Counter-Intuitive City Building Techniques

[BlueCloud 82]

Hi guys,

Does anyone have any counter-intuitive city building techniques they'd like to share?

My city/region building technique is always evolving. I can look at the region I'm working on and tell which city I created during any specific phase of my technical evolution. I'm always looking to learn more in the hope that I build better, more aesthetic, and more functional cities.

I'll start. This is a technique I mentioned in another thread, but I'll repeat it here. Once you have a region with 200k or so sims, building highways and adding lots of bus stations will generate inter-city revenue via bus fares, and thus eliminate a city's financial issues, if they had any. The key to this trick is to have only one connection between cities.

If anyone else would like to add, I'd be extremely grateful. Thank you!

 

[Naomi57 2,985]

Totally agree with @BlueCloud's strategy with bus fares.  Buses are wonderful, and I talk about many other ways they are wonderful in this other post of mine:

https://community.simtropolis.com/journals/entry/29028-the-mysterious-powers-of-the-SC4-bus-stop/

My counter-intuitive city building tip ... preserving the low wealth R$ residential population helps improve commercial prosperity.  

It's easy to pack a very large number of R$ residents into relatively few high-rise tenements.  More residents filling the roads, buses, trams and elevated rail, is what drives commercial prosperity.  A busy road is a prosperous road.

Some players want all their neighbourhoods to gentrify to high wealth R$$$.  Not me, I appreciate the benefits of having some low wealth R$ sims around, too.  I've seen many C$$ areas established or revitalised by building an R$ tenement or two nearby.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

I'll share two:

1) Usually, when R$$ and R$$$ homes abandon, I leave them to be re-occupied by greater numbers of lower-wealth sims. The lawns are ugly, but the varied housing gives my cities character -- a lived-in look of people getting by.

2) Back before NAM and nearly-perfect pathfinding, I built my road nets like trees, what I called a "dendritic" road pattern. My highways spanned the region, and my avenues branched off the highways. From the avenues I hung flags -- a road was the flagpole, and streets were the stripes. This all served to funnel sims into carefully "load-balanced" branches because the original path-finder was so wretched. Left to itself it could put every single commuter through the same intersection, making the game utterly unplayable.

 

[infamousjbe 592]

On 4/25/2020 at 10:25 PM, BlueCloud said:

 adding lots of bus stations will generate inter-city revenue

I actually start putting down bus stops everywhere pretty much from the start of a city and is typically my largest revenue stream tbh.  Tho not so much in the affluent ares of my region. Spoiled yuppies.