need advice to develop big city

[loudpack 5]

in my big city im wondering do you need high wealth residence and high tech to develop the skyscrapers or do you provide that in the neighboring cities. Also Is it good to discourage the dirty industry in the big city and make them a neigbor city im confuse. I started a big city did the basics school, parks, heath fire and police, all covered the area following the demand bar got 17,000 people to live there, the advisor told me to build a neighbor city, now am i building the exact type of city as my big city or make that city the dirty industry i discourage earlier i mention. If i build 2 neigboring city which provide high wealth residence will that increase the high wealth commercial offices in the big city.

something else i did so far on my region my first neighoring city of high wealth residence was successful all residence few small commercials no industry some mid wealth people moved in and started abandonent property started popping up so i fixed that by starting a neigboring city next to that and lowering the mid weath commerce services to 0.0 %. I started a manurfacting city also just want to know if this will stimulate high office tower growth.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Building stage depends on population alone, and the proper environment to release the demand caps. External population will not do it.

My playing style is not oriented to population, but profitability and good life for my Sims with lots of green space. I could really care less about high buildings, but if they happen, well, and good.

There is a table somewhere, in the Omnibus I think, showing what kinds of buildings you can get with various population stages. If you have the standard game (not the CAM) there are 8 stages.

[loudpack 5]

Building stage depends on population alone, and the proper environment to release the demand caps. External population will not do it.

My playing style is not oriented to population, but profitability and good life for my Sims with lots of green space. I could really care less about high buildings, but if they happen, well, and good.

There is a table somewhere, in the Omnibus I think, showing what kinds of buildings you can get with various population stages. If you have the standard game (not the CAM) there are 8 stages.

I feel what you saying also it sounds like you like to make villages and small towns which i like to make also. But somewhere in the region i would like to have a big city but I guess there different ways to develop commercial tower growth

[RABicle 9]

He pointed you towards the Omnibus which has the table. I can't find that table either though.

Honestly dude. if you really want scyscrapers, start on easy. Map out a grid of roads, 6x6 or whatever. High density Fill some squares with commerce, some with residential, whatever. Water them, power them. Fill one square with large flower gardens.

Drag a road out to an industrial area, make an industrial area AT LEAST THE SAME SIZE.

And run the game at full speed. Big buildings will come.

Your city will be dirty, poor, crime ridden, stupid, unhealthy, full of traffic and the industrial area will burn down every five minutes. but it will make money. Spend $400,000 of your starting money mapping out this monstrosity, save up a lazy million of so. And then redo the whole thing. Maybe make the roads one way, put in some parks, subway, bus lines, schools, hospitals and a cop shop.

And before you know it your first R$$$ scryscraper will emerge.

About as big as the buildings that come with the game get. Maybe having this built can be a measure of your success?

  Edited November 17, 2011 by RABicle  

[loudpack 5]

He pointed you towards the Omnibus which has the table. I can't find that table either though.

Honestly dude. if you really want scyscrapers, start on easy. Map out a grid of roads, 6x6 or whatever. High density Fill some squares with commerce, some with residential, whatever. Water them, power them. Fill one square with large flower gardens.

Drag a road out to an industrial area, make an industrial area AT LEAST THE SAME SIZE.

And run the game at full speed. Big buildings will come.

Your city will be dirty, poor, crime ridden, stupid, unhealthy, full of traffic and the industrial area will burn down every five minutes. but it will make money. Spend $400,000 of your starting money mapping out this monstrosity, save up a lazy million of so. And then redo the whole thing. Maybe make the roads one way, put in some parks, subway, bus lines, schools, hospitals and a cop shop.

And before you know it your first R$$ scryscraper will emerge.

About as big as the buildings that come with the game get. Maybe having this built can be a measure of your success?

i can get rich residence skyscrapers with no problem, but check this out. I steady build around my maine city 3-4 mini blocks, 2 blocks full of high wealth residence, another city block mainly low income because the demand be 6000 or better on the demand bar. Raise office tax to 20 so the demand go to the big city which works out perfect. I come back to the big city office demands be pretty nice but then when i build high dense commercial, they be drive ins. I'm guessing it should be better to leave a region block open for all commercial. since you need 45000 commercial jobs that would be alot of space use for that situation.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You really need to grow into this kind of situation. Pick an area to be your CBD, zone it low density with blocks that are at least four grid squares deep and a multiple of four wide. As you build towards your need, rezone these blocks to medium and then, eventually, high density as the number of commercial jobs increases.

It doesn't hurt to run an avenue through the middle of your planned CBD at the start. Find a way to funnel your traffic along this avenue to encourage your commercial area to grow. More traffic means better commercial. If you try to force it, the program will just make you wait. Computers don't argue.

[Simoleman 34]

I don't seem to have any problem getting skyscrapers, so maybe I can offer some things to try.

My most densely populated city, Burlington, has about 290,000 residents on one of the smaller standard plots, which means there are a lot of tall buildings. I did it by first zoning almost entirely industry and residential, then slowly rezoning industrial sections in favor of commercial. By then, there was plenty of demand. This takes time, but patience has its rewards.

Put plazas of various sizes in your commercial zones. Put parks etc. in your residential zones.

Place bus stops every couple of blocks or so. (A nice bonus to a lot of bus stops is that your transportation infrastructure winds up making money -- lots of it -- not losing it. Between the bus lines and the tollbooths, Burlington's transportation sector shows a 90% profit margin! It's making the difference between a surplus budget and a deficit.)

And I tend to intermix commercial and residential zoning (see Arlington, Virginia), which keeps commute times down.

Build a region, not just a city or two. The cities contribute to each other's growth.

An underappreciated aspect of the game, I think, is the power of tax rates. As economists say, if you tax something less, you're likely to get more of it. My City of Enterprise (population approx 180,000) also has a lot of skyscrapers, simply because tax rates are low -- about 2% for commercial and 5.5% for residential. This covers for a lot of "sins" -- e.g. very little in the way of healthcare and schools and NO amenities (parks, plazas, playgrounds, libraries, or anything else). I notice there are a lot of rooftop pools and tennis courts, so the well-enough-to-do get their amenities that way. Of course, there are some pretty drab places where "the other half" lives.

Getting past the "peanut butter point". One knowledgable player somewhere on the Simtropolis site posted some interesting suggestions for dealing with a city that seems to be "stuck" (like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth, I think), and just doesn't want to grow. I had that trouble with my mega-city, Worthington, which seemed to top out at 400,000. I tried stuffing more amenities into it, and that didn't help. I was losing money, too. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. I cleared the books of all the nice but expensive ordinances, cut taxes radically, and presto...growth. As the city began growing I began putting the ordinances back in and slowly raising the tax rates. Now it's up to 550,000 and I'm sure would grow faster if I were more concerned with growth and skyscrapers and less with quality of life issues.

Beware unbalanced growth, While the RCI demand bars are a nice guide to what your sims are looking for, they're not the be all and end all. Unless you have neighboring cities that provide RCI your city does not, then it's wise to more or less balance the number of jobs (industrial/commercial zones) with the number of residents. Otherwise, you're likely to get some buildings that go dark because there's not enough demand. While there might be nothing more beautiful to you than a gleaming new skyscraper, there's nothing uglier than one that's been abandoned.

Hope that's food for thought.

[SimCoug 5,972]

Building stage depends on population alone, and the proper environment to release the demand caps. External population will not do it.

My playing style is not oriented to population, but profitability and good life for my Sims with lots of green space. I could really care less about high buildings, but if they happen, well, and good.

There is a table somewhere, in the Omnibus I think, showing what kinds of buildings you can get with various population stages. If you have the standard game (not the CAM) there are 8 stages.

I was curious about the requirements for building stages, and I found this link (couldn't find it anywhere in the omnibus) - it may help folks who are also looking for a quick guide: http://www.simcitycentral.net/knowledge/simcity4/building-stages/