Del

In my experience, the size lots you can draw depends on the land value of the area you are zoning. Put a few gifts down ahead of where you plan to expand your city, wait a few months, and you can sometimes lay zone squares that are 4 X 4. I'm not sure how the game works out whether an area of land will let you put down large zones, but zones larger than 3 X 1 will merge, if rather haphazardly. It's irritating when the game decides to make a big building in the midst of a row of zones, and the awkward 3 X 1 plots left out rarely (in my experience) develop much higher, or remerge. It's also irritating when the large zones fail to develop for years, despite there being plenty of demand and desirability. One place where you can zone huge zones right from the start is at the coastline / riverbank. If you check out the land value on a freshly terraformed piece of land with no development on it, you'll notice that on the edge of water the land value is a healthy green, growing less valuable the further from water you go. Elucidation would be much appreciated. "A river runs through it" Del

I'm sure Sim City 4 is taking over my brain. Still, I was reading an article in my newspaper the other day, and I couldn't help but think about Sim City 4. Hows this for agricultural zoning? Gurskey's "Greeley" From the article: "This is Rawhide gone industrial, without a hint of pork'n'beans and trail coffee, an industrialised west where even the Marlboro men have quit. The grid itself - on the tilt, a bit irregular, a thing of fence-posts and roads and numbered gates - is already emblematic of a mentality. Grids are practical. They bring together and they divide. They impose themselves on the world, carrying with them a sense of order, of coordinates, of regularity. In Rosalind Krauss's great 1978 essay on the subject of the grid, she talks about the ubiquity of the grid, of its being both a sign of our materialist view of the world, and its almost spiritual, other dimension in much art, from Mondrian to Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse. " And you thought pre-planned cities were simply anal? The main thing I'm interested in is efficiency and expediency. Working completely Freeform stifles that. I plan ahead, and use my favourite zone, amenity and road configurations. Set systems and grids are the most efficient and effective way of accomplishing your goals and coping with the needs of your city. That said, even though I work to a grid, I tend to expand the neighbourhoods how I feel, and adjust the systems depending on what local effects I want to create in different areas. I like to have a variety of amenities, a residential heart, large industrial parks, and bustling commercial districts, rather than an ugly and inefficient hotch potch of zones. I've seen cities and read city plans on the internet which are simply soulless, using a flat, square piece of land and having the zone and road layout down to a pixel. They're deathly dull, and recreating them is an empty and unedifying experience. It's far better in my opinion to develop your own strategy and find out how best to influence your city, rather than copying straight from a guide. I'm sure you can think of the Oxfam 'Fish' quote, so I won't bother repeating it. "Well Fed" Del