A farming community

[Mr Baseball 0]

After messing around for awhile, I've decided to play for real, using the Fairview region. My first  city will be a smallish farming community. I figure a small downtown with some light commercial and residential, and farms. Should I put in any other industrial zones away from the farms or just keep it strictly agricultural? Suggestions welcomed. TYVM.

[Bdub01 201]

If you don't plan on growing the city any higher than a farming community I personally wouldn't put any DI in. Maybe if you have a higher demand for MI I would download a good MI factory from the STEX and plop a couple in a small industrial area. But no DI at all. Also if the city remains rather small make it more "rustic" by using wind power only.

[Mr Baseball 0]

I was just thinking about wind power. I have to admit I'm still not used to not having a lot of things on a year specific basis like airports and  bus service, etc as it was in prior game versions.

[infamousjbe 592]

Here's a couple alternatives that work better than the default modern wind turbine.

 

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2855

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=485

[Bdub01 201]

Here's a couple alternatives that work better than the default modern wind turbine.

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2855

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=485

Sweet. I think I might download them myself!

[Prophet42 1,500]

Make sure you have a neighbor connection so the farmers have someplace to ship their crops  .  Also, if you grow enough farmes you can get the rewards of 'Farmer's Market' and 'Fairgrounds'.  They add a nice touch to small farming communities.

[infamousjbe 592]

Forgot to also mention, Simgoober's Canals has a small water power plant good for one or two farms. They do degrade quite quickly, but there is a mod to extend the life of your power plants.

[Bdub01 201]

Make sure you have a neighbor connection so the farmers have someplace to ship their crops . Also, if you grow enough farmes you can get the rewards of 'Farmer's Market' and 'Fairgrounds'. They add a nice touch to small farming communities.

If you download the vertical farms you will be guaranteed to get the farmers market. They hired A LOT more sims and take up less space!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

You might find this enlightening.  I always try to get something on top of a neighbour connection and it often is outlying farms.  The farms are SPAM.

 

[AkemiAzula 280]

Nice windmills

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

They are game default.  Has a PEG pond water supply in there somewhere, too.

[michaeldcannaday 42]

For 'A NONNY MOOSE'  :  Great pic on your farm area city...although the freeway that you placed, I'm sure that'll be a wild one to drive on with the bumps.  Level the roadway lol 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, its a work in progress.  It is also a Maxis highway.  You can't lay one with all that irregularity using RHW.  Frankly, Scarlett ...

[Metalpuritan 160]

The best suggestion I can ever give to people who want to start building in specific styles is to send them to Google maps.  It is essentially impossible to copy exactly anything in reality in this game, but if you try what you will get is very successful and visually appealing cities and landscapes.  The things you build in this way will work from a game standpoint, often times the layouts of cities and their infrastructures will mesh well with this game(provided you have at least the NAM installed), at the very same time you will find your cities and outlying areas to also be visually appealing.

 

I call this phenomenon, inspiration.

 

Also while you are at the Google maps thing, you may also find that farms are pretty much endless.  This is not going to be accurate in anyway, but I would say more than 90% of all ground has been covered by farms and the rest is roads and populace accounting for the remainder 10%.  I scrolled in Google maps while zoomed in from Cincinnati(where i live all the way to to the Pacific Ocean and didn't cross a single city, not a one, I was not trying to avoid them, I just didn't cross one all the way there all I saw was farms and fields, endless farms and fields of all shapes and sizes and colors, it really is magnificent. 

 

Something else I noticed you inquired about was power.  On this, I would also like to note that extreme rural environments such as farm country are ripe for massive power plant facilities, often located near rivers.  With a large enough buffer zone, 8-10 tiles separation all around and filled with trees, the pollution effect of ANY power plant on surrounding farms will be zero.  Also as a bonus, because it is pretty much all farm country you can run your power out of your map and supply multiple city tiles with power from that one plant.  I severely expand my power plants though to make them gigantic as they are in reality, even my coal power plants have huge cooling towers like the nuke plants do because coal plants for the most part do have giant cooling towers.  I never make a power plant power only for one city tile, that would be ridiculous right?(to me anyway).

 

I will leave you with a couple pictures.

 

This is Port Carbon.  It is heavily influenced by a city called Tracy in California.  If you look very closely, most, if not all of the residential area is as close to the actual thing as I could get, including the highway.  The location of the industrial zones is also taken from those maps, aside from the actual layout of the zones themselves.

 

You can see the port there, that port does not exist in Tracy, Tracy is landlocked.  This where the reality starts to breakdown and begin to become more SimCity 4.  I will be surrounding this city and for I think the next 3-5 tiles around this one with farms, all of it farms.

 

Speaking of farms...  This is where it all begins, from Port Carbon.  You can see those narrow farms at the edge of the map?  Those actually continue into the neighboring city tile, as does the residential area that touches the edge of the map.

 

Someone up above mentioned the SimGoober Canals, they are there, they are not providing anything except for agriculture demand though but I do think they look good and appropriate given the circumstances.

 

You can see below I am supplying two other maps with power from my power plant here.  There is an additional connection to and additional map somewhere else in town.  Those power lines run clean through the connecting maps into the next maps which will also be supplied with power from the power generated by the plant in Port Carbon.

 

Lastly, the power plant itself.  I actually looked up "pictures of coal power plants" on Google and I snatched inspiration from the very first one I saw, it is not a copy, just inspiration, if it were a copy it would take up a full quarter of the entire map and I could not have that.

 

On a last note here, my game is heavily modified, everything here can be acquired either here on the STEX or on the LEX.  The major names though are, Pegasus, Paeng, Fukuda, Jmeyers, Twrecks, and of course, the NAM team.

 

I consider myself to be "mediocre"  I have been playing around with this game for a long time, perhaps I learn slow, but I know for sure that the things that can be done with this game are nothing short of amazing, many times I see other people's works and the first word that comes to mind is "art".

[infamousjbe 592]

 

Something else I noticed you inquired about was power.  On this, I would also like to note that extreme rural environments such as farm country are ripe for massive power plant facilities, often located near rivers.  With a large enough buffer zone, 8-10 tiles separation all around and filled with trees, the pollution effect of ANY power plant on surrounding farms will be zero.  Also as a bonus, because it is pretty much all farm country you can run your power out of your map and supply multiple city tiles with power from that one plant.  I severely expand my power plants though to make them gigantic as they are in reality, even my coal power plants have huge cooling towers like the nuke plants do because coal plants for the most part do have giant cooling towers.  I never make a power plant power only for one city tile, that would be ridiculous right?(to me anyway).

 

Right in the middle, it is absolutely amazing to look at. At just the right view lvl, you'd swear it was a pixelated image, but then when you zoom in, you realize that it's perfectly cut out rectangles of farms, and then inside the grid are all the circle style crops...all the wonderful colors that contrast themselves. I've found myself zooming in/out so many rural areas around the belt. It truly is a wonder to look at. 

 

There is a site that also has the last 12yrs (1 photo a year) time lapsed from Google's satellites. It's awesome to see the viral spread of man across the land since the early '90s. I only wish I could see the time lapse from an earlier time of development. Wish I bookmarked the damn site to post here cause I know many of us would enjoy it..

 

 

Someone up above mentioned the SimGoober Canals, they are there, they are not providing anything except for agriculture demand though but I do think they look good and appropriate given the circumstances.

 

That was me      but TBO, I prefer SPIC over SG's canals. SG's sort of lack some texture. Almost looks 'cartonish' to me.

 

 

 

Lastly, the power plant itself.  I actually looked up "pictures of coal power plants" on Google and I snatched inspiration from the very first one I saw, it is not a copy, just inspiration, if it were a copy it would take up a full quarter of the entire map and I could not have that.

 

Something SC4 has opened my eyes too, is the fact that just here in RI, there are power plants located all over the place. Was always under the assumption that local downtown power plant was supplying the majority of the power. Now I know there are several power plants of various types within a 10 mile radius. Now I assume there are probably more than I actually know about in the smallest state in the USA. Couldn't image states like NY and how many power plants much be needed to feed that beast.

 

 

 

EDIT: and I also love heavy power lines running through my region. I even had to have the sidewalk mod that adds the curbside power lines.  

[AcmeSigns 97]

And don't forget that here are also sub-stations:

https://www.google.com/search?newwindow=1&client=firefox-a&hs=CLo&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&q=electric+substation&spell=1&sa=X&ei=-jzTUfbwIMHgiwKcmoHACA&ved=0CFAQBSgA&biw=1876&bih=964

[Metalpuritan 160]

Acme, you just gave me a great idea.  That new set Paeng gave us the other day, the alley set, I am going to use that to fence in substation clusters, the one's you see at the edge of the map and when the power lines change directions, that would be awesome!  The fence sections allow the power lines to cross over them, it will look sweet.

[Simbabe54 15]

Port Carbon looks great, Metal. I was thinking about doing a larger farming community and I like the way yours looks. Thanks for posting it.