Efficient airports and/or eliminating them entirely in SimCity 3000

Contributor/author(s): Nate Gehl

I've been playing around with my super-size city and kept hitting on the commerce limit of needing more airport space. Unfortunately, airports develop really inefficiently, and seem to waste a lot of the tiles dedicated to them. To counter this, I spent a day on various scenarios and worked out what I think are the best two strategies. The first and best one may surprise you, but it really does work--try it!

The easiest way, and if done properly, the cheapest way to solve the problem is to build a ton of neighbor subway connections and the spaceport. I didn't do the math, but my 60 subway connections and spaceport let me pull out all 1000+ airport tiles and overcome an ongoing commerce deficit that was driving me insane. This should give commerce enough to not limit out till you're well over 2 million or so citizens (your results may vary, obviously). Plus you get all that land back, and no pollution from the nasty airports. Note: you need >50 developed airport tiles to get the spaceport. So after the cutoff year for the spaceport (2000 or something like that) build an airport only long enough to get the spaceport, then tear it back down and recover the tiles.

Fine, so you want to actually build an airport. How do you get maximum density and no wasted squares? Note: I didn't try to minimize pollution... only maximize airport density.

Before I hit on the subway solution, I spent several hours fighting for the most efficient/dense airport layout strategy, and I believe I've finally stumbled upon it. The earlier article mentioned crisscrossing electric wires to help develop the airport. That's partially true, but doesn't explain the whole story. The electric wires can be used to define your airport. They dictate the runway location and direction!

The best size is to work in 5x20 blocks. This way you can get 10-square length runways every time. You can have the 5x20 blocks in a row, one after the other lined up on the short sides. I did this in one of my cities... an entire row of airport from one end to the other with no wasted squares. If you want to line up the long sides though, you'll need a separator of 6 tiles between each to keep the runways far enough apart.

Be prepared to pause, mow down, redo wires and restart every now and then... but it's pretty rare if you do it correctly.

Here's your design

Note: You need to be 3+ tiles in from the edge. Airports don't like to develop right on the edge, at least not at maximum density.

 123456789...20
1    w
2    w
3    w
4    w
5    w

(numbers represent rows and columns, w = electrical wire)

Pause the game. Zone 5x20 tiles for airport, or tear down and dezone around a 5x20 area. Horizontally rows 1 & 5 get wires their entire length. Then cross the zone with one wire on column 5... that defines the end of the runway, allowing for 5 rows of buildings/towers on each end.

Restart the game and watch it build perfectly almost every time.

Now, the design above goes left to right. For some really strange reason, I actually found it works better to start from the right and work your way left... i.e. do a complete 180 on the above design.

See also
How to develop airports
Do they really want more airports?
The lost airports of SimCity
Airport aesthetics