Flatt's Landing

[petercintn]

Flatt's Landing
Hello everyone.  I have recently been a 'beta tester' for SC5.  I, like everyone else, had high hopes for the new Sim City but these hopes were dashed with the beta.  Ever hopeful, a couple of expansions could right the boat and smooth the waves of SC5.
 
I had never gotten very far with SC4, but I enjoyed the game immensely.  I found myself looking around the main SC4 sites and found, (TA DUM!) SPAM.  Now that's how I always wanted to play the game.  I find big cities in SC4 ugly and have never played the game for them.  I finally tried one of those MDs years ago but my health and the commitment level of the MD did not mix well.  It did not last long.  That's ok, my attitude and commitment level has gained me two divorces, is there a pattern emerging?

So... I am willing to try this again.  Until I am banned for bad game play or whatever.  My health is what it is and times a wasting, let's get on with the intro.

Ok, as I said I found SPAM.  I have, unless I missed something, downloaded it all with the add-ons.  That I assume is the core mod I am playing with.  I have all of Simgoober's replacement mods.  And here is a look at the mods folder I am playing with and a look at my plugins folder.

(Mods folder pic)


While looking at this folder and thinking that's a whole lot of mods, I saw the CP_PalmtoLodgepole.dat file, a leftover from where I did a pine tree game so I changed to Cp_PalmtoAspen.dat but was too lazy to do a repic.  If anyone sees a conflict or a better file or just a thought of how I could do it better, please let me know.

(Plugins folder pic)



Flatt's Landing is going to be a rural MD and I have nothing planed.  I have no experience with the finer things of NAM and not much experience with the finer things of SC4.  I am using the Cape York region which I have renamed Flatt's Landing.  I am playing every city on hard and will play with no money cheats, or the 'you can't have it unless you can pay for it' mode of play.  That being said I will use money cheats to reimburse cities for things such as interstate highways and other things that I deem Sim Nation should pay for and include this info in the MD.  I am using Peg's MTP Terrain mod (the textures seem to blend better with this), the MissouriBreaks cliff, rock and MuddyWater textures, the MeadowshireRiver tree controller and the Riverside beach mod.  I will on occasion show how each city is doing in the nuts and bolts of game play.  I will give details on anything asked for that I understand enough to give details, and will seek out answers from the experts if I can. Yeah, right.
 
That's enough introduction, hope you enjoy. Here's the region for you to look at and a teaser after four years before I take another game year to detail the landscape for close up pics.

(Region pic)


(Teaser pic)


I hope you will enjoy looking at the pics and even reading the MD, it is not going to be serious and I hope to have a lot of fun doing this.  Any questions feel free to ask.

[Flatron]

Looks promising

[art128]

What a beautiful region you have there! Looks really good.

Nice teaser picture too and good organization of the plugins!

Looking forward for more.

[Swordmaster]

Nice views! Let's see what happens.


Cheers
Willy

[Ricky112233]

Nice! I really like the 'patches' of forest around the region, and it looks like a gorgeous place to live

Cheers

-Ricky

[Schulmanator]

An interesting start. I look forward to more.

[Reform]

Wait, what? SC4D does not have Popcorn smiley? Well, in the house, please. Old Ref is placing his Maximus gluteus down and will patiently wait for the next update.

You do know that you can build SPAM farms in almost any form, while they are at least 16 tiles? Give them a little variety, for your own pleasure.* 

- I

*As general note, there is mod to do the same with default and other custom farms as well.

[Varnado]

Nice work doing something interesting with the trees, it would be cool if you could also add in bushes and/or copses of different tree species. Should work well to blend in some of those open fields and give more of a wilderness type feel.

I'm looking forward to seeing how you deal with laying out farm fields and developing towns in the dense areas of glacial lakes in the lowlands of the region. Such irregularly shaped places usually end up looking pretty cool in real life, or at least they do from Google Maps.

[petercintn]

Flatt's Landing


"Sign here and here and here, initial here and here."  Jeb Flatt leaned over while his brothers Zeb, Reb and Neb looked on as Jeb signed the deed.  When he finished, Jeb handed the deed back to the Mayor of District 2487.
"Here Amie, notarize this."  They all watched as Amie bent over to retrieve the stamp from her desk.  There was no sound as Amie squeezed the instrument.

"Well, well, there it is boys, a 20 large and 8 medium city deed.  Right nice one, if you will forgive me, flat as hell, right on the coast... well you've seen the maps.  Wish I was going with you, well I wished I wished I was going with you, hell I'm too fat and lazy to do anything anymore.  So I'll get Amie to give me reports on you Flatt boys, I do wish you well.
 
The Flatt's gathered their belongings, their wives and children and headed out to their new land, with pilgrims to share the burden and glory of the new Flatt's Landing. 

The four brothers chartered a plane and told the pilot where they would like to land.  The pilgrims were on their way with alll the supplies the brothers had purchased.  The Flatt's were not quite dead broke, but they only had money to keep the city going for a short while.  Of course, profits must be made.  The brothers started by building a dock for the supplies and the pigrims who were three months away on a ship traveling the never ending Sim and Peep World.  The four brothers gardened and labored to eek out their existence.



For five years the Flatt's and their families labored, people came from the far reaches of the Sim Nation.  The Flatt Brothers and top agents of Flattland had a Five Year Planning Board.

"Ok," Jim Parsons, the secretary opened up the meeting, "The first item up is that Patagonian Feed & Farm Supplies wants the road lengthened to surround their store."

"Yeah, we've all been there and it would be easier on the trucks if we did this and it won't cost us much."

"I agree."

"Me too!"

"Ok, I take it this passes?" Nobody said a thing. "All right, passed, Jim?"

"All right, let's talk about ordinances, it has been brought to my attention that our medical services suck.  Well, I told them you gotta have something for it to suck.  I'm sure you've all heard this, so do we enact a free clinic and/or a cpr training program for these folks.

"This one is going to cost us." Piped up Reb. "But we got to have Medical.  If we had a doctor when Steve Stone
got mauled by that thrasher he might have be here now."

Robert Norwood injected, "We have a thousand simoleons a month to play with and I say we get this done.  There were no nays.

"Ok." Jeb said, "We will start both ordinances and look into and implement a start up of  small medical services or whatever gives us medical care as cheap as possible."

Oakly Crabapple interjected, "We must have fire protection or everthing could up in smoke, only this won't be funny like the movie."

"There goes any profit I was hoping to reap out of this place."

"Maybe for now, but you knew this coming in"

Neb retorted, " Oh hell, I was only complaining, don't a man get to complain every now and then?"  Then Neb turned to the others, "Got to have it."

It was Jeb's turn to look around the room.  "Let's try to get a small part of this back.  We need to enact a parking fine system and think about legalizing gambling."

"I'm all for the parking fine thing, but gambling will just bring crime and we'll need a police force.  It will just cost more to clean up than pay us." Mr. Norwood said.

" I agree" Seconded Oakly.

Jeb realized that he did not have the support for gambling now. "Ok, let's table the gambling till we have a viable police force and then talk about it."

"Ok."

"Sure."

Other murmurs could be heard and then everyone quieted down.

"The Timber Lumber Co. has contacted me and wants to lease land from us to grow pine trees for a small lumber mill they want to build here." Jeb told them.

"That sounds like a win-win situation," Reb said.  "Get taxes from them and money for letting them use our land to keep their company going so they can pay more taxes to give us more rent, so on and so forth."

"Sounds like a winner to me."

"Alright, I'll get up them and tell them to get going with their plans."

"We need an airport."

"What?" exploded Reb. Murmurs turn to shouting real quick.

"Whoa, boys!" Jeb yelled louder than than everyone else.  "Let's not get carried away here."

"But a FRACKING AIRPORT!"

"Who said that anyways?"

Zeb just hung his head, "My wife made me ask."

Everyone who had been about to start a small tactical war just a second ago, started cracking up.  The laughing got so hysterical that people had to sit down and tears streamed down some of the men's faces.

"Hey Zeb, why don't you just send her to the next meeting?"  More roars of laughter.

" Is she toting both them in one pocket or got one in each?  Reb fell out of his chair and had a hard time catching his breath.  A new round of laughter went around the room.

"God Zeb" Reb shook his head.

Zeb hung his head like a hound dog.

"Any other business?" Jeb

"Well," Robert said, "we have those three boats coming with all those pilgrims."

"How many?"

"Don't know." Answered Robert.

"Neb you'll have to get on those housing plans."

"Already started."

"OK, anyone one want to tell me why we have three car lots in town?"

"It's called free enterprise, Jeb"

"But three of them?  There's only twenty-five hundred sims here."

"It will all work out in the wash, Jeb"

"You wait, one of the will want us to subsidize them."

" Hey, Let's look at those pictures that nice girl, Amie sent us from the overfly."

There were nods of agreement around the room.

[petercintn]

Thanks for the nice replies.

@Flatron - Are you a two dimensional creature?  ;>
@Art - I hope this gives you just a little smile reading this.
@Swordmaster - I want to see what happens, too.
@Ricky - I wish I could take credit but the tree controller does all the tree layouts.
@Schulmanator  - I hope it keeps going well, thanks for the encouragement.
@Ilja - I shall give that a try, thanks.
@Varnado - I shall try to flush the region out with that kind of stuff, but I am no master at this game.  Thanks for the tip.

[benedict]

Wow, that is one huge update. Nice work.

[rooker1]

Interesting pics and good story. The last update was great, lots of wonderful pics.

Robin