreciate all the info, but some of you are trying to give graduate school/doctorate knowledge to a pre-schooler. I'm just learning about all the basics of this, and you guys are throwing terms at me like NAMs and BATs and mods and comellas... Like I said, I really would like to learn all this stuff but I'm trying to take it one thing at a time. I was lookig at all the cool buildings like Best Buy and Taco Bell LOL, and I couldn't even figure out how to get those in the game. I'm not saying I don't want to learn all this stuff, but I want to take it one thing at a time. I don't even know what a BAT is, nor how to put backflips in or whatever.

[TheDancinZerg 0]

wait wait wait you spent 285 years on one map! YIKES! I spent almost 125 years and have 150,000 pepole. You need good neighbors to grow. export trash import power! Will save you a lot of space!

Edit: yay 10 posts!

[jacqulina 162]

take your time its more fun

[Superchan 23]

yeah, thats good advice, also the problem with imports is if you need more power you have to increase the amount you buy, and there is a limit depending on the avaible power in the neighbor city which means you would have to go to that city and build more power plants there, and you could accidentaly demolish the powerline connections, also be aware of the NAM (Network Addon Tool) and its possiblity to crash your game.

 

EDIT: on that first picture you can use that open space to build a highway that provides access right to the center of your city, and might solve some traffic isssues.

[dzi 0]

All advices are good here. I'd suggest to decrease heavy pollution and move commercial to the center of the map. And generally IMO the city is not bad... You're quite dense developed, so your small population is the map size - not your play

But I have something that nobody mentioned yet. Decrease fundings in schools and hospitals when you place them! I can see you're like just perfectly health and educated, note it's not always needed at this level. You have to choose if you want to have well educated sims living in wealth areas (and that means low pollution for example) and working in offices or if you want to have low educated workers living in low wealth areas and working in industries. So as for my, the map you have here is for low wealth, so it doesn't need that much education for example. And it doesn't mean you can decrease the funds because it leads to strike. Check a school with the query tool and set it just a bit higher than it should be (number of students vs. number of places). So you can just lower the number and density of schools and hospitals, at least at start. After some time you'll have to build more of them anyway so I'm now talkig about your over 250 years problem than about how does your city look now

When using as few civic buildings as possible you can easily handle a small city with windplants to reduce pollution for example.

 

Oh, and search the forums for YIMBY/NIMBY Try to figure out how the game works.

 

[MayorTim 16]

Well, if you don't know what a BAT is, you may find The Simtropolis Glossary of Terms helpful. It is located in the new member information forum, which has several useful threads on getting started and whatnot.

The Omnibus (almost very bottom of the left side panel of this site) also has several somewhat useful, but OLD tutorials.

BTW: If you want to install a BAT, just download it, unzip it, and place the files it contains into your My Documents/Sim City 4/Plugins folder.

[sweetmsdj 0]

I don't think it's bad, especially since you didn't use any mods (How about cheats?). I can't build a city without exploiting the fact that if you go over 4 billion in some kind of capacity, it turns out negative. If you ever get RH, I suggest finding a good reader and modding for yourself. While there is a bit of a learning curve to it, it can become convenient if all you want is a slight capacity mod or one that nobody else is interested in.

[Orwell1984 0]

Hey, it's cool to see that you've been able to get RH up and running. It seems like you've been getting a lot of nonspecific suggestions recently. I might help if you add some updated maps and cityviews (if you can get them uploaded of course).

You said that your biggest problem is traffic, right. I'm glad you started using one-way roads, but I think the main problem is that your city is too well connected, that is every road is connected to every other road so that no matter what networks you use, sim commuters will have ways of avoiding your new one-ways or whatever.

 

The RH commute query tool is very powerful for planning traffic networks. Use it on some of your most congested intersections to figure out exactly where and how your sims are getting to work. Once you have some idea about this, build some high capacity network (like an avenue, for example) and start channeling sims into it by eliminating the alternate routes they use. It's perfectly fine to have dead-end streets and roads that don't really go much of anywhere.

 

You could also consider adding some diagonal roads or more curvy roads that run directly from sims' homes to their workplaces. Sometimes this is enough to break up a very grid-y system and provide some interest.

 

Also, don't worry too much about the folks in here; most mean well, but some can be vague, easily annoyed, or just plain rude. I'm not trying to be as patronizing as I'm sure I sound. I really like your city, I think it offers a breath of fresh air from all of the cities and CJs that rely almost entirely on MODifications, B(uilding)A(rchitect)T(ool) creations, and all of the other fancy distractions. If you are ever really stumped by something, feel free to send me a Simptropolis email; I may not have a lot of posts racked up, but I've been here a long time and been with SimCity since the beginning.