raindog

I love those Amsterdam buildings (by Vanderaap) but I always got them mixed up with the normal Maxis buildings and have them removed from my plugin folder. I loved your Dutch village, more Frysian I guess as it seems to be build on a 'terp'. What is the terrain mod you are using there, MrMAvE94 ?

I'm glad to see you all again. I could not access the site for more than a week now. Mr.B banned for two weeks? I find that really hard to believe. Well, luckily the site was offline at the same time. Mmmmh, I hope there's not a connection there. Mr. B, how could you! (just kidding of course). Lynn, je n'ai pas recevoir le prochaine challenge. Aussi je n'ai pas vu Fred ici en Hollande Ou est il exactement? BarbyW: your story about the bottled water sounds a bit like Coca Cola's great invention. Simply bottle 'improved' tap water and let people pay a hundred fold. I saw a BBC documentary about it a couple of years ago. Introduction of their water Dasani failed miserably in the UK because of this. Please note: Bottled water has emerged as the worst environmental menace since leaded gasoline. So don't fall for it. Newsimaddict: you mentioned those irrigation channels I use between my farms. I got these personally from someone a couple of years ago. I think it was from a fellow Dutchman. They have never been uploaded as far as I know. I can add them here if you want, but please mind they have not been perfected ( a bit scattered in the park menu and the corresponding icon does not tell you much either).

Thanks bumdark, I was looking for an explanation. Damn hackers. Hope everything can be restored to normal. I missed you all this week.

Ixnayonthetimmay: good to hear from you. Luckily time is not one of the conditions set by our 'benevolent leader' Mr. B. About those green diamond filler pieces I can tell you the answer to that: they belong to the Japanese wall set by Mas71. You'll find it here: https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=17875&v=1 I have not used this set myself. PS: the latest great thing is the CAM, extending the levels 1 to 8 to 15. I have not installed it myself, anyone experience with this? Some of the buildings in those megapacks I found were made 'campatible' NAM, CAM, FAR. And you can get all those beauties from the STEX, LEX or PLEX. The game is getting more and more complicated (or should I say advanced). Pps: the grey box is of course Mr. B's own village battery. I found it when browsing through my old simtropolis downloads and thought it funny to mention here. I believe it was a rather popular piece when it came out and is still very useful today. I do consider it a small cheat btw as it gives 4 times the power for less costs than a wind energy collector.

Hi everybody, after one month of posting my first pic of the region I am back with update four/challenge two. Junxiang, those graphs you mention were made with excel. First time I used the option to export the data from Region census to a csv file. I think they will come back in a later update. You got a great watertower in that pic of yours, the very Dutch creation by Haarlemmergold. I did not recognize those green walls but just happen to see them in a wall pack this afternoon. May I suggest you replace those standard Maxis trains for something better. !!! UPDATE FOUR !!! I wanted to show you a pic of the waterfront I created last week. But now I read about the coming update I'll keep it to myself for a while. In the meantime I like to congratulate our 100.001 inhabitant of our favorite region. I was saving back to region view when I noticed this, an important milestone of GRR and immediately made a screenshot. Our lucky winner was born in Macallan, the biggest city in the region with about 43.000 inhabitants (tiles 11,12, 13 & 14). Ardbeg has grown less fast and now has about 35.000 people (tiles 7,8, 17 & 18). Naturally such an event can't go unnoticed and as the brand new country fair was just opened he received a life time membership. Now I have absolutely no clue what people are doing at such a fair, but he sure seemed happy with it. Now all those people do want their lights on at night, keep their freezers running etc etc. My standard powerplant is the Hardun Coal Plant as created by the great Simgoober (more of him later in this update). I always use thise in my regions as a standard. I did notice that I am missing a couple of vehicle props. Maybe I'll look for those later. There are two of these in the region: one in tile 11 (as seen in pic) and the second one in the industrial area of Ardbeg in tile 7). So how do those people in the agricultural areas get their power, one might ask. Well, that's an interesting question because we are not really sure. Initially people used the clean power of wind energy. And that is still being used in some regions today. In others we find some kind of 'grey box' as shown in pic below. When asked for any explanation the mayor replied that he did not know but that it sure packed a lot of punch. It could just as well be alien as far as he could tell. After a reïnstall of my computer a long time ago I never put all the plugins back my simcity folder as I hardly played the game for the past 18 months. Now I find myself downloading a lot of new material and trying to find some of the goodies from the past. Reading about the Cleanitol I quickly found my way to SC4 Devotion and found a number of megapacks there. Some of those were from Simgoober (there he is again). And these packs result in buildings popping up I never seen before. These small RLS homes for instance. I love the details on the lot with the seasonally blooming flowerbeds. The only thing I find a bit strange is the use of a golf green in the garden. As you know I have a lot of farms in my regions. One of the thing that I was missing here were a lot of fields. I remember having more variety two years ago. And ten days ago I again found some

I would like to mention that there are 10 challenges in all for this thread, I think it was never mentioned before. Meaning there will be 12 updates for every player.quote> 12 challenges! Oh boy, I'm in for it now. Haven't played for such a long time I am learning new things and seeing new buildings pop up every time. It's fun. I read something about FAR yesterday evening. 'Fairly accurate roads' I like to call it but it stands for 'Fractional angled roads' apparently. :-)

merci beaucoup Lynn C'est vrai. Les forets sont un peu maigres. Et la prochaine challenge est plus difficile. Never paid enough attention in school for French or German. I appreciate the time that you and mr.B are investing in us participants. It's not just us. You do a fantastic job as well. Now I got kicked out of the game twice tonight, kinda spoils the fun of it. Added a number of plugins yesterday and today, so could be a conflict somewhere. I'll try again tomorrow. If I have read the feedback correctly I need to spend more time on details and add some more trees.

Your subtitle about ill-tempered herrings attracted my attention. But wauw, what a great city you made here. Fantastic eye for the detail. I love those pics from the Burj al Arab. You make great use of your plugins. I said it already somewhere else. It's not the number of plugins that count. It's what you do with them.

Great beginning you got there Tommy Toon. I like the non-griddyness of your towns. Those farms look good too. I guess I better do some shopping on the STEX as well. Sparrowsraven: I hope your problems with the region are now solved and we will be seeing your comeback here in GRV. Ixnayonthetimmay: I love the logo you made for our region. And your work on the dam is fantastic. "As if the dams plopped from the sky" LOL. Death54: Great use of the new lots from Pegasus. I think that container dock looks very realistic. BarbyW: thanks for that link to the No Maxis lots-mod you gave several pages earlier in this thread. Downloaded it and wanted to use the residential version only. Now I find I accidentally added the commercial dats in my pluginfolder instead of the residentials. Duuuh. Well, at least that explains why it wasn't working as planned. !!! UPDATE 3 !!! In the meantime there have been some developments in Grand River Valley. More specifically the birth of a new town Macallan, in tiles 11, 12, 13 and 14. About 35.000 people live here effectively doubling the population in the region since my previous update. Here you have the overview of the population: mainly low wealth. I guess that's no big surprise. One of the things we'll find in tile 14 is an industrial area. People got to work somewhere. Unfortunately this comes with a price: pollution! The two pics below give you the air as well as the water pollution. Let's go to a more tranquil area. If you take the train from Macallan to Ardbeg on the coast you will pass the little town of Bowmore (on the right edge of the picture). To get there the train has to cross several rivers. Here's one of them. I made a mosaic of Macallan and some of the bridges you have to cross. Pic is a bit too big too large to present here (2700x1100). Nothing fancy really. In all instances the shortest distance from one bank to the other is used. Not unlike some of the wide bridges made by BarbyW or MrB himself. That 'Rock Island bridge' on page 13 is a real beauty. Perhaps that grain shipping facility may look familiar to some people. Last but not least I'd like to show you some pics of the housing in Macallan. I love the Dutch houses made by Vanderaap and Haarlemmergold. However they do look somewhat out of place next to the standard Maxis buildings (hence the intended use of the no maxis-mod). In this last picture I like to point your attention to these small 1x1 houses. I think they're great and it is my preferred zoning style, especially in the low dense areas. Hope you like it. And I love to receive some (constructive) feedback. the Raindog Ps: talking about feedback, I wonder how to post the click

Thanks Dbranch for your encouraging words. About the plugins, sometimes I look at a CJ and think: "I got the same plugins as he/she, but I cannot make it look that beautiful." It's not the plugins that count but what you do with it. :-) The quote is from Winston Churchill, I believe. But do you know this one? "Methinks, by God, the devil must ***** Dutchmen." (yes, I am Dutch, lol) edit: aha, apparently that word is automatically censored. Oke, it's a four letter word starting with the letter 's' and it ends with 'hit'. second edit: I am playing simcity but getting a bit distracted by the world championships snooker (Ronnie O'Sullivan at its best against Stephen Hendry).

Yeah, i got points! I have been reading most of this thread now and I have seen so many great pictures that I know I won't be the one with the most points. Above update is only one perfect example for that but there are many others to be found on these pages. Just like some of the stories are really fun to read. My playing stile is that I try to develop the entire region and start perfecting and growing in a later phase. The 'oldest' tile in my GRV region is still less than 20 years old. And it has the disadvantage that I lose interest at some point and stop playing. That's why I never finished a region before nor developed a really big city. Now I haven't played these last couple of days, I better get to it.

hee guys, I got a small question about the working population. The total number of people working in commercial and industrial is about two thirds of the total population. Would you consider that a normal average? Also I have a problem in one of my tiles (in the city of Ardbeg). The budget for education is automatically reduced. Which I notice when get the message that the teachers are on strike. I raise the budget only to find it going down again in a couple of months. Anyone had this problem before?

That's a shame to hear that Sparrowsraven. I'd like to see how you are progressing. Death54, I had a big laugh at your signature. Very funny indeed. in the meantime let me show you some more pics of my region now that I am allowed to break the time limit. To tell you the truth I haven't played the game for some years now. Only after a recent visit to Prague a couple of weeks ago I decided that it would be a good idea to try to make me a city again. !!! UPDATE 2 !!! An important fact happened in Grand River Valley: the arrival of the train! Now not every major is happy with the route that the track has taken. I tried to argue with those railroad people but it was in vain. "If we can go in a straight line without crossing too many of those darn rivers we'll just do that", was the reply I received. It does have a major impact on the development of the second city however. It will be somewhere else than I initially suspected. See below the traffic view of the region with the two planned cities. As you can see the second city Macallan is not there yet. Also noticeable is the absence of any long bridges on the wide parts of the river. If you want to get across you just have to take the ferry. Most part of the region is taken by farms as you can see in the second picture. It's a beautiful sight with all the flowerbeds in bloom but you can also see a ferme anis in the upper right corner (it took me some time to find the farm in my downloads and have that nasty brown box removed). Here a picture of a train in the region. It's a funny thing. As I said I haven't played the game for a while and it is even longer that I used trains in my region. So I have no clue where this particular type comes from. It's no maxis original. Now do you remember that villa I showed you in the first update. It was the first in the whole region and belonged to the Vanderzande family. As it turns out he is the director of the bureau for farm management. People simply refer to it as "the bureau". It is rumoured that mr. Vanderzande is planning to open more offices in the region. By the way the Goober farm supplies on the other side of the street belongs to his son. Last but not least some stats about the region in question. There are now almost 30.000 people in the region. 4100 of them work in the commercial sector while 16500 work in the agricultural and industrial sector. Graphs below show you in which region tile they are actually active. As you can see most people live in tile 17 which is the city Ardbeg and they work in the industrial sector nextdoor (tile 7). And with this update I will use my time to prepare for the challenges ahead. I already read some things about what to expect. greetings from the Raindog