Catmando

My guess is that when modding tools come out some clever player(s) will create something akin to smoncrie's hole digger lots, except hopefully those would let us change larger areas of terrain at a time. Using tunnels and viaducts and such to carve out the terrain bit by bit would be very tedious.

What I would prefer is to have you win the election each time, but with new political promises. For example, let's say your city's pollution is beginning to get out of control and citizens are getting sick. An interest group tries to spread awareness of it, and at a certain point you automatically make a promise to listen to them (because realistically speaking, they're threatening your election). After the election, you now have a promise to cut back pollution before the next election. You don't have to do it, of course, but if you don't your Sims will become unhappy with you. This could be a way for the citizens to incentivize you to make certain choices without necessarily forcing you or anything, similarly to how things like pollution already do that, because with higher pollution you need more hospitals and it lowers desirability and so on.

A mod that makes the economy of the game reliant entirely on the in-game region would be a nice community solution to this (in other words, the game could run essentially self-sufficiently), although I don't think EA would want that to be possible.

My guess is that if we're able to essentially subsidize certain markets (like the coal market), we'll have lower prices available to us, ergo maintenance costs for some kinds of trains would go down. Hard to say just how Maxis will implement that right now, though, since we're so early in development.

I'm definitely that kind of person. I have 6.34 gigs right now (down from 6.4 gigs last week; I've been cleaning out a few stray installers and stuff that the LEX left me), and it's unwieldy in ways I can't properly describe. I think it was mrbisonm that takes the record, though (am I remembering his name right? I always got him confused with you). Last I remember he maxed out at about 20 gigabytes and then went on a two-year organization binge and cut it down to like 12-15 gigs. That was years ago, though, so I may be remembering wrong. What I'm actually going to start doing now, I think, is reorganizing my whole plugins folder into a series of much smaller ones that the game can actually handle: nature, city, surburban, and a folder full of all the shared files, like my terrain mod, water mod, NAM, and so on. This is probably an even bigger undertaking than all my previous organization binges combined, however, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort: I can already cut my folder by 20% just by moving the Miscellaneous Skyscrapers and NDEX folders to some safe spot, and probably upwards of 50% if all I want to do is make a nice semi-urban town. All things considered, however, at least half of the content in my plugins folder is simply not used by me. I'm a hoarder at heart.

Hah, I've never thought of that! I'll have to try that next time I build a city. Also, on the topic of multi-national companies, do you think our cities will all have dealings with the same coal company, kind of like Simland's version of Omnicorp? I kind of hope so, if only to indulge in the pleasure of running Richie Rich and his polluting factories out of town fifteen times in a row.

Well, my guess is that tunnels and underground rail and whatnot will act like interiors, but it's hard to tell so early in development and with so little information about this stuff. Besides, I don't mind if we can't actually go underground and fly around inside the subways or something or if our view of the "underground malls" are only fake. I still think it would be better aesthetically if we had them than if we didn't, and it would be more realistic.

I think suggestions like this are the tip of the iceberg to an underlying idea: having several default levels of a city for building. There's ground level of course, but how about a default level for building underground malls? I know there's some custom content in SC4 that lets us do that, but it's more a workaround than anything. In this first underground level road underpasses and tunnels could go as well. In a level under that could run water, sewer, etc. Finally, in a level under that could run subways. Above the ground we have the default elevated rail level, but why not expand on that? Let that be a default level for elevated highways, road overpasses, and so on. Above that could run high speed rail, monorail, and ungodly high highways, the kind of thing we sometimes seen in really awful interchanges like these: With a few default levels I think we could avoid situations like "Shoot, my highway is going to be four meters too tall when it reaches this other one!" and "Gotta tweak this overpass just right, juuust right...."

Strange? Nonsense! After all, it looks to have a dome, and is that... illusionistic painting on the roof? Why, it's practically Baroque! All it needs is a grand staircase or two and it could sit aside Maderno's façade or the Trevi fountain comfortably.

Perhaps houses of worship could petition to build private cemeteries. The private cemeteries would free the city of maintenance costs, but would of course waste just as much land. It would probably be advantageous for a mayor to let houses of worship handle all the cemeteries, although they would have an artificial limit on size imposed, perhaps. Also, regarding houses of worships and their lack of specificity, I almost always ended up building Catholic churches in my cities. It just so happens that I am Catholic, but I don't build those because I'm biased or anything; it's just that the vast majority of churches I've downloaded online are Catholic, whether explicitly stated in the descriptions or not. Although I did have a region whose national religion was Catholic, though, and I took it to the point that in the center of the capital, just north of the National Palace was a gigantic cross formed by the streets clearly visible from the region view with St. Peter's Basilica (thank you, Debussyman!) and a papal university in it, or so I imagined. I wouldn't mind at all if there were a few religions represented, and Maxis could even skirt around the issues a bit more finely by having, say, a church, a synagogue, and a mosque available. But if all we get are houses of worship I won't complain, I'll just get some more specific ones from the community when they inevitably come out. EDIT: And before I forget, I remember on the Cities XL forum when someone said that they didn't care how it was done, no matter what, they wanted a Jedi Temple in the game. This resonated my inner Star Wars fan and I wholeheartedly agree and still do. Please, Maxis, let there be Jedi!

With what we've seen of modularity in constructing the game's buildings it wouldn't surprise me at all if we could hand-design zoned parks, i.e. adding fountains, trees, paths, etc. I think a more fluid form of what we see in Simcity 4's modular uber-packs would be ideal. I love designing and constructing the parks, although it's a pain in the butt waiting a full minute for the parks menu to open, as you can imagine. Just last year I made a modular university for my city. I don't remember who made the university or who made the particular park pack I was using, but they worked together almost flawlessly and I filled sixteen city blocks with various university buildings, paths, gardens, etc. Naturally, it would've been far easier if I could've just plopped down the pieces of the university, zoned the whole area a park, and added all of the little details via the options available for park amenities.

Here's something I haven't seen addressed yet: better cemeteries. Firstly, cemeteries should be merged into the healthcare menu. Secondly, they should also become zoneable. Cemeteries should need to be periodically expanded to accommodate the age and population of one's city, like the city's landfill. There will also be a cremation facility for lowering space issues, akin to the recycling center in Simcity 4 which handled waste so that landfills wouldn't fill so quickly. Cemeteries should also play a larger role in health, as having a preponderance of dead bodies in one's living space increases the likelihood of catching certain diseases. Cemetery costs would be relatively low, as Sims pay for their plots, which covers most of the costs. However, cemeteries would also take up a lot of space, potentially valuable real estate.

I almost fully agree, with the caveat that each person has not one private itch but about half a dozen. Personally, mine are the retention of a grid, of disasters, and of the classic Maxis humor, and the expansion and simplification of modding and custom content creation, of terraforming tools, and of transportation customization, in no particular order.

It seems discussion is waning. Here's something that may be of interest to you guys: Remember this picture? I was analyzing it a bit, and I don't think it would be premature to make the assumption that what we see is what we'll sim when the game comes out. A few features of the road and transit system we can get from this image: Gridded roads are possible.Curved roads are possible.There are either three types of roads here or two forms of one kind and one form of another kind: we see a typical two-lane road, as well as a four-lane road, what we would call an avenue. In addition, there's a boulevard running right through the city, the one with trees lining the center. This suggests a few possibilities: the boulevard could be a customized version of the avenue, the boulevard is a separate kind of road, or the boulevard is made up of one-way roads with some zoned parks in the center. That last possibility is a rather depressing thought to me, but is evidence by the fact that the trees abruptly stop at the top left corner of the picture, as if the mayor decided not to zone it any further (it seems to be near or at the edge of development, although more buildings can be seen just outside the range of the picture). It's also possible the boulevard is a kind of wide avenue and zoning, say, residential made it look like a boulevard. Since there's not much zoned in the top left, there are no trees. I wish there was a more definitive answer about this one—the one thing I didn't want to do is speculate.There is an elevated train running through the city.In the far right middle an avenue bridge is running over both the river and another avenue.A little bit below the avenue bridge is a road bridge whose mouth is right on the avenue. This was difficult to achieve in previous Simcities (at least for me). It seems to work flawlessly in that picture, however.

Dear God, I had a dream last night that Maxis announced a fully featured offline single player mode. I'm not sure if this is a good omen or a sign I'm completely obsessed with the new game.