Modding / Recalibrating Land Value

[Psiman 177]

I've discussed the problem of mansions popping up all over the place in this thread. I feel that a key part of this issue is that it seems to be too easy to get most of the city up to maximum Land Value.

In this screenshot of my previous city, one can see that most of the city is at the highest level of green Land Value. Using the SHIFT + CTL + ALT + Query Tool, I was able to confirm that most of the city was at the maximum allowed Land Value of 255. This means high-wealth mansions can appear pretty much anywhere in the city - the default Medium/High wealth boundary is 120.

I've been going through the list of known Exemplar properties trying to find something that might have an effect on this, and have then been creating some modified .DATs to test out in the game. I've been through a few and haven't noticed any effect, but I've now found one that looks very interesting, even though I don't know exactly what it's doing. 

There an Exemplar property called:

0x47e2c331    Float32    Land Value Desirability Factors    Size of effects (see IDs)

It's default value is 2.5. I changed it to 1.

I then loaded up my city and the effect is instantly obvious on the Land Value data map. Instead of most of the city being maximum 255 Land Value, everything is reduced significantly. The highest I could see was 172, and then all kinds of numbers below that. Lots of land had gone below the High-wealth default threshold of 120.

So I don't know exactly what's happening here or how it will affect other aspects of the game, but it looks promising.

[monkeywater 910]

It would be interesting to see the park effect at each of the 1 vs 2.5 settings.

[Psiman 177]

41 minutes ago, monkeywater said:

It would be interesting to see the park effect at each of the 1 vs 2.5 settings.

Park Effect is reduced in magnitude. In screenshot are four Large Park Greens at 2.5 and 1.

Land Value is just one factor in Desirability, so just adjusting Land Value will not be enough on its own. Here's a screenshot showing High-wealth Desirability with the modified Land Wealth active, and there's no change. Pretty much the only area on the map that is not desirable to high-wealth is the land by the power stations and dirty industry. So the aim would be for the high-wealth areas to be more exclusive.

[Psiman 177]

There's an Exemplar property called Land Value Effect. I changed it for R$$$ so that when Land Value was below 120 there was a negative number. It had the desired effect on the R$$$ Desirability map - see first screenshot. However, the Desirability map then kept flipping between this map and a second (2nd screenshot).

[Psiman 177]

I re-did it and it's now stable. I set all Land Value below 120 to be -100 desirability for R$$$. The map looks pretty good.

If possible, it might be good to make a smoother transition so that borderline high-wealth do not suddenly go -100. I presume I can just add some extra values to the Exemplar property?

So this plan looks like it might work - land value has been reduced from full throttle, and desirability can also be calibrated. I can't think of any known unknowns, but there may be some unknown unknowns. Can anyone think of any known knowns or known unknowns that may complicate things?  

EDIT: By reducing desirability of sub-120 Land Value for R$$$, that has somehow itself affected Land Value, and hovering over these areas now has them at really, really low amount. Knew it couldn't be this easy and straightforward...

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Good investigative work. I really like where you're heading with this.

As a data view which can more granularly define the segmentation between RCI wealth types, it does seem the land value would be much more useful scaled this way. I believe when adjusting these values it's the multiplier which is being reduced, and how at the default 2.5 it'd be maxing out at the 255. This happens to be the upper limit for several things in the game including grayscale heights for maps, and if I remember correctly it's an 8-bit binary limitation in the code.

As a comparison between the standard Land Value and Desirability for R$$$, there does seem to be a clear correlation (click to flick and compare):
 

Land Value

 

R$$$ Desirability

The green shaded areas are mixed residential wealth, with predominately R$ based homes and still having a uniform coverage at the high end of the spectrum. So as the description says, this does prove how the Land Value Effect property has an influence in terms of: "How much land value is a factor in desirability."

 

1 hour ago, Psiman said:

I presume I can just add some extra values to the Exemplar property?

From what I can tell, it does seem this is very possible. It appears that property has the Rep values in pairs (18 in your dialog preview). So providing they scale up in the same way when adding extra values, it should be feasible to add others in there to create a more gradual fine-tuned scale as desired. I think it'd be beneficial this way, since a high wealth neighbourhood would encourage other R$$$ houses of the same type to be constructed in the local wider surrounding area. As in there being a smooth transition from bright green to a lighter shade of green, then leading into the red lower value of less affluent areas.

 

1 hour ago, Psiman said:

Can anyone think of any known knowns or known unknowns that may complicate things?

From my limited knowledge in this regard, I don't know about any possible unknowns. However, that's not to say there aren't unknowns, because they're likely not yet known. What I do know is if knowing about them (which would require knowable knowingness to investigate), it would mean said mystery could be knowingly solved.

In all seriousness...

I believe by modding the data views, my best guess is it can be considered a visual display of the data.

In other words, much like having raw data in a spreadsheet, this is still present in the background which the game uses for internal calculations and outputs. Then what's happening here involves editing the graphical display to adjust how it's displayed as information. Therefore to implement a more gradual transition in the data view, I think it'll be a matter of either it works or not, and there shouldn't be ill effects with disrupting the simulation for RCI demand. To have this as an adjusted data view would make it more visually accurate, even if the game still considers areas of land as more equally distributed for similar developer types.

[Psiman 177]

Thanks for the info. My brain can't deal with any more thinking about it today...

I'm still not sure what the "Land Value Desirability Factors" property is doing. I'm not sure whether reducing it from 2.5 to 1 is having the unintended consequence of making Land Value less important as a factor in Desirability, thereby increasing the importance of other things like pollution, hospital effect etc. 

[Psiman 177]

Well, I did another test! I measured the Land Value rating using the advanced Query tool mouseover. Here are the results for vanilla:

One Large Park Green: 86
Two Large Park Greens: 106
High School + Large Medical Centre together: 216

I placed a Low-wealth house next to the High School and Large Medical Centre and it has a mouseover Land Value of 255! No park effect on it at all.

Here are the results using the "Land Value Desirability Factors" changed from 2.5 > 1.

One Large Park Green: 40
Two Large Park Greens: 48
High School + Large Medical Centre together: 90

So that looks good - the balance still appears to be there.

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Let me join CycloneBoom in saying that you're doing very interesting research here. Much like you, I have always been annoyed by high-wealth buildings (not just mansions) popping up so easily. However, my thoughts used to be focused on an exemplar/property that seems to determine how much different wealth levels would attract or repel each other - hopefully changing it such that a low-wealth neighbourhood itself would discourage high-wealth development (you wouldn't build a mansion between council housing estates, after all!). Then again, this would probably make it too hard to 'level up' existing areas.

Therefore, the approach you chose may be better: It will make it harder to get R$$$, it will make placing parks and trees more impactful and strategically relevant, and it doesn't prevent a neighbourhood from becoming more desirable for high-wealth Sims.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I'm not sure if there would be anything useful in @Thalassicus's Dataviews Increased Detail Mod v1.0, but it might be useful to peek under the hood.

[Psiman 177]

Thanks for the replies and info.

Here are some of today's thoughts:

1) To recap, since Desirability affects Land Value, I can't see an easy way to reduce the size of R$$$'s Desirability area.

2) Here's another issue that I'm not sure what the consequences would be. The next screenshots shows Land Value around the Central Business District in my city. Flanking the avenues are lots of higher-density commercial, with many at C$$$ level, especially at the top of the picture. 

The first screenshot is vanilla. While the land adjacent to the avenues is lower in Land Value than the surrounding bright green, presumably due to traffic and pollution, it is still above the 120 threshold for high-wealth.

The second screenshot is using the Land Value Desirability Factors 2.5>1 mod. With all Land Value now reduced in intensity, the land adjacent to the avenues is now in the Medium-wealth bracket. Would this prevent High-wealth commercial from developing there? I'm not sure if other aspects of Desirablity would override the Medium-wealth Land Value and High-wealth would still develop there - the C$$$ Desirability map still shows most of the city at maximum green.

3) The "No Abandonment" mod modifies the "Desirability Threshold Growth" property, with which "tracts with desirability less than this value never develop" - R$$$ is changed from 50 to 120. The problem that would seem to be with this is that Desirability is so high - see the maxxed-out green in the vanilla screenshot for R$$$ earlier in the thread - that this seems pretty irrelevant. Since so much of the map is at maximum desirability, one could potential set this to the maximum 255 with no change in effect.

4) There's a property called "Land Value Range", with default values of 0-255. I did a test and set some Low-Wealth Housing to have a range of 100-255, and no housing would build unless the Land Value was over 100.  

One could potentially set this at 120-255 for R$$$, 120 being the Medium/High-wealth threshold. While this wouldn't make a difference with vanilla, since everywhere is at 255 Land Value, with the 2.5>1 mod it would make some difference. Testing it in my city, it didn't have any apparent effect on buildings that had already been built, such as making them abandon.

5) There a couple of Exemplar properties that look as if they would be interesting to experiment with, but I haven't been able to locate them in Reader:

0xcab1ce3a    Sint32                Subjective Factor Threshold (Min value)    Min value of desirability for subjective factors (pollution,garbage,school,hospital,crime,traffic,triplength).
0xcab1ce3c    Sint32                Subjective Factor Threshold (Max value)    Max value of desirability for subjective factors (pollution,garbage,school,hospital,crime,traffic,triplength).

6) I think that in the vanilla game, it can be too easy to get areas up to High-wealth land value. Build hospital, schools, police and fire coverage, some park, and an area will be High-wealth. An experienced player is not going to have much difficulty in accomplishing this, so everywhere becomes capable of High-wealth. I feel it would be better if to make an area into high-wealth, one had to do something extra. The obvious category to something to push an area into high-wealth is to add extra parks/beautification. So maybe there are some adjustments that could be made to Desirability settings to accomplish this. 

7) There's also the "Land Value Wealth Boundaries" -     Low/Medium boundary, Medium/High boundary - that could potentially be increased slightly. Default is 70 and 120. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 hours ago, Psiman said:

5) There a couple of Exemplar properties that look as if they would be interesting to experiment with, but I haven't been able to locate them in Reader:

[Psiman 177]

28 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yeah, I'd looked at that page loads of times... 

I'm currently thinking about reducing the overall intensity of Desirability somehow. Reducing Desirability would in turn reduce Land Value, since they are linked. 

One way might be to change some of the Exemplar properties, so that instead of desirability starting high and getting lower towards zero with distance from centre, they would start at zero and with distance would produce a negative number of undesirability. Some other exemplar properties use this system. CS$, for example, has a Proximity Effect towards R$ that starts at zero and decreases to -15 at 255 squares away. So instead of being attracted to R$, it is repulsed by being away from it, but the net result should be the same, I think.

Doing this might, hopefully, prevent Desirability from hitting the maximum Desirability ceiling all the time.

Another property that could be useful is "Baseline Desirability", which is "value for desirability, if no other effects are applicable". Each RCI zone type has a different value, listed below. I wonder if lowering them all by the same amount would lower the overall level of desirability evenly?

CO$: -27
CO$$: -65

CS$: 68
CS$$: -3
CS$$$: 1

I-D: 69
I-HT:-94
I-M: 47
I-Resource:-81

R$: 25
R$$: -89
R$$$: -104

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Well, I don't know what the default "neutral" desirability is, but this "baseline desirability" that you found seems to be a modifier of it: Take the default "neutral" desirability, add 68 points, and the result is the "neutral" desirability for CS$.

These are some interesting stats, by the way. They show just how picky I-HT is, for example. It was a surprise for me to see that CS$$$ is absolutely not picky. You should think they wouldn't want to build luxury boutiques and hotels next to a landfill, but apparently they're not that picky in SC4.

BTT, lowering all these values across the board should have the effect you mentioned. This might also offer an opportunity do do some fine-tuning, e.g. by spreading the three residential wealth levels more evenly if deemed necessary. (However, I think it's fine that R$$ is much closer to R$$$ than to R$.)

[Psiman 177]

I've kind of reached a dead end with trying to affect Desirability, as reducing Desirability reduces Land Value. If one tries to make some areas less desirable for R$$$, then those areas lose Land Value.

The Exemplar property "Land Value Desirability Curve", which "maps desirability to land value", can be used to boost Land Value, but I haven't found a satisfactory balance. There's another Land Value Exemplar property that may be useful, "Land Value Desirability IDs", with the description "Growth Developer IDs (see Effects)", but I don't know what it does. The default values are 4 1 4 4.

So, the most interesting thing so far is the "Land Value Desirability Factors", being changed from 2.5 to 1. Instead of everywhere being high Land Value, suddenly only a fraction of the city is. There are many areas that are within coverage of all utilities - police, park, fire, hospital etc - that are still a bit below the 120 high-wealth threshold. This makes sense in my game, as high-wealth residential form only a small fraction of the total population, despite the majority of the residential architecture being high-wealth mansions. Setting a "Land Value Range" for R$$$ of 120-255 with this would appear to guarantee that mansions wouldn't pop up everywhere and would instead only appear in exclusive neighbourhoods.

I'm not sure what the consequences would be if one had R$$$ as the majority of population, though.

The main issue I've found with doing this, however, as mentioned previously, is that pretty much all the land directly adjacent to avenues 
has now become medium Land Value, which therefore has consequences for commercial growth. I guess a next step is to try and work out exactly what it is about being next to an avenue that is so damaging to Land Value.

If anyone wants to see what effect this change would have on one of their existing cities, then it's easy enough to do with Reader - just change "Land Value Desirability Factors" from 2.5 to 1. Holding SHIFT + CTRL + ALT and hovering the Query tool over a lot will reveal the precise Land Value.

[Psiman 177]

Here are a couple of screenshots showing the poorest neighbourhood in my city. The first is vanilla, the second is after applying "Land Value Desirability Factors" 2.5>1 and letting it run for a while.

All the mansions containing high-wealth residents are now under the high-wealth Land Value boundary and are therefore abandoning or dilapidating. If "Land Value Desirability Factors" 2.5>1 had been used from the start, I don't think any of these mansions would have developed in the first place, and the land would be filled with lines of individual medium-wealth houses.

Also, does anybody know the minimum Land Value for Hi-Tech Industrial to appear - is it high-wealth or medium wealth?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

27 minutes ago, Psiman said:

Also, does anybody know the minimum Land Value for Hi-Tech Industrial to appear - is it high-wealth or medium wealth?

High wealth.

You can peek in any of the lots upon which HT buildings grow and see the LotConfigPropertyWealthTypes is set to 0x03 which is high wealth.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

4 hours ago, Psiman said:

Here are a couple of screenshots showing the poorest neighbourhood in my city...

OMG! Why are the streets so close together? Mine may not be ideal, but my typical housing block is 6x20 (not counting streets).

 

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

2 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

OMG! Why are the streets so close together? Mine may not be ideal, but my typical housing block is 6x20 (not counting streets).

That's a valid observation. I have to wonder though, does it really matter on this occasion? Of course depending on mayoral preference, there are a multitude of ways to strategically plan the construction of a city layout. This includes residential blocks being closely segmented by streets, or those more widely spread out. From the previews @Psiman posted, with the idea being a proof in concept, I personally feel it's not so much about the aesthetics of design in this instance. Instead by adjusting the aforementioned exemplar property, more importantly to highlight the differential desirability factors of how they affect Land Value.

It's interesting to see evidence how this adjustment influences what grows where. If not wealth as a global variable, maybe it requires modding the actual RCI lots themselves? That way, perhaps R$$$ could accept the lesser extent of Land Value to be sufficiently desirable for sustainment.

[Psiman 177]

8 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

High wealth.

Thanks! 

3 hours ago, jeffryfisher said:

OMG! Why are the streets so close together? Mine may not be ideal, but my typical housing block is 6x20 (not counting streets).

I agree they're too short there.

1x2 is my standard house size, otherwise you get weird stuff where everybody's got a house in their garden.

I guess a size I would consider as a standard would be based on a 4x4 grid, so one could put a road through if necessary and still have blocks of 4x4. I like 9x4 and 14x4 as standard low-density residential blocks that fit this system. 

19x4 looks a bit too big for my view of SimWorld, where everything's a bit compressed. For example, the Soccer Football pitch in the game measures as 64 metres long, but a real pitch is 90-120m long. Real international airports have runways a couple of kilometres long, much longer than that of the game's Small International Airport.

---------

I think I've done with experimenting on this project now, although I'm not sure what's come out of it, if anything.

My attempts to modify Desirability have not brought successful results, or more precisely, have brought some good, but not without creating some even worse bad. (Better-defined Desirability maps, but massive drops in Land Value in less desirable areas).

If there is good news, it is about the "Land Value Desirability Factors", being changed from 2.5 to 1. I had earlier expressed concern that the drop in overall Land Value had placed Commercial areas in my game that were next to avenues below the High-wealth boundary, meaning they would not have been able to develop in the first place. 

I did some testing on this, by the way, and I'm still not sure what's causing this big Land Value drop where commercial lines avenues. Through the Clean Air Act, I eliminated traffic pollution, but with no real change in Land Value. Building more plazas didn't help much either.

In any case, it does not appear to matter. I bulldozed, and even dezoned and rezoned, commercial zoning in my Central Business District and new high-wealth commercial was building, even though the area was medium Land Value. I saw high-wealth commercial growing with Land Value as low as 73 (with 120 being the high Land Value boundary). As I write this, it has occurred to me that I tested this without the "Less Abandonment" mod, so I should double-check that that does not raise the "Desirability Threshold Growth" property for C$$$ too high for this to happen. Hi-Tech Industry would also grow while not at High-wealth Land Value.

I've also been testing out the "Less Abandonment" mod, without any other mods, and it's been doing a really good job at preventing mansions reappearing when I've been demolishing and rezoning mansions in my poor neighbourhood.

So, at this stage, I'm not yet sure whether the 2.5 mod>1 actually offers any improvements over the "Less Abandonment" mod, and so I need to do some more playtesting/observing to better evaluate.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

4 hours ago, Psiman said:

I think I've done with experimenting on this project now, although I'm not sure what's come out of it, if anything.

The great thing here is you've taken the time to explore and share your findings. So even if right now it might not do everything as would ideally be desirable (with Desirability), there's been progress made just through research and testing. To see people like yourself still interested in modding SC4 all these years later is very encouraging indeed. So do be encouraged to keep experimenting, if not with this, maybe as inspiration for other projects in future.

 

4 hours ago, Psiman said:

I've also been testing out the "Less Abandonment" mod, without any other mods, and it's been doing a really good job at preventing mansions reappearing when I've been demolishing and rezoning mansions in my poor neighbourhood.

On a related note for finer control to limit the redevelopment of low wealth, that's where the "No Kickout" mod really comes into its own. What this does is prevents medium and high wealth from taking over when low wealth is already established. Since it modifies different properties, "Less Abandonment" can be used in combination to reduce the rate of dilapidation. Once getting used to NKO myself, I quickly realised the distinctive benefits of what it brings as a simulation enhancement. I like to think of it as an adjustment which greatly improves realism to have different wealths coexisting. Then as mayor to have more power for developing and managing RCI zones through selective bulldozing.

For more info including with a few picture previews, there's an excellent summary by @CorinaMarie posted here.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@Psiman

Just another random thing I recalled. If you haven't seen this already, Tim presents a good comparison between Less Abandonment and Abandonment Dilapidation Modd:

On 23/12/2016 at 7:51 AM, twalsh102 said:

I downloaded and took a look at the only two mods I could find that deal with abandonment and dilapidation globally:  the Less Abandonment mod by Bones1 and the Abandonment Dilapidation Modd 1.2 by RalphaelNinja.  They took two completely different approaches to the issue of abandonment and dilapidation:

Abandonment Dilapidation Modd 1.2:  RalphaelNinja took a two pronged approach.  First, he modified the Lot Developer Stay New Time property in the Building Development Simulator exemplar to periods from 1 year to 180 years.  Second, he modified the Capacity Satisfied property for all the Maxis medium- and high-wealth R, CO, and CS building exemplars to include only occupants with the same wealth level as the building.  The end result is he neither prevented downgrading of buildings, nor abandonment.  He really only hid the visual aspects of both.  Changing the Capacity Satisfied properties prevented buildings from be re-occupied by lower wealth occupants.  In effect, once conditions changed such that a building needed to downgrade to a lower wealth level, instead of lower wealth occupants moving in, the building abandoned.  Note:  This mod is not compatible with CAM as both modify the same exemplars.

Less Abandonment:  The approach taken by Bones1 was to modify the Desirability Threshold Growth property in the Developer exemplars for the various medium- and high-wealth residential and commercial developer types along with I-HT.  He changed the value so that the threshold for growth is much higher than the threshold for decline, whereas previously both thresholds were the same.  In effect he prevented buildings from developing when desirability was borderline (previously with the thresholds the same, a newly developed building could start to dilapidate with only a minor negative change in desirability).  NOTE:  While this mod is not compatible with CAM, the changes instituted by Bones1 have been included in the latest version of CAM.

 

For the extra drop in desirability along avenues it seems there might be some negative influence tied directly to the avenue itself. Have you peeked in there?

[Psiman 177]

On 15/11/2018 at 12:21 PM, CorinaMarie said:

For the extra drop in desirability along avenues it seems there might be some negative influence tied directly to the avenue itself. Have you peeked in there?

I've not managed to find an Exemplar property that controls this.

-------------------------------------------

I'm still not sure if there's any actual gameplay difference between "Land Value Desirability Factors" 2.5>1 and vanilla. It may be that it is just a visual thing, giving better definition than vanilla's "everything at max 255 Land Value" approach, thus providing the Land Value map with a gradient effect at high-wealth levels, and meaning one can get an accurate Land Value reading for all lots. 

The mansions abandoning screenshot I posted earlier happened the same with vanilla, so it wasn't an effect of the 2.5>1 mod. Also, laying parks next to lots that are apparently maxxed-out with Land Value and Desirability in vanilla still gives them development growth boosts from transient aura effect. Furthermore, high-wealth residential is more likely to grow by water in vanilla than in other areas which also have maxxed-out Desirability and Land Value. So these things suggest that vanilla and 2.5>1 mod are not different in gameplay terms.

I think it's preferable to use the 2.5>1 for the reasons stated. The only reasons I can think of why the developers might have changed this to 2.5 is so that placing parks has a more noticeable graphical effect on the Land Value map, as with the reduced intensity of 2.5>1 it's much more faint, especially at lower levels.

Of course, there could be unknown unknowns that I don't know about...

The "Less Abandonment" mod has been working really well and I definitely recommend it. 

I am thinking, though, of adding an additional factor to prevent the appearance of mansions in areas they are unwanted, which is enabled through use of the 2.5>1 mod. With the better definition of Land Value that the 2.5>1 mod gives, one can see actual Land Value of individual high-wealth properties, rather than them all being uniform max 255 with vanilla. 

Looking at my existing city, the boundary that I personally felt that mansions should appear at was around Land Value of 130, slightly higher than default 120. So I might also try using the Land Value Range Exemplar property, setting it for R$$$ at 130 minimum, so that mansions will not normally appear below this level. I might also in turn raise R$$ from 70 to 80, although that wouldn't matter as much, since it's easy to increase Land Value at this level.

The transient aura effect temporarily raises Land Value (and Desirability?) so high that these limits described above can be temporarily overcome. Therefore, understanding of the transient aura effect is crucial for promoting and preventing appearance of high-wealth mansions. If one wants high-wealth, then one must plop the zoning and then plop the parks etc to feel the full benefits from the transient aura effect. If one wants some park in a medium-wealth or lower area, but doesn't want mansions in that area, then one should lay the parks first, wait a few months for the transient aura effect to wear off and then place the zoning. 

----------------------

I was looking through the R$$$ residential lots. Stages 1-4 use the same buildings, so it's garden size that is the difference, and the gardens get smaller. So lowest-stage R$$$ look more impressive than slightly higher stages, since they have bigger gardens. 

Stage 5 also uses a lot of the same buildings.

Here are the numbers of lots the vanilla game has in each size at each of the lower-density stages:

R$$$1 4x5: 6
R$$$1 4x6: 6

R$$$2 3x4: 4
R$$$2 4x3: 4
R$$$2 4x4: 6

R$$$3 3x3: 6
R$$$3 3x4: 2
R$$$3 4x3: 2

R$$$4 2x3: 6
R$$$4 3x2: 6

R$$$5 2x2: 10
R$$$ 2x3: 2

It's strange, as I don't recall ever seeing mansions in anything other than 3x3 and 3x4/4x3. Anyone seen other sizes?

I had an idea about doing some modding of this, but the vanilla mansions probably do not vary enough in size to create two tiers of mansions. Another idea I had would be to create some sort of pre-mansion high-wealth housing, perhaps at 2x2 and 2x3 size. Using the "Land Value Range" property, mansions could be set to only appear at a higher Land Value than pre-mansion high-wealth housing. It would need some new pre-mansion high-wealth building models, but maybe such buildings exist in ST Exchange.

[Psiman 177]

There are loads of R$$$ lots in the Lot Editor that I've never seen before, of all the sizes I listed in my previous post. I'm really not sure if these are currently used in the game. If not, then that means they could be put to use! Has anyone ever seen a mansion develop into another mansion? I've never seen it.

One of the things I don't like about mansions is that they have a depth of three or four squares, and therefore don't fit well visually with other residential zoning. It looks a bit silly that when a block of 1x2 houses upgrades to mansions, the mansion will have expand to have a road in front and behind it. 

So a mod could be made that doesn't use the existing 3x3, 3x4/4x3 lots, but instead uses the lots with a depth of two or three squares, like other residential. Residential capacity could be reduced in turn to compensate for the smaller lot footprint size, so it all balances out the same. 

Here's a screenshot showing some of the R$$$ lots in the Lot Editor. Same buildings are used as vanilla mansion lots, just lot size is reduced. Firstly, are some 2x2 lots, and then some 3x2 lots.

(P.S. Anyone else get a slight optical illusion with this picture, that the squares are slightly tilted anti-clockwise?)

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

1 hour ago, Psiman said:

It's strange, as I don't recall ever seeing mansions in anything other than 3x3 and 3x4/4x3. Anyone seen other sizes?

The only other which I can recall would be 4x4 lot sizes. Although since I use No Kickout and limit the growth of them to certain neighbourhoods (in desirable locations), larger mansion sizes don't come recently to mind for me either. However according to a spreadsheet-based RCI Buildings List which usefully documents all Maxis growables, it reveals there are the following varieties for some (not all) types of mansions:

2x2,  2x3,  3x3,  3x4,  4x4,  4x5,  4x6
(For example with Stone Mansion and Modern Villa.)

This reference list also includes the Name, Tileset, Type, and Capacity for all lot instances. So based on this there can be a maximum of 7 sub-variations of each kind. Collectively encouraging the larger sizes to grow, I suspect it may require using the precision zoning technique of holding the Ctrl key to define the parcel area. As you may already be aware, this and the other methods can be a useful means of controlling what grows where. When the game decides which growable to select for development in a given location, I believe considerable factors are the lot size along with occupancy. Then depending on the demand and conditions being desirable, to support the growth stage and density of each developer type (per wealth). One key consideration is how demand is which RCI can potentially develop, not necessarily what needs to.

(As a side note, for some reason the list has the last 20 pages showing blank, but those can be removed by downloading a local copy and editing the PDF.)

For additional info on the properties of RCI lots, you may also find this site of use which displays exported data from the SC4Tool exemplar analyser.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 hours ago, Psiman said:

Anyone seen other sizes?

Yep. I've seen 2 x 2 low density, high wealth mansions. This is in a game which I've set to build only Chicago 1890 from the beginning and in which I've been using No Kickout from the start too.

 

[Psiman 177]

14 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Yep. I've seen 2 x 2 low density, high wealth mansions. 

Hmm, could a mod be made then to only use 2x3 and 3x2 (and maybe 3x3) size lots for the early stages of R$$$ growth?

EDIT: If the answer is yes, then I'll start a new thread around it, as it would be getting slightly off-topic.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, Psiman said:

Hmm, could a mod be made then to only use 2x3 and 3x2 (and maybe 3x3) size lots for the early stages of R$$$ growth?

I'm sure the answer is: Yes.

I believe it would require editing each building's exemplar to remove the higher size lots from the option list in the lower stage mansions.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, Psiman said:

(P.S. Anyone else get a slight optical illusion with this picture, that the squares are slightly tilted anti-clockwise?)

I forgot to answer this. Yes, they do look all cattywampus.

 

26 minutes ago, Psiman said:

Hmm, could a mod be made then to only use 2x3 and 3x2 (and maybe 3x3) size lots for the early stages of R$$$ growth?

Ok. I've peeked in Reader and it'll be the lots that need altering. Just change the growth stage so the sizes you want are in 1, 2 & 3.

And increase the growth stage for the larger size lots to keep them from growing too early.

[Psiman 177]

1 hour ago, CorinaMarie said:

Ok. I've peeked in Reader and it'll be the lots that need altering.

Thanks, I'll look into it.

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After experimenting, I was able to create a 4x4 mansion by holding Ctrl to create a 4x4 block (and have seen 3x3 mansions in my game). I wasn't able to create 2x2, or 2x3 etc in testing, despite building dozens of parks.

When clicking on mansion buildings, they have the same/similar number of residents regardless of footprint size. Is it like farm fields and farm anchor buildings, where there are unrecorded residents, on top of those actually displayed? So a 3x4 mansion would actually have the same number of total residents as two 2x3 mansions, despite the number of buildings and recorded residents suggesting the two smaller mansions would have double the number? EDIT: Same with other buildings - does a 1x3 house have unrecorded residents, or is its extra square over a 1x2 house being wasted?