Apankou

There are several possibilities: You can, of course, bulldoze every building you don't want to have in your city and do it again and again, until you have the one you want to grow exactly at that place, and then make it historic in the building's info. This works only, however, with lots that are growable. You can encourage certain buildings, e.g. §§§-Residential, by building parks and education etc. In addition to this, if you want to have a specific look, it would be good to deactivate any other building style in the game's menu - a new york style city looks strange when european-themed residential houses come in. On the other hand, of course, yes, plopping is the way to go - most buildings you can dl here or anywhere, which do add a lot more variety and realism to the game, come as ploppable version, appearing in your parks or landmarks menu, functional or eye-candy. This give you any possibility to make your city look the way you want it. Both ways, of course, are time-consuming, but many players take the time because they use SC4 rather as a showcase. Many Cities in the CJs, I assume, do not work correctly in terms of budget and the like. Going for optical realism requires some tuning. Oh, and there are some mods which give you some control over the game mechanics: there are several which prevent Maxis buildings from growing, for example, which on the other hand requires a lot of custom content in your plugin folder from the very start.

Either Stockholm Central Station: A nice yet confusing multi-floor station combining regional and international train, underground and large bus depot. When I was there, I could at least figure out 3 buildings from different times, connected to each other to form a labyrinth. And they close it every day at 0:30 am. Keeps it neat and clean, but where do you go when your bus to the airport is leaving there at 3 am? Or: Sao Bento Station, Porto, Portugal An old building with a building concept that I always try to copy in my cities: It's a terminus with only half a dozen of tracks, today serving mostly regional commuter trains. The station is located in front of a steep hill, and the trains enter it from the rear through long tunnels unter the city, and the platforms begin roughly 50 meters after they've left the tunnel. It looks like an amphitheater for trains, the station area and tracks surrounded by rocks and tall old houses. It saves a lot of space, after all I think that's why they build it that way. Oh, and there are beautiful paintings in the hall.

If you're talking about central European medieval towns, my suggestions were: 1) Look for a ideal place to start a settlement. That might be a river bend, a nice hill with some steep features to it, a peninsula, a nice little bay with a natural harbour and so on. Water, defense and natural resources were crucial to medieval settlements. You can also imagine a trade or pilgrim route crossing your region, maybe along a river or something like that 2) Start with one or two roads, a crossing is usually a very common starting point for a settlement. Concerning the town's layout, there are, as far as I know, 2 possibilities: a) an irregular circular pattern. Most medieval towns were erected with irregular streets, radiating from one or more focal points, which would be a church, the town hall, a castle, a harbour, a market or something like that. Those cities loke like ugly, irregular circles from above, with some restrictions: a river or a hill might prevent the town from growing in one direction, or a certain, often used road is a preferred location for new dwelling and so on. The basic layout is that of some little "hot spots", most often small plazas as said above and main traffic routes radiating from them in any possible direction, with chaos in between. Depends on how your region is constructed. Those towns are of course very hard to build in SC4. Examples from Germany would be Rothenburg ob der Tauber or Weil der Stadt, or the center of Cologne around the gothic Cathedral. b) some cities, e.g. those founded by the House of Hohenstaufen in the Holy Roman Empire, were planned. The usual pattern is that of a rope ladder, with one main road and lots of little street branching off in the right angle. Might sound strange, but take a look at the old town of Heidelberg, Germany, which is one of the most famous examples of this style of building. 3) Grow it slowly! Most medieval towns would stay within their once erected city walls for centuries, with mostly farmland around and some scattered farms, taverns or dwellings around. For most part of Europe, the urban development can be seen as: 11th-13th c.: massive growth, foundation of most of the modern cities, deforestation, agriculture 14th century: disease, famines, decrease of population, no growth at all 15th-16th century: growth, but very little and slow, usually combined with a new fortification of the whole town 17th century: wars and diseases, the poulation decreases by 1/3 in some regions 18th century: little growth, construction of new and bigger castles, manors and the like. Many parts of the old medieval infrastructure are renewed With the beginning of the industrial revolution by the end of the century, population and towns would start growing everywhere, which would even accelerate after the second world war. In the last decades, there has been a lot of urban sprawl, suburbs, extraurban settlements and so on 4) to sum up: although most medieval cities have suffered a lot from war, disease, fire and the like, some of them are still intact today and have town centers looking like 1320 AD. Usually, however, the majority of the buildings in a european city center is baroque, classicist and from the 18th - early 20th century. Especially after WW II, a lot of ugly, brutalist buildings have been crammed into nice historic neighborhoods, filling up holes left by the bombings. Next to the old, medieval town, which would remain in its boundaries till the 17th century in the majority of cases, there would be some kind of a grid pattern with 19th-century-architecture. Paris is almost entirely made up of this. To return to the example of Heidelberg, the historic city center is located in the eastern part of the modern city, around University Square, where the river valley is narrowing, covering an important strategic point. To the west and south, there is the so-called "Weststadt" and "Südstadt" next to the Old Town: 19th-century-neighborhoods, erected to cope with the increasing population during the industrial and agricultural revolution of the 19th century, which are then followed by row-homes, post-war architecture and so on. Development only took place in this direction because it was the obvious way to go - the Neckar Valley is way to narrow to allow any building except a state road and a railroad track. The CBD is usually located next to the Old Town, because those historic quarters are a nightmare in terms of traffic and infrastrucutre. That's my two cents, hope I could help

Good tutorial! I will test it as soon as I'm back at my place and run SC4 (and started at least the basic layout of a new test region...) How is it continued?

Beautiful. I think I might check in for another night...

Looks great! I would never get a seaport that big running without buildings being abandoned... my rural regions just would not support it. I'll look my regions up later on to see if there's any port in there...

Seems we're from the same county. ;-) Looking forward!

Personally, I prefer SC4 a lot to Cities XL, however, some of the CXL pics round here look very impressive. But I like the variability and complexity of SC4, and I got no problem with the grid, it's a challenge to play with it as free as possible. I would think of an updated SC4 with some new features, like the NAM, SAM, RHW etc. included, an Asian, medieval, arabian etc building style, a possibility to choose between different terrain and flora mods, and of course dozens of dozens of new utilities, transportation networks/stations and buildings of R, C and I, which are all out there, created by creative, enthusiastic BATters.

Setsealevel because it is necessary for some purposes and weaknesspays (copy and paste) for the time my city is losing money. Actually, I try to build realistic and/or beautiful cities, but I stick to the principle of having cities with a balanced budget without money tree etc.... however I admit I use some of the utilities that have a better efficiency than the default ones.

Very ambitious idea and detailed development, I love reading the story. Where will it end?

I like the idea very much, because I think lots of beginners will get tips and help here. I'd like to see a region view of the whole island. And maybe you should try to build a more realistic structure with lots of different quarters of the city and large suburban areas (if it fits the stylistic and architectural tradition you have intendet for your project). This way, a city of 100,000 inhabitants will consume a lot more space than yours, maybe several medium city tiles, but for me it is always worth it concerning realism and the look of the region. And it helps structuring and separating, but also connecting the outer areas and the CBD, industry etc. with transportation networks like highways and rail. This way you can also force your sims to use them even in relatively small cities, where they would be rather ignored otherwise. Keep it up! I like it.

This detail is amazing. Keep it up, lots of inspiration for my own humble efforts...

I'm not an expert in the game mechanics, but I am building up an inter-city-train network as well. Place stations next to residential and next to industry/commercial areas in a way that it is the next and easiest way for your sims to get to work and back. They will only travel to neighbouring cities if they have to, so if there are enough jobs for them in their hometown they won't commute longer than necessary, and only freight would be exported to your neighbours. However, that's my experience. I often see that rail lines are not used directly as they are established, they need some development. EDIT: that's only for heavy rail/ground railway, of course. I never use EL in my cities, partially because I usually don't let them grow too big, so it would look kind of exaggerated.

Excellent choice of buildings, flora etc... I really like the atmosphere built up in your journal, as I am a huge fan of rural regions (with some bigger centers, though). This must have needed a lot of time to put into! One question: Did you plop all the trees or just a part of it? I recently had trouble with plopped trees because they started a huge wildfire that destroyed half of my forest before I could get there...

Love the fantasy put in all those great ports... I hope I can post some pictures of my own first try once I'm returned from work abroad and figured out how to handle all the great tools and BATs I found here. I'm definitely inspired now. Oh wow, first post out of the CJ section, hello to everybody, you intrigued me to dig deeper into all the possbilities of SC4 by your fantastic work everyone...