Modding / Recalibrating Land Value

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

I suspect you can't get the 2x2 or 2x3 because your test city isn't ready for the growth stage where they would appear. And I'll say no, there are no hidden Sims like farm workers as I believe the population is always tied to the building itself. The larger lots are just indicating that particular rich Sim is richer than the other rich Sims inasmuch as they can afford a larger yard. (Genericly speaking.)

Now from my appraisal background IRL I'd say the way Maxis has it set up is realistic. In the early growth stages the land value is less and a rich Sim can afford a larger parcel for their mansion. In the middle stages the land value shoots up and they can only afford a smaller parcel for a similar house. Then in the stages 7 & 8 they can not only afford a larger parcel, but a better house on it too.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 hours ago, Psiman said:

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

I've been looking into the Avenue and other car networks and I don't see anything related to land value for them either.

 

As a quick test I did compare a small house adjacent to a street and then adjacent to an avenue and the land value of the home does change:

So something is going on.

[Psiman 177]

2 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

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.

I followed your instructions, removed the "Less Abandonment" mod and let some mansions grow...

Looks good. There's something up with lack of trees, though, compared with screenshots posted previously. Will have to look into whether its something to do with this particular tileset. With some random-spawning trees they'd look even better.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

14 minutes ago, Psiman said:

There's something up with lack of trees, though, compared with screenshots posted previously. Will have to look into whether its something to do with this particular tileset. With some random-spawning trees they'd look even better.

Run 10 or 20 years in game and see if the trees grow. Many of them are modded with saplings that will grow over time.

[Psiman 177]

24 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Run 10 or 20 years in game and see if the trees grow. Many of them are modded with saplings that will grow over time.

Yep, that's it. They look awesome now!

Will still, I think, have to recalibrate residential capacity, since Stage 4 buildings are being used as Stage 1.

I wonder if there might be a way to still have the occasional large mansion. Perhaps a later stage. Could perhaps be a 4x3 mansion (3 depth). Not sure if one could have a 3x4 (four depth) without risking back-to-back 3x2 mansions upgrading to it. There are potential ways to spruce up a larger mansion tile by adding an existing greenhouse/observatory prop. With 2.5>1 mod, one could also specify the Land value.

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, Psiman said:

Not sure if one could have a 3x4 (four depth) without risking back-to-back 3x2 mansions upgrading to it.

You could give NKO a try.

[Psiman 177]

18 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

You could give NKO a try.

Yeah, that can't be applied to single lots, though?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, Psiman said:

Yeah, that can't be applied to single lots, though?

No. It's a simple toggle for the whole city tile. You can find some more info here, here, here, here, and here.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

5 hours ago, Psiman said:

Yeah, that can't be applied to single lots, though?

For preventing redevelopment on an individual basis, I've found this is where the Make Historical option comes in useful.

When querying an RCI lot which one considers irreplaceable, such as:
 

 

This preference is maintained on the chosen lot upon saving that city tile. When using No Kickout, this option is still of benefit in the cases when some lots decide to segment themselves into smaller lots with extra houses. This is because the simulation likes to maximise density, and so setting the Historical toggle allows not only the wealth level to be preserved, but also in those rare occasions they upgrade between stages. The brilliant thing about NKO is it saves the need for going through historicalizing all lots to stop redevelopment from the low wealth. Then as an observational response in certain situations, to use Make Historical as an extra precaution.

It's worth mentioning how neither using Make Historical nor NKO will prevent abandonment.

As explained on Page 376 of the Prima strategy guide:

Quote

Historical designation won't protect a building from abandonment due to negative demand, loss of water service, or other such catastrophic events. In fact, the building's inability to redevelop in the face of changing desirability might make it more prone to abandonment.

Historical buildings also won't be protected against the effects of fire or other Disasters. They can still be destroyed like any other building; they just can't be redeveloped.

So that might be where that "Less Abandonment" mod is worth using too in combination. Both are compatible with each other and work well.

[cogeo 960]

As other members mentioned above, the reason why you can't grow mansions on smaller lots is that they are stage-4 and -5, and thus require medium-density zones. I met this problem back in 2010, and made a mod for it. Check this thread post on SC4D. Don't know what effect this will have on an already developed city/region though. The mod changes growth stages for Maxis lots, instances of which you already have in your cities, and it is unknown what will happen if you change their growth stage, will it be OK or it will mess-up lot stage counters (sums), and therefore what the simulator will grant you?

Also, I find the Less Abandonment Mod absolutely brilliant, not only it sets desirability thresholds to get $$ and $$$ in the first place higher (so they won't grow in areas of marginal desirability and then easily get abandoned/dilapidated), it also sets dilapidation threshold lower than the growth/recovery one, which means that lots can tolerate some drop in desirability (which is very much possible to occur, as a result of congestion, air pollution etc, as the city grows and becomes more dense), without suffering dilapidation or abandonment, and imo this is the key point. I use it in my cities (can't remember if I use it as it was originally or further modded it though), and along with some custom lots I made, utilizing the so called "transient aura effect" (1x1 "park" lots with extreme desirability settings, and zero costs, which you plop to get the desired development and then bulldoze them), I have been able to grow what I want where I want, resulting for example in completely segregated R$/$$/$$$ areas, or avoiding the "fragmentation" of commercial zones (eg having those nasty 1x3 boutiques, which they cannot be upgraded, only merged with another one next by to form a larger lot). But this requires a lot of marking historical and unmarking, saving the city when getting the desired development and exiting to region when not etc, which is... "micromanagement"!

[Psiman 177]

9 hours ago, cogeo said:

As other members mentioned above, the reason why you can't grow mansions on smaller lots is that they are stage-4 and -5, and thus require medium-density zones. I met this problem back in 2010, and made a mod for it. Check this thread post on SC4D. Don't know what effect this will have on an already developed city/region though. The mod changes growth stages for Maxis lots, instances of which you already have in your cities, and it is unknown what will happen if you change their growth stage, will it be OK or it will mess-up lot stage counters (sums), and therefore what the simulator will grant you?

I'm making a smaller mansions mod which does away with the larger mansions, although I may find a way of reintroducing them, and instead allows 3x4, 3x3, 2x3, and 3x2 mansions to appear at the same Growth Stage. In the vanilla game, tax is the same for all-sized mansion buildings, so the smaller footprint the better, meaning a 2x3 mansion is 3.33 times better than a 5x4 mansion. The mod I am making will instead change tax rates for different-sized mansions, so a larger mansion is not intrinsically worse than a smaller mansion.

It looks like the stage counters can be adjusted to rebalance things.

9 hours ago, cogeo said:

Also, I find the Less Abandonment Mod absolutely brilliant, not only it sets desirability thresholds to get $$ and $$$ in the first place higher (so they won't grow in areas of marginal desirability and then easily get abandoned/dilapidated), it also sets dilapidation threshold lower than the growth/recovery one, which means that lots can tolerate some drop in desirability (which is very much possible to occur, as a result of congestion, air pollution etc, as the city grows and becomes more dense), without suffering dilapidation or abandonment, and imo this is the key point.

Although I have yet to use it in actual play, I've used it a lot in testing and would go as far as to say that I consider the vanilla game to broken without it (or another similar mechanism that achieves the same effect). Although I haven't looked at all the files, I'm not sure the "Less Abandonment" mod reduces the dilapidation threshold. For example, in the vanilla files, the "Desirability Threshold Growth" and "Desirability Threshold Decline" properties for R$$$ are both set at 50. So not only is the desirability growth level ridiculously low, it's at the same level for it to instantly dilapidate. "Less Abandonment" raises the growth threshold to 120, which is the same Land Value figure for high-wealth, but leaves the dilapidation level at 50. Desirability and Land Value are intrinsically linked, so 120 makes sense as the default figure for this. 

However, I'm considering raising this to 130 for my next game. Providing all the utilities and some park is enough to get anywhere in the city up to high-wealth value. By increasing the threshold slightly higher, it will limit high-wealth even further to the parts of town that are a little bit more special than the others for one reason or another. It looks like it would work when applying this mod to an existing city I've built.

Using the "Land Value Desirability Factors" mod discussed in this thread I may also set the Land Value Range, which appears to prohibit growth while not affecting existing buildings, for R$$$ to the range of 120-255 or 130-255 to act as a further filter (instead of default 0-255).

On a related note, I am also going to make modifications to how Park Effect affects residential Desirability, which has knock-on effects for Land Value, as discussed in this thread.

The maximum amount of Park Effect that the vanilla game will use to calculate Desirability at any given location is 100. A Large Park Green emits 75 Park Effect. So if one places two Large Park Greens next to each other, two-thirds of the second Large Park Green's effect is being wasted in the area closest to the parks. A Small Park Green emits a Park Effect of 50, so just two Small Park Greens has reached the maximum limit of desirability consideration.

For my next game, I'm going to change this level of Park Effect that's considered for desirability from 100 to 255. This will mean that the game gets harder because one will need more park to get to the same level as before, but it will also mean that the city will be less liable to reach a uniform level of Land Value/Desirability (and the difference would be visible on the Land Value map when using Land Value Desirability Factors 2.5>1 mod).

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 minutes ago, Psiman said:

"Less Abandonment" raises the growth threshold to 120, which is the same Land Value figure for high-wealth, but leaves the dilapidation level at 50. Desirability and Land Value are intrinsically linked, so 120 makes sense as the default figure for this. 

I may very well have this backwards, but isn't the dilapidation level a lower end threshold? In other words desirability needs to fall below the value set here before dilapidation occurs.

[Psiman 177]

6 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

I may very well have this backwards, but isn't the dilapidation level a lower end threshold? In other words desirability needs to fall below the value set here before dilapidation occurs.

Yes, I think so. So at vanilla 50/50, mansions will build when when R$$$ desirability is over 50, and will dilapidate when under 50. So often a load of mansions will build and instantly dilapidate. The "Less Abandonment" mod won't let mansions build until there's a sensible for R$$$ level of desirability of 120. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

2 minutes ago, Psiman said:

The "Less Abandonment" mod won't let mansions build until there's a sensible for R$$$ level of desirability of 120.

And my point (perhaps misunderstanding your statement) is that 120 to build and 50 to go sour is a good thing rather than setting both to 120.

[Psiman 177]

22 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

And my point (perhaps misunderstanding your statement) is that 120 to build and 50 to go sour is a good thing rather than setting both to 120.

Well, I guess it's a good thing in the sense that it will theoretically make it harder for a mansion to dilapidate once established, but you have made me think about that 50 figure, which does seem like a very low level of R$$$ desirability. So now I am thinking of changing that too!

It seems like it should at least match the low-medium wealth Land Value threshold of 70. I'd be interested in setting both these figures to 120 for R$$$, loading up an existing city and seeing what happened.

I'm not entirely sure how it all works, but is maybe a reason that a mansion can get dilapidated is not because its desirability has gone below the R$$$ desirability threshold (as I think it would be hard to do that, since 50 is a low figure), but because R$$$ move around the city according to desirability? So some new high-wealth housing builds somewhere else in the city which has a higher R$$$ desirability level and the R$$$ move there, causing buildings to dilapidate?

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

5 minutes ago, Psiman said:

It seems like it should at least match the low-medium wealth Land Value threshold of 70.

That sounds logical.

 

5 minutes ago, Psiman said:

I'm not entirely sure how it all works,

I know less about it than you do as I've not done the kind of tests you've been running. (And I tend to play more rural type city tiles than many peeps so I rely on my NKO and the Less Abandonment mod without any tweaks to it.)

[Psiman 177]

I found that changing "Land Value Desirability Factors" halved the Land Value bar in the city Opinion Poll, so I'm not using that any more, although its a useful experimentational tool. I'm working with Park and Landmark Effect now, anyway.

I'm also trying to investigate more about the "Desirability Threshold Decline" property and what its effects are. To recap, this is set very low in vanilla and "Less Abandonment" mod. 

For a test, I've set the "Desirability Threshold Decline" values to match the "Desirability Threshold Growth" (with "Less Abandonment" values). 

I have an area of mansions in my test city and I bulldozed the parks and the hospital and got R$$$ Desirability really low, to the 50s and 60s. The number of residents in each mansion decreased and would fluctuate. When a mansion got below half its residents, it would dilapidate - but not to a lower wealth group, still high-wealth. The mansions would flicker on and off, but were mostly on. They didn't abandon.

The dilapidation would surely be bad, although I'm not sure exactly what the consequences would be. I'm also not sure what the consequences are of having less, but more than half, residents. I was under the impression that it was Buildings that were taxed, not residents. If that were the case, less residents in a building would be good, as long as it didn't dilapidate? 

Anyway, I'm wondering if having "Desirability Threshold Decline" too low might be removing an important aspect of cities and, potentially, the game - that of urban decay and regeneration. The "Less Abandonment" stops the building of buildings that should never have been built in the first place, and so is kind of like a bug fix. But it make sense that a changing city will also produce dilapidated and abandoned buildings as desirability changes within a city over time, and these areas will need regenerating by building parks, bulldozing dilapidated buildings and potentially rezoning.

I will have to test to see how sensitive "Desirability Threshold Decline" is - in my test, I lowered R$$$ desirability down to the 50s and 60s vs its 120 setting. I think generally, though, desirability tends to be relatively stable once one has developed an area, unless one builds some dirty industry or a power station nearby. One factor that might be harder to control would be Air Pollution caused by traffic, as traffic increased over time, but there are ways to address that. The biggest issue, perhaps, might be large fluctuations caused by crime hotspots.

[Naomi57 2,985]

On 25/11/2018 at 8:48 PM, cogeo said:

avoiding the "fragmentation" of commercial zones (eg having those nasty 1x3 boutiques, which they cannot be upgraded, only merged with another one next by to form a larger lot). But this requires a lot of marking historical and unmarking, saving the city when getting the desired development and exiting to region when not etc, which is... "micromanagement"!

Hi @cogeo, this subdividing and merging of lots can be controlled without micromanagement, by using striped commercial zoning techniques.  The medium density commercial lots next to the OWR-2 Avenue x MHW FLUPs underpass on the left of this screenshot are earmarked for future merging as a 4x3 CO$$ or CO$$$ lot, and the sims can subdivide it and merge it as much as they like, as the city goes through it's growth stages.  The striped zoning preserves my long-term view.  The only micromanaging required is deciding the timeframe to re-zone the 4x3 to high density.

This screenshot is from a related post of mine, which talks about checkerboard, striped, higgledy-piggledy, and yes "Make Historical" techniques for controlling subdivision and merging of lots, in the context of R$ neighbourhoods.  The same sorts of techniques work for commercial and industrial, too, to guarantee the desired clean demarcations between lots for the entire lifetime of your city.

 

[Eusebio Ptolomeu 24]

Sorry for bad english.

 

     I tried something here that might help you control it a little. Using iLive Reader, we can check the General -> Developer tab, which contains the parameters/exemplars for the development of such lots. If you check the residential ones, at the bottom you'll see exemplars such as "Water Supply Cap", "Fire Coverage Cap", etc. They work as a form of threshold, limiting the stage of the building to be developed in case this is not met. The "Water Supply Cap" for R$$$ is 0, so no R$$$ building of a stage bigger than 0 (in other words, no building at all) will ever appear here, even with everything else, like education and health, fine.
     The idea is to add caps for both R$$ and R$$$ lots in the form of "Fire Coverage Cap" and "Park Cap". The former checks if the lot is inside the protection of fire stations, and the latter checks if there are parks "nearby". Here's what I did, keeping in mind I have CAM, so take the different growth stages into account:
-R$$ has a "Fire Coverage Cap" of 3, and a "Park Cap" of 16. In other words, without fire protection, only buildings up to stage 3 will appear. When it comes to parks, it doesn't matter: give them fire protection, education, health and water and they will happily build the highest towers, if demand allows.
-R$$$ has a "Fire Coverage Cap" of 3, and a "Park Cap" of 0. In other words, NO PARKS, NO R$$$! With the park cap o 0, you NEED to provide parks in the neighborhood for the wealthy to appear.

     This is all the changes it takes for the system to work. Let's see how it should (hopefully) work in different scenarios.
-Suppose you want a high-rise neighborhood of, at best, R$$. You'll need to provide the basics (water, education, health, demand) and to have the neighborhood inside the coverage of some fire station. BUT DO NOT ADD PARKS HERE: it's not that R$$ don't like them, but R$$$ also like them, and R$$$ have the financial means to kick your R$$ out, so do not add parks in order to preserve the R$$. What if, instead of towers, all you want are those quaint middle-wealth houses? Just do the same thing, but zone it with low-density
-If what you want is lots and lots of high-rise R$$$, then you should add parks as well.

I don't know if what I said here was clear enough, but I am attaching the modified CAM file below for you guys to try out. This is a modified "CAM_2.1.0_PlayStyle_Standard.dat" file, that you should put in Documents -> SimCity 4 -> Plugins -> a_CAM -> a_Core, replacing the original there. In case you want to search this file for the modifications I did with iLiveReader, check General -> Developer -> Residential $$ and Residential $$$, and search for the "Fire Protection Cap" and "Park Cap" exemplars inside each one.

CAM_2.1.0_PlayStyle_Standard.dat

[Piotr Tarnowski 8]

Hi All,

It took me around 3 years from concept to implementation of mod that do what this topic says: "Recalibrating Land Value"...

What I manage to acheive is that:

1. Land value does matter (it impacts what type of wealth is develop where)
2. Land value looks interesing (I have changed data view for land value that now is showing more colors, cause there are more stable levels  )
3. Land value is under control (By placing parks, schools, hospitals... you are in control of what land value will be in particular place)
4. Rivers and terrain level have impact on land value
5. Deasarability of all kind of development was ammend to support land values changes, and now are more interesing
6. I have tested that my changes are playable by playing diffrent style of playing including Cori's placing mansion inside crop fields
7. I work really hard to keep as much compatibility as I can to not ruin already builed city and I manage to keep it in some degree ... I mean for sure we need to place more parks here and there, or other things... but it seems to work on my exemples in acceptable way.

Now I want to share my work with your kind society and belive that together we could improve this mod even further maybe some balancing? I know that what is working for me is not working for everyone... and also for sure my mod is incompatible with other mods...

To the point.... I do not know how and where should I place my mod properly to allow other users to download it ... help!

Kind Regards

Piotr

P.S. 3 years cause I do not have too much free time in my life and I belive a month of full-time job will be enough to make all those changes and all those testing which I did. The most time consuming thing was to learn about internals of the game and its limitation and then using this konwladge to achieve what I have planed for this mod. Not all things in my mod works "perfectly" but playing with it is interesting and fun. 

Thank all of you for your time and konwladge and without that I would not be able to implement this mod, even if this is my first post here at simtropolis I have read many of your posts trough all these years :-)

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

5 hours ago, Piotr Tarnowski said:

I do not know how and where should I place my mod properly to allow other users to download it ... help!

Prolly a new topic in this forum would be the best way to go.

My experience has been some peeps might jump in right away and start testing and giving feedback or no one will and it'll feel like no one cares at all. I don't know which way to predict for what you have. I know I would love to peek and test, but RL doesn't allow me to do more than a few posts now and then each day.

Please do post anyhow. Even it it takes a few years, it's really nice to contribute to the SC4 Community.