Maximizing Population

[Jaketropolis 17]

I am currently working on an attempt to deduce what the highest practical population is on a single city map, and I'd like some input on my methods from the wider SimCity4 community.

Currently, I am trying to find the maximal possible population per tile in residential buildings using the SimCity 4 building index. It appears that the answer to this is the Ong Condos in the Houston set, at 4x4 and 20,778 residents (when dilapidated to low wealth), you get 1,298 Sims per tile.

I'd like to know if there is a practical way to bring this building down to low wealth and keep it there permanently. Is this something that 'make historical' can accomplish? Is there a mod which will allow me to place the buildings I wish and keep their wealth level at a set figure? Any information would be much appreciated.

Attached below is my spreadsheet with data taken from the SC4 building index. It contains the figures for all low wealth, high rise buildings, and the most promising medium and high wealth buildings, sorted by Sims per tile when brought down to low wealth.

[CorinaMarie 29,923]

Interesting idea. Will you be plopping the Ong Condos while using the Growify DLL? If so, I suspect you'll just need millions of jobs via neighborhood connections and a good transportation network to whisk them away quickly. (I'll guess subway would be the way to go.) Then if you zone 2 x 2 landfills in strategic places (use the Parks Aura Dataview) you could make all the land undesirable to both R$$ and R$$$ and then only the riff-raff population will want to live in the dilapidated buildings. Ship out all the extra garbage the little landfills won't hold. And while you prolly won't need it in this case, you could consider NKO as well.

For marking historical, I believe that only locks in that exact building but it can cycle thru any of its other wealth levels depending on your city factors. If it fully abandons while historical, anything can re-grow there and what does grow will maintain the historical setting.

[Girafarig 1,433]

If you need dilapidated buildings, maybe a better idea would be to rely on the negative residual effect of parks. I accidentally built a number of bugged parks that maxed out the park aura, then deleted it -- and as a consequence, I now have a city that has maximum negative, city-wide park effect. I realized what had happened because the buildings that were built (which tended to be R§§§ due to the land value) would immediately become half-empty, then dilapidated.

And abusing this effect would require you to dedicate exactly 0 (zero) tiles to parks -- just build something bugged, then delete it, rinse and repeat a few times.

You'll also want to consider what kind of grid to use. Roads actually take up a fair amount of land -- a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a 4x8 grid devotes at least 28,8% to roads, while a 6x6 grid uses 26,5% (so it's slightly more efficient) and an 8x8 grid uses 21% of the land for roads. The tradeoff is that you have less traffic capacity, of course.