|
chitoryu12 posted:Someone should make a Groverhaus mod for the mayor's mansion. Yep, sounds similar to the one I played. I can be making $5,000 a week as mayor, but the advisors yell at me for installing a $100 park. You'd figure the game wouldn't complain about installing basic necessities, especially when it's really not causing a problem.
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2019 16:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 22:15 |
|
|
Poil posted:What is grover house anyway? https://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=2555 Grover was a very jingoistic mod of Goons In Platoons who was hated by LF (The predecessor to CSPAM) for being in favor of the Iraq invasion and being a defense contractor. I think he was also responsible for a very famous post predicting the Iraq war would be over in 2 weeks with minimal casualties or something. He built an addition to his house in the middle of a swamp and did a very bad job of it. There were insulated stairs, mismatched windows, plastic siding he melted by barbecuing next to it, child-sized windows at the bottom of flight-of-stairs so that a falling kid could plummet to his death instead of just bonking his head bad. LF made fun of him mercilessly for the house, and the admins actually banned and probated people for making fun of the house for mod sass which just made people make fun of the house more. Honestly a lot of the stuff wasn't immediately apparent and you could only catch how bad it was if you had a contractor or architecture background. Its notoriety comes in large part from the bannings. GiP also hated him because he told everyone he was a Lt Col when in fact he worked for a private civilian defense contractor that made tech for the Navy. His argument involved some bureaucratic military mumbo jumbo that only GiP people can understand but was essentially based around the fact that he was paid the same as a Lt Col and he also ultimately once you followed to org chart enough worked for the Navy. So the soldier subforum was modded for several years by a stolen valor idiot. Jalak posted:Is using the river as a water supply an actual game mechanic? Be pretty neat if it was. Nope. Maxis had planned for there to be a distinction of salt and freshwater and there was originally going to be a desalination plant etc. They reduced it down to three buildings: water tower, water pump, and large water pump, all of which officially have the same source: an aquifer (That's an underground lake in layman's terms). How do I know the source is an aquifer? Because they tell you on the description of the building so you don't make fun of them for letting a pump work inland. I'll probably try to keep my water pumps close to Freshwater sources when possible for RP reasons though. The Flying Twybil posted:
Not water specifically. Once we have a system up and running, we'll get our Utilities adviser who we've yet to meet complaining about buildings that aren't hooked up. This was just me making fun of the game for treating electricity as more of an essential than water. There is a tutorial in the game that involves you getting an over-spending cities budget in order that tells you to get rid of their fancy water system.
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2019 16:46
|
|
|
BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:https://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=2555   Thank you.
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2019 20:56
|
|
|
BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:The game just said MWh which I now realize is Megawatt-Hours instead of MegaWatts per hour. Man, I'd like to go an update without a mistake. Even so! It should just be MW. At least Watt-hours are a unit people use, not something invented. Poil posted:
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2019 21:57
|
|
|
I should be starting a new job Tuesday which is good because money but the 9 to 5 is going to take away a lot of my free-time from funemployment away so I'm trying to crank as many updates out as I can before then. The next update will be either tomorrow or Thursday but so we have enough time for voting I'm going to ask now. What should we name our next city? It's going to be the riverbend west of our current tile because I want to show off neighbor connections.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 03:38
|
|
|
Twoson, obviously! We can't just give up the theme that quickly!
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 03:48
|
|
|
The Flying Twybil posted:Twoson, obviously! We can't just give up the theme that quickly!  I really liked Earthbound. This is nice for some nostalgia.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 03:51
|
|
|
Yeah, it's gotta be Twoson. We have a clear pattern for our first four cities, why toss that now?
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 04:01
|
|
|
I haven't played Earthbound, but a friend of mine absolutely loves it, so sure, Twoson, keep the Earthbound references coming.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 04:13
|
|
|
Too late to get off the Earthbound train, it seems. Twoson it is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 06:30
|
|
|
the groverhaus is fascinating because literally every part of the idea is bad. starting with the loving foundation. his DIY thread about it featured him putting up a YouTube of the foundation pouring, and some actual construction people commented "this is literally going to crack in half inside of a year. what in the name of God were you thinking." looking dumb can be fixed. insulated stairs can be fixed. bad thermostat placement can be fixed. Melting off cheap plastic siding because you put your grill next to your cheap plastic siding can be fixed. you cannot fix pouring concrete directly into a wet hole in a swamp without knocking the whole thing down and starting over.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 06:35
|
|
|
Knowing nothing about building but, wouldn't it be safer to build your house using raised pillars instead? Edit: I mean, instead of what he did.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 06:51
|
|
|
Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:insulated stairs can be fixed. This is something I've never understood. Insulated stairs are always one of the things people mention about Groverhaus, and I don't ... get it. Why is this such a problem? What's so bad about insulated stairs? I'm not trying to defend the idea—I find it kind of confusing in an 'I never would have thought to do that' way—I want to learn what the problem was. Was it just that it was monumentally pointless and irrelevant, or is there more here I'm not getting?
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 07:55
|
|
|
Sure, Twoson is thematically appropriate. But clearly it needs to be a monument to Grover's brilliance. Thus I propose it be titled "[b]Insulated Stairsville[b]" (Insulated stairs was probably the least offensive home design choice in the Groverhaus)
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 08:53
|
|
|
 They said it was daft to build a house in a swamp. But I built it all the same just to show them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 10:01
|
|
|
Poil posted:
"It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one!"
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 11:29
|
|
|
Vavrek posted:This is something I've never understood. Insulated stairs are always one of the things people mention about Groverhaus, and I don't ... get it. Why is this such a problem? What's so bad about insulated stairs? I'm not trying to defend the idea—I find it kind of confusing in an 'I never would have thought to do that' way—I want to learn what the problem was. Was it just that it was monumentally pointless and irrelevant, or is there more here I'm not getting? I don't think there was a problem with insulation as is, but the pictures he posted showed the stairs still unfinished with the risers off. Just an empty hole between each step with insulation hanging in it. All the info and pics are here: https://twitter.com/3liza/status/891475977183739905?lang=en
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 15:06
|
|
|
I think this imgur album has all the relevant groverhaus pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/rwCMSux Those pictures of (I think) the HVAC system make me laugh.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 15:39
|
|
|
Did he loving design that house in the Sims 3 or something?
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 16:07
|
|
|
Vavrek posted:This is something I've never understood. Insulated stairs are always one of the things people mention about Groverhaus, and I don't ... get it. Why is this such a problem? What's so bad about insulated stairs? I'm not trying to defend the idea—I find it kind of confusing in an 'I never would have thought to do that' way—I want to learn what the problem was. Was it just that it was monumentally pointless and irrelevant, or is there more here I'm not getting? there is absolutely no purpose to insulating the stairs, as they already are fully contained within an insulated box. insulation is a barrier that slows transfer of heat from one side of the barrier to the other. when both sides of the barrier are the same temperature, it doesn't make any sense!
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 17:10
|
|
|
Chapter 2: Water, Water Everywhere and Plenty of Drops to Drink ~~ Classified ~~ Circulate among Officials on Approved List Only ~~ Classified ~~ : We found the shipwrecks, and the mystery of why all our settlers were rude young men whose idea of a “joke” was throwing people’s things into the water was solved. Unrelated: I no longer have any shoes and require an emergency shipment of black loafers. I’m having to go barefoot with suits and it’s not a good look.  I don’t understand it. Our sea charts said this should be sea… Well, this land literally rose from the sea only two weeks ago. I’m still surprised you didn’t know it though. It was all over the news.: I look like a nerd to you? I only watch basketball and things with Gordon Ramsey in them. Eventually they were going to update the Sea charts and our growth would stagnate. What's more, shipwrecks being our sole source of people had led to an extremely skewed gender ratio. Out of a population of 500, there were only five women, including my 3 advisors. The sailors were starting to refer to Onett itself as (and forgive me for saying this in official communications) Sausage City. On the plus side, I had noticed that the lopsided dating pool had come with a definite improvement in my finance adviser Monique’s mood. On the bad, she was now humming constantly. Unfortunately this improvement was probably going to go away. It’s clear to me that the best interests of Eagleland require us to build a seaport. It’s going to be expensive, and it’s going to require us to mess with the land as there’s currently suitable location, however it won’t be long before the Coast Guard updates its sea charts to actually have us on its maps, and our only supply of immigrants will dry up. That’s not to mention the fact that a Governor should always have the confidence of his people and I was finding the sailors difficult to connect with. Ahoy matey! Trust all’s ship-shape starboard-side. Permission to come aboard? What? Fore and aft! Swab the deck!You’re lucky you ran out of shoes. Yes, it was time for Onett to have transportation links with the mainland. It would be expensive and difficult, it would require us to make cutbacks in the budget, and for me to get yelled at by Monique but it would be worth it to secure Eagleland’s future, it would boom our population and unleash our industry. I had made up mind- 500 a month?? I had decided. We would have to make sacrifices but Eagleland’s future rested in building a reasonably sized Ferry terminal. The shipwrecks were scrapped down for parts and rebuilt into a Ferry terminal on the mouth of the river. The Bulltop which we crashed in on was spared, however. That was a piece of history, and one day people are going to want to see where Grover took his first steps on Eagleland.I made a few quick arrangements with some party members from back home and we now had a daily ferry service with the nearest city on the mainland. Onett was no longer alone in the world. ‘ I’m really just building this for role-playing purposes. A ferry terminal by itself does nothing. When its time for us to expand on the other riverbank the Ferry will let us do it without building an enormously expensive bridge. There is a building in the modpack I’m using that’s a seaport within out budget but every time I place it the game crashes. In terms of game mechanics, Seaports provide a destination for freight trucks other than neighborhood connections at the edge of the map. Except they’re inferior to the neighborhood connections because they cost way more and but don’t provide industrial cap relief like the edge of the map does, so I would really just also be building the Seaport for roleplaying purposes and I’m not spending literally twice our current budget on some RP thing without in-game benefit. What is cap relief? I’m going to have to explain it eventually because its the absolute core of the simulation’s arithmetic and how it decides demand but it's pretty complicated and would honestly take up an update of its own. We’ll save it for later. Another sidenote: if you travel the rivers of America you will see abandoned barges on the banks every now and then, especially on islands, like the Bulltop they’re there on purpose, except instead of for historical purposes, they’re there to stop the island from eroding away.  I began extending the west end of Main Street. It was still a bit too early to extend it all the way to Onett’s edge but that was coming soon, and besides I needed a place to relocate some farms because we had run out of space. Surprisingly, seizing people’s property costs money. There’s some law that says you can’t just take it, you actually have to buy it for a fair price. Whatever, farms pay almost nothing in taxes and replacing them with housing will pay for itself fairly quickly. I started connecting the dead ends off the southern road with East Main street so that, get this people had more than one way to get around town. Also our environment score improved! We’re no longer an industrial wasteland. We were now slightly better. I asked my Environment adviser what happened.  You got rid of the farms! Now mother nature can breathe free! The mountain lion and the magnificent elk can frolic freely in the forest where before lay only corn fields- You do know I’m immediately going to be putting a subdivision there right? *Sigh*This is Camille Meadows, our environment advisor, she is pretty easily the most difficult advisor to keep happy. Yes, even harder than Monique. To keep her happy you have to not have any air pollution, water pollution or radiation. But having even one thing in your city which produces pollution will absolutely tank your rating with her very quickly. Water pollution won’t be a problem once we get money because there’s a building that can take care of it (and my modPack comes with a version of that building which isn’t ugly and takes up an unholy amount of space) Air pollution? There’s trees which do have air pollution eliminating effect but there radius is very small and you need a lot of them. There ARE cheat buildings and they are the only way I’ve ever gotten a full green bar in environment but they’re kind of ugly and its star-trek syle air purifying tower technology which doesn’t fit with what I’m trying to go for in this LP. Anyway, get used to her being pissed off. Oh and farm’s were mentioned by Camille because they produce a lot of water pollution, fertilizers and what not.   So much potential. Wasted… Now to do the same thing on the west side of town. The town square is supposed to be the center of a town so it should be at the center instead of the edge.If you’re confused by the directions and how west is up just remember that Onett’s on the east coast. There’s a region map in the OP. It confuses me too and it’s my region. Now for the tough decisions. The sailors had gotten used to the space and low density of early Onett. Many of them didn’t understand what baths were, and you had to get bathing water from the river anyway so big side-yards helped keep the peace. But it was ugly, it was inefficient and meant that I would have to spend even more on services to make sure all the neighborhoods were covered, at least in a hypothetical future where the city was actually providing services. Not to mention that the new ferry system meant that civilized citizens were flooding in, and we had to figure out a way to put houses for them. On the other hand, the sailors were scary and bigger than me, and increasing the density might piss them off.  On the other other hand, those bastards threw all my shoes in the river. Hope you like stink boys!Some of you might be wondering why I didn’t do it like this in the first place. There’s a difference between low density and ultra-low-density that this game doesn’t really recognize. In my hometown the suburbs next to downtown are closely packed together and tightly build and it feels built up even though its all detached housing. The suburbs farther out which were built after the car was introduced and where land is much cheaper are all spread out. You can also see this if you go to a small town which was founded pre-automobile and compare it to the parts which were built post-automobile. This was just me trying to get that feeling across.  There’s a lot of demand for a House of Worship, now that we have people who aren’t godless sailors moving in. I wasn’t aware you needed my permission to build a church. Are you going to build or do I need to tell everyone you hate God?In the base game the House of Worship is designed to be as non-denominational as possible. Which is nice, especially since they let you re-name buildings so you can make it a synagogue, mosque whatever. The modpack I’m using replaces it with a building I’m not a fan of. It’s kind of ugly and it has a Christian cross on it which nothing against Christianity but it removes some flexibility. It lifts the middle class residential cap by a lot though so it is a necessity if you want to build a big city. So whatever onto West Main st it goes.  The huge increase in population has led to a huge increase in the demand for shops, so I zoned for stores along the newly re-named Curtis road, after the deckhand who was heroically killed by his captain’s incompetence when we crash-landed. (I had to give the sailors something after I densed up the town center.)I looked at our population, 2,300 sims. It was time. The new citizens were beginning to complain about having to drive all the way to the river to get water for the day, and there were quite a few people who thought making showering easier would improve the general smell of Onett, something I had to agree with. We were running a $300 budget surplus so we should be able to afford it… I asked my utilities advisor Jonas Sparks about it.  No question about it. I’ve been saying we need a water system since we got here. Why have I never heard from you? I could’ve really used some back-up when we first talked about this. You’ve never come visited me. Communication is a two-way street. I don’t like always having to be the one to reach out.Jonas is our utilities advisor. He is appropriately very utilitarian and its almost impossible for him to be unhappy if you’re doing the basic functions of your position. He’ll let you know when you’re power plant needs to be replaced from age, your water system is inadequate, or when you’re not giving the plants enough funding. He’s boring but easily has the most important job among our advisors. Just like utilities!  Oops. I guess water is more expensive than I thought.  DID I JUST HEAR THE SOUND OF A BUDGET DEFICIT?! Relax! We’ll put in some housing and be in the green in no time- Oh that’s your answer to everything! Put in more housing we’ll make up for it in new taxes! Spend whatever you want it’s not your money! We simply can’t afford luxuries like running water! Demolish that pump right now. I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about that. I think you might have a conflict of interest in this conversation. I went for a walk around the town square yesterday and I did notice a business on the corner lot that caught my eye. So? Everyone has an outside gig. The advisor job only pays part-time wages. Jonas works at the power plant. Neil lives off his inheritance, Camille is some sort of hunter-gatherer. Small business owners are the life-blood of this nation. I won’t apologize for success. But you don’t see that there might be a problem when the thing you’re telling me not to do would also lead to you going out of business? No, it sounds more like a convergence of interest to me! The water stays Monique. Jonas, turn that pump on. Yes sir! ~~Across town~~ Holy cow! Water’s coming out of that faucet. Look at us Boyd. Cholera-free running water! Huh. Living like a couple of millionaires. Lap of luxury, man. I feel like I’m a Kardashian right now. Water of course, requires pipes, I was busy coordinating how to lay them out with Jonas when Neil burst in- We need a graveyard. Already? But we have running water now. No more cholera. Yeah, but we also don’t have any doctors.  Fair enough. I took a look at a report from Neil’s office that estimated our demand levels. 12,000 plus 12,000 plus… hold on. This can’t be right. Neil! This says over 30,000 people want to live here. Right now, yes. As you get closer to that number it’ll probably increase even more. How?! Word about the running water things gotten around. But we don’t have anything else. Not even schools! A little bit of services goes a long way. While I have you here, the farmers wanted me to ask you something- Yes!! This is one of the best buildings in the game and its one that without cheats you can miss out on entirely. As your city grows, farms will eventually stop growing because its too big and expensive for them. You need farms and at least 3,000 people to get this reward. It boosts the amount of people your city can support tremendously and it also increases your health by a little bit. Not as much as actually having doctors will but a little bit! An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Oh good you’re still here. I ran all the way from the power plant. My god its urgent. What is it? People are using more power than the power plant is producing. The engines are getting overloaded, if we don’t do something, we could be looking at a disaster- What do I need to do? *pant* *pant* Increase our funding. Just give you more money? *pant* *pant* We have enough machines *pant* to meet demand *wheeze* we just don’t have the funding *pant* to use them. Okay. You could have just called. I told you I don’t like sending the first text! Two-way street! When you build a building, you can control how much money you give it so that it actually meets your needs. This is a pretty big part of staying within your budget, when your needs have increased to where funding needs to be increased, you will usually have an increase in revenue too.  Onett had a good 4,000 people. It wasn’t exactly self-sufficient yet. We’re only running a $100 surplus and that’s with us only providing two services. But still, we had grown so quickly and had so many people waiting to move in that it was time for us to think about a new settlement. I looked west at the riverbend, and I saw a new settlement. A new city. Eagleland's future.Twoson. Up next: neighborhood connections BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Nov 13, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 22:12
|
|
|
Guess all the people rushing to move in after you got running water installed are coming from Flint. Or New Orleans.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2019 22:30
|
|
|
So do those sim-like satisfaction bars for the advisers have any actual in-game consequences if they're too low or something?
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2019 14:05
|
|
|
Jalak posted:So do those sim-like satisfaction bars for the advisers have any actual in-game consequences if they're too low or something? They affect your mayor rating, and if water pollution gets too bad the environment advisor will actually shut the water pump down until you build a water treatment plant completely dehydrating your city, and forcing hundreds of buildings to get abandoned. They ARE abstractions of how well you provide services and services affect your desirability which affects your tax revenue. BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Nov 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2019 14:39
|
|
|
Chapter 2.5: Tunnel Magic! Ugh, sorry about how long the next update is taking. I wish I could tell you that’s it was because of technical difficulties but its actually just good old fashioned writer’s block. I started this Let’s Play to try to force myself to write even when I don’t want to and to put a work out there even when I’m pretty sure it’s awful so I got a while to go. Anyway in the field of actual technical difficulties, some screenshots I was certain I took in IfranView were not taken. They were only of me building a tunnel but since its a brand new game mechanic, one that is while present in the base game, you can really only actually use with the Network Add-on mod and modding, it feels wrong to just build a tunnel without explaining how. So I started a test city just to teach you guys how to build a tunnel! Fun!  What is this? Where am I? This is a special training simulation we run for party members who’ve been moved into administrative posts. City Managment Simulation Version 4.0 also known… As SimCity. Why’d you pause in the middle of a sentence like that? Were you expecting something? Its a medical condition. I’d appreciate your patience. Now I don’t really want to be running this but they’ve tied my Christmas bonus to it, so let’s get this over with. You know how to build tunnels right? No. poo poo. We could’ve made this a 10 second lesson. Alright, tunnels are small tubes that are used to provide a level path that avoids drastic changes in terrain as well as avoiding roads, railroads, parks, buildings or other things you would prefer your road, railroad, or highway to avoid. The Greeks referred to tunnels as- I know what tunnels are. You asked if I know how to build them. Oh. Well that cuts a good hour. Great! Alright you see, this big cliff. Now without the magic of tunnels we would have to build a big circuit to get through it slowing down everyone’s commute. But why don’t you just take that road tool and drag it like you're building a normal road? Okay. Huh. There’s usually not a big green thing. Now build it. Wow! That green thing turned into a tunnel! Its like that cliff isn’t even there! Tunnel magic! Yes tunnels allow us to bypass this sheer cliff face by placing a small tube- Okay, you’re starting to explain tunnels are to me again. Sorry, I’m reading from a script here. Skipping… We can also use tunnels on hills and mountains. The tunnel possibilities are endless. It feels kind of like there’s actually a defined list. But what about tunnels that aren’t to get around natural obstacles? What about tunnels that are built to get around things we built. Railroads we want grade separated, spaces we want freed up for building, maybe just because we’re so jazzed about tunnel magic we want to see them everywhere we go? Okay. No one gets that excited about tunnels. You would actually be very surprised.  Oh look, I have a lovely avenue. I must get a road and a railroad from one side of this avenue to the other. This avenue has been designed to be the main route for my citizens to get work. I do not want the road and railroad to form an intersection with this avenue because it would slow down traffic and cause congestion. There’s a frowny face in the script. I don’t know how to pronounce that. How can I get my road and railroad from one side of the avenue to the other without an intersection? Tunnel magic? Tunnel magic!!  First you take your little handy-dandy hole digger/raiser tool from the road menu and select the right height. We’re going to want to dig a 14m hole for out road.This is a mod. It was its own thing but its been bundled with NAM for basically forever. NAM is not something I or most people who are way too into SimCity would consider an optional mod. A lot of people consider it to be its own expansion pack. Even if you want to play a vanilla game instead of the modded up monstrosity I’m playing, please consider installing NAM. The Digger/Raiser tool is shifted between the two functions by rotating it and pressing tab makes it cycle through different heights. The heights can seem kind of random but they’re based around the things you use the hole digging tool for. 14 m is the height for neat road tunnels. You can do other heights but the land will end up deformed.  Next you start laying down street squares to flatten the area. How does that flatten the area? We’ve learned the easiest way to get the construction workers to flatten an area is to trick them into thinking they’re building a parking lot. They just think about parking their Volvo on a slight incline and BAM! Flatter than Kansas. A little trick I learned from Grand Fromage’s LP. This is an exploit that’s so useful its been turned into a feature in the minds of SimCity fans. There’s no model for an uneven single square of street so if you place two squares of street next to each other without connecting them the game will level itself to be flat. It can be tricky because sometimes the game will decide to flatten to the level you don’t want and you have to do it over, but its both more precise and cheaper than the God mode tool that the developers intended for you to use for flattening. If you see giant fields of single street squares in this LP its because I’m flattening the land.  Alright now build a tunnel just like you did with that cliff there. By the way, you see how there’s one space of blank land between our ditch and the avenue? You need that. If you try to put the tunnel directly next to the avenue it won’t work, you need to have a blank tile so there’s space for the actual tunnel. Now… build it! Wow! Now I can get to the other side of the neighborhood without waiting to cross a scary high-speed road or messing up my fellow citizens commute! Tunnel magic! Tunnel magic! Now for the railroad.  Oh no! The tunnel’s still perfectly functional but we messed up the land so it’s all deformed and ugly. What went wrong? I don’t know. We did exactly the same thing as we did with the road. Exactly. The process for a railroad is almost the same but instead of needing a 14 meter hole like a road does, it needs an 8 meter hole. Let’s re-do it with the proper-sized holes. That’s what she said. Grover, this is government business. Nice.  Whoa, what a great looking tunnel! Do you see how the ditch is shallower? This also means that a railroad doesn’t as much “clearance” or landfall to get from ground-level to a tunnel as a road does.  Boy, that ditch looks kind of ugly though. How about a retaining wall? That should pretty it up.This is Jeroni’s wall mod. Its the most popular of this very wide category. It comes in two styles, rural and residential. We’ll use rural for the railroad and residential for the road tunnel.  Woah! That’s quite an improvement. Let’s see if we can pretty it up even more. Fantastic. Our tunnel’s not just functional. It’s pretty too. We don’t just have to put decorations in our ditches! We can put buildings too! We can put buildings in that empty space we need to build the tunnel in the first place too! Also decorations! That space only has to be empty when we’re first building the tunnel. Pretty spiffy! That concludes our tunnel building lesson. I hope you learned something Grover. It dramatically reduces the chance the party’s going to make me do this again. I was supposed to be learning something? *sigh*
BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Nov 17, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2019 18:32
|
|
|
You know, this makes me think that later on we need to make Ditchville, a place where all the buildings are in deep holes regardless of flooding problems. Obviously the roads should be as high up as we can make them. It's seems like a terrible design, thus Grover-esque.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2019 19:59
|
|
|
The Flying Twybil posted:You know, this makes me think that later on we need to make Ditchville, a place where all the buildings are in deep holes regardless of flooding problems. Obviously the roads should be as high up as we can make them. If only this were Cities Skylines, where we could systematically drain a lakebed and river for the purposes of Ditchville.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2019 20:04
|
|
|
Pyroi posted:If only this were Cities Skylines, where we could systematically drain a lakebed and river for the purposes of Ditchville. And then flood it with poopwater
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2019 00:15
|
|
|
Chapter 3: Sold My Soul to the Company Store Video Conference Transcript~ August 8th, 20xx Call held between Eagleland Territory and Internal Affairs Minister ~Highly Classified~ Only White Clearance and Above May View ~ Highly Classified This Call May be Reviewed for Quality Assurance Purposes  I’m sorry. You want more money? Just another 200,000. Nothing big.  What happened to the 200,000 we gave you? I spent it. Well half of it. Look 200,000 is not enough for an area the size of Eagleland. Onett’s growing much faster than we predicted, and it’s a good time for us to start expanding further down the river. That peninsula is a perfect place for us to found Twoson but- Put your feet down! Your laptop is not an ottoman, I don’t want to see your dirty feet. Why are you barefoot?! This is a business call. You never sent me the shoes I asked for. It’s been two months. I’m actually starting to enjoy the barefoot lifestyle. A lot of ideas I’ve had about shoes are starting to be challenged and, frankly it’s scaring me. Why didn’t you just buy some shoes? You know, with your salary? I spend my money on personal stuff. I use those shoes for Government business, the government pays. It’s not paying for this. You were given a budget, you didn’t stick to it. The request for extra territory and shoe funding is officially denied.Call Terminated Help us improve your experience with a short survey! On a scale of 1-5 how helpful was the Internal Affairs Minister? drat it…I spent the next three days, trying to figure out a way to work Twoson into the budget without crippling Onett. I couldn’t do it, we had already spent half our money and were barely treading water financially. But then-  Governor! What a lovely tent! And sholess with a suit? Bold choice! Cutting edge! I should’ve known you were a Fashionista! Allow me to introduce myself- Eli Smiley; I represent a group of investors over in the Captial who’ve formed the Eagleland Exploration Company. A little birdie told me about your funding troubles- A little birdie? Well more like a little bug. I brought you a gift- Sneakers? One of our board members owns a shoe factory. And you couldn’t get me something that would actually go with my suit?...... Anyway I have a proposal which I think is going to make us both happy. Eagleland has exactly what the business community is looking for in factory locations: cheap land and poor people. Your new little community is the perfect place for us to start our operations in this region and we’d like to get in on the ground floor. We’ll purchase a plot of land from the territory at 200,000. We’ll use that land to build factories, providing jobs to the region, you can use the money to build the rest of the city out. Its win, win, win. Who’s the third win? The people of Eagleland, of course! So whaddaya say? That’s right boys, Twoson’s going to be a company town. One of the design ideas behind SC4’s region system was that you could have one town specalize in industry, another one specalize in Commercial and a third in Resedential and have your sims commute between the three. This was meant much more for the small city tiles instead of the large ones that all of are city’s are so we’re never going to get that specalized. Its also a pretty bad idea in real life. While there are examples like City of Industry in California which was founded as a tax dodge, the trend in urban design now is very much mixed-use which in its purest form of shops on the ground floor, apartments on the second and up floor SimCity doesn’t support. We can have its general idea of minimizing commute time for our sims though. It sounded like a decent enough offer. And besides I didn’t have much options anyway. The settlement of Twoson was back on, but first we needed to figure out the transportation options. I consulted my transportation advisor. Road’s not going to be enough, Grove. You need rail. Frankly, you already hosed up, in my opinion rail should be the first thing you build.  This is Jamil Herd, our transportation advisor. In SimCity4’s perpetual quest to imitate the charm of 3k without doing any of the work, he has the paper-thin characterization of speaking very informally and using words like dude. When you put rail off, you end up finding out that there’s a building everywhere you’d like to build rail. It costs way more money than it needs to, you make a lot of people lose thier homes and buisnesses and you tear your hair out the entire time.  Well we have to build a rail connection to Twoson. Let’s see what we can do. I built a staion on the Western edge of town and extended the line to the river. We would build on the other side at some point, and it would reserve the space like Jamil said. Why did I build the station off of the main line? So that the station doesn’t slow down through traffic. It also helps us with planning, if we built the station on the main line, then when we used the traffic analyzer we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between people getting on and off at this station and people going through this station. This gives us a nice little distinction. I looked at my work… and realized I hated it. It was ugly and it wasted a lot of space. There’s no easy way to build on the space in between the railroad lines so it should be minimized as much as possible.  I demolished it and set back the station. There we go, there’s still going to be wasted space but its much less and much more attractive. I directed Camille to start planting trees on the land that would be dificult to build on. If we couldn’t use it for building, we could at least use it for nature. These are PegProd’s seasonal trees. Don’t see them? They’re the little white spots in the field. They’ll grow in soon, there’s a small delay with these things to get them on the right calendar cycle. It’s better than the other modder’s seasonal trees which demand that you personally wait until September 1 to plant them lest you have autumn in March. Peg is short for Pegasus who’s a really prolific and talented modder. Like half of all the mods people use come from him. He was talented enough to actually have his own modding website and exchance PEX along with the two big ones Simtropolis and SC4Devotion. The hosting fees got too much and now all his stuff’s hosted on Simtropolis though. The OldFashioned modpack has like 5 different types of seasonal trees but Peg’s the one I like best so be prepared to see a lot of it as our default filler.  Then I put in some plaza’s for the front of the station. They’ll give us another public space besides town square and maybe eventually will provide another shopping area. Lastly I filled in the remaining space around the station with some houses and a small shopping strip to help defray the monthly cost of the plaza upkeep and the station itself. And Voila. Just adding some parks and some trees makes a much nicer looking station that looks like a centerpiece instead of an afterthought. I hope you liked that. Needless redevelopment for small aesthetic improvements is my favorite part of SimCity and this update especially is going to be full of them. Also look at dem trees. This is the summer model.  Finally we were able to move on to Twoson, after talking it over with Jamil, our plan was to build a road and parallel rail down the peninsula.  I laid down a Natural Gas power plant at the bend in Onett road in the middle of EagEx’s land (That Eagleland Exploration Company thing’s a mouthful.) I also built a spur road to hug the eventual factory area. Are you sure about a Natural Gas plant? A coal plant would be better suited to our needs and our budget? Its not like pollution matters for an industrial town… I’m mixing it up! ts not like it matters, a natty gas plant will be fine. Please don’t call it that.  I took a quick look at Neil’s demand estimates, despite Twoson’s lack of running water and- well, running water was the only thing Onett has that Twoson doesn’t, almost everyone willing to live in Onett was willing to do so in Twoson too.This is the first thing about Neighbor Connections. When you connect to a neighbor their demand becomes your demand, because Sims are willing to commute or drive a little farther. Its called a suburb.  EagEx started building up its factories, I did notice something strange though. Hey, Jamil, what’s going on with the railroad there? I thought we were going to just have it be a straight line. Oh that, yeah. That’s a spur line, EagEx requested it, the railroad in Twoson’s mainly being used to bring the stuff made in its factories to Onett for export. That Spur line just makes it so that the railroad’s closer to the actual factories and the people who are actually using it. That doesn’t seem like it would help much. They’ll still have to drive to the freight station, I can’t imagine making it slightly closer would be that much more efficient. Actually factories built next to railroad lines can just load directly onto trains, no freight station needed. We should still build a freight station for the factories we can’t build spur lines too though. (Jonas turned out to be right about the Coal Plant but let’s not talk about that.) And yes factories loading directly onto tracks is an actual unmodded game mechanic. No creative interpretation here. But why is freight important and something I should worry about? Its time to talk about that mechanic I mentioned earlier but kept putting off explaining: Demand caps. Demand is very simple, its how much people want to live or locate their business in our city. But the game actually has a limit on how much demand can be called a demand cap. If you actually have more people or businesses of a certain type than there is demand for it, those houses or businesses will become abandoned with the reason given being “low demand”. The reason this demand cap is put into place is because without the ideal city from a gameplay perspective would actually be a Judge Dredd-style mega city where people are crowded into every possible space and there’s zero parks, zero amenites, zero whatever. Certain buildings are assigned cap relief values. Most parks give residential relief, most plazas like in station square give commercial office relief, almost every reward gives cap relief of some kind, otherwise there would be no reason to build the rewards from a game mechanics perspective. Commercial Services have no cap. Retail stores after all simply go wherever there are people, so if you can support a certain population of people you can obviously support a certain population of stores. Industrial cap relief however comes from freight and neighbor connections. Everytime a freight truck or freight train makes it to the edge of the map that relieves the cap on industry by a certain amount. It doesn’t matter if the square next to it is a huge metropolis, farmland, or inky blackness, it just has to get to the edge of your city map. Therefore its in your interest to design your industrial areas to be as easy to get to the edge of the map as possible.  I started prepping the residential area, we needed somewhere for the workers to live after all. I plopped down a passenger train station for commuters, some houses, and a small shopping strip for workers to spend their wages.   FIRE! FIIRRRE! GOVERNOR, YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING, THERE’S A FIRE, FOR GODDSAKES! CALM DOWN! STOP SHOUTING! WHO THE HELL ARE YOU ANYWAY! I’M SAM ARMSTRONG! YOUR PUBLIC SAFETY ADVISOR! I AM ADVISING YOU THAT THERE IS CURRENTLY A loving FIRE IN THIS CITY. I don’t have a public safety advisor. YOU DON’T?! WELL, THEN WHO THE gently caress AM I?* That’s what I’m asking. BUILD THE drat FIRE STATION OR BUILD A POLICE STATION FOR THE ASSAULT THAT’S ABOUT TO OCCUR! Ok, sure. Whoa! We just built our first service! The fire department is generally the first service you’ll establish in your city if you don’t count utilities. The way it works is this, each fire station has a radius, any building within that radius will never catch on fire, If it’s outside that radius then it has a chance to catch on fire based on that building’s flammability rating. Then you will get this alert from Sam Armstrong, he’ll take you to the scene of the fire and you can click on the emergency response button to dispatch a fire truck, as long as you have enough fire trucks, at least one fire station, and there is a road connection between the fire station and the scene of the fire you’ll be fine. The trucks will drive out there and fight the fire. It’s possible to run a city with only one fire station especially if you put it in a central location but, boy, its annoying. Oh, and factories have higher flammability ratings than almost anything else so make sure you have a station in your industrial area or you’re really going to be peeved.  The train station in Twoson got redeveloped to be more attractive like I did with Station Square in Onett. I had a problem though. There was a lot of good land on the other side of those tracks that I could use for residential neighborhoods that would let me maximize the use of the fire station. But putting in a rail crossing would slow the trains down which would slow down EagEx’s production. Since they were paying for this whole thing that’s a no-go. I could give trains priority in the right-of-way and force people to wait to cross but I expect trains are going to be going through all the time. It would be inconvenient, piss people off, and if a train stalls that would cut off an entire neighborhood from the rest of town for hours while they fix it. Maybe I should just write the land off and make it a forest… Tunnel Magic… Tunnel magic Did I just hear Kenton’s voice? Oh poo poo, Grover, sorry, that was a butt dial. I didn’t mean for you to hear that. Really? Because you specifically mentioned something we just talked about last week. You will not believe how often I have to talk about tunnels at this job. It’s also a perfect solution to the problem I was just talking about. Well, yeah. It’s tunnels. They solve everything. I don’t know about everything. Sure they do! Don’t tell anyone but if they replaced me with a post-it note that just said tunnels, it would still accomplish about 80% of my workload.  Seasonal trees as space filler again. They have an air pollution clean-up effect in addition to looking pretty so expect to see these as my default space-filler. Totally worth the small upkeep cost.  I extended the road down the side of town and built a tunnel on the other side so that it hugged the factories. After setting down side roads, I could probably fit enough housing in here to double the town’s population. And with that we finally had a foothold in the west. Twoson was a company town, sure, but it would provide an industrial base that could serve Onett and the entirety of Eagleland. Now to get the gently caress back to Onett. These factory guys are even scarier than the deckhands. Up next: Back to Onett. BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 05:50
|
|
|
All the times I played this and never knew I could just drop a spur into my industry area.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 06:03
|
|
|
BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:TwosonPic You forgot to put in the image there, Grover!
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 07:10
|
|
|
BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:The reason this demand cap is put into place is because without the ideal city from a gameplay perspective would actually be a Judge Dredd-style mega city where people are crowded into every possible space and there’s zero parks, zero amenites, zero whatever. Otherwise known as Magnasanti. The more I read this LP, the more I realize that I think I barely played SimCity 4. All my "was that 3 or 4?" memories are turning out to have been from SimCity 3000.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 07:48
|
|
|
Deadmeat5150 posted:All the times I played this and never knew I could just drop a spur into my industry area. The factories have to actually touch the railroad so you're still going to want to plop a freight station or get really tangled with how you build your tracks but yeah City Builders in general are really bad at not explaining core game mechanics to you so that there's an illusion of depth. Its how industrial areas are set up all the time in real life so it makes sense, at least.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 13:51
|
|
|
BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:The factories have to actually touch the railroad so you're still going to want to plop a freight station or get really tangled with how you build your tracks but yeah City Builders in general are really bad at not explaining core game mechanics to you so that there's an illusion of depth. See also: How far WILL people go to reach a public transport option? How many public transport options will they chain together?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 20:52
|
|
|
Veloxyll posted:See also: How far WILL people go to reach a public transport option? Based on my family's experience of trying to sell a house and dealing with entirely too many morons who wanted a house near the railway station but didn't want to be near the railway lines...
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 22:42
|
|
|
Black Robe posted:Based on my family's experience of trying to sell a house and dealing with entirely too many morons who wanted a house near the railway station but didn't want to be near the railway lines... SimCity 4 is very realistic in this respect if you don't have NAM (For the love of god get NAM. It and the Opera House fix are the two mandatory mods.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 22:47
|
|
|
Black Robe posted:Based on my family's experience of trying to sell a house and dealing with entirely too many morons who wanted a house near the railway station but didn't want to be near the railway lines... NIMBY is a hell of a drug
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2019 17:31
|
|
|
pour one out for another victim of simsLPitus friends
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 00:13
|
|
|
T-man posted:pour one out for another victim of simsLPitus friends I got busy with work and moving but now Im going to make an update just to spite you
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 02:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 22:15 |
|
|
BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:I got busy with work and moving but now Im going to make an update just to spite you Excellent. The system works.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2019 03:54
|
|