pauljs75

Pedways are good for connecting destinations to subways, bus, and parking garages without having vehicle traffic and its pollution. They can work for residential and you'll need road access, but on the backside or inbetween have pedways going to a sub station. Industrial may not get the no-road zot, but it will want a way for freight to get out, so it will still need a road or rail connection within so many tiles. (One way to force rail usage, right?) You can build commercial pedestrian malls with nothing but pedway to access those lots. But if you try that, use a subway or bus stop for access. (Or if you still want to let sims drive, a parking garage is also a good entry point for a pedway mall.) Pedway bridges are also nice for opening up access for bus stops across avenues (peds normally don't cross them where there is no intersection) or for getting to a train station on the other side of a track where there is no road crossing. There's some little nuances that aren't so obvious, but most aspects are straight forward.

I do a bit of both. From what I recall elsewhere, parks have some other YIMBY or radius things plain trees do not. But trees seem to still be quite handy and perhaps cheaper than parks if pollution is the main concern. (No grounds maintenance fees on trees.) But the neat thing about trees is that in additon to being able to be plopped on park tiles, they're also ploppable on parts of various other developed tiles. If a developed tile has something that looks like a lawn or open area, odds are a tree just might be allowed there. Also trees can go on the very outside edge of ground level highway tiles. (Haven't checked all the other types.) So if an area is built up and developed a bit already, trees may present a more flexible option for pollution control. (Only downside to trees on a non-city or park lot is that if a lot re-develops the trees go with it.)

Just wondering something here. It seems that I have some cities that just barely manage above break even, yet others seem quite profitable. Also it seems a lot easier to make money with a rural farm town than by trying to rapidly grow a population. Yet there seems to be some variables I'm not sure of. So I have a few cities that seem similar, yet one will just hold around $100,000 in reserve and then the comparable one will have $600,000 in a comparable timeframe. And it's not necessarily taxes or tollbooths, since they'll both be w/o tolls and have the default 9% across the board taxes. Only things I could think of was neighbor connections and perhaps some quality of the landscaping or road layout. (I try to build around the terrain and water rather than flatten it out and fill every spot. Seems more challenging, and makes the cities more different.) Also I'm trying to do complimentary cities region-play thing, but job growth in the industrial city doesn't seem like much in comparison to the residential/commercial city it's supposed to support. Any tips that may boost income w/o hurting growth too much and not using any cheats, business deals, or UDI?

There's an elevated walkway that does Battleship describes. But I'm guessing Battleship wants to have a ped traversible tile that can be adjacent to a rail station without the additional elevated walkway ramp/tower pieces. So they can go straight across from the rail station by crossing the tracks there. I could see where that would be handy without needing the offset and extra tiles. Not sure if that would be workable, but if it is, I wouldn't mind having that myself.

I'm going nuts trying to get an intersection with the MIS ramps and ground level avenue (and I assume this would be the same for roads and one-ways too). Best I could come up with so far is to transition a MIS to a one-way, but the result looks - how to put it - ick. So two questions: 1. Is there a set of transition puzzle pieces that allow the MIS rural higway ramps to create intersections with ground level roads/avenues? (And also would there be MIS to one-way transitions that don't look crappy.) 2. If there is such a thing as in question 1, why wasn't it included in the mod to begin with? It's a cool mod as it is, but it still doesn't feel as complete in comparison to the NAM. Of course maybe I'm doing something wrong, or perhaps there's a workaround I missed. But it would be nice to connect the various routes in the way I want to connect them.

Originally posted by: mayor_brando Mabye there is a map/region of the actual Puget sound in Oregon....quote> Last I heard, Puget Sound was in Washington and bordered the corner of British Columbia. When did it move south? Anyhow, I do know what people mean by game box art. But it's nowhere as bad as back in the Atari 2600 days. Back then the game art was way way cooler than game itself ever was. I guess the disappointment nowadays is that the average computer is actually capable of rendering the same type of imagery seen in the box art, so the expectations are higher. I suppose that's just part of living with marketing hype, especially from companies like EA. Still that doesn't make the game any less fun in regards to what you can do with it.

Hmmm... My last reply didn't work for some reason. (meh. I suspect the site's server is odd and doesn't like tabbed style browsing. Slow as it is, it gets real wonky when I do that.) Anyhow, trying again... Looking at the one file, it's set to Traffic Simulator C. Is that the same as Z in the current release? I haven't seen simulator-C referred to much at all on the forums. And I still don't know where to get the info concerning road volume and travel distance settings under the simulator though. That would give an easier idea as to what the new setup should be in order to smooth the transition.

I tend to make my cities cul-de-sac hell. Not because I don't like grids. (In real life I find such cities are easier to navigate because you can go around the block if you miss a turn. And most of the cities around where I am tend to follow a grid.) But rather because the sims tend to be rather dumb about finding their way around and I can control the flow of traffic better by limiting where they go. And also because bus stops or whatever seem to work from all directions if you put them where an intersection would normally go. If sims weren't so insistent on shortest possible route despite the traffic congestion, I'd be a lot more willing to use a grid. I guess I still grid the major avenues, but all the feeder roads and streets dead end. Other than being easier to layout and navigate, I believe real cities tend to go with a grid after getting to a certain size because it makes things easier for maintenance crews (possible to close a street and divert traffic) and because emergency services can get around faster. I'd probably try some even crazier stuff than cul-de-sac style planning, but unfortunately the software doesn't really understand how to build properly around diagonal or curved roads. Would be fun to do a proper mountain town layout (like in the Boonies or Appalachia) or one of those old pre-automobile haphazard planned cities.

I think air pollution is the biggest one (since you say you have no water pollution). Also radiation/garbage may factor into this as well. (But that tends to be easier to take care of by exporting trash and being aware of radioactive rewards/ploppables or city deals. Did you know the number crunching facility has some radiation? Weird, huh?) The main thing seems to help is mass transit and using parks to isolate air pollution from adjacent zones. So if you have a busy highway, you want to limit the air pollution spillover by keeping it a few tiles away from other stuff and plopping parks on the open tiles. There's a youtube video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-6y1oXzVik) about the different Maxis parks/rewards and how they affect pollution. In addition to absorbing pollution, different items also have a different radius. So sometimes the stronger ones aren't always the best because of the radius. And did you know the country club is the biggest pollution sponge? Also park maintenance needs to be funded well for them to work adequately. Also don't forget about trees on the tiles where you can plop them. They help a bit. (Not to mention that's what you always hear in the nag.) You can either shell out for them or use the god mode trees (Ctrl-Shift-Alt when clicking god mode to get access). You can even plop them on the very outer edges of the straight highway tiles. It seems to be one of the harder things to control in a heavy populated city. If there's no space, you're sorta stuck like Chuck in this regard. (Outside of hunting down some mods, that is. The pollution controlling ordinances only help yea-much.) Despite the one advisor complaining, the sims don't mind it too much if their health is ok. Maybe somebody else could chip in with better advice, but that's my 2

Who knows? Also in a lot of places both post offices and churches would actually be located in old storefronts or within shopping plaza buildings instead of in dedicated stand alone buildings. In some big cities they also exist somewhere within those big office buildings. (Some buildings if big enough, not only do they have a mail center, but their own zip code. Like the Sears Tower has.) I'd wonder if they show up in some of the commercial storefront lots if you did maximum zoom to see what the details are.

I have an older version of the NAM installed (Jun 2007 I believe) and I was wondering if there was a way to find what the simulator settings are, etc. I actually like how it's currently running, but I've seen some neat features (like dataviews) that are included on the 2009 NAM. I haven't messed much with the plugins in a good while and I'd like to know if it's possible to update witout borking the old simulation settings. Also I've been reading some stuff related to the NAM, so I figure I may need that Cleanitol app. The download at SC4devotion isn't working at all from what I can tell. If I need this, are there any alternative sites?

Not just music, but every reality show featuring some disaster or mishap also has that "little girl" scream that's in Zoo Tycoon (from when the animals get loose) dubbed in (and I think that sound fx may also be in the Sim City series disasters somewhere too). It gets kinda obvious when you hear it used way too many times. (It's almost as bad as the Wilhelm Scream once you reckognize it.)

I'd put in Chicago, but not quite the city itself or some of the older satellite cities. (Metra and CTA/Pace aren't quite the best, but they make up for a lot of the highway system crap.) Rather the problem is more with the associated region view surrounding Chicago. A lot of stuff built up during the late 1980s and most of the 1990s in the 'burbs wasn't well thought out as it could have been. (Way too much residential development put in for the existing infrastructure.) I also suspect a problem with blaggy-style graft hiding in the IDOT system, so we should have much much better roads and highways for the money being put in. (Things like construction zones put up for months, but no actual work done util the last week of the project and stuff like that.) And the roads are kind of crap-tastic in some places. (If you look at the IL side of the interstates and state roads vs. the WI side, with the same traffic levels - the WI side is better. And they have the same weather, less gas tax, and NO tolls that I'm aware of. So what is going on?) But from all the other posts I'm sure people from just about anywhere can find faults with how cities are managed and planned.

You can also make them get used by creative use of pedway tiles. (Road to parking garage, but no access to commercial other than walking from the garage.) But you will need the NAM to do that. Dunno if there's any advantage to that other than making your sims pay a small bit for driving.

I'm not too worried about props (more concerned about utility than it being purdy), but for some of those tiles (like the grass one) - I only wish there was a way to plop trees on them. Then it wouldn't look too obvious when there's a tree covered grass park tile nearby.