CJ's : are they 'modeled' cities, or 'played' cities?

[jigsaw 227]

ok, after all these years, and reading billions of CJ's, i want to know once and for all how many of you actually play the game when you build these cities, and how many of just simply plop and model your cities?

i assume that  there is 2 types of CJ's here, and i will now explain what i am talking about

model: absolutely everything is plopped and controlled. the game isnt actually played as such, and the city is built to look a certain way and stay a certain way. ie: when a member with a paris-themed W2W city just plops the entire city to control how it looks. these cities for example, are built not to grow, but are just pre-designed from the start, and are more CJ friendly/ designed to be used more like a display city for photos and pics.

and if your city is built in such a way, how do you control that city? do you pause the game so the game mechanics dont abandon the buildings? is traffic and data stats out of control?

played: this type of city is more the player 'reacting' to demands, controlling problems, and is growing the city from a single point. it will not be perfect, it may have lots of traffic problems, and it is high maintenance and very demanding of your time to keep improving it.

now, if my assumptions are right, there are lots of cities/CJ's here built just to please the eye, and be photogenic.

however, if a lot of these paris, w2w themed cities are played cities, do you strictly control plugins, game content, and bulldoze a lot to get the buildings you want?

i would love to heare feedback from a lot of CJ authors here, and i would love to know if there CJ's are either one or the other, and/or a mixture of both.

[GMT 389]

I do model.

I'm not that much into actually playing this game. I never was to be honest.

For me, it's much more fun to sculpt the city so it looks the way I want it in a reasonable amount of time rather than acutally following the games physics and grow the city the way the game was intended.

To me - and at this point I have to thank jeronij who's CJ Sculpting Columbia River gave me the kickstart into this way of playing the game - SC4 has become more of a virtual model railroad to create a scenary that, thanks to endless amounts of awesome mods and custom content, is by far off what the game was like when it was released.

[Nardo69 51]

My CJ cities are the played type.

I allways loved it if everything worked out fine, everything was working and in constant changed. Sometimes I get mad because all the wrong buildings are growing sometimes the game surprises me with a selecttion of BATs I never would have thought of.

I usually plop only to get a certain part of the map in a way that I cannot achieve by letting things grow, i,e, diagonal W2W etc

[MandelSoft 2,769]

My cities are a compromise between modeled and played type. You may call it the semi-modeled type. I plop a lot, but I'm also zoning a lot. I keep track of probems in my city and at the same time, I want to make it look good. My city Guilliano is a good example of this method (see my CJ).

[jigsaw 227]

GMT: how realistic have these modelled cities been so far? does the city services suffer badly for the aesthetics of looking picture perfect?

[Benedict 3,119]

I play my cities. I also try to keep them all at the same 'age' as well, even if I haven't been doing much building in a particular one. No cheats, no plops, no plug ins, no mods.

[psander5 195]

These days I plop all of my commercial, but grow industry and residential. I guess I use a mix of both. You can suppress the game mechanics by using cheats. I tend to use the radical ordinance mod to make sure I have demand for all the buildings I plop, and to make sure I can grow vast tracts of farms and industry. NAM is great for traffic if you use the high capacity settings. That way you can get on with sculpting your dream city that works in a visual sense, and also in a game sense. You don't have to worry too much about traffic problems unless you like to make skyscraper jungles.

I don't think there's any shame in cheats and plopping, especially if you're aiming for CJ-able cities. They're meant, in my opinion, to be the author's vision of a perfect (or perhaps even dystopian) city, and it's the eyecandy that matters there. Many CJ's use the cities to tell stories too. In which case game mechanics barely mean a thing at all!

There are also great CJ's that do follow game mechanics exactly. It's just a question of personal preference.

Your main concern seems to be whether the services suffer in modelled cities... The answer would be yes, but with the help of cheats and game mechanics mods it's possible to get a sculpted city that has perfectly functioning services, even though it's a heavy manipulation of the true game.

[TekindusT 3,809]

In my case, I do both. Cities are played, but I also build my own airports, seaports, campuses, etc; and all this has to be plopped and cheated because it doesn't exist by default. I also plop lots of different BATs, including skyscrapers, but the city; where sims live and where the sims work, is all played, functional and profitable.

My opinion is that you HAVE to have a minimum of plopped content and to make some cheating to have a CJ which goes a little further of what we're used to see in our own games; although there are many examples of "natural growth" CJ's which are nice and appealing following the regular game mechanics.

[crazychickensc12 84]

My cities are also a compromise, in all honesty my plugins need to be redone because its so messed up but for the most part everything works, my downtowns are mostly plop but im gonna with half and half next time I think and incorporate some more maxis midrise buildings. My suburbs are almost all grown. I would love for the city to look the way I want and have everything grown but its just to difficult sometimes.

[kj3400 178]

Right now my cities are being played, but when my main city areas get to the hundreds of thousands, then I'll start plopping...

[tostartpressanykey 2]

well ive been using sum custom content and i plop my "downtown" area but after that the citys on its own. Sure i guess the average CJer gets a 50/50 mix in their city.

[Chptrk 86]

For me, I guess it depends on what I'm trying to do. Some cities, like ones that are just airports, are all plopped. Others are more played with some plops, just to fine tune things. And in some other cases, I may find that I don't have the money or income to do what I want, so I may just start plopping things with the help of some extra money till I get things how I want them to look.

Oh yea, Moved to City Building Concepts.

[penguin007 27]

I have a mixture although I do strive to make my cities look aesthetically good I plop some buildings but large parts are zoned and this creates more natural scenes in my opinion. Also I use several mods allowing me to have a bit more control on what I want to do.

Will

[jigsaw 227]

i understand everyone is saying they use a mixture of both, but what i am trying to get at, is it common to do nothing but plop, and not play,grow or use the city after it has been plopped for the sake of a picture for your CJ? some of them look fantastic in CJ pictures, but at the same time unplayable because of no roads, or lack of services.

[un1 41]

I model all of my CJ cities in my CJ Doodles. After I put them on an update, I scrap them completely and start over with another city, so I don't have to worry about abandoning buildings and etc. All of the buildings are plopped, in all three of the pictures, nothing grown because I simply couldn't stand what would happen if I actually "played" the game with those cities (because since they are simply Doodles, they are not functional)

[SounderBruce 173]

Combination of both...I control most aspects of my cities, but I set aside "Little Maxistowns" that grow.

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

Yeah, my CBD's are always made of plopped skyscrapers, but I'm mainly a 'builder'. You can check out my CJ, Manningham for some photos (you can see its built, not modelled).

[jigsaw 227]

so what about transport plans? does anyone here build freeways etc just to please the eye and make their city look good, or do they build their transports based on the game's demand for them?

[Yonk 2]

I do a little of both with my cities, but mostly functional, as I don't have much in the way of custom content, especially ploppables. I don't have a CJ yet, but I'm planning on making one when the region I'm working on gets to a certain point. This pretty much reflects how I do things, as I play the game firstly to have fun, and secondly to look good. All my cities function well, although I usually spend the first bit in each city just expanding the borders and population, without regard to how good it looks, and only when I've reached the point I wanted, do I take pains to make sure everything looks nice. But some things are just for the CJ pictures, especially flora. I do NOT have the patience to plop custom flora all over the entirety of a large city tile; it takes too long and I get bored with it. So I only plop the custom stuff where I'm taking pictures, and if there's a suburb off to the side that you wouldn't see in my CJ, well... too bad for them, they're stuck with just the Maxis trees. ^^"

I have put in some things just for the sake of aesthetics. I have a region-wide highway connecting all the large cities, although because most of them just have farms in between the urban areas, they get very little use. I mostly did it because it looks nice in region view and there happens to be one there in real life that people use to commute from city-to-city. Sims don't commute across multiple large tiles, however, so it's pointless from a game-mechanic standpoint. Same thing goes for airports, as I put them often in city tiles that are far removed from the major metropolitan areas, and thus bring no benefit to the city they are supposed to be serving, but again, that just makes it look better in region view. I also put roads where they look good, often forgetting about the eternal commuters bug, and putting roads in corners. My cities would probably do better without that, but I don't really bother unless it becomes a major problem.

- Yonk

[ilikehotdogsalot 308]

I model my cities.

[beebs 129]

I generally model my cities to look the way I want, but they also will operate effectively, if the simulation is run. Sometimes I'll make a few tweaks based on how the traffic is flowing, but I like to think my networks are designed pretty well.

[diamonddog_74 32]

I play my cities. Sometimes they grow the wrong way, I get frustrated, and I obliterate them. But it definitely helps to get ideas from CJs. I've also been paying a lot of attention to conditions in the real world, to try and see how they'd work in-game. Pretty much the only things I plop are monuments, parks, utilities, churches, rail stations, rewards and civics.

I've plopped some commercial lots only when I see a particularly high demand for something, and I feel I know where those buildings would work best. So far it's worked for me and it doesn't make my cities just look picture perfect. For example, look at my post in the Show us your Downtown/CBD thread.

To answer your transportation question, I don't like super highways (freeways), and I don't use them, or seldom do. I know it's not realistic in the automobile age, but I really just hate them. There just isn't any way to make freeways look nice to me. Though, in the current region I'm playing, I'm thinking of actually laying down some freeways because I've downloaded the RHW, and I think it may actually work better for me.

In the real world, I've never owned a car. I have a valid driver's license and a yearly ZipCar membership, but I only use it very seldom. I've always relied on public transportation, so in-game, my cities tend to be very mass-transit heavy.

I try to use lots of heavy passenger rail, and El/GLR fed by buses. I just like to see lots of public transportation moving about in my cities so there's high pedestrian traffic. So far I have seen very little orange or red areas of congestion on my roads. I also try to keep freight trucks out of residential and commercial zones by placing freight rail stations close to industrial zones. I use NAM Simulator Z High.

[ixnayonthetimmay 16]

I've played several regions, but have thus far only worked on one CJ on this site. My style is mixed, but more heavily weighted to the "played" style you mentioned.

I feel that playing the game within the bounds of the simulator is a more engaging experience and why I originally liked SimCity games many moons ago. While a well-modded SC4 has many good tools for controlling individual sandbox-like features, it's ultimately the pressing of play that allows me to capture a better sense of developmental realism in the CJ. But since the simulator still has it's shortcomings, the lightly-used but effective scheme of "model" playing helps greatly!

[LastTrueChamp 196]

I like to naturally grow my suburbs to up my income levels to a point where I could easily support a modeled urban landscape and downtown. Check out The Republic of Miltopia CJ to see what I'm talking about.

[jigsaw 227]

i always play the game. i plop the ploppables ie: civics, etc, but my ind, res, and com is grown on game mechanics. i may model small areas the size of a suburb, but the gaps are filled by growing not plopping. my transit networks are built half on planning, but then i modify to demand.

how far do you go in modelling a city? do you make sure that there is very little or if any repeated buildings? and do you model it down to the finite detail, including the houses in the suburbs?

[emgmod 16]

My main CJ is a small town. I have gone away from the town and showed a partially planned city.

When I'm going to start building my larger cities in the future, I will plan a little, and randomly grow the minor street network.

Some repeated buildings are okay for me, as long as it looks good. As for the suburbs, I only use a Maxis Blocker. The suburbs can easily sort themselves out.

[Yonk 2]

I believe building repetition is ugly, especially with commercial buildings, but other than that I try to keep it realistic, to the point of pushing perfection, sometimes. For instance, there are some commercial buildings that have parking lots, and sometimes they don't face the road. I'll plop additional parking or demolish that building to make sure the parking lots are accessable. I also try my best to keep wealth levels seperate, especially in residential, and under NO circumstances do I allow a giant mansion to grow in the middle of a cookie-cutter suburban subdivision, because it looks silly and very unrealistic. For the rich, I'll zone some nice, open areas near forests or water or on hills, and put down spread-out 3x3 zones until the area is all mansions. I like the results better than the usual mish-mosh of wealth levels you get if the sims do whatever they want. Industrial gets the least micro-management, but I plop a lot of parking lots and storage areas (industrial looks best with lots of empty space), and try and group together the large factories and keep them. Almost all the custom content I plop is eye-candy and doesn't affect the game.

This all takes a lot of historical designation (I have to think at least 50% of my residential, 75% of my commercial and industrial and 99% of my downtown, are HD-ed) which probably takes the majority of my time, but that's what it's for. I'm not picky with what the sims put up, like choosing which tower they build, but I won't allow them to build a tower amid a bunch of low-rises. My downtowns are all HD-ed, until the demand goes up, and then I'll select a small building in a good spot, and un-designate it, and the sims will satisfy the demand by building a larger tower to replace it.

I don't consider this the same as someone who plops everything, because the sims still decide WHAT to build, I only decide WHEN and WHERE (in accordance to natural demand), which is fairly realistic as things go in the real world. Mansions don't grow in suburbs, huge towers don't get built without city approval, and parking lots must be accessable without driving through other buildings.

- Yonk

[Deathcat001 8]

No plops... Only use the build certain era (Chicago, New York etc.) and make historical when i like the layout.

I dont do CJing because it takes to much time with photoshop (Which i dont have anyway).

[GMT 389]

Originally posted by: jigsaw
GMT: how realistic have these modelled cities been so far? does the city services suffer badly for the aesthetics of looking picture perfect?

quote>

well, the way SC4 works, it's hard to achieve visual and technical perfection alike.

So in my case, functionality really falls behind for aesthetics sake. Ok, thanks to several mods affecting capabilities and coverage of public services (radius extension mods, radical ordinances mods just to name 2) you can reduce the needs-factor drastically ingame so you can focus more on the visual side of the game, but you can never eliminate it entirely (and tbh I dont want it eliminated either).

And some of these mods also add realism or correct ingame features to show a more realistic behaviour, I think the most common name here is the NAM and it's traffic simulators.

After reading some other comments I think I have to correct myself and say that my style is also a mix of model and played, but with the annotation that the played part of it serves the sole purpose of helping me sculpting the city I see when I look at the map I'm working on until what my physical eye catches in second place matches what my mental eye sees in first place (or to be less poetic: "playing" the game helps me develop the city I have in mind when I look at the map).

 

[jigsaw 227]

yonk just hit on another fantastic question:

for the sake of CJ beauty, how much eye candy is added? is the city just full of useless (but good looking) lots? is it just too easy to place LM's and not have jobs in the area for the sake of a good pic?