Introduction
I've had this dream for quite a while. A city, no, actually even an entire region, modded to look like Japan. I already did quite a huge region before, in which i tried to build as realistic as possible. The goal was to get a huge city which spans across several large maps with a cool looking skyline, which is made entirely from crystal white skyscrapers. I put quite a lot of work into it, searced for bats that would fit into it, and created a nice CJ on it on simforum.de. I was pretty pleased with it, and when i got too frustrated, i used to flatten the region and start all over again. After several attempts, i came up with a result which i liked, but which got infested with PropPox. This is the last shot of the region view i have before i dropped it and quit SC4 for quite some time. Now, i'm back. And i've got a lot of ideas i want to try.
Goals
I want my city to have the look and feel of Japan. Therefore i switched all the trees to seasonal ones which fit, while also throwing in some cherry trees to give my region a Sakura feel once a year. Due to this, i also blocked pretty much every Maxis lot in the game and made my own lots. I already did this quite a lot in the past, but only to complement my plugin folder, never to give the game an entire new look. So far, i've done around 200-300 (civics, R$/R$$ low density, some industry) for this region, but i still have many, many more to do until i can finally build at my heart's desire.
I also want to build it realistic and try to avoid the grid to a certain degree. I used to make my roadwork really curvy in the past, but it neither looked good nor was in any way realistic. I realized that in fact most cities do have gridlike structures, but they arent orthogonal to each other, but in all kinds of angles. And so that's what i aim for. This picture of my old CJ is a good example.
Difficulties
Yeah, i guess there will be quite a lot of these. First, it will take a tremendous amount of lotting and modding work, with even more searching fitting bats on top of it. A big reason why i write this CJ is to keep me motivated so i'll finish this project. Another is how i can get all bats to grow evenly. In the past i always had Maxis lots as some kind of backbone of my cities. So all plugins were just additions, not replacements. This time, it will be different, which forces me to mod quite carefully. On the other hand, SimCity4's mechanics on how to get new buildings into the game are quite complicated, and i have no real idea how to balance out of much which lot will grow. That's why i decided to make one single, invisible .sc4model to act as all buildings i'll add. I created sc4descs for each type of growable and stage, and i will add buildings as props on these lots. So basically there's only one building for each type of growable, but with a lot of varying lots. I hope this will work out how i imagine it. Please let me know if you know better or have doubts.
Pictures
Yeah, i have some of these and i can show what i have done so far. I can offer to upload the lots, but i won't be able to add readmes/provide links to the dependencies.
R§-Buildings. I have made around 48 lots in total for this type: 16 1x1 stage 3, 16 1x2 stage 2, 16 1x3 stage 1. The pictures show spring, summer and fall.
These show several civic buildings i lotted so far. The first shows a huge coal power plant. I kinda missed to add a parking lot though... I have to add that later. Also i already found a bat of fukushima power plant made by SOMY, so i'll just have to use these. The second picture shows the two big railway stations i'm planning to use for regular rail and HSRP network in my region. This spot will be quite near the downtown of my city. The third picture shows all the education/health lots i've done. elementary schools (small/big), a library, a hospital (top right) and museum (temple building bottom right).
To finish, i've got two shots of the region:
Hope you like my project .
