Keetron posted:

Disregarding your comment about starting a region from scratch, let's assume you download some region from the stack such as Eaton or Saul St Marie.

The lovely part is to forest all tiles you want to use. The initial trees are free but are a pain to put in place. There must be a mod somewhere to do this faster but you will have to find that yourself because I am lazy.

Where would people settle first? At the foot of a mountain, the place where the river flows into the sea or in the middle of fertiel farmland? Build some small settlements there with a few small farming plots, they have to work all this by hand/horse you know. Do this across the region in a bunch of different cities.

Now, how would they connect if they connect at all? Put in some railways and allow these to follow logical lines, so as straight as possible unless there are mountains in the way in which case you seek as little elevation as possible.

Revisit all your towns after they are connected. With the industrial age there will be bigger farms, so start drawing bigger farms. Use the shift key to prevent a roadgrid. Draw the farms spreading outwards from the town, but following the roads you made to have some outside connections other then rail.

You will see residential and commercial and all other demand spiking across the region now.

Build out your towns using the small farming plots as you can imagine the municipality would buy up one farm at the time to turn into shops and houses. Also, the bigger and more flat land there is in a region, the cheaper the land to build on so build spacious. You can put in a few small plots of dirty and manufacturing industry somewhere outside of town. This makes more sense in a harbor town then somewhere in the middle of Bumfuck, Alabama.
There is still no need for silly stuff like water, healthcare or schooling.

By now you can have most of your map/region that you think makes sense covered by farms and some small industry. Pick the town that is most likely to grow into a city, often near water. Do the same as above but remember to build in layers instead of going straight for a high-rise town. You can of course, the big region you build up that will have about a 100k citizens and three times that in jobs (mostly agriculture), will cause a huge demand in everything so you can build what you like.