Naomi57

I specifically resist gentrification in my SimCity 4 cities. Given the economic simulation in SC4 generally attempts to simulate real-life economic factors, the low wealth sims are not becoming wealthy, they are being pushed out by speculative property developers and a lack of affordable housing. I make sure to use a combination of NIMBY and air pollution to guarantee low wealth sims have affordable housing in some neighbourhoods, or else using other techniques to plan and preserve low wealth neighbourhoods. This is a type of "companion planting" that goes into my city-planning. Some types of zoning and buildings work well together, other combinations are very bad. My techniques don't solve all problems in creating an Ultrasanti, but it helps realise a vision of protopia, rather than a vision of utopia. Here's a table I compiled examining this "companion planting" of SC4 buildings and zones, with protopian objectives, and with vanilla+NAM economic prosperity in mind. This is in three sections: 1. causes of city neighbourhood problems, 2. the neutral buildings which serve well as a buffer zone, 3. the victims of regulatory failings in city planning. My "companion planting" table helps assess Peter Richie megacity recipe, and can be used for assessing and tweaking your city planning. Best border any dirty industry (I-D) with civics, water treatment plants, trees, and then manufacturing. Proximity of low wealth residential R$ and manufacturing (I-M) is a natural fit. Proximity of high wealth residential R$$$ and high tech (I-HT) is a natural fit. Casino doesn't fit well with much at all, and did you know that it's even radioactive! What is not mentioned in this "companion planting" table, is the critical factor of commute distance, and match of education status and wealth class to available jobs. Unemployment, underemployment, long commute, and job/skills mismatch are frequent deal breakers for sims. Good employment and ease of commute are generally the two most important factors for happy sims.

Ultrasanti makes for such an interesting conversation, @elfrjz. I've been long-term unwell, which is why my participation here has been limited lately, but this conversation very happily engaged my attention. Thank you for posting that YouTube account, @Terring. I've just watched all seven parts of Peter Richie's "How to Build a Mega City" YouTube series. Admittedly, I watched most of it with sound muted, only unmuting for parts that looked interesting and in the last two videos in the series, right-arrowing ahead through the videos to take in the boring bits quicker. Fascinating to see a gameplay style so at odds with my own, but still aiming for a prosperous High-Tech/High Commerce healthy and happy city in the end. Here's a 43x47 representative piece of his "How to Build a Mega City" map that I plotted out in Excel with yellow lines indicating subway and arrows indicating neighbour connections. I plotted out more of his city if you're interested to see. Truly excellent points with Peter Richie's city building recipe: Zero cheats and zero mods, none at all! 21x21 cell grid made up of nine 6x6 blocks is an excellent grid geometry, with 3 times 21 = 63 leaving 2 cells for a bordering Avenue (or Highway). Dirty industry (I-D) is the fastest way to make money without cheats. Distance is the simplest way to avoid the deleterious impacts of I-D pollution and Waste-to-Energy Plants. https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Waste_to_Energy_Plant Building out substantial residential/commercial/industrial sectors before de-zoning everything seems to have lingering effects that are useful and interesting. He very correctly builds for residential proximity to industrial and commercial jobs. 100% coverage of Fire Stations completely suppresses fire emergencies for Cheetah play speed (Ctrl+3). He does not mess with Transportation, Water, Police or Fire funding! He manages Health and Education funding using central budget sliders rather than building-by-building, an easier approach for a quick Mega City build. Switch to Zone data view for faster Cheetah play speed. Using Oil Power Plants for initial high capacity power, in preference to Gas or Coal. https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Oil_Power_Plant When Hydrogen Power Plants become available, use the Nuclear Free Zone ordinance to clear the Nuclear Power Plants from the map. Libraries are important! https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Local_Branch_Library Kudos for getting into the Guinness Book of World Records, but I do have some problems with Peter Richie's approach: Orthogonal (horizontal/vertical) subways ignores the extra commuting power of diagonal subways. Subway station usage benefits from pedestrian proximity to side streets. He leans heavily on the overpowered (OP) stats of the Avenue in vanilla SC4. That won't work with a NAM city which far more desperately needs Highway grade (MHW or RHW). He completely ignores traffic congestion problems. He completely ignores the dreaded SC4 Eternal Commuter bug in the planning of his neighbour connections, which I think he doesn't notice because he doesn't care about traffic congestion. See @CorinaMarie's legendary analysis in this post to thoroughly understand this issue, and https://www.google.com/search?q=Eternal+Commuter+bug+site%3Acommunity.simtropolis.com for more threads discussing it. He zones vast swathes of commercial, ignoring the fact that commercial prosperity depends upon vehicle traffic and light rail traffic in an 8x8 radius centred upon each building's 4x4 home tract. This probably works in his case because of the massive traffic snarls he tolerates. He completely ignores health and education strikes, which does have economic impacts. The Casino has the maximum police corruption effect of 50 with radius of 128 tiles. https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Casino I think he misattributes this effect to the Airport. This is a non-issue in his Dirty Industry phase, but really not a great "Reward" to include in the city in the fast commercial growth phase! The Legalize Gambling ordinance has a citywide 20% increase crime effect, which is particularly counter-productive to developing high density commercial. My key differences of play preference from Peter Richie. IMPORTANT: Population growth depends on actual employment, not just the existence of buildings. Actual employment depends on commute journey time, and while sims will travel further for cushie office jobs, I very seriously question the depth of that blue commercial zoning and commute distance from residential to the extreme centre of his city. I don't think he's checking Route Query to see if any sims really do commute all the way to the centre. I think he's using default School Bus funding. Zero School Bus and zero Ambulance funding is far more effective way of moderating city expenses, without the economic hazard of causing strikes. City Beautification is another budget you can plonk to zero and gradually increase. Preserving a bit of Manufacturing industry (I-M) is actually a good thing for R$ employment, and sector diversification improves economic growth and resilience, and I-M makes is a good buffer zone around Waste-to-Energy Plants. For that matter, low wealth R$ residential makes a great buffer zone around manufacturing (I-M). Water Pipes every 13 tiles works. In this case, pipes every 10-11 tiles would fit the 21 tile grid geometry. No need to turn on so many Ordinances! Some are invaluable, but most can be ignored. https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Ordinance Rewards like Movie Studio which don't improve your RCI CAPS are a waste of space. https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Movie_Studio I prefer planned plop of all civics, including schools, libraries, hospitals, police and fire, rather than his random plop to fill the coverage radius circles on the map. I'll happily use cheat Ctrl+X you don't deserve it to make my city planning easier. https://wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Cheat_codes I have noticed that Windows systems with lots of mods tend to bog down the SimCity 4 open/save/refresh performance. That's one reason I keep my mod list small and avoid the HD cosmetic mods, because I value speed. I'm pretty sure that too many mods impacts performance, responsiveness and playability of large cities (256x256), which could be a big issue in building an Ultrasanti region. The region size, on the other hand, is far less of an issue because that only affects performance in Region View. Once you've loaded a city, it's only that one city and its immediate neighbour connection properties that are in memory.

Yes, this one solution to the the Fermi Paradox is called The Great Filter. Kurzgesagt has a fun video which explains it well: “It needs to be something that's so obvious, that virtually everybody discovers it, and so dangerous, that its discovery leads almost universally to an existential disaster.” At this point, we don't know enough about The Great Filter to use it for predicting the future, but we may come to know more within this lifetime. Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter | Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

DW Planet A does not always present a balanced picture, but this particular video released today fits other facts I've collected, and is a representative sample of one corner of climate migration and disaster mitigation which is already in progress. Not covered by this video, is the impact of glacial retreat on water scarcity. Freshwater flooding mitigation and water harvesting are vitally important to maintaining both ecosystems and broader habitability. We increasingly need to care for the world like a garden, and to involve traditional people groups in that ecological care. In that sense, significant portions of a protopia future will be a curious mix of futuristic and traditional. It reminds me of the Kingdom of Bhutan, where most of the inhabitants of this very traditional country skipped landline telephones to go straight to 4G mobile phone networks. As at 2012, the Kingdom of Bhutan had reached 560,000 mobile phone users but just 27,900 installed landline phones. I see climate change adaptation in poorer countries heading in a similar direction, a pragmatic mix of technology and tradition. Why the Himalayas have so many ghost villages | DW Planet A

Yes, that's precisely why I think it takes a big enough set of crises to shift a society, otherwise self-interest rules. Some parts of the world are already becoming like Mad Max, and more are heading in that direction. Some other parts of the world will be relatively sheltered from dystopian outcomes. "Renewable" is a relative term, but when done right, it is a big step in the right direction for resource and environmental impact. For grid scale energy, it has less to do with energy density, and more to do with economics. e.g. Nuclear is the most energy dense fuel, but for various reasons it has neither time scale nor LCOE suitable to current needs for most countries. Nuclear has a safety record orders of magnitude better than coal, but politics prevents that safety benefit from being realised. Nuclear waste reprocessing and storage are essentially economic and political issues, too. On the subject of wind turbines, did you know that graphene is already being used to extend their life and reduce maintenance costs? Further scale on renewable energy inspires further innovation, and scarcity of one material inspires material science development of others. Carbon nanotubes here we come. Turns out that our environment is a finite resource, too, with food scarcity and water scarcity being one grim way to identify ecological bankruptcy. I believe there is reason for both pessimism and optimism. In terms of resource costs, city governments and state governments are starting to grapple with the immense cost of protection against rising seas, or relocation and rebuilding. The amount of construction, or reconstruction, implicit in rising sea level is immense, and might be one of the key motivators for some nations to take action on CO2 reduction. So both pessimism and optimism arise from the same cause ... crisis. Disaster mitigation is another immense cost governments are only just starting to realise. Among many climate tipping points, there is also an economic tipping point, where we discover that we're too overwhelmed coping with disaster to prepare for the future. Climate refugee nations have already reached that point. There is a real risk that only a few nations survive. I've heard some philosophers and futurists say that both utopia and dystopia are unstable states. They posit an idea they call protopia, which provides an achievable path that turns out to be a better fit for the human species than any ideal.

I think we might have wandered off-topic, from natural growth to crystal ball, but here's my take on a post-scarcity society. A post-scarcity society is radically different from the society we live in now, and that radical change implies a force that generates that change. While technology is a primary enabler, I don't think the transformation of society will come from technology. I think it will come from disaster. It doesn't require a cataclysm. Multiple combined disasters at sufficient scale and long time frame are quite sufficient to reshape societies.

This reminds me very much of a planned city, where city planners have the luxury of starting from scratch. In Australia, we had this exact situation, where Sydney and Melbourne politicians were arguing about which city should be the nation's capital. The compromise was to build a new city as the nation's capital partway between these two major cities, which is how Canberra was born, with a provisional parliament house (upper right) opened in May 1927, and the new parliament house (centre) opened in May 1988. Similar geopolitical compromises created planned capital cities in other nations, though the degree of artistry and design varies with each one. The provisional parliament house in Canberra is now a public museum. The city features other museums, war memorial, historic buildings, landmarks, and greenways. In this sense, a futuristic and beautiful transit network can arise "organically" out of geopolitics, even without a post-scarcity society. This city design approach is inspired by the garden city movement. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Canberra+ACT+2601/@-35.3082726,149.1202573,2394m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x6b164d69b05c9021:0x500ea6ea7695660!8m2!3d-35.2801903!4d149.1310038!5m1!1e4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#Urban_structure

A very interesting question @Daeris, and I'm curious what resources people come up with. From my own observations of sub-rural development surrounding my home city of Sydney, Australia over the last 50 years, growing urbanisation and rapid growth in a city leads surrounding areas to shift from generalised communities to specialisation. e.g. Luxury crops in place of staple crops. Larger farms near the city rezoned into sub-rural smaller farms. Increased mining, refining (dirty industry), port development, and energy infrastructure clustered in strategic areas about 100km to 200km from the growing city. Quarries, sand mining, and plantation timber in close proximity to support construction projects with local materials. A major dam in a nearby pristine catchment area, with a protected catchment zone that is off-limits to the public but allows access for specialised personnel. Re-zoning of nearby ex-urban townships along highway and rail corridors, for low wealth commuters near the corridor, and high wealth estates where there are desirable landscape features. Expansion of pubs, roadhouses, and petrol stations (aka gas stations) at townships and/or isolated spots along the highways. Increasing specialisation of townships and rural areas, with some of them diversifying into farmstays, B&Bs, galleries, museums, and tourist spots. A few isolated towns well off the main highways being abandoned and becoming ruins or ghost towns, as residents move to locations with greater opportunities. Very curiously, just a few of those ruins ended up being close to the highway, and I'm not sure why.

I rather enjoyed the "gale" look of the water. It provides some interesting possibilities for weather effects!

Great job with rendering, @wheeeze. I have a software development background, with a specialisation in data architecture. It's quite awesome to see concrete progress on OpenSC4. While I know your work is coming from a different (and exciting) angle, I see some functional overlap between your work thus far and some map rendering mods, which might be a useful reference point for identifying what SC4 map data is already known: Region View mods: https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/11580-the-melbourne-transport-map-mod/ https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/14219-the-metropolitan-transport-mod-v1/ https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/17605-region-transport-legend/ https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/11402-edmonton-transportation-map-mod/ SC4 Terraformer (wouanagaine) https://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=731 SC4 Cartographer (wouanagaine) https://sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=4019 https://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/33956-sc4cartographer/ In particular, wouanagaine's work is in Python, so his source code would likely be invaluable, if you haven't seen it yet. There's some other C# and Python tools that dig into the SC4 data, both in published tools and experimental projects.

Hi @Mikket, I well understand the temptation to just zone a massive grid. It's quick, and repeatable, but it doesn't yield results that I like long term. What I want from SimCity 4 + NAM, is a city with variety, where each neighbourhood is different. For me this requires: Some natural features that are retained, or created, with civilisation populating the spaces around and between those natural features. Major and minor highways that make sense from a regional perspective. Strategic placement of police stations, medical and educational buildings. Zoning commercial in proximity to police and traffic. Zoning manufacturing and dirty industry away from the high class commercial and residential zones. Building a broader transport network that makes for the fastest and easiest commutes. All sims LOVE a fast and easy commute. Playing SimCity 4, is kinda like an enormous game of Tetris for me, finding the best spot to fit each piece. By all means, build a megacity grid if that's what you enjoy most. SC4 is nothing if it's not enjoyable. You might also like to experiment with a "superblock" structure, if you like grids. Here's another approach, building a series of communities along a highway, with a hierarchy of road types from highway, to arterial, to avenue, to road, to street. https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/760074-how-to-diverge-traffic/?tab=comments#comment-1743535 Here's a sample of my own approach for creating variety, using the numbered steps 1 to 6 at the top of this post. https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/760404-can-cap-be-never-hit-by-appropiately-zoning-rci/?tab=comments#comment-1749252 The north-south highway is one part of my "Belt Parkway" which runs across six cities so far. Working around "natural" landscape limitations and a strategic regional transit architecture makes the game more fun for me. Let me know if you're interested to see zoning plans I tend to use at the local level. I have lots of "tetris" geometry playing out at every level in my game, deploying various patterns and variations on those patterns at each point, with a focus on land use efficiency, "vanilla" economic gameplay, and urban variety.

Absolutely, the property developers of SC4 will both subdivide and amalgamate lots, but there are a few conditions: The amalgamated lot must be square or rectangular, and deliver a lot size suitable to your installed growables, demand, and growth stage. e.g. A 4x3 might amalgamate at a slightly earlier growth stage than a 3x3, particularly for high density residential R$$ and R$$$. The lots being amalgamated must have the same density zoning. If you have Cori's No Kickout mod installed, the lots being amalgamated must have the same wealth level. I actually use zone density striping to control how amalgamation can occur. Set and forget. The zone striping helps ensure that later amalgamations occur more neatly, less chance of leaving an odd little row house amongst the residential high rises, or a lost little shop among the office blocks. Here's another approach I take to avoid subdivision, a 3x3 or 4x3 lot is readily subdivided, but a 3x4 lot cannot be subdivided in the vanilla game. On the downside, if your demand and growth stage doesn't allow for many 3x4 lots, they may just sit empty for a long time.

I just came across this great video, that I thought our good Mayors on this thread might appreciate. It covers village placement, agriculture, and dwelling placement with respect to hydrology, biomes, resources, and risk. 5 Best (and Worst) Places to Build a Home or Village | Andrew Millison (10½ minutes)

I enjoy doing faux eyecandy connections, too, for blending city borders, in places where I don't want the sims to crowd onto my back-roads. Here's a sample of that, on one of my favourite ST threads, this one was my first mosaic across city borders: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/14932-show-us-your-mosaics/?page=10&tab=comments#comment-1725868