soldyne

wow, I am stunned by the effort put forth for such a CJ as this. I am trying to start a CJ from scratch myself (terraforming a large region by hand and what not) and RLS always slows me down. How do you find the time to do such a wonderful project?

assassinlngl: I think the answer to your question is a two edged sword. mainly you want traffic and volume infront of your commercial zones. the idea behind traffic is that the sim is sitting in traffic and has a chance to look around at all the shops and thinks to themselves hey I should go shop there later when I have more time. essentially traffic is free advertising for commercial. Volume is obviously good since the more sims that pass by the more people they can advertise to. now the question about roads or avenues. In a small city (less than 200k or so) roads will be great in commercial zones. However, when you start getting skyscrappers and 5000 job buildings popping up on your commercial roadways the traffic will be so bad that the commute times will cause people to move out, you will get NJZ all over the place and your cities growth will stop or fall. with 0 or no city growth you are looking at bad times for commercial and everything else. Eventhough avenues will create less traffic in a smaller city they will provide a decent level of traffic and high volume in a large city which will still give your comm zones adequate advertising and allow your sims to get to work on time. so I guess the answer is that you need to plan ahead. roads are good for small and medium cities but when traffic gets into the red you really should get a one-way or expand into an avenue if possible.

I use a grid system mainly because of the way i live my life: ordered, planned, and efficient. I have a hard time even trying to make a random city with roads every which way. I will spends days with graph paper, ruler, pencil and just sit and draw out grid patterns trying to calculate just the right number of squares, where different civic builds will go and how the transport system will work. I love to think and plan. it's kind of like a hobby of mine. I am trying out an experiment though. I have just recently figured out how to create my own city layout in the region view. With this i plan to build a region from the ground up starting with farms, then working up to industry and finally into a huge megalopolis. I would like to make it a city journal but i need more planning!!! I plan to make the magalopolis out of 9 connected large city tiles. these large cities will be my ultimate grid design. I am actually experimenting with what i like to call metagrids. grids within grids. the metagrid design is still in its planning phases but essentially i am trying to take future transit expansion into account as well commercial and residential commute times and what not. the basic idea is to start with a 6x6 block (standard block), then make a larger grid of 9 of those blocks connected with roads (road block, no pun intended). surround this road block with an avenue, this creates a new Avenue Block . take four of these avenue grids and make a space between them big enough for the largest rewards (about 12 squares, the country club) and in the center of the four will be a 12x12 square. this is where the civic buildings are placed and it just so happens to be just the right size for nearly full coverage of the four avenue blocks (hospital and education). this is what i call a civic block. finally, i plop four of the civic blocks with enough space between them for a highway and the center square is big enough for a cloverleaf interchange (can't remembe the size of an interchange). This is about how far my design has gotten, not sure if I'll create any larger blocks than that (i might not have enough room to!). if not than that will be my pattern for the whole town. I would only like to have at most two highways per large city (a N-S and an E-W intersecting in the middle. this is what i still need to plan out. Im not at my home computer right now so i cant take a screen shot to show you what the blocks look like. I will try to get a shot later today and post it. I like the design so far but I am not sure how viable it is. anyway, great discussion so far and just remember what Tony the Tiger might say about grids... They're Grrrrrrrrreat!