infoscott

It's hard to be creative with a flat map. Get a map with plenty of terrain features. Build lots of scattered villages linked together by farms. Have the roads follow the contour features, but later allow interstates to cut through features even if you have to tunnel or flatten terrain. Farms like big expanses of flat lands. Villages, towns, and cities like to be at transportation junctions. You can ship ten times more freight for the cost via ships, so your largest population centers should be adjacent to navigable rivers or seas. Larger urban areas should also be close to large supplies of fresh water, so that usually means rivers and lakes. Taking this approach, you don't have to be very clever, and certainly not well planned out. Just study the terrain, lay down transportation while you still can, and then let development happen. Once you're ready to go from the rural to urban stage, you can grab the graph paper and bulldozer, but by them the simulator should have already provided suggestions to act upon.

High tech starts to just spring up where it finds a nurturing environment. You can get even a little high tech with sub 80 education level, but you won't usually see it in high pollution, low property value areas. Thus designing a high tech industrial park becomes something of a tricky issue. It's usually a lot easier to to build just an industrial park in an optimal location, suffer with suboptimal industries there over a period of time, and then let evolution do its business. You might think about designating your target neighborhood with industrial zones, but scatter them about sparsely and fill the gaps with trees and parks. This will raise desirability and reduce pollution; a high tech incubator. When you feel your education is high enough, i-HT demand strong, transportation is good, and pollution is not an issue, you can start digging up the greenery and replace with more industrial zones. Don't be afraid to put these zones close to or even adjacent to residential areas. If you grow it slowly enough you won't kill off residential with pollution. I've done it on small islands, and I've seen it done for real in Orange County California (city of Irvine - the Spectrum industrial park and the Irvine Business Complex, both R-$$/$$$ and I-HT).

On the monorail issue, you should check to see which wealth classes are using it. R$ tends to choose bus or passenger rail over other options, I can't find a particular preference for R$$, and R$$$ seems to prefer monorail or cars. However, I've built a rural to rural monorail system and seen R$ take it when the corresponding bus route was far less efficient, and surface roads weren't even an option. It seems highway trumps everything far too often. It's one of the better saboteurs of a well layed out mass transit system, toll booths notwithstanding. Monorail stations are tricky to place to get the desired effect. The destination should be near very high densities, and better if it's adjacent to a subway system. The source destination needs to be near higher density, higher wealth residential, although in theory a Park-n-Ride configuration should also work. I haven't seen many suburbs built with high wealth city centers surrounded by medium and low wealth suburbs, often it's just the other way around. So the Catch-22 seems to be funneling enough candidates to the source destination to make it effective. I'm still working on that problem.

By air, 27 hours from Columbia Missouri USA to Buenos Aires, Argentina (about 7,000 miles). We had plane changes in Atlanta and Miamia and relatively short stopovers in Saint Louis, Atlanta, Guayaquil Ecuador, Lima Peru, Santiago Chile, and Montevideo Uruguay. By sea, 17 hours from Esbjerg Denmark to Harwich England (somewhere over 700 miles). Fortunately I got a bunk and slept most of the way. By land, about 16 hours from Saint Louis Missouri to Boston Massachusetts (1200 miles) via Amtrak. In 1985 I wanted to try Amtrak out before Congress finally pulled the plug on the subsidies.

That's good to know. I use NAM but without any commute optimizers.

I get them to work, but the path through the rails have to be shorter than the path over the roads. I run my rails very straight, first piece of transportation infrastructure that gets laid.

1x1 residential is really hard to turn into anything. I have only seen 1x1 middle class low density and some medium density row houses without a back yard. 1x2 is pretty standard low/medium wealth low density and medium density apartment buildings. 2x2 gets larger apartment buildings. I find that 1x2 apartments give a lot of flexibility in road layout. You may have to use high density zones adjacent to medium density trick in order to prevent 1x2 lots merging into 2x2 lots. It may seem counterintuitive, but for low density residential I'd zone 2x2 and closer to the the urban center I'd zone 1x2 for low-medium wealth and 3x3 for high wealth. Land is much cheaper in the country than in the city, so if the game engine recognizes this you'll get lots that are proportional to land cost. I guess you could justify it by saying that rural people tend to live more extended family while city dwellers tend to live more nuclear family.

Thanks! Yeah, I don't replace electric plants until between 60% and 50% of capacity. You need the operating cost savings in the early days of the plant to pay off the capital cost of building the plant. For the commercial buildings, there are two considerations; traffic and concentration. Both Co and Cs like to be high traffic areas. It's usually better to not concentrate Cs, but to scatter it about in your residential areas. At most you'd concentrate some Cs into strip malls or shoping centers. Co likes to be clumped around other Co buildings. Although you can't zone specifically for Co versus Cs, your placement and desirability factors will influence which get built, so knowing this will give you some control over which is chosen. While you're population is still small, you'll need more industrial than commercial. You'll find it favorable to put Co zones in the transit path between residential and industrial, but don't expect to see a lot of them pop up, you'll probably see more Cs. When the populations get much larger and Co is more in demand than I, you can support a commercial center with a lot of C zones feeding off the traffic patterns of each other. So if you don't want to do a lot of rezoning, you kind of have to slowly fill in a hole where your commercial center is going to be. Alternatively you could fill that with low density residential and a good street grid, knowing that when your population rises it won't be to expensive to tear it out and make it a commercial center. Glad to hear your back in the black without making the city look like "War of the Worlds".

Keep education in your Ag towns, but be REALLY stingy about it. In any one village you can have an elementary school or a high school, but not both. You're going to set the busing radius to zero, and what few apartment buildings you have will be within the school's radius. You can also have one community college and one library (think "bookmobile" for the rest of the inhabitants). That's about all the education you can afford. You'll see a slow creeping rise in your EQ, enough to allow you access to C-$$ and I-M jobs. Your Ag town can have one or two clinics and one medical center, again in the area of population concentration. Ag towns generally don't need water in areas that are all low density. You won't have enough business to support much R-$$$. By my experiments you can support the following without water: R-$/$$, Cs-$/$$, Co-$$, I-Ag, I-D, and I-M; at least at the lower stages. The feeder towns won't need any police, and at most one small fire station. The big town should handle all the garbage. It terms of profit and loss, your farm taxes will pay for its share of the electric and some of the roads, the residential taxes for farm workers will pay for the rest of civic services on a small budget. If you're really frugal on the other expenses that boost desirability, you can turn a tidy profit on R-$$, Cs, Co, and I-D/M. The Ag towns are actually a great exercises in squeezing your budget to produce the most beauty and desirability from your designs. It's also a good test of milking civic jobs. Your medical center and city college will be your larger job providers, many of them high wealth. You can use either as the anchor structure for an Ag city, wereas in larger urban areas they are just though of as another civic service.

You'll find that your rural areas make excellent bedroom communities until your population stabilizes in the large city. In some ways they will be more stable than relying on row houses and large apartment towers in the large city. I would suggest actually building out your small and medium farm communities with more R-$ apartments and more dirty industry. Agribusiness manufacturing works better when it's close to the raw materials, this being the produce and livestock. If you have a good rail system there, then you can put up some dirty industry close to the rails and/or road junctions. If you keep the density medium and stagger around the zones you won't have any meaningful air pollution. In these "company town" villages, you'll probably have one or maybe two larger manufacturers, like canneries or meat packing plants, and then a few or several 1x2 tile small manufacturers, like foundries and automobile part remanufacturers (you would have to rename something like "Farley's Foundry"). If you keep the medium R lots small, namely 1x2 or even 1x1, you'll get appropriate structures like walk-ups and row houses, and meaningful population densities that boost your regional population considerably. Also, you wouldn't necessarily have to run out something like a monorail across the entire region. The bedroom communities could be linked by commuter rail or bus, and have a transit plaza on the edge of your map where the commuters switch to monorail or EL that takes them through the large city.

Regarding freight stimulating commerce; it's an observation, but I don't have proof from some insight into the game mechanics. Working rural areas, though, freight traffic is probably one of the largest sources of traffic on the side streets. I'm pretty sure freight trucks count against congestion, because most of my paved areas are streets, and I'll get yellow and red status around feeder streets that bring produce trucks out to the main road. In many cases the freight counts as 40-60% of the total traffic, partly because the farm residences don't have to commute more than 20 - 30 tiles to their jobs.

It's also worth pointing out that "off map" can mean an adjacent city within your region that either is or is not developed yet, and into adjacent regions. If you don't have enough connections for your freight, you'll get a message about the industrial goods piling up. Off map freight simulates the macro economy, while regional and inter-city transport is the micro economy. It appears the sims prefer to ship industrial good on rail instead of truck, but it won't go out of it's way to find a freight station. Medium/heavy industry and the parts of farms with buildings, if they are adjacent to a rail tile will load their freight directly onto the tracks without need of a station. If this looks too goofy you can plop rail spurs next to your industry tiles. With farms, you're sort of stuck as to where the main tile gets placed, so often you'll need a local freight station if you want to take the load off your streets. If you're playing a rural area, don't be too quick to place a freight station. You may want the traffic from the freight trucks to help stimulate demand for commercial zones. Early on the freight traffic may be two or three times the residential commuter traffic. Once you're traffic volume is up and you wish to take a load off your streets rather than upgrade them to roads, then go ahead and plop a freight station. Freight stations also make a great justification for laying out a small village at the street/rail transit junction.

Ditto. There are quite a few threads that leave the topic hanging without resolution.

<> Totally! I play mostly rural cities, so the proportion of wealth is usually R-$ 80%, R-$$ 15%, and R-$$$ 5%. In larger cities the ratio is more like 25/50/25. Around farms it's all about the little guy; they are the backbone of your economy. Even when you get to larger urban areas, quite often R-$ are your best bargain. Of course the R-$ tax base per capita is less than the other wealth levels, but their civic and beautification support costs are less, too. If you also take into account that mass transit can be made self supporting but roads (without toll booths) cannot, R-$ can be a real bargain. The one factor that I think gets overlooked is their contribution to higher wealth C&I taxes. Unless I'm mistaken and it's scaled, the share of high tech taxes from the R-$ workers is just as important as the contribution from R-$$/$$$. And I believe every city should have a little dirty industry for realism purposes, and this along with Cs-$ is the exclusive workplace of low wealth people. Rich people can't eat grapes without somebody picking the grapes. If you want to really appreciate this, go to the maximum zoom level on one of your farms. From time to time you'll see a couple of sims working the fields. If you're clever and put some woods right up to the border of the farm, you may also see some wildlife ambling around while the ag workers harvest away. It's really quite inspiring!

Ah, the Trinity. Commentaries associating a triune nature of God, apart from implicit passages in the Gospels, started showing up in the late second, early third century ("A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs"). Gender (which is how this ties back to DVC) wasn't really an issue then, more the bishops were trying to deduce the exact relationship among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and/or whether they were different aspects of a single entity. As it turned out, by focusing exclusively on these three aspects, two being male and one being neuter, it excluded the feminine from worship. Adopting the Nicean creed in the fourth century would enforce the belief in the Trinity. Extra-biblical references to God's aspect included the feminine, but they were not to be even considered at Nicea, because Constantine's purpose of this council was to unite Christianity under a common belief system and to shut the door on heresies. If a bishop would not sign the new profession of faith, he was banished, and in AD 380 Emperor Theodosius passed a law making it illegal to disagree with the church on the position of the Trinity ("The Dark Side of Christian History"). Bishop Ephiphanius expressed the sentiments of the orthodoxy, saying "Let the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be worshipped, but let no one worship Mary." (ibid.) Basically, within the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire, the sacred feminine was legislated out of existence and any scripture with even a taint of heresy was not to be even considered for inclusion in the Bible. DVC portrays events, sources, and movements of the fringe, non-orthodox elements of Christianity that wholeheartedly believed in the sacred feminine as an integral part of following Jesus. koffee: Thanks, {blush}, I still learned computer science stuff in order to make a living. Linguists are slightly more employable than poets. Let's see if we can yawn together in two part harmony. ;^)