In: Games, SimCity 4 Regions

Sim City 4 play session – Solaris

Last time I played around with road layout, I cheated some and pointed out some ‘what not to do’ things.  This time I’m gunning for a large city zone fueled by many smaller cities. The Solaris custom map play session.

Solaris Region – Here you’ll note I specifically laid out the map to have a large central city. This city can then be fueled and supplied by the outer smaller cities.

Sol Metro – You’ll notice that while the 4×4 grid system here works I still didn’t include enough open spaces to stop the stagnation process once a city grows up. I’ve put down an airport in this city even though it really is a no-no for a large city – soooo much pollution – but commerce asked for it and even though I had enough links out already I thought I’d throw one down.

Sol Metro Close Up – Just a quick close up of the Residential zones that have built up into medium sized skyscrapers. Again they’re unlikely to build much higher because of the little open spaces available.

The Peaks Community - A good mixture of all zones here. I’ve still not learnt my ‘open spaces = good’ mantra yet.

Sin City – I thought I’d show the zone layout for this city before an actual screen shot of the buildings because it’s a good example of when a Commercial zone pollution buffer works. Open spaces better designed but still not enough.

Sin City – Building view of the above layout showing the pollution barrier of commercial zones.

New New York – This city is a good example of how mixed Residential and Commercial zones can actually work together to build an overall higher wealth city – except those abandoned buildings… ehm.

Because of a few errors I made early on this region was never going to build up enough population for any massive buildings to appear. The fact that the region only has one large city zone will eventually also cause problems and breaking region population caps will be a nightmare.

Time for a new custom zone I think. One with more expansion options and more large city zones.

Posted: Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
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2 Responses

  1. Riddler  November 10th, 2009, 1:39 pm
    I can't tell what kinds of roads you used, but one-way roads tend to work wonders for me. They take a little extra time (especially when you have rough terrain and have to evade running traffic into dead ends!) but they are definitely worth it. You might also consider building blocks in a different way: zone blocks that don't touch the main road and instead put a buffer of trees between them and the major trafficways. Then, take a doble one-way road and run it into the middle of these clusters to take care of traffic. (I wish I could explain better but I can't!) And something you might also consider, in case you enjoy driving missions, is to zone the one-way roads in such a way that there are few crowded intersections and almost no left-turns whatsoever. Then again: I need to get my copy back from my dad before I can get back to playing again, so this is just the stuff that I've been thinking about during my SimCity withdrawals!

  2. Paul West  November 10th, 2009, 7:49 pm
    All those roads you see are avenues. I do things a little differently now, this is an old map, I don't waste so much money on bridges lol. I tend not to use one way roads because, as you say, it takes forever to lay them. Though I may have to start using them again, do you notice any advantage over avenues? They seem to both deal with traffic the same. On my newer maps I leave a road or twos width between eight block zones for trees/parks. I.E. RRHHHHBBHHHHBBHHHHRR I still do have touching roads around a nine zone block, I've never tried not having any roads touching. Do you have issues with zone take up doing it that way? Yes my comment formatting needs fixing, it's on the list :)

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