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The light residential zones look for nothing in particular. They just want some plot of grass to plant their trailers and be happy. The people living in these houses typically look for jobs in light commercial zones like fast food joints. You won't get much money from them, but they are your lifeblood at the beginning of your city's life. Medium residential zones have small apartments or typical, middle-class houses like the one you probably live in. Rarely, you'll get a small mansion here too. Either way, you get a moderate amount of money from them. They hate pollution and usually require at least one or two of the Big 4 services. Their typical jobs are middle-paying affairs like secretaries and shift managers. Dense residential zones house celebrities like Gary Golf in huge mansions or skyscraping apartment towers. Jobs get as high as CEO of the power plant or manager of the town. The rich need a lot of their needs attended to, so make sure you've got ALL of the Big 4 services, plus some recreational areas. Landmarks and rewards don't hurt either. Any pollution at all will kill the desire to move in.
Light commercial zones provide local shops. These offer cheap services for cheap prices, employ cheap people, and pay cheap taxes. You see things like ice cream parlors and car dealerships here. They will set up practically anywhere, so long as they're relatively close to customers. Medium commercial zones hold two types of buildings: offices and business. Offices employ white-collar workers who are paid a decent amount. Businesses employ no-collar workers who are paid less than the white-collar, but more than anyone in light-density zones. They need to be closer to customers to be inhabited, and farther away from pollution. Dense commercial zones hold both offices and businesses, too. Your tallest buildings will probably come from dense commercial zones. Businesses include malls, which accommodate customers from all classes, and which make absurd amounts of money that you can tax to death. They've got to be practically on top of customers, and very far away from pollution. Offices are more picky than businesses, but you can't control whether businesses or offices inhabit zones.
Light industrial zones, also called agricultural zones, are areas that you zone for farms only. Farms, unlike all other zones, can be as big as you want them to be. They don't employ too many people, but they're pretty and are required for larger cities (although cities can share that demand, but more on that later). You get ABSOLUTELY NO TAXES from farms, so if you're short of cash, don't even consider it. Farms appear once given road access, provided there's little to no pollution. After they're created, only pollution will shut them down. Medium industrial zones can house dirty industries or manufacturing industries. Both pollute (the former worse than the latter), and neither make a tremendous amount of money. However, they do employ the largest number of people, no education required. They produce large amounts of crime, so keep them away from homes and make sure they are provided police protection. Dense industrial zones eliminate dirty industries, but manufacturing industries are still around. However, so are high-tech industries, which are clean and rich. You'll need very well-educated sims in the city for high-tech industries to hire, so don't bother with dense industrial zones until your education program is in full swing. Also, high-tech industries hate pollution, so if you re-zoned, don't expect any HT industries to move in while black smoke still hangs over that part of town. Industrial zones (farms excluded) need two additional things to grow. There has to be some way for the goods to get from your industrial zones to your commercial zones and other cities. To do that, you'll need trains. Place a rail DIRECTLY NEXT TO industrial zones to eliminate the problem entirely. If you cannot do that, place a rail line anyway, then place a freight train station. The industries will ship their goods by truck to the freight train station, which will then in turn carry it away. Be aware that the longer the freight time, the more ticked off industries will be. Freight stations, by the way, are arrival-only stops. You do not need to place them at destinations, so don't, or you'll be losing cash with the monthly cost for no reason.
Zones expand and grow (in terms of density) when provided with the right services. If a dense zone doesn't seem to be developing, query it to see the problem, and try to fix it. Zones can be re-zoned to something more dense without the buildings having to be destroyed. Just "paint" over the existing zone with the new one. One strategy is to use the densest zone type right from the beginning. That prevents you having to spend additional money on re-zoning later. I believe, however, that the initial cost of the expensive zone is too great; young cities won't see the potential of dense zones, so there's no point in building them. However, that IS just my opinion... if you can get it to work with dense zones from the outset, no problem. Young cities favor industrial zones because industries are looking for the cheap land. As cities grow, they become more self-sufficient, so they favor more commercial zones. Adjust your zones and zoning techniques as you need to based on your population.
Elementary schools educate the young kids. Each one holds a maximum of 500 students, and they have a radius that represents the bus range (no more stacking all your schools in one corner of the map like in SimCity 3000). Place them in the hearts of your residential areas, because no one from businesses or industries will be heading to school (no child labor in this city, Kathy). High schools educate old kids. Each holds a maximum of 750 students and increases young people's EQ as they go through the ranks of school. They also have a radius, so use the same strategy as in elementary schools. City colleges and universities help out the young adults. Getting a degree is one of the greatest feelings in life for a lot of people, and it opens the doors to higher-paying jobs (which in turn leads to more money you can bleed from your populace). Colleges hold a maximum of 7,000 students, more than enough room to hold quite a few generations. Also, the college does not have a radius since most people will live on campus. Universities hold no students, but instead act to assist and improve colleges to make their education better. Local branch libraries and the Main Library let sims of all ages (excluding the seniors) maintain their education. Libraries are essential to keeping adults from forgetting everything they learned in college, which could lead to a loss of job or status in the city. Local branch libraries hold a number of books, which represent its radius. Main libraries assist the local branches. City museums and Major Art Museums offer relics of old for the people who routinely tell kids to get off their lawns. The presence of museums assists the schools and prevents seniors' brains from turning as mushy as the rest of their bodies. Don't bother with them until you have a fair number of years behind you.
Sims love driving as much as humans do. There are twice as many cars on the road as there are people if not more, but no one is going to be moving their gas guzzlers without roads. Streets are minor, low-capacity and low-speed routes. You probably live on a street as opposed to a road; the best indication is the presence or lack of a line painted down the pavement. Streets have no line, because the drivers should be going slow enough that no one is in danger of hitting anything. Use streets to connect out-of-the-way neighborhoods to main roads. Streets cost less, both initially and monthly, so use them when you can. Roads are the basic route to get sims around. These are medium-capacity and medium-speed paths, designed as major linking paths between zones. All vehicles will spend the majority of time on roads, so make sure they're well kept. Any street you have can be easily replaced with a road by "painting" over it, and the original street will not have to be destroyed. If you can afford it, I personally recommend getting rid of streets entirely. It makes transit quicker, and it's just a little more orderly.
Seldom are highways clogged, unless it's the only route to get between zones. If given the choice, sims will always take the faster route, so running a highway parallel to a busy road (or just replacing the road entirely) will guarantee its usage. Highways are expensive though, so don't bother with them until you can foot the bill. To get onto a highway, you need an on-ramp. On-ramps, in short, connect roads to highways. There's massive strategy to on-ramps because they come in two flavors and have to be placed on both sides of the road at the arrival AND destination. That's four on-ramps at least for any given stretch of highway... although the payoff in low traffic density is worth it. The two on-ramp types are overpass and side. Side on-ramps let drivers hop from the road to the highway without slowing, allowing smooth transfers and minimal congestion. Overpass on-ramps usually force drivers to bottleneck at that point, but the drivers can get to the other side of the highway by cutting under it. Your on-ramp choice depends heavily on your zones. If you have the highway simply as a link between zones, you can get away with a side on-ramp. However, if there are zones actually AROUND the highway, then an overpass on-ramp is the best way to go to avoid forcing commuters to taking longer trips than necessary. If you have multiple highways, you can link them provided they cross at 90-degree angles. One has to be going north-south, and the other east-west. Once an intersection is created, use the cloverleaf to combine both into one super highway. Commuters can hop from one highway to the other with little to no delay.
Busses are the cheapest way to cut traffic. They need to be placed near busy roads and intersections to be of any use. Sims will board at a bus stop, but they can get off anywhere, so you don't have to litter your landscape with stations. Sims don't like walking to bus stops, though, so make sure there are enough to give sims plenty of places to board. Unfortunately, there's no radius to help you. Trains take more passengers than busses, and are faster. They can travel much farther too, but they cost more. First, you'll need to build rails where you want the trains to go. Also, unlike busses, you'll need to put a train station for every place you want the train to stop. Like bus stops, sims don't like walking, so you'll need plenty of stations to make sure enough people are using it to make it worth it. Good stop points are in the hearts of residential zones to the hearts of industrial zones. Subways are underground trains. They operate like trains in practice, but they're more expensive. They take more people, though, and are even faster than trains. They're small, so they won't take as much room as train stations. Best of all, because the tracks are underground, you can make direct lines to each station, and you won't be wasting valuable real estate upstairs where it counts. If any station of any of the three mass transit types fails for whatever reason, your transportation advisor will inform you with a hyperlink to the offending station. He alerts you to the stations that make no profit, which means, as the game puts it, are black holes of money. Take them out with your trusty bulldozer to stop losing the cash.
The first is to go over it, the second is to go around it, and the third is to go through it. Mountains can have roads and rails over it, but this will make for a horrible driving experience, and some trains won't be able to make some climbs. Going around the mountain is an option, but that can be a long and expensive trip. The best solution is to just drill through the mountain to make a tunnel, giving your cars and trains a flat path to zip along. Bodies of water are similar. Again, you could go around it, but some rivers may take the length of the map. Build a bridge to get your cars past the obstruction and get them on their way. To build either a bridge or a tunnel, first plan on where you want it. They can get expensive, and you don't want to continually be destroying and re-building them. Make a strip of road where you want the tunnel or bridge by dragging OVER the mountain or river. Go a little farther along the land until your highlight turns green. After you let go of the left mouse button, you'll be given the cost of the bridge or tunnel, and you'll be asked to confirm its construction. If you decline to build a tunnel, the game will make the road you selected, but it will be going OVER the mountain. Declining bridge construction makes your engineers build the road you drew minus the bridge itself. Bridges cannot cross each other, but tunnels KIND OF can. If you build a tunnel through a mountain, you can still build a road ON the mountain as well. You can't make two tunnels on the same level cross, but you can make two or more tunnels run parallel if you need to. Highways, roads, and rails can all tunnel or bridge. By the way, you can also bridge over a canyon. One of my prides and joys is Canyon City, which features a huge canyon splitting two huge mesas. The northern mesa has the industrial sector and other pollutants, and the southern mesa has everything else. Highways bridge the two mesas, giving people easy access to their jobs.
Seaports assist your industries by hauling their goods across the oceans and rivers of your region. Although passenger boats aren't rare, you'll get far more people with neighbor connections (more on that in a second). By building a seaport or two, the demand for your industry of all types increases. They pollute heavily and are expensive, so take care. Airports provide more people than seaports, but they help commercial zones instead of industrial zones. Airports bring in planes with tourists, who will add to the coffers of your city's businesses. You'll get more tourists with more landmarks and rewards, so don't be too stingy.
Once you have two cities, you can link them in a number of ways. Two cities can very easily support each other, so just imagine when you link up a city to four other cities or more! The basic way to link cities is by road or highway. You'll have to have room on both sides of the border to accommodate the road connection, but it only takes one or two tiles. With a simple road connection, all sorts of things happen. First and most importantly is the shared demand. Two cities that are linked share their RCI meters. If City A has a bunch of farms, and City B desires farms, linking them will benefit both. Residents from one city DO cross the border to work at other cities as well, although there's no number to get an actual fix on how many people are doing so. Second, the cities can import or export each other's trash. If one city has the landfill to spare, it can take garbage at a cost of the exporting city. It's a pretty lucrative way to get a profit in the early days. Third, the cities will share tourists. If one city has enough tourist traps like landmarks and rewards, its commercial sector will get a boost when the second city's people come to visit. You can also link cities via water pipes to share water, power lines to share electricity, and rails to share people and industrial goods. A lot of the sharing happens without your knowledge in the background, so if you make two identical cities, one linked and the other not, the linked city will probably prosper better. There are also business deals you can make internally with your own city only. If you ever find yourself in debt, you are usually given the opportunity to build a building at no cost that will net you a decent monthly income. Young cities will have to practically depend on these buildings to survive, an there's no shame in using them. However, they all bring their own problems, so if you can sustain yourself without them, do so.
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