Tearing up large tracks of land and city for massive projects, fun?

[Dewm 177]

 

Bored here at work so I thought I'd make this topic. 

Who else thinks its really fun to tear up your city and have huge projects?

I know for myself I find it just tons of fun when I have a dense city and I need another rail track or a new station. a convention center or whatever to have the whole "area" reworked. I guess this is one of the things I love about SC4, Like yesterday I cut down a whole CS district because I had my new convention center that I needed to put down, and with that I play'd down some plazas and parking garages, bus stops and sky bridges to accommodate the whole area.

Anyways, but I just wanted to say I love this game and thanks to everyone who knows how to do the modding and putting sweet props and whatnot up for us to use!

[rainyday 2]

 This is a very good idea for a  thread!

I was just thinking about this when I was playing the game in the last week. I was planning to realign my main railway lines to get rid of nasty curves around some dense Commercial Districts and suburbs. I found it a chore to do.

I really hate having to bulldoze any of my work, because it makes me feel as though I made a wrong decision before, although most of the time, I probably did.

[SC4BOY 21]

In many respects it is more fun than the original "growing" of the area.. After a region has been developed and demands and civics developed and educational levels boosted the redevelopment is much faster.. (plus as you are "killing" stuff, you actually are boosting demand for what you are knocking out).. Many people are afraid to bulldoze stuff because they recall how painstakingly they developed it.

[Dewm 177]

Exactly, I dunno. I like to get a city full it it relatively quick, (with some proper planning) but then once its all full and busy, then I like to go in and add detail, cross walks, bus stops, parking garages, signs, lighting. And like it one of my old cities I had 2 train stations that where at 95% and they held 50,000 sims each. I had like 4-5 tracks going into each station. But then I made em so the tracks wen't totally underground except when they cam up to hit a station or leave the city. But that took a lota work!

[bigthing 35]

Although in reality, for transport networks, cities will tend to put them over roads or under ground.

[JayStimson 212]

I always find it one of the more realistic aspects of the game even though I would really like everything to go perfectly from start to finish.

It's what happens in real life. The suburbs expand, traffic on a main road gets to congested and the road needs to be widened.

Fortunately, in the game, sims don't complain when we exercise eminent domain.

[TekindusT 3,809]

I'm with rainyday; I hate demolishing stuff, just because they've cost me a lot of time to grow or they're some unique buildings I want to keep. I usually rely on trams or subways when downtowns get clogged with traffic and try to plan ahead my railroads to avoid those ugly 45

[jstn_brrtt 8]

Gotta love ripping a neighborhood in half to put in a new highway

But, usually when I have an area already established and I find that I need to do something to improve the area (like a new rail line or roadway), I generally spend a LOT of time carefully planning how I'm going to go about completing the project so that it has the smallest aesthetic and functional impact on the surrounding area.

[Jeiman2008 21]

I really hate to have to re-develop so I will spend a lot of time laying out the highways and avenues before I begin to zone. I know this isn't natural but it definitely helps me not have to re zone as much. I still achieve a natural look because I design my networks with real world networks in mind. I've found great inspiration from Wichita Kansas in particular. The interchanges there are spectacular! In one region I got so obsessive about it that I spent two months laying out transportation in several cities before I started growing anything.

[joshriddle 29]

ugh. I hate destroying the desne areas I worked hard on getting. That is if it is making room for a hi-rise ploppable that is taller! Zoos, convention centers, sit on the edge of downtown. I guess I like the urban areas

[Yonk 2]

Usually, I'm very careful with putting in new things to avoid damaging established properties, but sometimes you just can't avoid turning a road into an avenue and then demolishing a few blocks of commercial to do so. However, this gives me a chance to "upgrade" the area, turning low-density commercial areas into medium or high, and making a boring street into a respectible business district. I find that demolishing a large number of buildings (especially when improving the transportation network) ALWAYS helps stimulate new growth in a city, above and beyond what it was before doing so. Sometimes I get a city that has its development stalled, and that's when I'll rework the downtown, or plow a freeway through the place, or something else that will get it back into expanding again.

- Yonk

[quicksilver991 37]

i agree with the original post, i like starting major projects or re doing a neighborhood, even if it means destroying a lot of buildings. i was recently working on a waterfront downtown, and to make it look nice i had to tear up lots of low density shops and huge mansions

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

I try to keep as few buildings destroyed as possible, however if it means making a cheaper, quicker or better project then some houses have to go...

[Moonraker0 193]

Most of the time, I can't stand destroying anything at all building-wise. I just pause the game and then lay out what I hope is a realistic and functional transportation scheme (highways, rails and often I also pre-make a lot of the roadways) before doing any zoning. Naturally, this often leads to me needing to take out loans to get a budget surplus going.

I hate destroying things so much, I wouldn't even add in central Big Dig highways to one of my cities because I would need to destroy skyscrapers for the ramps. Similarly, I spent the last few hours laying out all of the highways and high-speed rail for half my region, and some roads/onramps/offramps besides, and I wished I had pre-made the HSR for one dense city because I didn't want to plow into the hundreds of skyscrapers to make the HSR line go into the center of the city; I ended up terminating the line at the outskirts of the metropolitan area of the city.

Naturally, I really like trams and el-rail over road for when I forget to add transportation for a certain area or think at first it doesn't need it. It's fun to mentally trace a route through the city's roads that would be fully tram-compatible with little to no destruction of buildings due to puzzle piece workarounds. I remember once I extended a city's elevated rail throughout a very large dirty industry zone with el-rail over road. There were, of course, a few factories that needed to be demolished (with the relative lack of puzzle pieces for the network; this was with the July 2009 NAM), but they were not very valuable, so I didn't mind destroying them.

[Tarkus 6,934]

I've got no qualms about tearing stuff out, especially for road/highway improvement projects.  Naturally, I try to work my alignments out with the goal of minimizing disruption to the vicinity, and I usually am relatively generous with the "right-of-way" when building my arterial roadways to account for the eventual possibility that they may need to be widened or re-aligned.  But sometimes, buildings have to go. 

And as often as I widen and re-align roads in my cities, it's a fairly common occurence.  A large part of why I play SimCity is the fun of tweaking my transport system.

-Alex (Tarkus)

[thefunktopus 1]

I love choosing the most complicated transportation schemes to relieve traffic after a city has developed and spending ages in pause working out the best way to execute them. This is why the highest game date I've got to is about 70 years...

[ROFLyoshi 1,760]

How bout reserving corridors?

[dcny 0]

What I usually do is plan all types of roads and transportation first and place trees where they will be. When I'm ready to build them I tear down the trees and build the highway/road/rails etc. This way there is no remove houses and business.

When I do have to remove something I have a policy of replacing what ever was removed nearby and if it effects roads/rails I reroute them to the new location.

[joshriddle 29]

I always think ahead of what everything will be like. It sometimes takes me 5 game years before the very first zone even goes up. I make the highways, and then the main roads, and then from there I zone residental commercial and industrial. Usually if there is a project it is a road project. Knowing how transportation minded I am the road projects are usually big expensive ones. The biggest road project costed me $120000 simoleons, but it really wasn't that hard on development considering it was out in the country.

What I was doing was trying to make the rural highway come together into another rural highway without having to make an urban interchange. It came out to be about a good 8 or 9x 10 tiles.

[Droidika 10]

i do demolish large areas from time to time, to make room for big lots, like airports etc. yet i do dislike doing it sometimes, I don't want to destroy my great skyscrapers. i usally go and destroy industrial areas to make room for ploping, since they tend to be a slight eyesore.

[thefunktopus 1]

Corridors?

PAH

London has few, as the city has just sprawled for many years. Sure, there are some large motorway and rail corridors, but Iprefer to add them after. Gives a challenge.

[Droidika 10]

Well, there is an altenitive method for tearing up areas, DISASTER TOOLS!!!! Now thats fun, and bulldoze for free.

[tkuelker 2]

Tearing up old or undeveloped areas of my city to add new buildings is the best part of sc4. I don't care much for building cities, where I have my fun is always developing or re-developing areas of my cities.

[This is my name 13]

I often redevelop my city to get rid of some nasty parts of the city and made a few adjustments here and there. Quite hate it when Simcity 4 goes CTD, that made me disappointed.

[joshriddle 29]

To be honest, my favorite concept of SimCity is the transportation networks, so really the only time I tear out tracts of land is when I make new interchanges, highways, or roads.

[longhorn 25]

I've played only one region since the game came out, so my first core city has gone through several renovations. The largest was when Rush Hour came out and I played Robert Moses with Maxis Highways and Avenues, but it has also had major changes when the RHW and HSRP came out. My massive region now has several core cities dispersed throughout, but the first, New New York, is still my favorite to play, since it's all brownfield at this point when I renew it. Plus it still has preserved areas that hearken back to to the days before we learned how to make roads larger than two lanes.

[Strategist01 0]

Oh, I don't usually like tearing out pieces of my beautiful city, except for abandoned lots, as I have far too many skyscrapers to bulldoze! Although, I must say I have caused unintentional mass abandonment in one of my cities.

What happened was that I had a city of about 30K and they were all commuting to one industrial city. It was in it's early years, so commercial didn't have much demand. I thought that two avenue connections would do it. Which they did. In excess. My advisor guy was screaming his head off, however that didn't bother me too much. I then saw that for future development, I would need a highway. I proceeded to build a EL-RHW4 around the north side of my city (the south side was already taken up by buildings, and money was precious then) with intersections and it was all very nice. I had to demolish maybe 5 buildings to get what I wanted. I made neighbour connections to the industrial city; made a RHW4 in the industrial city and waited. Nothing happened. So in a fit of rage, or to make my sims use the highway, I demolished my avenue connections, and let the game runs for a few months, saved and went to the region. Did the same in the industrial city. Mass abandonment occurred as they couldn't get to work. I lost about 10K in residents, or 1/3 of my Pop! However, this was a good thing, as the reconnected avenues allowed traffic and new development of skyscrapers in a new heart of high density city occurred. Without it, my city would have most likely stagnated!

[Aktof 2]

I used to have this issue alot with my dense very badly planned cities when I first started playing 2004 (man this game is old) it was very tedious and made me feel really bad about all the tiny sims being made homeless or jobless just for a few subway stations or a new superhighway going through their house (sorry mr.arthur dent) . Later on I tried to avoid this as much as possible though by preplanning downtowns, giving green room around highways for trees or maybe the ocassional police kiosk or whatever. The preplanned areas had subway stations, monorails and highways for inter/ intracity travel so later on it wouldnt be such a quagmire, all this just to avoid demolishing...