Does this game make you painfully aware

[SimBurger 0]

Every time I try to play this game, I get this overhwelming sensation of how insanely NOT creative I am.  Its like someone handed me a bunch of professional paints, and slapped a completely blank canvas in front of me.  I stare at the map for 15 minutes not sure where to begin.  How to start.  It drives me crazy.  Its kind of depressing.  I feel like you almost have to be an arteeste (say it like MonteCristo staff in Paris would) to play this game well.  And I have no art skills at all.  When someone hands me a blank paper, I don't envision the mona lisa pouring out from my pen.  I see a blank piece of paper.  Same sensation when I play this game.

I became doubly aware of this when they released the new cobblestone street / old village buildings.  Wow what amazingly cool things I could do with that - if I knew how to create!  I placed a street and it looked stupid.  So I deleted it.  Then I placed another street, and went a little crazy - adding the curved street feature.  It still looked stupid.  I felt like a 2 year old with a crayon.   LOL .....

Anyone else?  Or are you all amazing draftsmen and designers ....

-SB-

[Larks2242 251]

I am a horrible artist, but something about designing citys i do well at. It's funny because i can't draw the city but i find it very easy to create a city using a game.

[SimBurger 0]

That makes one of us!!!

[830point35 8]

The same thing happens to me. I usually just go with something, even if it looks ridiculous. The city will just develop around it. If it still bugs you after the city has built up a bit, just do a little urban renewal. It makes it really challenging, too later on.

[SimBurger 0]

Yeah, its a joy to have to restructure things without a pause button! Argh.

[Sainty 0]

Nope, not me. I am just awsome by nature.

[Sainty 0]

Holy crap, check this out: here and here.

Damn french doesnt know their place, making their cities fancy and stuff like that. Its making every one else in the world look bad!

[pete1061 0]

Wow, that's a nice city.

I don't really think it's an issue of creativity, it's more an issue of patience.

That city sainty linked to looks like it was very tediously sculpted one building at a time.

I'll bet that person had a lot of practice, likely a beta user, if not an MC employee.

I'm sure in 6 months many of us will be doing some nice things with this game.

It's just going to take time to get to know the tools.

Blank canvas anxiety strikes all of us, Give it time SimBurger, You will amaze yourself.

I feel much the same way when I start a city. I'm too impatient to plan out a work of art.

I just plop down roads and buildings and go with the flow, it's quite random & organic.

Rule of thumb.. don't do too much too quickly.

[Cthuulhu 0]

I feel the pain too. I start off with a blank canvas and get to painting with only air pollution and resources in my sights. I tend to cordon the unqualified off from the more needy people, something I'm totally against irl. As the city grows and my funds get bigger i zone up larger chunks, forgetting to zoom and fill with plazas and parks or to tweek a building here or there for a better look. I get to about a million a million and a half people and decide to toss the city out and take some lessons from what ive build in the past to balance some sense of beauty into the equation. One thing I really like about this game is the lack of pause button, balancing demands without a god button makes the game way more challenging. When I feel good about a city I feel like i did something that a 3 year old retarded orangutan couldn't do.

[Ephemeron 17]

I too can sympathise with what you're saying. I have been playing SimCity 4 on and off for a while (longer than I've had this account) - actually a matter of years. And I still haven't built a region that I'm completely satisfied with. I just start with a central city, (which never looks right when your future CBD is covered with low wealth houses) then I start to develop some cities around it, until I decide that there is something wrong with the region and start over. It sucks that I have rarely delevoped cities past 50,000, or hardly ever gotten mid-rises. And for a while I've been reusing the same city names. I am actually quite a creative person, and I feel that someday I might create the perfect region. Luckily I don't have to pay a monthly fee.

[mentarman 14]

Two things that helped me be more creative and break out of the temptation to just do boring grids all the time are to 1) look at a bunch of real cities on Google maps to get a feel for a real city, and 2) to imagine your city building up historically through time instead of picturing the final product.

So I start out with a map and picture where some colonists landing in the New World would pick to start their little community (rather than thinking immediately about where the industry is going to end up, or rather than just starting near a map edge). Put a road to a map edge, but maybe you don't make it straight. Make it how an old trail might have developed into a major road, just going from point A to point B the best way possible from a traveller's standpoint.

Build up from there thinking sort of short term, because this is how development took place early on. As you deal with hills, coastlines, rivers, railroad tracks (not in CXL yet, but picture them being there) how you react to these features will generate a more creative looking city.

Then picture a time when the city is big enough it has a more professional planning department and a longer view of things. So then you might get some bigger districts that are better and more unifromly planned.

The great thing about this to me is that you end up with a more creative and realistic city, and also you have sort of a little story that goes with your city.

Take a look at NYC from a Google map for a good example of this stuff. Lower Manhattan, the original area of settlement, is very randomly developed, with roads every which way. Go uptown and things get more orderly until you hit the grid that takes over the rest of Manhattan. But there are still (especially further out, in the other boroughs) areas with grids that are turned off the n-s axis, and places where things get more curvy and even suburbany.

Anyway, that's just how I do it, partly because I find it more fun but also because I think the result is more creative.

[Khanon 0]

Some of us do something else entirely, SimBurger...

I start off with a couple main avenues and some block districts to get things going... After that, once I've gotten a good build-up of cash and happy citizens, then I slowly expand in creative ways. Once the more creative sectors are built, I demolish the gridded areas and fill them in with more fluid sections. I still keep some gridded blocks, as you'd be hard pressed to find any major city in the world with no gridding whatsoever. Beyond that, just make sure you have a good cash flow from a core couple of districts and just play with the tools, roads, etc. It's what all of us have done. I've finally gotten my new online city of Nightshade to a level where I can start laying out custom work, like a medieval village (the original town!) on an island in the bay... Then, I'll be working backwards from that point until the rework swallows up the original districts.

[kiwispanker 1]

Originally posted by: SimBurger

Yeah, its a joy to have to restructure things without a pause button! Argh.quote>

It is can be frustrating, but I think of it as adding realism.

Once I had a couple of one way roads going through my "mountainside" to connect some jobs and the airport. Traffic greatly increased and I decided to place a highway in its place. Where the realism comes in is that you must re-route traffic. I built a temporary road nearby and demolished the two one ways.

It's quite rare to see a real city pause itself and have a new block or highway just pop up overnight. At least this doesn't happen where I live.

[El_Presidente 0]

Originally posted by: kiwispanker

Originally posted by: SimBurger

Yeah, its a joy to have to restructure things without a pause button! Argh.quote>

It is can be frustrating, but I think of it as adding realism.

Once I had a couple of one way roads going through my "mountainside" to connect some jobs and the airport. Traffic greatly increased and I decided to place a highway in its place. Where the realism comes in is that you must re-route traffic. I built a temporary road nearby and demolished the two one ways.

It's quite rare to see a real city pause itself and have a new block or highway just pop up overnight. At least this doesn't happen where I live.

quote>

Aye, as frustrating as it is to not be able to pause, i like the realism of having to come up with ways to handle traffic during major building projects, and trying to get it done on time and within your budget.

[Rakeesh 0]

The only thing it does is remind me of is I can't make large smooth circles like Auriga and his New Coast City. No matter how many times I try. :C

[Sainty 0]

Originally posted by: Rakeesh

The only thing it does is remind me of is I can't make large smooth circles like Auriga and his New Coast City. No matter how many times I try. :Cquote>

Use math, geometry is your friend here.

[Sincx 0]

Originally posted by: Rakeesh

The only thing it does is remind me of is I can't make large smooth circles like Auriga and his New Coast City. No matter how many times I try. :Cquote>

Quite easy.....Tip:  ( Edit ...just tried to explain by just words...hope it is SOMEWHAT clear lol )

Lay down the type of road you want to use...lets take the luxurious avenue in this case.

Make a long straight stretch of road.

Now make another long stretch of road in a 90 degree angle, your road will colour blue when it is alligned correctly.

You should now have a big cross.

Next take the zoning tool for ..low density unquallified workers.

Place 1 of those in the centre of the cross in either part ( you have 4 .

Place 5 of those next to each other accros all 4 roads at both sides.

You should now have a cross with 4 roads and on each side of each road 5 zones for low density unquallified workers.

Now take the road tool again for luxurious avenue.

Place your cursor just above the 5th zone and slowly move your cursor away form the road CLOSE next to the zone.

You will see your cursos 'jump' like 1/4 zone away form the zone. Left click and draw a road in 90 degrees back to the avenue in the square. Make sure its coloured blue.

Do the same on the other 7 zones left.

Now delete all the zones you have placed leaving you just with roads. The cross and the little streches you just placed.

Select the road tool again for lux. avenue but this time with the CURVE option.

Start from the small stretch you have placed and draw it to the other small stretch and voila..thats 1/4 circle done.

Repeat another 3 times and you have a perfect circle.

[Sincx 0]

And to the OP.

Yes it can be quite hard to build the City in such a way that you are happy with it and have it look somewhat realistic and cool above all. 

I have visitied many cities to see how other builders fare and I'm dissapointed to see such a lack of creativity. Most Cities are just plain Square and lack any form of imagination or artistic vision.

And I know why because it is damn hard to make a really cool City bith efficient and good looking.

This is mostly cause we LACK the tools for proper tranport...aka MASS Transit.

AND we lack proper tools for TERRAFORMING....

making it extremly overly difficult to have the efficient and the cool part in your City.

But nevertheless there are workarounds and you can still achieve quite alot with the basic tools given to us so far.....and it's still bloody good fun.

So lets hope MC delivers overtime so creating and managing your City will become easier with porper tools.

[JakeMD 107]

thread read.

[Palpatine001 57]

Me, just 6 years of playing SC4 has resulted in the greatest mix of ad-hoc styles of elegance and share uglyness

All I can say is time, Rome wasnt built in a day, neither is your cities

[RorciaK 0]

check out las vegas on google maps satellite view without labels.. the definition on blocking/gridding.. so dont feel bad about ur town, just make it make billions of dollars to make up for it lol

[Jack_Hawksmoor 0]

I am totally the same SimB. I just grid the hell out my cities. I think for me though at the moment the games is all about maximization and understanding the mechanics/rules.

Like pete1061 mentioned, I think creativity will come later when I feel I can take more risks and still be successful. I'm a slow learner though so that may take a while lol

Toothpaste you're right about klienthe3rds city looking cool. Reminds me of Paris

P.S. - Palpatine001, if a classical architecture pack comes out you should totally host a community event where people sign up to build the best version of ancient Rome in 24 hours!! I'm sure Monte Christo could pitch in with some sort of unique ancient roman inspired blueprint for the winner (we have a colessium already right? How about the Pantheon?).

[SimBurger 0]

a perfect circle.quote>

Great Band

[zwr100 2]

SimBurger, I feel your pain.

My first try at a decent sized city had Food Industry, so as I filled every bit of farm land it was naturally curved.  I tried to use curvy roads that complimented the farms and terrain and my road layout was really interesting and reasonably eye appealing and maybe even creative.  However, the lack of an organized plan led me to problematic sprawling residential areas who were unhappy with every service.

Since then, I've embraced expert mode and the grid.  I've built a few 100% grid cities over 500k to really get a handle on how big of a residential area I can build for one set of services and what roads are needed to handle them.  The grid really simplifies things so you can clearly see what's working and what's not.  As you run out of space you'll have no choice but to bend and twist roads along mountains or water.  You can make the grid less boring by rounding some corners, and making the edges follow the terrain.  If you really want to make it a non-grid you can delete a few blocks and remake them so that they 'fit' but aren't totally the same (delete four 3x2s and make three 4x2s).  In other words...make grids, then try to make them look a little better later

In architecture you need a solid structure, before you can 'make it pretty.'  Once you've got the structure down you can add the aesthetic bends and twists.

TLDR: Embrace the grid =D