Like may people, I enjoy watching other people play online and before streaming I used to do mayor’s diaries (basically a city blog) with the Sim City 4 community. When I look at my cities over time a few trends emerge.
I’m curious what characterizes your cities? What are the giveaway brush-strokes showing a city was painted by you?
- Full city trail systems. It’s amazing how far cims will walk.
- Colliding grids, I build urban and big, but I like to let smaller towns grow together over time. This resulting in misaligned grids and some “signature” streets with cool intersections.
- Promenades, as an Urbanist, I’m almost always playing with the goal of maximizing transit/bike/ped travel while getting rid of cars and keeping trucks out of residential areas. There’s almost always some grand pedestrian oval or linear park in my cities.
So true about the water treatment. If I build up the infra to plop down 1 sewage plant, I’m doing a row of them so the whole city doesn’t abandon from drinking poop water while I’m off detailing some campsite in the forest or something.
It gets even worse when you have props for building a more realistic sewage plant, all of which are actually just sewage projects with different visuals. Of course you want all those components in place, often more than one of them so it looks right… and suddenly your plant is way more powerful than it needs to be.
But it looks cool and that’s the important bit.