A beginner needs your help

[haibei 0]

Hi folks,

I have just started playing SIM4. I have also downloaded some customized stuff to make my cities prettier and get some real-world landmarks.  However, I'm puzzled on a variety of issues and I'm also curious about how you folks construct such beautiful and functional cities. I appreciate if you can shed some light on the following questions.

1. It seems to me that a city (not region) can be pretty midsize or small. Do you guys simultaneously work on different cities of a region and connect them at the very beginning?

2. I usually start by paving roads and developing on residential and an industrial zone (where the power is). But it seems that if I put the power far away, even when connected with the residential area, the "no-power" sign still shows up. It goes away when I put the power plant closer to the residential area. But everyone says you should put industrial area far away from the residential area. What should I do?

3. I found that roads can go 45 degrees but avenues don't. Also, I don't know how to connect a ground highway with an elevated highway?

4. I have seen pictures from CJs of relatively small commercial district at the beginning of a game, but with high rise Skycrappers. How do you get those skycrappers when you have a relatively small population and not much commercial items? It seems that I did a lot of things, like making my city green and getting a bigger population, but skycrappers still don't show up after my city has become pretty messy. I'm curious about how those neat skycrapper areas are made (many of them are obviously stuff already in the game, with no extra fancy downloads)

5. How do you get those "circles" at the end of an residential avenue, like those you often see in suburb sprawls?

6. How did you guys creat lakes or canals? I have downloaded water, but the edge doesn't seem realistic and it doesn't look as good as some of your cities.

Thanks a lot

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

So, to answer a few of your questions, here goes:

1. I started with my main city in the center and played until I got stuck at a certain point and development stopped. Then I worked on surrounding cities. There's nothing wrong with connecting them all at the beginning and working on them simultaneously (I think this is probably a desirable tactic). If I did it over again, I'd probably start a number of cities at the same time.

2. Use power lines to connect the power plant to the residential area. Power only goes with roads for a short distance, and you need to use power lines (available in the power plants menu, or by pressing "L" on your keyboard) so you'll have to try that.

3. You should just be able to drag a diagonal avenue... Ground-elevated highways are easy to connect. Simply drag a length of highway into the first pair of tiles into the one you want to connect to. It will automatically make the transition. Also, if you want a more gradual slope, the custom interchanges with the NAM have a longer, smoother elevated-ground highway transition piece.

4. Lots of people download custom buildings and simply plop skyscrapers. I try my best not to (unless there's a custom building I ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE!). It takes some time for skyscrapers to develop, and I didn't start seeing my first ones until I had a few cities growing in the region and my main city's population was well over 45,000 sims.

5. I drag the roads into a circle manually, and it automatically turns into a roundabout/cul-de-sac. There are other downloads available here and at the LEX that do a similar job with different looks.

6. There are canal packs available here, at the LEX, and at SimPeg's website. All of them are fantastic looking. I highly recommend downloading and playing with the myriad canal packs available everywhere, they are all great.

I hope I was able to help you out on some of your problems! Good luck!