MrFingers

Highways are interesting. You need to step back and look at your overall terrain, where are people going to live, where are they going to need a route to get to the city center? I like to trace river fronts or mountain range bases as these often define where people will live. Then you need to get people to use the highway. Think of the system as a tree or blood vessel network. you go from street, to road, to avenue, to highway. don't give them the option of taking a side road all the way to work, because they will. you have to control traffic flow by creating branches of residential areas, forget grids, think about arteries and veins, let the developement grow to fit the landscape and it will be much easier.

My personal favourite is extremely effective with directing road traffic. Because the Sims always take the shortest path to work, you can count on them taking a diagonal avenue if it is properly placed - triangle sides etc. Diagonal avenues, when placed intelligently, are therefore your friend. I like to start by sizing up the core of my downtown and then start splaying avenues off at different angles and then developing those areas one at a time.

trains are easily the best. train and bus combo never fails

no.

if u develop more than one city and connect them up it helps your demand alot. I also dont think u can get tall commercial with just one city's demand....

I'm actually quite fed up with this BS now. Let's take my most recent example. I have two cities, both small, one industrial, one commercial and residential. I have NAM, I use extensive public transportation and ALL my roads are congestion free - oh that includes my subways/rails too. Yet STILL I get dilapidated and abandoned buildings due to "commute time". I think I'm about to go nuts. It's totally ridiculous, these freakin sims are travelling such painfully short distances, but still screwing about with supposedly long commute times!!! Is there a way to speed up commute times or something?! I'm dying to build a functional region, but if the little bastards can't handle a trip across one small city, then how on earth am I going to get a whole region to work properly?!!! I absolutely know that this is not an issue of my city's network being inadequate, so please no responses in that vein as they are just pointless. Please help me! - One fustrated SC player. P.S. I should mention that I'm using a mac and that on the commute graph the y axis is very low numbers, from 0 to no more than 5. I think that was a result of installing NAM without having the update available for mac, but I'm not sure. This may be relevant info.

according to the PC users here u need to get ilive and open the file simcity1.dat and it's in there

i always delete abandoned buildings asap ... the non abandonment mod is useless as all it does is prevent the building turning black, but they still get abandoned, so then u have to query buildings instead.

Yeah I would say build another couple of ferry terminals spread along the coast. Your sims are using that because its their most direct route out of the city, just provide them with more ferries or delete it all together. recommend deleting it actually and seeing what happens. your roads are set up for the other route, not the ferry, i believe.

Can you guys give me a few pointers on how to go about this? Things like how should you design and direct arteries, which cities to start with first (is your downtown the right one to begin with), how should you incorporate the landscape, etc etc etc. Just anything you can think of that will help, thanks

I think it would be a good idea to leave that city be and connect it in time to my center no? I don't think there is enough flat land there for that tile to be anything more than just a farming village.... shall I take a screenshot of my region?

Should point out though that Florida IS sprawl in every direction.

Thanks Jacqulina, coming from you especially that means alot! Your farmlands are staggering There is something I have come to realise. When you first start playing this game, like I did a couple weeks ago, you try to bend your landscape to fit your city plans, but as your style matures you bend your city plans to fit your landscape. I think if you can make that gradual transition whilst retaining functionality that's when your cities start to come together.... not sure though as I'm still learning alot of new things here.

Wow you guys liked that?! awesome, maybe I have some talent after all! YourNickname, I did that by first winding the railroad in, the town then had an obvious natural location after I cut that corner in the river with the railroad. Then with the farms, I just shift-placed it with no roads, then trimmed the edges to approximately the same elevation and cut it up with roads. I'm still banging my head over how to start this town center though maybe I'll just keep trial and erroring....

Is this what you meant by a farming village? It is sunken in a valley with a river side railroad running through it as it's only connection. My problems are more with the built up areas I think... I don't know how to begin construction. should I just put a 6x6 grid down and then start splaying neighborhoods off it?

Big downtowns depend on: 500,000+ region population Large amounts of traffic flows Good accessibility Building Rewards

The toughest part is the conceptual stage. once youve got a city started its easy, I know what you mean

I have the same problems too... from what I gather it's all about making it the transportation focal point in your region and basing it roughly on grids. I think that last point can be bent quite alot though.

suggest you play the in game tutorial... if u are having problems as fundemental as that. It's difficult for us to go as basic as how to zone land and connect it to jobs, you need that to be shown to you first hand - try the tutorial.

For anyone who has the same problem as me, I believe I have found the solution. When you download NAM you have to chuck away a whole bunch of files. In this case there is a folder called "Traffic_Plugin_Files" which contains a whole bunch of files which modify key parameters affecting this problem. You only need one of these files, their names are fairly self explanatory and you should just chose the one you want to keep and throw away the rest. If you leave all these files together you give the program conflicting instructions and I believe this is why I was having such problems with commute times.

This game is made by americans, in america people don't know what walking is outside of the major cities. Don't mean to rub any of you up, and if it makes you feel better, know that I'm half american too... but let's face it, americans drive EVERYWHERE outside of the major cities... and people wonder why a third of the country is obese.

I believe that means how far from the road a sim will travel, since it is one that means adjacent...

Could you be a bit more specific so we can change these values too? Just tell us what to look for and what to change it too...