City efficiency vs style

[juliebug 5]

Thanks for the correction, much appreciated. So the bus isn't cool enough for them, eh? Alas! At least they'll use the streetcars and such, though.

[Towel 76]

Thanks for the correction, much appreciated. So the bus isn't cool enough for them, eh? Alas! At least they'll use the streetcars and such, though.

 

All it really means is that high wealth sims will cause traffic issues if you don't have decent commercial buildings within walking distance. 

 

While you can use streetcars to ferry them around, they will still prefer to drive.

[Spatzimaus 77]

beside that: grid-style cities will face enourmous traffic issues in endgame, thats what I learned in beta, they work well at the beginning, but tend to collape later...

A good example of this is the highway connection (for the maps where the highway doesn't run through the center of the tile); you'll often have massive traffic jams at the first major intersection, especially for culture/gambling cities relying on out-of-towners for income.  A grid is often not the best way to deal with that sort of jam, especially if you're trying to funnel all of those people to one small area of the city (and that area isn't right next to the entrance).

 

Then there's terrain.  For the first two betas we played on a very flat tile with only tiny impassable areas (water on one corner, a railroad on one edge), so a straight grid worked fine.  But play on a tile with mountains or a river, and a grid results in a lot of wasted space; you're actually better off if a road parallels the mountains/river, which'll mean changes throughout the rest of the city.

 

And finally, some city objects are just too big to fit the standard grid, especially once you include the ploppable expansions.  The university is a great example of this, but you'll also get it with the biggest parks, stadiums, city hall, and so on.  Even a standard grade school's classrooms stretch a bit too far into a standard block to let anything develop on the opposite side of the block.  Trying to stick with a grid will mean breaking up cross-streets and leaving uncomfortably large gaps in blocks.  So for at least part of your city, you might be better off going with non-standard shapes (including curves), to maximize the occupied room.

[efgrib 45]

style

 

beside that: grid-style cities will face enourmous traffic issues in endgame, thats what I learned in beta, they work well at the beginning, but tend to collape later...

How so, if you use a grid of high density avenues you will not have traffic problems and will have the max use of space, cant be bad.

 

 

using only avenues and max use of space are excluding each other, beside that you still will face problems with a simple grid because of too many intersections. another problem with avenues is that cars entering them can only drive in one direction and need often leftturns which are very slowing down the traffic

[InvaderNat 275]

Definitely style, since when you do look at someone's CJ and go "oohh that city is so efficient!" You don't of course. Whilst efficiency is important you don't want to be too efficiency-minded or else you'll end up with nothing but a boring grid-ville.

 

As long as it works then why worry about the boring game stats? In fact I don't even use a budget (I "weaknesspays" until I no longer need to) because all it does is hinder my sand-box creativity. Problem with the new game is that it just looks so terrible with all its silly cartoony graphics that it seems impossible to make anything worthy of putting in a CJ.

[AkemiAzula 280]

I would have thought low wealth sims would prefer walking because it's cheaper. I don't have a car and only have a bicycle to get about. I hope pushbikes are a form of transport considered by sims

[rigurat 6]

Now that I've played the game for a few hours I'm going for efficiency, I already ran out of space and I'm now working on getting every bit back of empty space between buildings.