bat_mantis

Glad you like it so far! The city is very much in its infancy. Not even a city, really, more an overgrown town at this point. Got the updates on the forum covered . Every time I update the blog, I'll just bump this up with a quick post and a pic or two.

Welcome to La Crosse on the Mighty Mississippi My first official CJ. The region is based very very loosely on La Crosse, Wisconsin, a city I have only been to twice, but fell in love with instantly. I am using blogger.com to house this CJ as it is easier for me to update it than on here (i.e. I'm lazy and want the computer to do my formatting). Here's the url: http://portlandcj.blogspot.com/ It's called Portland because I had originally intended to have one of Portland, ME, buuuuuut that one kind of fell through. Anyway, hope you enjoy. Comments are always welcome, whether on here or on the CJ blog.

I apologize in advance if these have been requested before and I just didn't see them in my searches. Since I ride the GMAX short bus and can't even make a decent picture in MS Paint, I would like to humbly request two monuments. Both are Russian (Soviet to be exact), and commemorate Yuri Gagarin's historic first flight into outer space. The first one: Other images are here: http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/268gagarin_statue.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/gagarin1.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/gagarin2.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/gagarin_close_lg.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/moscow28.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/ry04gagarin1.jpg This is the second, and in my opinion, the most impressive of the two. More images: http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/77516759QUxtog_ph.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/moscou-monument-gagarin.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/mv49.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/mv50.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/mv51.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/mv53.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/raket.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/ry04raket.jpg http://usera.imagecave.com/evilmonkeygenius/Monuments/space1.jpg I just love Soviet public art. Somehow it managed to be this amazing contradiction of bold inspiration and stark cold inhumanity. Anyway, if any of you guys are feeling up to it, feel free to take a whack at em. With my skills I'd be more likely to build actual reproductions than put anything even remotely good together for SC4. Thanks alot in advance.

Date: 12/18/2005 5:36:30 PM Author:deanej Residential Development: This was very slow and eventually nonexistent when my city got to 65,000 sims. How do I fix these? quote> This has been a problem I've run into on alot of my cities. As population goes up I think you just get to a point where you need alot more incentive bring more people into your cities. Try building more parks and green spaces, planting some trees, increasing education and safety, and just generally making your city a nicer place to live. Usually when my cities reach ~30-40,000 (I'm a guy who prefers the mid-size cities) I do a massive downtown redevelopment where I add alot more museums, maybe build a hospital if it's needed and especially build lots and lots of new recreational areas like parks. It gets expensive, but if you want to get over the 100,000 hump it's worth it.

Date: 12/25/2005 1:30:57 PM Author: hamsterTK Anyways, realistic or not, i hate messing with freeways. They cut a swath through my neigborhoods and they hurt my cs on the side streets that are often set up so that sims dont have to go far to work. The only time that a freeway really was useful was when i had a big city, and i made a loop around it. It really helped my commute time since R$$$sims not traveling directly thru town hopped on it instead. the tolls were nice too.quote> I agree with you on the freeways. I had a reasonably sized city (~90,000) and decided that traffic flow downtown was high enough a freeway would cut down commute times. I made the biggest urban renewal mistake I could think of with this. I uprooted hundreds of homes and businesses for the sake of traffic. My downtown became a commercial desert in no time flat. I think, though, if I wasn't so gung ho about it and built up a block every few months giving the area time to recover and adjust itself it would have gone alot better. Right now, though, I only build freeway bypasses on the outskirts of my cities and bring people downtown on avenues. That's mostly because I've only got mid-size cities on my current map and partly because I'm not much of a fan of them anymore. Oh, and to stay on topic here, I think I figured out the frontage road bit. I'm using ploppable commercial lots as anchors for the area to bring in commuters. The plop lot automatically creates traffic and demand for the adjacent lots and just like that I have a functional retail area on a frontage road. Don't know why I never thought of this before...it's how developers bring people to malls.

I've been using industrial parks for quite a while now too. It really does make the area look alot more realistic. It also keeps everything off the main road so future expansion is alot easier. I'm also working now on reducing air pollution by building smaller industrial areas that are spread out farther and divided by trees or parkland. So far I've had limited success on actually reducing pollution, but the desireability of the area increases and the aesthetics of the area are alot higher than they would be if I just built one giant area.

Date: 12/24/2005 9:47:41 PM Author: sam I don't seem to have too much trouble with that. My sims tend to take the quickest way to the avenue and then stay on the avenue, and vice versa. But I use the perfect path finding option in the NAM. I find the game's default path finding a bit whacky.quote> I've been wondering if that might be the trouble with this. I've only got better pathfinding on in NAM and not perfect pathfinding. They still might be doing some goofy things because of that.

Yeah, this is generally the exact same results I've had with frontage roads too. They work really well in residential areas where the traffic noise from the larger roads kills the desireability. I've been trying for more realistic looking suburban retail areas and where I grew up that always included a small frontage road off the main road to keep traffic moving from store to store off the main road. The only luck I've really had with them is when I put up a larger shopping area with a parking lot in front. This seems to boost demand and bring in traffic along with being semi-realistic. Other than that, though, the roads only seem to confuse my sims. They either don't use it at all and stick with the main road or decide it's a shortcut and overwhelm it with traffic that should be going out to the main road. Thanks for the replies on this, though. I'm going to keep toying with it.

I've been playing around with frontage roads parralelling the main road next to large commercial areas within a few of my cities. So far I've had pretty bland results and ended up scrapping quite a few and replacing my areas directly next to the main road. I was just wondering if anyone else has tried these and what kind of results they've had.