How to play on "Large" tiles

[pepsibottle1]

Hey, it's me again. Just wanted to bring up a pet peeve of mine.

I have a bunch of NHP regions that I've downloaded. The maps themselves are great, I could not find anything more detailed if I had tried. The problem is with how the regions themselves have been divided. I find it very hard to create a realistic city by using large tiles; they're just far too big landwise. Does anyone else have that problem? Often, I'll make a wonderful city but am nowhere near close to taking up 50% of the tile. And if I did fill up the tile, my city would have more people than the region would itself.

Now I know all about the config file, but I don't want to mess around with that because knowing me, I'd screw something up. I'd be more than willing to work with someone to make configs for NHP maps, but for the meantime, how do you guys take on large city tiles?

[usfwoody]

Don't be afraid to 'not build.'  You can create forested areas of the tile.  Make a city center to your liking, with suburbs, and when those are finished, and you still have room around the edge(s) of the tile, just make a nice forest.  Check out some of the great rural MDs like "Rural Life of Vale Paulista" and AntigOne's latest MD entry.

[wallasey]

I always build on big tiles; in real life some urban areas are more spread out than we care to appreciate. Build a good set of parks, give your schools some playing fields. Spread your $$$ areas out to have two or three tiles between each street.

Have a play with it and see what happens!

[pepsibottle1]

I've tried that but for me, I can either fill the whole tile with an ungodly amount of residential area, or I can spread things out, but that sort of defeats the concept of inter-city travel.

Maybe it's me, but I find it extremely difficult to play on large tiles.

[MandelSoft]

^^ There are a few good methods to avoid that:
- Lay down some farm zoning around your city. When your city grows, you can reclaim these patches of land and convert them into some other zone.

- Place parks and fillers! Lots of them! Not only does your city look more green and spacious, but also it satisfies your city's inhabitants. Eventually you might get this (extreme example):


- Leave room at railways, main avenues and freeways. People don't like noise (noise pollution) and not only do you make your city look realistic, it also looks good. It may look like this:


Hope these tips are helpful!

Best,
Maarten

[pepsibottle1]

Thanks Maarten, I'll be sure to try that when I get home this evening!

[Lowkee33]

Do the sound barriers actually reduce traffic noise?

[MandelSoft]

In-game: no, since noise pollution is not accounted for in the SC4 Simulator
In RL: there is a significant difference, because these walls redirect the sound waves from the freeway. But the barriers you see on my picture will only reduce traffic noise to a certain height, so high-rises would still be affected by noise pollution.

[Andreas]

Do the sound barriers actually reduce traffic noise?

As far as I know, the only way to reduce the traffic noise is modding the transit network (via the exemplar files in the traffic simulator). What most soundwalls do is increasing the desirability (usually a strong park effect over a short distance), so the negative impact of the traffic noise is counterbalanced with a more attractive vicinity.

[pepsibottle1]

Hate to go off topic here but sound barriers are considered a nuisance around my parts. They just added some to I-64 (which is right behind my house) a couple of years back and there was a great outrage about it. Noone wanted to live next to a bunch of those ugly, brown walls, plus there were never any complaints about the sound to begin with. To add insult to injury, the area they installed the barriers around was renowned throughout the city as the place to go see Christmas lights. Every year, they would set them up and you could see them from the highway. Now that the barriers are up, the tradition sort of died because everyone eventually forgot about them altogether since they were no longer visible from the highway. Instead of having park effects, I'd prefer to have the soundbarriers as a prop to the RHW or what not. That's just my opinion though and a whole different thread altogether