boundegar

You must be doing it right, because that sounds a lot like the way I build.

If you want to build Chicago, yea. I once lived in Hoboken, NJ, the "Mile Square City," which covers about 1.2 square miles, or about 3 small tiles. That seems like it would take a week at most to build. I think I'll stick to small cities for now. The scale is practical. 1km per small tile can represent a neighborhood. At low density you can pack in maybe 5,000 people. Manhattan Island holds 28,000 people per km2, in a mix of medium and high density. One person per person seems like a good scale factor.

I read that. It was helpful! However, I think you omitted front and back yards, which don't hold 6-12 more people. I've seen your towns, I don't think you pack them in like sardines. @matias93 I'm not really looking for precision, so much as getting the feeling right. My end goal isn't to build Los Angeles. I just want Zinn's Junction to look nice. (If it's a long-debated topic, my Google ninja skills must suck. I couldn't find anything exactly relevant.)

Wow. Mine loads in seconds. My computer is a few years old, and it wasn't the Cray Blitz when it was new. I guess it helps I don't like mods. I run SPAM, NAM, and Industry Doubler. Nothing more.

So I've been putting some thought into this, and thought it might be worth sharing. How should I organize my region so it (sort of) resembles reality? I grew up near Washington, DC, which happens to be a square (with a bite taken out) almost exactly ten miles on a side. A standard SimCity region - the ones that auto-generate - are 15-16 km on a side, or ten miles. Perfect match. But as I started nooding around, I discovered the entire city is served by one power plant, and one sewage treatment plant. There is no way at all to model that in SimCity 4, so yeah, it's a game. No need to get hung up on precision. I recently started working on modeling a rural county, and ran into an obstacle there, too. The average US county is about 1000 km2, or almost 200 large tiles, and almost all of that land is either rural or completely empty. Did I really want to build tile after tile of forest, with the occasional highway? The population density of the entire US is 86 per km2, which means it's almost all empty. I experimented with scaling the area 10:1, because a county of 100 km2 seems like a nice building project; but then the population density gets multiplied x10, and the simulation ends up far from reality. So I've decided even the county is the wrong unit of measure. A standard region would represent a small city, like DC or smaller. New York City covers 784 km2 - who wants to build seven hundred small tiles? Does anybody here also have a job? The small city I live in today covers about 200 km2 and fills about 1/5 of the county. That seems like a big project, but feasible. It's not all skyscrapers - mostly suburban, with a nice busy downtown and some rural bits in the corners. It seems to me this is the kind of city SimCity 4 is designed to model, with a mix of small urban tiles and big rural outskirts. The most fun part of this project has been choosing different towns and looking them up on Google Maps. You can switch to satellite view and go flying over the landscape, learning all sorts of interesting things!