How to Demolish Lots That Are Hidden by Buildings

[z]

Sooner or later, anyone who plays this game a lot building big cities with lots of tall buildings comes across the situation where there's a small building that needs to be demolished, but demolishing it seems impossible because tall buildings hide it from view in every direction.

For example, there might be a Maxis bus stop, which can still be seen in the Traffic Congestion View.  When the city was first growing, its capacity of 1000 seemed plenty, but now it's overloaded to the point of malfunctioning.

Or there could be an elementary or high school which initially seemed to be plenty big, but which is now crowded way over capacity.  The teachers have gone on strike, but the capacity can't be raised any further; the building needs to be replaced with a bigger school.

Or there could be a very nice reward building that you just can't afford on your current budget.

Maybe there's a power plant that's gotten so old that it can't produce power any more, and it needs replacing.  Maybe you wanted a nice clean power plant near your buildings, so you plopped a nuclear power plant, and now it's about to BLOW UP! 

In all these cases, you have the choice of bulldozing many of your favorite skyscrapers just to get to the little building that needs demolishing, or you can just put up with the building's existence, count it as wasted space, and build elsewhere.  (Unless it's that nuclear power plant about to explode, of course.  )

Fortunately, there is a way to demolish virtually any lot without disturbing surrounding lots, no matter where the lot is, and regardless of whether or not you can see it.  The only requirement is that the lot must have at least one tile touching an above-ground network.  This tutorial will show you how to accomplish this.

In order to use this method, you will need the current version of RTMT (or a later version, when it comes out).  If you don't already have the current version, you can obtain it by installing the downloads Roadtop Mass Transit V3.50 and RTMT Add-On Pack V3.60.

Whenever you use this method, you should first save your city.  This cannot be stressed enough.  With a little slip of the finger, the demolishing of your bus stop can turn into the destruction of one of your favorite skyscrapers.  In such a case, if you have just saved your city, you can just exit to the region and try again.

Now let's take an actual example.  Here's a picture of the section of the city that we'll be working with:

Somewhere down at ground level, there's a branch library.  We don't need it any more, because we've just built a big library nearby.  So we'd like to demolish it and build another skyscraper.

In order to even see where this library is, we have to go to the Zones view:

The empty 2x2 area is where the library sits.  We can query it, as you can see, but of course we can't demolish it in the Zones view.  However, we can plop RTMT stations in the Zones view, and so that is what we do.  The 1x1 subway station works very well in this situation, as subway stations have their labels show up immediately here.  We just need to position the station on a road where it is directly next to the lot we want to delete.  When we do that, we see this:

Since we have just plopped a subway station, we are now in the Subway Building View, which is why the roads are a different color; the colors of the networks indicate their volume in this view.  Other than that, it's very much like the Zones view.

Now in the Data Views panel, we move the cursor to the "All Off" radio button.  But before we click it, we look at the subway station that we plopped, and we keep our eyes on that subway station as we click the button.

Once we click the button, we return to the normal Building View.  We select the Bulldoze tool, and now we move the cursor to where we placed the subway station:

As you can see in the picture, when we move the cursor to where we plopped the subway station, the subway station's label lights up in red, even though we can't see the subway station itself.  If we were to give our mouse a quick click now, we would simply demolish the subway station.

But that's not what we want to do.  Instead, we hold down the left mouse button, and drag the cursor into where the library is:

You can see that a larger square is now lit up in addition to the small subway station; the larger square is the library.  The low price shown for bulldozing shows that this is a small building that we're about to destroy.  We now release the mouse button, and the subway station and the library are both destroyed.  We now return to the Zones view:

Here we can see that our subway station is now gone; the fact that the query says "Unzoned Land" means that the library is gone as well.  (If it were not, the query would say, "City-Owned Land".)  Now we just connect the road back up, and zone for our new skyscraper!

We're all done.  You can see why this can be used to demolish virtually any building.  You may also recall that I said that the building only had to be facing an above-ground network.  What if it's only facing a rail line?  There are no RTMT stations for plain rail lines.  It doesn't matter, though.  Just demolish three squares of the rail, where the middle square is directly facing the lot you want to demolish.  (You can demolish network tiles in the Zones view.)  Then plop the RTMT station in the middle square, and proceed as before.  When you're all done, you can connect the rail line back up.

Occasionally, if the ground you're working on has a fair amount of slope, you may find that when you finish this process, you are unable to reconnect the original network, as the buildings that have grown up around it have anchored the ground too much to flex during the connection.  If you have other RTMT stations around, they may be the problem, and deleting and rearranging them may allow everything to be reconnected.  Or you can just exit to the region and try plopping your station in a different place; this often works.  If even this doesn't work, try going to the highest zoom and using the leveling tool on its lowest setting.  If you do this carefully, this will usually solve the problem, and the network can then be reconnected.

However, usually there's a much simpler way to resolve this problem  The solution is to use puzzle pieces, which are extremely slope-tolerant.   In general, Underground Rail puzzle pieces work extremely well; I have not found a situation that they can't fix.  FLUPS puzzle pieces also work quite well, although they seem to be slightly less tolerant of slopes.  Between the two of these, though, it should be possible to reconstruct any network.  Temporarily removing an RTMT station in certain places may be necessary, but they can be replaced in their original position, and then surrounded by puzzle pieces.  (Be careful of the CTD bug when you do this!)  Using the 1x1 RTMT stations where roads are concerned will make this process easier.

[RippleJet]

Ingenious! Thanks, Steve!

[travismking]

nice write up. Ive used this before too, works really well if you build on semi-flat land, without flat land ... not so well

[z]

nice write up. Ive used this before too, works really well if you build on semi-flat land, without flat land ... not so well

When the land isn't flat, it just gets a little trickier.  I've just added a paragraph at the end of the original tutorial describing how puzzle pieces can be used to get around the problem of sloped terrain.

[DCMetro2834]

Amazing...very interesting tutorial, thanks so much for posting! 

-DC

[A Nonny Moose]

Most useful.  Without the RTMT labels, this bug would be impossible to get around.