"Real Life"

[brianc1327 161]

I am currently working on a region that has the 4x4 cities as "central producers" (3 in the generated region I am working on), that I am zoning as that are surrounded by 2x2 areas that are zoned as either only residential or only commercial.  There are a bunch of 1x1 cities splattered about as well, but I have not decided what to do with them.  Perhaps put roads in them connecting my larger subregions then fill them up the rest of the way with trees, I don't know.  I think there are enough 2x2 and 4x4 regions to make 3 "central producers with 5 or 6 residential and business districts each surrounding them.

What I am doing is zoning ~1/6 of the central producer as high density industrial, adjusting the taxes so that there is demand only for industrial, and let it run for a few game years, until the  jobs/population graph indicates that growth has stopped, usually less than 2 game years, especially in a region that I am just starting.  Then I go to one of the adjacent 2x2 areas and develop part of it as residential, the "neiborhoods" being laid out in a method I described in a post titled "new neighborhood design." Obviously, what I am doing is a bit different from my original post since I am zoning only residential, and I have improved my neighborhood design since I made the original post.  Then I go to the next 2x2 city and let it develop as commercial for a few years.  I then cycle through my 3 cities, developing each a little bit until the residential city is "fully" developed, 800k-900k the way I am doing it, usually 40-50 game years in the residential city under current development. I suppose I can post a picture of what I have so far if anyone is interested.

I don't know if this is the way most people lay out their regions, but after over 15 years and probably millions of copies sold, I would think there has been somebody somewhere that has tried this strategy or something like it.  It might suffer from the "eternal commuter" problem in some places, but mostly what seems to be happening is that the residential area provides more demand in both the industrial and commercial areas, the industrial produces more demand in the residential and commercial areas and the commercial produces more demand in the industrial and residential areas, in sort of a region-wide positive feedback loop.  How I am developing my current region is not what I ultimately want to talk about, however, it just ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would.  What I really want to talk about is how SC4 differs from "Real Life" (RL).

Airports.  Since a post about how the "ploppable" airports in the game don't look like reals ones inspired me to think about this, I will start with them.  In the sub-region I am currently building, there is enough demand for a medium (or perhaps even large if I let the region develop long enough) municipal airport in each commercial city, and there does not seem to any demand from the industrial and business areas.  In real life however there would be demand from all 3 sectors (or at least I think there would be) and the region would be served by a single municipal or international airport with perhaps a few airstrips as "satellite airports."

Who pays for the airports?  The cost for maintaing a small municipal airport is $1000 (not sure how to make the simoleon sign, if there even is a way to do that.  I don't know that much about the expenses of running an airport, but it seems to me that several things would have to be paid in real life: the salaries of the personnel directly involved with the flying such as the air-traffic controllers, flight mechanics, etc.; the other non-flight personell such as the workers in the restaurants in the terminal buildings, the janitors, etc.; the actual maintenance of the runways, hangar buildings, etc.  If the maintenance fee on the airport pays for all of these things, that would make, in that conversion at least, a simoleon worth 100 to perhaps 1000 dollars.  I guess simoleons can be worth as much as the programmers want, but most conversions make a simoleaon quite valuable.  If the airport fee does not pay for all these things, who does?

Cost of public transit in general.  When I place a bus station, a budget item for that station is placed into the ledger for the maintenance of that station, but I cant seem to find a budget entry for the maintenance of the buses or the pay for the drivers.  If the cost of the bus stations includes those things, again that makes a simoleon quite valuable.  If the maintenance fee on the bus station does not include these things who pays for them, or are they "magic buses" that require neither drivers or fuel.

Water.  In SC4, the water pumps and such draw from an infinite aquifer.  In RL, water systems are subject to droughts, pollution, and all sorts of other problems.

Water and electricity hook ups.  In SC4, any place that is within 6 tiles of a water pipe that is connected to a pump is automatically watered, but in RL, a pipe has to be laid from the water main to the building being built.  Pretty much the same can be said about electricity as well.

Money Cheats.  I think the most mayors in RL would use money cheats if possible to reduce or eliminate taxes, but in RL magically producing money this way would probably ruin the economy.

Mods in general. Many mods increase the capacity or productivity beyond what would be practical in RL.  For example I have a mod that makes the private schools have a capacity of 10,000 instead of just 1,000.  While this is quite useful in the game, in RL, buildings that size would not have a capacity of 10,000.  In fact, saying they have a capacity of 1,000, seems, at least to me, to be stretching it.

No Inflation.  In RL there is certainly inflation, and I have been told that in an industrial economy, some inflation is healthy.  In SC4, a tennis court, for example, is $130 in game year 0 or 500 or 1000 or whenever.

There are probably lots of other places where SC4 differs from real life, but that is enough for now.

Brian Christiansen

[matias93 7,535]

Well, many things to comment here. On the same order:

1. Airports are surely twisted and weird on the game, and so are seaports. In both cases, the big issue is because regional gaming was never fully developed, and commutes cannot be done across city tiles, so you need transportation utilities repeated on every place. In any case, some mods that add small 'shuttle' styled lots to replace the actual port lots can fix most of the problem.
2. The scale of the simulation is borked elsewhere, not only on the costs of transportation. Just put attention at the population numbers of the maxis lots: they are easily 3 or 4-fold what one would expect from the respective building in real life, and as a consequence, all the networks to serve them have to be scaled as such; to give an example, metro stations each 300 metres is about the maximum possible closeness on a real city, but on SC4 is a sensible distance for an averagely dense neighbourhood. Obviously, this also has to have a correlation with the costs: as the game expects you to plop much more transportation lots than would be reasonable on an adequately scaled simulation, the costs of doing so are reduced to compensate.
3. A full water simulation, as we know, was something that the game was due to have, but developing and executive constraints avoided it. That's why all water pumps inform us (without any usefulness) that they are getting their water from an aquifer, as if they were able to get it from another source (that was the original idea). A complementary part was the moisture simulation, that still exists and can be activated, and even used, to produce seasonal changes on terrain textures and god-mode trees.
4. Don't forget that what the 'power line' and 'water pipe' tools are simulating aren't their full networks, but only the main lines; the 'area of effect' is intended to simulate the local connections to each lot. Certainly I would have prefered having true electrical substations as the only source of 'area of effect', but this is an adequate compromise.
5. Cheat-like mods are a relative evil on a game that is not so focused on 'winning' against the simulation, but rather creating a city. Giving the enormous restrictions a half-done simulation imposes, producing a credible-looking city oftentimes requires extra resources. Also, the very parametres of the tax simulation are simply too restrictive! I mean, which kind of real city can work with citizens that go away when having to pay more than 10% on income taxes? Either you have an external source of money to do things, or you let the city to rot on its economic unsustainability.
6. Capacities of buildings are heavily linked to the previous issue on the simulation scale, but also to certain cultural differences on which densities are sensible: A 6x6 lotted school with a capacity of 4,500 students sounds perfectly reasonable to me, but probably is absurd for someone from the US or Australia.
7. Inflation, just as many other elements of a market economy, simply cannot be simulated, because the basis for such a thing is absent on the game: there isn't a market, nor customers. Your sims simply are going forth and back to work, the industrial output is being sent elsewhere without any effect on the internal economy, and nobody goes to the commercial lots to buy anything. More precisely, what you have is a perfectly planned economy, on which inflation simply makes no sense.

 

[Duco 546]

19 hours ago, brianc1327 said:

There are probably lots of other places where SC4 differs from real life, but that is enough for now

Because real life often depresses me, I just play SC4 to empty my head....