SimCity 2000 Cities by Jeff

One of my favourite pastimes is to play with the Maxis simulators, in particular SimCity & SimCity 2000. This page will show a short perusal through four of the cities that I designed with the SC2000 simulator program.

Sahara

During a heat wave in July I decided that it might be fun to try and design a city that was completely in the desert. This was fairly easy to do, one just sets the design parameters for no hills, trees or water. The result was a fairly flat barren landscape. This was the beginning of Sahara. One of its major problems was that there was a constant shortage of water. With no major bodies of water there was nowhere for the pumps to be put so they could pump more water. I finally had to create "water parks". These were 7x7 squares that had 9 water pumps which were completely surrounded by water. This vastly improved the pumping power.

The following two images are taken from Sahara. This first is a general view of the city as it now exists. The second is a view of one of the water parks that I built.

Overview of Sahara

Water park to improve water pumping

Amigo

Amigo was one of my earlier attempts at making a city. Its main objective was to include some sort of interesting bodies of water. As you can see there are a couple of rivers which would make this city a good seaport. Sahara, for example, suffers from not having any bodies of water. A seaport makes it much easier to export your goods, which is crucial for a small city.

Overview of Amigo

Eigen II

I'm not quite sure why this city was called II. I noted that there was a version I on my PC, but when I loaded this one up it had severe power problems, i.e. none!

This is one of my earlier attemps at creating a highway system. SC2000 allows for many more transportation models than the original game. I really like the addition of highways, however one quickly realizes that they take up a lot of space and create tons of pollution. Also note the interesting pond on the top of the hill, I expect that was some attempt at making the waterfalls on that hill appear a bit more realistic. In SC2000 Hydro and Wind power are preferred, unfortunately they do not provide much power and you tend to needs lots of them.

Overview of Eigen II

Spot Mountain

Spot Mountain was named after my cat, Spot. This city is an interesting one, primarily due to its complex geography. The first image shows the dense downtown area of Spot Mountain. Note the several suspension bridges over the river, and the steep hill that a couple of the roads take to go up the mountain.

Downtown Spot Mountain

This next image shows the peak of the mountain. The game does not allow structures to be built on sloped terrain, thus there are not a lot of structures on the top of this mountain due to its general uneven nature. If you look closely you may notice the small tunnel. There is also a huge tunnel from the valley portion, which has one end just underneath the bottom windmill.

On top of Spot Mountain

Spot Mountain also has a small valley area on the eastern edge of the city, which would be accessed by the cross-town tunnel or by the cross-town highway.

Spot Moutain valley area

Note that the previous image was taken looking to the North-East, while the this image looks torward the South-West. Changing the perspective of your city allows for a much better idea of what is where. Note that the cross-town tunnel is seen in both pictures.

Valley area, showing one end of cross-town tunnel

This is a scene from the underground. Notice all the water pipes and the cross-town tunnel. The game also allows for a subway system but this has not been implemented in this city yet. As in real life, Subways are very expensive and people are hard to convince to use them compared to the private car.

Underground Spot Mountain

Last update: Wed Oct 29 2003