Gamingforce Community SimCity 4 Region Project

Originally Posted by KrazyTaco

(lol fix your FTP merv >_> )

OK, get me a new DSL modem.

Seriously, it's been broken for the past year or so, and my dad has absolutely refused to get a replacement, or even acknowledge that there's even a problem with it, and I'm sure when it gets hot out, the thing just doesn't want to work.

you can find mine here.

Sorry for the delay.

Circopolis - http://www.sendspace.com/file/6n4clu
Micropolis - http://www.sendspace.com/file/5n5k80

I am an idiot. I had the region uploaded at some point between yesterday and today, but forgot to even make a post about it.

Download region, it's only missing dragon87's cities, I believe.

2050 will be due next Friday night.

Back from holidays. I'll get back into this and cities up by Friday.

I'm going to grab lot 3 as a garbage and resource center.

"Revolving Door" isn't much of a place to live or work, unless you're a big fan of digging through yesterday's garbage to find today's meal. Neighboring cities can save land by building growing zones and allow Revolving Door to produce the land needed to take away their garbage or supply them with water.

Just a notice, my web host is doing, uh, something, so everything is 404'ing on it. So if you haven't downloaded the latest region by now, and absolutely needed it, you're kind of boned for now.

On the other hand, my modem has stabilized (cross your fingers!) so I made sure the DynDNS name was pointing to the right IP address, and hopefully it should be working when everything gets updated.

2050 Report Time ^_^

TacoStand
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* Um... I know I did something since 2040... Maybe not. I think I threw in a few bus stops or something, maybe planted some trees. Nothing significant though.

Beeftopian
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This one is becoming a sort of test bed city for me. This decade I decided to play around with mass transit systems in-depth. The result? The Mass-Transport features are not b0rked like I had previously thought. I know Merv had at one point said you need craploads of stops at virtually every street corner for it to work, but I never actually believed you needed that much. Well anyways, I was wrong. Examples ahead~

First - A reminder, Beeftopian is located on a small lot. The city is crammed with commercial located in residential's backyard, and some high tech industry in the same backyard for good measure. Free land is unheard of here. With this in mind, testing mass transit here is perfect. Every street is jammed to the high heavens with cars. You could watch a single stretch of road for 1 minute and see multiple accidents. So I cleared out some abandoned residential and start building some mass transit, bus stations and subways.

Heres an overview of the city in 2050.


After building my network of traffic stuff, traffic isn't half bad
Traffic Overview:

There are about 2-3 stretches of road that are critical still of course.
Infact, the demand is so high for the mass transit, my stations are getting overcrowded at a 3:1 ratio of Actual to Capacity. Unfortanately, the game is EXTREMELY PICKY about where you put bus stops and subway stations. It amazes me that I can put a bus stop in one location and get 3000 users, then putting a bus stop right next to it along the same road and have only 40 users.

Because of this, I just don't have enough prime road space to plant more subways and bus stops, so these roads will just have to suffer. I've done what I could for now and paved them over with asphalt. In the next decade Ill look into knocking out development along those roads and turning them into avenues. This requires that I knock out some prime commerical space though, along with an elementary school.

Some more random traffic pictures:



In short though: Clearly it's possible to make manageable traffic. It comes at a high price though, often requiring you to destroy high-value existing development to put in a cheap $50 bus stop. I actually question if it's worth the price associated with it.

Indianopolis:
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Still as trashy as ever.

Actually, I haven't gotten any response from folks concerning interest. I'm going to go ahead and personally contact the mayors that lie in the path of my projected first trash route line. The only way to get my trash line idea to work effectively in SC4 is to have everyone along the path agree to do it, since you can't fly trash to one city but skip another along the way.

Yea, having a LOT of stops is necessary to have a working mass transit system. I opted for trains here since subways were way too expensive for a small lot of 60,000 sims. Sims will roughly walk no more than 5 tiles away unless their work is within 10 tiles or something small like that (50 minutes of commute time). Pedestrians crossing roads does not count as crossing a tile.

I kinda cheated out a lil bit and got a new plugin since it was so hard to even consider bulldozing 4x2 developments to fit in bus stops. Maybe if I get at least $100,000 built up income in my cities could I think of a city overhaul. I think my last post said something about the plugin I use. It is more or less a space saver and would help you from demolising your 4x4 and 4x2 skyscrapers. I know el jacko said there is that option in the NAM essentials but I never saw them and he never got back to me about those dual road/stop tiles.

Probably since you won't be able to see them in my cities, I'll post pictures how well my transit system works.



Yes, they walk and bus more than cars. Train works well to cull the traffic between my other city. Remarkably, they also bus out of town which cuts down on the perimeter traffic.



I started with train lines from the start of this city. I added bus stops during the year 40 -> 50 cycle which expanded commerce and growth even more than before. Yes those are orange train stations experiencing moderate traffic (yellow is about 2k passengers, darker is closer to 3k. I think I had a 4k passenger load on my other city)



Just showing the lines from a single train station into and through my commercial hub. Since photobucket shrunk it, It says 1450 cars going in, 495 bus, 2618 train.

So mass transit isn't broken. You just need a lot of redundancy since there aren't stops between bus stops or train stations. Just think of a stop/station as that little stop on the corner of a major road. They are placed every 1/4 to 1/2 a mile. I just wish the default ones didn't take any space.


And one last thing. Incinerators do wonders to trash. Stick it next to an airport and you're set for a good long while. Burns about 300 tons a month, and you don't even need to fund it if you don't want the energy!

I'll report back if I can manage a year 80 goal to have 100% of the underground covered in subway lines in Forest Park.

And you can get the bus stop mods that place it on the road and cause just a bit of traffic when they go through. I'd do it, though.

I like how everything has gone batshit insane money wise. Everyone is rich beyond sense this decade. Surely someone will have to shoulder slums to balnce it all out?

Yasure Maw is doing wonderfully, Mial's Hope continues to chug along, boganup and Palletton are not the holes I hoped they would be.

I'm not rich ^_^

Anyway, I uploaded my 2050 cities just earlier today. Wayside has the largest airport now, Wayfront has the second largest airport and a seaport, and Plankton has neither.

Are the ships at the seaport supposed to move? I mean with airports, you see planes flying around in the sky, but I've never once seen a ship moving with a seaport. It kinda sucks. I wanna see moving ships :(

My 2050s won't be uploaded until tonight, but I'll say it now:

Mass-transit sucks wang. Yes, people will eventually use it, but it'll become really costly. I seriously doubt anyone has yet to manage to PROFIT from it. I think I've got ~100,000 people that use it and I still pay tenfold on the fares.

I wish we could use a mod for setting transit prices. Highways seem so much more cost-effective.

My city has about a quarter million inhabitants now and I don't have a single mass transit system. My entire city is an agglomeration, but I definitely have to do something about that =/

It does profit if people use it. I think it isn't the case with subways. They are a lot more expensive than rail. And a single mass transit system really can't act alone. They compliment each other if built well. Like using the subways to link far places and bus stations to fill in the gaps in between.

And I have seen ships move on my map when I was just messing around. However, they tend to disappear quickly when they travel under bridges, at least on my map with a narrow harbor exit.

Originally Posted by Lukage

My 2050s won't be uploaded until tonight, but I'll say it now:

Mass-transit sucks wang. Yes, people will eventually use it, but it'll become really costly. I seriously doubt anyone has yet to manage to PROFIT from it. I think I've got ~100,000 people that use it and I still pay tenfold on the fares.

I wish we could use a mod for setting transit prices. Highways seem so much more cost-effective.

Running the NAM with higher capacities/speeds generally makes the transit more efficient. That being said, my city Dystopia already makes some profit, and that's running GLR network with incredibly expensive stations. I took a random screenshot of it, you can see it here (note: 2.5MB in size).

If you like, you can also view screenshots of my cities Dystopia and Timisoara here. Each image is large and about 2.5MB each.

here are my cities at 2050.

Hang on, so mass-transit actually makes money? This is a shocking revelation to me, as I thought it was an expense with only a slightly higher mayor approval rating boost if you kept manageable traffic in the city. I was under the impression the only way to make money off transit systems was to setup toll booths.

(Tried that once on a busy exit to another city, it made squat :/ )

Originally Posted by cabbitluvcarrot

It does profit if people use it. I think it isn't the case with subways. They are a lot more expensive than rail. And a single mass transit system really can't act alone. They compliment each other if built well. Like using the subways to link far places and bus stations to fill in the gaps in between.

And I have seen ships move on my map when I