[pierreh]

I have been quite inactive lately, because of some family-related issues, which will continue to keep me busy until the end of February.

Still, I have found a few opportunities to play the game, and for a diversion to the Talaran 9-cities cluster, I have returned to an older 6-cities cluster. That cluster was called 'Sambey', since that was the name chosen for the entire region. Actually the Talaran cluster is also in that region. Because of this, and also as I don't want to start yet another CJ, I'll document here what I have started doing on the 6-cities Sambey cluster.

In the Sambey cluster I wanted to see the interaction between 'specialized' cities. About at the time when I stopped playing with that cluster, in late 2014 (!), it looked like this:



The cluster was composed of:
- 4 residential cities: Deliambert, Treymont, Aveillans and Jonolray
- 1 commercial city: Lessy
- 1 industrial city: Parnal

Because Sims in the residential cities had to go 'elsewhere' to find jobs, this entailed inter-city flows, which are shown in the next picture:

Quite soon those flows became difficult to manage: highways, railways and subways linking the cities reached saturation, were doubled, trebled, with little effect. As it was not possible to overcome the game's limitations, I left the cluster aside, and went on to develop Talaran with 'normal' cities (and yet considerable inter-city flows, as documented earlier in this CJ).

Lately I have returned to that old Arcens cluster. What I am doing is to 'normalize' its cities, by adding commercial zones to the 4 residential cities, and residential zones in the commercial city of Lessy. For the time being I am not doing anything with the industrial city of Parnal. I am also reviewing the highway interchanges and access ramps, taking advantage of some of the RHW features. This seems to be going fairly well.

I'll be documenting (slowly) the progress of that effort, in parallel with the further development of the Talaran cluster.