After playing SimCity 4 for years, I decided it was time to finally create a city Journal! What I wanted for this city was an attempt at realism, and to work harder with more forms of transportation. As such this city won't be full of sky scrapers, instead having a dedicated downtown area, industrial area, and suburbs. Unfortunately the block this city was built in is medium, so it won't be as detailed as I liked, and somewhat "squished" together. I am really happy with how things turned out, though. So without further delay, here we go:

This is where we begin, lots of trees, two connected cities, and some hills to the right. The hills will present some challenges in the future, due to slope mod I've added.

Early Industrial development. The city directly linked to St. Christine has a population over 100,000. Part of the problem with starting a city next to a large city is that sims from the residential areas of your city will immediately go next door for work if it isn't already available, causing commute concerns from the get go. So in this city I started with Industry which was already in high demand. As you can see, traffic from an adjacent city is using the new development as a bypass, represented by the green traffic arrow moving to the right. 

High traffic volume from the connecting cities necessitates a highway. I know many people use the RHW instead of the Maxis highway, but I currently prefer Maxis for its simplicity. The highway will become more important to the city over time.

Early residential development. These suburbs won't really change. One thing I've learned over time is the importance of  zone density. Eventually it can be tempting to zone up everything once it has developed. However, selecting zone density helps with many things, including traffic and added realism. 

A slight change to the train station. My hope with this being the station on the residential side will be used by outgoing Sims, and the other station on the industrial side will be used by incoming Sims. It didn't really function as planned. But the right side station will eventually become the second busiest in the city.

More industrial development

And that's all for now! More to come!