My problem is this: I'm not sure what I'm doing with my cities. I feel like they're lacking in general direction. I'm feeling very blasé about it all.
I've grown my slow suburban city for the past 120 years and followed a rigid set of design guidelines. I think it's actually too rigid.
(from the previous post titled: Suburbia)
"This city which I will name 'Fairhaven will use the following design constraints:
residential clusters on outskirts
"downtown" commercial/industrial areas
1 new zone every 5 years"
I also:
-Layed out my cities in an orthogonal manner. This always seems most logical to me since the SimCity zones are square blocks).
-Made "city blocks" that are comprised of 4-6 zoning blocks to provide road access on at least one side of each zone.
Fairhaven devloped around a main axial road. Potentially because this is one of the first elements I incorporated, and wanted my city to have balanced traffic.
The graph after the animation shows the steady even growth which is ironic since for the first 100 years, I was building a new zone every 5 years. After that I got impatient and started to build a new zone every year.
My big fast city is exactly that. But it's so rigid that I'm worried it lacks character. My population is high, so I'm led to believe it's successful based on my parameters of a successful simcity. But like New York (which I grew up in) I'm afraid it's so big that it's intimidating.
(from the previous post titled: Centralized)
Here is a centralized city. From west to east, there are outer residential zones, then a strip of commercial zones (as well as other support spaces), then a swath of industrial zones.
(from the previous post titled: Bartertown)
I'm going to create a centralized city with a few basic rules.
1. Maximize the waterfront area for high end residential and commerical use.
2. Keep a buffer space between the industrial and residential areas. (Parks and commercial). My hope is to grow the city slowly as the RCI needs indicate.
Although I never placed a zoning block when there wasn't demand, my population is WAAAAAYYYY erratic. I hover around the 100K mark give or take 20K people. I just don't know why.
While the residential along the waterfront does well, the residential at the left screen edge just never takes off. I guess this is similar to our country in that the coasts and cities near water source are more populated than the breadbowl of middle america.
I think I want to scrap both of them and start again with something more romantic. Not unlike Kerry's Bali-Hai.
