Realistic Cities For Dummies

[yochananmichael]

Wow! Chris fantastic work as always. I know you said this was based around suburbs in the UK but I could swear they look alot like suburb estates I have routinely seen all over the US as well. Fantastic Job can't wait till we see the inner city tutorial.

-Chip

[mike3775]

Look good smiley.  Very realistic.  The only thing I wish the game could do is allow you to decide whether to put stop signs in if you want based on length of roads, because in many small towns(not sure of UK though), roads that may have only a few houses on them and dead end usually have yield signs and the other road doesn't stop at all.

[smileymk]

Hey guys.

yochananmichael: Thank you very much. I thought US suburbs usually followed a loose grid layout, but obviously not. It just proves I'm learning a lot from this too.

mike3775: Yes, I'd like that too. Here in the UK we usually have a Give Way sign where a side road ends on a main road like you've described. In my side projects I've made a Give Way sign with the BAT to solve this problem, as well as other signs that don't appear in the game that should like speed limit signs, direction signs, etc. We may well make some in Project 4.

And now, lesson time.

Lesson 22 - Inner City and Coast

In this lesson we're going to learn how to build an inner city as well as how to zone and build the buildings for the seafront.

We will start with the inner city. For those who don't know what an inner city is, it is the area wedged in between the city centre and the suburbs, and is usually comprised mostly of fairly dense residential areas. It's a good place to find compact, back-to-back terrace housing as well as plenty of small shops.  You might also see a few blocks of flats in there too.
There are plenty of ways to build an inner city, but my method is as follows:

Begin by creating a grid of streets such that they form 12x6 tile blocks:


Now we're going to fill the blocks with medium density zoning. Use commercial along the main roads and residential everywhere else. Make sure you fill all the space, apart from one block in the centre:


So what do we do with that block in the middle? we fill it with amenities - a primary school, a few shops and appropriate parking should suffice:


Note that the commercial zoning here is low density. We want convenience stores and chip shops, not office blocks.

You can also add some playgrounds if you wish - but remember that this is an inner city and space will be sought after - so don't build too many.

Our plan calls for some inner city development around our main railway station, bringing us to a rule of thumb - major railway stations should always be surrounded by commercial zones. With suburban stations it's different, but we're dealing with a mainline terminus here so we need to zone for plenty of shops:


Yes, there is residential development close by, but the street next to the station has commercial along it around the front of the station.

You can make use of diagonal streets to create neat corners for your inner city like so:


And that is the essentials of inner cities covered. Now to move on to the coastline.

Generally speaking, in a city there should be a road along the coastline - but we've got that already so we're fine there. In the central area of the city, you want to have commercial zoning along your seafront. Zone high density in CBD areas, and medium density in inner city areas:


Outside of the central area, you need to provide high-wealth residential along the coastline - people like living by the sea and coastal properties are VERY desirable (and expensive). The best way to do this is to zone 3x3 (or 2x2) plots of low-density residential and make sure you have all the amenities necessary to attract high-wealth development:


To finish, there are some things you just have along your seafront, otherwise it just won't be complete. One of these things is hotels, which should be placed in the centre of the city along the coastline:


Another thing you should include is modern apartment blocks, which should go just outside your central area:


If you don't have suitable hotel and apartment buildings then you will need to go on the STEX and LEX and get some! The more buildings you have, the better.

And on that note, this lesson is complete.

Next time, we'll be building the CBD - the central area of our city.

See you then,
Chris

[smileymk]

I've got a Christmas present for you guys: another lesson!

Lesson 23 - CBD

Now what exactly is a CBD? Most of you will know the answer to that, but for those who don't, 'CBD' stands for Central Business District and is basically just a posh way of saying 'city centre'. And you know what a city centre is.

Creating one is very similar to creating an inner city. First comes street construction. You want to construct a 6x6 grid network of streets, as far as possible, within your planned CBD area. Now this will not always be possible - there might be buildings in the way or the gaps between streets (which you will zone in usually) are too big to zone plots in, for example, so in this situation, lay out the streets as necessary to provide optimum coverage and zone plot sizes (which is anything between 2x2 and 4x4 tiles inclusive):


Before you can begin zoning, there are a few facilities that you should be looking to include in your CBD. One is car parks - you need a good few of them (about 5-10 should do it, depending on the size of your CBD) and you should have a mix of both multi-storey car parks as well as flat ones:




Other things you should be looking to include are a shopping centre (this particular example is the ITS Metropolitan Mall):


A city hall (the one I'm using being Mattb325's version of the Bureau of Bureaucracy):


And (this is optional) a market square and street fair:


Now it's time to start zoning. All zoning in a CBD should be high density. And it should mostly consist of commercial zoning, supplemented by a small amount of residential zoning.
You need to zone commercial around all the landmarks, transport hubs and other interesting things in your CBD. Residential can be placed in some of the gaps, and the rest should be filled with commercial zoning:


One thing you also must include in a CBD is bus stops! Here you should pick a couple of routes through your CBD that pass all the interesting features within it and place bus stops every couple of blocks along these routes:


And once you've done all that, you might just end up with something like this:




And that's it for this lesson.

Lesson 24 will focus on the rural land around the fringes of our city - including farmland, open country and suchlike.

I don't plan to start it until after the New Year, so I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very merry Christmas, a happy and prosperous New Year, and I will see you in 2013.

- Chris

[mike3775]

Wow looking good Smiley. 

[Kergelen]

Nice work on the suburbs.

Also thanks for the tip in the Lesson 21 about how to make neighbors conections with streets.

[legoman786]

 

Bravo!

[wouanagaine]

You officially make me relaunch SC4 and try a 2x2 region !

[smileymk]

Hello. I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year holiday. But that's done now, and it's time to get back to business.

mike3775: Thank you. I quite like where this city is going myself, it looks promising.

Kergelen: You're welcome, I hope you find that technique useful.

legoman786: Thank you!

wouanagaine: Wow... I must be doing something right then! Obviously this MD has inspired you and that's great to hear. Best of luck with your region, and don't forget you're more than welcome to post pictures on this thread if you need/want my opinion on something.

And now it's time for our first lesson of 2013.

Lesson 24 - Rural Land

First, a quick definition. For the purposes of this MD, 'rural land' constitutes all areas outside of a town. This includes farmland and open country, which we'll be focusing on in this lesson, but isn't limited to it. Things like lakes, forests, etc. would also come under this definition.

Second, there is a mod you need to be able to do what we'll do in this lesson. That mod is the SPAM. I would not hesitate to call this a must-have mod. It's like the NAM of agricultural mods. You simply cannot create a good-looking, realistic, appropriately-sized agricultural community without it. So make sure you have this mod downloaded and installed, together with all of its addons, before you try the techniques in this lesson.

Assuming you have this mod, let's begin. The first job is to lay out a network of streets that will run through your rural land. They should be dressed up using the SAM gravel textures (SAM-4). You should build your street network such that you leave sufficient space for farmland (~ 15-30 tiles between streets should do it), and you should try to make the street layout interesting - include some curves, diagonal sections, etc.:


Also note how the some of the streets run off the map. We use the technique outlined in Lesson 21 to make this happen, even though this is a region boundary and there are no city tiles for these streets to lead to. However, in real life, there is land beyond the city tile, and so we need to build these street connections to give the impression that there is a world beyond our region.

OK, now you can fill this area with agricultural plots. These should be fairly large - typically 3 or 4 plots should cover a 'block' of land completely enclosed by streets:


Note that farmland should not be zoned on heavily sloped terrain (use your aesthetic judgement here, but I'd say that about 30° - 40° should be regarded as a maximum), and that I like to leave a gap of 1 tile in between plots. This is not a mandatory step, but you will see why I do this later.

Also I strongly encourage you to pause the game whilst you're zoning for farmland, otherwise you might find that a plot begins to grow before you've finished zoning for it!

I also like to leave a 1-tile gap in between farm plots and main roads/motorways/railways/facilities. Again this is more of an aesthetic consideration than anything else, and isn't essential:




You'll see that some of our farmland has begun to grow. This means that we have to do two things. The first is to zone a 2x2 plot of low-density residential in every developed farm plot. With luck these should grow pretty quickly and provide houses for your farmers:


Note that you need to keep a sharp eye on what grows in these plots. If you get flats or anything else that isn't appropriate for farmland then they need to be immediately demolished.

The second thing you need to do is add diagonal fillers to the plots that have SPAM development on them where appropriate. You can identify a SPAM plot by the fact that it's a 3-D object (for want of a better word) and that, when queried, it says something like 'Hops', 'Wheat Field', etc. rather than just 'Zoned Land - Agriculture'.
If you've done what I told you to do and downloaded the addons, you should find the filler pieces near the bottom of your Parks menu:


You can see how much better these plots look as a result of adding these pieces.

The next thing we do is to fill all of these 1-tile gaps with MMP trees to create visual boundaries to the farm plots. Don't fill up larger gaps with trees, we've got something better lined up for those areas:


That's much better, but we still have those big gaps to deal with. But we're in luck. The grass MMP that we used for our school playing fields comes to our aid, together with some flower MMPs for added detail:


If you have them, you can also add tractors to your ploughed land to provide some extra detail:


Try to place them so that they run parallel to the direction of ploughing. It won't look right otherwise - why have a tractor facing west when it's ploughing north?

Now we come to what happens when your farmland reaches a city tile boundary where there is a city tile beyond the border - a situation depicted in this image, where we have another city tile to the east that we have to extend our farmland into:


Now think back to Lesson 1, and my fundamental rule of realistic region-building, mainly that you must build your region as if it was one massive city tile - the landscape, both urban and rural, must flow smoothly between city tiles.
We can apply this rule to our farmland as follows. South of the street in the last picture, we have a SPAM hops farm. So on the next tile, we simply extend the street and place 1x1 hops filler lots on the south side, remembering to leave a 1-tile gap between the plot and the expressway.
We have a problem with the plot on the other side of the street. It's not a SPAM plot, so we can't just use the fillers to extend it over the border. The solution to this is to pretend that the farm extends to the north and not to the east, and simply place a line of trees on the east side of the border, then zone for another plot:


Now, when we look at this from a region view, it won't be obvious that there is a city tile boundary there unless you have the borders visible, thus making our region look like one single large landscape, as it should do.

So that's all you really need to know about creating farmland and open country. It's not the only way to do it of course, but it works well enough and produces quite dramatic and attractive landscapes:


Now that's a fitting way to end this lesson.

Our next lesson takes us back to modding, but rather than focusing on providing access to our lots (cosmetic or functional), we'll be focusing on the lots themselves, namely how to chop and change some of the elements within them to improve the overall appearance of the lot. I might also get us doing some work with the Plugin Manager to alter the behaviour of our lots in the game.

It should make for an interesting lesson, so stay tuned and I will see you then.
- Chris

[wallasey]

One of your finest updates....I shall go and get SPAM immediately! Thanks!

[SilverCyric]

Absolutely awesome work!! I'm really looking forward to next lesson. But I do have a question about farms, now since we have strived for realism in our cities, the last 2 regions I've started since beginning to follow your tutorial, I've started incorporating all these techniques I've learned from you. So I sat down and worked out how big farms should be, well in the USA at least. Average farms are 441 acres, with a large tile being 16 square kilometers and there are 4,000 acres in 16 square kilometers(Well, like 3,998), then you can fit pretty much 9 average sized farms on a large tile, divided into 9 even quadrants, thats would be 256 divided by 3 both ways, giving you roughly 85 tiles by 85 tiles as a basic measurment for average farms, and of course I make them smaller or even slightly bigger, but I started a region with 10 farms zoned out(I made many about 200 acres because they were alot closer to a city area), but only 5 started and ended up employing about 28,000 workers!! : )) bwahahahaha!!!
So major backfire there, so I was wondering your thoughts on the matter, I've downloaded the plop a field packs and have begun making my farms much smaller and just filling in like 300-400 acres of the farm with eye candy lots
Now this particular problem might be because I haven't datpacked the CAM into my simcity1.dat file and I'm running the SPAM at the same time, but my real question is, what do you think about making bigger, and I think more realistic farms. I've got all sorts of cool lots to add chicken houses, fences, cattle, horses, barns, farmhouses, you name it. Bunches of cool stuff to flesh out each farm a lot more. But lots of people zone bunches and buches or little farms, like dozens on a single time sometimes, when in reality you can only fit, maybe a dozen, when appropiately spaced out around the higher elevations and sized more accurately...

Once again thanks for everything, I'm always dropping by this thread to refresh my memory or look for an update, thanks for all the hard work dude!!

[mike3775]

One of your finest updates....I shall go and get SPAM immediately! Thanks!

IIRC it conflicts with the CAM farms.


Great update smiley, the region is coming along great

[Reform]

IIRC it conflicts with the CAM farms.

It actually conflicts with CAM itself. You can use CAM farms with SPAM, but latter only hold 5 stages, while CAM has 7. Employment and demand in SPAM is handled a bit differently, so this is not a problem for large regions with a lot of farmlands, or small farmland regions. CAM and SPAM just have different "goals."

Using them together requires a bit more understanding about both mods and their goals. Otherwise you will be destined to face some serious unemployment issues during the game.

To put it short, SPAM does not kill the agricultural demand, as vanilla game does after increased education levels. You have to keep your agricultural areas developing and alive, while tending your cities and suburbs.

I am not advicing against it, however. My own Plugins folder is built to be used with both CAM and SPAM. It is a different game, but very rewarding one. As said, you just need to understand what these mods are actually doing and how they are affecting to your game. 

[jmyers2043]

This is the SimCity for Dummies and I'll play the dummie if you don't mind. Tell me ...

I have a city. It is the first city of my region. I have a small town in the middle of my large city tile with a population of no more than 10,000 Sims. And I just grew 255 SPAM farms. It is an otherwise Maxis vanilla city. No CAM, no NAM, just SPAM.



Tell me why I have 52,000 workers on my farms? Where are these people coming from?





Will I have 52,000 workers in my city if I only have I-D and some CS$? I can answer that. I will find that I have 3,500 factory workers, and 2,000 commercial services workers (or there abouts). Try a city with with (no SPAM farms) only Maxis farms, I-D, and CS$? How many farm workers now? 52,000? Nope, that's a fact. 

I would not hesitate to call this a must-have mod.

I have SPAM-ish farms in my game. But I used the super resource pack and created my own farms using the PIMX. I spent three or four evenings making and lotting SPAM-like farms. I like the Peg's farm models. But never warmed up to the mod.

Regarding the CAM. It is true that the CAM and SPAM together will not cause your game to CTD. Be aware that the SPAM is more than a bunch of cool new looking farms. It also makes changes to some of the games rules for capacity and demands. And the gamer needs to be aware of what they are getting into if the SPAM loads after the CAM. The gamer may have to get used to the conflicting rules as the two mods interact. 


- Jim

[legoman786]

You can use the CAM with the SPAM, however, you will need to NOT USE THE SPAM CONTROLLER FILE. I've done it before.

[mike3775]

You can use the CAM with the SPAM, however, you will need to NOT USE THE SPAM CONTROLLER FILE. I've done it before.

Does that still allow the landmark stage 7 farms to grow with CAM?

[apeguy]

Intresting updates. I like how you've set out the CBD and the inner city, and I appreciate the tips on rural areas, as farms are something I've never got the hang of. Looking forward to more.

[mave94]

Tell me why I have 52,000 workers on my farms? Where are these people coming from?

To my knowledge, a job isn't the same as a worker. It means that there are 52,000 jobs available, but not all jobs are occupied. I've seen this a lot in rural regions. With only Maxis farms it's also possible to have more jobs than inhabitants. You could even have a citytile with only agriculture and notice that there are jobs available. I guess a lot of the farmers are living in the farm building.

[SimEurocat]

I love this tutorial. I have learned so much from reading it.

I feel so ignorant since I haven't been able to get past starting to work with the RHW. I have never worked with this mod before though. It would seem that I don't understand how the road gets turned so nicely. Every time that I try it, it turns out like this photo. Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong. Using the starter piece and then dragging the highway, but it doesn't seem to turn well!

Help!

[SimEurocat]

I cannot attach a file to this post so that you can see what I am talking about. Is there something that I am not seeing?