Garton (a vanilla MD)

[89James89]

Garton

A look into city building without any fluff

Introduction:

Right lets get the important bits out of the way first.

This is a vanilla CJ. (no, not even NAM). I just want to see what sort of city you can get when you don;t use any mods or CC at all, while still making (or at least attempting too) it look nice. Other rules include these:

-Each city started on hard

-No cheating (exception below)

-Can use God Mode cheat to replant trees because, despite trying to leave gaps in my farmland it still deletes all the bloody trees when they develop and like hell I'm waiting for the damn trees to grow in mayor mode.

-Must attempt to grow the region naturally without being like: Yay here's a flipping huge city with absolutely nothing around it for several hundred miles for no actual reason (unless of course I decide its going to be Las Vegas which I won't)

Anyway rules out of the way lets get started. Oh and please don't expect a massively thorough storyline to it. Sure I want to make the writing enjoyable and actually give the city some life but I don;t want to be restricted by the storyline either.

So, for the 2 people who are still vaguely more interested in this than what's under their fingernails. Welcome to Garton!

Entry 1: We found a city!

(not to be confused with the found in lost and found, as that would be cheating)

Or we'll at least a small bayside town by the end of this entry (a city would be pushing it a bit)

Right now, for reasons that no one seems to quite know about this piece of land appeared several years ago somewhere off the coast of America (I thinking maybe up north on the West side not that it really matters.). Now humans being humans it wasn't long before they'd explored the new area and decided, for no real reason that makes any sense to settle the area and claim it for their own.

This is the area in question:



Now, despite many of you probably thinking that the big bay in the middle of the map would make a nice place to settle along, what with the easy transport connections to the edge of the map and all you'd all be wrong.

Of course the best place to settle is on the big island in the north-west with connections to the rest of the country via a small ferry so that is what they did, under the leadership of a bloke called Mr Garton (who ironically enough, quickly decided that most of the township were idiots and promptly left to find a better life elsewhere, leaving a Mayor Poppins in charge (OOC: Basically I screwed up with naming the Mayor)).

Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself so here's a aerial image of the area the first town has been built in.



As you can see, the choice wasn't completely idiotic with a nice sheltered bay to ship in and out of as well as realtively flat ground to build on and as such a small town quickly took root, mainly focussed around agriculture with a bit of processing here and there. This is what the town looked like as the population hit 1000, shortly after Mayor Poppin ran out of excuses as to where the excess money from taxes was going and decided to appease them with a clinic and a fire station.



Fast forward a couple more years and as people slowly filled the area surrounding the bay a need to improve the infrastructure was decided upon. Now, with the town making a fair bit of extra cash Mayor Poppin in his infinite wisdom decided to splash out a bit of the town funds on a nice new, not in any way at all shiny building to help it grow.

Let's see if you can see it from this overview of how the town currently looks.



Did you see it? The not so shiny coal power plant. Yup Mayor Poppins a genius. Power too last the town a fair while given that suddenly, thanks to the black fumes belching from the power plant and an increasing industrial harbour, people aren't finding it the most inviting place anymore.

Anyway in case you couldn't see it in the above image, here's a closer look at the town.



Despite the above problems though south of the bay isn't too bad a place to live with some nice beach-front property (just don't swim in the black water ok).

Anyway, if you don't want to live next to the power plant you can always move into on the many small farming communities popping up all over the place. Provided that is you can understand a single word anyone that live in them say.



Anyway hope you liked the small introduction to our little town, join us next time when we jump ship and abando... I mean spread out and further explore our surroundings in an attempt to continue (hopefully) growing our community here in Garton.

Cheers

James

[vortext]

Good to see you back in action James! Very enjoyable read, looking forward to how things progress! 

[wallasey]

Back to basis no thrills and great descriptions! Liking the format, hope Garton does well!

[Themistokles]

(unless of course I decide its going to be Las Vegas which I won't)

Great start! It actually looks really good (that is, despite being vanilla ). Already looking forward to the next part!

[compdude787]

Good start! It would be nice if your images were bigger; right now, I'm seeing them as small thumbnails that can't be enlarged.

[89James89]

^ Hmm is anyone else having this issue, as too me there normal forum sized images (800 by something I think)?

Cheers

James

[FrankU]

Hi James,

To me they look as complete 1024 x 768 (most of them) images.
And I concur with the other comments. Interesting start and nice storytelling: no high brow fantasies this time.

[art128]

That is an interesting start indeed. What we can see already is a nicely done town with only vanilla content.
The only mod I'd really advise to get is a slope mod for when you're going to build in the mountains. (to prevent ugly 45° to 90° slopes)

[89James89]

Replies:

vortext: Thanks and I'm glad to be back. Also nice to hear that your enjoying the start to the MD.

wallasey: Thanks and yep no thrills, just gritty city planning (or attempts at anyway).

Themistokles: Thanks and I hope this part doesn't dissapoint!

compdude787: Thanks for takign the time to read through despite the issues you were having. I can't see anything wrong my end though so I hope it clears up for you too.

FrankU: Glad I captured your interests. Lets hope I can continue to spin a nice (if sometimes stupid) storyline.

art128: Thanks and regarding the slope mod, I'm going to see how far I can get without it using the terrain tools and the smallest brush (the ctrl + 1 one) so hopefully I won't need one.



Entry 2: Mount Hayley

Right, welcome back. Today were heading north from our small town to take a look at the centre of the island, which as you can see fromt his image is dominated by a very obvious landmark.



This would be Mt Hayley. Named after the local resident Hayley Keaton, when she decided to drunkedly make a bet that she could easily be the first person to scale it. This, she amazingly enough (given that she still very drunk when she set off) managed to do leaving a very impressed Mayor Poppins to name the the landmark after her.

Rather ironically however Hayley had sobered up considerably by the time she'd reached the summit and upon looking down remembered she was terrified of heights and had to be rescued by some more experienced climbers before she could make her descent, hence why you can see emergency flares in the above image.

Anyway, as the area featured a large amount of relatively flat terrain, farms popped up like daisy's and have so far spread around the entire south side of the mountain and its adjoining ridge.

As for actual residencies there are four named ones in the area.

To the South East of Mt Hayley, Hayleys Descent, which is the sister and rival town to Hayley's Ascent with both being settled by people who coudlnt agree on whether the point where they drunkenly cheered Hayley on at the start of the climb or the point where they worridely greeted her on her return trip down was more important, can be seen here alongside the small town of Pendrington



Whereas, to the South West you can see the aforementioned Hayley's Ascent and the town of Hayley (founded by people who were more intent on founding a town in a sound geographical location rather than on some local woman).



As you can see the area around Hayley and Hayleys Ascent seems to have spread a lot more successfully than the area around the other two towns but this is mostly down to the town of Hayley rather than Hayleys Ascent being the right place to celebrate the local Heroine, despite what the residents of Hayleys Ascent might tell you.

Anyway other than that the only real other thing of note is Pendrington Woods located just south of Pendrington as a attempt to appease environmentally minded residents by Mayor Poppins after building the coal power plant (interestingly enough you can see the Mayor had no qualms about placing power pylons throguh the forest though so that energy could be supplied from the coal power plant rather than the area having to provide their own. You can also see farmer Maggues radio tower converted from a old power pylon that used to help provide energy to the otherside of the forest before farmland surrounded it. Its also the first radio station of the whole area).



Anyway that's all I have for now so here's a image of some lovely rural spread for you all till next time.



Cheers

James

[11241036]

Quite a good bit of work considering that you are only using default Maxis content. You might want to consider using a few roads to speed up traffic between the villages, but other than that, that's really the best one can do (especially because of the IMO poor implementation of farming in Vanilla Sim City 4).

[89James89]

Replies:

11241036: Thanks and yes it is proving to take a bit longer than I'd thought it would to fill these tiles up with farms and small communities. As for the road issues you may enjoy this update as it may have something to do with that!



Entry 3: Gridlocked rubbish

Well were back and this entry will show that, even with a good plan in place, sometimes things can screw that up for you.

So what was this plan?

To fill up the rest of the tile of Central Garton.

What actually happened?

Well it started off well, with more farms and snaking streets continuing to fill up the area. In fact, it went so well, that the local farmers decided that they needed some central place to sell their produce leading to a farmers market being opened up in Hayley (yet again proving that Hayley was a more sound idea than Hayleys Descent and Hayleys Ascent).

However as this following image shows there was a slightly rubbish problem building up in town.



Yup rubbish.

Now, seeing as, (despite the stupidity of some of the residents of Garton) someone was probably before long going to realise that the rubbish they were leaving out wasn't actually being collected by anyone and that might lead them to get a bit annoyed.

Mind you as you can imagine, they didn't really want the proposed tip on their back door so we had to find another place for it.

This was the solution



Welcome to what is probably quite literally the most rubbish place to live in Gaton, Tipton. Originally just a landfill, the small amount of factories sprung up next ( because screw it, the area already has a landfill a little more pollution isn't going to hurt) and then slowly housing inevitably followed.

Now we did try to make it a little bit better by adding the recycling centre but by and large it obviously isn't the best place to live.

Anyway with that problem out of the way another one arose. Apparently 4,000+ people and lorries trying to use basic streets doesn't exactly cut it (go figure huh?) as this data graph shows.



Yes we have problems.

So, before the traffic ground entirely to a halt we replaced the route between Hayley and Garton Bay (the town in the other tile) with a nice shiny new road which as you can see definitely helped.



Also while we were at it (and also because not everyone likes data maps) here's a look at the general traffic lighted crossing improvements that took place all over Garton in an attempt to stop everyone trying to use the intersection at one, in another new town called Killinton.



Right so them problems mostly solved for now. Sorry the entry was a little bit on the boring side but I wanted to show you how were trying to cope with issues as they arise in the game.

Hopefully next time we'll actually finish Central Garton up.

Till then

James

[89James89]

Entry 4: Goodbye Hayley, Hello Sepen.


Right well today, with the problems from the last entry behind us we can safely move on to continuing to spread our small community out.

First things first though here's Hayley all farmed and ready to go. Unfortunately the area is pretty large so I had to do it in two pictures (useless helicopter couldn't fly any higher.) but it should still give you an idea of how the area looks.

Firstly we can see the the East side of Hayley (facing South) showing the towns of Pendrington, Hayley's Descent, Wellbourne, Tipton and Kilinton respectively (from top to bottom) surrounded by lovely open farmland (apart from Tipton which has a dump outside it).




Moving to the West (again facing South) you can see the towns of Hayley, Hayley's Ascent, Tineaton (pronounced Tiny-ton and the smallest settlement in the region that we've actually bothered naming so far), Adbury and Shore Regis with the two halfs of the area divided by Hayley's Ridge. Also Adbury woods can be seem to the North-East of Adbury, another attempt to please the hipp..... I mean environmentalist's.




Anyway with Hayley done and dusted we can move onto arguably the most pleasant place to live in the whole region so far, Sepen Head. Immediately west of Garton Bay (so south of Hayley), here's what it used to look like when it was even more pleasant.




As you can see the area has several interesting features. Namely the 'head' of land that gives the area its name, the spit of land that helps to create the Garton Bay area and the sandbar formed behind the rocks just off the head.

Anyway it didn't take long for us to capitalise on the nice surroundings situated in the area, with what could probably just about pass as a resort town springing up.




Now as you can see, despite the emphasise being on a relaxing place for the residents of the Garton region to visit we still didn't skimp on wasting space that could be used for farming so that's still relevant here but unlike most of the region so far this place has usable and nice beaches and a lean towards commercial ventures over industrial (though again there is a small industrial estate as the town is fairly large and needed the jobs).

Probably easier for me to show this in a closer photo rather than try and explain it with words so here's the photo of the main town of Sepen and its sand bar and headland.  As you can see the commercial areas can be seen in the centre of town and down by the beach. Also of note is Mayor Poppins holiday house (the one thats surrounded by trees on the hill behind the town) and the park behind it with its lookout tower allowing you to see the surroundings area pretty well. The small bay at the bottom of the photo and the shallows between the mainland and the sandbar also make lovely places to take little ones for swims as the waters are fairly shallow here. Just please be careful of the rather obvious shelf as it gets a hell of a lot deeper on the other side.




Other than this, the last photo I have to show you today is one of the spit of land that forms Garton Sands. With house prices here being almost double pretty much anywhere else in the regions its not surprising to find that the beaches here are almost always busy and thriving and a very popular form of relaxation for the residents of Garton Bay. Of course all the popularity isn't very welcomed by the homeowners of Garton Sands who generally think of themselves as above the rest of the region but screw it. If they weren't intelligent enough to realise that it was going to be a busy place then that's their fault not ours.




Anyway that's it for another entry from Garton and now were back on track lets hope we can continue the wave of expansion for the next few entries.

Cheers





James

[Themistokles]

Lovely landscape and you're actually doing great vanilla! (Even though I do miss the mmp's )

[vortext]

yes, lovely indeed, really great farming lay-out! 

And I'll even admit in that last beach picture, the palm trees actually look kinda, dare I say it, nice?! 

[FrankU]

Hi James,

Not at all boring! It's nice to see how things develop.

[89James89]

Replies:

Themistokles: Thanks and I miss them too lol but like not having to spend ages trying to get them all perfect lol.

vortext: Thanks glad you like the odd shaped farms and I'm glad you like the palm trees there quite rare here in Garton lol.

FrankU: Thanks glad your enjoying the developments and I hope I can keep you interested.




Entry 5: Nielton-on-Sand

(OOC: Just a quick note. I've decided that in my CJ distances are double that of the normal SC4 normal. This menas that I'm treating my large city tiles as 8kmx8km (instead of 4kmx4km), my medium ones as 4kmx4km (instead of 2kmx2km) and so on.)


Right lets see, last time we left off we had expanded south creating Sepen. Well today we head north and look at the founding and growth of Nielton-on-Sand.

Situated north east of Mt Hayley (above Tipton) along this rugged coastline Nielton-on-Sand was settled in the small bay in the centre of the map.




Initially founded as a small port for the north side of the island the fact that unlike Garton Bay, where its sheltered , Nielton-on-Sand took a pier based approach to its dock to try and minimise the amount of wave power that will be hitting the ships by having it dock alongside a pier rather than alongside the dock.

In the next picture you can see what I mean along with the small industrial area and housing that make up some of the town of Nielton-on-Sand.




Now over time as is normal with a settlement the town expanded and more and more people arrived and moved into the region. Unfortunately, some idiot got carried away with housing all the eager new residents arriving by sea and decided not to expand the industry in the area and seeing as no one seemed to want to buy food and stuff at all, this happened.




Yer oppps, we may have a issue. No worries though I have a solution, not like anyone's going to actually want to use that small strip of beach that's left anyway. I mean I'm pretty sure there's signs restricting swimming, well probably, so we'll turn that into more harbour and increase the farmland throughout the area. That should help (ironically enough though Nielton-on-Sand is now no longer anywhere near any sand. Go figure).

You can also see the newly formed Garton Shipping Administration building just above the harbour. Apparently though when you have a total regional population of around 12k you don't have much choice in architects as the building looks exactly the same as both of Mayor Poppins houses.




Well at least the whole unemployment's fixed. Pity no one can actually get to their jobs anymore to make use of the whole employment options. Looks like I should probably fix this traffic problem too. Not like linking this town to Garton Bay via Welbourne and Hayley's Descent (it'll also shut them up. They've been moaning about the fact that Hayley's Ascent has a road and they don't for a while now).




Anyway some time passed and with the connections to Garton Bay finished, the area around Nielton-on-Sand finished filling with rolling fields. You can also maybe just about make out the tiny village of Linsand, where you can find a nice beach regularly used by the residents of Nielton-on-Sand to unwind (seeing as it actually has sand and all that).




Right well that's it for now though seeing as its the 5th entry I've decided to show you all a updated regional view showing the tiles that have been started so far. The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that the map has changed a little in the bottom left corner and this is due to me wanting to have the choice to expand the region size later if I want to while still retaining it as a coastal region. I also changed some other small bits but nothing that affects any tiles that have already been shown.




Right so that's all for today's entry.

Till next time

James

[carlfatal]

Very nice! I like that kind of natural growth, and what you do with vanilla only is stunning! 

[romualdillo]

That's why this game was so great from the beginning!!! 

[89James89]

Replies:

carlfatal: Thanks I'm glad your enjoying the vanillaesque nature and natural growth of it!

romanualdilo: Thanks and I completely agree. The base game was a massively enjoyable from the go.




Entry 6: Schulman Bay's delights and then Glennington


Right well today we have a bit of both loveliness and then some not so loveliness. Starting off continuing in a westward direction from Nielton-on-Sand (or Nielton-on-Grit (thanks Nielsc007) as it's locally called due to the distinct lack of actual sand), where we come to this lovely little valley and cove.




Needless to say, with residents streaming in form out of the state of Garton it wasn't long before a small settlement sprung up here. Completely the opposite of Nielton this small settlement sprung up as a place of relaxation and fun. Below we'll see some of the images of the small oceanside resort and what makes it such a nice area.

First off we have what is probably the most obvious and striking feature of the area in the form of Schulman's Stacks. Several stacks of hard rocks just off the headland above the town.




The town itself, as you can see here is nicely nestled between the steep sides of the of the valley with winding roads up the sides of each leading to the farmland above.




The other local landmark is the states first proper hotel in the form of Schulman Cliffside Manor (ok we really need more architects). Also up here you can see some amazing views from the watchtower located next to the hotel. Just try not to fall off the cliff. The traffic into the area is pretty gridlocked and I'm not sure it has its own ambulance.




Anyway before we move onto taking a quick look at the next settlement we'll take a look at an overview of Schulman Bay which as you can see, due to the terrain isn't a patchwork of farmland like the other places we've visited.




Anyway moving on from Schulman Bay we come to the large spur of land at the end of Garton Island known as Cape Glenn. The north side of the mouth that leads to the huge natural harbour that Garton is situated on. A  place of distinct change between the rugged north side, constantly bashed by the strong waves of the Pacific Ocean to the smooth and calm south side sheltered from the waves.




This smooth sheltered and mostly flat land was perfect for an area to house an increasing population and quickly a sprawling town was formed.




unfourtunately as you can see this quick growing sprawl did have a couple of issues. First was that with so much land available we needed to make sure we could power the damn thing so a coal plant was built. Then on top of this rapid growth mean that we need to provide jobs and the most efficient way to do that was to continue to expand the industrial waterfront. As you can also see this continued industrial growth still isn't enough to stem the tide of unemployment and is causing a large amount of pollution to be thrown up above the town.

Still I suppose you can't make a omelette without breaking a few eggs (plus coal is cheap and produces a nice amount of power unlike them useless wind turb... what do you mean I'm not meant to say that? Not my fault its more cost effective and means more money comes into my... I mean the towns coffers

Alright I'll shut up now.)

Anyway join me next time when we continue to screw with Glennin... I mean develop Glennington and its surrounding areas.

Cheers

James

[89James89]

Entry 7: Edumacating Glennington!


Right lets see where were we. Oh yeah screwing up Glennington. Oh well lets carry on then. Right now I'm not sure this entry is going to be easy to introduce so screw it, were going to dive right in with this residential and commercial expansion to Glennington based on absolutely no real reason other than the fact that we thought as Glennington was quickly overtaking Garton Bay as the most populous town, that we should probably copy most of the other towns in the world and create some sort of commercial business district.




Brilliant, lots of residential plots surrounding what were sure will be a a thriving and successful business area for the growing town.

So several months later

Ta da!




Oh for the love of god not again. Well as you can clearly see something went hideously wrong (not my fault I'm sure). Don't worry though I'm sure some new Industrial development won't harm the citizens any more than the existing industry and might help with all the unemployment and increasing the harbour always helps the state.




Anyway this still didn't really help the whole development issues that we were having with our new CBD so it was back tot he drawing board.

Fast forward another couple of months and some further research into successful town planning shows that maybe we should edumacate our citizens. (because obviously this wasn't obvious at all).




So anyway here's a image of our states first centre of education, including a school for the kids, a library (Strngely enough given that I'm not sure most of the citizens can read the library has a lot of books checked out. We can only assume it has a large stock of picture books). and a town administration centre (yes I know architectural similarities again). no longer do you need that rather dodgy home schooling, well ok, at least if you live in Glennington anyway. If you live elsewhere your a bit screwed.




And by jove what do you know, it worked. Now you can see our bustling centre of commerce for the whole state and also some nicer housing popping up. You can also see another farmers market similar to the one in Hayley, reports have shown that customers who shop regularly at these farmer markets have improved health. God knows how that works but apparently it does.

Anyway, with edumacation beginning to help balance out the large amounts of pollution generated by the town (hey, you can't have it all) life in the continually growing Glennington was beginning to look up.

So that's it for this entry. We'll leave you however, with this rather random image of the small village of Adbury which if you can't remember is just north of Mt Hayley.




No one seems sure what happened here as it was the only settlement in the entire area (OOC: Central Garton/ Mt Hayley tile) that seemed to get a boom of middle class housing which never seemed to have sold and instead, has turned it from a nice wealthy village into a perfect example of class divide, with crammed in lower classes occupying half the buildings and the middle class that did buy the houses, occupying the rest. Still, their paying taxes so were not really that bothered, it was just a bit of a weird development.

Till next time

James