The Deal With Stage-8 Skyscrapers

[William Gates 84]

I can't seem to get very many stage-8 residential or commercial skyscrapers. I'm wondering, do you guys have cities with many of them? I'm stuck on how to get more.

For example, my city has a population of 500,000, of which 250,000 are R-$, 170,000 are R-$$, and 80,000 are R-$$$. Yet, I only have two R-$$ stage-8 skyscrapers, and no R-$ or R-$$$ stage-8 skyscrapers whatsoever.

Again, my city has 260,000 commerical jobs, 100,000 of which are CO-$$ and 75,000 of which are CO-$$$. Yet, I only have two CO-$$ stage-8 skyscrapers, and one CO-$$$ stage-8 skyscraper.

I was curious on what a stage-8 skyscraper actually was, so I printed out a list of them and compared all the tallest buildings in my city to it. Chances are, if you have a lot of what you consider to be 'tall' buildings in your city, the vast majority of them are not stage-8. I have quite a few tall buildings in my city myself, but I found then found out about 97% of them were stage-7.

The thing is, to me there actually isn't much difference between stage-8 and stage-7 skyscrapers visually. They are pretty much equal in height (sometimes stage-7 is taller), and they can have the same base area as well. The main difference between the two is their capacity. For example, Sky Rise Deluxe Condos (R-$$, stage-7) holds 2723 people, while Wallace Manor (R-$$, stage- holds 3767. The same deal is with commerical. Talin Tower Suites (CO-$$, stage-7) has 1612 jobs, while Chong Inc. (CO-$$, Stage- has 4549. Mind you, because stage-7 and stage-8 pretty much look the same size, it isn't really a big deal to your skyline if you don't have a lot of stage-8 in your city.

Anyways, anyone have any tips for me how I can get more stage-8's? I want them because they are the skyscraper elite.

[joshriddle 29]

Skyscraper building is a big challenge for a fact. I'm not to good at providing strageties without preparing an HTML document for someone to download, but here goes....

1: Usually you will have to have good neighbor connection activity. Prepare neighbor connections, as a mean for inter-region transportation.

2: Skyscrapers don't even show up in the form of residental until yo hit 26,000- 30,000 residents.

3: Stage 8 stuff requires high desirability, and high demand. Actually, the deal is with bigger cities it is so hard to control traffic and keep it at a flowing, reasonable rate that it makes it impossible for some, which is why you start getting in the planning stages for downtown early Set up bus networks at 20,000 residents. Heavy passenger train at 40,000. Try rapid transit. You have to know where your downtown stuff is going, so you can think ahead of time.

4: If you are talking commercial stage-8 stuff then there has to be enough residental around for those skyscrapers to get filled. Vice versa for residental.

Thats my 2c.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Somewhere in the manual there is a table of the requirements fo getting the various stage buildings.  I think your population has be be several million to get the really big buildings, and the conditions have to be very good.

You could, of course, get the Colossal Addon Mod from SC4D (BSC LEX) which adds several stages to the game and many very large buildings become available.  I find that I don't need this to get what I get out of the game, so I don't.  Some do want to have these ginormous populations, where I am happy with a nice, balanced urban centre with appropriate suburbs.  My current biggest city in my Mittel Europa region just topped 100,000.  It happens to be a secondary city, feeding tnto my main port which hasn't reached that level yet.

Also, I think, if you look, a similar table appears in the Omnibus.

[Jasoncw 11,949]

oh no the population doesn't need to be several million!!

To get some bigger buildings you'll need to do some building "farming". First, prepare a few zoned areas for your stage 8 buildings. So if the building you want is a 4x4, zone a 4x4 spot, and put some parks around it, make sure the traffic pollution isn't very high, etc. Then, demolish/dezone a bunch of buildings of that type. So if you want CO$$$ get rid of a bunch of CO$$$ buildings. This will cause your demand for that type to skyrocket, and hopefully the simular will decide to quench the demand with a stage 8 skyscraper in one of the spots you prepared.

This is slightly risky though, because the demand will need to be absorbed soon or you'll loose it. If all of those jobs go away, it won't be long before the residents go away too, and they'll take their CO$$$ demand with them.

[SC4BOY 21]

It is documented in various places, but this link should work for you