The avenues are mostly free of buildings, except for a few civic structures like the City Hall and the College: Unlike the two layouts above, this one features a low-connectivity network, with few intersections between the low density streets and the avenues. This layout is particularly useful when creating suburbs where your Sims can enjoy a nice quality of life in a slower-paced environment. Here’s one of them, looking from the edge of the park complex: They also open up the skyline and let more buildings to receive sunshine, so tall buildings don’t shade each other as much:įinally, the right amount of open space helps creating four view corridors that guide tourists to the casino. The squares here delimit a park complex, a casino, and some residential towers: You may have spotted a couple squares in the Grid layout above, but in the Grid and Squares layout, they are placed more deliberately and serve a purpose. While here you can see the view from the City Hall, looking back towards the arch: Here you can see the view someone entering the city would get: View corridors are very important in real cities, as they guide tourists towards particular landmarks and it generally helps with visual navigation. I also created two long park blocks going from the Arc de Triomphe landmark to the City Hall, which opens a wide view corridor between them. Some of the streets end in “T” intersections, forcing vehicles into the higher-capacity avenues: In the example below, you can see that I mixed large grids made with avenues and smaller grids made with streets. It’s by far the easiest pattern to create it’s useful to maximize building placement and density in SimCity, and it becomes interesting if tweaked in small ways. The grid pattern dates back to the Roman Empire era and can be found all over the world, but it’s especially prevalent in American cities. Today I’ll talk specifically about the first three, while the last three will be the focus of a later blog entry. There’s an infinite number of ways a mayor can build a city, but I’m going to focus on six typical street network patterns: the grid, the grid and squares, the curvilinear, the web, the radial and the irregular patterns. Hello, Mayors – I’m Guillaume Pierre, the Lead Gameplay Scripter on SimCity, and today I’d like to talk to you about road layouts and its impact on your Sims’ lives. Sep 03, 2013 Lead Gameplay Scripter Guillaume Pierre