Skyscrapers without NAM

[sfatimah 0]

Is it possible?? 

I cant install NAM because i still dont have the expansion rush hour yet..

[nygiants2007 0]

 Yeah it certainly is possible, as NAM only affects transportation.

[jmsepe 2,038]

Frankly, without NAM, skyscrapers tend to develop faster. Why? Simply because there is more traffic thus increasing customers influx. I tested this theory before, had a city where there a lot of tall buildings due to the accumulated traffic in the downtown when I added NAM, majority of the buildings became vacant as sims would tend to use alternative ways to their destination thus lowering commute time and traffic itself. I am not saying it is bad but NAM tends to be a little bit more bias with decentralization. 

[APSMS 1,892]

Keep in mind most mods on this site require the Rush Hour expansion or the Deluxe version, along with a patched game.

 

But like jmsepe said, skyscrapers are more than possible without the NAM; I had about a dozen cities running for around two years (real-time) before I realized you could mod the game.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

The most minimal installation that the NAM can do is just the Traffic Simulator and all of its transit station fixes. Technically you don't need anything else; it's just those two things, which are mandatory installations, that are responsible for the transportation improvement.

 

Everything else is just icing on the cake.

 

Though as mentioned, you require Rush Hour or Deluxe; practically everything on the STEX (or on any other exchange) requires Rush Hour or Deluxe.

[Tarkus 6,932]

Frankly, without NAM, skyscrapers tend to develop faster. Why? Simply because there is more traffic thus increasing customers influx. I tested this theory before, had a city where there a lot of tall buildings due to the accumulated traffic in the downtown when I added NAM, majority of the buildings became vacant as sims would tend to use alternative ways to their destination thus lowering commute time and traffic itself. I am not saying it is bad but NAM tends to be a little bit more bias with decentralization. 

 

It really depends on what NAM Traffic Simulator settings you use.  You can get some pretty drastically different experiences depending on the options you pick out on the Traffic Simulator Configuration Tool (TSCT).  There's a wide array of capacity settings available (some with less capacity than the Maxis defaults), and options for how likely sims are to use mass transit.

 

The biggest difference in the underlying behavior between the "vanilla" simulator and the NAM simulator is the pathfinding heuristic.  The algorithm Maxis used is a modified version of A*, and from what I know, its original operations during most of the development process were actually pretty similar to how the NAM traffic simulation behaves.  However, toward the end of the development cycle, they were forced to tune the simulator way down, in order to make the game playable on lower-end PCs, and in the process of that downtuning, the simulator basically lost its ability to calculate time cost differentials with different types of networks and relative congestion levels, effectively causing it to simply look for the shortest physical route.  I've seen the "vanilla" simulator do some remarkably stupid routings--like allowing huge amounts of traffic to clog up a Street, while the Highway that's a couple tiles away goes unused.

 

-Tarkus

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you have the original game, the NAM is irrelevant.  I ran that version for about a year before the Rush Hour expansion came out.  NAM is a traffic package and has nothing to do with buildings.