TotalCasual

That railyard in your second pic is pretty sweet whiteboybob. Here's a port from a region I abandoned, it's one of the few parts of the main city Frederica I finished to a point where it's worth showing. A sexy warehouse closeup.

Here's a chunk of the better-done suburbs from a region I abandoned a couple years ago. This one was part of an outlying city called "Iona Junction". Another image from the same quad, closer to the downtown:

Mayor-mode trees absorb pollution, so plant them densely in and around dirty industry for cheap pollution cleanup. On the other hand, parks will boost desirability so you can get R$$ and R$$$ and non-CS$ commercial closer to industrial areas, saving space. Like the others said, educating your residents will increase demand for IM, IHT, and office jobs, so new ID will stop getting built. One important tip about getting IHT - even after you lose the demand for dirty industry, high tech doesn't like to grow in areas that are already polluted. Therefore you'll need to demolish those nasty smokestacks, steel sheds, and tanks. Parks, plazas, etc will help boost IHT desirability also. (note I don't mean demolish only those ID structures, blow up all your ID in an area where you want IHT to grow)

Hello everyone, thought I should post a proper intro. I'm a long-time fan of the SimCity series, since the version on the SNES back in the early 90s (just like Jukebox!). I've been playing SC4 on-and-off since it was released, and I've gotten back into it hardcore after Simcity 2013 was so... underwhelming. In another life I was McClamm on this forum, but I stopped playing SC4 for a long time after I didn't have enough time to learn how to BAT properly and keep up with the modding community. I'm proud to see got over 10000 downloads ... I put a lot of effort into that re-lot. I'm hoping I can be helpful to the community again. I'll eventually end up posting some custom lots I make up for my current region. As far as outside of the SC4 arena goes, I'm a software developer living in Northern Virginia; my other hobbies are reading science fiction, anime (and manga to a limited extent), distance running, and bicycling. Also, 私は日本語を話すが下手です。 じゃあな！

Another option you have is to add filler lots, with bare concrete, parking lots, alleys, unkempt parks, and so on. Be warned, these kinds of lots look best on flat terrain, but your city looks pretty hilly. You could try adopting a terracing scheme where you flatten a couple blocks' area into a terrace then have sloped roads up to another flattened terrace level. I've been looking for this kind of filler recently for my own gritty industrial areas and poor rural towns in the region I'm working on. Here's some examples: Pegasus probably has more of this kind of stuff at his site. Also it'll be worth your time to look at Paeng's work, he's created massive amounts of scenery filler.

So I got to play the 2nd beta last night. On a different system performance note, with my system I was able to run all the highest settings without problems at 30FPS. This surprised me since my system's over 2 years old, and the game's graphics were pretty! Wind7 Professional SP1, 64bit Core i5 750 @ 2.67 GHz 12GB DDR3 RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, 1GB onboard RAM installed on a Western Digital SATA 7200rpm HD

I think you may be right there, although one of their lead designers has posted videos on youtube (I can get you links if you want) showing his cities which are on absolutely huge maps... That would be excellent - perhaps for the beta they're holding down the city size to cut down on PC performance problems.

Weren't Mediums in SC4 2 miles on a side? Or was it really KMs? All I can say is that the city size I'm seeing in the Simcity 2013 videos look smaller than the old mediums. It reminds me of the Simcity 2000 or Simcity Classic city size, pretty disappointing!

It's very tempting to buy a copy. I'm really disappointed with the small city size -- 2km square, that's like an SC4 small quad, right? The region display also looks strange with the cities spread apart, unlike the realistic regions I created in SC4, and the terrain you play on is flat, mostly land, quite boring. On the other hand, the complicated simulation in Simcity 2013 looks interesting and the graphics are beautiful! I also appreciate that EA's trying to include legitimate multiplayer features in this game, better than the silly shared region(s) on the SC4 site back in the day. Considering my disappointment with the feature set, EA does deserve some pocketbook punishment. I think what I'll do is wait for something like the Battlefield 3 Premium package where after a few months you get all the addons so far for a big discount. On the other hand they might go with the Sims 3 model where they do discount promotions on the base game and individual addons... that would be good too! Always-on connection is a non-issue for me and I don't understand why people complain. Assuming EA has sane use cases for situations where you don't have a connection, why is it a problem if the company protects its investment in developing the game? Now, if they have something like the Ubisoft DRM where the game exits if your wireless network loses connection for a moment, that's something outrageous; however, do we know that's what the DRM will be like?