Jamaica Bay: C$$$ City Startup

For all who have been waiting with bated breath, to see the initial zoning of my C$$$ tourism powerhouse, with squeaky clean posh neighbourhoods, Jamaica Bay, here it is!  

Three residential neighbourhoods:  Classy executives bottom-right, moderately rich families top-right, and lots of high density blocks of units for medium wealth sims on the left.  As it happens, the classy executives area, packed full of YIMBY plops, actually languished while the other two areas boomed!    That just goes to show how much proximity and fastest possible back road access makes a difference to prosperity.  We'll see if that gets better when my tourism economy takes off with ferry traffic.

Notice each neighbourhood has different styles of roads.  That's part of what I do in creating neighbourhood character.

Two OWR-4 ferry loops:  These are my tourism drivers, capitalising on the "eternal commuters bug" for a tourism-based C$$$ economy.  Many more OWR-4 ferry loops to come for this city tile!

LOTS and LOTS of commercial zoned with back to the city highway to capture traffic-based commercial growth, and front facing onto urban roads for RCI access.

Lots of rows of three 1x1 street plops, to mark where I will expand 2x3 commercial lots to 3x4 as the city proceeds through growth stages.

A few more sets of 1x1 street street plops to mark out 3x3 areas for large parks and plazas, an expense I don't need right away.  A couple signposts marking suitable spots for Marinas, again for later plopping, to drive a little C$ traffic in the backwater corners between major residential and commercial zones.

Back road access for local sims, to get them speedily to their jobs on the other side of the highway, without having to travel the long way round.  This was so much fun:

1. Two maxis vanilla tunnels.
2. One road underpass.
3. One L1 RHW-2 overpass.
4. Two underpasses with MHW highway ramps.
5. Two L1 road overpasses for backroad access to the inside of the OWR-4 ferry loops.
6. One roundabout interchange with MIS slip roads, and another with OWR-2 slip roads.
7. Five extra MIS slip roads to facilitate shorter highway hops.

After ten years in the simulator, the traffic is looking very, very healthy.  

With my special interests in SimCity 4 being economy and commuter traffic flow (and ferries), I actually spend most of my game watching time in Traffic Volume view.  Notice there's lots and lots of bus stops.  Part of that is a holdover from long experience with lazy sims, playing vanilla SimCity 4 without the NAM, but another part is that bus stops are just really good at encouraging higher density development, both residential and commercial, at any wealth level.  Unlike subways and rail, the bus stops also keep the commuter traffic ON THE ROAD, where they drive commercial growth.

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Now, here's my first tip for newcomers to SimCity 4 economic gameplay ... don't do this!   (well, not until you've developed a dozen rather prosperous cities, that is)

• 2 police stations
• 2 large high schools
• 3 large elementary schools
• 3 large hospitals
• 2 libraries

With a startup that size, make one false move and you'll have to rezone large sections of your city.  I'm an old hand at this, AND I run these layouts through the simulator for 10 years before playing, to check that there's nothing seriously wrong.  I never could have done this in my earlier SimCity 4 days.

One problem, money.  I've already burned through just over §1 million of my city startup loan ... much of that just playing with the NAM features!  

But I'm more concerned about trimming the monthly costs.  Notice the big ticket item in that budget is  Health & Education , at a whopping §12,250 a month!  Education is important, but the problem is the Maxis defaults for these things are way over-powered for a brand new city:

1. 4500 students in each High School.
2. 3000 students in each Elementary School.
3. 750 patients in each Hospital.
4. 30000 books in each Library.

With just 1 year in the simulator, here's what I actually need:

1. 44 students in each High School.  (22 after 12 months)
2. 329 students in each Elementary School.  (251 after 12 months)
3. 479 patients in each Hospital.  (376 after 12 months)
4. 3299 books in each Library.  (2366 after 12 months)

Phew!  That gets my overblown  Health & Education  budget down to a much more palatable §1,376 a month, almost 10% of the Maxis default, and that's even with this CRAZY MASSIVE initial zoning I've done here.

After ten years in the simulator, this C$$ city is turning a modest profit, even without the ferries ... and that's with just 425 sims using the road neighbour connection to the Breezy Point city tile next door.  None of the sims are using the ferry, yet, as they don't realise the ferry routes are operational.  I'll have to play the Breezy Point city for a little while so that the sims catch on that the ferry routes are good!  

We're not a C$$$ city yet, but after just ten short years, we're getting there!  C$$ in CS is far and away my biggest money spinner after residential taxes.

And we do have a serious trash problem.  Mmmm, I'd better do something about that!

My Mods and Cheats

I still run pretty close to a vanilla SimCity, as I don't want to use mods that upset the economic gameplay.  Here's what I use at the moment:

• NAM36, of course!
•  Modern Police Station, by Mattb325 , which costs the same as a Large Police Station, with a couple more tiles in radius, so that probably saves me §15 a month, to my bottom line.  I use it not for the slightly bigger police protection radius, but because this mod delivers better police presence in large lots, a fix for the "organised crime bug" that plagues large lots like the University and Country Club.
• Ctrl+X  you don't deserve it  to obtain the Large Elementary School, Large High School, and Deluxe Police Station, during city planning stage.
• Ctrl+X  moolah  to obtain a single large city-startup loan, at the very beginning, which I expect to repay inside a few short decades.
• I run the game in Cheetah Speed as my "simulator", to see how my planned city will behave over 5, 10 or 20 years.  Then I exit without saving and go and tweak the things that went wrong, turning hindsight into foresight.  

I should get myself some roundabout filler plops with the same specs as the Medium Plaza.  Those Medium Plazas really just don't look good inside a roundabout!

Surprises after 10 Years in the Simulator

None of my high density 3x4 residential lots are developing.  
That's a big surprise to me.  I'd carefully placed a few 3x4 high density residential lots, in places where I'm happy for the game to grow a huge R$ tenement, and put the R$$$ tax rate to 20% to give a bit of time for the tenements to grow before putting the R$$$ tax rate down.  I noticed that even the few small R$ medium density tenements that grew became vacant.  With only a sparse scattering of manufacturing (I-M) jobs available, there was just not enough low wealth R$ jobs to make my city attractive to them.  That was a first for me!

Lowering my 20% R$$$ tax to 12% resulted in quite a few high wealth sims moving in very quickly.  I guess they like it here!  I'll set R$$$ tax to 12% from the start, when I run this city properly.  That's also a first for me.  Usually the high wealth sims only move in at 11.5% or 11.7% tax rate.   ... rezoning those 3x4 lots to smaller sizes right now!

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Here's a weird one.

The sims worked around this broken MIS ramp for 10 years!  

Actually, when I exited without saving, and then came back in at year zero, the MIS ramp wasn't broken!   Then when I ran the simulator again for another ten years, the MIS ramp broke again when I wasn't watching!!!     Watch your MIS ramps carefully, people ... they're more fragile than they look!

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Ooops, I connected up some OWR-2 to some avenues AVE-4 stubs the wrong way round.  We drive on the left in Australia, and my SimCity 4 is right-hand drive.  See, that's part of why I run traffic changes through the simulator!  No wonder I was getting No Car Zots!

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Notice there's a zebra crossing for pedestrian access at the top of the roundabout, but not at the bottom.  That's because that little stretch of road connecting the bottom of the OWR-2 roundabout is highway grade, RHW-2 with no RCI access ... supposedly.  One of my little experiments is to plop this 5 tile stretch of RHW-2 in the centre of one of my urban environments.  Much to my surprise, when I looked ten years later, there's 15 sims working there who catch the bus to work, and then dash across the RHW-2 when none of the cops are watching!