I approached my first city with a definite idea in mind of what I wanted it to be: it would be a small, unassuming, and clean place. There would be no large industrial base barring one or two larger factories: the Sims who lived in this town would commute if they were not content to work in commercial services. Accordingly, I shaped a delicate little place for it, named it Diosa, and went to work.
As a matter of fact, I had forgotten to arrange for power. Oops. Thanks for the heads up. I exited to the region after saving: time to build a neighbor city that provides the dirty stuff like power and low industry. Since it would be a polluted cesspit where the welfare of people was subordinate to profit, I named it Reagan. I soon got the opportunity to provide power to little Diosa.
...hey, aren't you the city planner in Diosa?! Guy gets around. Anyway, now that Reagan has a few industries developing and is selling power, I return to Diosa. I find out that I made Diosa's initial connection to "Reagan" on the wrong side of the map: consequently, I had to drag another road across the map. It worked out nicely, though.
Pretty place, right? Nice place to drive.
My nondescript homes begin appearing, but hopefully with the right improvements, they'll start posessing character. I make my first MySim, a lady-type named Tory Shephard, and drop her in the lower income housing neighborhoods.
She immediately informs me that her commute to Reagan is like a "sunday drive".
I accidently botch up the planning for a new neighborhood and get this. Ugh. Terrible. All of these neighborhoods have commercial-service strips: they provide some jobs, and I want Diosa to be more of a collection of little communities and less of a characterless expanse of homes. Commmercial service lots only develop if there's traffic, though:
See? Although SimCity 4 has a hard financial model, with the right tweaking of budgets -- adjusting facilities so that their total capacity only slightly exceeds demand -- it's easy enough to stay in the black. I run into a problem only once during these opening periods, and it's resolved by my expanding the tax base and building new neighborhoods.
In the center of town, roughly, you can see Diosa's first sanctuary. Note that the highway running through town provides an ideal place for commercial expansion. The circle you see is a medical clinic's ambulance range, which I tweaked to cover the town and nothing more.
I soon notice my first high-income family move in: they immediately complain about not having jobs. Perhaps they should have thought about that before building a massive house.
Here's that commercial expansion I mentioned before: note that they're bigger. These are commercial offices, and I'm building them to provide jobs for middle-class Sims, as they're coming to Diosa in greater numbers. Consequently, I create a middle class Sim named Vic Cardoni and move him in to inform me on what the middle class thinks.
Note how pretty houses are becoming. I take a break from Diosa to expand Reagan more, then build another town in the north called River's Edge. River's Edge quickly becomes the most populated. Its economy centers on agricultural and industrial production.
This looks quaint, but there are heavy manufacturing jobs in this town as well. It may be better than Reagan in that respect, actually. Here's a parting shot at part of Diosa, with both of my MySims nearby:
Note that Vic's job description is "wage slave". Living in that house, I kinda doubt it.
That'll be it for this update. Next time...well, we'll stay in Diosa, expanding jobs in Reagan as needed.
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