t_co

Region play--realistic scale (cities of up to several thousand square km). Accurately sized industrial sectors, roads, and airports.

Bascially what I mean is without the open paved areas around the building.

Just a small request--the Shanghai BoC tower looks gorgeous, but I'm wondering if you could make a version without the ground decorations (keep the roads going into the building tho, that's a nice touch). Thanks!

For the Japanese school, here is the link: http://members3.jcom.home.ne.jp/somy000/

Depends on whether I'm building a downtown, suburb, or other district. Downtowns: 6x6, 8x8, 6x8, 8x10 grid bounded by avenues with streettop subway/bus stations at the four midpoints of the resulting square's sides. However, in my sole "large" downtown (the one that's filled with skyscrapers) I have built a winding, s-shaped avenue lined with shops, parks, and museums that runs the length of the medium city tile (right down the middle). The downtown is ringed with a freeway loop and has a cross-shaped underground freeway system running through the medium city tile at the center of the region. Suburbs: I usually take a large city grid, split it into sixteen blocks with avenues, and then proceed to build winding suburban neighborhoods inside each block or small industrial/commercial developments. Sometimes I will simply fill a block with parks and museums, etc, or those massive japanese schools made by somy (which i find simulates a suburban school in terms of coverage much better than the maxis schools). Freeways tend to go straight, with five large loops that look like a sinusoidal rose forming my regional freeway system. (the middle part of the rose would be my downtown.) Also have sunken suburban rail, usually with two lines going through each large city tiile (which looks like a cross, one line down the middle going northsouth and the other line down the middle going east west). Industrial complexes: 6x6 road grids with avenues every four or five roads. Also usually built around a port or giant railway depot (which usually takes up between 10 to 20 6x6 blocks). Ports: One long highway going parallel to the coast, with feeder roads going through it at right angles leading to piers and warehouses etc . Usually have industrial development on the other side of the highway. Exurbs/mountain communities/luxury communities: usually large city tile with one avenue going through it, one major road that then branches off into many streets among a) winding hills and small mountain cabins or b) the beach and beach houses/massive estates Airports: regional airport has a ring of highway around it surrouding four terminals and four crisscrossing runways (in a # configuration with terminals at the corners) Farmland: rare, but usually a single road running down the middle of the tile with farms/streets surrounding it. Coasts: I terminate the grid at a coast, only allowing bridges for freeways. The water is bordered with an avenue that intersects with all the grid streets it hits, but not the smaller streets. Part of the downtown loop highway is along a coast and takes the place of the avenue there.

Perhaps it might also be prudent to make more of a free 3d perspective--imagine what it would feel like to be able to view your city through the eyes of an individual sim. It would also be good to make population densities more realistic. I know they're already quite realistic now, but some buildings (like single family homes) still have too many people while others (such as industrial plants) are too small and have too few workers. Third, the cost of everrything needs to drastically rescaled. Currently, tax revenues and city costs are way too low--a hospital does not require 1000 dollars a month to have 10 doctors. It requires something more like 200,000 dollars a month for 10 doctors. Also, I highly doubt that a commercial skyscraper would only generate a few thousand dollars a month in tax revenue--the balance of tax structure between CS and CO needs to be reworked. Along the same vein, it is important to rework the economic/commute simulator. The current RCI simulator is a regionwide average; this needs to be reworked. Say your region is 10 miles wide and you have a shortage of people in one city on the eastern edge. It does not make sense for that demand for people to be translated to a city on the western edge. Full regional commuting should work too--people should not simply go to the edge of the map and "disappear"--the game should simulate them going across 5, 6, 7 tiles to get to work. That would solve the eternal commuter bug and fix a lot of the demand problems inherent in many regions. In addition, it would finally let true CBDs grow (the kind that attract highly educated white collar workers from an entire region--a la the Loop, Midtown, or Central). Simulate other commutes as well. People don't just go to work and go home--they go shopping, go to the airport, go to the ballpark... Finally, change the tax system. Cities do not arbitrarily tax "zones"; they tax sales, property, etc. So institute those taxes and do a good, original job at integrating that revamped tax system into the aforementioned new economic simulator. I'm sure the effects would drastically improve the realism of the city. P.S. A change to the current building system would be nice. Right now we have "stages" and "rewards"; perhaps in the next game we could have you reaching a certain stage to get an intangible reward (like a fortune 500 company) or a land developer; both of which would unlock additional growable buildings.

U3D, it looks like you have a diagonal bridge in the bottom right corner of ur picture. How did that come about?

Here's my downtown.

Here is one of my pictures. Sorry for the size issues, how can I resize them?

Here's a medium city with around 960000 people. In my region, largest large tile has only 300k (b/c they're all suburbs of the main city.) Largest small tile is 126k. Region pop: 15 million.