SimCity of Heroes

[Gregg247 0]

Some of you may be familiar with the late, great MMO game, City of Heroes, which ran from 2004 through 2012.  I played that game for 8 years and loved every minute of it.  CoH was a superhero game which took place in the fictional Paragon City, the largest city in the US, which was plagued by high crime rates, alien invasions, zombie outbreaks, you name it!

 

Paragon City was split into many districts, due to game graphics/size issues, ranging from high-end real estate to dirty industrial sites, to rubble-strewn ruins.  What a great basis for a SimCity region!

 

My CJ is not an attempt to faithfully recreate the City of Heroes maps or experience, but to have fun by doing a general homage to the game by creating the essence of certain districts, utilizing SimCity specializations.

 

I first had to decide which region to use for my homage.  Paragon City (PC) had many islands, peninsulas, and rivers, so I wanted a lot of water.  I also needed nice flat maps to spread out my towns as best I could.  I decided on Discovery Delta as the best map for this.  There are 16 cities with a wide range of features, lots of water, and plenty of room to spread out.

 

Since there are 4 clusters of 4 cities each, I decided to start on the bottom-left cluster.  One of those cities (Magnolia Wetlands) has no resources aside from water, so that's the perfect place for my future Education city.

 

For my first city, I wanted to start with Atlas Park, the traditional "starter city" in CoH.  Atlas Park was the location of the PC City Hall and had a huge statue of Atlas holding up the world.  This served as the unofficial hanging-out spot for many players, and in fact was the place where we all gathered on Nov. 30, 2012, when the lights of CoH were turned out for good.   But, I digress.

 

Here's a look at the region:

 

 

 

As you can see, I chose the bottom city (originally called Honeysuckle Marsh) to serve as Atlas Park.  Since Atlas Park had City Hall and plenty of giant statues, it seemed natural to make SimCity Atlas Park a Government and Tourism specialization city.

 

 

 

Above is the basic street design that I laid out.  I wanted to keep city hall in front of a large park-like expanse, with room for future landmarks.  This also called to mind the Washington DC Mall.  I'm leaving room in the back for the Expo Center and Pro Stadium, with a direct, straight route to my regional connection.

 

I'm also trying an inverse "U" shape for my high density avenue.  Hopefully, tourists will use the front section to get to the tourist areas, while my residents will use the back portion for getting to work and stores.  I have a street that connects the top of the "U" right at the entrance.  If it becomes a traffic problem later, I may just dead-end it to segregate my tourist population from my residents.

 

Here's a closer look at my City Hall center:

 

 

I want to end up with all 6 government add-ons attached to this city hall in Atlas Park, really cementing it as the center of governmental power in my region.

 

I've placed my Industry to the right of the map (down-wind), along with my sewer plant and coal power plant.  I placed my water plant on the tiny island in the top corner.

 

I plan to add schools, as I want this city to be educated.  In fact, I plan on giving all my non-mining, non-drilling towns the elementary school, high school, and library.  Some will get the community college -- we'll see.  My mining/drilling towns will make due with elementary schools and libraries.  It's not really a strategy so much as the fact that I want to have less smokestacks in the region (and less idiots burning down their houses!).

 

Also, I want to make my cities as self-sustaining as possible, with the exception of the Electronics cities.  Mining and drilling seem to play out way too fast in this game, so I need to be able to re-invent those cities at some point, without starting too far in a hole.  Electronics cities should be able to coast on their profits, so I can spend what I want there!

 

Anyway, Atlas Park started shaping up well, and I hit the 50k mark relatively quickly.

 

 

 

And such a nice profit so far, too!

 

Visually, my city has arrived at that awkward stage, where all the big buildings are mid-rise brick, there are a lot of fast food joints, and smoke pours out of every factory.  Its the equivalent of a teenager with a face full of zits and a mouthful of braces: butt-ugly now, but full of future potential!

 

I plan to let Atlas Park continue to grow for a little while and then start my next city in this little cluster of my region.  After all, there's no reason to plop down the Expo Center if there are no tourists around to know about it.  The other cities I want to create in this cluster are:

 

Education city/high wealth (Founders Falls)

Electronics city (Steel Canyon)

Mining city (The Hollows)

 

For low-wealth tourists, The Hollows may be my best bet....

 

 

 

[Benedict 3,119]

Great start - looking forward to seeing how things develop.

[Gregg247 0]

Day 2, and I've decided to expand my Paragon City region by adding a Mining city.  In City of Heroes, The Hollows was a hilly section of town that was sitting on top of massive underground caverns and old mines.  When the Trolls tried blasting these out to create a criminal hideout for themselves, the entire part of town collapsed onto itself, leading to complete destruction.  My SimCity Hollows will be an Ore and Coal mining town, with the possibility of future disaster!

 

One of the city sites near Atlas Park was originally called Cottonwood Forest, and has large ore and coal holdings.  The location itself is hilly, sitting on 2 tiers of land.  The lower tier sits on the water and has 2 large ore deposits, while the upper tier has coal.  Here's the ore map:

 

 

 

 

And here's the map of my coal deposits:

 

 

 

 

As you can see, these deposits take up a HUGE amount of space on my map.  Mining for both of these resources at the same time will make zoning for residential pretty tough.  I could go with JUST Ore, or JUST Coal, but I think I want to take on the challenge of mining both at the same time.  This means my miners are going to have to get used to living in close quarters.

 

On mining and oil towns, I like to rope off my resources early on, so I have a clear idea of what land will be used for mines, manufacturing, etc., vs. where people will live and shop.  It looks like the best residential portions will be on the left side of the map, near the water, and on the bottom-right of the map.

 

 

Big Mistake!

 

My very first move in my new city involved me making a classic rookie mistake -- laying down roads without thinking things through first.  I decided to lay an avenue straight through the middle of the map, as the far end of the map had access to the upper tier (cliffs), where my coal mining operation would eventually grow.  My assumption was that the avenue would be flat until it got to the hill, then rise upward.  I plopped the avenue down and was surprised to see an almost full map-length of overpass, rising gradually from near my regional access all the way to the back of the property!  Overpasses this long are extremely expensive (it cost me almost all my start-up money!) AND I had a single road that allowed for almost no zoning along it! (Hard to zone when the avenue is 20 feet in the air).  Oops!

 

 

The center avenue right in the middle of the map is what I'm talking about.  Below is a closer view of the overpass, taken from a little later in the game:

 

 

 

What a massive undertaking for some civil engineers!

 

Well, SimCity is very forgiving, especially early-on in a city's life, so I was able to adapt.  (I want to build my cities without gifts from other cities, so that's a restriction I've placed on myself.)  I quickly laid out some roads close to the entrance to my city, zoned them, and started my build,  What I've since found, though, is that I was consistently short of cash in the early going.  I'm not sure if it's because I started myself in a hole (ironic, given my city's name) or because I was trying to build too fast, but this was a more challenging build that Atlas Park so far.

 

Mining and Oil towns make me nervous, as they seem to run out of resources very quickly.  When I play these maps, I always feel like I'm under a deadline to get things accomplished as quickly as possible, before I run out of time and raw materials.  Because of this, I tend to take a much more pragmatic approach to Mining cities; less art and more science.  Here's my list of "to-do" items:

 

1. build wind power, sewer outflow, and water tower right away

2. replace with coal plant ($27k), sewer plant ($64k), and water plant ($44k) as soon as possible

3. build first ore mine and trade depot to start generating extra funds (ore is closer to city entrance)

4. build fire department to get that "fireworks" optional mission.  Sure, it burns down a bunch of your Sims' houses, but you get $50k really fast!

5. add clinic and police only when you definitely must (too many deaths, crimewave)

6. build first coal mine

7. build Metals HQ when you've mined enough

8. add 2nd ore and 2nd coal mines in order to get Smelting add-on to the HQ

9. build smelting plant, then a 2nd one

10. collect profits

 

Here's my town in the early stage (Step 3).  I've placed my sewer system and coal plant in the top right corner (down-wind) and have just built my first ore mine and trade depot near the front of the map.  The $5k this raw ore brings in is really helpful early in the game.

 

 

 

Here I am at Step 6, with my first coal mine added near the back of the property:

 

 

 

As you can see, my workers live up front on the property, and along the left side.  I had to upgrade my roads to medium density earlier than I usually do, at a population of 8000, in order to boost my population.  It looks like this will be a tough one, as I keep running out of workers to fill jobs.

 

Once I hit about 30k residents, I was able to build my second ore and coal mines and upgrade to the smelting plant.  Here we go:

 

 

Success!  Now the money should start rolling in!  I added a 2nd plant very quickly after, and my money problems dropped, as I hit $750k in the bank.  Then, "a visitor"!

 

 

 

Wow, he managed to take out both my Metals HQ AND my smelting plant!  Back to the old drawing board.... 

 

Once things stabilized, I decided to revisit Atlas Park, as I now had plenty of potential tourists for my Tourism city.  I added the Expo Center as well as my first Landmark, the Washington Monument, right in front of my City Hall.  This turned out looking awesome, and exactly the way I'd hoped it would.  Take a look:

 

 

 

You can see the Expo Center in the back, right at the end of my avenue that gives direct access to my city entrance, and next door to my train station.

 

I also placed 2 $$$ plazas next to my Washington Monument.  The commercial district LOVED that.  Look at those skyscrapers!  Beautiful!

 

Right away, though, they started squawking about taxes.  I didn't have the Finance add-on the City Hall, though, so I went over to The Hollows and added it to my City Hall there.  It doesn't make any sense to do this (the Finance add-on in a Mining city), but I needed it, and I could add it immediately there, so there you go.  I'll definitely change this later, though.  Also, rich people sure are picky.  Those high-wealth commercial buildings keep replacing themselves, as the owners are really happy with all their profits one minute, and complaining about lack of shoppers the next.  I may have jumped the gun in going to high-wealth so quickly.

 

My first 2 Expo events were complete sell-outs.  I paid a lot of attention to my traffic patterns during the events, and was pleased to see that my road system worked well.  Here's something that should be obvious, but I missed:  Bus Depots travel within a city, but it takes a Bus Terminal to travel between cities.  Duh!  I think I'll need to adjust both cities for this piece of new knowledge (discovered while watching how The Hollows residents traveled to Atlas Park-and how they did not).

 

My next step will be to let The Hollows percolate for awhile.  I want to get my population there up some more and build up my profits, too.  Then, I can work on some quality of life issues for the people living there.  I have an elementary school for their children, but I think I can make their tough mining lives a little nicer with some parks and other amenities.  I'll play with that somewhat before moving on to my next city in the region.

[Gregg247 0]

The Hollows - I continued to work on this city and managed to achieve a stable population of 71k happy Sims, working away at the Mines and coming home to parks, shopping, and a library.  I'm making $4k/hour profit, plus all the profits from my mining and smelting, so The Hollows is chugging away nicely, much better than I thought it would have in the early going.  I've decided to not add more mines to the vast empty spots situated over my coal and ore deposits.  Rather, I'll use these deposits as replacements when my current mines get tapped out.

 

Atlas Park - This turned into a real ordeal!  At my last posting, the city was incredibly profitable and humming along nicely.  I decided to "improve" things further by adding the Stadium for big events and the curvy Landmark building (Edificio Copan) to boost my population.  At that point, I had about 160k population.

 

I ran several daily Expo events with complete success, with tourists streaming all over my city, boosting revenues for businesses.  it didn't take long for almost all of my businesses to turn into hotels.  I did notice, though, that Sim tourists are real night-owls, and they do a lot of shopping at 3-4 in the morning.  The result was that the traffic didn't die down until well into the next day, interfering with school schedules and locals trying to go to work.  An Expo event every other day worked better.  I also found the Tourism overlay map to be very helpful here.  I could watch where my tourist went and what they did en masse, and was able to adjust my planning accordingly.

 

Then I tried the Stadium event.  This was a big success and a sell-out, but the traffic was terrible.  It took almost 24 hours to get everyone off the streets.  My commercial (hotels) loved it, but all my other Sims did not.  That's when I made my big mistake -- I thought that the best way to handle this increased traffic would be to get bigger roads.  I upped all my streets to high-density. 

 

First, my population exploded, as towers sprung up everywhere, and I suddenly had 241k residents!  Traffic became a 24 hour nightmare (even with no events scheduled).  My coal plants had a hard time getting coal shipments, garbage couldn't get picked up, schools were lightly attended, people couldn't get to work or stores.  Soon, I had a complete cascade failure.  My power plants went off-line, leading to no power, no water, no sewer, no fire protection, high crime, high unemployment......

 

I wish I'd thought to take a picture of this, but it all happened so fast!  I couldn't bulldoze abandoned building fast enough before more would empty out.  For some reason, though, as soon as I'd bulldoze one for "No Shoppers!", another would immediately spring up in its place.  That made no sense.  It seems like the cascade failure should have "self-regulated" by forcing my population down as unhappy Sims packed up and moved away and, in effect, fixing the problem of over-population itself.  That never happened here.  My population remained incredibly high, with traffic everywhere and buildings rising and falling like crazy.

 

My solution was simple:  I paused the game, downgraded all my streets back to mid-density, then bulldozed every large tower that wasn't facing my avenue.  This brought my population back down to about 162k, which then gradually rose to about 190k.  I kept attacking the large towers until they finally succumbed to my bulldozer and started building the pretty mid-rise apartments and condos that I'd had earlier.

 

This worked for the most part (traffic is still worse now than it was before the ordeal -- I'm not sure why), but at least the city is functioning again.  My informal "test" for this: classroom population in my elementary, high school, and community college.  If they're high, things are okay.

 

My only "bug" I have now relates to my garbage and recycling.  Recycling is slow and only does a fraction of what it used to do.  Garbage, on the other hand, started picking up 120% of all garbage cans in my city (!).  Now, though, they only pick up about 80%.  I watch the garbage overlay, and my trucks will work until about 11:30 in the morning, and then go back to their base for the day, despite the fact that some building still have trash to collect.  Weird.

 

Oh, I also bulldozed the Stadium and Edificio Copan.  Instead, I have some open land for future expansion.  I also added Willis Tower and Cinquanenaire Arch as my other 2 Landmarks.  These 2, plus the Washington Monument, all bring in steady income throughout the day, without the need for scheduling events or giant waves of sudden traffic.  I like this much better.  Despite all the problems, Atlas Park makes $22k/hour from regular operations, plus the huge Landmark daily profits, and any Expo event I want to schedule.  That's good enough for me!

 

Side note - I've built a 250k Sim city in this game before (a mining town) that had some traffic issues, but nothing like this.  My road set-up was very different from Atlas Park, though, so I think I know how to adjust for these traffic issues.  I have a plan to create a city called Perez Park later on in this region to test out my theory.

 

 

Founders Falls - This is my third city in my Paragon City Region.  In City of Heroes, FF was a large area on the water that had high wealth residents, a bustling downtown, a university, and -- did I mention a lot of water?  There's a city in this region originally called Magnolia Wetlands that I decided to use for Founder Falls, my Education city.  This map is going to be a challenge, as there's so much water everywhere, that finding enough dry land to place zones will be tough.  Sounds perfect for a small, high-end college town.

 

Here's my basic layout for the city.  Look at all that water!

 

 

I bet that at low tide, this whole town smells funny!  Below is my zoning plan:

 

 

I REALLY like the layout here.  The main avenue goes straight up through a small commercial area, City Hall and residential on the left , then follows the contour of the land, over a bridge to the back of the property (lots of residential on the water), zig-zags a little (I did this for "flavor"), then goes to the small island in the back.  (I was planning on placing a nuclear Plant or 2 back here and selling excess power, but the island shape wasn't really conducive for that.)  Meanwhile, I used the windy road tool to have another road wind around and eventually meet up with my avenue.  I zoned my industrial along here, which is down-wind of the rest of the town.

 

As an education city, I wanted to start schools early, so here's the "first day of school".

 

 

City Hall is right in front of the future location of my University.

 

 

The back of the property has a decent amount of land, so I wanted to get some high-wealth people back here at some point.  Unfortunately, I may have laid my streets a little too close to the water on one side to maximize my population,  I wish we had access to the little grid system from SC4 for precisely measuring where roads should go!

 

 

 

Once I got some of the basics out of the way (power plant, water, and sewer upgrades, clinic, fire department, etc.), I had enough money to place the University.

 

 

 

It's not the grand, sweeping university spot that I'd envisioned, but with so little dry land here, I was happy with what I had.  Apparently, so were the Sims.  Here's a look at traffic as soon as the University opened for business.

 

 

These Sims have a thirst for learning (among other things in this swampy town).  In no time, the surrounding buildings responded.

 

 

I immediately added the Science and Engineering Schools so I could research clean power systems for the region.

 

Also a Note:  I boosted all my streets to medium-density early on in order to keep making profits so I could afford the University.  I added a bus depot, train station, and ferry boat, but street cars are a no-go here, as there's no section of my avenue that's straight enough or on a wide enough stretch of land to build the street car depot!  Oh well, I want this to be a small town anyway, so that's what I'll work towards keeping.

 

Here's a look at the city at the end on the play session:

 

 

All clean industry (except my coal power plant), tall commercial centers (very little space for commercial zoning) and room for plenty of high-wealth (I hope) residents.  I added the cruise ship terminal to try to induce rich people to visit and maybe stay.  So far, though, no one from The Hollows or Atlas Park seem interested in going to college, despite the fact that I've "visited" each a couple of times since the University opened.  Maybe that takes some time to synch up.

 

This city deserves some playtime to allow it to fully develop before moving on to my next city, so I'm going to concentrate on getting the details "right" here for awhile.

[Gregg247 0]

The Hollows - The city is doing well, with 78k residents and an approval rating of 79%.  I'm making an hourly profit of $4400 and my revenue from mining is rolling in, with $3.7mm to date.

 

Founders Falls - I've enjoyed playing this city the most, as I really like the way the city conforms to the weird environment.  I leveled off at around 28k residents (approval rating of 92%).  I have $7900/hour in profits and $1.9mm in the bank.  To save space, I'm utilizing Atlas Park's recycling trucks, and I'm happy to say that this is the first completely germ-free city I've made!  The University is currently researching clean coal technology in order to help keep my regional pollution down.

 

Atlas Park - I just can't resist tweaking my traffic situation here.  I have 180k residents, an 82% approval rating, $18,700/hour profit, plus all the money I make from my 3 Landmarks and the Expo Center.  However, I hate how an Expo event completely floods my city with wall-to-wall traffic.  My latest idea was to segregate the bulk of my residents from the tourism traffic.  Here's what I did:

 

 

 

The entrance to my city in on the bottom left.  The rest of the bottom of the map are my residents (middle) and industry jobs (right).  I dead-ended most of my streets to the residents so as to isolate them from the rest of the map.  There are only 3 entrances to these residential areas now, one across from City Hall and the other 2 facing all my industry on the right.  This keeps all my tourists at the top of the map.

 

After some test runs, I found that this works well.  I can run an Expo event and the traffic in my neighborhoods isn't really affected.  Previously, an Expo event would prevent students from reaching school and residents from getting to work the next day (about 12 hours of game time).  Now, that's largely over.  I have some traffic for residents getting around during rush hour, but it doesn't last long.  I'm able to get visitors out of town quickly at the end of the events.

 

it works, but it seems kind of weird - fixing traffic by deleting roads rather than expanding/fixing/adding roads to maximize efficiency.  This has been the most disappointing part of the game for me so far, as it seems like "real life solutions" to problems and "SimCity solutions" to problems are completely different. 

 

Steel Canyon - With my first 3 cities coasting along, I decided it was time to go to work on the 4th city in this regional cluster, Steel Canyon, on the site in Discovery Delta that was originally called Willow Woods.  In City of Heroes, Steel Canyon was the shining, sleek, big city portion of Paragon City, with lots of high-rises and populated by captains of industry.  My SimCity version of Steel Canyon will hopefully be the same, so I'm specializing in Electronics.

 

I like the Electronics specialization, as the steps for creating an Electronics city are pretty straight-forward:

 

1. get education in the city (community college and/or University)

2. build trade depot to import alloy and plastic

3. build processor factory

4. build trade depot to sell processors

5. use profits to build 2nd, 3rd processor factory

6. sell enough to qualify for the Consumer Electronics HQ update

7. build 1, then 2, then more electronics factories

8. sell TVs and computers for BIG profits

 

You can make a beautiful, artful city when specializing in Electronics, but you really need to maximize your usable space for all these factories if you want to make some real money.  Here's how I started my city:

 

 

This map has some nice water features to it, perfect for residents.  Plus, the wind is blowing "down", towards the regional freeway, so I'll place residents at the top and all my industry and factories at the bottom.  I also thought I'd go with a big middle space within my avenue loop.  I couldn't decide if I would fill this space with residents/commercial or with more factories, so I left it empty for the time being.  Here's my early zoning:

 

 

 

I'm placing my coal power plant, my sewer treatment facility, my trash dump, and all my factories along the bottom on long straight roads that run parallel to each other.  I also want to keep these blocks wide enough to hold my processor and electronics factories (I've been burned before my making my blocks too narrow).

 

I also decided to place my trade depots close to my entrance to avoid traffic issues.  For education, I went with a elementary school, followed quickly by the community college in order to boost my industry to the next level (a requirement for building processor plants).  Here's a shot of my first processor plants coming on-line:

 

 

As you can see, I've got them over on the right, near a lot of empty space that I'm reserving for more factories.  I also have my avenue loop completed in this picture, and I've already upgraded all my streets to medium density.  I had a surprising problem with traffic early on with this map.  Even at just 4000 residents, my roads were getting backed up.  I\It turns out that even though my other 3 cities have no unemployment and, in fact, have thousands of unfilled jobs, their residents would just drive into Steel Canyon looking for work, then u-turning and leaving again.  It really messed up my map and I couldn't figure out what to do.  This isn't a tourist town, and I have no real attractions for anyone to see, yet I still attract a lot of visitors for some reason!

 

Here's what happened next:

 

 

It took 3 processor factories to finally sell enough to qualify for the Consumer Electronics add-on to my Electronics HQ.  I added 3 TV/computer factories in the bottom right corner of the map and I also bought the trade port option from the Trade HQ.  This gave me a lot of storage for my goods, plus it allows me to sell them via trucks, ships, and trains.

 

In the meantime, the limited residential that I "temporarily" placed in the empty area within my avenue loop really blossomed, to the point where I thought it would be a shame to tear it all down just to add more factories.  Plus, I'm having a hard time filling jobs, even though I have 100k+ residents now.

 

 

Here's Steel Canyon from a different angle.  Although I hadn't originally planned on it, I had to add a University to this city.  My industry started complaining that there were too few skilled workers, and even though all my education overlays showed a highly educated workforce, and I had even expanded my community college, it just wasn't enough for these picky Sims.  I plopped this University down (with no dorms or any other frills) and that did the trick.  Wow, look how nice those towers in the middle of the map look!  I like this view quite a bit, to be honest.

 

Here's the map from another angle:

 

 

This shows that I've still got some room for growth.  At this point, I need to find a way to fill some of those jobs that exist in my city, but without filling up my roads to an unreasonable level.  Also, its about time that I do some decorating with parks and exercise areas.  I'm losing a good bit of money each hour from basically running the city, but my electronics profits make up for this MANY times over.  Plus, unlike mining or drilling, these profits are evergreen!

 

My next goal will be to start the Arcology Great Work (unless I get that bug where not all your cities can synch up with it properly).

[Gregg247 0]

I started the Arcology Great Work (and managed to synch it up with all 4 of my cities!) and used Steel Canyon for the 60,000 TV contribution and The Hollows for the 1000 Alloy and 2800 Metal contributions.  It was during the "hang around and wait" period for the contributions to (slowly) make their way to the jobsite that I experienced a rollercoaster ride of events in The Hollows.

 

As noted previously, The Hollows was sitting with a nice, stable 78k population, steady profits, and zero traffic.  I had had to boost my street densities to high-density in order to pack as many workers as I could in such a small space (most land is used for mining).  My population was clamoring for more schools, so I felt sorry for them and plopped down a community college at about the same time that I started contributing to the Arcology.

 

I don't know what happened, but my traffic started turning yellow/orange/red and my population took off!  I went from 78k to 99k to 120k to 135k to 145k to 165k in a matter of minutes.  The Sims driving around town were all now working at the Great Works site or were coming from my other cities, looking for work.  I started re-aligning roads in order to lessen the traffic tie-ups, but to no avail.  Soon, I had the classic cascade failure of over-used power plant, water and sewer shutdown, fires all over the city, delivery trucks stuck in gridlock, skyrocketing crime, etc.

 

I shut down my community college, but it was too late.  The regional highway outside my city was backed up for miles with Sims trying to get into town.  I finally decided to try the old Democratic strategy of taxing the you-know-what out of everybody.  Even boosted taxes couldn't stop the growth.  I hit 190k residents by the time I set my tax rates at 17%.  Finally, this did the trick, and my population started dropping, resting at 140k, but with citizens REALLY angry with me. 

Then, I downgraded all my streets back to medium density (note to self - NEVER use high density roads again!) and bulldozed every tower I had.  Here's the immediate aftermath:

 

 

 

Once my population dropped down to 58k, I dropped my taxes back down (13% for $, 11% for $$ Res and Com, 14% for $$ Ind, 11% for $$$).  I set a high tax for $$ Industry because every time I got a $$ factory to pop up, they'd immediately complain about low skilled workers, and I got fed up with them!  Smoke stacks for me in this city! LOL

 

The city started to quickly recover, and soon looked like this:

 

 

Not bad.  My expenses were high due to the fact that I'd replaced my small police, fire, and medical buildings with the bigger options.  Eventually, my population recovered enough to put me back in the black.

 

It took a long time, but the Arcology was finally finished.  Here are a couple of regional pictures:

 

 

 

 

 

Overall, I'm very happy with Paragon City so far!  Here are the stats for my 4 cities at this point:

 

 

Atlas Park - Tourism/Government; 175k population; 79% approval rating; $20k/hour profit; $23.1mm cash;

 

The Hollows - Mining; 92k population; 93% approval rating; $2500/hour profit; $21.4mm cash;

 

Founders Falls - Education; 27k population; 94% approval rating; $6600/hour profit; $2.7mm cash;

 

Steel Canyon - Electronics; 77k population; 87% approval rating; ($12.3k/hour) loss; $22.7mm cash

 

My next step will be to start another cluster within this same region.  I'm not sure which one I'll go with next, although I've put together preliminary plans for all the available cities in the region. 

 

I hope anyone interested in SimCity has enjoyed reading these posts and has learned from my (many) mistakes while building these cities.  My favorite part of this game (as well as all previous versions of SimCity) is the design, development, and growth of cities.  I love urban economics, and this game really delivers on that!

[Benedict 3,119]

Some great posts here!