Detroit

[Karter 3]

Is it possible to recreate the whole Metropolitan Detroit area (Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties in Michigan) in SimCity 4?

[matias93 7,535]

Yeah, with two big limitations: you will have to divide the area in a lot of cities in the game, as the biggest available city is only 4x4 kilometres, and depending on the map you find, you will have to use a lot of fractional diagonals for the networks, because the city centre and the suburbs are oriented in different angles.

This one, for example, would have the city centre at a weird angle but the suburbs being conveniently orthogonal:

 

[rsc204 21,866]

Ultimately you can recreate anything, accepting the limitations of region size and scale that are inherent to the game. Step one is finding a map to play with, many regions from RL have been made into maps for easy use, although you can make custom maps too. Then it’s just a matter of building something that has the feel of what you want to see.

[TheMurderousCricket 5,104]

On 18.01.2024 at 4:36 AM, Karter said:

Is it possible to recreate the whole Metropolitan Detroit area (Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties in Michigan) in SimCity 4?

Absolutely. You may want to check out the city journal by "@korver The Great".  He made a glorious series named "Real Earth" in which he tried to recreate numerous places around the globe and to an amazing result too.

As the two previous forumers have pointed out, recreating a real-life city will have its limitations. One that I can specifically think of is the fact that this kind of city will most probably have to be ploppable. It won't be possible (at least not easily) to keep the normally-grown buildings healthy in a game that doesn't follow real-life mechanisms too closely.

When building networks you will also notice that making connections from town to town under exact angles they have IRL will be difficult. Vanilla game doesn't support "fractionally angled" neighbor connections - only ortho and diagonals (as a matter of fact, I think that neither does NAM).

[alexcheetah 35]

I don't see why not, someone recreated the entire country of Japan in SimCity 4.