Baltimore, MD

[twiigss]

So after moving from MD after 19 years, I downloaded a map of Baltimore that has the major highways put in, 695, 95, 395 etc. Anyway I took a look at the real map of Baltimore and started laying down the streets and roads as they are in real life.

I can tell you that services are not showing many green roads with one way streets. It works in real life, but the way services work and give coverage certainly don't work the same way in game.

Basically I laid out Key Hwy that connects to Light Street to run into the city. So from there I laid out Lee st., W Barre, W York, S Sharp st., which Sharp st. connects into W Conway St. and the 395 connects into Howard st. I laid out all the one way streets and everything is connected, but the police station or health clinic, seems like the services like those don't like one way streets.

[loverevolutionary]

Green areas are not service coverage. They are the value/happiness boost areas. These are the areas the service will help to level up. Coverage can be much greater, depending on traffic. Your services will probably have no problem covering those one ways, even if they don't boost the level of the buildings on them.

[ms6615]

yeah the green area is the influence area, and also the efficieny area. it means that under most circumstances, that service will be able to reach those areas reliably. it doesn't mean, however, that those serivces won't be able to reach outside of that area. most service vehicles are idle a good protion of the time anyway, so unless it's a very very dense area, they should have coverage just fine.

[ms6615]

also the way this game simulates population and area is very deceiving. see: 5 families living in what is styled to look like a single family home. there is a lot of liberty taken with regard to things like this to give the appearance of reality, but still be playable at the level that modern mid-range computers can simulate.

[twiigss]

Originally posted by transitmonkey:

yeah the green area is the influence area, and also the efficieny area. it means that under most circumstances, that service will be able to reach those areas reliably. it doesn't mean, however, that those serivces won't be able to reach outside of that area. most service vehicles are idle a good protion of the time anyway, so unless it's a very very dense area, they should have coverage just fine.

Ohhhh okay. I thought that like if there are crimes in your city, (you see the little robber face above the buildings) and you place down a police station, certain roads will turn green, and I was under the impression that the green roads meant how much coverage that police station will have, or what area the police station will cover.

I guess that mode of thinking comes from SC4 when you place down a police station you have that AOE circle, and the police would only handle what was in that AOE circle.

[CellNav]

Originally posted by twiigss:

Ohhhh okay. I thought that like if there are crimes in your city, (you see the little robber face above the buildings) and you place down a police station, certain roads will turn green, and I was under the impression that the green roads meant how much coverage that police station will have, or what area the police station will cover.

In general, the "green" displays the full effect along the road with regards to "police accumulation". The police buildings have an accumulation value and it appears to use the "radius" value (from happiness) to determine how far along that road network the accumulation value effects.

Crime accumulates in buildings along a road, however, police accumulation will slow down the process. A patrol car has a police accumulation value of 5000 (a police building is like 25) and it will reset crime along the road network as it passes buildings. Since crime accumulates faster along "grey" roads, the police building will dispatch (spawn) more patrol cars. If the patrol car doesn't get diverted to a crime scene then it will eventually patrol all your streets.

Garbage facilities (and garbage trucks) appear to use similar logic. As the garbage truck passes buildings it will fill up with garbage and eventually reach 100% capacity and then return back to the garbage faciity and won't travel far if it's road path is full of trash. If more garbage vehicles can be dispatched it will spawn new ones to that same location and it will get farther than the last truck, but again, it might not get there before it's full ... etc, etc.

If you don't mind running mods, there's a "Police Box" mod that helps fill in those little gaps where the roads are grey. I've been meaning to make a "donut shop" mod that behaves in a similar fashion. You know, like an undercover police operation with 10 employees, one cop with 9 snitches (with a new single undercover cop car) .... ;). Here's the link to that mod if it helps :
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=411153557&searchtext=

[ms6615]

i don't know if baltimore has any toll roads, but there are a series of toll booth mods that act as police stations and dispatch police directly onto highways or 6 lane roads. this can help get police into areas away from bigger neighborhoods, but you're still limited if you're trying to recreate an actual city

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=497546511

[twiigss]

Yea there's a toll I believe if you cross the Key bridge. There's also a tunnel, but it's not in the map. However I am having an issue with realistically recreating the map because, where industry should go, industry is off the map. So I placed it down in a spot that I thought could be industrial for the city. Same thing with garbage, I placed it down but I'm gonna have to do that random placing of things as I'm going along building the city up.

[ms6615]

Originally posted by twiigss:

Yea there's a toll I believe if you cross the Key bridge. There's also a tunnel, but it's not in the map. However I am having an issue with realistically recreating the map because, where industry should go, industry is off the map. So I placed it down in a spot that I thought could be industrial for the city. Same thing with garbage, I placed it down but I'm gonna have to do that random placing of things as I'm going along building the city up.

yeah you'll run into that a lot recreating cities, especially things similar to baltimore where it's dinstinctly split between city and county. lots of older northeastern cities have that and it makes them hard to adapt to this game because a lot of services and zoning are split along/across the county line. good luck!