Region building style

[a.panda 10]

I am amazed to see how people building up big regions from zero, especially those huge regions with about a hundred city tiles. Do you usually build gradually on every tile so the region looks "growing together" in starting page showing the overview of a region, or do you finalise one specific tile (to skyscraper/million population/historic town centre etc) and move onto the neighbouring tiles?

[rsc204 21,836]

Good region growth requires many cities growing together to increase demand. Once you've got demand going well, new cities become easier to build.

I usually get a basic region going and then start to concentrate on individual cities. That way I can increase Res, Com or Ind in neighbouring towns to fulfil demand and keep the cycle going.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Generally, I start a new region with several small villages then start linking them with roads and rail.  As the connections go through, the demands propagate across the connected tiles, and the whole business becomes more integrated.  Here is one that I have had in the works for a few years:

Note that every tile is used.  The big one is the one on the lower left quadrant that is completely filled and it is unplayable on my machine now.

Started this region sometime in 2012.

[MintberryCrunch 83]

Generally, I start a new region with several small villages then start linking them with roads and rail.  As the connections go through, the demands propagate across the connected tiles, and the whole business becomes more integrated.  Here is one that I have had in the works for a few years:

PIC

Note that every tile is used.  The big one is the one on the lower left quadrant that is completely filled and it is unplayable on my machine now.

Started this region sometime in 2012.

That looks awesome What is that program your using to view the region? 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

The name of the progran is listed in the title bar - it's called "Region Census".

The way of growing you described - making it all grow slowly and gradually, slowly replacing farm fields with settlements etc., just in real life - is often called "natural growth". It can be very interesting and is realistic because it imitates the kind of growth we see in the real world. However, it takes a lot of time, and you don't have to build this way.

You can also have a fully occupied tile filled to the brim with skyscrapers, and an entirely undeveloped tile right next to it that you'll develop later. If you do it well, the final look can be as realistic as the look of a "natural growth" region, it just looks odd while it's in progress. On the plus side, this approach is faster.

Since your cities interact with each other (commuters drive to neighbouring cities to work, demand from neighbouring cities affects your current city), it is recommendable to cycle through the city tiles every once in a while and let each city run for a bit. In doing so, you give the simulator some time to update, adapt, adjust, and balance the simulation.

The first city is the hardest because in the first city, city demand equals region-wide demand. In later cities, demand generated by previous cities in the vicinity adds up to the demand of the city you're currently playing. Therefore, if you want to play smart, you don't struggle with creating a nice CBD first and add the suburbs later. It's a much smoother ride to make the suburbs first, build up demand, let education and health coverage slowly take effect, and then tackle the CBD. You'll have a much better starting position this way.

Another advantage of this is that you won't have to start with tiny houses first and develop the city all the way through to skyscrapers. If the city tile for your downtown-to-be is already surrounded by city tiles containing suburbs full of single-family homes, apartment blocks, smaller high-rises etc., you'll start with higher demand and at a higher development stage, meaning that the first building that grows on a given lot can already be a lot bigger than the most basic stuff. This will accelerate development.

  Edited September 30, 2015 by T Wrecks  

[MintberryCrunch 83]

Oh, thanks I guess I could've figured that out.

So to answer the question: When I started I didn't know anything about the game; I worked on one city and one city only. After a couple months I finally started a second one in the tile directly to the left of it. After that I realized it would be better to start more cities across the region, and that's what I did.

I frequently "cycle" through them, every time I play the game. I built up the freeway system, dedicated a couple centrally-located tiles to be the biggest cities (which they are) and then created suburban and farming-heavy cities around the fringes. This system has worked for me and all of my cities are doing pretty well. I basically divided my region into sub-regions. Each sub-region has a "capital" and then there are smaller cities around that capital. 

Here's a map of my region, which is just a copy of Timbuktu where I resized a few tiles. As you can see the "Midland" subregion is the most developed, along with Sutherland. The stuff around the fringes has work to be done on it, but I've at least started something. Astoria Gardens was the first city I created and is by far the oldest (I think the year is up to 95 on that one). 

 

[Sabretooth78 808]

I personally prefer what would be called "natural growth", taken a bit to the extreme.  I like to start with at least a core (or a few cores) of tiles with a basic grid of roads, rails and power deals (these can be tricky to set up later) and then seed these with agriculture before starting the first settlements.  Then I'll gradually grow these together until they fill the reasonably buildable area of the region.  In my last prior attempt, I actually seeded the whole [12 x 8 large tile] region with agriculture before zoning my first R & C.  According to Region Census, I had up to over 1.9 million agriculture jobs before beginning the settlements.

My current region is quite large - 21 x 18 "large" tiles - a big undertaking but it includes just about everything so I'm intending it to be my opus.  It's too tedious to fully seed out at once, but I have a good chunk of it going, enough so that the 3 or 4 starting points I selected have almost all become contiguous.  Right now it stands at only about 1,000 residents, but 1.2 million agriculture jobs.  I can't post a region shot as it actually crashes Region Census (I'm maintaining the totals manually in a spreadsheet) but if you want to get a taste for what it involves you can check out the street map link in my signature; check out the zoning "tab" and scroll to somewhere about in the middle of the map - it's quite large and the upper left corner that it initially loads is empty - and probably will be for some time.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

My current active region is just getting going along the seacoast edge.  At the moment, I am setting up heavy rail connections among the tiles and creating garbage deals.  I had a CTD the other day that wiped out one of the cities, so I am rebuilding it.  It was my fault, because I tried to force something improbable.  It's a small place, but it was the hub of a commuter loop and I was trying to fix it.  Wound up obliterating the tile, and starting it again.

One of the important features of this game is the Obliterate City command.  Removes everything except landscaping and neighbour connections.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

By the way, this region looks really good, MintberryCrunch! Although I cannot see the actual buildings in that transit view, it looks like you managed to make the transitions between city tiles rather seamlessly.

[MintberryCrunch 83]

By the way, this region looks really good, MintberryCrunch! Although I cannot see the actual buildings in that transit view, it looks like you managed to make the transitions between city tiles rather seamlessly.

Thanks! 

The transitions between city tiles are all pretty good except for between Viveros and Puerta Vista. Puerta Vista is a small town, mostly forest. Viveros is a huge metropolis. So on the satellite view it looks a little "abrupt". But the others are all pretty smooth. 

[SimCoug 5,973]

In my vanilla days I built up cities one by one but I tried to blend them into a greater region, so as to make a seamless region pic:

After I caught the custom content bug, I've focused more on a natural growth approach, and I don't see myself veering too far from that philosophy.

[a.panda 10]

Thanks everyone for inspiration and advice. I appreciate all your effort and I find that naturally growing the entire region is the best for me. However I decided not to take this approach too strictly and allow myself to grow towns of a couple thousand people per tile before moving onto the next, as I find myself pretty crap at maintaining a small community of few hundred people. So far the results look aesthetically enough (for a long time returner like myself) and demand comes quite easily once the first tile is made. 4 "done", two hundred or so to go...

[raynev1 1,886]

After many years of playing SC4 . It took much trial and error for me to figure out how to play regionally . Thanks to the community here at Simtropolis and reading many many forums . I now finally got the hang of it . You seem to be off to a good start  A.Panda . Welcome to Simtropolis .

[kschmidt 6,179]

Simcity 4 regional play is nothing more than ordering the zone´s correctly together. Within a zone all manufacturing must be located at the border with the big city so it goes there. Tax differences can be used to have a certain kind of community arround, zones with lower wealth should provide for heavy manufacturing. Clean zones have a higher tax rate so they can sustain institution like university´s, middle income is most present there. Heavy industrie are on the lowest level. Farming is quit static it isn´t gowing better or is absorbed into a neighbouring zone. Rich zones are for those who can afford this life style and are mostly the most beautifull parts of the region. The City is for anyone who can afford it, anybody else just have to commute. Travel corridors need to chosen with care not to disturbe  the chain of goods and people.

[citycowboy 183]

This was my first attempt at building a region, but its bogged down now because after building it I learned what the parameters were for the tiles and squares and felt it to be entirely too unrealistic. I focus a lot on building placement, not duplicating buildings, keeping similar heights even, not facing blank walls to the street, etc. It took me about six months to get this far, but I also got tired of all the suburb towns looking the same because they all use the same buildings. I think I can build about six towns, so I'm trying a much smaller city now, and I like to build downtown first, so that way the streets all line up the way I want them to first, and then web their way out from there. I'm also focusing a lot on producing a pretty picture and taking advantage of the region view angle. To me, this city seems drab.

[a.panda 10]

While I'm filling tiles with farms I found that the filesize of some land-locked city tiles shoots up to 40-something MB.

Will the file size go up even further when denser buildings are developed later, say, to the hundreds? If so I may have to replan the map as the total region size may be too big for my liking.

[rsc204 21,836]

Indeed the save files will only get larger as you place more items in each tile. 40MB, 200MB, who cares, this isn't 1995 when you'd be lucky to have a GB of storage. My biggest region is something like 125MB, but it's really not something you should need to worry about. The plugins folder for that region is over 4GB in size by comparison, almost always it's your plugins folder that will eclipse your save files. Personally I've something like 5TB usable space on my machine. Even a really basic machine should have more than sufficient space to cover SC4. If not, then you need to think about some extra storage, because Windows will likely be suffering from a lack of Virtual Memory.

[a.panda 10]

Thanks and my system is also capable to contain such large file, I only want to estimate how big the region would become 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you are running earlier versions of windows, be sure you defrag your Regions folder weekly.  City files do not only grow, but because of deficiencies in NTFS, frequent saves can cause these files to become multi-extent.  This can result in loss of entries in your master file table which loses disk space permanently or until the disk is fixed up using CHKDSK or FORMAT.

It always pays to run disk cleanup before running defrag.