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

[GMT 389]

I think that's up to everyone's own.

of course it's nice to plop a 50 floor office tower that actually offers jobs a 50 floor office tower might offer in real life, but if it doesn't ... well then it doens't.

In my current project, I use a lot of ploppable office highrises in the downtown area becase they simply match the theme I layed out for the city and look good aswell.

That many of them offer jobs aswell is a great addition but not a must-have imho. (with an inhabitants:jobs ratio of 1:3 my region offers way to many jobs anyways).

[diamonddog_74 32]

Originally posted by: Yonk

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.quote>

I've recently been exercising my mayoral right to "HD" (Historic Designate) as Yonk said. When I find that a growable building in my downtown looks right, I want to keep it. I like my cities to have a variety of textures and architectural styles, but I must admit that I am partial to the Chicago and New York look. I think this is mostly because I grew up in the New York City area, and I currently live in Chicago.

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.

quote>

Precisely, I agree.

I "checkerboard" my residential zones (low- and mid-density), so it makes the sims grow single family homes interspersed with slightly larger apartment buildings, which to me seems to simulate the look and feel of my real-world hometown. When I feel there are too many of one type of building along a street, I bulldoze them to make the Sims build more variety. I also use Jeronij's Street Side Mod, which kinda simulates Chicago style residential streets. A lot of people don't realize how green this city is. I just love our green-canopied streets here.

Closer to my downtowns, it's more mid- to high-density. I don't like suburbs, but in my current region, I'm allowing some small ones.

[Yonk 2]

Originally posted by: jigsaw
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?

quote>

 

I don't add very many eye-candy buildings. The only lots I add that are eye-candy tend to be fillers for empty areas, like parking lots, storage, rural things, various parks, and lots and lots of flora. The one thing that Maxis totally failed on is flora. They have ONE type of tree, and the original terrain has little variety, only barely suggesting changes in elevation. So I use the gorgeous Olympic Terrain Mod, and I've downloaded more prop plops than I care to remember; dozens of trees, bushes, flowers, grasses, rocks, paths, etc. to pretty my empty areas. Because I've seen enough real cities to know that there is often a ton of empty space, especially outside the urban core, and not all of it is expensive, cultivated parks. Suburbs on the edges of forests and streams, unbuildable mountains, farms pushing up against wilderness, and sometimes just open fields that a developer has yet to buy. A great deal of my eye-candy props are just for making those empty spaces more than just... well... empty space!

- Yonk

[diamonddog_74 32]

Originally posted by: jigsaw
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?
quote>

I use the "Functional Landmarks" mod because I don't like having useless buildings. I do have a few buildings I've downloaded that don't have functional equivalents, but I use them sparingly. I really like taking care of my demands, and if one of those functional landmarks will satisfy it (and look good doing it), then I'll use it.

Otherwise, I guess I have some parks and monuments that may be considered eye-candy.

In a nutshell, I like working cities. It's more fun to me.

[mightygoose 92]

i control the locations of the major towns and cities, but beyond that i try to control as little as possible in game, by ensuring you have a well selected plugin set before starting the region, obviously is something grows too much i make take it out or re mod it, but i let the game build the beauty into my cities.

[guthea 0]

It depends on the city you're building.

For instance, I'm making a region for a future City Journal.

Capital city is a model, I try to control every details and I spend much times to create plazas and to think about buildings dispositions. I made a canal district, with mbear mods. Of course, commercial buildings, surrounded by canals will be abandonned due to commute time if I click on "play"

However, I'm making at the same time an industrial, dirty and ugly city and I don't care about aestheticism. Aim here is to give some heavy industries to my region.

Therefore, I think capital and historic cities are "models" because game mechanic is for modern cities, with contemporary problematics, such as pollution, road, train, airport, commercial districts disposition... but, if I want to create a medieval town inside a city, I can't use some of basic game content, as road for instance. Of course, there are some mods, but the disposition of a medieval city isn't the same as a modern city and if I reproduce the urbanistic shema of an european medieval town, some of my buildings will be abandonned.

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

Hey guthea, welcome to Simtropolis!

You have some wonderful input, but this thread has been dead for 2 months. Please don't bump old topics (did you find this on the 2nd page?)

Anyway, enjoy your time on Simtropolis!

-ROFLyoshi

[mightygoose 92]

Originally posted by: ROFLyoshi

Hey guthea, welcome to Simtropolis!

You have some wonderful input, but this thread has been dead for 2 months. Please don't bump old topics (did you find this on the 2nd page?)

Anyway, enjoy your time on Simtropolis!

-ROFLyoshi

quote>

Actually i think this is one of the cases where threadomancy is justified.

guthea makes both relevant comments and there is no other thread for this debate. in these circumstances threadomancy is encouraged. he was not bumping the thread but rather contributing.

This is a debate i find most interesting, so please continue.

[jigsaw 227]

well i will add to my original post to keep this puppy alive:

i have developed a theory that Modellers are both artists, and/or controlling types, to make a single visual statement. they have a plan, they have a goal, with minimal flexibility or reaction for the unexpected.

whereas,

growers are more reactive, problem solving types who are more like managing the city instead of absolute control. not making a visual statement per se, but deal with what ever happens good or bad.

neither are better or worse than the other, just different.

your thoughts?

[thingfishs 417]

I've always grown my own... (wait for the punchline) why should simcity be any different?

Seriously the one time I gave myself an unlimited budget and started "modeling" I lost interest very quickly and actually didn't play the game at all for several months, it just sucked all the fun out of it for me. Something I've noticed repeatedly in life that I am attracted to is controlled chaos, whether as an improvising musician, my life in general, or as a player of SC4. Without the random/chaotic nature of the game, and without the limitations that balancing a budget imposes: there is no game for me.

After a closer read of the title of the thread I thought it worth mentioning that I don't have a CJ/MD... 

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

Originally posted by: mightygoose

Originally posted by: ROFLyoshi

Hey guthea, welcome to Simtropolis!

You have some wonderful input, but this thread has been dead for 2 months. Please don't bump old topics (did you find this on the 2nd page?)

Anyway, enjoy your time on Simtropolis!

-ROFLyoshi

quote>

Actually i think this is one of the cases where threadomancy is justified.

guthea makes both relevant comments and there is no other thread for this debate. in these circumstances threadomancy is encouraged. he was not bumping the thread but rather contributing.

This is a debate i find most interesting, so please continue.

quote>

Well if there is some interest still alive, than it's perfectly acceptable.

[boon1234 9]

The way I play has changed drastically. When I first started playing the game, I was not aware of plugins, or simtropolis etc. So I 'played' cities naturally, with the never ending intetion of getting a huge city filled with skyscrapers. I rarely built a region, rather just building out one city tile and then moving on. Then after I discovered plugins, I cheated alot with mods etc. I built massive regions of skyscraper forests for some reason and it interested me. Then slowly, my skills improved and I got more and more plugins and built realisitc cities. I stopped caring about functioning cities and started building model cities - plopped buildings, etc. It eventually got to the point where every lot was plopped and nothing was grown.

Recently, I discovered CGS Natural Growth MD at sc4devotion and moved out all my plugins and returned to basics. I've been playing cities naturally as they would grow in real life - based on CGS's ideas on gameplay. It's the most interesting experience I've had with simcity 4 so far.

[Zeddic 3]

My opinion on the subject is that SC4 just doesn't give you a chance to actually grow a realistic and good-looking city. The main problem is the grid. Everything is really at right angles and with the side of a square being as much as 16 meters (or yards? Close enough anyway), there isn't a true possibility of micromanagement. Then there are other details; international airports have shrunk to a percent of the size they really are, people refuse to commute a mile, an average single-family house holds 15 people, 'cities' are restricted to squares of about 4 x 4 km and lack true interaction with each other... the game just isn't that great at actually simulating the life of a real city. Mods and plugins help but they can only go so far.

I have to agree on the basic idea of two types but I also believe they can overlap. A 'builder' shows their personal creation while a 'grower' shows how they play the game. Many good CJs include both even tho they are fundamentally quite different things.

[Yonk 2]

Zeddic, there are many mods avaliable that have been put out to fix these problems. You can build your own airports with the various packs, as large as you like, and you can put them in another city, but still reap the benefits by plopping an "airport tram". I haven't tried the latest version of the NAM, but I've heard there are several options that will improve how far a sim can commute. I'm fairly sure there is even a mod to reduce the population in each household. As for the set size of the city, that will never be changed, and not just because it's hard coded in the exe, but rather because simulating larger cities is impossible. It would take a supercomputer to run anything as large as a theoretical realistic-sized one-tile city, all at once. Inter-city interaction as detailed as intra-city interaction would basically be the same thing.

I believe that a CJ always has some element of a vision from the creator, even if it's just subconscious, because no city will completely build itself. Whether one is a plopper or grower just depends on how much the creator relies on the sims, themselves, to dictate how things are done. I think of SimCity as a really complicated ant farm, except the sims are much MUCH stupider than ants, and really can't take care of themselves without constant assistance. What someone who plops everything does is set out with a plan exactly were everything is going to be. They dig all the little tunnels and chambers in the substrate themselves, dictate where the queen will live and where the workers will work, and doesn't even bother with real ants. Real ant will upset their grand vision, so they put in little fake plastic ants to suggest that their ant farm is alive and moving. But really, it's not alive, it just looks nice; it's a static model. Growers work with real ants, and try to push them toward a nice place, but don't get upset if something unexpected happens. Perhaps sometimes, they will dig a tunnel for them, and it will be a great tunnel, a wide, straight, perfect one, but the ants won't use it, because for some reason, they prefer a weird, curvy one off to the side that takes twice as long. But that's okay, because it's unexpected, and the grower finds that interesting and entertaining. For them, the joy is in the journey, not the destination.

Then there are the people who just love to watch the little ants run around and die by unleashing terrible disasters on them. But that's another thing altogether...

- Yonk

[riverwoodsjc 1]

My cities are all about 97% zoned. extremely little is plopped.  All my cities are real.  No RCI mods or cheats either.

[woodb3kmaster 342]

My building style is mixed but heavily weighted toward the functional end of the spectrum. I grow most of the territory of my cities, although I do work with a very vague large-scale plan that is only about regional transportation networks and where development will end. I prefer to grow the small-scale details (like subdivision layouts) naturalistically. The main plopped parts of my cities that are larger than individual civic buildings are sea/airports, parks, malls and part of the CBD; only rarely will I plop more mundane things like strip malls and restaurant rows.

[stocktons_pimp 10]

i'm not playing the game right now...

but the region i'm working on will be played until i develop all the areas i want... then i'll save a spare copy of the region and then let the mass plopping begin.

::

[Slashback 136]

My cities are played,

but i spend lot of time, planning my cities, and sometimes i wait 'till the "right buildings grow where i want them to. Only parks, landmarks, utility and roads are plopped in my cities. I think, that cities gets so "dead" when you plop all buildings (at least what i've seen in CJ's), so it's also therefore.

[TekindusT 3,809]

Originally posted by: ImVhOzzi

My cities are played,

but i spend lot of time, planning my cities, and sometimes i wait 'till the "right buildings grow where i want them to. Only parks, landmarks, utility and roads are plopped in my cities. I think, that cities gets so "dead" when you plop all buildings (at least what i've seen in CJ's), so it's also therefore.quote>

I'm currently playing an all-plopped city (my first one) and I don't think it is "dead", it only lacks automata. I think playing this way is pretty boring, in my experience. My aim is only have a great control of the city details, but I confess that I've got bored in some parts of the construction.

Usually, when playing "the classic way" I wait for the right building to grow but if it doesn't grow in a reasonable period of time; I plop it.