Population Density

[boundegar 3]

So I've been putting some thought into this, and thought it might be worth sharing. How should I organize my region so it (sort of) resembles reality?

I grew up near Washington, DC, which happens to be a square (with a bite taken out) almost exactly ten miles on a side. A standard SimCity region - the ones that auto-generate - are 15-16 km on a side, or ten miles. Perfect match.

But as I started nooding around, I discovered the entire city is served by one power plant, and one sewage treatment plant. There is no way at all to model that in SimCity 4, so yeah, it's a game. No need to get hung up on precision.

I recently started working on modeling a rural county, and ran into an obstacle there, too. The average US county is about 1000 km2, or almost 200 large tiles, and almost all of that land is either rural or completely empty. Did I really want to build tile after tile of forest, with the occasional highway? The population density of the entire US is 86 per km2, which means it's almost all empty. I experimented with scaling the area 10:1, because a county of 100 km2 seems like a nice building project; but then the population density gets multiplied x10, and the simulation ends up far from reality.

So I've decided even the county is the wrong unit of measure. A standard region would represent a small city, like DC or smaller. New York City covers 784 km2 - who wants to build seven hundred small tiles? Does anybody here also have a job?

The small city I live in today covers about 200 km2 and fills about 1/5 of the county. That seems like a big project, but feasible. It's not all skyscrapers - mostly suburban, with a nice busy downtown and some rural bits in the corners. It seems to me this is the kind of city SimCity 4 is designed to model, with a mix of small urban tiles and big rural outskirts.

The most fun part of this project has been choosing different towns and looking them up on Google Maps. You can switch to satellite view and go flying over the landscape, learning all sorts of interesting things!

[CorinaMarie 29,868]

Here's my synopsis from another thread:

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.

 

[matias93 7,535]

Certainly this is a long debated topic.

For starters, the game, hasn't a coherent scale to which one could easily adjust things. From my experience, a medium dense city can be represented without too much sacrifices on accuracy by scaling it at 1:2, this is, halving the distances and doubling the densities and capacities of the networks.

Remember too that the game simulates commuters, not people: sims only move to go to work and back, their stats are only relevant to decide where they work, and where they work defines what they demand on matters of residences. Given this and the fact that around half of your sim population doesn't work at all, you will have a bit less than the expectable traffic for the population size you are seeing.

[boundegar 3]

43 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Here's my synopsis from another thread:

 

I read that. It was helpful! However, I think you omitted front and back yards, which don't hold 6-12 more people. I've seen your towns, I don't think you pack them in like sardines.

@matias93 I'm not really looking for precision, so much as getting the feeling right. My end goal isn't to build Los Angeles. I just want Zinn's Junction to look nice. (If it's a long-debated topic, my Google ninja skills must suck. I couldn't find anything exactly relevant.)

[CorinaMarie 29,868]

3 minutes ago, boundegar said:

However, I think you omitted front and back yards, which don't hold 6-12 more people.

True, but in my example I'm suggesting that 8,192 cells would be enough and there's 16,384 cells in a medium tile so that leaves plenty of room for some front and back yards.

And, ofc, it's just a guess using some live numbers mostly to suggest a one to one relationship would be huge in terms of size needed in the game.

[boundegar 3]

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

a one to one relationship would be huge

If you want to build Chicago, yea. I once lived in Hoboken, NJ, the "Mile Square City," which covers about 1.2 square miles, or about 3 small tiles. That seems like it would take a week at most to build. I think I'll stick to small cities for now.

The scale is practical. 1km per small tile can represent a neighborhood. At low density you can pack in maybe 5,000 people. Manhattan Island holds 28,000 people per km2, in a mix of medium and high density. One person per person seems like a good scale factor.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

18 hours ago, boundegar said:

I'm not really looking for precision, so much as getting the feeling right.

I think the feel you're looking for is "organic". You can achieve that by enumerating your own personal design rules to guide your zoning and development, and then let those rules be dented by geographic features.

In my region, I laid out all of the main-lines for heavy rails across the entire region before anything else. I then did the freeways, staying clear of the rails. I then planted a passenger station in each sector crossed by rail, and I located it as close to center as I could. I then planted an interchange or two in each sector that was crossed by a freeway. I drew through-roads to create connections on sides that did not already have them (taking care not to induce circular commutes). Then I finally got down to zoning.

When I start a town, I create a major crossroads near the train station and plant my first elementary school to become the nucleus of a residential area. Inside the school's radius (starting at 50%), I then zone industry along the RR track followed by residential on roads and streets (but not avenues or highways). Import some water and power, plop a hospital and road-top bus stops, and the clock can start. As residential is filled, I can expand the school radius and zone more industry plus residential. I usually zone some farms too -- planting them at edges that will probably never be within any service radius for schools, police etc (i.e. rural).

As the clock runs, I look for where traffic is developing. Where I see high traffic, I zone commercial. Where I see low traffic avenues, I zone small amounts of high-density residential.

I have other personal guidelines for trash, ports etc. Add them up, and my towns take on a very organic look and feel, the end result usually surprising me. I think that's because, instead of designing with the end in mind, I plant seeds based on initial conditions and then collaborate with the game's spontaneous development to produce something pseudo-random.

YMMV

[boundegar 3]

13 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

I think the feel you're looking for is "organic"

You must be doing it right, because that sounds a lot like the way I build.