[Darvince]

I'm opening this thread today because lately I have been playing Simcity 4 a lot in this region, and I wanted to start sharing it with you all, as well as give myself more reason to participate in this here forum!  

Today for you I just have this picture of a Cruise Ship Port I unlocked in the city of Zhurstl, apparently it had many more jobs in commercial than I thought. I may post the area again later when it is fully developed.

[Towncrafter]

Nice looking ship. I never knew that was in the game.

[Guardian]

Sweet! Keep them coming Darvince!

[brian51]

Darve, I really love both the ship and the port !!
but that is also extra good news about all the jobs it provides..
thanks very much for this new Cj posting !

[pierreh]

It is very good to see a new CJ started on this site. Welcome, and please show us more!

I like the cruise ship. I have cruise ship ports in some of my cities, and ships occasionally berth there, but in my recollection they are not as nice as the one shown in your first post.

[Darvince]

Nice looking ship. I never knew that was in the game.

Thank you! I didn't either, I saw the news story in the ticker for it and thought it was neat, and it looked fancy so I plopped it in since Zhurstl is a fancy place.

Sweet! Keep them coming Darvince!

Thank you!

Darve, I really love both the ship and the port !!
but that is also extra good news about all the jobs it provides..
thanks very much for this new Cj posting !

It doesn't provide that many jobs, it required them as it's a reward, don't know how many jobs it provides.

It is very good to see a new CJ started on this site. Welcome, and please show us more!

I like the cruise ship. I have cruise ship ports in some of my cities, and ships occasionally berth there, but in my recollection they are not as nice as the one shown in your first post.

Thank you! I will try to post around an update per week. I don't know why mine looks fancier, because I don't think I have any mods to change what it would look like

[Darvince]

Update 2
In this update I will show the public transit situation in Chinauk. There's not very much of it but actually compared to real-world cities there is an impressive amount of public transit usage!

I saw a chart about a week ago that plotted how many trips people take by public transport and how many they take by car, in American cities. I got curious where my city Chinauk would place on this chart since I had placed many bus stops throughout the city to encourage people to take the bus. That will be the focus of this update. Here's an area that is served quite well by buses, to give you an idea of how well Chinauk is serviced by buses:

It seems to me that for some reason people are willing to walk much more than twice as far to get to work, than to get to a bus stop.

Here is the city's overview of used bus lines:

Despite appearances there are lots of bus stops inside the suburban neighborhoods, but they don't have enough users to show up until they are on the main roads most of the time.


Here is the chart I saw: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...ns2006.png
For Chinauk, it has about the following, found by pixel counting on the traffic volume chart for each type of travel, and then rounding to the nearest 100:
Car trips - 33,800
Walking - 12,600
Bus trips - 6,700
Light rail - 100

Adding those together we get 33,800 for car trips, 6,800 for public transport, and 53,200 total trips, placing it here on the chart:
   

And this is what it looks like in-game. You can't even see the light rail usage yet!


Here is my baby light rail line. Its users increased from just ten (!) to ninety-four after I added in some new mid-density zoning around it. As you can tell, the area is still very young as there are plenty of services around but all the zoning is for poor people and their businesses. The taller commercial building that I remember being everywhere in CSG's cities had just finished building right before I took this screenshot.


That's all for today!

[Towncrafter]

Nice bus service!
Sims love to walk a lot which I guess helps with traffic.
Now if we could just get Americans to walk more and stop taking the car to their mailbox. (Yes, they do that, unfortunately.)

[Guardian]

Great update Darvince!

Now if we could just get Americans to walk more and stop taking the car to their mailbox. (Yes, they do that, unfortunately.)

I've seen this too. Ridiculous.

[SpookyZalost]

* SpookyZalost usually bicycles to his PO box because the USPS keeps misplacing his mail two neighborhoods over.

the city design and transit design so far looks great darvince!

it's actually kinda cool to see public transit being heavily used in a still developing area, just wish more areas were like that IRL when it's really only been happening here recently.

[Guardian]

You still playing on this one? How's it going for you?

[Darth-Apple]

Looks very nice! I love your attention to detail and patience with getting the networks working before they are expanded. My approach was always the opposite, and I ended up with huge networks that had areas that were virtually unused.

Nice work, thank you for sharing.

[brian51]

Darve,

sorry i am so late with this update !!

This is an amazing update by you.. And maybe you recall I was a bit of a traffic buff always in sc4 ? LOL

But this is just the type of traffic info I enjoy in a quality CJ.., such as yours is..


I just love both the Bus and MT set ups you have going on so far in your city..
Keep up the impressive work  you have going in this city's transit systems..

[Darvince]

Hi everyone, thanks for all the comments from February! Unfortunately, almost immediately after that post I stopped playing Simcity 4 as much, especially in that region, and have only picked up a few times since then. There is however one tile that I might be able to make an update with, though, since I did play it a bit after then (and took screenshots!). If I do decide to post it, it'll likely be later today, or tomorrow! And of course there's always the option of picking up the game again for more updates beyond that.

[Darth-Apple]

Hope you're able to post it! I'm only able to play every so often now myself. I get into it for an hour or two, and then I find other priorities...

Even if it's just a tile, it's still a worthy update!

[Darvince]

Update 3
This update will be focusing mainly on a tile away from the main city which I named Gevril Crossing, which is almost entirely farmland due to its lowland but distant location. Developing farmland is a much smoother experience than suburbs for me, mostly due to the reduced crashes and more straightforward population dynamics.

This is most of what I've done in the region since the last update. It's fun seeing how fast I can run out of money as I develop farmlands 'too quickly' to maintain my budget without having the financial advisor get angry. In both the tiles I've done like this, I've had to take out loans just to continue filling in the farmland as fast as I wanted to. Here is the money and farmland population situation in Gevril Crossing:


I bet you can guess when I took the loan from this

The way I play this region has it mostly unpaused except for when I am zoning each farm, so it doesn't develop in the middle of my zoning for it, so these charts after about Y4 mean basically continuous farm zoning. This is how the edges of the development have looked basically continually since I started, albeit usually with even more farms waiting to develop along the edge:


There are two unnamed settlements in the tile, along with a third area waiting for farms to reach it so it can be settled as well. This first one I developed right after starting the tile and zoning a few farms in the southeast corner of the tile mainly to get more income:


The second one came later, when I decided the shoreline needed another settlement, as it is the shoreline after all, and we all know how people love to live along the shores:

In case you are wondering, the shorelines have a somewhat odd relationship with the land as Karatlev is built on an automatically generated region with the Landscape Designer tool, which has shallow sloped terrain everywhere, including at coastlines. In some places, the terrain slope is so shallow that Simcity 4 is seemingly unable to "decide" whether a patch of land is water or land, with it allowing you to build streets and zones on it, but showing the coastline as being above that elevation, especially when zoomed out.

A third settlement, larger than the other two, is soon to be developed (in game time of course ). For now, it is surrounded by single farm tiles so I know where to zone in the future.


And that concludes today's update! Thanks for reading and commenting, everyone! The next update should be in less than ten months' time.

[Darth-Apple]

Very clean layout! I love that you went with the diagonal roads, but kept the farms at roughly the same size with some small neighborhoods in. Very nice suburb, all in all.

[Towncrafter]

Diagonals! 
The small settlements and the diagonal farms look great.