grazr

Hi, this is my first post and i'm kinda unsure as to which part of the forum this thread should really go, but this seemed the most appropriate so forgive me if i'm being stupid. Anyway, i just bought SC4 the other day and i'm having trouble with a particular issue. As a city develops you need to upgrade it's road network. Such as upgrading streets to roads. How ever when it comes to upgrading roads to avenues it becomes rather problematic. The avenues are wider than roads (2 squares instead of 1) and so you're required to demolish swaths of developed real estate in order to do so. Including amongst other things your first mansions and factories. This seems kind of counter intuitive when it stumps your simoleons house-wealth plots. I kind of have an idea on how to develop my next city, planning avanues ahead of time, but this requires placing tier 3 roads in a tier 1 city after the tutorials said in order to manage your funding, build only what is necassery at the time (It makes sense, avenues are expensive to maintain). The other issue that comes with planning ahead is the roads that sims use to travel, say to and from work, are completely arbitrary; which also means it's difficult to predict which roads will actually need developing. I tried increasing the number of roads between residential areas and industry areas (home and work, where most of the traffic was to and from) but the first roads would sit and 300+ traffic with the road 2 squares beside it at 0. I had 1 road sat at 550 cars but it was impossible to upgrade because of terrain limitations. This is becoming really frustrating for me as there was no small>big city tutorial. Only "here's a small city" and "here's a broken big city". It doesn't tell you the bits in between Edit: Oh poo, i posted in the wrong tab :/ I meant to post in the forum above this, nevermind... Moved to General Discussion. -CaptCity

Thanks for the very informative posts guys, this really helps. The NAM sounds like it'll help me create more logical cities and control traffic better without the use of one way roads. As for renovation, i completely understand the need to redo areas of a city, it's a natural thing in reality and an interesting mechanic to see in the game also. I just found it slightly counter-intuitive to my enjoyment of the game when my first high wealth land has to be demolished to fit in a bigger road, i felt like i was constantly playing the game backwards and each piece of progress was swiftly met with another necessity which would have me going through a cycle of one step forwards and two steps back. Each time my city takes on a form i like i have to destroy it, it feels like instead of letting my kids teeth fall out naturally for the second set i'm punching him in the face and smashing them out. It doesn't make me feel particularly great. So as a game mechanic it seems nonsensical to me, but then i also appreciate that my tastes and what translates to seretonin for me is not the same for everyone else. I should probably just accept it as a part of the game and try to avoid it with prudent planning and mods.