db108108

I just finished with my biggest city ever - 1.3 million (and the city includes a river). I never got above 500k before (mostly due to a slow processor). And I didn't use cheats (money, specifically) Here are things from this city that I did differently: 1. Garbage: Outsource it to neighbouring cities. 2. Industry: Start out as normal, and eventually move towards high tech. How I do it: put the tax on D/M up high, then put in parks. Clean up the water with a few purification plants. I like to zone industry on the corners of the city. HT moves in quickly. As an added bonus, this helps to unlock the Hydrogen power plant and creates less pollution. 3. Downtown: For a very large city, set aside an area in the centre of the map and hem it in with highways. Leave it until you have it surrounded on three sides, then start building high density in downtown. 4. Mass Transit. The biggest mistake I made before was having mass transit everywhere with no particular plan. What I did this time was have different train and tram lines every 16-25 blocks, all leading into the edges of downtown. Downtown had an avenue tram, and subways under every street. This city doesn't even have buses, but the commute time is only 17 minutes. And if you're going to use mass transit, download the Road-top mass transit modd. It's way more realistic and saves valuable real-estate. 5. Types of wealth. If you want to build a really populous city, don't be scared of low-wealth residential. In my city, Low wealth = 400 k, med = 600 k and high = 350k. It's a nice distribution. 6. Parks. There are some nice downloads that have trees already built on open grass areas. What I usually did for parks was plunk an OGA and then tree it. Place these everywhere (coastlines, especially, and wherever you can't place zones). If you have a block of zones that aren't developing, placing a row of these OGA will create an instant boom, and ups the property value to boot. 7. Streets: Use them very sparingly. In a very large city, they get congested way too easily. 8. Opera House. I can't stress this enough. Either install the patch in the modds section, or delete it. It was seriously dragging down my education, so much so that the month after I deleted it, the population zoomed from 1,050,000 to 1,250,000. I didn't realize that it has such a negative effect due to the capacity being way too low. 9. Neighbouring cities. If you want a large city to boom, you have to first develop bordering cities. The population in the main city will only grow so far if it's alone on the map. Once you develop neighbouring cities, higher densities will occur in the main city.