Small Suggestions for improving Zones

[Ocram's Razr 964]

First, I want to thank Colossal Order and the wonderful modding community for making and improving such a great game! The game is already better than all predecessors on average but I have a couple ideas to bring zoning to a whole new level. I also want to thank everyone in the community for bouncing ideas off of each other and inspiring me.

The gist of my suggestions are

1. Density as a side/modifier setting
2. New Zone types
3. Zone levels should only measure wealth.
4. Preferences for housing, employment, and commerce/services.
5. Specializations should affect the entire economy.
6. Offices and Warehouses should produce Logistics
7 Deeper grid zones and free-form Industrial Park zones

____________________________________________________________________

Now for more thorough explanations

1. Dense Residential and Dense Commercial should no longer be separate zones but low (detached), medium (W2W lowrise or separated/narrow midrises), and high densities should get little buttons in the same space as road geometry (straight, arced, or curvy)
2. The empty space should be replaced with Hotel zone and Industrial Park zone.
    a) Hotel zones in generic districts grow Business Hotels (with demand based off of number of office jobs, offices producing slightly less taxes without hotels and producing much higher taxes with adequate or excessive business hotels) while hotel zones in tourism or entertainment districts grow Holiday Hotels (with demand based off number of tourists that leave the city with money, tourists would then get purses/budgets that get depleted with visitation to unique buildings, hotels, and commerce)
    b) Industrial Parks would be zoned just like farms are zoned in Cities XL. Free-form parks should use the same system but have options to go without surrounding paths. In generic districts, they become parking lots with storage lots without pollution and with the job spaces, logistics production, and maximum orders of special large semi-truck freight orders going up with increasing levels (up to level 3, like normal industry). In specialized industrial districts on top of their respective resource deposits, the zones become primary (extraction) industry AKA farms+plantations+pastures, working forests, quarries (potential new specialization), open pit mines (coal and ore should be different resources), and oil drilling sites (with even distribution of pumps so as to completely deplete all oil deposits in range at the same time)
3. Higher zone levels mean that they house, employ, or cater to higher educated and wealthier Cims with the same capacities while growth stages (which hold more of the same type of Cims) should make a debut to the game so that convenient access (measured in commute times and amount of times vehicles disappear along commutes) to jobs, goods, and services.
4. Students, Single workers, [childless] Couples, Families with Children, and Retirees should all have strong preferences. Students and Single Workers should strongly prefer High Density housing but will tolerate affordable Medium Density housing; they won't live in Low Density housing. Couples prefer Medium Density housing but will tolerate [affordable] Low Density housing and [safe & healthy] High Density housing. Families with Children strongly prefer Low Density housing but will tolerate safe & healthy Medium Density housing; they won't live in High Density housing. Retirees prefer Medium Density housing but will tolerate safe Low Density housing; they won't move into High Density housing. Marital Status, Children, and Age should contribute to employment and shopping preferences in addition to education and [wealth] level.
5. Hardware stores should be common in petroleum, forestry, or mining specialized districts. Car dealerships and repair shops should be common in mining and petroleum districts. Furniture stores should be much more common in forestry districts. Grocers, farmers' markets, and sit-down restaurants should be far more common in agricultural districts. Commerce relating to textiles and clothing (yardage stores, seamstresses, cobblers, boutiques, thrift stores, consignment shops, department stores) should be more common in Agriculture and Forestry districts to account for the influx of leather, cotton, linen, dyes, and rayon. In other words, commerce within specialized districts should demand more specialized goods (with sit-down restaurants and farmer's markets demanding raw agricultural products (fresh produce) with grocers, fast food, and supermarkets demanding processed agricultural products (shelf-stable food)). Low density and mid-density housing should also change appearance, looking rural in Agricultural districts, wooden in Forestry districts, modern and metallic in [Metal] Mining districts, modern & made out of sturdy concrete in [Petroleum] Drilling districts, more secure and modern in Entertainment districts, and more stereotypical of map types (European, tropical, old-fashioned brick (temperate), or ski-lodging+alpine/winter retreat style) in Vacation districts.
6. Offices should provide logistics, which benefit industry and travel around like electricity (so if there are adequate logistics and all buildings are on the same grid, all factories become more profitable) but that would require a change in the way factories behave. If there are no logistics, factories pollute the same as they currently do and provide slightly less money. If there are balanced or excess logistics, factories pollute 50% less, generate more profits than they do now, and make more goods with less input (doesn't affect farm fields or tree plantations but petroleum wells (and ore mines) generate the same amount of petroleum (or ore) while consuming far less ground resources). If there are shortages of logistics in industry zones, some buildings in low density or medium density zones become warehouses, which import their respective good (generic or refined specialties) in semi-trucks (which are slightly bigger than normal import trucks but with higher capacities) and let nearby factories take goods (freeing up highway traffic) and generate a small amount of logistics as well (not as much as an office building of the same footprint).
7. Lots (zoned and plopped) should have 3 parts to them:
    a) Main area (must never overlap anything else, not even sidewalk), up to 8 tiles deep for zones, higher for plopped
    b) Extended front (a flexible area that can have road or sidewalk overlap, if the road is flat the overlap is a very narrow strip, if the road is curved the overlap could be a side, corner, or center completely overlapped with parts of this area unconnected), up to 3 tiles deep (always 1 tile deep along perfectly straight road)
    c) Filler, can fill surrounding 3 tiles between zones and roads with textures and props as long as there are no more than 3 tiles in that direction to a road or another zone

 

Here is a picture demonstrating the changes to the UI:

[Ltw 401]

I really like your suggestions. There are some improvements indeed. The lots should be bigger (or you should at least have the possibility to make bigger lots) and I really like your suggestion regarding logistics. I have some cargo terminals around the city to make the logistics a little bit better. However, this results in a lot of traffic (mostly vans of individual shops), warehouses could solve certain problems. I have some additions though. For instance the zones for hotels are very nice but I would also like the possibility to build individual hotels. I think that would add some realism as well. Furthermore I think it is nice to have furniture stores in forestry districts, farmers' markets in agricultural districts and so forth. However, I think it would be nice to have similar specialized lots in normal commercial zones as well. This could be a representation of the amount of specialized industry you have in your city.

[SyntheticBiscuit 5]

I quite like all of these ideas, especially your thoughts on altering zone density.  However, keeping the old density settings in addition to adding the density sidebar could result in an even more complete level of control.  Zoning a low-density residential area with low-density selected on the sidebar could create rural homes with large yards, possibly making use of deeper zone space.  Medium-low residential zones could create neighborhoods similar to those that are present now, and high-low residential zones could result in wall-to-wall buildings similar to those in some government housing projects.  Density in the other zones could be carried out in a similar manner.

This would also make use of your suggestion of levels measuring wealth, as zoning, say, low-density office space would not have to be accomplished by halting the leveling of the buildings.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

1 hour ago, SyntheticBiscuit said:

I quite like all of these ideas, especially your thoughts on altering zone density.  However, keeping the old density settings in addition to adding the density sidebar could result in an even more complete level of control.  Zoning a low-density residential area with low-density selected on the sidebar could create rural homes with large yards, possibly making use of deeper zone space.  Medium-low residential zones could create neighborhoods similar to those that are present now, and high-low residential zones could result in wall-to-wall buildings similar to those in some government housing projects.  Density in the other zones could be carried out in a similar manner.

This would also make use of your suggestion of levels measuring wealth, as zoning, say, low-density office space would not have to be accomplished by halting the leveling of the buildings.

I just didn't want to crowd the UI/menu space too much. My idea would accomplish rural homes with deep zoning (4-8 tiles) of low density residential in a Farming district with no parks little-to-no-schools (maybe 1 overcrowded rural elementary school) and ample zones available for development in more desirable areas. That would give you rural homes (because I want district specialization to change appearance of more buildings) with large yards. Educated families would move next to the clinic or school (working there) and the rest of the area would consist mostly of families of farmers. If we had low/medium/high settings for low and high density residential and commercial, you would get 6 density levels and no way for the simulation to upgrade density. My idea is that within each of the 3 zoned densities, access to enough services with a short enough commute (no cars vanishing in traffic) allows buildings to grow/renovate and gain more capacity (densify). In medium and high density, this can be easily simulated by making shorter and higher variations of the same model, with increased density adding more stories. In low density, it would mean adding another floor (turning a single-family home into a duplex) or another building (subdividing the lot). However, increased density only happens when there are no empty zones appropriate for the occupant to move to and build new buildings. By this I mean that affordability and desirability become major determinants on whether a city builds up or (more likely) out. Also, removing two icons and adding 1 new icon (hotels) makes things less crowded instead of just adding 1 icon. My idea also allows for 3 densities of hotels (small motels & boutique hotels, midrise hotels with plazas, or skyscraper hotels), offices (low rises, mid-rises or narrow high rises with plazas and parking lots, and skyscrapers), and factories (small plants and burners, small warehouses, 1-floor factories with parking lots; typical warehouses, moderately sized factories without parking lots or taller ones with parking lots; or giant factories with underground parking).

[Ltw 401]

15 hours ago, OcramSeattle said:

I just didn't want to crowd the UI/menu space too much. My idea would accomplish rural homes with deep zoning (4-8 tiles) of low density residential in a Farming district with no parks little-to-no-schools (maybe 1 overcrowded rural elementary school) and ample zones available for development in more desirable areas. That would give you rural homes (because I want district specialization to change appearance of more buildings) with large yards. Educated families would move next to the clinic or school (working there) and the rest of the area would consist mostly of families of farmers. If we had low/medium/high settings for low and high density residential and commercial, you would get 6 density levels and no way for the simulation to upgrade density. My idea is that within each of the 3 zoned densities, access to enough services with a short enough commute (no cars vanishing in traffic) allows buildings to grow/renovate and gain more capacity (densify). In medium and high density, this can be easily simulated by making shorter and higher variations of the same model, with increased density adding more stories. In low density, it would mean adding another floor (turning a single-family home into a duplex) or another building (subdividing the lot). However, increased density only happens when there are no empty zones appropriate for the occupant to move to and build new buildings. By this I mean that affordability and desirability become major determinants on whether a city builds up or (more likely) out. Also, removing two icons and adding 1 new icon (hotels) makes things less crowded instead of just adding 1 icon. My idea also allows for 3 densities of hotels (small motels & boutique hotels, midrise hotels with plazas, or skyscraper hotels), offices (low rises, mid-rises or narrow high rises with plazas and parking lots, and skyscrapers), and factories (small plants and burners, small warehouses, 1-floor factories with parking lots; typical warehouses, moderately sized factories without parking lots or taller ones with parking lots; or giant factories with underground parking).

Maybe adding some more stages as well? 5 stages isn't a lot, especially when you compare that with the 15 stages in Simcity 4 with CAM. A thing I don't really like about Cities Skylines is the fact that you can't really build skyscrapers. There are some really high unique buildings in the workshop and they're very nice. However, you can't really fill up your skyline with high residential or commercial buildings because the lots are too small and the growth stages aren't high enough. It would be nice that the game changes the lot-sizes if you're setting the slider on a higher density. This way you could 'upgrade' 4 by 4 lots into 8 by 8 lots, 5 by 5 to 10 by 10 etc. I think that would also give some nice possibilities in creating really high skylines.

[boformer 3,169]

8 cells deep zones would only work in grid road systems. As soon as you build curves or non-90-deg corners, there would be noticeable gaps (dead space) or non-square zone blocks which are blocking the large buildings.

It would not be suitable for farms.

I would prefer a procedural system that works without zone grids, like a paintbrush to fill a road block. Then the game would try to minimize the "dead space" and maybe even fill it with trees and props + ground textures.

[Marc Collins 36]

Great ideas.  We've needed this (realistic scale zoning instead of the silly blocks that are there now) since day 1 (and some of us have said so), but I don't see any movement on it from the devs. 

[Ocram's Razr 964]

On 12/31/2015 at 1:51 AM, boformer said:

8 cells deep zones would only work in grid road systems. As soon as you build curves or non-90-deg corners, there would be noticeable gaps (dead space) or non-square zone blocks which are blocking the large buildings.

It would not be suitable for farms.

I would prefer a procedural system that works without zone grids, like a paintbrush to fill a road block. Then the game would try to minimize the "dead space" and maybe even fill it with trees and props + ground textures.

The only example I can think of is Cities XL. Parks and fields (we could conceivably put forests, mines, and even add quarries) used free-form zones but every zone had to have road access to be usable (jobs or satisfaction) and only 1 lot could be made (so you couldn't make a suburban subdivision, office park, or housing project like a farm). Cities XXL uses Unity so I know that would be possible (at least for specialized industry and parks). If CO managed to give us free/field zones and deeper normal zones (and my RCI suggestions), Cities: Skylines would be better than all competitors in every way (besides modular buildings, plopped by the player).

 

EDIT: Petroleum extraction could also use free-form zones, by having a distribution of pumps that extracts the oil so that it all becomes fully depleted at the same time (which should take many decades in-game). Combine that with 2 levels of specialized industry (depending on education, which would require all the workers to be at least in the 2nd most educated category and at least half of the workers in the most educated category), the advanced/high-tech petroleum extraction would take centuries to deplete (if new drills/pumps are zoned over a 100% full deposit after the large collider had been built) and produce slightly more crude oil per square meter than current specialized industry (which depletes in the matter of years, rarely lasting more than 20 years of extraction).

[BlitzPackage 19]

These are awesome ideas.  Do we know if the good folks over at Colossal Order has seen the ideas in this thread?  If not, can someone send it to them?

[Azurespecter 506]

Yep, I've read them =) I like seeing conversation before I add my input and stuff though

[hitzu 139]

On 29.12.2015 at 0:26 AM, OcramSeattle said:

1. Deeper lots: Even if lots remain 4 tiles wide maximum, doubling the maximum depth would be a godsend! Not only farm fields but houses with spacious yards, deep Wall-To-Wall low rise (and mid rise) buildings, shops with plazas, malls of all sorts, and buildings with parking lots would all flourish with 64 meter deep (32 meter wide) lots (parking lots could also use rows of all disabled parking and of no disabled parking spaces so that large parking lots have logical positions of disabled parking spaces).

Actually I like how buildings grow in Cities in Motion 2. they don't have to have a direct road connection in order to appear and function and in very desirable places they can grow in many "layers" into the block. I don't think it is acceptable for C:S in majority of cases, but this behaviour can be applied to spawn little props and groups of props around buildings. For example high-rise residental would force to fill up an empty area around them with small park assets, playgrounds, gazebo, benches, chesstables; industrial buildings would spawn some industrial props like barrels, stockpiles, containers, tanks and other industrial stuff; farms would extend fields with field props, elevators, tractors, hay stacks etc. Every building should have its maximum radius of the influence based on its type and size and there should be a border where the areas of influence cross each other where special divider props like fences or hedges should spawn or in the contrary some buildings could work on coherence providing better or larger props in the mutual area of the influence. Also it would be nice to be able to customize the prop collection and link it to the style.

This could be a fairly good substitute of larger footprints because:

- this can fill empty gaps between the buildings with a nice lovely clutter

- this does not require additional work to change existing buildings

- current saves could be updated with no harms

- the clutterness can be scalable, basing on the computer spec and/or the draw distance

- this doesn't cancel the possibility of expanding lots in the future

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I have refined my idea for zone area but it would require an expansion pack because it would be difficult otherwise.

Lots (zoned and plopped) should have 3 parts to them:

1. Main area (must never overlap anything else, not even sidewalk), up to 8 tiles deep for zones, higher for plopped
2. Extended front (a flexible area that can have road or sidewalk overlap, if the road is flat the overlap is a very narrow strip, if the road is curved the overlap could be a side, corner, or center completely overlapped with parts of this area unconnected), up to 3 tiles deep (always 1 tile deep along perfectly straight road)
3. Filler, can fill surrounding 3 tiles between zones and roads with textures and props as long as there are no more than 3 tiles in that direction to a road or another zone

Zone types should become Residential, Hotels, Commercial, Offices, Industrial, Industrial Park (Parking/Campus/Field/Plot/Site/Storage Bay/Yard), and Dezone

RCIOH (or RICOH) zones should get 3 buttons to the left to determine density with the following:

1. Low density (detached buildings)
2. Medium density (small mid rises surrounded by grounds (parks, plazas, and parking) or wall-to-wall low rises)
3. High density (wall-to-wall mid rises, typical high rises or small (footprint) skyscrapers)

Industrial Parks (and free form city parks) should be zoned much like farms in Cities XL (with a minimum and maximum area, with the minimum area being 50% instead of 90% because the 90% minimum was designed to avoid overlapping farm exploits in Planet Offer) and have the straight vs arced vs curvy road options (for the edges of the farms, which will be small roads by default). Generic industry will use these to extend parking spaces (acting like parking lots, which should be added as fully featured systems instead of city parks where visitors can park in) and storage yards (providing small amounts of logistics and allowing imports and exports), never polluting but hiring next to no workers and looking like a run down parking lot + storage yard on level 1 but looking like a fancy parking lot with trees (which might die from surrounding pollution), lawn (or plaza), and a modern & well-kept storage yard on level 3. Agriculture will use these as either crop fields & orchards on fertile soil or biomass fields and storage barns+silos. Forestry will use these as tree farms or lumber yards (parking lot with piles of logs & lumber that can import & export raw timber & processed lumber). Mining will use these as open pit mines or storage yards. Petroleum will use these as drilling sites (with drills spaced out so as to deplete the area of petroleum evenly) or parking lots with petroleum tanks. Quarries (if added) will use these as (typical) open pit quarries or as storage yards.

 

Offices provide the most logistics. Warehouses provide less logistics but allow the import and export of raw resources, industrial products, and consumer goods in greater quantities at a time (these semi-trucks would reduce traffic). Industrial Parks that don't extract resources (either generic or zoned over land devoid of natural resources) provide even less logistics and can only send out and request a small fraction of the semi-trucks that warehouses can but provide extra parking, which would help when you have a lot of industrial workers commuting by private automobiles. Factories (generic industry and specialized processing industry) require logistics for maximum profits but will still work with diminished profits (yielding the city with almost no taxes and being much more prone to problems) without any logistics (though low density and medium density industry will build or convert some factories to warehouses, which decreases industrial output but raises revenue from industry taxes and decreases congestion from industrial traffic).

 

Hotels grow exclusively in hotel zones and only when there is demand for them. Tourist hotels only grow in Entertainment or Tourism districts. Entertainment hotels are much like the casino resorts of Las Vegas, Reno, Atlantic City, or Macao or the various Indian Casinos or live entertainment (without gambling) venues around the world. Tourism hotels look like the ones already in Cities Skylines After Dark, combined with more "stereotypical" for the map type (tropical, mountain/winter, European, or old fashioned temperate). Outside districts with these specialties, hotels will only attract business travelers for local offices. Hotels will simply never grow if there are no tourists (in the specialized zones) or offices (outside specialized zones). There would be 4 types of tourists: poor, wealthy (let's not kid ourselves, even the lower-middle class in developed nations live better than the wealthiest people in the underdeveloped nations), rich, and business. Tourists would come to the city with a certain amount of money. They stay until they run out or cannot find an acceptable place to stay. Poor tourists can only spend up to 1 night in a cheap motel (level 1 tourist hotel). Rich tourists can spend months (4-8 day-night cycles) in level 3 hotels if they remain satisfied.

[hitzu 139]

3 hours ago, OcramSeattle said:

Lots (zoned and plopped) should have 3 parts to them:

1. Main area (must never overlap anything else, not even sidewalk), up to 7 tiles deep
2. Extended front (a flexible area that can have road or sidewalk overlap, if the road is flat the overlap is a very narrow strip, if the road is curved the overlap could be a side, corner, or center completely overlapped with parts of this area unconnected), up to 2 tiles deep (always 1 tile deep along perfectly straight road)
3. Filler, can fill surrounding 3 tiles between zones and roads with textures and props as long as there are no more than 3 tiles in that direction to a road or another zone

 

What the purpose of this?

[Ocram's Razr 964]

It's nigh impossible to build or zone anything on the concave side of a curve in Cities Skylines. SimCity 2013 does the best job with this, allowing zones and big buildings inside tight curves if there is enough land area. If the deeper zones can have up to 8 functional tiles and 1-3 flexible tiles (it acts like its current normal on 4 tile or less deep zones along flat or slightly curved roads), then it would be easy to have skyscrapers, mansions, cemeteries, universities, etc inside curves without drawing flat roads for the lots. The filler also helps make uneven (inside curvy roads) blocks look good when they currently have ugly dirt.

[Ltw 401]

20 hours ago, OcramSeattle said:

It's nigh impossible to build or zone anything on the concave side of a curve in Cities Skylines. SimCity 2013 does the best job with this, allowing zones and big buildings inside tight curves if there is enough land area. If the deeper zones can have up to 7 functional tiles and 1-3 flexible tiles (it acts like its current normal on 4 tile or less deep zones along flat or slightly curved roads), then it would be easy to have skyscrapers, mansions, cemeteries, universities, etc inside curves without drawing flat roads for the lots. The filler also helps make uneven (inside curvy roads) blocks look good when they currently have ugly dirt.

 

Here is an example of what the zoning UI might look like:

That looks really great! I think this could work better than how it is right now. The choices you have look a little bit the same as in SC4 but more flexible. I was wondering how you would see the options for districts in this set-up. Zones like agriculture and hotels are taken care of in the districts-menu at the moment and leisure, ore/oil industry etc. are being managed in the districts menu as well. How would you make use of that in the new zoning UI you suggest over here?

I have an idea regarding district policy. First of all I really like the idea of a hotel-zone with its own demand. However, leisure/tourism zones could still have a functional use in this new set-up. It would look quite different though. I would like to see more clubs in leisure-zones. Now you see mostly arcades etc., which is a little bit outdated in my opinion. Tourism-zones might be a little bit more focused on restaurants and maybe small bars/pubs. This way you could build hotel-zones that are mainly focused on businessmen and tourists and you could zone leisure/tourism zones that are focused on the population in general but also have a positive effect on tourism (and thus on the demand for hotels). I think it would be nice to be able to set the tourism specialization on commercial zones and hotel-zones. If you set the tourism-specialization on for instance a commercial zone you get stand-alone bars/restaurants etc. and if you set the tourism-specialization an a hotel-zone you could get hotels with bars/restaurants that are also focused on people that aren't sleeping there. In this case you are focusing on both tourists as residents in a hotel-zone and you are therefore satisfying the demand for both commercial zones as hotel-zones. I think this could be quite realistic because hotels often have separate restaurants in the same building.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Commercial zones in Vacation districts could increase tourist draw much more than default but charge higher prices, draining the tourists' purses faster while decreasing benefit to locals vs normal shops. The traffic and decreased benefit to locals would be the drawbacks while the increased tourism would be the benefit. Entertainment districts would stay the same but with hotels being entertainment type of resorts and the night life benefiting locals less.

[hitzu 139]

On 08.01.2016 at 11:28 PM, OcramSeattle said:

It's nigh impossible to build or zone anything on the concave side of a curve in Cities Skylines. SimCity 2013 does the best job with this, allowing zones and big buildings inside tight curves if there is enough land area. If the deeper zones can have up to 7 functional tiles and 1-3 flexible tiles (it acts like its current normal on 4 tile or less deep zones along flat or slightly curved roads), then it would be easy to have skyscrapers, mansions, cemeteries, universities, etc inside curves without drawing flat roads for the lots. The filler also helps make uneven (inside curvy roads) blocks look good when they currently have ugly dirt.

This is exacly what I did propose with the influence zone around a building where props and land decals should spawn  

[Ocram's Razr 964]

5 hours ago, hitzu said:

This is exacly what I did propose with the influence zone around a building where props and land decals should spawn  

I never pretended my ideas were original. It's actually a good thing that multiple people want the same thing. I just compiled a list of various individual suggestions, added some of my own suggestions, and refined everything to make sense together.

 

I edited the OP to use the further refinements I made with your helpful feedback. Here is my mockup of what I think the full RICOH zoned demand graph should look like (when you click on the mini demand bars in the main toolbar