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.
Giant hubs for industry with massive transportation to them, like an old Soviet city.
You sound like someone who knows how to handle colossal levels of truck traffic.
A failing economy and terrible urban planning haha
Chaos with grids. Even with walking and cycling paths everywhere industry would gridlock the entrance causing a collapse of my commercial areas.
I tend to start out fairly egalitarian, but infrastructure upgrades all but force a class division and I reconcile my feelings on that by considering it a built-in Kaiju deployment suggestion, for later. 🤷🏽♂️
Subways as the main form of
publictransit. If there’s a place farther than three blocks from the nearest subway entrance, there’s something wrong.Overly lavish sewage plants. Yes, my city of 20.000 needs to be able to treat the sewage of 1.000.000 people. What if some more people move in, hmm?
Solar power. Solar power everywhere. Except for a few legacy wind turbines, solar power is the only option. You’d think fossil fuels had never been invented if you look at 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.
This applies to my cities in SC4 and CS1:
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Multiple small cites whose grids/layouts merge as they expand
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overbuilt rail infrastructure that gets abandoned over time
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large undeveloped “park” areas
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small country roads that lead nowhere
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gaps between houses, especially on the outskirts
I am bad at SC4 so to that game i’d add:
- abandoned neighborhoods from nuclear disasters
I currently have a few "large undeveloped park areas"of my own. :D
I’ve been experimenting with gaps between properties lately. I haven’t built the skill of perfect placement yet.
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- Ring roads that go around the city to take as much traffic out of it as possible,
- many public transport lines that were designed some time ago and were never updated to more efficiently cover whatever was added after them
- smaller, detached villages / small cities away from the main city that sometimes grow full of skyscrapers for some reason
Too few services, as I tend to forget to plan for schools police etc when building new housing quarters.
Lots of pedestrian trails but often unconveniant because I added them after the roads and there wasnt much space lett
