Organic Versus Plopped Cities

[Jazzmaster 716]

I've been toying with the idea that having a city in which all residentials are grown but all commercials are plopped might cause Sims to claim they don't have jobs? Or correction...they have jobs for a while, and then seem to be out of work, despite having quite the abundance of jobs. The strangest thing is that they will complain about having no jobs, even when they do. To show you what I mean...

There is a No Job Zot, yet they are clearly commuting to work? Any ideas while I experiment further? Thanks.

[simcity4deluxe 95]

How far is you residential from your commercial and do you have a lot of traffic going into that area. I would recommend a monorail or a highway to get to their work much quicker to see if that fixes anything. Other than that, I don't really got anything better to say.

[De Ja Vu 117]

That kind of building causes no problem for me...

[Jazzmaster 716]

I might have gotten too excited. Just had to have some jobs a little closer. I suppose the nearest buildings' jobs were being taken rather quickly. The game crashed after my last save, though, which worries me. But I suppose that's for another thread.

  Edited October 13, 2011 by Yoshiisland  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

As a matter of interest, I rarely plop any buildings and never residential. If you just wait long enough, it will happen when you arrive at the right conditions. Plopping things just skews the game. About the only things I plop are items like shore installations which cannot be grown, and other such civic buildings. Regular RCI for me are like Topsy, they 'jest growed, Mr. Rhett'.

[Jazzmaster 716]

I understand completely...but I really don't like the way the game grows things. I understand the random growing is the best way to simulate reality, but it's not consistent. In real life, such skyscrapers take quite a bit of thought and planning; when urban planners, civil engineers, and architects all come together. You wouldn't see the same building more than once, unless it were a copy paste one like a suburban home, rowhouse, or fast food joint. I absolutely never place the same 'signature' tower (like those by Scotty222 or nycc06) more than once. In all honesty, anything that isn't a suburban home or small shop, I plop or (zone/build/destroy/make historical for residentials), because a city that looks like a city is as important to me as a city that behaves like a city...at least as far as this game is concerned.

  Edited October 13, 2011 by Yoshiisland  

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I understand where you are coming from too. However, I am more concerned with my Sims and making them comfortable while being profitable than is pretty streets. My often stated motto is "Doing well while doing good".

[Jazzmaster 716]

Most of my Sims are doing quite fine. Just working on making sure this particular neighborhood can find some employment soon.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Consider tossing in a small commercial plaza in the residential neighborhood. It can be medium commercial with some single commercial as a kind of mixed bag. Put the bigger stuff at the ends, and you'll get a kind of neighborhood plaza.

[psander5 195]

I plop all my commercials. I too like to have full control of the commercial architecture of my cities. I've noticed that residential areas can suffer if you plop your commercials before you have enough demand for them. These days I wait until I have plenty of 'real' sims in my city/region before I plop the CBD. It seems to work well enough that way for me. I like to build multi-tile cities with lots of suburban sprawl, and in these cases you can suffer from commute time and employment problems. I usually place a few small shops on every 'estate' to ease the problem... and I even made some cheat lots that are just plain grass that provide a few hundred jobs

I'm no purist. I play for aesthetics and fantasy. I'll use whatever cheats I can to get the overall design I want, and I'm not ashamed to say so

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This program is whatever you make of it, and whatever floats your boat. I consider it a blank canvas for a kind of artistry.

[_marsh_ 1,117]

I, as a lot of you seem to do, plop jobs but grow (most) residential. I personally use the RCImulti mod to get things how I want. I try to go for realism. In real life, a person would commute over multiple city tiles to get to work. In SC4 that just isn't possible, so I use cheats to get things the way I want.

[Kifflom112 355]

I agree. Here is what I do and it shouldn't even be noticeable when I make a CJ.

I usually plan the area I am in and then sprawl from there without doing what most RLS people do, planning the whole city out which is what I may do later but wonder, I bet I won't, but then I plop civics and jobs as realistic as I can. I usually let a neighborhood grow, then plop over all of it. Then I use Plopmatic 9000, which I saved the file on my profile so if it disappears I'll still be able to download it. I usually just let everything go its way and then play through the city.

[Jazzmaster 716]

What gets me is I used to watch thousands of Sims take the heavy rail trains from one far end of a large city tile to the downtown in an adjacent tile without any problem. Now it's like they won't travel farther than 30 tiles without crying about it...

But really, I don't see much different from how I used to build, I guess the jobs are just "too" far away. For this game I suppose it works, but as mentioned by _marsh_, with the diameter of a large city tile roughly totaling ~2.5 miles, I don't see why less than half that distance is such a problem. I suppose the scope of the regional functionality soley exists to serve freight shipping and trade deals, because the vanilla traffic simulator was very unrealistic to start out with.

  Edited October 16, 2011 by Yoshiisland  

[Jazzmaster 716]

Heh, I plopped one single building down, and an entire jobless neighborhood suddenly became employed sort of odd, but I'll accept it