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[R^2]

This place is huge! Four times the size of Bob-omb Battlefield and Termina.


It's enough to make you feel small.


Very, very small.

[R^2]

Typical earlygame stuff here. Some low-density residential and commercial, some agriculture and medium-density industry. A power plant. A fire station right by the industrial area because holy balls those things catch fire every couple of ingame months.


The city is soon large enough to unlock the larger civil service buildings and prosperous enough to afford them. And I like the big buildings, they let me put in large residential neighborhoods and still support everyone's healthcare and education.


Is there a mod to turn off randomly-occurring fires? Because I've had five or six already.


ARRRGH CAN I GET SOME RED PIKMIN WORKING HERE


I'll try again some other time, perhaps when I'm less frustrated by the constant interruption of factories bursting into flames.

[R^2]

The game recommends you grow out before you grow up. Namely, cover the whole map in zones before you upgrade them to medium- or high-density. I'd rather grow up before out, due largely to having civil service buildings and infrastructure already in place to cover a small area, so packing as many people and jobs into that area seems more efficient on the old city budget.


Like, I don't even want to think about covering a whole map in subways for a looooong time. Bob-omb Battlefield is pretty close to that, and its subway tracks are a real mess.


The trick to connecting avenues to smaller streets is to use the avenue to do it, not the smaller street.


Wistful Wild has a coastline, largely to provide easy commutes to Termina. I'm not sure how far people will go on a ferry for a morning commute, but I guess if people really want to go work in Norfair, they can.


Siiiiigh.


Anyway. People really want to get out of Wistful Wild for some reason -- this is the busiest bus station I have, and all it serves is the ferry out of town.


Good news! People love to use my mass transit lines. Bad news is, I have no idea how to alleviate an overcrowded station. People ignore extra stations built nearby, so that doesn't help.


A small high-density area for residents and offices, an area of single-family homes, some farms, and a factory lot. Not bad, I guess.

[R^2]

Like C-Island, I'd like to keep Wistful Wild relatively clean, and intend to do so in the same way.




I was going to make a whole chain of islands like these, but I couldn't get the funding. There's no demand for them, anyway.


It's not long before I've wrecked the island's environment as thoroughly as Capcom wrecked any dreams we may have had about a third Megaman Legends game.


I zip over to Termina and Hyrule to install some passenger ferries so people in those cities can work on Kattelox, too. Hyrule has been crying out for manufacturing jobs for as long as it's existed, so they should be happy about the smog-covered island I build for them.


Sure enough, lots of people in Wistful Wild commute out-of-town.


...two people commute into Kattelox, just to work the toll booths on the ferry.

It would be nice, by the way, to have some sort of analysis chart so you could poll your residents on where they come from, where they're going, and why. I know everyone in Wistful Wild is leaving town to get to work, but are they working in Kattelox (no), Termina, Hyrule, the City of Mana, C-Island, or Norfair?


I build another ferry on the other side of the island, and that one's a bit more successful.

[R^2]

Giving people in Wistful Wild a better reason to commute out of town puts a lot of strain on this bus station.


I put in a subway station, and it's immediately overloaded, too. I put in a bypass, hoping that people who aren't taking the ferry might reroute around the over-capacity stations, but no one uses the secondaries I put in place.


There's nothing for it but to just build another ferry and hope the Piksims will use the less-busy one. (Soon the stations serving both ferries are over capacity.)


Screw it, I'm gonna go develop on the other side of town for a while. My education and police coverage should be able to handle it, but I'll need a new hospital.


I'm also putting in a dedicated high-tech industry sector, near the high-wealth residential area with the country club and everything. The goal is for the new residents to not have to commute very far to get to work.


As usual, it takes some convincing to keep the dirty and manufacturing industries out. Go to Kattelox for that!

[Classic]

Maybe you can force a restructuring of paths by deleting the over-used stops and then replacing them? I dunno.

[R^2]

The last bit of old-town gets paved over for a commercial zone. Now everything is structured with roads that make sense, bus stops, and subway stations.


Every single time I have done this I have looked at my stunted growth, checked my density, wondered why things aren't erupting into skyscrapers, and had to go back and put in municipal water pipes to get things past the low-density stage. Hurr durr water


Waterfront zoo.


I worked out a partial solution to my subway overcrowding issue. The trick is to build to stations but not connect them. People will overcrowd the station closer to the ferry and ignore the other if you give them the chance. To relieve some of that use, there are two lines serving the same spot -- people from the side of town closer to the bay have a shorter trip to one station, people living on the side of town near the country club have a shorter trip to the other.


Yes, now the station is only running at double capacity. It was running at octuple capacity before, so this is actually a huge improvement!


Wistful Wild has gotten to the point where nobody wants to work on a farm anymore, so I took those out and replanted forests. All in all I'm doing what I can to fight huge commute times -- thorough subway and bus coverage, and putting up plenty of high-capacity office towers near where people live -- and meeting with some success. Before long I'll have to buckle down and put in a proper highway, though, especially if the town gets too much bigger.

Wistful Wild is about as big as Bob-omb Battlefield now, and has lots of room to grow more.

[Classic]

I think I have a copy of this somewhere.
Don't you get hippie-green-feel-good-vibes if you've got farmland?

[R^2]

Not as far as I can tell. Eventually as your city gets bigger, the demand for agriculture shrinks and vanishes. Eventually the farms get abandoned as people head for office and factory jobs, and the gentle rolling hills of fields and orchards become just a waste of space.


I spend a few minutes messing around with highways on a sidemap. Needless to say, this useless mess isn't saved anywhere, but now I have a better grasp on how they work. Namely, they're about as finicky as elevated rail.


For instance, simple highways don't just connect to roads at intersections or anything.


And highways don't count for road access, since no one can just turn off the highway into somebody's parking lot.


So that's not gonna work. Let's try again.

[R^2]

Putting in onramps is a pain, but sometimes when you make a road or avenue an underpass the game offers to put the onramps in for you and save you the headache.


It's a mess, but highways have gotta end somewhere. In this case they turn into an avenue to feed into downtown, another new passenger ferry, and a seaport for my industry.


This bit I am... less proud of. Highway onramps and intersections each demand a certain amount of space, so sometimes you need to work around stuff like that.


Not bad, I guess.


But apparently traffic on my avenues isn't bad enough to actually make highways appealing. Or maybe I should have just gone straight through downtown instead. The only spots that get used are by industry, who puts their freight trucks on the highway to ship their goods out of town.


Likewise, the seaport is too far from industry to do anybody any good. I have people commuting in to work at the seaport, but no freight for them to actually move.


...nah. I just spent a lot of money for not a lot of benefit. I don't save these changes. Perhaps I'll do them over next time, in hopes of making them more effective... but highways are starting to look a lot like elevated rail: a lot of trouble to deal with and Sims don't like actually using it anyway.

[R^2]

Back to work. My jobs offered is about half of my residential population, so hopefully fewer people will be leaving Wistful Wild to get to work in the morning.


With a good look at my zoning, I can tell what I'll need to remove to put a highway straight through downtown. Anything facing that central avenue will have to go, either removed or rezoned to face side streets.


Pow. Avenues get onramps, roads do not. (They can, but I don't put them in.) I also zoned a little low-density residential and commercial between the original factory lot and my fancy high-tech lot; people have been putting low-income areas in high demand and the air pollution from being in a factory zone's shadow is a pretty good way to make a place unappealing to rich people.


Since I was working to fill in some space I had to make my lots kind of a wonky shape, so I filled the gaps with parks and stuff. Like usual. Here's a softball diamond, a tennis court, and a children's playground raising the local land value a bit.


I don't know why they complained about the unavailability of low-income houses and jobs. Everyone in Wistful Wild is FREAKING LOADED. Median income is $70k!


Pollution is actually getting to be kind of a problem, since high-traffic venues generate a bit in the form of automobile exhaust. So with Dirty Industry in negative demand, I bulldoze the original factory area and see what pops up. Surprise, it's a lot of Manufacturing, which produces less air pollution and no water pollution. This is the result.


Hah! Caught it before you had to bitch at me!


I find this to be in hilariously poor taste.


So I ended up putting my highways in almost the same places as before, but this time they're somewhat more effective. There's a municipal airport on the far side of the highway, with some residential and commercial zoning near that. The residential zone demanded a new hospital and educational facilities. Closer to the bay, there's a commercial lot benefiting from the nearby beaches. And on the eastern edge, close to Hyrule, there's a major league stadium, convention center, stock exchange, and movie studio around... uh, around a bunch of empty commercial zoning. Hmm. You'd think a place between the highway and a major-league stadium would make an appealing place to open a store or restaurant.

Population is nearly 115,000, and the city is still in the black. Things are looking promising, but the lack of a University building is a puzzler. Average education level and income in Wistful Wild are amazingly high, and I can afford it, so why haven't I been offered a University?

[R^2]

According to the region population count, a quarter of the people who live in World 1-1 live in Wistful Wild. Another quarter live in Termina, and a majority of the rest in Bob-omb Battlefield. But I guess that's usually how these things work, with a few big population centers.


As I expand outward into a new section of the city, a lot of strain is put on my schools and medical facilities. So I build more! I assure you every one of these is essential.


I also bring the highway around to help with traffic a little...


...and since they're complaining about unemployment (when before I built these houses, my corporations were complaining they couldn't find enough workers! Figure it out, people!), I expand an industrial zone out here. Demand is high for manufacturing work, and out here the pollution shouldn't have a big effect on the rest of the city.


Here's a bird's-eye view, if you ignore the weird rendering problem that cropped up for this shot.


Since I've got a remote corner of the city zoned now, I might as well plunk this down for its citywide benefits. In fact, I put in Waste to Energy plants beside it since nobody wants to be near one of those either, and bulldoze the one that I've had on the other side of town near what is now a high-tech sector.


Nuclear power was the best choice in the SimCity I played, but from what I've read the chance of a meltdown in this game is nonzero and actually increases the longer you have your plant. So I'll stick with solar, thanks.


Near my new residential/commercial zone, across from the new manufacturing zone, I build an area tucked inside the curve of the highway for more High-Tech industry. They offer a lot of jobs, and don't pollute... why wouldn't I? Anyway, I cram a seaport into this tiny bay, which ends up having a few clipping issues but is actually used anyway.




...seriously?


ARRRRRGH

[Zaratustra]

I have Simcity 4? Fuck me, I do.

[patito]

This LP is entirely responsible for me gettnig and playing sim city 4, I still can't figure out how R2 gets a city up and running so well so fast.

[R^2]

I'm still on Easy difficulty if that helps. I'll probably bump up to Medium after Wistful Wild finishes doing... whatever it's doing.

[patito]

Ah, easy mode, I guess that explains things.

[R^2]

It's been a while since I've updated, I guess, but all this messing around in Wistful Wild made me want to go mess around in Wistful Wild. I've spent my time replaying Pikmin 2 instead of SimCity. Deal widdit.




New industrial zone. As always, it takes a bit of finagling to make sure all the stuff that grows here is nonpolluting high-tech instead of water-polluting manufacturing or everything-polluting dirty.

So on with my ci--


DAMMIT


I go back and build a part of town quite similar to what I had before the game crashed last time. It's mostly slums and projects and pawnshops and so on, because apparently that is what people are now looking for in Wistful Wild. (New branches of town tend to be like this, because the people who move in tend to be dumb as dirt and take a few years of straining your schools before they're smart enough to want better for themselves.)

[R^2]

W... water pollution? Enough pollution will make my high-tech industries pack up and leave, to be replaced by other kinds of industry, which pollute enough to force other high-techs out of town, and it starts a terrible snowball effect.


Unfortunately, if there's a "sort zones by wealth level" display, I don't know what it is. It takes a lot of hunting to find the dirty and manufacturing industries in this area.


Surprise, I am interrupted partway through a delicate process by an advisor bitching at me.


Happy?




I've done all I can for that area, so I guess something around here is polluting the water too?


Heh heh. Butts cause water pollution.


(Actually it is probably the manufacturing/dirty industries that snuck into this corner, gol durnit.)


To further manage pollution, I do that thing where I build Waste to Energy plants way outside the city. Again.

[R^2]

Look at all those circles, and at the center of each one, a nigh-full educational facility. If you live in Wistful Wild and are dumb it is your own fault.


Comprehensive city view. People don't like to live by traffic-clogged avenues, but commercial zones appreciate the traffic, so you can see in my new areas that my new developments, surrounded by avenues, have commercial zones on the outside and residential zones on smaller roads in the middle.


Traffic has a noticeable effect on air pollution. Oddly, checking my traffic data view shows that my roads are mostly free and clear of traffic congestion, and it's the subways I've scattered all over the city that are straining to handle all the commuters.


Garbage is accumulating again, so time for YET ANOTHER Waste-to-Energy plant.


It is apparently possible to have too many police stations in this game.


Lookin' pretty good, overall.

[R^2]

The last power plant to unlock is actually a reward! Hydrogen power is safe and clean, and while it's expensive, its capacity is literally that of ten lesser plants.


I bulldoze all my solar plants and replace them with one Hydrogen plant, which still leaves Wistful Wild at about half power capacity. (Granted, as the city keeps growing I keep building new Waste to Power plants, but the power those provide is secondary to their primary purpose of keeping the streets clean.)


Gotta build a new water pump, too.


All that power and fresh water is for the new zones I'm building, see.


Because for whatever damn reason Wistful Wild has become a real hotspot for poor people, and the old downtown structures I have near the bay are mostly high-wealth.


I've filled just over half the map, now. There's a commercial zone that needs filling in (QUIT BITCHING TO ME ABOUT HOW MUCH PEOPLE NEED OFFICE SPACE THE RCI METER SAYS THAT IS TOTALLY NOT THE CASE), and an industrial lot I've stuck along the edge for the Sims who insist on working in smog-belching factories. I'm up to four Waste to Power plants now, keeping the streets clean for my almost-500,00 Sim population.