Blogger City Anddul — Part 2

Anddul is presently a Little Hamlet, with a population of ~450. It consists of dirt roads… and, well… Not much else yet. It does at least have its own power and water supplies, I suppose. That’s where we left things last time in the introductory post.

I also noted a few key projects to achieve in this part! In no particular order:

• Providing the services we unlocked namely, garbage collection, healthcare and basic education.
• Providing a lil pavement in the way of upgraded roads.
  • Also thought about providing a connecting road directly between the industrial and residential areas.
• Becoming a Worthy Village i.e., reach a population of 800. This will unlock districts and more opportunities to name things!
• Naming some individual buildings and roads even before we hit the next milestone potentially, to ‘place’ some of our community in this world from the ground up. :)

Upgrading the Roads

Tackling the roads first ends up making the most sense to me. For placing the services, I’m going to want to see what their coverage looks like when not impeded by travelling in the dirt and mud.

I also decide to add in the connecting road, cutting down on the travel time required by my residents dramatically between their home and work. I haven’t zoned anything along this road yet — it might one day become a commercial strip. Or equally it might become a national road, extending out beyond this initial square of land we have.

It might be a bit hard to tell in the after shot — there is a little sheen on the roads from a rainfall between the shots — but I’ve only upgraded where people/industry actually is right now. The maintenance on the dirt roads is far less than paved, so I really only want to upgrade where and when necessary.

Serving the Community

First up… Dealing with the trash. I may end up being forced to put a landfill dump in to keep up, but I can imagine the people of Anddul wishing to recycle as much as possible so, despite the rather significant cost difference ($4k vs. $16k) we’ll start with a recycling plant and see if it can keep up.

I’m going to place that near the new connector road for easy access to both areas, without any risk of pollution spreading to where we have people.

That $16k is quite a whack against our budget though. Just $2.7k remains… Not nearly enough to place a medical centre and an elementary school which both demand $10k each.

So… Time to put on my Mr Taxman hat and up the rates. I think 12% is still a rather modest ask given we’re now putting the people’s money to work in providing more services to said people! I’ll also be taking the $20k loan on offer to ensure I can place these services now. The extra tax will aid in covering the cost of the loan.

Expanding the Community

Perhaps surprisingly, we have an overwhelming demand for additional housing. We have a waiting list of people wanting to move to Anddul. Rents are through the roof. While I had wanted to start on the naming before hitting the next milestone, this demand for places to live is pretty crazy.

The Residential, Commercial, Industrial (RCI) Demand Indicator telling me I have a bit of a problem. Not a bad problem per se, but too long in this state and industry and commercial sectors might become a little upset about the lack of available workers.

Now… I did expand the layout north up the river a little more. And that is initially where I thought I’d zone next. But I actually have something of an experiment to try first.

Experimenting With High Density-Low Density Residential

You might’ve noticed — I have a LOT of space sitting out the back of my residential properties. This was actually intentional. It allows for placing larger parks, walkways and the like later with minimal disruption.

But something I’ve seen done elsewhere, which I’m going to dub High Density-Low Density, is where you use even smaller roads still to really pack people in. Rather than going for the giant 4×4 sized lots, allowing a maximum of 2×2 where possible, maybe with the odd 3×2 for variety.

This is not something you would want to do everywhere, I would imagine. Parks and larger service buildings are going to need to be placed. But used in the right spots and in the right mix, it can actually create quite a homey, local-community feel.

One of the mods I’m using is ‘Network Extensions 2’ which provides a number of additional road types not found in the vanilla game. Many much larger — but also a few ‘tiny’ roads. Alleys and the like. I’m going to try use some of these, and see if I can get a layout I like.

Huh. Not too bad all things considered. Although I do wonder about when I need to upgrade any of these roads to a wider width. That will require a fair bit of reshuffling.

In any case — that’s a problem for another day.

You can also see I’ve left the outer edges as the larger 4×4 plots, and added a little commercial on the connected road, but still within walking distance.

If you’re wondering about the capacity difference between this layout vs. what I had originally — I had about 450 population previously. Now? 550 with things having settled down. So certainly nothing on expanding to a new area — which I’ll do next — but not nothing either!

Moving North

I went and upgraded the roads, inserted alleys, and then zoned the additional area laid out during Part 1. This will definitely see us through to the ‘Worthy Village’ (800 pop) milestone… I’m actually thinking it might blow right past that and up to ‘Tiny Town’ (1,200 pop) too.

A Worthy Village

And sure enough — a short time later:

I’m going to place the emergency services and police department — but otherwise will largely ignore the unlocks of this milestone for now. Including Districts and expanding my area of control. (I have no idea which direction I want to expand in yet!)

I ended up placing two emergency service stations. One right in the industrial area, and one in the northern residential area. I’m even considering a third already, but the upkeep might be a tad prohibitive. Still; that one in the industrial area is key — can’t risk having our power plant go up in smoke at a time we can’t afford to replace it!

As for police, I positioned them near the junction between the two residential areas.

And alright… Yep. As expected, zoned a little too much and ended up blowing through to…

Tiny Town

Very much not ready for this! Haha.

I was hoping to use these milestones as natural break points for each post. Although in retrospect, perhaps it is none to surprising these first ones have blown by so quickly. And thinking forward — some of the latter milestones take significantly more to do.

So I’ll need to rethink the break points.

What is clear to me though is that this post is long enough already. If I were to add naming to it as well… It could easily grow to twice the length.

Soooooo… I think I’m going to have to defer that particular goal to the next part. If two out of three ain’t bad, then I figure hitting three out of four goals must be pretty OK too.

Next Time…

We have population enough to warrant figuring out where to place Anddul’s first high school, so we’ll do that almost right away and get that education rolling.

But after that — no more building. Straight into the assigning of names! That high school? It might become The Later Levels Hall of Study. One of the Box Factories might become Bhagpuss’ Box Factory. Perhaps our town will be powered by Rakuno’s Shards of Imagination.

If you have any ideas for other blogger tie-ins (for yourself, or anyone else!) please do let me know!