KeepItStandard

I voted for a couple of things, especially more great works and more city entrances, but I also voted for "other" and have something for that. I posted the idea earlier in the mod suggestion forum but I'd like to see if I can get enough positive feedback for it that I can get a petition going. Tell me what you guys think. Personally, I'd like to see an expanded global market and more realism in regards to use of space outside of cities. Here's my ideas for that: -The addition of farms. Now, the farms would start out in a city's territory, but would have to be removed to make room for the city itself. They would serve the purpose of providing food for the city that they surround. Each city would have a territory surrounding its actual boundaries that would have farms within it (and these territories would border one another); there would be a small number of roads and maybe one or two rail lines that would connect the farms to the city (and I think it would be fair to let the player decide where those connections happen). The farms would also have an economic purpose: The farms would produce more food in return for more industrial machinery sold to them. Meaning if you produced enough industrial machinery you could have a surplus of food to sell. This means that food is on the global market. -As for industrial machinery, that could be a city specialization like mining or electronics as well. You could have a factory for heavy machinery that could produces industrial equipment. This means that heavy machinery is on the global market as well. Additionally, the factory's existence would cheapen the construction and monthly cost of infrastructure and buildings, and encourage industrial development. Industrial machinery would be made from metals/alloys and electronics, or something along those lines -Now I recognize that it wouldn't make sense for skyscrapers to be bordering farms, so I think that once a city passes a certain population threshold, then some of the farms closest to the cities start turning into larger houses. In other words, this means that suburbs develop. The suburbs would likely radiate out to half the extent of farms. Suburbs would consist exclusively of low-density housing. Wealth of the residents there would correlate to the city's wealth but wouldn't go below middle class. Often times the city's wealthier citizens might transfer to the suburbs, similar to real-life suburbanization; the suburbs would, by default, have a decently high desirability factor to draw citizens out. The suburbs would basically be an extension of the city's residential zoning; it would certainly benefit the city by providing extra room for residents, but would also lead to greater congestion and traffic problems, as well as a "brain drain" of sorts-the further out residents of the burbs may want to work in a nearby city, and would bring their talents there instead. If you wanted to combat suburban development you would have to improve desirability substantially within your city and improve density everywhere. But eventually suburbanization to some degree would be unavoidable. I have a couple other ideas on density and open space within the cities themselves, but I'd like to see these implemented first if possible. I feel like this wouldn't take too much extra programming and leave the overall character of this Simcity unaltered while at the same time enhancing overall gameplay.

So it turns out that this is exactly what I did. Issue resolved, now the commuters are actually using my highways (although there's still an excessive amount of people going in and out of my smallest city-the # of cars and buses is higher than the population of the city itself!)

I also would like to see a mod that eliminates open space between buildings and makes them grow outwards in proportion to the amount of space available. In this article, it says that Simcity tends to favor a suburban-like layout; I think that by implementing a mod that encourages buildings to squeeze together as opposed to sprawling outwards, we will be able to pack more population in a grid and thus more population into our cities overall. Through a mod like this we'd be able to see shotgun houses crammed together at lower densities, with row houses showing up at medium densities and high-rises finally appearing later on. This would permit for a more realistic development of cities.

I would like to see an expanded global market and more realism in regards to use of space outside of cities. Here's how I'd like to see it done: -The addition of farms. Now, the farms would start out in a city's territory, but would have to be removed to make room for the city itself. They would serve the purpose of providing food for the city that they surround. Each city would have a territory surrounding its actual boundaries that would have farms within it (and these territories would border one another); there would be a small number of roads and maybe one or two rail lines that would connect the farms to the city (and I think it would be fair to let the player decide where those connections happen). The farms would also have an economic purpose: The farms would produce more food in return for more industrial machinery sold to them. Meaning if you produced enough industrial machinery you could have a surplus of food to sell. This means that food is on the global market. -As for industrial machinery, that could be a city specialization like mining or electronics as well. You could have a factory for heavy machinery that could produces industrial equipment. This means that heavy machinery is on the global market as well. Additionally, the factory's existence would cheapen the construction and monthly cost of infrastructure and buildings, and encourage industrial development. Industrial machinery would be made from metals/alloys and electronics, or something along those lines -Now I recognize that it wouldn't make sense for skyscrapers to be bordering farms, so I think that once a city passes a certain population threshold, then some of the farms closest to the cities start turning into larger houses. In other words, this means that suburbs develop. The suburbs would likely radiate out to half the extent of farms. Suburbs would consist exclusively of low-density housing. Wealth of the residents there would correlate to the city's wealth but wouldn't go below middle class. Often times the city's wealthier citizens might transfer to the suburbs, similar to real-life suburbanization; the suburbs would, by default, have a decently high desirability factor to draw citizens out. The suburbs would basically be an extension of the city's residential zoning; it would certainly benefit the city by providing extra room for residents, but would also lead to greater congestion and traffic problems, as well as a "brain drain" of sorts-the further out residents of the burbs may want to work in a nearby city, and would bring their talents there instead. If you wanted to combat suburban development you would have to improve desirability substantially within your city and improve density everywhere. But eventually suburbanization to some degree would be unavoidable. I have a couple other ideas coming up in the next post, but these are the main ones I'd like to see implemented. If enough people are interested I'd like to get a petition going to EA for this to be an official update, although I doubt it'll get to that level of popularity. Let me know if you guys have any thoughts

Hey everyone, so I'm having an issue. I'm playing SC4 stock (absolutely zero mods, hence the username), and I have 3 cities bordering each other in the Timbuktu region. It's one of those set ups where it's 3 medium-size city areas, one which is placed above the others and stretches about halfway across each (from above it almost looks like a pyramid). So my problem is that I have a highway system I'm setting up as a connector between the 3 cities. However, I'm trying to do it to maximize efficiency in regards to traffic flow and fighting congestion. My problem is that the sims that travel my roads seem to go nowhere! Whenever I use the route query on the road I'm trying to adjust for traffic, it says the cars and buses are all going one way; but when I switch to another city and check the same route, all the cars are going the other way. The traffic originates from my main city (the "top" of the pyramid) and goes down to the second primary city, on the bottom left of the pyramid, and they go from there through the bottom left city towards the bottom right. When I check the traffic flow in the bottom right city, it says that the traffic is headed south towards the city on the bottom left. I'm really confused, as this obsviously is contradictory. So what's going on? Why are my commuters so inconsistent?