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So the first district is residential, named to begin with 'A' ... Appleton.
All its roads also begin with 'A', in alphabetical order they were laid down, so ...
- Abbey Road
- Acre Road
- Aden Road
- etc
... an alphabetic ordering helps me visualise where roads are within a district whenever their name comes up.
With Industrial I don't bother with numbering so much, instead I organise by type of industry.
So the second district is Industrial, named to begin with 'B' ... Badsmell
All its roads also begin with 'B', in alphabetical order they were laid down, and also reflecting what industrial activity occurs on that road:
- Battery St
- Bedwear St
- Binhire St
- Boxing St
- Builders St
... then the buildings are named to correspond to their industry - that way I don't need to include the street in the building name so much. So on Bedwear St there's ...
- Headboards Ltd
- Plump Pillows
- Waterbeds Ltd
- Hospital Beds
etc
With Commercial I often name buildings based on locale, such as:
- Abbey Road Grocers
- Battery Street Takeaways
Likewise schools, clinics. police etc
The Commercial zone is the third District, named to begin with 'C' ... City Centre
I number on short connecting streets, but otherwise just name based on function, sufficient to say - distinguish one Big Bite Restaurant from another - like:
- Lotsa Lollies [Candy Lane]
- Big Bite [Central Terrace]
- Big Bite Pizzas [Commerce Ave]
I use 'road' for residential only, 'street' for industrial only, and ave / drive / lane etc for Commercial.
Rinse and Repeat working through the alphabet with Districts D, E, F etc
If I run out of names I just have a quick look in the Yellow Pages for ideas!
I see a Fire Truck coming from City Centre Fire Station to a fire at Hotel Bedding Ltd
Now I can work out exactly where Hotel Bedding Ltd is located.
The name tells me it's on Bedwear Street.
And Bedwear Street begins with 'B' ... so that street must be in Badsmell.
So now I can ask the question ... why the hell is City Centre Fire Station handling that fire instead of Badsmell Fire Station ...?
Likewise ...
If you were to ask me where Coffins 4U Ltd is located I could tell you without even thinking just from the name 'It's on Boxing Street, in Badsmell'.
So a naming methodology enables me to analyse activity on the map / in the city in far greater detail than default naming would ever permit.
All seems over the top and a bit unnecessary but each to their own. :)
You're right, it does take a while to set up a customised city (your comment does come across to me though, as rather derisive and 'sniffy').
Bottom line is though, your city has a hundred buildings called 'Ice Cube Factory', and you've no idea where any of them are, nor are you able to distinguish one from another. In the end, it's a foreign place to you.
In contrast, I'm intimately familiar with my city - I know exactly where everything is, and know my way around like it's my hometown. The result is a FAR richer game experience for me, one that's a great deal more satisfying than just building eye-candy (or an 'animated screen-saver' as one pundit calls city sims).
So, like anything in life - like say learning to play a musical instrument, or acquiring skill in a particular sport - what you get out of it is a function of the work you're willing to put into it. But if you can't be bothered, then don't expect to become an Eric Clapton or a Tiger Woods - two guys who evidently also had 'too much time on their hands' and practiced to a degree that was 'over the top and a bit unnecessary'. Same principle applies in any endeavour, including gaming.
By the way, for anyone customising their cities like this (as opposed to building something 'generic'/ out-of-the-box), I can confirm:
[1] When a citizen dies and new occupants move into their house, the street address is preserved.
[2] Likewise, when a house levels up, its street address is preserved.
Cheers.
Well I did say each to their own. No need to get offended. Thats the first time I've been called sniffy..lol!
All I said was that it seemed a touch un-neccessary and also very time consuming. By the looks of what you say there's no actual point. You're not gaining anything to improve your city development. It's just so you can find a building on the map, which is nice but has no real benefit in this game from what I can see. Especially as everything has a jump-to button and you can follow all traffic to it's destination with one click of a button.
Carry on though by all means! If it's fun to you that the main thing aye? :)
There are a great many benefits, especially in the area of traffic management.
As mentioned earlier, a customised city facilitates 'drilling down' to street level - to individual vehicles. So I can click on a queue of cars / trucks / vans, see where each one has come from and where it's going, look for common denominators ... and I gain a degree of clarity FAR beyond anything Traffic Report Tool could provide, because I already know the city inside out.
For example, I might discover that a lot of people are commuting halfway across the map - from Appleton to Evergreen - to get to work each day, even though there's jobs available closer to home. Or I can look at people at bus-stops, see exactly where they live, and know straightaway just how far they had to walk to get to that bus-stop. There again, I can investigate why a police-car from Evergreen is patrolling the City Centre instead of its home area. There are many many more similar scenarios.
That kind of information can't be acquired when every other workplace is called 'Ice Cube Factory' or 'Big Bite Restaurant', and every citizen lives at 'The [whatever] Residence' ... there's no clue at all as to where any of those places are. All you have are thousands of ants going Gawd knows where.
So there's masses of useful insights to be gained by knowing your city inside out. And that's the kind of stuff I find really absorbing, rather than just building roads, levelling up buildings, maximising population and revenue - that's way too easy.
Systems analysis with a view to maximising efficiency is what I find challenging and stimulating (fun), and I've found that a customised city is the most effective way of realising that kind of experience.
In contrast, I look at someone like Keralis on YouTube, and to me his whole approach means he misses out on so much of the real indepth stuff built into the game by the developers, which is why I suppose most of his subscribers appear to be schoolchildren. Still, he's making truckloads of loot from his channel, so good luck to him!
But yeah - like you say - to each their own.
Cheers.
I would go with a theme-based 'system', at least for residential. One district's roads named after flowers, another after famous painters, then scientists, etc. That is similar to how many real cities are done where I live. It would still allow me to see where a fire truck comes from. I'll just have to remember where each district is, but should work out I think.
How do you combine this with building models that include a name? Or is that only on custom assets, I don't remember.
This would actually feel limiting to me, and lower the immersion. I like variety and have avenues in the same distric as alleys, depending on road size and function.
But to each their own indeed. It's a well-thought-out game if you can play it in so many different ways.
I use a naming convention however, because I find it easier to come up with short quick-to-type names that way. Also, they help me pinpoint a building, by using the second letter in the street name.
- roads tending east to west in Appleton for example, have sequential letters B thru M
- Abbey Road
- Acre Road
- Aden Road etc
- roads tending north to south have sequential letters N thru Z
- Anytime Road
- Appleton Road
- Aquatic Road
... the houses are numbered E > W and N > S as well.
That way, the second letter of the street name combined with the house number acts like a grid reference. So if I see a citizen living say, at 120 Azure Road, I can tell from the number and street name that their house must be in the lower-right corner of Appleton. And someone living at 3 Aden Road would be close to the upper eastern edge of the district ... the grid references in those cases being 120Z and 3D.
It might all sound rather complicated I suppose, but it's actually not that difficult to embed a lot of very useful information into a map that way, which then gets displayed in vehicle / citizen Information Panels in a way that can be easily interpreted, as long as a naming convention based on a few simple rules has been employed.
As far as buildings with pre-assigned names are concerned, I might incorporate the name in some way, like in the case of 'Big Bite' I append 'Burgers' / 'Pizzas' / 'Takeaways' / 'Pies' or whatever. If the name isn't prominent though, like the 'Williams' seen on some factories, I just ignore that and think of it as just a billboard, and assign something aligned with my naming convention.
By the way, I have recently come across instances here and there where a house has reverted to an address of 'The [whatever] Residence', so I ended up renumbering those. I'm not sure what's causing that yet, so it's something to bear in mind, though it hasn't proved to be a big deal as it's only been the occasional odd one here and there.
Seeing your W-E and N-S approach, I guess you mainly use grid-style cities?
Just theoritizing some more: does it happen that you start with narrow houses that later grow into wider houses, and thus messing with your numbering system?
Talking of names, know of any mods that can find something by name? There used to be one called FindIt that worked perfectly but it seems to have vanished.
Well, I tend to aim for a semi-grid layout, but not too rigid. A varied layout is much more interesting I think, especially when driving around a city with First Person Camera ... I find strict grid layouts samey and dull, and they don't give any real sense of wherebaouts you are in a city, so I try to create distinctive 'character' in different locales.
So I do have plenty of winding roads, especially in hilly parts of a city, as I like to avoid unrealistic gradients up the sides of hills, or with approaches to bridges. So roads on hills tend to snake their way gently up the hill like they do in real-world topographies. But as roads do tend to lean towards either E > W or N > S I can still apply the naming convention in non-grid layouts OK.
Likewise, I'm not absolutist or 'fanatical' about sticking to naming conventions for the sake of it - rules are made to be broken after all - so exceptions do exist, such as the main road through Appleton being called 'High Street' for example. I find special exceptions like that can even assist mental visualisation of a map, as they 'stick out' in a wy that makes them memorable.
As for houses, I start off assigning 4x4 or 6x6 squares to each house, but initially only build a one-square shack on each plot. So I start off with large shanty towns with low population density, with plenty of space to upgrade down the track. So street numbering isn't affected, though occasionally some plots disappear as a suburb evolves, or for expediency I might end up say with 20A Aden Road next to 20 Aden Road.
@DaveyBoy
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, it would be a very big job indeed, trying to retro-fit a naming convention on an already-established city - I found it simpler to just start afresh.
I don't know of any mods that let you search / locate buildings. Though as you can probably tell from my notes here, with a fully-implemented naming system you wouldn't have much use for a mod, as the location of any address soon becomes intuitive for you - a bit like you don't usually need a map to find your way around your own neighbourhood.
Do you sometimes «dezone« low residential to high residential? Do you sometimes name all the houses when you start the game but then, you need to upgrade the neighborhood to higher density? That's a lot of lost work. Hehehe, but I applaud your dedication. I thought I had patience and dedication into my games, I guess not.
The only reason I would start doing what you guys do, naming all residential, commercial and industrial (growables), only if we had a «historical« button like we had in SC4. That way, even if the building gets empty, I don't care, but at least, the model that grew there is now «fixed in time« and I can name it forever. I'd love to have growables historical. I could destroy a building until I get the model that I want!
I aim to approach the simulation in a real-world way, so I start out with the whole map in mind from the outset, and an overall 'vision' of what I'm aiming for.
My personal preference is to 'savour' the game and take plenty of time, rather than try to build a city in a week, then another, then another ... a Cities XL model I built took me something like 15 months before a fullblown megapolis started to emerge from it. So my gaming style is more about enjoying the journey rather than aim to reach the destination as quickly as possible.
My approach is for each tile on the map to consist of a self-contained township that over time links to other tiles also with their own towns, and the central tile ultimately ends up becoming the cental hub / city proper (someday, a l-o-n-g way down the track).
So - once established - roads tend to just level-up rather than get completely redesignated, just like in the real world.
A lot of rezoning would indicate poor forward thinking / planning to me - sort of 'making it up as you go along' - and that would play havoc with local roading capacity and even more with already-established and otherwise stable public transport systems. The quickest way to stuff up a city I reckon is change its underlying dynamic with arbitrary reassignments of function from say residential to industrial, or from low-density to high density.
To the extent I do rezone, it's not a big deal anyway, as it's usually just a piecemeal exercise here and there - like, I don't rezone entire districts or anything, typically just a short stretch of road. So any renumbering / renaming is relatively trivial and only takes a minute or so.