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[R^2]

I had no idea what to name this part.


Thanks to Zara for this one.


I usually do my zoning in 6x6 blocks -- enough for two columns and three rows of 2x3 zones. But setting things up that way makes your farms very very small if the automatic street placement picks up on that. And that's okay! It's the buildings that provide jobs, and even tiny 6x6 farms can get the biggest grain silos that offer 15-20 of those. So this makes farms a lot more efficient than they were (but still not as efficient as a skyscraper, office, shop, or even a factory).


This place rivals Wistful Wild in fire hazards, though. Odd that my first one is in a residential zone instead of a factory where they usually crop up.


In stark contrast to real life, everyone wants nothing more than to go to Appalachia. As I expand into previously-agrarian zones for homes and shops, I end up widening this avenue to handle the flow of traffic out of town.

I'm as baffled as you are, folks.


There's more to do, but it was getting late. Notice: there's a rail line going down the eastern seaboard from the factory zone, to keep traffic manageable from freight trucks trying to ship out of town. Eventually I'll be able to afford a seaport that will obsolete the rails -- they really are pretty useless overall.

There are power lines going over to that tiny "island" -- actually the tip of Michigan, over what would be Lake Erie if there were a Canada -- because I put a Waste-to-Energy plant there to burn off some garbage buildup. The only open spot at the time was near the agricultural zones, and didn't want the air pollution from the plant to interfere with those.

[R^2]

Meanwhile, the small commercial area in Appalachia is growing like crazy.


To hell with interregional rail networks, nobody ever uses the damn things. Literally two farms in Appalachia ship via train. The rest have trucks headed off to Hurricane County or Obligatory Ice Level.


Actually... hmm. There are more cars traveling on this road than there are citizens living in Appalachia. That means people are commuting from Obligatory Ice Level directly into Hurricane County. I wonder if it'd be worth my while to run a rail line from one to the other so people could commute by train instead.

I wonder if I could afford it. 


Yikes.

[R^2]

Hey, they're not driving to Hurricane County. They're just going to the beach! Slackers!


I also run a rail line over to Gulf, but nobody takes it so I revert those changes.


Will people take the ferry instead of driving? It might be quicker since you're avoiding traffic. No? No dice? Oh well.


There's a global transportation view on the region screen, but... that's not helpful at all.


Since nobody wants to take a train or a ferry to Gulf, I gotta just widen the street to handle the traffic volume. Oh well!

[R^2]

Well, that solves a lot of problems. Turns out you can cut the funding for a Waste-to-Energy plant to 0 and they won't produce any power, but they'll still burn up all your garbage. Since Waste-to-Energy plants are hugely expensive, that's good to know.


Appalachia is thriving largely because it is between Hurricane County and Obligatory Ice Level. I'm making it a rail hub, because people will ride the hell out of some trains to get from one region to another.


I have people driving in from OIL to get on the train in Appalachia to go to Hurricane County. Man, you Sims are weird.


Now we're talkin'.


Anyway, back to Appalachia.


People are commuting in from Hurricane County in droves. To work on a farm. Man, I don't even know.


Apparently industrial zones near a rail line don't need a station, they'll just load their freight up themselves. How nice of them!


There are three passenger rail stations in Obligatory Ice Level. There are three passenger rail stations in Appalachia. So here we have someone who hops a bus somewhere in OIL, rides into Appalachia, gets off the bus near the center of the map, gets back on a bus again at the same station, takes the second bus to a rail station, gets on a train, and rides to Hurricane County.

What the hell


Meanwhile here are all the people crowding up my busiest passenger rail station in Obligatory Ice Level. So I stand corrected! Sims LOVE taking trains!


Man I don't even know. I kind of want to nuke it and start over with a logical rail network now.

Probably not gonna.

Probably.

[R^2]

Modeling the map after the USA is throwing my sense of scale off a bit. It seems like a big undertaking to drive from approximately Vermont to approximately New Orleans, but it's really not far at all. Apparently one small map division (such as Appalachia) is a square kilometer. So the whole map is only forty square kilometers -- really tiny.

[Zaratustra]

I live in maine but work in florida

[R^2]

Everybody gets a rail network. Even Gulf. While Gulf continues to grow, the huge number of out-of-town commuters is causing traffic strain, too.


Avenue, commercial zone, rail line, beaches. I had to add a bit of space to get it to work but I'm willing to warp the local topography a little.

Who would want to go to the beach with trains constantly passing by I don't know, but Sims don't seem to mind.


The trick now is getting this rail line from Gulf to Hurricane County...


To connect with the existing rail line and station waaaay over here.


It ain't pretty.


I wanted to rezone these blocks for a while anyway, since I did it wrong at first.


Had to move the high school, too.

[R^2]

My advisor keeps bitching about medical funding even though all my clinics are well-funded. So when one is actually overworked, I bulldoze it and replace two clinics with a large medical facility.


Everyone who passes through this station gets off the train, gets back on, and continues on the same track. I implement a workaround -- one other people developed because apparently before the expansion pack every station worked that way.


See those advisor messages at the bottom? See my funding for this facility? They KEEP DOING THAT.


There was a clinic here. It's gone now.


I'm offered a University! Even if I could afford it, can I really spend two city blocks of space to place it?


Oh yeah, I also demolished most of the old factories to let high-tech industries take over. Pollution was getting to be a problem, see.

[R^2]

All right so I've just been doing it wrong, rails are great and people love to work in factories so


I'm not expecting much out of you.


And I get it! Just like in Norfair and Kattelox before, the factories develop even with nobody commuting in to work them. The freight trucks and trains come out, but no one goes in! Weird. Eerie.


I think you only get commutes like that if you go to the city where Sims would commute from and let them work it out. So now people are taking the bus over to Least Coast.


...so they can get off the bus, get on a train, and travel to Hurricane County. Despite the fair chance that at least one of those buses came from Hurricane County via Appalachia in the first place.

[R^2]

Ooh. That's the rail from Least Coast. It's gonna be tricky to connect to the rest of the network.


Nothing some minor terraforming won't fix.


I dunno where he's coming from, but there's a guy who takes the train in from the other station in Hurricane County or all the way from Gulf, then schleps over 20 squares on foot to get to work. I've never seen a pedestrian willing to walk that far.


I do some light remodeling to the rail connection in Appalachia in order to run a line straight into Least Coast. The slightest incline on the ground underneath the rail junction would have made the whole thing impossible, I presume.


Then I immediately decide I like it better when my rails don't bend all over the place and change it from a four-way junction to two three-way junctions instead, saving me a bit of room.




Oh, balls. There are a lot of offices and shops in Appalachia, and in order to grow further, I have to find someplace to put this damn behemoth.

And as soon as I put it down...


Another huge demand on my limited space!


...and another!


I forego the Country Club and University and finish rounding out Appalachia overall. Time flows for each city individually and somehow I've spent enough time in Appalachia for my wind turbines to start losing efficiency. I built a new set and demolished some of the old ones.

In SimCity 2000, your power plants would suffer critical existence failure after a given number of years had passed, exploding instantly off the map on their fiftieth birthday or whatever. In SimCity 4, they gradually degrade in efficiency, producing less and less electricity, until you're better off demolishing them yourself.

[R^2]

Slight reworking to the rail network in Least Coast to allow for the new line coming in from Appalachia. No one actually uses it on this map, of course, but people take the line out of Appalachia. Apparently once a Sim crosses over the border the game shrugs and says "He got a job over there, I'm done figuring out where exactly he goes." So Least Coast is providing jobs to all the areas it connects to, I just can't figure out where and how because the game gives up on figuring out their route to work as soon as they pass over the border.




IRL this is the part of the country between New Orleans, Louisiana and Houston, Texas. I know absolutely nothing about this area, but Google Maps tells me it's mostly federally-protected parks, wildlife preserves, and bayou.


Yep.


So of course I turn it into a smoggy, polluted industrial hellhole. Shoulda called it Deepwater Horizon.

I was kind of amazed to see that with enough trees, a lot of the factories grew into High-Tech facilities. So the pollution is just over the line of unliveably terrible!


Back in Hurricane County, enough high-tech jobs have moved in to open up a Solar power plant. After 87 years, that Coal plant is starting to drop in efficiency a bit, so a new clean energy source is much welcomed.


Unfortunately I damn near bankrupt the city on its upkeep. Oopsie. I cut funding to the bone and end up pulling about $5 in monthly profit, but I think it may be best if I stop messing with Hurricane County at all.

[R^2]

Unlike other map regions, I have been to southern Texas. Welcome to Pretty Much Hell On Earth.


While I'd like to do something novel with it, these tiny suburbs mostly exist as outlying areas for the exploitation of that big central map. And what I really need for them to do is... provide industrial jobs so I don't pollute all the nice places I want people to live and work. So like Wetlands Preserve beside it, Pretty Much Hell On Earth is going to be an industrial shithole.

Of course, it wouldn't be Pretty Much Hell without some fire, so one of the factories explodes as soon as it's put up.


Water and trees for the high-tech folks.


Meh.


With new connections to the rest of the region, Hermitage grows a little. A very little.

[R^2]

Welp


Not much generalization I can make about a map that stretches from Michigan to New Mexico.


Dude what does that even


Oh, I can build a Tourist Trap. It's a boost to nearby commercial zones, I think.


Hmm.

It's kind of okay I guess.

...

[R^2]

Yeah, I'm not thrilled with it.


OH FOR SHIT'S SAKE




I backed up the files for all the cities, but Pretty Much Hell On Earth, Wetlands Preserve, and Obligatory Ice Level didn't reload. Go figure.


It's another chance to make things right.


Huh. Never saw that building before.


Pretty Much Hell On Earth is now the slightly-more-liveable Still Hell, as I try out a few city block configurations.


People in Hermitage were driving into Still Hell just to hop a train for points beyond, so I gave them their own station.

[R^2]

I'm starting to get reasonably certain that your advisors have a default gripe they fall back on when they have nothing else to complain about. Does this neighborhood look like it needs more trees?


Same trick as before. Even with no funding and no power output a Waste to Energy plant still pollutes like crazy, so I put it on its own island to keep it away from homes and offices.


More or less the same as before, just a little friendlier to rail transit. The industrial zone is all high-tech, and I could afford that seaport they wanted to keep their freight shipments short.


Meanwhile in Least Coast, I put in a water main. As soon as I do, all the little warehouses and foundries explode into massive smog-belching complexes. I keep forgetting how important water is to getting higher-end buildings, especially in a place like this where finding an unpolluted spot to install the pump can be tricky. (If a water pump is in an area with too much water pollution, your environmental advisor will shut it down with little warning.)


The bafflingly-sought-after factory jobs allow a smidge more growth in Hurricane County, too.

[R^2]

Right, back to what I was doing.


Which is building too many houses and not enough factories, as usual.


See that minimap? I have farms wrapping around most of the map, and it's still not enough to decrease demand.


Minimap again. Even more industry in what would be Michigan to cover the Sims' typical demand for factory jobs. That's the only thing that would remove all those unemployment icons from this neighborhood, I'm afraid.


God, I wish this was even a little bit unexpected anymore.


Well, I've reversed my unemployment problems. (I have never seen the RCI meter do that before.)


Offscreen: a lot more farms.

Guys I just read my Earthbound LP this morning and I apologize for making this so damn boring by comparison. I'll get back to playing games with a plot I can make fun of and not LP sandboxes anymore.

[Classic]

There is something fascinating about watching you play in a sandbox, but there's often not much to add.