lowbart

This is a great thread, it should stay alive. Here's some new content Big version: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/33796991/Simcity/port%20petrovic%20and%20lower%20west%20side.png

Kruemel, that looks pretty nice! (Except for the abandonment of course). I don't think I'd want to try to navigate around without a GPS, though A lot of the other hillsides in this thread just don't look very... hilly. Here's some of mine from a couple of older regions: Midtown of Albatross City. North shore of Cannoli City. The cliffs of Dabblingport that separate the industrial port from the downtown. Condos in the hills west of downtown Bumsgrove.

How do you get those retaining walls on the riverside road?

I see. Sounds good to me. Your CJ/MD is really interesting!

That cluster of high rises just off the highway towards the top left of the picture is interesting to me. I don't know if you're going to build all around this area. In any case, clusters like that are pretty common around the greater Washington DC area (where most of the expansion is from the last 40 years) and are kind of a pet peeve for me. They don't seem to make sense from a city planning perspective. You can often only access them from the highway, and they're usually bought and built up all at once, usually in a huge bid to one developer. They end up being overpriced "luxury" apartments and contrived, touristy shops and restaurants (usually all mid-to-high-brow chains). My problem is that I'm biased toward towns that develop organically because people have some reason for being there. That's why cities tend to grow at crossroads and harbors and river mouths. They're not just plopped down in some marginally accessible place because it looks nice and the land values are high/low. But this is how a lot of modern satellite cities form. One example near DC is Fairfax Corner, which is an area of about 6 by 6 blocks. It's around the same size and land value as "Old Town" Fairfax, the core of the actual town of the same name, but the difference is that Old Town grew up at a crossroads more than 150 years ago and expanded, and Fairfax Corner is way out in the inter-town sprawl area and popped up in the last 20 years. Fairfax Corner has permanent residents, restaurants, a movie theater, bars, tons of clothing stores, even a central plaza with holiday celebrations - but it's all in the same pseudo-old-town brick-and-glass architectural style and has no personality or history whatsoever. I'm not criticizing you. In fact, I think it's cool that you incorporated this interesting feature of modern city development into your game. (Also, I really like the way you did the winding roads to get up the steep slope). I just wanted to rant about modern city/sprawl development for a while.

This is my first waterfront area that's interesting enough to post: the marina towers near North Beach in Albatross City, a long island about the size of 3 large city tiles end to end. This city was my second big multi-tile project in my second ever region, originally dating from before NAM and CAM came out. The downtown is offscreen to the right with the first Stage 10+ towers that I was able to maintain without cheat ordinances, and the midtown is to the left in another city tile. I'm pretty sure these buildings, facing the channel between Albatross City and the mainland city of Kingsport, would be the most expensive real estate outside of the two main downtown areas. After I was mostly satisfied with Albatross City, I didn't play Simcity much for a few years because I didn't feel like starting a new region. In the first semester of college I decided to turn the entire Timbuktu region into a megalopolis. The bay to the east became Hemlock Harbor, with four major cities meeting in an absurdly landscaped central island. This was the city to the south, Cannoli, on the northeastern end of that diagonal island spreading across 4 medium tiles. It's not much of a waterfront, but I love those cliffs. I'll write more about these later. The next pictures are all from Hurricane City, my part of the Reddit Simcity Coop.

Here's my work-in-progress subway map. I'm going to crop it once I'm done and maybe organize it with some overlapping or express lines. Not sure yet. I'm planning to use circles or squares for stations (white centers for transfer stations). I have the names mapped out on paper, but wanted to get some advice before going ahead with that. How do you do those nice 45 degree curves? (the 9 squares on the map represent administrative divisions in-universe, or large city tiles in the game.)

That park looks awesome. I just have a couple questions - are those tunnels going under it functional? Are they parking garages? Also, it looks like there's no bridge or tunnel for pedestrians in the park to cross the GLR tracks safely.

Where do you get those letter signs that you put on the hill?

A few years ago I decided to stop using cheat demand mods, and forced myself to learn how to run the cities legitimately. I sometimes end up running in the red for year or two here and there, but I haven't had a city blow through its whole budget when I was actually paying attention. Here are some things that worked for me: - Residential taxes should be at least slightly progressive so that you get some benefit from building schools, hospitals, etc. When a block or a neighborhood turns over from R$ to R$$ it will be a relief and you can upgrade your services. - You can skimp a lot on police and fire stations. Industrial areas should always have fire stations, but houses don't really catch fire that much. You don't need the whole city to be covered by police precincts either. If you're not getting messages complaining about crime, you're fine. - Build plenty of parks and slash the parks & rec budget. I ran my most recent city with the parks budget at HALF until serious development started in the downtown and my revenue ballooned. Buildings like the mayor mansion, city hall, museums will give you nasty messages if the maintenance funding is cut, but statues, parks, and plazas won't. - If you're on a large map, make several separate towns (with shared electricity and water) and put commercial in the middle. - Force your freight trucks to pay tolls as they leave the map. This is a really useful source of revenue early on. Don't use the big seaport until your finances are stabilized. - Pick a number like $100,000 and make that your "rainy day fund". That's your capital, cut services any time your net income is negative and you go below it so that you can recover. - Water and power outages are MUCH more disruptive than education and medical strikes. Prioritize and give them each a buffer. Remember that power plants start wearing out after a few years. Remember that power outages can also cut off your water pumps! - You don't -really- need to deal with garbage until you have medium density development. Waste-to-energy plants don't become cost-effective until that time either, because they have a high monthly cost and make more energy than you can probably use. Considering the amount of garbage they deal with, it's more like they are burning dollar bills for electricity. BUT, you can externalize all those problems by building it in a neighboring city. There's a conservative policy for you!

" In real life people travel about 150-200 miles (about 1 and half to 2 hour drive with good traffic) back and forth to LA's Downtown area for work with complaint but they do it! In my test city people left their homes if they had to travel from the edge of the large tile to the center of it on uncrowed freeways and roads." My conclusion is that LA is such a ridiculous city that not even the craziness of SC4 can handle it, because it just shouldn't work.

I like building cities at the mouths of rivers, personally. But don't completely separate the residential from the jobs on opposite sides of the river, it will just make bottlenecks and eventually abandonment.

Originally posted by: Xascul Here is one i was playing around with, a six way interchange with a north-south expressway, still not finished with and with to play around with a bit more quote> Jesus, Xascu, that's a monster. A for effort, but, seriously you should just bulldoze it and put a town in the middle. Here are some other ideas that me and my friend came up with: The double highway is connected to the diagonal highways by a crossbar. Twin cloverleafs (or stacks) over the expressway, Y intersections on the ends. My friend made this one - Here, you have a beltway, but the double highways split (neatly if you use RHW) into a beltway entry and a 6 lane expressway through the middle. The grey lines show an overpass with no onramps, all the other 90 degree intersections are T's. In this one I tried to add an express lane for the diagonal highways. There are 4 cloverleafs (or stacks) but it's supposed to reduce bottlenecking if there's a lot of east-west traffic. Or, you could just dump all the roads into one big belt. This is the actual system used in Washington, DC.

Originally posted by: storms991 P.S. The Mcmansions are not actually made out of brick, they are just there for decorationquote> Oh look, it's Daria Morgendorffer's house!

I guess... can you recommend a good free hosting service that generates thumbnails automatically? The problem is I don't want to scale them down to the maximum size allowed in the forum.