Fortresses from “The Lord of the Rings” SimCity 4 appeared before, but usually as decoration on an empty relief. Recently, a player from the city planning community completed the job and populated Minas Tirith with real neighborhoods, having shown the completed Barad-dur a week earlier:
Terraf near Minas Tirith was laid out before, initially as a joke. After the next revision of the film trilogy, the relief was decided preserve and turn into a residential city.
The settlement of the fortress required separate preparation. The player known as Fart_Bard first built on neighboring tiles to accumulate large pent-up demand for middle- and upper-class offices, and then redirected this demand to the desired site with taxes. He applied the same scheme to the rest of the region’s supporting cities.
The choice in favor of offices is explained by mechanics. Upscale commerce places fewer demands on transportation than dense residential development, and the fortress’s inconvenient layout is poorly suited to traffic. Additionally, offices have many small 1×1 and 1×2 lots that grow into tall buildings, while high-rise residential buildings take up noticeably more space.
The player specifically noted that he did not consider his approach correct.
Apart from the DLL for the terrain and camera, plus the Japanese set of stone walls, everything else here is vanilla, so in some areas there are a lot of abandoned residential buildings and traffic jams. It’s suboptimal and annoying at times, but tolerable if you know what to expect and work around the problems in advance, so you could say I’m playing “wrong” too.
He listed the problems of such development himself:
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abandoned residential buildings in certain areas
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traffic jams on some streets
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too densely packed blocks of high-rise housing
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layout of the fortress, initially inconvenient for transport
The player calls the error with density the main one. He no longer remembers the reason for this decision and chalks it up to laziness, although he knew about the consequences in advance. For the easternmost city in the region, he still destroyed residential buildings, and it turned out more successfully than other supporting cities.
Separate frames show a satellite view and a transport diagram. In the lowlands, the road network began with a lazy grid; closer to the hills, the layout became looser.
The discussion resulted in the idea of a new type of transport. From a joke about brake failure on mountain roads, the question arose about working cable cars, which could be made on the basis of modified power lines with a carrying capacity lower than that of light rail. Such transport would replace steep slopes and serpentines and would return interest to the mountainous areas of the map, which are usually avoided in the game.
The ability to build full-fledged cities on top of such mega-structures appeared about a year ago, along with expanded DLLs for terrain and camera. The Modern Camera tool allows you to freely view the modified landscape up close.
Attached to the post is a shot of Denethor falling from the wall, referencing a scene from the third film.
The player plans to post the finished region on Simtropolis along with the city diary.
