Priyon

How do you mean 'smart cities' in the context of SC4? By that, I mean very efficient cities with a good road layout without any jams, availability of services everywhere, eco-friendly planning and minimum pollution, clean and efficient power and water system, recycling and minimum garbage, jobs and workplaces in the right area without polluting much, a well-built transportation system, a well balanced, educated and healthy population, a well balanced budget with enough reserves in case they are needed, all this in a very space-efficient and completely realistic manner. Also using Euro-Contemporary architecture set since that is the closest thing in the game to modern and contemporary architecture. These are basically the smart city features that can be built in SC4. Real world smart cities have much more like high connectivity, electronic and smart government system, a dedicated goal (most smart cities are built for a purpose, such as IT sector for example) and they are sustainable and eco-friendly with buildings not being constructed by traditional materials.

My playing goal changes depending on what I had in mind before starting to play. But most of the time, I am building Japanese style cities and towns, especially based on Tokyo and anime. Which means modern semi-utopian happy urban areas with excellent health, education and police coverage without much pollution, just like real Japanese cities. Also, they are sprawling, so I have to fill entire region to be close to reality, and I have HUGE regions (there is one 6400 km square region I am building on currently) which take over a year to build up. I use a dedicated plugin folder I have built over years for that. I never use non-Maxis buildings unless I am using that Japanese plugin folder. But as I said, the goals change. Sometimes I build villages and rural areas surrounded by farms, mountains (if I wanted to play a mountain scenario), rivers and so on. Sometimes I want to build small industrial towns. Sometimes I just spend a week planning out a city and then build it to see how it does. Sometimes I want to construct a huge sprawl spanning several cities in the region, sometimes I build eco-friendly cities. And when I am not building planned cities and regions, I frequently just play for fun. Growing cities naturally and then unleashing disasters on them, sometimes playing like Simcity 3000 (building a city and then 4 cities on it's border, and playing just the first one). There are times when I try out cities that look like historical ones, like 19th century style cities or cities based on ancient Roman/Indian/Chinese urban planning. And finally, I build cities just to look at them in non-gamey aesthetic perspective, i.e. just constructing and not 'playing' the game. For example my Tokyo based city is just like that. There are regions that I built up just to see how beautiful they are from the top. Currently I am trying out the concept of Smart Cities in SC4 to see if they can work as well as they do in real life, or not. But whatever I do, I ALWAYS build realistic cities. So no stupid grids unless I need them, no funky and unrealistic looking cities, no gamey city planning and abusing the system, and so on.

There is another parade of buses incoming from the left.

In my region have a 8x8 'metropolis' based on Tokyo. It's over an year and I haven't even managed to build the port area. The 64 cities function from cheat power plants since it wasn't realistic to have huge, polluting buidlings everywhere around the metropolis, especially in the middle of what were exclusively commercial and residential zones. God, it is hard to build a city that large without losing motivation after some time.

You guys should look at the Chinese cities. Apart from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, most of them are horrendously monotonous. I think having same kind of building over and over again does represent reality, only with different political orientation.

I build Japanese style cities, and when I am not building the Tokyo region I am building fictional Japanese cities. Based on anime and manga if possible. Especially Pokemon-style cities.

Region Census does have a limit to amont of regions though. I tried converting my 20x20 large city tile flat region (80km x 80km) and it crashed every time. Meanwhile I built cities on an 8x8 large city tile square on the same region, and they can be rendered without problems.

My personal strategy is to put the taxes for wealthy sims on highest, and then build the city without the villas. Once I am satisfied with the number of low and middle-wealth population, I check 'make historical' on their houses. Then I restore the taxes on the rich to normal. This prevents housing from being turned into huge, ugly villas.

My city, Bhopal, which is right in the centre of India, has some of the worst city planning you'll ever see anywhere. There are even worse cities here, but Bhopal is pretty bad too. The map of roads themselves are not so bad. The problematic thing is the extremely unplanned buildup alongside these roads, done by severely undereducated and extremely corrupt city planners, most of them being dumb fools who probably have never seen a real city in their life. Most of them are old and are only good at making attempts at copying big cities based on 20th century socialist models. Hence, almost nothing. Firstly, the city is de-facto divided in two zones. One is old Bhopal, the city that existed from 16th century onwards, and everything else that is called new Bhopal, which has some decent road planning. The old city resembles an Arab town from 12th century in the Middle East, not surprising it since it was built under Muslim governors (and later independent feudal lords) from central Asia brought during Mughal Imperial era. It has extremely narrow dirt streets where most cars cannot reach, extremely closely built houses that resemble a rich stone slum, and has little to none space for modern facilities like schools and sports facilities. What land remained was occupied by the mosques, ending any semblence of city planning it might've ever had. It is commonly referred to as Muslim quarter by the people of the city. The rest of the city (AKA new Bhopal) is different. It has wide roads up to 6 lanes, many bus lanes, two well established railway lines. We have a business district, a market zone, an industrial township constructed back in '80s unfortunately in the middle of the city, a lot of housing areas with parks and etc. No high rises, but after all Bhopal is a quiet, suburban residential city. Now that might seem like a decent place, but then the problem starts kicking in. There are absolutely NO pavements/footpaths beside the roads. What pavements are there are from '80s as well, and they are just huge ugly concrete platforms, simply pathetic attempts to make them look like a pavement. They are almost completely unwalkable, because the city planners (with their undeveloped brains) planted trees in the middle of the pavements. There are no drains besides the roads, so if it ever rains heavily the people suffer massive floods on the roads that cannot be dealt with until it naturally dries up after a few weeks. There is no parking system anywhere. There are NO zebra crossings. Well there are some, but they wear out within a week and no one uses them. There are no traffic lights at almost all the crossings either. They just built a stupid-looking roundabout at almost every single road junction. The bus lanes are completely unplanned as well. They just arbitrarily destroyed the divider of a 4-lane road, and took the inner two lanes as bus lanes and walled them up. It failed because only one bus at a time could pass through the road, so much narrow it had become. Besides, the shopkeepers have a tendency to snatch land and build upon the roads, which leaves out any possibility of correcting the damage done to the city. Parks, they are there but only in name, most have delapidated and become hubs of criminals, smokers and drinkers by the evening. What parks remain safe have nothing a park should have - benches, swings, decent lighting and such, just wild trees. There are frequent traffic jams everywhere. There are maybe two fire stations in the city, but they don't have any fire trucks (because they don't actually know what a fire truck is). The ambulances never take anything less than an hour or two to reach a small distance, so ambulances are as good as nothing. The police are divided in zones to handle, but those zones are so badly designed that the policemen are always confused as to take any action at all when called for help, or just let the men from the neighbouring zone to handle it. The worst thing that has happened over time is forceful land snatching and building of unplanned concrete jungles over it. Some real-estate managers just snatch thousands of acres of land wherever they find it, build hundreds of monotone housing units on that land and sell it out. The city officials, the same uneducated lazy men, just stand by and watch (since they get a share of the profit as well) Overall, it is a vehemently wild city. The road map was well planned, but that's about the only good thing about urban planning this city. It is in it's current state because of uneducated, lazy and corrupt men ruling over it, and the sick mentality of the population living in the city. Large metropolitan cities in India like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and others are completely different, they are usually well planned and built, like any decent city of the western world, but Bhopal is really bad in terms of urban planning.

Looks great. As I have been to the Paradox forums and seen the feature reveals there, it seems like this game has a lot of features Simcity 2013 was missing, plus a lot of good things. Besides, it is going to have a lot of modding abilities. Hopefully this game turns out good. Still, this is going to be very different from Simcity series, and SC4 in particular.

That's excellent, Oerk. I'll take that 'Little Shibuya' as a role model in my 20X20 large city tile region completely based on Tokyo...that I am building these days. BTW, what is that river mod? I searched all around for it and couldn't find it anywhere.

It seems very nice. Although I'll have to say, there is a good chance for an aeroplane to hit the highway or that building so close to it.