The Development of Leicester County - Update No. 2 - Power Infrastructure

[Sabretooth78 808]

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Overview:

Welcome to the follow-up to my ill-fated DeWitt County region. In this City Journal I hope to pick up where that endeavor failed and document the development of this sprawling region from virgin forest to, well, wherever the development takes it. Ideally, it will feature of healthy mix of big city, small towns, agricultural communities and everything in between.

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Index of Updates:

1. [2015-03-25] Teasers
   1. [2015-03-29] Addendum No. 1
   2. [2015-04-06] Addendum No. 2
   3. [2015-04-24] Addendum No. 3
2. [2015-06-01] Power Infrastructure

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Terrain Map:

Leicester County is based on drunkapple's beautiful Bris Vegas map with a few modifications. Sprawling over 6,048 square kilometers (2,335 square miles), or 84 small tiles wide by 72 small tiles high in SC4 parlance, the map covers nearly 25 million cells for the bean counters out there. Granted, much of the eastern half of the map is underwater and the northwestern corner is rugged, but the develop-able land area of the map alone still dwarfs most entire regions available on the STEX.

Note that this map is saved from wouanagaine's SC4Mapper utility. Typically, I would use Sawtooth's Region Census to prepare regional images for community consumption, but guess what - the region crashes Region Census because it is too big! Actually, it crashed under Windows but would run under Wine before I initialized and forested the tiles; however, after doing so it now crashes in both. Oh well, I'll just have to find more creative ways to capture the information that utility provided.

Click through to view full-size

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Municipal Divisions:

Upon optimizing the region configuration to the landmasses, the region consists of a total of 447 game tiles. 297 tiles feature developable land, with all but a handful of those being large. Municipalities typically consist of blocks of 4 large tiles. Municipal boundaries typically follow the centerline of cell row 0 for northern quadrants and the centerline of cell column 0 for western quadrants. A major exception to this rule occurs along the southernmost row of municipalities, in which case the southern boundary follows the centerline of cell row 255 for southern quadrants. Hence, the southernmost municipalities are 1 cell shorter than the typical size.

To mitigate the absence of Region Census output and because the Street Map which follows is too unwieldy to get a good handle on it, I've created the following map to show the spatial relationships of the municipalities of the County.

Click through to view full-size

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County Street Map:

Continuing in the style of DeWitt County, the following is the street map of Leicester County. This map will be updated more or less continuously as I develop the region - not only is it pretty, but it's actually a real handy tool to keep a region-wide perspective while developing individual tiles.

Note that due to the sheer size of the map (if stitched together it would comprise a 21,504 x 18,432 pixel jpeg), I've added a municipality selector which will typically place the center of the selected municipality at the upper left corner of the map viewer frame.

Feel free to use the zoom function of your browser (typically [ctrl] + [-]) to view a wider area; however, be advised that doing so may cause small gaps to appear between the individual map tiles due to scaling and rounding errors beyond my control as not all of the tile edges are collinear.

Click here to open the Street Map in a new window.

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Regional Statistics:

Total Population...............0

Top 5 Cities (by Tile):

1. 68 Tied.....................0
2. n/a.........................0
3. n/a.........................0
4. n/a.........................0
5. n/a.........................0

[MushyMushy 3,617]

Looks promising! That's a nice terrain map to build on as well.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

I'll be looking forward to seeing where you take this.

[Ronnix 1]

Very interesting. I am looking forward to see your project development!

[Benedict 3,119]

Really looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

[Sabretooth78 808]

Thanks for the interest!

I'm really looking forward to moving on this myself.  Unfortunately, I've hit two snags in getting started.  Good problems to have, actually.  The first is that I just bought Cities: Skylines so I have that new toy to play with.  The second is that this region is so huge that I'm having a little trouble deciding exactly how and where to start it off!

It's not going to be like DeWitt County wherein I tried to have the environment all set up before building towns.  By environment I mean in particular setting up all the plop water and agriculture.  It took too long with that map and if I were to do it on this one it would probably take me until 2018.  There are definitely some water features I'm going to change, for instance there's a tributary to the main river in the southwestern corner of the map which exists as pretty much just a chain of small potholes.  There are also some lakes that were apparently forced in and are basically just big potholes.  So there will be changes; they're just going to happen as I get to them.

Another thing that's different with this region vs. past ones I've run is loading time.  The game loads super fast now that I have it running off a SSD, and after the initial tile load of a session (which always take the longest), second and later loads of an empty large tile take only about 5 seconds.  Now, it's exiting to the region that takes all the time - 17 seconds as I've timed it.  It doesn't sound like a lot, but it feels like forever. That's just how big this thing is.

Anyway, I hope to have an update up within a week's time.  I'm planning on getting at least some things started this weekend, C:S notwithstanding.  It's looking as though I'm going to have 2 separate games to enjoy about equally.

[RipRap 4,400]

I like where this is heading, and don't worry about the audience. We are patient , spend your time as you wish

[TekindusT 3,809]

That's a massive map for a massive to be CJ!

[Vitoraju 675]

Interesting project, looking forward to the next update.

[Sabretooth78 808]

MushyMushy - It is an excellent map, once you get past the sheer size of the thing.  Hopefully it'll last me a good long time.  SC4 is a great game and all, but sometimes starting up a new region can be a chore.

NMUSpidey, Ronnix, Benedict - In general, it should be somewhat of a parallel to DeWitt County, just maybe a little more...let's say chronologically discontinuous.  Keeping this whole map up on a consistent level of development is probably pretty well impossible - certainly for a non-group endeavor anyway.

Tonraq - For sure.  Anybody who followed my last CJ had to learn to put up with excessive time between updates.  

TekindusT - Let's hope it becomes that!

Vitor13 - Wait no longer!

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Despite things being quiet on this front, I have been busy with the map, mostly doing some preliminary planning and infrastructure seeding.  I'm still not quite sure exactly where I want to place the initial settlement (I have a broad idea as you'll see) but I figure there are some things I still want to get addressed before choosing and acting on it.  For instance, rail is a heck of a lot easier to lay out on a clean slate (similar to how most rail lines in the US and Canada were laid out); roads and power line corridors sort of fall under that umbrella as well.  Once I get a good amount of this done I'll a.) get tired of doing it and just jump into city building and b.) the layout itself will probably reveal where to start.

I've also taken a few days to rebuild and improve my DAMN menus.  I didn't do that while I was rebuilding my plugins suite last autumn and to be honest was sort of dreading the eventuality of it.  Nevertheless, I sucked it up and did it and I think it's a much better setup than what I had.

Finally, I've been roughly alternating days between this and Cities: Skylines, so there's that.  One of the things I enjoy most about it is while the games are so similar in some aspects, they don't really compete for time because they fill different niches.

So to tide things over for a little, here's a small teaser of an update.  In the absence of a functioning Region Census, here's a shot of about half of the total area I've done so far.  It might look tempting, but that's not a RHW snaking its way along the waterfront.  There will be a time and place for that in the future - maybe not so far in the future, either.

What it is, is quad-track RRW.  No, not the kind that's under development for some future NAM release, I wish.  This scene is along the waterfront in southeastern Geddes, looking north.  The plan right now is to get the first of what will probably be a mess of power plants and heavy industry in this area.  One problem I think I might have is that I've sort of FA-ed my way into a corner with this road and rail layout.  But then again, what good is a city builder without a little problem solving?  Also note that unlike my past journal, I haven't done away with the shallow Maxis water (which I've always found a bit ugly) in favor of plop water, not yet anyway.  I do expect to use it at least strategically - like say up to tile borders - to try and minimize the visible transitions between the two.  But for now, it stays.

Here's a close-up (from the northeast) of the big bridge visible in the satellite picture above.  I went through the trouble of building the bridge up to a 30 meter height to accommodate ferries only to remember that diagonal bridges don't permit ferry passage.  But at least it looks like it could!  To be honest I don't think there's much of a prospect that I'd run a river ferry anyway - certainly not one along the river for any significant length.

Well, that's it for now.  I haven't updated the street map yet since there's so much changing at the moment.  Maybe next time I'll have a village or two to show!

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

Diagonal bridges and grid-busting weird angles!  

[RipRap 4,400]

Diagonal Bridges! I would want to know how to use them, but yeah, it's difficulty drives my nerves

[cmdp123789 710]

It looks really good! Can't wait to see more!

Btw, diagonal bridges are not hard.. And you can even have FA bridges if you want.. Just saying

[Sabretooth78 808]

NMUSpidey - Especially now that we have Cities:Skylines, is there any other way?

Tonraq - They are pretty easy, actually, with the Diagonal Bridge Enabler.  There are still some quirks in getting them to work properly, though.  Well worth it in my opinion; the ability of not having to be forced to cross water orthogonally is priceless.

cmdp123789 - Not the big update we're all waiting for, but here's a little more to hold us over.

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As an addendum to Update No. 1, here are a few more teasers to show what I've been working on this week.  It may not look like a lot, but there has been a fair amount of time sunk into it - I didn't even play Cities: Skylines this week!

Here's a snapshot from the satellite view; this time covering an area shifted slightly north from that shown in the original update.  More rails have been placed and the cleared power line right of ways are clearly visible.  That's something I haven't seen a lot of in other City Journals; even I only barely scratched the surface of it with DeWitt County.  Look for the more major power corridors to keep some permanence in the development going forward, even if in a game sense it has no practical use.

Notice also that a power plant has been placed; what you don't see is that it's powering 13 city tiles.  Development is imminent!  It's far easier to set up power deals before you actually have real demand.

Allow me to be the first to say that FA rail can be a complete pain to get to look right on grades.  That's not to say I didn't quickly figure out a system to doing it, but it's still a bit tedious and it takes some time.  That said, it's worth it because it looks great.  Let's hope a future NAM release features the return of dragable FARR - though it'll be too late to provide me much benefit for this region.

You'll also notice a fat rail corridor to the top of the satellite picture, and that would be this:

This is the K&S mainline over the Iselin River from the northeast.  Did I ever say constructing a bridge with a tall embankment so close to the edge of a tile was easy?  I also don't expect the region to ever physically generate enough demand for heavy rail to require a 6 track section, but this location is a bit of a choke point and in real life this is what you'd probably see here.  That, and it looks cool; just too bad the bridges can't be directly adjacent.  Failing that, I did put the s-curves at the top of the embankment to help slim that down a little.  (Lifehack:  if you're looking for a good time on a Friday night, try putting down some FAHTR.  That's Fractional Angle Hex-Track Rail.  You might as well just flatten your map.)

I've also pushed an update to the first several tiles on the Leicester County Street Map today - all in this general area.  You can either go scrolling the vast expanses of the map looking for it, or zoom to Geddes or Roxbury in the drop down selector.  Don't yell at me for the disjointed road network!

That's all for now; I'm going to spend the rest of my free time this evening getting my Skylines fix!

[cmdp123789 710]

Well.. looks good, and trust me, working on simcity always takes a lot of time.. especially when you have a good looking result like the one above.. we are patient people haha! Keep it up buddy, I like the progress, and I see a good future for this project of yours.

[Sabretooth78 808]

cmdp123789 - Just a little more patience...

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Just to make sure I've squeezed every bit of potential out of this teaser thing I've got going on, here are a few more.  I've got something like 25 tiles "initialized", so-to-speak so I'm just about ready to settle down and start zoning some farms and villages.  I'll still be spending time expanding the road grid and mapping outwards a little at a time, but getting a good core going definitely takes the most time.  Check out the Street Map to see where the progress has been made - it's effectively up-to-date with the region save for some railroading out closer to the edges.  Also note that there is now a much less disjointed arterial road scheme happening.

Enough of the boring stuff, on with some pictures.  As you're no doubt aware by now, I'm becoming more and more of a fan of diagonals and FA networks by the minute.  Here's a representative sample of what we've got going on, just ready to be converted from forest to farmland:

It seems I really like cutting rural arterials diagonally across an otherwise perfect local road grid...

Continuing some more on the theme of grid-busting and roadgeekery - the latter of which being something that should prove to be almost a canon to this City Journal, here's a particular configuration I'm not sure I've seen done elsewhere.  Don't you just hate it when they don't give you enough room to land those darned bridges?

I spent a good hour at least trying to get that on-slope diagonal to work (and it still doesn't look right but I think it's just a limitation inherent to the puzzle pieces) and then I had trouble grading the loop before I realized "duh, I don't have to use the smooth slope mod for everything" - especially since curves do a good job policing their slopes regardless what you do or don't have installed.  While it is quite tall looking (another faux ferry-passing bridge), I rather like it.  It's smooth enough to look good, but just tight enough to become a hazard once it starts nearing capacity.  It may also be the one time anybody ever wished there was a set of 22.5 m overpass puzzle pieces!

[Schulmanator 5,787]

Interesting... looking forward to it.

[bakercity 270]

Not to shabby if I say so. I have to agree with Schulmanator in saying interesting.     JKB

[Sabretooth78 808]

Schulmanator & bakercity - Thanks!

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I promised myself I would wait until I had a real update but I figured I would post some shots to prove this thing is still alive and I haven't been lost to Cities:Skylines.  Not teasers so much as progress shots.  It seems I'm avoiding zoning - you'll note I said earlier that there would be some adventures in plop water over time; well the time for some of it is now.

There are a couple of reservoirs near the middle of the map that just didn't look right with Maxis water, mostly due to the steep slopes because in real life, well they don't sit at sea level.  Since they lie close to where I intend to start building and are therefore somewhat in the way of my preliminary road layouts, I figured I might as well start fixing them.

As you can see, I'm pretty far along - really the biggest thing remaining is updating the lakes' representation on the Street Map, especially since I can't use Region Census.  I'm figuring it's going to involve road stubs, around the perimeter, a transportation map dump, and an exit without saving.

Here's a closer-in shot:

A trick I've found to help doing this is to use the BLaM Sea Level Mod.  What I did was do a little surveying with the terrainquery cheat to figure out what the elevation should be and then edit one of the mod files to set the sea level to that elevation.  The leveling and plopping is still tedious, but at least it's easier to keep everything on that desired elevation.

Hopefully I'll get these things far enough this weekend to be able to start doing some real building and eventually show what I have planned for these lakes.

[Kim Sunwoo 817]

Lovely region. Looking forward to see some development soon

[cmdp123789 710]

Looking good! I like the effect of the MMP water.. although I always had trouble when trying to blend it with real water.. Never get the result I want.

[Sabretooth78 808]

Kim Sunwoo - Thank you!  It's been a long time coming, but it's almost there...

cmdp123789 - It's tricky.  I played around with it extensively in DeWitt County and for the most part it was ok.  It's perhaps the biggest reason why I stick with the Brigantine water mod, although it's certainly good enough to hang onto regardless.  This time around, however, I think I'm going to keep those terminations to areas where a transition isn't needed, such as tile edges, dams, etc.

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As if to prove I'm still alive, without further ado...

It's been quiet in the journal, but a lot has been happening in Leicester County.  If you've been following the Street Map, you'll notice that the reaches of map have been steadily growing, enough such that a full-height column down the middle of the region is nearly laid out.  No residents yet, but there has been the first hints of development.  I've laid out enough infrastructure so far to lay the seeds for 3 or 4 good urban cores - a region this large can easily handle a few respectable size cities.  For now, however, we'll be mirroring the development course of DeWitt County by filling out the agricultural aspects around those soon-to-be seeds of civilization.

With DeWitt County, I was always conscious to avoid laying farms out on slopes - I generally wouldn't carry any fields past grade breaks where the elevation would change 3-4 meters in a tile.  This time around, I'm still following that but applying a practice of "less is more".  There will be more woodlots, shelter belts and "imaginary" stream valleys.  Imaginary in the sense that I'm not going to plop water throughout most if any of them, but topographically speaking areas which would be expected to contain some kind of stream.

One of the features where it helps to pre-plan is power infrastructure.  I'm not a fan of every city producing their own utilities (power in particular) so in practice I try to have a few core power plant areas and then share the wealth.  The problem with this is that neighbor deals, especially power deals, in SC4 can be very finicky when considering developed cities so I prefer to get those initiated as early as possible.  So far, so good.  Below is the initial power station, a large coal power plant in Geddes.

So far, this plant feeds 16 tiles.  When it maxes out, I'll probably just build another one next to it!  It can get quite expensive in the farther flung service territories, so you can't go crazy with it.

Next up is the Nikola Tesla Dam; my first attempt at a hydropower project.  This primarily earthen dam impounds the Iselin River in Zelienople, forming Lake Tesla - the larger of the two lakes featured in a previous update.  Oh, and the road over the dam is Tesla Highway, for good measure.

Here are some of the behind-the-scenes to all this planning.  With a region so large, I quickly started losing track of where my power lines were running, so guess what I decided to do - create another map!  Here's my power line schematic, which will also give you an indication of how many tiles I've laid out.  You can't see it here because it's just a low-res dump, but it also depicts whether the lines are single, double or triple.

Finally, here's the current look of the power deal spreadsheet - basically the same as the one I had featured for DeWitt County.

Gotta get those colored blobs to meet up!

[Linoa06 1,374]

I wasn't aware my city had a massive bay next to it, would save the two hour drive XD

 

Pretty lovely updates and pictures anyway interesting way to plan out your region's layout too. 

 

How did you get to do the online map by the way? I could use that for my own CJ, it really seems awesome and allowing for a lot of detail!

[Benedict 3,119]

Tremendous work here, both on the region itself as well as the amazing graphic.

[RipRap 4,400]

These looks great! I really want to see the development being implemented after that d got built.

[TakemeThere 5,833]

Taking a closer look at that map it looks like your region is 21 x 18 large sized maps which comes out to... 6048sq/km!?
That is one massive region. I have to give you kudo's for just trying to undertake such a thing

[Sabretooth78 808]

Linoa06 - I developed the online map using Packerfan's tutorials and added a few of my own customizations.  The tutorials are available both here on ST and also on SC4D.  As I recall, the SC4D version seemed to be missing fewer pictures.  Basically, you're just creating an HTML file that consists of a big table stitching the individual per-tile image files together.

Benedict - Thanks!  The graphics are quite helpful for keeping things consistent across tile edges.

Tonraq - Well, I thought I was going to be able to get into some real development today, but...

takemethere - Yeah, that's what it is!  Ideally, I won't have to work another region again.  I don't see why this one can't provide me enough to do for some time to come.  Although...

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I was hoping to have something actually development-wise to show, but I've hit a few snags.

The first and minor one was that I "discovered" another plop water lake towards the southwestern corner of the map in Vincennes.  I was adding squares to the terrain map when I found the suspiciously flat looking area between a pair of ridges and viewing the real world terrain in Google Maps proved me right - so we now have another plop water lake and potential hydropower source.

The second and hopefully minor one is that I've decided to cull my growable agricultural plugins down to just SPAM and dependencies.  I had been running with selected BSC and JMyers farms for added variety but I've come to the conclusion that SPAM provides enough on its own and less is more.  I'm also convinced that some of my prop pox issues in DeWitt County were ag-related although I can't prove it and I don't feel like going back to it.  Fortunately I had only developed 19 tiles, so aside from the issues mentioned below, it was a fairly painless operation and I believe I've deleted all traces of the non-SPAM farms.  Hopefully this doesn't bite me in the rear some time down the line (if it does, I've kept a legacy plugin DAT handy).

The third and major one is an instability that seems to have been slowly cropping up over time and has really reached a head today.  I think the region is just too big for the game to handle - while it has always taken a little while upon loading or exiting to the region, lately it'll just bomb out after saving cities or hang on loading.  It doesn't seem to be affecting actual mayor mode play in the slightest - it's just annoying that sessions are basically becoming one-and-out.  I think the solution to this issue is to break the region up into 2 or 3 smaller pieces.  There's a clean horizontal break line 8 tiles down from the top, and a nearly clean vertical break 5 tiles in from the right (it would only require breaking up a large water tile into mediums).

There are only a few snags I can think of inherent to this course of action...

1. Power deals which cross the line will have to be reconfigured.
2. Development across the new region-line will be affected by differing regional stats, although I'm not expecting that to be a huge hang-up.
3. Traffic patterns and commuting across that line will basically "hit a wall".
4. Time in switching between the two regions, although it should be faster than what I have to deal with currently.

In terms of the presentation of this City Journal, there shouldn't be any real changes.  It'll still be treated as one region for those purposes.  Who knows, I might even be able to use Region Census again!

[Benedict 3,119]

Hope the problems get resolved, because I really enjoy this CJ.

[Linoa06 1,374]

I do hope those issues get resolved. Pretty ambitious stuff!

[Sabretooth78 808]

Just figured I would drop in seeing as I haven't posted in a bit.  I haven't been doing much playing on account of, of all things, scratching an itch I've had lately to play Rollercoaster Tycoon.  But I'll be back with regular updates eventually!  Evidently I also need to fix the first post to meet the new forum format as well...

I've been able to (so far) keep the issues at bay by reverting back to my Wineskin version of SC4.  For whatever reason ("native" memory management perhaps?) it seems to be able to handle it better.  Who knows if that will continue as the region becomes more populated, or if I just haven't pushed it enough.  The issue running it under Windows seemed to pop up quite suddenly, if regional "population" means anything.  The only caveat is I need to manually throttle my laptop down to 1 CPU since the Wineskin option to do so automatically is apparently useless.

  Edited July 13, 2015 by Sabretooth78