Real City Recreations

[tails2489 350]

What are your favourite real world cities to recreate?

What cities have a sufficient number of BATs on the Exchange to make a realistic recreation?

I have made a NYC, Chicago, Hong Kong, LA and currently working on a London UK recreation. I have also made cities that aren't actual recreations but I use landmarks from 1 or 2 cities only to come up with a familiar look. I have done this with Shanghai, Singapore, Melbourne and a Taipei/Tokyo mash up. I think my next city will be Denver, as thee 3 or 4 largest downtown skyscrapers are on the Exchange as well as the really cool Denver Art Museum. Shenzhen also on the list, with a few cool civic buildings to go along with skyscrapers.

[CorinaMarie 29,574]

Er, uhm, well... I don't recreate any real world cities. I just make my little random imaginary ones.

However, if you want to be blown away with real world recreations, check out @korver's True Earth city journal.

[tails2489 350]

Those True Earth ones are out of this world good, I've seen many of @korver's City Journals. Mine are nowhere near as good, as evidenced by my mini San Francisco here.

Sometimes I start out with a plan like making a San Francisco look alike.. Or other times I'll have a purely fictional city and will finish it off by placing landmarks from one specific city to complete the look.

Maybe a more appropriate topic would have been; Which cities are best represented on the Exchange by number of BATs?

 

[Cassalett 16]

Washington can be recreated with no Exchange BATs. Maxis made, not two, nor three, but FIVE landmarks of Washington!

As for the real-city inspiration, i usually mix two or more styles into one city. If you watched the movie "Big Hero 6", you'll have a perfect example of this, as the city is an awesome mix between Tokyo and San Francisco. Another thing i do is to give the city it's own history, like a post-apocalyptic survivor town that eventually became a city, but i think that's another topic.

[tails2489 350]

Thanks @Cassalett IV for the reply. Yes in some of my cities I'll pick landmarks from 2 or 3 different cities to complete the look I want. For as huge as Tokyo seems.. it sure seems underrepresented in the BATing world. Not too many non-Maxis DC BATs either but you're right, with the 5 provided it's a nice start.

[Lucario Boricua 7,027]

Do you use real world maps at full scale? There's plenty of those here and in SimCity 4 Devotion. In some cases, there are cities with grid street networks in the city center area and there's maps that are tilted to match the city's grid with the game's construction grid. The most popular such instance is that of New York.

Also make sure to get water, terrain and flora mods to match the climate of the real world city's location, that can add a lot of character beyond the building and landmark choice.

[tails2489 350]

Definitely not to scale. More like mini-recreations. Just 1 Large city tile which I try to model based on the real city but nothing too hardcore. (EX. NYC long skinny island, SF has a bay, London Thames..)

For my new London city I am letting the city fully sprawl into the surrounding tiles so that will be a bit of a different look for me.