Average Population per Tile Size

[MrBradB 9]

What, if any, are typical population sizes for each of the 3 Region tiles?

I have a region with small and medium tiles. I'm currently using 8 or 9 of the tiles (a mix of both sizes). Most of my small tile cities have 3k-4k sims. One tile has 12k and another one has 25k. All of my medium tile cities have 25k-30k sims.

I'm just curious what I should/could/will be seeing in these tiles as I keep working on them.

Thanks in advance,
Brad

[CorinaMarie 29,614]

I have a feeling the answer is going to be: It depends.

I have long ago quit using small and medium tiles since I make my own custom maps and I personally like all large tiles now. When I have some rolling hills and rivers or lakes and I make my typical farming region with zones only on the green land (as seen in the in game topographical map) I usually wind up with 7k to 8k Sims in a large tile. If I add a small town with some heavy industry I get to around 15k total Sims.

At the other extreme peeps who make metropolises have surpassed 1 million Sims in a large city tile.

[Cyclone Boom 16,909]

One key factor here would be the population density of a given tile. This is how many residents are situated in a certain area, which would be influenced by the occupancy of buildings. In the game the number of Sims able to live in residential buildings is significantly extrapolated. So once reaching the higher growth stages and sufficient demand, the population can mount up fairly quickly with apartments and large tower blocks becoming more frequent.

I suspect there's no baseline answer here, and any given tile can vary depending on the scale and type of development (rural to urban). Therefore it's hard to say what would be a realistic average population for any of the 3 tile sizes. The sky quite literally is the limit.

[matias93 7,535]

I remember having filled a big city tile (which was about 60% land) and getting around 600,000 sims inside of it. Making the counts, that means:

4 x 4 kilometres = 16 square kilometres

16 x 0.60 = 9.6 square kilometres of land

600,000 / 9.6 = 62,500 sims per square kilometre

That's clearly over the worldwide maximum densities on city centres, as the most dense real city is Manila, with 41,515 people per square kilometre. And on that tile of mine, only a handful of places were effectively zoned as 'dense'.

As you can image, the game is thought as a model, and as such, it is scaled down from a perfect representation: more sims live on fewer space than their human analogs, and because of that, you are required to build for them at those reduced scales; you can note it, for example, when making a metro (subway, underground) network on SC4: 20 tiles are about the maximum distance at which stations are useful in the game, but in the real world, that resolves to about 300 metres, which is a very short distance; if your cities are as dense as the game propels you to do them, that's a reasonable scaling, though.

[CorinaMarie 29,614]

You might also be interested in what I said in reply elsewhere:

On 1/17/2018 at 8:56 PM, CorinaMarie said:

1. For an example, let's take some random town (which I happen to live in) that has a population of 24,867 peeps and occupies 13.01 square miles (33.70 km²). In SimCity that would be about 364 x 364 cells or roughly 3 x 3 medium sized city tiles (384 by 384 cells). For low wealth, low density the game has about 6 Sims per cell meaning if every cell in a small city tile was a home 24,576 of those peeps could fit in one small tile (64 x 64 x 6). Then if I arbitrarily say we need twice as many total cells (8,192) to hold the roads, residential, commercial, and industrial, and other miscellaneous stuff we now need roughly 91 x 91 cells. Round that up to 128 x 128 and you have one single medium sized tile populationwise. So, my conclusion is that from the regional view I'd want to make my hometown about one ninth the size it is in real life to look about right in SimCity. This would also mean I would not draw every street (and home) there is. Only the main ones. Kind of like how real world maps change the detail level as you zoom in or out.

 

[blade2k5 1,523]

5 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

At the other extreme peeps who make metropolises have surpassed 1 million Sims in a large city tile.

Early on (circa 2005-06) I had a large tile with a pop. of 2.05 million, with only 25% of said city tile zoned for dense residential and the rest dense commercial, no industrial.  Never been able to reach those numbers again and it was certainly not the most populated large tile, someone from around that time had a large tile with over 3 million and a region with around 35 million.  Like Cyclone Boom said, the sky is the limit.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

17 hours ago, matias93 said:

the game is thought as a model, and as such, it is scaled down from a perfect representation

I think the maps that came with the game were 1:4 scale.

In my region of about 1 million people, I have at least one small sector that grew from nothing to over 80k pop in its first 5 years of game-time.

[MrBradB 9]

7 minutes ago, jeffryfisher said:

I think the maps that came with the game were 1:4 scale.

In my region of about 1 million people, I have at least one small sector that grew from nothing to over 80k pop in its first 5 years of game-time.

Wow! And I thought I was doing good to get 25k in a small tile. Well done sir, my hat's off to you.