---------------- On 10/27/2003 4:47:14 PM toroca wrote: I said a long time ago that I was going to create a mod that changed the Stage Caps to be more realistic, but I never got around to actually doing it. After playing with the Reader today, my interest got reawakened in this, and now I'm trying to find out if there's still interest for the idea. Here are my basic thoughts on how I'd set this up: 1.) Stage Caps on all forms of commerce would be lowered somewhat, so you'd start getting the larger commercial buildings earlier. 2.) Stage Caps on all residential would be increased significantly, so you'd have to get a higher population before you'd get the biggest buildings. With these two changes, you would see less of the 'downtown hole' problem that is common now, where your commercial core (assuming you have one) is dwarfed by the residential buildings around it. The idea is that commercial skyscrapers would appear LONG before residential ones, making for a more realistic city. I wouldn't be able to completely eliminate the problem of residential buildings being taller than commercial ones, for the simple reason that Maxis for some stupid reason made most of the game's tall towers residential, contrary to almost every real world city. But I could significantly reduce that problem by keeping the tall residential towers out until your population has grown very large. Note: This mod would NOT be for people who just want to get as high a population or as many skyscrapers as possible, because by making it harder to get the big residential buildings, it would by default become harder to get a high population and the big residential towers. This mod would be for people who want more realistic looking cities. So, what do you think? Would this be worth my effort to produce? If you're interested in this, please post here with comments and suggestions that I might be able to incorporate into this mod, assuming I actually do create it. EDIT - For those who don't know what Stage Caps are, they are controls Maxis put in the game that prevent you from getting towering skyscrapers when you first start a new region. They're meant to make your region grow more realistically, but they don't really work that way because of the size of the big residential buildings and because the commercial office stage caps are set the same as the residential stage caps, which ends up causing big residential buildings to appear first. The reason for that is that the Stage Caps are based on residents/jobs of each wealth level. So a city might have 50,000 people and thus be past the Stage Cap for Stage 8 (big) residential buildings to appear, but that same city may only have 20,000 commercial office jobs, so it would still be limited to smaller commercial buildings. Ask if you still don't understand. ---------------- Hrm. Now, I know I'm probably going to be laughed out of this thread but, one quick, small, simple question. How exactly would I go about changing the stage caps to my own personal prefrences and what modding/editing tool would I use?
