IljaS

Airport lots lift CO caps. I personally use functional helicopter pads and airport bus-stops in my CBD tile for caps, and build nonfunctional eyecandy airport to another tile for realism and fun.

Sucking salt out of sea...

As general rule I would say no. Cities don't develop that evenly. You are bound to have some R§ and R§§ sims in your R§§§ tiles. They are forced to cross the tile border for jobs, so each of them will have long commuting time. You could rather try to build different districts within your tiles, so that you don't loose the base of your upper level development.

Same here. I have §9.2, §§9.4 and §§§9,6 tax rate in all of my regions. I have never met a point where I should lower or raise my taxes. I just drop them when necessary to keep the neutral tax rate. I have no farms, so there are no farm subsidies. I am playing with CAM+SPAM combination. Farming is what I do to get get my CBD to flourish. Getting back to the topic. Raising taxes blocks the RCI-type you wish to block, but I feel that lowering taxes gives just a momentary relief. This is IMO-stuff, but city works best when taxes are between 7-11%.

Nope, you are not the only one. I like to play my regions as more historical point of view, so occasional fires happen. -> This is my serial arsoninst fase. Don't tell anyone. - Ilja (Sorry about my childis manners today. I am starting my 35th year in life in... oh, about 2 minutes. Living the last moments of my youth. )

Low wealth Cs is your best friend. Cs does not have caps and the overall amount of C allows Co levels to grow. Zone a lot of Light C around your most used road networks - the high levels of traffic noise is the key here. Growing Cs should help you get rid of this problem. Try this and call me in the morning. If it does not work then we will try something else. - Ilja

Yes, and buses and freight trucks too. The game doesn't really simulate customers, so it makes workers do double-duty as customers on their way to work. Key element here is the traffic noise. Game uses that as a value to determine the amount of customers. Building commercial areas is a constant balancing between creating noise and fighting against pollution. IMO, current simulation and traffic speed works surprisingly well for players like me, who likes to build CBDs with central railwaystations and use a lot of pedmalls with public transportation.

Blockers usually prevent something from growing, not existing. Remove the blocker-file, zone for mansion, grow it and make it historical. After that you should be able to add the blocker-file back to your Plugins folder and keep the mansion in the game. I am currently blocking all Maxis files. It has been some time while I used this file, so I can't say for certain that this routine works. It did when I was only blocking the low dencity mansion and, if I recall right, I used this blocker for the job.

I have been playing this game for 10 years with European mass transtit systems, but this number has allways escaped from me. Thank you for bringing it up.

Bypasses are not needed for this purpose either. If you use properly modded stations (such as are found in the NAM), bypasses are never needed. In these stations, trains neither stop nor slow down at intermediate stations. In the original Maxis stations, el rail and monorail actually cross intermediate stations in zero time, meaning the more stations you have, the faster your network is. This has been fixed in the NAM. Thank you Z1. I was aware of this. I am using fast tracks to fight congestion and for visual realism. My rush hour lines go trough large stations, skipping all smaller stations between them. I should have explained better. This is actually how trains work in South Finland. Regional trains and long distance trains may sometimes use same tracks, but not same stations. Large stops, like Tikkurila in Vantaa, serve both long distance trains and regional trains. From ther the next stop for long distance train is Pasila, skipping all regional stops between. Passengers that left the train in Tikkurila can take the regional train to travel to their destination between Tikkurila and Pasila. There is often a third (or fourth) rail for bypassing trains near stations.

You work fast. I have downloaded your fix and moving to test it in my sandbox region. Thank you.

1. That is a possibility, yes. 2. Crossing the tile border is concidered as long commute time. The game does not share information about fysical location of buildings across tile borders. Only RCI existence and amount is stored and read while working with neighbour tile. There is nothing that we can do about it. 3. You are not lacking the you? 4. No. You don't need to add bypasses for that purpose. You can create bypasses with fewer stops as rush hour track. I sometimes do this with my ground rail networks. 5. Someone else has to answer to this one. Sorry.

You can also use this mod to prevent mansions from growing in low density areas.

Roadtop Mass Tranist has avenue bus stops. I am using the version 3.60. Perhaps you missed something while installing those files?

It does not matter. I think that this area looks very nice. One question, though. At the center of the image, right next to that "battery" looking IND, there are four similar houses. One of them - the one on right - seems to be missing somethin. There is a purple, kind of transparent looking square. I do not recall seeing that bug before. I really like this one. Well done.

There are. I remeber doing Whale Watching some years ago. I had forgotten those missions entirely.

I like to play with large maps and tiles, keep it slow and let my region develop trough different ages and stages. Only growables in my default Plugins folder are those that can be built with only Chicago tileset selected (Chicago_01). Old buildings. A lot of small homes. Slow growth. Rest of the stuff waits in another folder, outside the main Plugins folder. I will add them in to game, when I feel that it is time to allow my region to develop more (Chicago_02;03, NewYork_01;02;03 etc.) The biggest city gets zoned first, but without any big city aspects. It looks like your average rural community, with a lot of parks and plazas. This will be the place where I build the most important building in any region that I have: The Main Railway Station. It might not look like a main station at first, but it will act like one. My traffic system borrows a lot from Helsinki and South Finland. It works, it is fun to build and looks fine in allmost any setting. My regional development works around those 2 or 3 most important railwaylines. Rest of the region gets build between them, including highways. I don't know what else to say in this small box. Maybe I will show some pictures later, once my new region gets some more meat around it's bones.

There is no need to download a separate version of SAM, because it has been integrated to NAM. Mods are fully comatible. Download the newest 31.2 version of NAM and you get them both. SAM street textures will keep going on, untill something stops them. That "something" is usually a road. You should not loose any streets over it.

This general CDK Tutorial might help you out: The Official CDK Tutorial, Part I - by Pegasus Link to part II can be found from the same page. Do some searches trough Simpeg forum and CJs. You will find plenty of examples how to use these lots. If it gets too rough then ask again either in here or over at Simpeg 4. Happy hunting.

Peg linked all dependencies for each file at the end of every post. There is no need to google them. It seems that you are missing at least PEG-CDK3 Super Pack. Road should horizontally above the lot. Now you are trying to place where the rail would go. Those two openins at the fence are the places where lot connects to road. The central opening - where you are trying to get your road - is where the rail would be connected. That connection is functional and allows freight to move in to this port. Lower connections allow CDK lots with rails to connect with each other, when plopped side by side.

I too have few "rules" for my regions. They are actually more of ideas how to plan and built regions to feel more alive. 1. Regions history dates further than the beginning of the game. I try to keep this in mind when planning names, old traderoads, historical sites and shapes of different settlements. 2. Style of the time matters. I might plan oldest parts of the town as Empire style with big squares, parks and plazas. They look cool even - or especially - in grid cities. 3. Church was (at least very near) the center of any settlement. If town was created by merging different villages together then church and squares should express that. 4. The location of towns economical core might have changed several times. It propably still keeps changing. Same applies to main industrial traderoute. 5. Economical and social classes. Working class propably lived at the different side of the town than rich folk. This might not be the case anymore, but general shape and density of the city should reflect that situation. Same applies to rural areas, where landowners built their mansions away from worries of common folk. Few currently urban districts are named after these mansions and some of those buildings might still stand. 6. No highway just "appears" in the middle of nothing. There are older and more curvy roads in the area, as well as older settlement. 7. World does not end to region border. Highways and railroads should reflect this idea. 8. In time, any large airport will develop a considerable amount of commercial and related industrial around it. It might even act as a secondary economical core for the region. 9. Regional railwaystations also create and uphold higher level commercial and residential around them. At least any other suburban railwaystation should have some amount of medium size C and R around them. Oh, and there should be any kind of visually notable parkingstructure as well. 10. Regional trains and long-distance trains have different demands. Regional train just "saws" around the same track, from begenning to end and back again. It allways uses double tracks. Long-distance trains use single tracks, but they also have to be able to give way to other trains. 11. Everything gets broken. Everything needs to get fixed. Region needs more storagespace, railyards and scrapyards than we are giving. And as a final rule: 12. Wastemanagement is a form of art. There is no need just to stick the smallest cheatlot you can make or find at the corner of your city, just to avoid the challenge. Working with garbage is visible, messy and smelly. Let it be visible. Let it feel messy and smelly.