PatternRec

Love the ped malls. I've got a nice ped bridge over an avenue that looks great. Two quick questions: 1. I assume they increase ped traffic and are good for commercial zones and the benefit is they don't cost like the ones Maxis put in the parks menu. Is that right? 2. How do you place them? Which way does the arrow face? Since they're technically "roads" according to the help tool, does this meanI can put business zones facing them without any streets, roads, avenues, etc? Confused.

Up to about 15k sims in the first city. Now that I've got an economy and some demand, started a city next door with the purpose of playing with some of the new toys that NAM gives me. Here's a screenie:

The pollution there isn't that bad - just the edge of the dirty industrial cloud. I'm actually surprised that there's some medium and high wealth buildings there. I've got some time to play tonight so I'll see where I go with it.

I'm hesitant to try any new mods, particularly buggy ones, because I have a limited amount of free time and I want to spend it playing rather than trouble shooting. As I build I might add a few more but I stick with NAM-only now. Haven't played in a few days. Population about 13k right now. City making money. Don't recall how much. I added a couple of medium density residential areas in a place with some air pollution - demand for low wealth res was way up - so now I've got some apartment buildings:

Thanks guys. I really hate the grid system, but I found working with diagonals unwieldy and didn't realize there were benefits to traffic. I'll try some out. I had an old city in another region that I laid out like Santa Fe, all winding streets, but it felt like there was so much unused space. As for the open areas, I've been leaving the so I wouldn't have to bulldoze when I went to put in bus stops and subway stations. I used to really fill everything up densely, and then I thought maybe that wasn't so good. I'll keep experimenting, but it's definitely cool to have some feedback from experienced players.

Thanks. It's nice to get positive feedback. I looked at some other city journals and I'm way out of my league here. lol Some real creative stuff out there. Pic of the latest soon.

Population about 12k. Making almost 2k a month. Zoned a couple of blocks of medium density residential in old town. Now I've got some tenements! Bus system in place. Connected an avenue, power, water and rail to a northern tile. Tomorrow, neighbors!

Population of about 7k. Making around $500 a month. Replaced clinic with hospital, upgraded to a large police station and added a city college and a museum. Water treatment plant cutting into profits but was needed. Surrounded area with rail and avenues. Rail connects with screen edges in two directions. High wealth residential starting to move in. Started to get commercial demand so created a "downtown," but it's only low density right now. At some point I'll have to start experimenting with the new transportation stuff like roundabouts and things like that. Here's a pic:

@Chptrk: thanks. Good advice as usual. @Kusajika Yachiru: I grew up in NYC, and I think that's why I used to be really bad at SC4 when it came out. I always tried to make tightly spaced, dense cities like the one I knew. Now that I've lived in Phoenix for a few years I know what they mean when they say suburban sprawl. I'm gonna try to keep a lot of less densely zoned areas this time around. I had a few biggies in the Berlin region before I installed NAM. I did a clean install of SC4 before putting in NAM because I wanted to start from scratch. Gotta work now for the next eight hours but I'll be jonesing to build my city instead. Can't wait to grow it.

Is it ok to keep asking questions in my CJ thread? I don't wanna come across as spamming or post pumping. I just like the idea of visiting a single thread rather than being all over the place. I can get pretty scattered easily. I have a question about rail stations. The arrow faces a road. Does the rail just have to touch any part of the station? Is there a way to do it right? Never sure about this. So glad I re-found this forum. Gave up on SC years ago because I didn't have answers to a lot of questions. edit: added a dedicated freight rail, straight shot out of town with 2 freight stations. Two months later neither were used. Reverted to the pre-rail save. I don't get rail at all in this game. Should I leave it for the future? The roads next to the industrial areas are not congested, but they're at 100% so I'd hoped to get some of the trucks off them. :/

Here's a pic of the city as described above. I'm gonna tweak things locally and avoid growth while I try to plan for future transportation. Never used to plan in the old days. I just reacted. Hence my cities were always broke in no time. Been much better playing the game these days.

Thanks for the tip, Chptrk. I'll give it a try. I've never messed around with rail all that much in the past because it was annoying to lay. How seriously should I take the advice about dedicated freight rail, ie. not mixing passenger with freight lines?

Thanks. Just played a little more before hitting the hay. No screenshot, but it's the same as above with some more industry and residential. Basic services and infrastructure is there, including a police station, elementary school, high school and library. No college yet. Replaced the small fire station with a large one to cover the bigger area. Pop's up to about 6700 and the city is making about $500 a turn. One thing I've always struggled with at this stage - on the one hand it makes sense to start putting in other transportation networks now, other wise you have to do major bulldozing later to put in rails and stuff. On the other hand it seems ridiculous to put a railroad in a small town only a couple miles wide. Maybe I'm thinking too "realistically" for the game? I don't know anybody who houses a family of 12 in a single ranch home, but those are the numbers in the game. Maybe the same distortions apply to traffic.

Oct 2009: about 4000 sims. Making about 400 a month. Small clinic and landfill in place. Pretty boring layout. Time to take a break from the comp for a while. [image resized. Please keep the pictures no larger then 800x600. Thanks - Chptrk]

Hi everyone. I just started playing SC4 again after years of the Cds collecting dust on a shelf. recently I installed the NAM recommended here, including the July 2009 Update. Two quick questions: 1. In the documentation, when they refer to the plugins folder they mean the one within the NAM folder itself, not the plugins folder in the SC4 that NAM resides in, right? 2. I started a new region from scratch so as not to have the old layouts affected by the new pathfinding stuff. I have two small cities that seem to be getting abandoned buildings and long commute times in even small cities with only low density, whereas before NAM I didn't get that until I had fairly large cities. According to what I read here, NAM's supposed to help that but it seems a little worse or more extreme right now. Also, demand seems less stable and fluctuates more. I installed NAM with the default settings, not adding anything that wasn't already checked in the installer. I'm assuming that my old play style doesn't gel with the new plugin. Any suggestions on what I may be doing wrong or how play is affected? I've heard great things about NAM and wanna keep it in there. 3. I've been experimenting with the new road and rail types. Looking forward to learning what they do besides looking cool and adding variety. I figure they all heap with traffic (ie. roundabout doesn't slow things as much as two avenues intersecting). I figure this is all earnid in game via trial and error, but wondering if there's a link to some info I missed about the specifics. Cheers. edit: Just did a clean install od SC4 and the NAM. This time I chose the Better Pathfinding option. I'll see what happens. Still would like a few pointers. I've read the documentation and browsed the forum for a few days and still have a couple issues.

Thanks for the quick response. I'd already read your post - very informative. I'll let you know how things progress as I have the whole day to game today. The only other issue/question I have right now is some clarification of technical terms. What is a BAT file? Seems like those are what add extra buildings and such to the game? Would definitely like to add some variety to the looks of the game. How do I install those? I used the installer for the NAM and wanna make sure I put any BATs I get in the right place.