Building Basin: A SimCity 4 Interactive Dynasty
 

I tried one of these a few years ago to good results, but the difference is I'm actually saving the pictures on a server other than my own this time. Anyway, the idea is pretty simple. I've been pining to play SimCity 4 for a while, but as usual lost my CDs as I have probably half a dozen times since the game came out in 2003.

It was available on Steam now, so I went ahead and took the plunge and now I'm building cities again or at least, that's what I'm trying to do and where you come in.

I'm not looking for a lot of help. Mostly naming help in some cases as I expand to areas of the region I haven't built yet or other things as I get going, because sometimes it can be haphazard when I'm building.

The community I've taken is a custom map called Basin from some guy on the interwebs. I've just kept the name because I couldn't think of anything more clever. It'll be comprised of cities, towns and so forth.

To tell you how old the game is, I can't even get a resolution to fit my full laptop monitor because it's too new and the game maxes out at 1600 x 1200. So I had to take shots of the region in pieces. As you can see below, we're just getting started with all of this. I just began less than two days ago with building, but intend to spend some quality time investing in the other parts of the community in the coming days, so the population might grow quickly. In time, if it grows and I can get immersed, I'll perhaps do some leagues based on this place because that's always fun for me.

Here is Basin:

I think my next project is to build a military community. I've never done this before in any of my regions, save for a random base someplace and I think it might be fun to just build an entire city that's got an Army base and an Air Force base within it or something like that.

I'm guessing it'll be next to Devonshire, because that community is already designated as my agricultural city and so, having it in the rural part of the region might be interesting.

Here are some things to get out of the way:

- I use a money cheat. The game is nearly a decade old, so suffice to say that playing to "win" went out the window a long time ago. I have a lot more fun playing to build communities and so forth, so that's what I do and while I'm adept at knowing how to generate taxes, again, the game goes way too slow that way.

I have a lot of mods: Simtropolis.com, coupled with a bunch of other communities out there are my friend in this regard. It makes the game infinitely more fun, lemme tell ya.

Here's Fort McCreary, which is home to McCreary Air Force Base and Ft. McCreary. Here's the view from McCreary AFB. It has McCreary Highway that spans across the city and into other cities that I haven't built yet. I imagine this will be the largest city in his part of the region, just from how I've constructed it.

I spent a bit of time in Moon Island just now building on the community that was already there. I've named it Hamlet and at the moment, it's the largest city in the entire region at over 45,000 people and counting. I anticipate this will change a great deal before too long.





Here is a snapshot of the region's best high school (thus far) Hamlet High School. The area is the best thing we have in regards to a tony suburb and so, I felt they needed a high school to go with that reputation. That's actually a download of a museum in Shanghai, but...it works for me.








If you notice the peninsula in Moon Island that is the actual reason for the name (the original founders believed it looked like the moon and that it was an island...) to me, it feels like Manhattan waiting to happen and so, I'm going to eventually tackle it and try to turn that particular island into a type of metropolis.

Parking looks like a nightmare at the high school. Can you imagine having to trek up that mountain before a day of school? ;)

As far as the "interactive" part at the moment, I'm really looking for naming ideas. It's easy for me to name after people I know or to be random, but since you can't really edit the cities once they've been named, I'd like 'em to be good.

Another thing is of course, the cities within the cities or whatever. Because as I envision it now, the "cities" and "townships" are effectively counties with cities inside of them, mostly because I've never been very good at doing the whole neighborhood effect. But maybe I'll work on that...

Haha. "I had to walk 5 miles up hill. No really uphill each day!"

Devonshire is located in the absolute north part of the Basin region. To it's south is Ft. McCreary. To give you an idea of Devonshire, it's entirely rural and there are just two cities located there, both essentially bedroom communities to the military base to the south.





Barnsdale and Harriman are next to each other and the local saying is "You don't really know where Harriman ends and Barnsdale begins..." Together, their population is just over 16,000 people. Every September, people flood the area for the annual Harvest Parade and Festival. About half of the population comes from military people who prefer to live here because of better schools than in the Ft. McCreary area. It's about a 5 minute drive from here to McCreary AFB. (And yes, I actually measured it because I was curious...)

Barnsdale and Harriman share a high school called Barnsdale-Harriman High School which is located in-between the two towns on Main Street.

I'm loving this so far. Keep it up!

The Fort McCreary area has grown to over 110,000 people. The area is anchored by Ft. McCreary and to the south, a community known as Settlement. North of Settlement is the town of North Woodland, a bedroom community to Moon Island and also military officer retirees.

Conversely, the nicest area in this entire area is North Woodland. The rest of the area is pretty urban and not exactly the most affluent.

Ok folks. I am about to settle the area just south of Fort McCreary, southwest of Moon Island. Any ideas on what to name it? So far, the only name I could come up with is Hook Lake, because the lake looks like it hooks inward there. But save for that, nothing. Ideas welcomed!

Crescent Lake? Maybe adds something like Heights to it (can't tell from the picture if the topography reflects that or not).

that high school is sick, very cool!

Thanks for the input, guys.

Here is the new community of Crescent Lake. So far, the anchor city is Lakeview, population 66,000 or so. Home to Lakeview High School and when I finish building it, some kind of college or university. Any ideas on a name? Should I put say, a state university here or a private school a la Yale in an otherwise grimy city? I'm looking for inspiration (and I think I'm going to stick the colleges next to each other on that peninsula, maybe. Dunno...)





I'm eventually planning a variety of suburbs across the river that ought to be more suburban and richer in nature than the more gritty city of Lakeview. We'll get down to those later, though.

If you want a sense of how far things are from each other, Barnsdale is about a 35 minute drive from Lakeview.

My lack of foresight doesn't actually provide a way to get from Hamlet to well anywhere west, but I'll eventually build a road connection -- but not a highway connection as they won't want people to move there -- and when I do, it'll probably still end up taking you 45 minutes to an hour.

I always referred to these as "federal grants." Sometimes, that Congressional delegation really comes through for you! ;)

Awesome. What a great idea. :)