LadySieera

Originally posted by: willthefalcon would you get any use out of them if you placed them in your higher density commercial areas? not connected to subway or anything like that.. just a place for the workers in your big buildings to park.quote> That is a great question i would also like to see if that would work

N_O_Body: Dual channel RAM is not dual cores! It means he has two 512 megs of ram that are working together in a 'dual channel' setup I have it on all 7 of my computers. Nothing to do with processors.

Thanks Peorth and IronDogg! I found a really nice setup that allows me to build 4 types of mass transit and use all 5 types of roadings (Avenues, streets, roads, highways, and one ways) all together without causing a headache! It works great especially with subway/bus stops all on the same road tile! (mod) so i have CLR subway buses and a highway all right next to eachother! My city is arranged like a T so i just spread out the usage and have specific things go to specific places. CLR goes to industry. Subway to commercial. Highway to both. It works great! I have 200,000 people 1.7 million and im like 50 years into it! I did start on easy and its not really beautiful but the design worked. Funny because it must have been predestined. Why do I say that? I named the city Final Test! Even before i built the design! And yes it was the first design i built Ill post screens later when i refine it down and beautify it!

Wow thanks both BlackJackal and KoolSIM! Do you guys have any instant messangers? I would really love to chat more =) Maybe spread out ideas on cool things you've done that i can try. My last question has to do with intersections.. sims dont like intersections and as i FINAL got through my head on why i have such problems with commute is i try to keep all my sims wealthy as possible.. So as you can see all wealthy sims dont use mass transit THUS cause my commute problems.. Now KoolSIM if i make that grid i just duplicate it out right like but that same grid around it in all directions and all the roads connect to eachother? I had some cool experiments with realistic style citys with winding mountain roads and culdasacs etc. But i found besides busses mass transit is really hard to place.. yes even subways! so without a grid system you cant get too tall or commute has a problem. So my next 2 questions are: How can i make realistic city with culdasacs slowly build into a grid system as it goes downtown? Its hard for me to visualize diaganol roads etc. when im gridding! So any tips would be greatly appreciated. How do i make multiple cities truly 'link' together? I dont mean like highways roads etc. i mean without haveing one city ALL industry and the other commercial/residential i want self sustaining cities that interlink but people actually travel around to get to jobs etc. I see alot of people who have this and i wanna know how they make it work correctly and still keep good commute times.. (I guess 'good' commute times are matter of opinion, but you know what i mean.) Yours truly! The Lady. Sieera. PS: Hugs and kisses (on the cheek) to all that have replied!

Why do you guys keep posting on how to make money... I can get 50k Wealthy citizens and still be gaining money my problem was when i expanded to fast i know what i did wrong i added schools to an area that had no residents.. so i wasnt making any taxes from them... Its not about how to get money!!! 3 people in a row have posted about making money... Im looking for tips on PRE-PLANNING mass transit... you say a grid system. so where in this grid do i place my highways my subways etc.?

Guys you missed my whole series of questions... I can do all that easily! My problem isnt growing the city i can easily get 150k and not have any issues my problem is EFFECTIVELY using roads and masstransit! I have only busses in my city they do well but are getting really expensive. The last issue im going to have is commute time when sky scrapers start to come... How do i plan out highways etc and actually have sims use them.

Hun thats not my issue i can do that easily I can even have ALL services and all $$$ sims and still gain money... its when i start going upward my commute times go up and people leave.. thats what im having a problem with.. my commute times sky rocketing when i start building upward.. i need a good layout..

Im playing on easy just to get use to it. It shows a gradual increase of both income and expense then the income stopp and expenses kept rising... then rose again when i was adding more.. but i had to add more to cover my area... OH my i didnt think of that.. Is it easier to leave an area un refined (no schools etc.) until people are living there then add them? If so i havent been doing that and that would be the problem.

After reading for a week straight on these forums and others like it I decided to round up some mods and start actually playing. I got NAM digger and some others. I layed out a city plan that looked promising ... and it is! My old average commute time was 100ish this one is between 40-50 most of the time. As you can see i use one way streets in the commercial and underground highways to link residential and industry. All using busses effectively i easily had double busses vs cars. By this time i had 12k people all low wealth and dirty jobs... Now i know how to keep going like this and fill the map with low wealth pops and just sit on my loot but i didnt want to.. I started building up at about 20k... As i knew at 35k i would start getting higher density and 4block lengths instead of just 3. (Im basically trying to test designs for commute times so i can mix these designs together to make a realistic city.) It all went ALOT better then before.. I was actually making money as i got wealthy sims.. so i changed the tax rates and sure enough HT came and took over. Well after a while i kept getting deadlocked they wanted HT but wouldnt build it.. so i decided to build some beautification and that worked... after a while (50k people) i need onther power plant or two... ALOT more water onther set of schools hospitals etc... thats when it all failed... i started losing LOTS of money 2-5k a month... (oh and i NEVER got rid of my trash..) Any suggestions as to why it all failed? I expanded slowly just built upwards instead of out. As i spread out more just using low density i let them build to wealthy then built exceedingly higher densities.. yet it failed. (and yes i kept up with my bus stops my ending commute time was 40 mins) Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

OK guys thats it... I just want to know HOW you guys made these? I was told not to use Highways and thats almost ALL I see how do you guys make such realistic looking cities? Cheating!?! If so then it all makes sense... if not then HOW!?! I mean I get to 150k people and have really bad commute times with 5 trains and 2 avenues splitting up the city everything else is streets at angles to make less intersections and i STILL have red everywhere.... same if they are all roads.. ANY help would be great.. Is it easier to Cheat first THEN make real maps? Also is it easier to say build up a couple small 'towns' and build them up into wealthy? in a city then connecting them all with commerce in the center and industrial outside the map? I get lost on where to place what... Any help would be nice!! PM me on AIM if you could!! im always on if im AWAY leave message anyway. Also on that above picture by "kingofsimcity" what region is that and where can i DL it? JUST the region NOT the cities in it!

Thanks Mayormot! That makes alot more sense now! And I've just planned out a city center that should work perfect but ive yet to start using it as i found it might not work as great as i thought due to the fact that sims from farther away wouldnt be passing through the city center besides one trains to get off the map to their jobs... Ill post pics later.

Thanks for all your inputs and i have been looking into these very issues quiet throughly. Infact i emailed my local city hall and got a layout of the city from top down of only the roads and it seems alot of utah is grids, not just the city center. I live 45 minutes from the center of downtown (shortest/fastest route) and we have roads that are clearly named 6200 south 5400 south 4800 south... so every 600 units is a street... and it goes east to west as well.. 5600 west 5000 west.... and alot of highways just run through my state and were not made for normal city traffic on them but they built the city around the highways anyway and now we have 4 highways interconnect just south west of downtown... I like to call it my concrete jungle... I downloaded alot of buildings and plugins. I got that network add-on as well as a few others but my problem IS not getting cities to work or RUN together its to keep them going... I can get to about 150k people before i start building upwards but even from light to medium density makes my places over crowded... It seems i just dont place my trains etc... properly Ive read tutorial after tutorial guide after guide to no avail anymore pointers? Thanks for all the help! Yours truly, Sieera

Originally posted by: wouanagaine Hi LadySieera Welcome to simtropolis I can give you some answers, as I just finished my first regional game with quite the same goals as yours ie no money cheating and good looking. 1 : Yes it's possible, I think a lot of us as done it. 2 : Download a lot of bats/lot/mod to get a large variety of good looking building/parks etc... For the financial part, stay slowly, very slowly, and adjust the money for every civic building. A 4000 capacity school don't need to be full budget when only 1000 students come to it, don't put to much civic stuff at the beginning 3 : I don't understand what you mean, my bad english, sorry 4 : NAM for transportation network, Cycledogg colombus for the great landscaping texture it give. I also use the Cycledogg trees. The slope mod because ingame the slope are way to big. and the bridge height mod, and the tunneling and digger lot. ( you can find all of them in the STEX or in the Mod& Download section ) 5 : Use ferry 6 : I don't understand your question. What do you mean by running an avenue ? Hope it will help you Take care! quote> Thanks for the answers and your right maybe i have created a beautiful city but ive yet to get over 65k people before i force myself to restart... Commute times are killing me I've started talking to people on AIM (its a messaging service) and they've said to do mixed cities then build out... (as in have all zones in one city resdential commercial industrial) but those dont work for me up to certain points. Mainly because im suppose to spread out before up... If i spread out as fast as i normally do i have 50k and the map is used. Which means if i expand up two problems occur... first Commute times sky rocket as i didnt leave or need mass transite or bigger roads such as avenues or highways the 2nd problem is my schools and hospitals get over crowded even using the biggest ones. Ontop of all that they demand industry which is already on dense and they want more commercial which also is already on high density.... so either it fails due to loss of money for more facilities or it fails because of commute times... What i meant for number 3 was simple. If you have a sim at Train station A traveling to Train station C he wont go DIRECTLY from A to C but will stop at B get off the train THEN go to C. Example: A--------B---------C Why? 6: I had a city that only had 1 avenue and that connected to onther avenue on a seperate city (industrial) i ran that avenue not only length wise but width wise. As a test i ran the avenue width for 6 Tiles all filled with industry. Yet no commute problems? Noone left my city and noone complained about commute times. Infact i noticed a few medium housing near a cliff edge on the ocean which i assume got water from the ocean proper? As i had none at the time?! And on number 6 i had a avenue like this. ^ = Avenue keeps going through 4 more cities * = Where one city ends and onther begins ^ * | | | | | * | | | | ============*| So people say why dont you plan out a city? Well first off as much as griding sounds like the best idea im personally against it its great for the game but where is the beauty in it im sure you can make non gridded cities that still work... My question is how do you make commute times stay low? If somone has the time to get on AIM and message me i have a few questions that are probably simple to answer but there are alot of them and i dont want to post them all for fear they would look intimidating and go unanswered.