Strategy Notes
I played on the ‘hard’ economic difficulty throughout.
For a typical ‘normal’ sized city, I seem to be able to get it to a population of 250K-300K or so before running out of space.
The first city is the hardest to build - after that, the spillover supply/demand effects from neighboring cities make things a bit easier.
I’ve read that it’s good to make many road/rail/etc connections between cities - this pumps up your demand, albeit with sharply diminishing returns for multiple connections (i.e. the fifth road connection is worth far less than the first). But all unbuilt cities are considered collectively as ‘SimNation’. Therefore, I ‘started’ the small sized cities that lay around the edges of the main ciites I was building. Generally, I would do these small cities very quickly - a main road in each direction criss-crossing in the center. A few blocks of residential and commercial, a small school, police station and fire station. Then agriculture all around. I could do one of these cities in about 15 minutes or so, and thus pump up the number of connected ‘cities’ in my region somewhat artificially.
The default region (Maxisland), does not contain any ‘huge’ city plots. But you can add them by editing the bitmap in the save directory. See directions elsewhere on the 'net. Basically, colors in that bitmap correspond to city size. You can even do this editing after you have built up some of the cities, as long as the edited area is undeveloped (or else you risk losing what you’ve already built).
After I’d built up the ‘large’ cities, it was fun to work on a ‘huge’ city that connected to some of them. I haven’t finished the ‘huge’ city, but it seems like I should be able to get it’s population over 1 million.
Some tools/options seem fairly useless:
Highways are seldom used, even when they connect to neighbor cities. They seem like an expensive waste of money - but perhaps will be valuable when my ‘huge’ city is fully complete.
Avenues seem to have little additional value relative to regular roads.
Subways CAN be useful, if you have a really dense grid. I do one station every 12 or so squares in each direction. But they’re not really needed or used until your city is very dense, and they’re too expensive to build when your city is small, but cumbersome to build until after your city is big. I got around this by putting down all my subway stations (and a lot of bus stops, too), as I laid out my city, but not connecting them with the underground subway rails until they were needed and I had the money.
All the elaborate power generation systems are nice and pollute less than coal, but they’re overpriced. Build coal, or worst case, oil, just do it at the corner of your city.
Ferries were hit and miss - a few car/passenger ferries I built near the edge of my city were heavily used (mainly to ferry people off-map), but those built at river crossings near the center of my city were barely used.
Bridges were under-used. Sims hung out on their own side of the water and rarely crossed.
I never had much luck with conventional rails. Passengers used it VERY little, and freight only a bit more. Perhaps because I didn’t have a dense network of it… But the Chicago paradigm of trains carrying lots of passengers to one downtown location, from which the passengers walk 1-15 blocks to work, doesn’t seem to work.
Because so many buildings have fairly high requirements, and/or are expensive with global effects, I found that it was easier and more useful to build a lot of the ‘exotic’ buildings with my huge city. With regular ‘large’ cities, some of this stuff was only marginally worthwhile or hard to qualify for.
I don’t really like the way ‘industry’ is set up. You’ve got one type of zoning (industry) that builds several very distinct types of industry: high-tech, manufacturing, and ‘dirty’. The problem is, it seems hard to segregate. If I want ‘dirty’ industry in one corner, and high-tech in another, I’m not really sure how to accomplish that. So I generally went for high-tech only, setting the taxes on the others prohibitively high. But high-tech industry never seems to build at a dense level - it’s always lots of small, low job-count buildings. So getting a large high-tech industry requires a LOT of land. I was only able to get the 25,000 high-tech jobs for the spaceport on my ‘huge’ city, and I had to dedicate a big chunk of the land to industry to do so. Perhaps I could have done this also on my regular sized maps, but I’d have probably had to zone half the land as industry to make it happen.
