MidwestSimGeek

Hey all... as the message title and topic summary suggest, I'm not yet fully "up" on how to navigate around the STEX. Is there any way to sort the available maps (or anything else, for that matter) by their region size (or any other variable, for that matter)? I'm looking for a really super-gigundo-region, so I can exercise my jones for building large swaths of systematically arranged suburbia. Failing the possibility of sorting, does anyone have any specific suggestions for very large regions I could download, that are more-or-less USA Midwestern (i.e. a fair number of small-to-moderate hills, a few lakes, and a major river running through most of it)? Thanks in advance for your help!

Hey DanNukes -- Another Twin Citian here, and I hear ya... our vehicular transportation is subpar (though I shudder to think what the place would be like if they hadn't, back in the 70s, built at least the freeways we DO have!) I have something of an unorthodox suggestion for improving it... and that's to put more focus back on the surface street system, building out and extending existing city-street arterials in order to provide alternatives to those congested freeways. WARNING: EXTREMELY LONG POST AHEAD!! I started thinking about this when visiting a friend in Kansas City. I arrived in town while he was still at work, and headed for Westport, the really "happening" neighborhood a couple miles south of downtown. As 5:00 approached, I realized a crucial part of my brain must have been "off" -- I was staying at this friend's place, and he lived in Olathe... 20 or so road miles to the southwest, and dense suburbia all the way. (The Kansas City equivalent, in both distance and placement, of a Minneapolis-to-Shakopee return commute... UGH!) In desperation, I pulled out my Rand McNally city inset... and discovered something nifty: KC's suburbs all developed along an existing grid of former farm section roads. And instead of being ripped out when the freeways went through... they were expanded into four- and six-lane beauties only a mile apart from one another! 87th, 95th, 103rd, College, 119th... Metcalf, Antioch, Switzer, Quivira, Blackbob... dozens of options in all cardinal directions, all the way out to Olathe. Aside from a couple red lights, it was a steady 45 mph the whole way... I did that 20 miles in 35 stress-free minutes. And it occurred to me then -- the hellish return commutes in MSP (particularly to the explosively growing south metro) could be blamed largely on our lack of route options. For those unfamiliar with our metro, the Minnesota River cuts (in the big picture) west to east across the very heart of suburbia... and on the thirty or so miles of metro river frontage and downtown St. Paul (the easternmost major city), there are literally SIX crossings. Two of them carry state highways; the other four, major freeways... not a single surface street or arterial to be found. They're all about evenly spaced... but even so, it leaves many commuters with five or six wasted road miles (from doubling back), and huge amounts of stress, pollution, and headache from sitting in jams. So, for those following along in Google Maps... my magic pill would involve reconstructing bridges for a number of city streets and arterials. First, I'd extend a road south-by-southwest from the current sharp curve of US 212 at Flying Cloud Airport in Eden Prairie, and hook it up with Scott County 83 / Canterbury Road in Shakopee. (This road has the advantage of an existing interchange at US 169... and the added bonus of running directly to that massive metro destination, the casino in Prior Lake... so no more massive tour buses annoying residents on 154th or beating up the unreconstructed section of 140th). Next, I'd extend Scott County Road 27 (Dakota Avenue) down the hill to MN Hwy 13, and from there across the river to Normandale Boulevard. (Normandale runs north-south on an alignment 3.5mi west of Nicollet Avenue, Mpls' downtown zero meridian. After the proposed bridge, the current road segment continues through three moderately developed miles of Bloomington as a four-lane, undivided 45 mph arterial... then turns into the MN 100 freeway at the 494 beltway, and stays freeway until it meets the other side of the 494/694 loop 20 miles later). Since 27 already runs all the way south into Scott County farmland as a 50 / 55 mph rural highway, this plan would have the added advantage of providing a nice alternate for I-35 for commuters in the booming exurb of Elko New Market (though it may be necessary to cut off a number of residential side-street intersections near 170th and/or signalize 170th, to avoid access complications). This new bridge would be almost precisely halfway between the current US 169 and I-35W freeway bridges, and would resurrect at least the spirit of an old low-capacity bridge at Vernon Avenue in Savage (one lane, shared with a railroad, and a sharp 90-degree kink on the other bluff... but it did its job back when we weren't such a boomtown). The next proposal isn't quite as essential as the others (the Normandale bridge makes it slightly redundant), but in a perfect world where money was no object, my next bridge would be at France Avenue, about a mile east of Normandale. North of the river, France is a fairly major arterial through south Bloomington, then becomes an absolutely massive boulevard of upscale shops, offices, and condos through Edina (between the 494 and 62 freeways), and continues as an unusually wide residential 2-laner along the western boundary of Minneapolis until Excelsior Blvd (gateway to the hip, well-heeled Uptown neighborhood 2mi south of downtown). France doesn't exist at all south of the river, and existing development would make it difficult to extend the southern end any further than Dakota County Road 34 (an old alignment of MN 13, half a mile up the bluff). Next shot (extremely redundant, and would be the first to go if money / right-of-way became a difficulty): Extend Dakota County Road 5 into a Humboldt Avenue bridge. It's especially redundant because it would be immediately parallel to the existing I-35W bridge -- so I'm only even considering it because 5 is such a major route south of the river (being the former US 65). Next: Nicollet and/or Portland Avenues. I'd lean toward Portland, because it's less redundant than Nicollet (a mile east of I-35W, instead of half a mile) and because its Bloomington residents are already much more used to heavy traffic than are Nicollet's (since Portland / Park is already a major commuter route from the Minnesota River to downtown Minneapolis). South of the river, instead of lining up with existing Portland Avenue (which ends at MN 13), it would chicane to hook up with the existing Burnsville segment of Nicollet (which is already multi-lane; serves a major bus station and the "Heart of the City" project to construct a "downtown Burnsville"; and travels two miles further south to a major suburban commercial strip at County Road 42). If money were no object, I'd "Y" the new road just south of the current terminus of Portland (say, 106th or so), and fork it into two bridges: the one for Nicollet, and one for either 12th Avenue (to the Rupp industrial park) or Dakota County Road 11 (which accesses I-35E, and is where Cedar Avenue would have ended up if it didn't curve eastward coming out of the Mall of America). Finally, I'd throw in probably one more bridge (though this is also somewhat on the list of redundant ones) -- I'd extend 34th Avenue (which comes out of the airport and an office park near the Mall) to the river bluff, then run the new roadway due southeast to connect with east-west Yankee Doodle Road in Eagan (which runs all the way east to South St. Paul). This would have the advantage of providing an alternate route to the airport, and also serve the massive industrial area which runs along the entire north side of MN 13 through Eagan. Additional social benefits of this plan (depending on one's point of view) would include a more unified "feel" of the metro as a whole, and a more consistent identity of being part of The Twin Cities as such. (As it stands now, something about Burnsville just "feels" a lot more middle-of-nowhere to me than did its rough equivalent, southern Overland Park, when I was visiting KC... OP felt a lot more like an organic extension of KC as a whole). Additional minor south-metro annoyances: 1) Rebuild the quarter-mile of Judicial Road south of 170th, for full route continuity to 185th, Lucerne Boulevard, and the Lakeville 18-plex theatre. This way, it would be possible to return from the Burnsville Center (a major regional mall) to Prior Lake or Jordan via County Road 5 and Judicial... without having to get on I-35 at the end of CR5, accelerate to 70, and merge for the sake of the ONE MILE to 185th. 2) Get rid of the silly Y-intersection at Scott County Roads 27 and 44... or at least eliminate the stop sign for northbound 27 traffic at the fork. There's more than enough space there to construct 500-600 feet of auxiliary lane, allowing northbound 27 traffic to yield/merge with eastbound 44 traffic veering onto northbound 27. If the money's around, a single flyover ramp for a single traffic movement would solve most of the problem -- send the eastbound 44 traffic up over both lanes of the 27 fork, complete the four-laning of 27 between the new high school and the fork, send the right southbound 27 lane into westbound 44 and the left southbound 27 lane under the flyover onto southbound 27. With an optional right-turn lane for east 44 to south 27 (a rare movement, anyway) and the 600 feet of auxiliary lane from above... problem solved! 3) For the love of all that is holy, eliminate the quarter-mile jog required to remain on MN 50 in Lakeville (215th St - Cedar - 212th St). This one's fairly easy... buy out the farm right-of-way, extend 215th a couple blocks, and curve it up into 212th. 4) Where eastbound Hanrehan Lake Rd. in Savage curves 90 degrees north to become Burnsville Parkway -- buy out a couple acres of the park reserve and plow through an east-west connector to Southcross Drive. The park reserve (4 miles long N-S) is a major traffic obstacle, and that's fine, conservation is an important value... but let's mitigate its obstacle-ness by building through routes as close to its edges as we can. The new road (call it 148th) would be a nice alternate 3/4 miles parallel to the choked and congested CSAH 42... reduce some of the cut-through traffic which currently uses Corporate Center and Hollow Park Drives as ersatz 42 alternatives... and connect directly to the Burnsville Center and south I-35 via Southcross.

Pardon the strange question, but here goes... Has anyone in here managed to reverse-engineer a saved city file to see how the data is stored? I'm wondering whether it's possible, for someone with a hex editor and a lot of time on his hands, to isolate the part of the file which contains a city's road and transportation network. I ask this because I recently got my hands on a very accurate Minneapolis-St. Paul terrain and started laying out roads to match their real-world equivalents. I chose one major north-south road and one major east-west road whose placement could be determined from certain terrain features, laid those out, and proceeded to base all the others on 100 tiles = 1 mile (since, according to the literature, 1 tile equals almost exactly 52.8 feet.) Unfortunately, after about 16 hours of work, I realized that when the region rendered, its aspect ratio had somehow gotten thrown off! Looking from east to west, it was accurate, but it was severely compressed along its north-south axis, meaning all my work had basically been for naught. I was hoping I could extract the road placement information from the old city files, correct the bitmap and re-render the region, then plug the old road information into the new city files. I realize it's a long shot, but I thought it was worth asking after all that work I lost!

Just a couple of quick questions here that have been nagging at me... Re. pathfinding -- I don't have the severe commuting issues some users have experienced (i.e. to the point where all their residential buildings go abandoned), but I'm still having a couple of annoyances. Sims seem to take weird shortcuts through residential side streets (no matter how congested they already are)... rather than staying on the nice, wide avenues (with frontage roads and grade-separated major intersections!) I spent so many simoleons building for them. They also seem quite reluctant to use highways (even where it provides the most direct path to the job), make left turns, or "backtrack" at all. (In other words, they won't go even five or six itty-bitty grid tiles west from home to jump on an Avenue that leads to a Highway which eventually takes them directly east to their job. Instead, they'll fiddle around on miserable little two-laners for an hour and a half, simply because it allows them to go directly eastward.) Finally, I'm still seeing some reluctance to travel large distances (though not as bad as before I installed the NAM.) I do have the most recent release of the NAM with the pathfinding plugins, and was wondering which ones would be most appropriate to solve my problems. (Also, would changing to a different pathfinding plugin screw up gameplay or the growth of my region?) The config question is (mercifully) briefer -- I recently found a nifty little region on the STEX which I wanted to download. It's 32x32 km, but the config map is really weird, involving lots of small and medium cities. I prefer larger tiles, as it's easier for me to maintain the stylistic consistency of my cities when there are fewer borders to interrupt things. Would the region still function if I replaced its config bitmap with an all-blue one before rendering the region?

Honest to goodness... this thread finally makes me understand why envy is on the list of seven deadly sins... those awesome airports make me homicidally jealous! In all seriousness, though... this thread is a good jumping-off point for a question I had about custom airports... do they actually serve multiple cities in a region, i.e., do they still play a role in gameplay? I ask because I thought about reserving a small or medium city tile entirely for airport (as I've seen done in many CJs), but didn't want to knock the life out of my main city by removing its stock in-game model...

Warning... Long obsessive essay ahead :-D I don't have any visual examples at the moment (as my cities are on a different computer), but I can at least describe a couple of things I've done in order to force myself away from grid thinking. Mostly, I look to real-world American cities for inspiration. The western suburbs of Omaha and Kansas City follow a sort of "deviated grid" pattern that I've found useful in building the suburban areas of my cities. These areas are griddy in the big picture (they retained the farm section roads defining each square mile, and expanded them as the area built up), but moderately to completely irregular in the small scale. In some areas, residential streets have a short segment that follows what would have been the alignment of the urban grid, then curve off and follow their own logic (with some or many of the streets still parallelling one another as if they were traditional inner-city streets.) A good example can be viewed by Mapquesting or Googling Overland Park, Kansas. Check out the mile bounded by 95th, 103rd, Metcalf, and Nall, as well as the one bounded by 95th, 103rd, Antioch, and US 69. Other mile blocks are built on a convergence-point pattern, i.e. they have a couple of different radius points which neighboorhood streets seem to center around. The best example I've found is located on the outskirts of Sioux Falls, SD, in the mile bounded by 41st, 57th, Marion, and Sertoma. Still other areas seem to have no logic at all -- just randomly curving streets inside the mile grid. The main issue with this style of building is that, due to Sims' notorious aversion to long-distance commuting, you end up needing to zone commercial more frequently and diffusely than you'd expect in reality -- i.e. you can't have the three or four miles at a time of pure residential that you observe in many suburbs. This has led me to place a couple of major intersections on each mile-long segment of suburban road, and center small to medium sized commercial developments around each intersection -- say, a 6x6 light commercial with the Ctrl zoning trick (to force a Lee Mall or a Fashion Center) plus a strip of 2-by-x or 3-by-x light commercial for smaller shops and gas stations. Occasionally I'll take a chunk (say, 20x20) at a corner of two section roads and turn it into a medium commercial office center, perhaps including some medium industrial plus LOTS of green lawn to ensure high-tech development. (Frontage roads are quite helpful in the above developments, not only to encourage realism and break up the grid monotony, but also to keep the avenues clear for any longer-distance commuters you DO have.) This has allowed me to preserve at least a vestige of realism, while still building game-functional cities. (I've taken some liberties with the definition of a mile -- theoretically each tile is supposed to be 53 feet (16m) on a side, but that resulted in ridiculously high population density. Thus, I've taken to pretending that each tile represents just under 75 feet and that the game's aspect ratio is slightly off, resulting in 70x72 "mile" grids that contain a much more believable number of Sim soccer moms and are easily subdivided into even numbers of city blocks in my urban core.) As far as industrial areas, it's often helpful to set aside areas for large-scale industrial-park developments that don't necessarily follow the city grid -- just kind of build randomly, with roads only as needed to provide access to the plants. (Google-maps Eagan, MN and look at the area near Lone Oak Road and Lexington Avenue.) As far as the city proper, I take my inspiration from the craziness I've seen here in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Minneapolis is mostly laid out on a grid pattern... but there are several different grids that were laid out in various stages of the city's history, leading to very interesting and irregular neighborhoods where the incompatible grids converge. The downtown and West Bank neighborhoods are on a 45-degree angle to the cardinal directions (built this way in order to parallel the Mississippi), but this grid all ends abruptly at Franklin Avenue (except for Hennepin Avenue, which plays by its own weird rules until it reaches 28th.) South of here, things are mostly orthogonal to the compass (as they also are northwest of downtown, in North Minneapolis). The Warehouse District twists into some kind of bizarre halfway compromise between the downtown grid and North Minneapolis (67.5 degrees?!?) Northeast Minneapolis (across the river from downtown) is kind of a hodgepodge of all the grids, with East Hennepin Ave. defining the neighborhood by running through it at its own strange angle. Then there's Hiawatha and Minnehaha Avenues slicing through the otherwise-orthogonal southeastern part of the city (now MN 55, but built several decades ago as US 218, a radial highway aimed at the suburb of Eagan). Also worth noting is the way Minneapolis allows geographical features to break up the grid (particularly the lakes -- several of these are ringed by parkways and angling residential streets.) St. Paul is interesting due to the very long, linear warehouse / industrial district which occupies the space between two major railroads in the north-central part of the city. The residential grid ends abruptly at the Pierce Butler Route, then picks up again north of Como Avenue (3/4 mi. to the north.) As in Minneapolis, city officials had the wisdom to let the city's geography define its growth in certain places, rather than attempting to subdue it completely -- leading to charming irregularities in neighborhoods like Dayton's Bluff (due east of downtown), Cherokee Heights (south of downtown, across the river), and Crocus Hill (up the hill north of I-35E.) Also notable are West 7th Street, which runs all the way from downtown to MN 55 in south Minneapolis at its own goofy angle, as well as Hampden Park and St. Anthony Park, whose random curves make them appear to have been platted by a spider on drugs (just east of MN 280, for those looking on Google Maps.) Just a few long-winded suggestions... Hope they help.

Minneapolis-St. Paul used to have some really bad spots, particularly with getting from the south suburbs into the city proper. US 169 through Bloomington, for instance, was finally upgraded to limited-access from expressway. Prior to the upgrade, 169 was freeway for several miles south of the Minnesota River, did a crossing (the only one for several miles in either direction), and then dumped everybody right into a bank of stoplights! I suppose the delay on this one had much more to do with financing, land acquisition, and environmental-impact studies than with poor planning... but it was still a pain in the posterior. Troubles we still have include the I-35 / MN 62 commons that someone mentioned on the Lame Highways thread, where the otherwise north/south 35 tees in to share an east-west route for all of about a mile... and the fact that MSP doesn't preserve its "old" Minnesota River crossings as alternate routes. For those unfamiliar with the area, this river is a huge obstacle. It runs just south of the second-ring suburbs, east-west across the entire metro. Yet the only crossings are major freeways which are multiple miles apart, with the old crossings that they replaced put into complete disuse. (No more Lyndale Avenue crossing after I-35W was built, no more Cedar Avenue crossing after MN 77, no more Vernon Avenue crossing into Savage after the Bloomington Ferry Bridge was built... and then when the new 169 freeway went up, they closed THAT, too!) Since our suburban sprawl is out to a good four or five rings to the south, this leads to a huge bottleneck as everyone in Apple Valley and Lakeville tries to cross one of the three bridges in a 15-mile stretch to get to Bloomington and Minneapolis. It would be really nifty if there were some surface-street bridges for major routes that roughly align on both sides of the river -- I've always dreamed of a Nicollet Avenue bridge into Burnsville, and hooking up Normandale Boulevard with Scott County 27 in Savage. This would not only directly cut traffic on the freeway bridges, but would also have a secondary decongesting effect (as local north-south traffic wouldn't have to clog up the east-west routes by doubling back to get to the freeway bridges.) However, the expense would be huge... and there are environmental concerns with building across the vast marshy expanses that line the Minnesota River... so I don't imagine it will happen anytime soon. It's back to Simworld for me, where I can change these pipe dreams into digital realities. EDIT: I forgot my hometown... don't get me started on good old Prior Lake. We're that fifth ring of suburbia, and consequently are just starting to get huge growth. Prior Lake is bisected by MN 13 (2-lane 55 mph south of town; 2-lane 45 mph through town; and 4-lane 55 mph north of town) and Scott County 21 (which comes in straight west from I-35 as 4-lane 55 mph, cuts through Prior Lake, and then curves around to head north.) 21 will soon be extended to dump directly into US 169, so people coming from the far south metro will be very likely to use it as a 35 to 169 link to go to office towers in the heavily developed west metro "edge cities." This is all well and good... until you see what happens in downtown Prior Lake proper. 21 (still at a decent 50 mph) continues through a stoplight with 13... right into a four-way stop with the main downtown surface street ONLY 300 FEET after the stoplight! Any fix here is going to be bitter medicine indeed. Leaving it as-is will be a traffic disaster after they expand 21. Making the stop a two-way would bisect the heart of downtown, sabotaging active efforts to preserve what little traditional on-street downtown culture still remains in Prior Lake. Rerouting 13 would be impossible, as everything is built up... unless you put it on Franklin Trail, which WAS the 13 route a long time ago but is now a 30 mph local street lined with homes (a wide one, but a residential street nevertheless.) Angry residents will make that impossible (and it wouldn't do much to help the downtown, either, since it's far enough away you wouldn't see it from that route.) Doing some kind of overpass would result in huge land-acquisition costs and assessments, which would probably also destroy our little downtown (not to mention, in our age of high regulation, we'll never again see the little "shoehorned" urban interchanges that make life a little easier in many of our nation's older cities.) To the north, things are too built-up to reroute 21, but you could send it further south before starting its northwestward curve... e.g. bring it in south of Prior Lake and then run it north on an expanded Scott County 17, which eventually hits 169... but then people IN Prior Lake would complain about losing access to it (not to mention the multiple governmental agencies and huge expense that would be involved.) In short, we are completely hosed.

Another favorite -- I-35E through Saint Paul, MN. AFTER all the land was purchased and graded for the project, the, let's just say, "well-remunerated" residents of the Crocus Hill neighborhood filed noise and safety complaints about the route. This resulted in an entire section of major interstate freeway, built up to the normal design and safety standards, being limited to 45 MPH.... (By the way -- to the moderator -- with all due respect, I have to laugh my tuchis off here. The part that you "edited for language" in my earlier post was nothing more than a collection of Shift-key symbols (%, etc.) that I myself intentionally used in the original post in place of actual cussing! Was this just a misunderstanding, or is it an accurate reflection of the level of moderation on this board?)

A quick rundown of evil highways I've experienced in my time... 1) US 69 through Ames, Iowa. While, in all fairness, one wouldn't expect this to be the smoothest-moving road, it gets especially craptastic once it hits town. (Part of this is because the only limited-access highways that serve the city of 50,000 are US 30, running along the far south end of town, and I-35, on the extreme eastern edge... through the city proper, you have to depend on little undivided 35 mph four-laners at best, and even these are rare. Some, like Hyland Avenue on the west end of the ISU campus, run for a mile and then abruptly quit.) Most of the problem arises from the fact that 69 enters the city from the south as Duff Avenue, a huge strung-out low-density commercial district with no parallel alternate streets for most of its length. Then, it finally reaches another major thoroughfare (Lincoln Way), and immediately jogs west onto it -- even though it's just as closely lined with commercial buildings and has a stoplight almost every block! After following this for half a mile, 69 finally darts back north along Grand Avenue. This is all bad enough, but the ends of Duff and Grand opposite the jogs have their own problems that render them useless as alternate routes: Duff to the north has a 25 mph speed limit and two adjacent at-grade railroad crossings that carry sixty-six trains a day in alternate directions, and Grand to the south dead-ends into a grocery store parking lot! This resulted in quite the existential dilemma for me as a pizza driver when heading to far south Duff: Brave the wait for a left turn from southbound Grand to eastbound Lincoln Way and all those lights... or take Duff straight through from its humble beginnings as a city street, and risk incredible bad luck at the bidirectional railroad crossing? (I actually thought of getting railroad timetables, but figured that, in the modern political climate, I'd probably be surveilled as a potential terrorist for even asking.) 2) US 69 isn't the only lame road in Ames. The city is finally fixing Dayton Avenue north of US 30, a route that used to figure in semi drivers' nightmares. Dayton is the main access for the industrial plants on the city's east side, as well as for a major truckstop and the city's official Cheap Hotel District (six Super-8ish chain motels clumped into the far southeastern edge of the city limits, with two miles of farm fields between them and the rest of civilization.) BUT... it runs so closely parallel to I-35 that the 30/35 cloverleaf made it impossible to put in a direct exit with 30, so the city had to put in a "nub" for the exit... result being that trucks exiting 30 onto this nub have to stop at the end of the nub, make an almost immediate right onto SE 16th (the 30 frontage road), stop AGAIN after a quarter-mile, and finally proceed left on Dayton. (Yes, that's right -- even though Dayton proper runs for precisely ONE BLOCK south of 16th before dead-ending at US 30, the city gave it the right-of-way so guests at the ONE hotel that fronts on the dead-end wouldn't have to stop.) Last year, they finally started construction on a chicane (dog-leg) from the end of the nub over to a point half a mile up Dayton proper. 3) University Avenue through Windsor Heights (an affluent first-ring suburb just west of Des Moines.) It's four lanes, and not only divided, but divided quite nicely (if memory serves, the medians are a good eight or ten feet wide). Along its Windsor Heights length, the properties fronting it are almost exclusively commercial. A few city streets intersect it, and there's a couple of stoplights (just enough to ensure safe cross-route and pedestrian access without being ~Edited for language~ annoying or dangerous.) Visibility is great the whole way (good old Midwestern open views). YET... this road is posted at 25 miles per hour!!!! (And before you ask, it's not just because the city fathers think it's a good way to trick folks into going their real target speed of 30... they actually hand out tickets to people going 26 and 27. Meanwhile, one state to the north, you can go 30 completely unmolested on much narrower two-lane streets directly lined with single-family homes.) What's more, a City Council meeting in 2004, where they discussed raising the limit to 30 to be more consistent with similar roads in the Des Moines area, featured a man who just about went into orbit screaming THE CHILDREN, THE CHILDREN, WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?!?!??!?!

MC Gringo -- how on earth did you get that huge Avenue intersection? I'd love to have one of those somewhere in my city... Does it just draw automatically when you drag the diagonal Avenues across an existing 90-degree Avenue intersection?

Myself, I'm a fan of the 6x8 block, because of its versatility. You can plop down a bus stop and a little 1x1 park or plaza next to it to enhance land values, and yet still have (6x6)+(5x2) or (7x6)+(1x4) to work with. So many things to do with the smaller space, as towers grow in the larger one -- you could zone it light commercial, to achieve a rough equivalent of the "street level retail in towers" effect... you could turn it into a long promenade of plazas, a sort of "mall" effect in the midst of your downtown... row houses, if you're one of those New Urbanist types that wants to put everything within walking distance... you could even just leave it as part of an irregularly shaped High Density Commercial block and see where the game decides to put the towers. The possibilities are endless. A couple of other things I do with my downtowns -- 1) some sort of identifiable "main drag", even if it's "main" only in the sense of being a wider road than all the others. A sort of grand, encircling ring or crescent around your downtown can achieve the same majestic effect. 2) Some irregularity, particularly around the edges -- imagine that some other Sim developer had a plat laid out for a sister city at the same time, and they eventually grew together and merged... only they were on different grid sizes... leaving small irregular plots of land to be sorted out. Here you can pop down some row houses (see the various articles on row house zoning), maybe a little light commercial, turn it into bohemian-land for your Sim coffee drinkers and collectible-vinyl enthusiasts. Then slowly fade out the development, through areas of slightly different character, until it eventually becomes the calm yet predictable rows of tract housing that shelter most of your city's middle class.

Diagonal avenues radiating from downtown... MrFingers, are you from Indianapolis by any chance?

OH thank goodness! You have no idea... or maybe you DO... how much of a relief it is to find out that other people are just as crazy about these little particulars of the game as I am. Myself, I've even gone so far as to develop multiple street-naming systems for different areas of my Deal River region. I've taken the liberty of imagining grid tiles as 70-something feet square instead of 53.3. This has allowed me to use a tidy little 5x6 city block size and have ten numbered E/W streets fit into each north-south mile, and twelve named N/S avenues into each-west mile (random at first, but then alphabetizing to match major world and U.S. cities as one gets further into the suburbs.) Of course, just like in real life, these start to collide with other systems at the fringes. My region is starting to twin-cityize a bit... and the system in San Narciso (a conurbation loosely based on the city in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49") is exactly the sort of unbridled bizarreness you'd expect from a bunch of Yoyodyne engineers who've been systematically denied their daily lunch breaks for the past three years running. All straight E-W and N-S streets are numbered based on a system of exactly 52.8 streets to the mile, with each street being numbered for the nearest integer and given a directional suffix. This has the nice result of making Sims' addresses correlate with their exact distance, in feet, from the centerline... but sends recently-transferred pizza delivery drivers up a wall as they try to absorb the realization that, unlike in their previous cities of employment, "2379 44th St. W." can easily be delivered on the same trip as "6314 53rd St. W." And then management decides to expand your delivery area a tiny little bit into the Deal River side, so you're happily rushing down 92nd St. N. only to discover that suddenly, inexplicably, it turns into NE 116th St. Oh, the humanity! But enough about my sordid little imaginary life that seems, almost uncannily, to match my real one. And don't even get me started on the rural naming/numbering systems that all those crazy hillbilly township Sims, using me as a mere intermediary, have foisted upon their distant homesteads. Sorry, but there's only so many times you can drive "C Avenue" for a mile between "Sasquatch Street" and "Rabbit Street" without breaking down and absolutely laughing your tochis off.

Also, any future slowdowns you may have could potentially be jump-started by the use of trees. Empty residential zones are apparently quite ticklish, and like to have their lot arrows teased, especially with Maples.

Actually, PrinceofSims, I think there are a few buildings larger than 4x4. (Either that, or there's some "support-tile" system for certain Commercial zones, the way there is with unparcelized Industrial.) I say this because one day, after reading the article on parcelized Industrial, I got curious and decided to try it with Commercial too... and my 6x6 Light Commercial parcels started popping up Fashion Centers and Hsu Malls. I've seen at least the Hsu on a 4x4 parcel before, and the tiles around the edge of this 6x6 looked a lot like parking lots... I'm not sure whether this applies to any large Co$$$ towers, though... since I've never been fortunate enough to get them either. :/ Your population of R$$$ Sims is certainly relevant to your concern here (although I recall reading that even Co$$$ towers can have R$$$ Sims as only a limited percentage of their workers)... perhaps try some mass transit or Highway links, as direct as possible, from your R$$$ neighborhoods to the area of your desired towers. The only other thing that really comes to mind is the land value and desirability factor of the specific area where one is trying to get such large towers to grow. I imagine a 5x5 or 6x6 office tower is going to be quite posh and will want surroundings of the same character. Try zoning along a high-traffic Avenue with a nearby cross Road (to allow U-turns for access if necessary), then plop down a TON of nearby Plazas as an experiment, and maybe some Green Lawns as well. Be sure to let us know if this works!