soldyne

ok, well I have made some great progress and it is thanks to all of your replies. I dont have any pics right now but I can post em if they are requested. I used the design I said I would (posted above) with better pathfinding. I had some trouble around 300k population. I built a small suburb community (I posted pics in the Show us your suburbs thread) and after that everything stablized and my population shot up to 500k within a game year. I have maybe three or four abondonded buildings in the whole city and everything else is quite stable. I manipulated the taxes to keep R$$$ and R$ to a minimum which has greatly increased mass transit use. infact pedestrian and subway traffic both beat car as a means of commute choice. followed by bus and passenger rail. there are only two problems which I am trying to solve yet and that is that my monorail system is nearly unused (only about 10k out of 500k use it) and even with all the subway traffic and walking average commute time is still about 50 minuets. I think I will actually take Tungstons and Hyms suggestions into account for my next test city and see what happens then. so far though my design shows great promise. thanks to everyone and If I get some interesting results I'll be sure to post em.

well my pics are not nearly as cool but here are some of my industrial areas: http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4158/ihtbig0bw.jpg align=baseline> http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9674/id6we.jpg align=baseline> http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/5026/im0yf.jpg align=baseline> http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/2148/ihtsmall8an.jpg align=baseline> hope you like em!

well, I think it is about time I posted some of my suburbs here. I would like to say that these pics are all in the same city and are my very first real attempt at making suburbs. this bedroom community is about 33k residence and is connected to a larger city of nearly 300k. It was difficult for me at first as I tend to gravitate toward the grid style so any comments would be most appreciated. oh and I would like to thank PEG for making his seasonal tree lots... these first pics are of my R$$ communities: this next pic is a sample of my R$ communities (not much to see here just a bunch of low rent housing): here is a sample of my R$$$ communities. they are all walled communites with thier own hospitals, schools, fire and police departments. no expense spared for my wealthy residence: and here are some fall pics of some other R$$ communities: hope you enjoy the pics. let me know what you all think. I just want to thank starrdarcy for starting this thread as it was my inspiration to make these communities in the first place.

Date: 12/6/2005 10:55:18 PM Author: vab423 I vote for an Omnibus article.  These kinds of how-tos are so great and helpful but it's painful searching the forums and scrolling through all the replies.quote> I second the vote! if that matters. this is a great article which has helped my cities industrial areas. thanks starrdarcy!

Date: 11/24/2005 6:01:44 PM Author: starrdarcy Date: 11/23/2005 10:32:36 AM Author: DCFusion Thanks for the tip. It's amazing, you play a game for so long and them up pops a simple, but beneficial idea... Guess I'll be reworking some industrial zones tonight after work.quote> Actually, there is several little secrets deep within simcity 4. You have to find them... like 1x1 dense, row housing.quote> I would like to see a screen shot of what you mean by 1x1 dense row housing. I assume you mean 1 tile of high density residential. low density houses can still build on high density which is well known. do you mean that there are hidden maxis buildings which build only on 1x1 dense zoning?

Date: 12/6/2005 5:56:22 PM Author: matsture If SimCity was real life there would be a folder in heaven containing so many plug-ins, it would have taken God aproximately seven days to start up the whole world. so long as God does not use a windows based machine to render the universe I think we will be ok! ... if SC4 were real, people who have experience with NAM will be known as transit experts and not Vietnam war veterans. ...the mayor would occasionally be called upon to drive school busses full of school children and ambulances responding to 911 calls.

verywell then! I have installed better pathfinding with no other NAM mods. not that I am complaining, but I was not fully aware that the perfect pathfinding might have been causing my problems. we shall see. I am also going with my second zone layout. I am not counting tungstons zone placement out quite yet so I will use his ideas as a fall back plan. I normally dont like clumping everything together like that as I dont really experience that where I live. I would say that I live in a medium density residential area and there is low density commercial service all around me in every direction clustered in small areas. that is what gave me the idea to do commercial clustering in the first place. it is interesting that as I examine my own town I realize that indeed all the major commercial areas are along a major avenue and all the residential areas are along streets and roads. surprising that I had not noticed it before. my only concern is with this 10 tile trip = long commute bug I keep running into. I certainly hope perfect pathfinding had something to do with it, otherwise I have no idea what to do. I will also try to manipulate the taxes better and try and keep the rich sims out of my city. I aways have maximum demand for all wealth levels in my city. I am not sure if that means I am a good mayor or a bad one but over time my city does seem to get overrun with R$$$. at one time my cities average income was about 120k per year. thats a lot of simoleans! now that I think about it perhaps they are not abondoning due to commute time (even though the building reports this in the query) but are abondoning due to no jobs available for their wealth level...interesting.... ok I have lot to absorb. it may take me a while to get any results.

ok I have done some more work and this is what I came up with: first I will show you the current zone placement I have been working with. my original thinking was to place all residential facing an avenue and all commercial facing a road. I wanted small business districts like little cells in each residential block hoping that it would help reduce commute times by giving the sims a close place to work in. this did not work like I planned. note that the center area is for civic buildings (hospital, schools, etc). The center and the 2tile strip in the middle of the large neighborhood is also for the future addition of monorail if I ever get far enough to need it. the empty 3x3 areas around the commercial are for future parks or libraries or whatever fits. the roads have road top mass transit bus/subway stations on them and so appear not to be connected but they really are (they dont show up in zone view. here you can also see the proposed buffer zone to the south and east which is being used as my IHT district: http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/3299/currentstyle8gg.jpg align=baseline> this next pic is an idea I came up with after reading all the replys in this thread. I decided to invert my zone placing by having all commercial face an avenue and all res face a road. If anyone thinks this is a good idea then I will most likely replace the outer avenue ring with a road. I kind of like this idea now that I see it laid out as all my commercial zones are placed along my main arteries into and out of my neighborhoods. I think I will combine this zone placement with a new tax law of 10% R$, 9% R$$, 11% R$$$. these tax rates seem to work well without causing excessive negative demand. I will also try the better pathfinding version of NAM instead of the perfect pathfinding (and I will get rid of the 10x commute mod as it does not seem to work very well): http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/5834/newstyle2cw.jpg align=baseline> please give me some feedback here. I dont want to quit the game just yet, but, I still need help.

ok this is what I have gathered: juaquin: I have thought about this before, but every time I raise taxes on anything to 10 or more the demand drops suddenly into the high negatives. what exactly do you set the taxes to to better control demand? tungston: I redid the design from the first experiment and added more commercial to each block. I am not sure how much commercial to add. I also put IHT in the buffer zones on the out skirts of the neighborhoods. I only had about 6000 ID and IM jobs which were in a neighboring city. should I mix the IHT in with the comm and res? hym: I have thought about your idea before. are suggesting a checkerboard pattern of R and C. what about IHT, should that be thrown in there as well? I will try better pathfinding and see if that helps things. hopefully it help my city run faster at least. Rymac91: I always did the opposite and here is my thinking: when the res buildings get large there will be so many people living in a single building that when they leave in thier cars (even just to go a parking garage or down the street) it will cause instant congestion on a road. I put roads near commercial as they like high traffic. now perhaps I am confusing traffic with congestion but that was my way of thinking. I will try your way and see what happens. ok, I think that was everyone. just to let everyone know, I reinstalled NAM from scratch and put in perfect pathfinding with 10x commute mod. this still did not solve the problem. I still had tons of long commute times. what is even stranger is that my average commute time went down to 15 minuets!!! I let it run on cheetah for 5 game years and no changes. overall, in my city of 150k i had 30k car commuters, 25k subway, and the rest was passenger rail and bus. the only congested area was a small strip of subway line near my airport tram (for some reason that dang thing employs 10k workers!). thanks for the responses everyone. I am calming down now but still am frustrated with game. I made my original design as a way of trying to be efficient yet not so grid like. I am trying to design an efficient and nice looking central downtown area that I can use in a city journal idea I have. but I can't start the CJ until I know this is going to work.

Date: 12/4/2005 8:46:13 PM Author: tungston Soldyne:  Are you refering to the cities like your experiment with mass transit?quote> yes, but I only had a singe neighborhood. even by car on an uncongested avenue I had abondonment issues. although I had no congested stations either. no congested lines. I am thinking of raising taxes on R$$$ to max and starting over. I remeber Bones1 talking about a 50 minute commute penalty when they use mass transit. I remember most of my abondonded buildings being R$$$ buildings.

Date: 12/3/2005 9:31:23 AM Author: AHB Hey this is my first post ever on this forum but i just got too reply too this great thread. Thank you for your great experiment and this dicomentation. I enjoyed too read those and looking forward to see more of your threads. I do hope you keep posting, i love it quote> Thanks very much. I am honored that your first post was to my thread. I guess the holiday weekend was just a bad time to start up an experiment. when I have new information to post I will indeed post it. cogeo: yes I see what you are saying. just last night I witnessed a 6x3 lot grow into what appeared to be two identical 3x3 lots but when I route queried either of them it gave me the exact same routes for both. there is so much to learn about this game it is amazing. thats why we have the wonderful community to share our thoughts on.

hmmm, I would agree that if I parcelize a 3x3 zone with other zone areas around it that a lot bigger than 3x3 may grow. but no lot may grow on a 3x3 zone which is smaller than 3x3. when I zoned non-parcelized areas I was getting a bunch of silly 1x1 buildings poping up all over the place. it looked like carp. here are some pics of what pops up in the 3x3 center of my large squares: this first pic show some small 1x1 fillers with no NOROADZOTS: http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/396/smallfillers5ct.jpg align=baseline> this next pic actually shows a 3x3 building which popped up in the center: http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/3539/largefillers3bh.jpg align=baseline> this final pic demonstrates that no lot will grow in a parcel which is larger than its foot print. the parcels in the center strip are all 3x4 and notice that no 3x3 or smaller lots have grown in the center. there were some 4x4 lots that grew in other strips in other spots though: http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/6377/largeparcels8ha.jpg align=baseline> perhaps you are unaware that with industry lots they can be as far as 5 tiles away from a road and still have access. in this design the center tile is 5 tiles away, therefore there will not be any NOROADZOTS. hope this clears things up a bit.

Date: 12/1/2005 11:32:01 PM Author: tungston I wanted to see if the larger industrial zones would fill up completely.  Maybe there hasn't been enough time to develop, but I think the zones over 6x6 are too large. I have always needed to upgrade the usage capacity with custom MT stations.  I don't think the lines themseleves cause a problem.  I just got tired of trying to get the sims to use double stations.  I up the capacity and budgets so it doesn't seem so much like cheating.  After all the game does have a Grand Railroad Station with higher capacities. BTW, how are you getting the multiple city icons in the image? quote> as for the 6x6 areas: if you look closely some of the 6x6 areas have buidings that are 3x4 tiles instead of the original 3x3 parcelization I originally laid out. some areas even have little 1x1 buildings living in them. I have yet to see any no road zots. but, one Idea I had was that since IHT gains the same effects from parks as does residential I was going to put a 3x3 park of some kind in the middle area to increase desirability. however, one of the main problems I came across was that the IHT city was never making a profit until the very end. it seems that IHT has a great power demand and low population per building. so I was constantly adding new power sources but my income from taxes was just not enough to compensate. obviously I was spending a lot of money maintaining a transit network that was not being used but that was only a few thousand a month In my next design I plan to keep IHT and commercial in the main city and export only ID and IM. I plan to put the commercial inside each neighborhood and put IHT in the buffer zones on the edge of the map. I wont need to worry about the 9x9 blocks anymore. as for congested MT lines: I am unsure if a congested line such as Monorail track, passenger rail track or subway line actually has any bering on commute times as a congested road or avenue does. I am going with the assumption that it does influence commute times and am now working on a design which makes use of a dual track for both monorail and subway with more stations attached. I am still unable to create a dual track design for passenger rail and I am starting to think that it might not be possible with my current set up. but if I can increase usage on the other forms then the single line design should be sufficient. as for the multi icon images: I centered my region view on the cities I wanted info from. then I hit the camera button and took four pictures of each city as it was selected making sure to use the same camera size and location for each picture. I then opened up two instances of MSPaint and cut and paste each icon into a single pic. I then saved the conglomerate pic and resized/resampled in IrFanview to 800x600, hosted offsite and away we go. it is also the same way I made the chart/graph conglomerates. mteach2000: thanks for the support. Perhaps if my new city design yields better results I will post them. I am starting to think that this forum (Rush Hour) was not the right forum for this topic. oh well.

your city is facinating. very comfortable and peaceful. I especially like the use of the streams and waterfalls. good job.

I am awed by the terraforming in this CJ. I have recently finished terraforming my own region and I know how much time something this detailed can take. very inspirational. keep it up.

you city looks very detailed and interesting. I will certainly try to follow the journal in the future. keep the updates comming.

I love the region view. very impressive and inspiring terraforming. it must have taken a while to get it just right. I also really like how your city is developing. great strip mall you have there. keep it going.

I see. well, if anyone else is interested I have come up with a new design which implements a double monorail and double subway line. I think the big reason my commutes were long was due to congestion. most every monorail and subway station in the center area was twice over max usage and the main arteries going out of the city were all red. At least I know the system was workin. oh well, here are some Industry pics. I think the whole parcelization thing worked out quite well. It let me keep controll of what industry buildings popped up and where. I will continue to use it from now on. although I will be experimenting with different sizes based on some new lots/BATS I just downloaded. http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9674/id6we.jpg align=baseline> http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/5026/im0yf.jpg align=baseline> http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4158/ihtbig0bw.jpg align=baseline> http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/2148/ihtsmall8an.jpg align=baseline> I need feedback people. and thanks to those that have given feedback so far.