poll What's your favorite size of city tile to work with?

[drocca 173]

What's your favorite tile size in SC4 to play with?

I like playing with a medium myself, I do like the other size tiles but I can't completely fill a large tile with my computer having a fit. I can usually lay down the entire city layout at the beginning on a small tile; with a medium tile there's a bit of expanding to do, I can zoom out and see my whole city, and I can get more rewards than a small. I feel like a medium is a happy balance for many situations and most of my best tiles are mediums. 

 A small tile is good for a short burst of gameplay and it gives me more "instant gratification". I also like how the large schools and medical center can cover nearly the entire tile. 

I like the large tiles and what all I can put into them, a finely crafted large tile is a thing of beauty. Often times, on the large tile,  I have to settle for a peak EQ in the 180's and a life expectancy in the low 90's. I don't think I've ever gotten the life expectancy to 95 in a large tile. A small or medium can easily go to an EQ of 195+, a life expectancy of 97-98, and no crime whatsoever. 

[CorinaMarie 29,934]

For me it's always the Big 4x4 tiles. I have minimal plugins so I'm not bogged down when creating my rural scenes with the occasional larger towns.

[Cyclone Boom 17,033]

I used to vary the sizes as back in the day I only created randomly generated regions. These days though I've switched to wanting to create cities in Large city tiles only.

I tend to find how focussing on an individual city takes me time, and so I like having the extra room for constructing it how I'd like. Not that I've played SC4 much recently as there's been many other projects in the works testing things (and such), but this will be me personal preference going forward with future regions too. I think it helps since now I like to focus on predominantly rural regions with selected custom content, and so the scroll and zoom lagging with a highly developed tile isn't as likely to be as prevalent.

[infamousjbe 593]

Voted for big even tho I play on 4x4 mediums. This is also due to the lagginess once the city starts passing 30k popultion.  You could say I'm mostly an Urban City builder so the tile can get packed in. I also use quite a few MMPs to spruce things up. Make it look more "lived in".

I'm a plugins junkie playing on a subpar laptop. Current plugins folder is sitting at 3.24gb with a zip folder at 5.45gb downloaded. Trust me when I say,  don't check the "Zone" view or you're waiting half a minute for the game to be playable again.

Bout to invest in a better gaming computer so maybe large tiles will be playable again, hopefully. Large city tiles are ideal imo, just more room to branch out. And as CB mentions, my building style is also starting to need more room to fill in between all the development in attempts to keep it more "realistic" in words. Not just endless square streets, but with more aesthetics. This will cut down on actual development the game will have to compute.

 

[Edvarz 1,985]

I choose Medium, moslty because I play on a laptop and have 3+Gb of plugins, I don't want to wait forever for the city to load. Plus, I tend to really pack my cities with w2w blocks and fill in every available tile with decorations and such, I pay a great deal of attention to streetscapes. That means I mostly play the game on zooms 5-3 so a large city tile is not that necessary tbh. Also, it's easier to fill and it feels a bit less overwhelming for obsessive detail maniacs like me.

The only trick is you have to learn to seamlessly continue the street layout troughout various city tiles and plan your network so you don't trigger the eternal commuters bug.

[Naomi57 2,985]

I do a mix of mostly Large and Small city tiles.  I do this because of my gameplay style, focusing on:

1. Sophisticated traffic management and mass transport.  I like the puzzle and problem solving of providing my sims with a pleasant commute.
2. Maxis vanilla economic gameplay.  I like the puzzle and problem solving of economic factors, too.
3. Neighbourhood character.  I like creating distinctive features that make each neighbourhood look different and unique.

Large city tiles make 1 and 2 (above) more challenging, especially when you consider that a short commute is very important to a prosperous economy, too.  They are also more challenging from the perspective of crime management, pollution management, and education, all of which are primary factors for C$$ and C$$$ prosperity, which I almost always include as part of my city strategy.

I like the challenge of making my sims happy, which is harder to do with a Large city tile with vanilla economic gameplay.  Large city tiles have enormous flexibility to develop many different kinds of neighbourhoods on the one city tile, and they are also ideal for parts of the region with lots and lots of water.  I so LOVE seaside landscapes and ferries!

I have only a tiny bit of lagginess, which is partly due to running a high-end desktop tower PC (though it is 6 years old), and partly due to installing a very small set of mods.

The gameplay on Small city tiles is faster moving, which can be fun, and have greater ease and flexibility economically, creating a different set of possibilities for neighbourhood character, but the space restrictions feel tight.  I aim for very small (and possibly quirky) goals for Small city tiles, doing something very different with each one, so that I don't get frustrated with the lack of space.

Having large city tiles, padded with small city tiles in-between each large one, maximises the HUGE economic benefits of neighbour connections, as shown with Brownsville, Marine Park, and Brighton Beach, on this current little corner of my 27550-new-york-city-united-states region.

A mixture of Large and Small city tiles also provides maximum opportunities to control (or avoid) the Eternal Commuter Bug, which is described on these two posts:

The Eternal Commuter Bug ... what I call "tourist traffic"  (by Naomi57)

Let's go ahead and clarify what eternal commuters are with pics from a real game  (by CorinaMarie)

[Lucario Boricua 7,062]

To be fair, I work predominantly in large city districts, but also accept medium city districts. Whenever I define the config.bmp for the regions I play in, I try to go for arrangements which have large city districts with an offset bounding relative to each other. This allows me to better match geographically interesting/useful arrangements (coastlines, valleys vs mountains, continuity of rivers...). But it also leaves some gaps which can't be filled with large city districts--this is where I use the medium city districts for filler use.

I also have preferred use cases for each:

• Main cities (from large towns to metropolises) always get the large city districts. This allows me flexibility in their placement, using more elaborate shapes and layouts for their urban area and allow me to incorporate transitions into suburbs, countryside or natural areas.
   
• Villages and small towns work better in medium city districts, as it makes them harder to overbuild and overdevelop.
   
• Very large infrastructure projects (airports, seaports, reservoirs) generally need the large city district unless it's feasible to extend them to adjacent city districts.
   
• Prominent natural features (mountains, glaciers, islands, lagoons, lakes, canyons, winding rivers) generally go to large city districts.
   
• Auxiliary industrial and utility facilities (power plants, industrial estates, railway depots, marshalling yards, distribution centers) preferentially go to medium city districts
   
• Farmland preferentially goes into medium city districts to avoid the situation in which I run out of farm demand before covering all the land I wanted. This has been largely alleviated
  by the use of the Census Repository and its agricultural CAP relief.
   
• Transitions between terrain types preferentially go in medium city districts if I want the separated features to have the full spotlight
   
• Historic and archaeological sites preferentially go in medium city districts to set them aside as being distinct from the more modern surroundings.

[The Thinker 479]

With SimCity maps I've always felt that "bigger is better".  Even if one has no intention of building a great crowded metropolis, larger maps essentially give more room to manoeuver.  They also allow you to get more out of farm zones, make it easier to cultivate (pun may or may not be intended) that agrarian sprawl look (especially if you're like me and you like to role-play your farming towns as the breadbaskets of your region).

That said, the smaller city areas do have their uses, be it as utility towns, and/or as suburbs/overspill for the larger cities, not to mention that occasionally one has an idea for a town for which the largest map size would just not be appropriate.

[SIM-ple Jack 17,451]

I use large tiles for vast expanses of rural areas, or large bodies of water. I use medium tiles mostly for suburban sprawl, mainly because custom lots can be huge and need the space. I also use mediums for specialties like airports, military, etc. I use small tiles in clusters for major cities, so I can create sections of a metropolis, rather than trying to fit it all on 1 4x4. In other words, if I made L.A. I'd have it broken up into East LA, Watts, Hollywood etc. Most big cities are actually small cities with a lot of adjoining areas not technically in their borders. Miami, as an example, only has roughly a 200K population, but has 9M in the surrounding areas.

[LightSkinnedPisces 71]

@Naomi57 that's ur region ? And how do you guys know how big the city tiles are? I see people saying 4x4 and so forth

[CorinaMarie 29,934]

8 minutes ago, LightSkinnedPisces said:

And how do you guys know how big the city tiles are? I see people saying 4x4 and so forth

It's based on the pixels in the config.bmp located in each region's folder. A single red pixel in that image file is called a 1x1 for a small city tile. A set of 4 pixels arranged in a 2x2 pattern colored green is a medium city tile. And the large city tile is 4x4 blue pixels.

You can learn all about it in the Config.bmp: How to Make it Yours tutorial.

[infamousjbe 593]

15 minutes ago, LightSkinnedPisces said:

And how do you guys know how big the city tiles are? I see people saying 4x4 and so forth

Most of the time the responder would state which size. The 4x4 usually just means how many cities squared. So it could be 4x4 large city squares, or like my region on 4x4 medium city squares. The you could have 4x4 small city squares. However, with the advancement of region map making, most maps are so big and awkwardly shaped that the region will be cut up consisting of all 3 sizes. Typically to make best use of the land features of the map.

[Naomi57 2,985]

On 03/12/2019 at 6:41 AM, LightSkinnedPisces said:

@Naomi57 that's ur region ? And how do you guys know how big the city tiles are? I see people saying 4x4 and so forth

Yes, that's part of my region.  I took a screenshot from SC4 Mapper, pasted that into Microsoft Excel, and then overlay the names and symbols in Excel.

 SC4 Mapper creates a "config.bmp" to define the city sizes in your region, and allows you to customise them,.  If you look carefully at my screenshot, you'll see red squares (1x1), and blue squares (4x4), showing where each of the cities are in the region.  There's also green squares (2x2) elsewhere in that region of mine, but I don't do many of those.  

[Lucario Boricua 7,062]

3 hours ago, LightSkinnedPisces said:

 And how do you guys know how big the city tiles are? I see people saying 4x4 and so forth

City size specified for each tile or city district. Here's the actual measurements:

* Large (blue): side is 4 pixels in the config, 256 cells within the game, 4,096 meters in actual distance (or roughly 13,440 ft per side). Total surface area of 16.77 square kilometers.

* Medium (green): side is 2 pixels in the config, 128 cells within the game, 2,048 meters in actual distance (or roughly 6,720 ft per side). Total surface area of 4.19 square kilometers

* Small (red): side is 1 pixel in the config, 64 cells within the game, 1,024 meters in actual distance (or roughly 3,360 ft per side). Total surface area of 1.05 square kilometers.

[LightSkinnedPisces 71]

That explains how ppl post these huge cities on huge city maps, so you can basically create how big the tiles will be.

[LightSkinnedPisces 71]

So my region I started was the one that came with the game called timbuktu, which has tons of different lil cities (empty squares)small, medium,  large,  so the large ones are 4x4?, medium 2x2?, e.t.c? 

[CorinaMarie 29,934]

3 minutes ago, LightSkinnedPisces said:

... so the large ones are 4x4?, medium 2x2?, e.t.c? 

Yep. The sizes are based on how many pixels they need in the Config.bmp file to define them.

[LightSkinnedPisces 71]

So the standard regions loaded w game only have those but just in different places right? If I download a region and/or create one do I have to get the SC4 mapper thing?

[CorinaMarie 29,934]

The regions the game has predefined are a random set of small, medium, and large city tiles. The same is true if you tell the game to create a new region.

For downloading maps, that will depend on if they are a grayscale image intended for rendering internally by the game or if they are in .SC4M format which then needs Mapper.  (If they are grayscale, Mapper can handle those too.) In either case, the uploader will almost always have included a Config.bmp for you to use. That Config.bmp can be edited beforehand if you want a different set of tiles than the creator provided. (Mapper has a tool for that built in.) 

As an example, if you download any of my maps they will all have a Config.bmp available, but they will be all large tiles only and the format will be grayscale with the intention of rendering at the default import ratio of 3.

[Cyclone Boom 17,033]

13 minutes ago, LightSkinnedPisces said:

If I download a region and/or create one do I have to get the SC4 mapper thing?

Additionally to what Cori posted above, you may find this post I wrote useful for some additional info on config.bmp sizes and map rendering.

[Naomi57 2,985]

1 hour ago, LightSkinnedPisces said:

So my region I started was the one that came with the game called timbuktu, which has tons of different lil cities (empty squares)small, medium,  large,  so the large ones are 4x4?, medium 2x2?, e.t.c? 

Of the standard Maxis Regions, San Francisco is really fun, and it has some really interesting map sizes and geography to play with.

If you want to get into downloadable regions, and defining your own city sizes, you'll need some know how and a third party tool.  The best third party tool I know for the job is SC4 Mapper 2013 <https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2880>.