omegaschlange

Date: 10/24/2005 11:17:19 PM Author: Darksun23C Great, great CJ! Although, as a Bostonian, I must protest... You didn't mention Fenway Park! The old ballpark is right in the middle of the Fenway neighborhood, surrounded by resturants and transit stops. The Massachusetts Senate recently passed a new bill allocating $55 million for more transit upgrades and a new parking garage to be built over the Mass Pike to lower street congestion. Somebody's gotta push for Boston around here Darksun, where in Boston you live? I ask because I live in Newton (though next week I'm moving to Winthrop).... Anyway, a stadium in the middle of a neighborhood has its downsides of course. We need not forget the fiasco last year when the Sox beat the Yanks and afterwards the drunk college girl got shot by the police in the eye, and she died as a result! And I felt bad for the people in the Fenway who dislike the Rolling Stones. Drunken rioters are better contained in a sea of parking lots than let lose right in front of your door. So to put everything in extremes, choose which you would rather lose: your car, or your life. Of course, seldom do things boil to that point, but sometimes....

Date: 10/26/2005 8:08:08 PM Author: Jasoncw I liked the growable airport and seaport zones ALOT better. I like them so much, that I think it should be applied to other things as well. Growable Civic Buildings: There would be zones for: Health, Education, and Safety.  You would zone it, and then a hospital or whatever you zoned for would grow.  Once the capacity would overflow, it would build an expansion on itself somewhere else on the lot.  These zones also have the options available that I mentioned in my previous post, so you could control what style and how big and all that the hospital got. That's a pretty good idea. This makes me think of Boston (where I live): You have Longwood, the medical area, Government Center (self-explanatory), and so on. If nothing else, you should at least have the option to upgrade your civic buildings like you can do with the airport. This idea was mentioned earlier in the thread.

Date: 10/26/2005 3:58:11 PM Author: Pixelrage 1- bring back the water tool. Redo water from the ground up (literally). Make water be an important and very customizable part of this game, like it should have been from the get-go. Rivers that move in a specific direction...creeks that branch off of rivers. Lakes that can be a higher water level than the river across the city from it.  Allow the water level itself to be raised and lowered to your heart's content...even in certain areas. I completely agree with Pixelrage here. At least SC2K had the plopable water tiles, so you could create pseudo-waterfalls and place hydroelectric plants (how I powered just about all my old 2K cities). This bounces back to Pixelrage's fifth point and to the point I made about power plants in my previous post. PEG has a pretty cool hydro-electric dam, and I would like to see something like that in SC5. If you did build a dam, perhaps that would create a reservoir? That would require you making sure your terraforming is done extremely well so you don't completely flood the surrounding landscape, however. Speaking of power cables: I think it would be intersting to have power cables that run over the streets for trolleybuses and trams like in Europe and other places. This could easily be built in with the various transit options. 2- area-specific terrain (specified by you), instead of one grass & dirt skin for an entire region This of course would make for a lot more interesting regions and cities. Plus this doesn't seem like it would be to difficult to add to the game. 4- a persistent volcano that erupts at random would be nice That would be cool. As much a pain in the ass as random disasters are, I've actually missed them. Don't quite get a fuzzy feeling out of personally ordering a tornado to rip throug my city. 8- Proficiencies (farming, mining, fishing, textiles, steel, oil pumping, etc). Towns with high levels of certain industries are proficient in specific goods and services, and should be 'established' as so...this would affect region-wide trade and a virtual stock market as well.  Sim City 2000 *vaguely* hinted at something like this - there was a menu where you could see attributes like these and to what level your city was involved in them, but it had no impact on the game. This kind of reminds me of resource management like in the good-ol Ceasar games/Pharoah, and a million other games for that matter. Perhaps we all are morphing SimCity into something more like those games? 11- I might be alone on this, but I miss airport and seaport zones. I dont like having to plop down one big slab that I didn't create myself. I second the motion to return this feature for the seaport at least. I never really liked the complete randomness of how my runways were oriented, but if you could sub-zone the airport by where the terminals could grow, hangars, runways, etc. that would rock. I do miss building my seaport to match my coastline. I don't like the SC5 seaport - it looks like sh** and thus looks ridiculous. Of course, we demand too much from Maxis/EA for SC5. I'll be happy with just about anything they put on the market, because I know that it'll be reasonably good at worst, and totally awesome at best. I don't doubt the transition will be made to 3D, but I hope they leave the option for the same fixed angle hat you view in SC4. I don't like most truly 3D games - they make me queezy. And lastly, I suppose, I have one last thing: I really loved SimCopter (and it never made me queezy ). I enjoy the UDI missions, but they don't give the same feeling as SimCopter did (and Streets of Sims would have had it not made me queezy ). I hope Maxis will include something similar as part of the SimCity experience.

As I remember, Bend has a good subway system, but I haven't seen any evidence of public transport extending out to Platte - there's another $50 mil. the region will have to spend. Looking at the site, I think a nice pedestrian river-front district lined with three-story mixed-use buildings would boost the entire feel of the neighborhood, plus it could be a draw on its own for people to come to the area. (You could use PEG waterfront district bats for all this). You could even build a ferry terminal nearby to keep up the water-theme. An open stadium with it's north side abutting the newly constructed river-front area and facing towards the river could complement the whole setting (I'm thinking along the lines of the new-ish stadium in Seattle that faces out towards Puget Sound). Although, you might need to do something about the other side of the river in that case - people won't want to be looking at dirty, abandonded shacks and industrial warehouse. Anyway, throw some cute two-story buildings, with restaurants on the ground floor, directly across the street from the stadium on the remaining three sides. Beyond that build some cool row houses like those seen in the picture of Wrigley field. Eventually this can dissipate into the single-family homes in the rest of the district. Then again, is the entire Platte region going to be torn to the ground or just the area immediately surrounding the old industrial site?

Here's my two cents: 1) Mixed zoning - not because of any New Urbanism allegiance, but just because it would add a touch of variety and realism 2) Season/Climate changes: I'd like to see actual rainfall, snow, etc. fall from the clouds that hover overhead, and this would further be based upon the time of year and altitude. Some mods have started addressing what I'm getting at (for example the mods that cause foiliage to turn color in fall). 3) For advanced players, the option to have more precise neighborhood zoning. I'd like to dictate whether buildings in a certain area are allowed to be only single-family, multi-family, two story, three story, etc. I think this would build off the option in Rush Hour of having only certain building sets built. In one city I created, I wanted to have a Back Bay, Boston type of feel, so I set the building set for Chicago 1890 and made historical all the row houses, while destroying those buildings that didn't fit what I wanted. Zoning options and building sets could help create small Chinatowns or what-have-you. Overall it would be easier to get a neighborhood feel. 4) As others have said, I'd like more control of the public transport system, specifically fares and routes (and perhaps even schedules if SC5 would have a daytime clock like SC4). I don't really agree with the possibility of building a city with no roads whatsoever. The only place I can think of that's anywhere like that is the old center of Venice - although admittedly it would be pretty cool to be able to build your own Venice in SC5. 5) I second the motion about more flexibility in roads. Roads should be able to curve, and lots should be able to be oriented according to the road. I always hate it when buildings don't orient themselves to the face of the street because the street runs diagonally rather than north/south/east/west. 6) Healthcare: I don't know about others, but my hospitals run me dry. Why can't private corporations build hospitals that might be subsidized at a lower cost to the city budget? Now I'm just complaining. 7) Most of all, the complete revamping of the power system, which I think is completely unrealistic. Utility bills were made to help offset the cost of power production! Either the amount of power you get per plant for your money needs to change, or you need to be able to recuperate some of your loses by charging for the utilities. Probably way too much to ask for, but I wanted to throw it out there as possibilities.