The Republic of Terra Specula - Update 18: Teaser!

[rooker1]

Very interesting start Rady. 
You seem to have a very quaint little town.

Robin 

[Rady]

To my visitors:

scott1964: Hope you already found that lovely fishing port lots ..
Battlecat, Cyclone1001, rooker1: Thanks! Unfortunately I did some mistake with chosing "build all styles together", so I got a kind of building mismatch ... OTOH I'm not the kind of plopping fan right now ..



After some years of steady progress, the settlers encountered some mundane problems ... already some settler had begun to build their houses in some distant spots away from the population centres, and also the traffic on Wildbank bridge - heading for the industrial district - was close to a collapse.

So the further developement of the settlement needed to follow some thorougly planned scheme, if it weren't to fail. After some planning sessions, a settlement developement plan was presented: A new bridge was to connect the two sides of the bay, and zones for (long needed) commercial and additional residental zones were defined.



Immediately after, the bridge construction was under way.









Finally, after only 8 months of construction work, the new bridge was released for traffic.



Now called Wildbank Bay Span, it would soon prove well worth the money invested, as the zones connected by the new bridge developed rapidly. After having finished a hard piece of work, the workers were glad to spend a company-funded evening at the "Ol' Whalers Tavern" ...

[ShultzCity]

Great work!
Love the contruction area, adds so much realism to the township

[canyonjumper]

Nice! The construction really adds a touch to it 

                -Jordan

[shaylan221]

Great Update! Where can I find those construction lots?

[Cyclone1001]

Decent update, could have used a better bridge. In the end, looking good.

[Rady]

Great Update! Where can I find those construction lots?

It's the SFBT Construction Set, I think I found it at Simtropolis.

Decent update, could have used a better bridge. In the end, looking good.

You may be right ... it's just that I need to download some more bridges . Having different bridges wasn't a point for me up to now ... but as this MD moves on, I realize that I will have to download some tons of additional custom stuff    OTOH, following my storyline, my settlers aren't in a situation right now to have some stupendous bridge design, so I decided to use this basic bridge type.

[Tomas Neto]

Wow, great update again!!! Fantastic work!!! 

[Battlecat]

Very cool, the construction scenes are a nice touch!

[Rady]

Welcome to the 5th update!

To my readers:

@ ShultzCity, canyonjumper, Battlecat: Thanks - glad you like this detail. I would have liked to keep it, but - well, it was about the bridge ...
@ shaylan221: Hope you found the lots already ..
@ Cyclone1001: I keep your advise alive, but haven't had the time to search for additional bridges so far. But I promise to bring a new type of bridge next time I'm going to build one!
@ Tomas Neto: Thanks ... I spent some time at Vale Paulista already to fetch some ideas for designing rural areas .. so thanks for the inspiration!

Today I want to introduce Harding to you ...the village has been risen in the area that was assigend as a residental one some time ago (Update 4 ...). As you can see in the city view, it's located west of Willows Bay. The first houses have been built following the shore where the terrain is even. Later on, they settled down in the hilly area of that zone also. As a matter of fact, despite beeing one village, the people in the hills never really had any near contact with those living in the lowlands, and soon named theyr village Harding Hills.

5_01: Region View




5_02: A closer look on Harding





5_03: The main roads connects the two parts of that village




5_04: Insisting on beeing a "seperate" village, people in Harding Hills requested an own main road to the commercial area in the south ...





5_05: Some of the richer guys managed to settle down on a seperate part of the coast.





5_06: As the colony's wealth increased, more parks were built trougout the villages. This one is Hopkins Park in the middle of Harding Hills.

[Cyclone1001]

Very nice, I believe you should get some different houses. The Maxis ones work, but are kinda dull. Search mattb325 on the LEX, plemty of variety. Get a Maxis blocker. Its a good product from BSC.

[Rady]

I will have a look. Up to now, I concentrated on commercial and industrial stuff, since I was building big cities only. But when it comes to suburbs ... thanks for the hint!

[canyonjumper]

Harding and Harding Hills remind me of Vancouver, in the way that we have Vancouver, and then you have North Vancouver, North Vancouver City, West Vancouver, and there used to be a South Vancouver. Interesting stuff you've got Rady. ANd I agree with Cyclone1001, you should download the Maxis blocker. I imagine that in Terra Specula you'd have more interesting houses, because they aren't on Earth anymore. And I'm just curious, if they are using radio signals to communicate with Earth, how long would it take the transmission to reach Earth?

                     -Jordan

[Battlecat]

Very nice update, I like the terracing between the upper and lower parts of town.  Nice touch having them as separate communities!  Interesting that despite it being a fresh start on a new world, the typical political problems are still coming up between these communities!

[Rady]

Since it will now take some days until I will be able to add another update (there are some RL matters interfering with our little planet ..  ) I will at least try to respond to my readers regularly in between.

@ Cyclone1001, canyonjumper: I already downloaded the "No Maxis" plugin that allows you to seperately block Maxis res, com and ind buildings. For the start, I think I will only block the residental buildings. But there are two question that I need answered prior to any action:

1) Is there any known problem when installing the "No Maxis" plugin in an already developed city? Are the already existing Maxis buildings effected in any way? Or does it simply block new Maxis building from the moment on I install it?

2) I downloaded quite some residental stuff from the STEX today, and will add most of the res stuff on my LEX DVD. But will that cover up for the amount of different Maxis buildings? I mean, how many different Maxis res buildings (R$, R$$, R$$$) are there in the game? Or will I loose say 150 buildings and ad a total of 80 or 90? Actually I cannot really count how much buildings I'm going to add with that custom stuff. What I fear is that I end up with beautiful (non-dull) custom res buildings, but a lack of variety.

@ canyonjumper: Funny, I didn't know that fact about Vancouver .. well, basically I don't know any fact about Vancouver  . As for the communication .. taking into account that it took XP-J874-A 18 years to reach that distant planet, we actually do have a little lag in communication 

@ Battlecat: Thanks. Actually Harding turned out to be the first successful hill village that I ever created  . I had that before, but never thought of terraforming or something else, so all the buildings turned out with retaining walls and the like ... whenever I had a settlement in an hilly or mountenous area, it turned out bad  . And yes - the peoples behaviour unfortunately wasn't oblique to any transport constraints ... so it was easily imported 

[Cyclone1001]

I will (hopefully) answer your questions...

1) I'm not sure if there are problems, but if you demolish all Maxis buildings, it should work fine.

2) The variety and quality make up for amount. Also, there are plenty of residential, commercial, and industrial (growable) lots on the LEX and STEX, you can get TONS!

[canyonjumper]

There are no problem if you open an existing city. The mod doesn't let Maxis buildings build after you install it. Eventually all the Maxis you had before will be built over by the Custom stuff.

                 -Jordan

[Rady]

Thanks, that looks fine. Are there any suggestions upon which mod to use. Right now I have the BSC No Maxis Mod and the Dusktrooper No Maxis Mod ... any preferences? At the moment I would prefer DT's, 'cause it would let me block buildings by type (R,C,I) and wealth level ...

[canyonjumper]

DuskTrooper's mod is more specific, so I use that one.

                   -Jordan

[bat]

Great views of your city! Also nice work on them!
You have a nice MD!