Maister said:
without further tipping my hand or prompting any particular response from you - what are some of the 'subtle' things you've noted?
Well, I was going to list a few things but removed my list because a) maybe I am an idiot and these are all things that all professional planners know and I would just be revealing what a Rube I am :-c b) It was some time ago and I was sick and heavily medicated, so my memory for the details is not The Best it could be. 8-! But, an attempt to answer your question anyway and perhaps merely entertain everyone by making a Fool of myself :-D :
When I played Simcity 3000, I developed a lot of strategies for keeping farms alive. Good, healthy farms that were not being converted to industry too rapidly to stop the process is like a "leading indicator" for certain things. For one thing, farms do not thrive if there is too much pollution. Pollution causes them to convert to industry. So, if you have healthy farms, you have a clean environment. If you can figure out how to keep the environment clean, you have more success with farms. For another, in a small town with a large farming area, your farms are major employers BUT if you have much residential near them, your farms are more likely to begin converting to industry. However, if you don't put any residential near them, you will end up with long commutes to the jobs on the farms. Long commutes creates traffic. Traffic causes pollution on the roads. Too much traffic and too much pollution on the roads...begins to convert your farms to industry. So, if you are not constantly battling conversion of your farms, you must have traffic doing fairly well, you must have affordable housing that is not too close but not too far, you must have a port or some other means to get the goods to market, etc. And it is a delicate balance that falls apart pretty rapidly, so you have to stay on top of things all the time.
In Simcity 3000, I could save cities at different points, rename them and make multiple copies that way. That allowed me to save the game at a critical point and try alternate solutions. One thanksgiving, when I was awake for 24 hours or so due to drug withdrawal and decided to play Simcity rather than cause trouble in some online forum
, I played to a point where my city was kind of "Hitting a wall" in development. I began going through ALL the stats and trying to figure out what I could do to get unstuck. What I noted was that commercial and and industrial development are grown based primarily on access to resources. I had been trying to "pump up" commercial and industrial development when it began to flag and it wasn't doing much. Cutting taxes, passing or unpassing ordinances to make it a more business-friendly environment, etc -- all of that failed to make any substantial difference. Those were just tweaks, with minor impact, and it wasn't fixing how badly my city had stalled. After going through all the stats, I found that access to water and power is crucial to growth of business and industry. If I had about twice as much power and water as I needed, and didn't have any significant bottle-necks in other areas (such as an inadequate port), commercial and industry grew like wildfire. It grew about as fast as I could layout new zones. But if I only had a little "extra" capacity in those areas, growth was anemic or nonexistent.
I also found that land use planning was a more effective deterrant to crime than extra police stations (which only cause cries of "oppression" anyway). If I make sure my military base, university, amusement park, and other high crime items are sufficiently spaced and have appropriate land-uses around them, crime will be low. Low density commercial belongs around things like the amusement park. Residential does not.
I have also found that small changes to downtown business districts can make a huge difference in the success of the area. And that it is generally better, after you have sufficient size in a city, to have a downtown that is higher density but a smaller footprint in order to make space for large park areas and other perks like that. The mix of stuff is really critical to how well the downtown area succeeds in being high value, etc.
I think if you play a long time and get stuck and try different solutions, you begin to learn subtler things than just "don't stick your power plant in the middle of town -- no one wants to live near such pollution". lol. At least, I think I did. But, what do I know? I am just a college student. :-}
