Transitioning

[Chesh 173]

hi 

i recently started a region and made a few 'suburb' tiles behind where i plan for my inner city section to be. i currently have four medium tiles developed with a total of 90k people, three of which are mainly made up of $ and $$ residential with a little bit of low wealth commercial lining the main streets. the other tile is industrial and houses dirty jobs for the other tiles as well as power/garbage etc.

the reason for this post is that i want to start development on the inner city part, and i don't know how to go about it. i'm ok when it comes to making small, sprawling, somewhat unorganised cities, but i think my problem is that i'm hooked on the spraw frame of mind and i can't seem to switch over to an organised, large city frame of mind. also, in my 'burbs i don't have need for alternate means of transportation at all, the the zoning is simple. i don't know the first thing about big city zoning, and i've not had the opportunity to practise in the many years i've had the game.

i don't suck at the game but i'm not great by any means. i usually just look at everyone elses creations and loose all sense of motivation, but i feel optimistic this time and i don't want this region to fail like the countless amounts of others. haha ok sob story over. can anyone give me advice?  

[Superbacon 380]

You can try to zone it more-so like a real city. With dense, tall buildings in your city-center and the density gets lower the further you get the edge. 

 

I suggest building your transit networks first. As with any large city, you need a mix of everything. Hopefully you have the latest NAM. If you're using a custom region, build your roads and highways/railways to conform to the terrain and shorelines so it looks natural. If you're using bare, flat land, then it's as simple as deciding where you want your city-center to be and you design out from there. In your city-center, you'll be building your main civic buildings. As well as your financial district. If you have custom office towers that contain CO$$ and CO$$$ jobs, use them there. Make wide roads in this area. As your most dense buildings will be there. It wouldn't hurt to throw in some 4x4 dense residential lots in the same general area. 

 

In addition to your avenues and one-way roads going through your downtown, you need arterial roads and highways that flow in and around the city-center. You can use the NWM if you have it. I'd recommend building a "ring-road" of a highway or avenue going around the city-center. And have avenues fanning outward from the middle of the action that connect to it. Since you want it to be a large city, build avenues going about in a grid or random pattern. On these avenues, you can build your medium/light density commercial. Inside the avenue grids, you can build your choice of residential density. 

 

Also  along the avenues, build a subway network to keep things flowing. The network can be more tightly packed in the city-center. 

 

There's also the matter of industry, power, water and waste. You can have your power in the same large city, so long as it's clean energy. If you're not using any custom content for these, then use hydrogen. Use large water pumps as well. Keep your waste disposal facilities in the next tile over. Same with your dirty and manufacturing industry. If you use non-polluting waste disposal downloads then you can keep it in the city somewhere. 

 

You can keep your high-tech industry in the city, or put it in an adjacent tile. 

Keep in mind that when you start the simulation you're probably going to get quite a bit of R$ sims. That's normal. Just let them get educated. Plop your university, college, schools, museums and libraries a plenty. If you're not using it already, I recommend custom content for schools and hospitals and such. 

 

Don't forget to leave space for your cap-relief buildings. Stock Exchange, Convention Center, Airport, etc...

 

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Or you can do it like me and build naturally. From a small farming town into a teeming metropolis on the coast with dozens of other towns to accompany it. 

I gave you some advice from when I planned things out ahead of time. Might not've gone over every point I wanted to but it's late and there's anime to be a watchin'. I used to plan cities out ahead of time like that before I found more joy in building things up from scratch and watching things grow. Everyone does things a different way, so the choice is yours. Give my advice a try with your own personal twists and see what happens. 

[Chesh 173]

ok and so with zoning, what's the magic behind that? short and sweet, what creates what? sims need jobs and civics, businesses need traffic and sims, industrial needs sims and transportation. each wealth class requires this same scaffold only on a bigger scale. is that right?

thanks! i'll try your advice with my personal twists and i'll tell you how it goes

[Superbacon 380]

Your residential areas will need parks and recreation and pretty things to gawk at. Commercial areas need plazas. 

 

Commerce and industry are tied in tandem. Industry creates demand for commerce. Residential creates demand for industry. Residential creates demand for commerce as well. High-wealth RCI requires more of the civics and utilities available. R$ can get by with barely anything, say for a school or something. R$$ to a certain extent can get by with just some parks and basic utilities coverage. But even low-density R$$$ needs everything. Water, garbage service, police, fire, education, parks and transit. Commerce brackets work the same way.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

For your central downtown area, you can't make it spring up all at once, but you have to develop it slowly. 

 

A commercial centre works best with high traffic on as many streets as you can arrange, with a good sprinkling of open space (plazas and parks).  The plazas help break any commercial caps.  Pick the corner you want to be the Wall Street district and zone four high density 4 x 4 lots there.  Don't get excited if what you get are drive-in theatres, they will be replaced eventually.  This may well take more than 100 Sim-years, and you should run at this slowly, developing all around this nexus of commerce with more, but lesser commerce.

 

An alternative scenario is to drop an avenue roundabout where you want your centre to be, radiate four avenues from it, and behave accordingly.  Drop a bus/subway station in the middle of this, and use ped-mall tiles as filler.  You will need subway running along the spokes of your avenues, or Tram in avenue, or both eventually.  High density commercial lots all around the circle as needed. 

 

This is an exercise in planning.  You won't get anything really good until your population gets over 120,000. 

 

Build residential rings outward at a distance from the centre.  Be careful to avoid mansions early in the game.  A couple of schemes are: alternate medium and low density 1 x 2 R lots so the game can't consolidate them on you; build blocks of 2 x 1 lots back to back -- maximum joined lot here is 2 x 2, not enough for a mansion.

 

No matter what you do, you have to get to level 8 in the game before you can get the maximum skyscrapers.

[Chesh 173]

i think what i'm going to do is develop the tile first like i would the lower density suburbs, and then i'll expand on it. 

 

my trick for avoiding mansions is to layout residential lots like this:

 

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leaving a three square gap in between streets, so the 1x2 residential lots overlap but can't join together. 

[Metalpuritan 160]

You could grow your residential one building at a time or a small group at a time and once they grow just lock them down by making them historical this will keep them from changing into mansions.  A tactic I would employ in your city as I transition to suburban to urban is I would make a buffer area that was comprised of medium rise buildings.  I would do this by doing what I suggested earlier, by zoning say, 6 or 7 2X2 lots of medium density, I will arrange these lots like an apartment complex or something of that nature, then I would run my simulation.  I would grab one of the buildings that suited how I felt at the given moment and make it historical, I would proceed to let the others grow and bulldoze them if they popped up as anything different from the first one that I made historical and make historical any buildings that were the same as the first.  Once all buildings were of the type I wanted and made historical, I would then go to my roads menu and grab the SAM#1, the parking lot streets, I would snake this parking lot street through my apartment complex for realism and be done with it, and move on to the next neighborhood.

 

Once I had my Commercial business district framed in by medium wealth I would pretty much do the same thing there.  I would strongly suggest getting both your medium and high wealth commercial demand to go through the top of your demand graph before tackling a central CBD.  Many times one skyscraper will employ 1000-2500 Sims, that drains your demand meter pretty fast.  If you drop below 0 on your demand you get abandonment, nobody wants to have an abandoned eyesore of a building right in their downtown, "Look at this building, it is the pride of my city, it is abandoned though and looks all run down."  

 

You can influence what grows on any lot in particular by placing parks and/or plazas next to the zones and destroying them over and over again until your building, the one you want pops up, the park effect wears off after a certain amount of time, it is only temporary so repeated bulldozing of the parks is often times necessary.  Also for residential, sometimes traffic noise and pollution can be a factor influencing what grows, I would get a set of sound barriers for your highway, I would use them also temporary like the parks, I would frame in that particular area and once finished bulldoze the walls unless I wanted to keep the area quiet and clean.

 

I assume, as you have been building suburban sprawl, you like things to look good.  Using this method makes for very good looking and functional cities.  You can apply this "zone, build, bulldoze and repeat" method for your industrial areas as well to make industrial areas that make sense, like bulldozing burners that popup next to the paper mill  or chemical tanks for warehouses, and do that until you get logical or matching satellite buildings for your anchor buildings.

 

I am always making the same post as a reply, I should make a video of the process and post it on youtube and just link to it, or copy and past this text and save it to note pad or something.

[Chesh 173]

that's perfect! i do like things to look good, i'm a perfectionist to the point where it becomes a chore playing any game because everything has to be right. that's so smart but, i totally forgot/underestimated the power of the 'make historical' button. 

i'm going to start a new region and use a few of these tips and see how it turns out. i ended up making a bit of a mess of my old region with the big city, it didn't turn out right and it sent the suburbs around it into some impressive population fluctuations. whoops.   

 

[Bdub01 201]

Another great thing to do is to look at googlemaps or google earth and check out how real cities are laid out.  You can spend many an hour just on a site like that.  I know it has helped me a lot!

[Metalpuritan 160]

Don't delete your old regions.  I am not assuming you do, I am just warning you.  One day you may possess the skills necessary to fix your old one easily or even use it for a reference.   Your old regions are not ALL bad, just certain things you don't like.

 

For years when I thought I messed my cities up I would delete the region and start over.  I deeply regret this as now I could go back and fix them, had I not deleted them.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, I have tons of disk space, but when I have gotten a region to the point where I am just plain bored with it, I delete it.

[Metalpuritan 160]

Disk space?  I would hope nobody would need to think about disk space where the regions were concerned.  The region files are not big by any stretch of the imagination.  I mean, I am currently working on a region that has in excess of 100 maps, currently 89 of those maps has some sort of development, all of them are rendered.  This entire file folder is 81MB.  With practically any computer from the last 15 or so years this file size will not even make a dent, also if a drive is so full there is no space for 81-200, MB that computer should not even run, at least not very well, horribly even, that is if it runs at all.

[Turjan 1,048]

Disk space?  I would hope nobody would need to think about disk space where the regions were concerned.  The region files are not big by any stretch of the imagination.  I mean, I am currently working on a region that has in excess of 100 maps, currently 89 of those maps has some sort of development, all of them are rendered.  This entire file folder is 81MB.

 

A single city easily reaches half of those 81 MB in size. especially as the game adds 10 MB to the city save file when you reach about 15 MB (the file structure changes). So, if you use all large tiles and build your tiles up, a region save gets huge. It doesn't even have to be big cities. I posted some images from "Hicksville" a quaint town of 16,195 inhabitants, file size 25,176 kB.

 

Then again, backup drives are usually several terabytes in size, so it's not a principal problem, but it's easy to get your region folder to GB size.

 

*Linking the post seems not to work properly in Firefox and may need some scrolling.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, I was being a little facetious there.  Currently my Region folder occupies 120.9 MB, not all tiles developed fully in four regions.  This represents 11.2% of the 13.6 GB that my account takes out of the 252GB partition I am using for production work.  The physical disk is 500 GB, and my general backup disk is 1 TB sliced into five 200 GB partitions (not windows compatible).

 

Tiny, I know, but I don't store huge files such as movies.

[Ltw 401]

I usually start with a commercial zone and a residential zone next to it. I place the industrial zone a bit further to reduce negative side-effects. Later on I decide whether I'll delete this industrial zone or not. That all depends on what strategy I choose. However, when the city gets bigger the pattern is getting different. I usually have commercial, then residential and then commercial again and so forth. I like this setup because I think it gets a bit more dynamic to mix commercial zones and residential zones. Another pro is that it could significantly reduce commute times since people don't have to travel to a single spot.