why parking garages may be the solution to all the worlds ills.

[halby 5]

Hi, I was never able to get a city bigger than 40k until I discovered the trick of forcing sims to have wonderfully short commutes OR NOTHING... ie: i build a industrial zone of like 16x16, a residential zone of 16x16 and a commercial zone of 8x8, connect those 3 together, everyone is happy, i move off somewhere unconnected, and repeat... nobody can go in btw these relatively small sections, so nobody is commuting further than a maximum of about 32 tiles under any circumstances.

This worked so well, that i finally broke thru 40k and got a 520,000 sims into my city in approximately 20 seperate unconnected areas. But lately I'm starting to run out of space, and I'm noticing that, for example, the first zone i ever built, still has crappy 400 population houses in it, despite there being 20,000 sim skyscrapers elsewhere in the city... it seems that once a building is built, and the residents have stable work, they simply don't upgrade or move out ever, and why would they, the same exact jobs are available within driving distance as always..

BUT if i de-zone a house, and re-zone it, that house comes back massively larger.. sims move in, discover there are no jobs, and after a few years, that new massive house just goes abandoned and rots... strange. This, i think, is because sims decide whether or not to move into an available zone based on the city-wide or maybe even region-wide demand for sims, rather than the availability of jobs within reasonable commute distance.

OK, neet. so now for the question, Most jobs in my city have work for poor, midclass, and rich sims, but most of them are only 1/3 populated, because of my disperate zoning technique, ie: if a 16x16 residential area is tied to a 16x16 industry area and nothing else, you will tend to get all sims of the same class (say all poor or all rich) in that area... so the industry they are connected to, might have jobs available for $ $$ and $$$, but only 1 of the job types gets filled. This is actually good, i believe this is really why the tactic I am using works so well, because I have all of these jobs with openings for 50 $ 500$$ and 5 $$$, but only the $ are working there, so that counts as 500 available jobs for the rest of my city, so people move into other locations like crazy trying to fill these available jobs, find out they can't get tehre, and make due with whatever i give them instead. MUAHAHAHA...

But I can't help thinking things would be more space-efficient if i wasn't wasting so many jobs in unreachable limbo..

What seems like a good idea, would be to have poor sims in 1 area, midclass in another, and upperclass in a 3rd area, and connect those 3 to a few jobs, then repeat..

ie: zone 4x4 rich 8x8 midclass and 10x10 poor, and connect them all together to a 16x16 industrial + 4x4 commercial...

But whenever I try to so this, I find that poor people and rich people simply refuse to live together

So then I was thinking I could have all of the rich people in the whole city live in one giant skyscraper strewn central business district, and connect that district by monorail to every single mini-zone... so i started doing this, and it worked wonders for generating a ton of super happy skyscraper livin rich folks in the cbd, but all of the sub-zones i connected via monorail started mingling! THOSE BASTARDS! my goal was for the rich ppl to join you, not for you to hop a monorail over to sub-zone 12 and get a job as a steel worker instead of a chemist... wtf.

So now I'm thinking of ways to prevent non-rich ppl from riding my monorails, here are two ideas i had:

Goal: rich ppl can go everywhere, non-rich ppl are stuck within their mini-zone.

Each mini-zone has R C and I, rich town has R and C.

Solution: create parking garage + monorail pairs in rich town that are not within walking distance of eachother. Rich ppl drive to monorail_1 and use that to get to zone_1, or drive to monorail_2 and go to zone_2, but ppl who live in zone-1 can't go from zone-1 to zone-2 because of the parking garages (and lack of bus/subway)

boom.

[Figit 0]

I tryed this (for heck's sake), and it crashed my game...

[z1 566]

Are you using the NAM? It makes a huge difference in large cities.

[Prophet42 1,503]

Wow, talk about an ultra planned city. This is population manipulation to the extreme. . Your thought process is very interesting.

However, I would ask the same question as z1. I have NAM installed and do not seem to have any issues with getting populations over 40K. I do admit though, that over 100K you do have to place a huge amount of mass transit or else you will get a lot of 'Abandoned due to communte time'.

Well anyway, good luck with your uber urban planning.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

One of the things I would try is to start extending tentacles outward from each isolated community. Populate them as you go, and I think you might be pleasantly surprised by the results when they start joining up. For this to work properly on a large tile you will need the NAM and I think the tentacles should be avenues. Run a subway under each avenue and into the various pods. Surface buses can supply transportation in the work areas from the subway terminals.

[mastorofpuppetz 199]

My city is 650000, I dont have a single parking garage, smart planning means sims always have short cimmutes.

[halby 5]

I tried nam, but i didn't like how i had a bunch of sims walking hundreds of tiles as pedestrians, just seemed like cheating to me.

the parking garage theory is more 'cuz thats a cool idea!' than 'you cant do stuff without this!' obviously there are plenty of ppl with 1.6 mil cities who didnt use parking garages... but what I find fun, is to try and grow my city steadily larger, while making sure that all jobs have ppl to work them, and all sims have a place to work... it is an impossible goal, which is good, cuz it means i can keep having fun striving toward it forever! (and ever!)

WHat bugs me, is when I make a dirty factory, for example, with 0 people of proper education/wealth/range who can work at it... and that factory produces goods, pays me taxes, and has no workers... to me that just makes no sense, that factory should shut down eventually due to low demand, but it doesn't. i've had a 20 dirty industrial drive and 60 dirty industrial capacity for hundreds of years,.. in fact it's where i get a lot of my cash from un-worked over-taxed factories that continue to exist presumably because the concept of abandonment due to low demand is not enforced on workplaces. I would imagine the thought process behind not abandoning such buildings is that they are wasted real estate, and they are not contributing toward my population, only my wallet, but still. is dum.

[z1 566]

I tried nam, but i didn't like how i had a bunch of sims walking hundreds of tiles as pedestrians, just seemed like cheating to me.

The only way you get Sims walking hundreds of tiles in the NAM is if you turn on the Park and Ride feature without building sufficient parking facilities.

Assuming that you turned that feature on in the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool, try turning it off, and I think you'll be happily surprised. Sims will still use your garages; they just won't depend on them for every commute.

[halby 5]

Thanks I'll try that when I get done playing around with non-nam, I still feel like if everyone insists nam is required for ppl who want to have big cities, that by definition means nam gives you a huge advantage... why cheat when you haven't even beaten the game normally yet Once I'm done making cities the hard way, i'll try out doing it the easy way.

https://i.imgur.com/uUQh1.jpg

[z1 566]

I still feel like if everyone insists nam is required for ppl who want to have big cities, that by definition means nam gives you a huge advantage...

Yes, that's true.

why cheat when you haven't even beaten the game normally yet

First of all, the NAM (and we're really talking about the NAM traffic simulator here) does not involve cheating. It simply fixes bugs that were present in the original Maxis traffic simulator. These bugs do not merely make the game more difficult - they make it impossible to have large, healthy cities. When Sims abandon their residences when there are suitable jobs available for them literally across the street (this has happened to me), this is a bug. Fixing it is not a cheat.

Once I'm done making cities the hard way, i'll try out doing it the easy way.

City building is certainly easier when using the NAM, but I definitely wouldn't call it "easy". You still have all the challenges of desirability, demand, health, education, crime, pollution, etc. All that's missing are the bugs from the Maxis traffic simulator, which make abandonment a bigger and bigger problem as your cities grow, no matter what you do. The fact that this abandonment is not fixable in the vanilla game should make it clear that it's a bug.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Amen. And since adding custom content is part of the design, I wouldn't call it cheating. Besides, what's a "cheat"? Usually it is a debugging command that has been left open for player use. Calling something like that a "cheat" is just a matter of gaming custom.