Preventing repetitive buildings

[jakeroot 4]

Hello everybody!

Hopefully someone (or somebody) can help me with this problem. It seems that my city has a real tendency to build a lot of the same buildings, over and over and over again. A good example is that low-density commercial office with the blue roof. There is so many in my cities!, even when I have all the structure types turned on (Dallas, Manhattan, European, etc). Is there any explanation as to why this happens, if its a glitch or something, and if it is caused by just a lack of proper-buildings, is my best bet to just download more buildings from the STEX or SC4 Devotion?

Thanks in advance.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Hello everybody!

Hopefully someone (or somebody) can help me with this problem. It seems that my city has a real tendency to build a lot of the same buildings, over and over and over again. A good example is that low-density commercial office with the blue roof. There is so many in my cities!, even when I have all the structure types turned on (Dallas, Manhattan, European, etc). Is there any explanation as to why this happens, if its a glitch or something, and if it is caused by just a lack of proper-buildings, is my best bet to just download more buildings from the STEX or SC4 Devotion?

Thanks in advance.

You could set your game to use all tile sets, which might improve things a little, or you could inhibit all Maxis buildings (a modd) and download lots of growables from the various exchanges. As a god, I don't really care what the ants build. I just try to stay in the black.

[Lucario Boricua 7,026]

The option of replacing all Maxis buildings with other buildings is only feasible with downloading building packs (say, the Colossus Addon Mod, CAM--don't think it's posted on Simtropolis but is posted on Simcity4Devotion) or having a lengthy accumulation of non-Maxis buildings (not doable in a short time).

[His Divine Hand 244]

One thing I have noticed when it comes to the tile sets, is that even when I set it to build all tile sets at once, it still uses one tile set at a time based upon the years set for the build one at a time option. Now, this may just be a Mac issue, but if this is true, then when any large number of buildings are built at the same time, and especially of commercial buildings were specific stage, type, and demand satisfied have limited choices in the Maxis sets, this will guarantee a large amount of repetition.

The only real cure is to dilute the maxi buildings with custom ones. You can also try and keep large numbers of buildings being built at once through careful zoning and making buildings historic so they don't upgrade. The way I mostly deal with the tile set issue is to set the years one tile set is built to just 1, but honestly, for most stages and types, there are only one building per tile set, so you are going to get repetition if you only stick to Maxis buildings.

[EyeofMobius 27]

Sometimes smashing the same old stuff down until it changes is good if not tedious. Also as you begin development making use of the 'make historical' feature of the query tool may help to keep things going to uniformity.