Urbansim vs Ruralism

[jigsaw 227]

in the last 5 years, i have seen the CJ's go through several evolutionary stages. First we played the default game content, then we developed custom content.

then there was an explosion of mega skyscrapers, and mega-metropolis was everywhere.

but the last 2years, i have noticed a more predominently 'ruralist'  CJ's appearing. this of couse be due to the fact that now more and more custom content now caters for nature, trees, rivers etc than 3yrs ago and all this nature content adds to the very limited choices on offer in the game. BSC farms are now available, and every month we get spoilt with more stuff to use.

however, in 2010 i have noticed that CJ's pretty much now fall into 2 camps: Ruralism or Urbanism. and as of late, i feel that BSC is leaning more Ruralist in their newer content than how they once were.

Now, i am not drawing a line in the sand, and suggesting that you must be one or the other, but i'm curious to see what you all think of the 2 distinct types of city building that has emerged in the present era.

do you agree with my analysis of Ruralism and Urbanism?

now i do dabble in both worlds, but i must admit that i enjoy building complex urban environments a lot more than Rural settings. i find plopping weeds and rocks quite dull, but i do love some of the amazing CJ's other people create. However my tastes are more complex, busy and big cities.

so, are you are Sim'city' player, or a Sim'rural' player these days?

[thingfishs 416]

hmmm, something like 60% SC & 60% SU... I mean I really love both a lot, and I feel both styles need each other to feel right. In other words I am a SimRegion player. Certainly rural areas are lacking in the wonderful complexity that urban areas provide, but without them my cities stick out like a sore thumb. And being a rural boy myself (of upbringing, if not of current circumstances), and genuine nature lover, I do enjoy making those areas come alive. However I am a "grower" so I am always coming back to the heart of the simulator, which is in the cities. Yet....

[kingdiz_55 12]

I'd have to agree with thingfishs on "both styles need each other to feel right" Most CJs now have both in them as well. The thing about both of them is how make them blend in with each other. I find that the most interesting thing here. So... I'd probably be caught in the middle of the two.

[MandelSoft 2,769]

The West of Imaginia (my SC4 Region) is quite urban, while the east has vast rural landscapes. So I try both styles, but I just can't stop building motorways:

It's hard to be a roadgeek

Best,

Maarten

[TekindusT 3,809]

While I enjoy more urban CJ's the most, I read and enjoy rural ones, too. But it's true that in RL, a large city can't exist without its rural surroundings, and as was said above, seeing a large metropolis without some rural areas seems quite unrealistic.

I think it's just a matter of personal tastes, I don't make rural areas because I'm terrible at it and I barely have no addons installed for it.

[ThePilotGuy 10]

I do like urban cities better. I just like the hussle and bussle of the larger cities, but I like the ones that are realistic and I don't like the ones that are just skyscrapers. I do liketo look at rural areas,but I only like to build them when they are on the outskirts of a large city. I just don't like taking the time to build this log than that water tile... (same for airports but airports are fun!)

Like everyone was saying, Every large city on Earth has small rural towns and farms scattered around it, And if you want your urban CJ to be popular, that's what you need to do.

[Timmystwin 201]

Depends, i love a good PEGpond and such but i also like an urban jungle that isnt just plopped and therefore in some areas you can see the roads through, not just skyscrapers

[riverwoodsjc 1]

I'm mainly an urbanist. Most of my attempts at making a rural area just end up ugly and take too long to make in the first place. Not to mention I have no real idea of how to use the RHW.

[emgmod 16]

Seamlessly integrating RHW in an urban area is a feat by itself.

I play in both styles, switching between the two when i get bored of one. I've only published the rural one as a CJ so far.

[Yonk 2]

Actually, I always thought that simcity was best at simulating the suburbs, despite the advisor always telling me that I need to zone higher density. I have the most fun zoning almost all low density across the entirety of each tile, and those are always really successful. Some of the larger cities may have an urban downtown, but it will be very, VERY small, and maybe only a few skyscrapers. I just love the way rural areas, especially farms, look in a city, and even more in region view. It fascinates me to try and find that perfect realism to have the empty land turns to farms, and the farms give way to sparse housing, then to scattered subdivisions, then to the sprawling, seemingly-endless suburbs, to the midrises and office districts, and finally to the towering downtown core. The way the roads become increasingly more gridded and closer together, how population density and complexity rises exponentially, how the folks in the fields are okay even without water, but the snobs in the city want every civic service in triplicate, how you can power an entire large tile covered with farms with three windmills, but the city needs so much power you run out of room to place plants, how farms follow every countour of the terrain, suburbs only suggest it, and the downtown bulldozes every hill and culverts every creek to coat the area with flat concrete.

If you want to make it a realistic scale, a medium-city-tile sized downtown would need to be surrounded by dozens of tiles of suburbs and hundreds of tiles of farms and empty space. It's difficult sometimes to spend so much time just plopping endless sprawls of farms, but it's okay if you throw together some square roads covered with gigantic square farms, because that's usually how it looks, anyway. Just don't forget the occasional rock or tree, because most farmers won't bother tugging those away to recoup a few more square feet of fields; it's not like how it is in the city where every square inch is taxable property and must be utilized. Sometimes, when I'm clicking away, I'll miss the edge of the menu and accidentally bulldoze a random square in the middle of a farm field, and I don't want to redo the whole farm. So I put a tree there, or a boulder, because it makes it look better.

SimCity has never been one style or another for me. I'm always trying to find the recipe to blend it all together into the right gradient from rural to urban, and everything in between, because the ever-elusive region view is what I'm most after. I'll often get so into the whole thing and the little details that I'll forget about everything else in the middle: the region view will be great, there will be this one suburban area that looks just right, and the rest of the city is just sort of there to fill in the space. It's frustrating and difficult to make each and every part of each and every tile special and distinctive and interesting, but I do try.

Even so, there's something nice about going to a close zoom and pushing the pointer to the top of the screen or one side and watching the endless farms scroll themselves by, and only an occasional road or house to interrupt the beautiful monotony. I spent so much time in Simcity 3000 carefully cultivating each farm area, and historically designating every square of farmland so they wouldn't turn to dirty industry. I guess this made me really REALLY appreciate how easy it is to build farms in SC4; in fact... it was one of the things (along with region-play) that made me say "I have to get this game, now!", when I heard about it.

So I love making it all come together, but I love rural things so much I'd gladly never build a skyscraper and just stick with my mostly-flat cities that drive my advisors nuts with the inefficiency and my sims nuts with the cookie-cutter houses and dirty jobs, just to keep the farms there. Suburbs are my favorite, so the answer is really "neither", even if I'd pick rural over urban, forced to make the choice.

- Yonk

[zurrabear 20]

I definitely relish both urban and rural about equally, but I feel like creating realistic rural settings is much harder to do. The palette is open-ended, you don't simply fill in every square with a lot of some kind; and the tools aren't geometric. You can easily have multiple landscape objects plopped in a single square and completely out of the grid lines.

[heitomat 156]

I agree with zurrabear. I try to build as realistic as possible, and I find the rural settings far more difficult to create. Thanks to zurrabear for describing my thoughts exactly.

I believe that a lot of people have had a desire to create scenic and realistic rural settings from the beginning, but the tools just wasn't there. As mentioned by jigsaw, more and more rural tools, lots and ploppables have been released by many great creators, opening a new dimension to the game. Thus, I think, many players finally got the opportunity to fulfil their dreams of not only creating great cities, but also more realistic rural settings and regions.

[Nardo69 51]

Even though I can regard myself as one of the rural pioneers in CJing I don't like that "OR" in "SimCITY OR SimRURAL".

They both belong together as stated before and those who know my (almost 5 year old) CJ know that even though I mostly do rural there are quite some urban / industrial areas, too.

The reason I once started concentrating on rural was lacking CPU perfomance but with the sheer amount of props you need for a nice urban area the lesser CPU calculating time is egalized with loading time for all the props. That's at least my experience on my old machine.

If you ask me what's better I'd say one's worth is twelve, there other's worth's a dozen. Just do what you want to do, what you like to do and what you are enjoying to do, because whatever you are going to do you'll find most of the needed content somewhere by now.

That's the essence of SC4, and that's why it is still alive and kicking after 7 years which is an eternity in electronics and computer gaming!

BTW: 

AFAIK the theme of the never released second EP (after Rushhour) should've been rural. And the BSC seems to tend a bit to the rural side as THEY did delivered a kind of farming EP ...

[tankmank 853]

Well i prefer urban areas and with the asian style i build it is easier to build Urban areas than rural areas due to the lack of rural asian props and other bits but there even isn't that much Urban Asian content but i've had a crack at both, also with there being millions of Urban pictures of Chinese cites and only a few good Rural pictures it is hard to create a realistic rural area as i physically don't know what it looks like.

[BoxCarRacer 1]

I tend to go for the big city feel. I like the challenge of making an aesthetically pleasing skyline that transitions well from towers to suburbs. Takes me forever though when I plop because every little building has to look perfect. It's the same though for ruralism. Every little detail is perfect, from the trees to the rocks to the flowers to the fences. And thats all thanks to the plethora of custom content we've been given.

IRL I prefer big cities. I'm a sucker for pretty nature scenes, but I enjoy the life and activity of places like New York. I think everyone can agree the suburbs are the worst haha.

[varuna21 0]

I think your description is accurate.  I am definitely more of a "Region player" because I like to have an equal amount of both present, and I think the Simcity creators have done a heck of a job making all this possible!

[kolnikov inc 1]

rural areas give you more opportunity to use the RHW to its full extent.