Blogger City Anddul — Part 6

Ahh, Anddul City at night. A beautiful sight. And yes — Anddul is in fact a city in the featured image! Only a month and a half late, but woo! Hitting the Small City (7,000 pop) milestone was essentially my only goal for this part. But to get there, there were a few specific things I wanted to do. Namely:

• Finally use the three land tile purchase options I have to expand our city limits!
• Bring in a second highway connection to ease traffic demands on the current highway ingress and egress point.
• Plan out and build a new district (using some high-density zoning!) to bring in our new population

Before getting to that, here’s how things looked at the end of Part 5.

Expanding the City Limits

Until now, despite earning the option several times to expand into a new tile of land, I’ve kept the building all within the original starting tile.

While I’m pretty sure I could hit small city status without expanding outwards, it might get a little cramped.

So I have a little room to the northwest, and another small chunk along the coast of the lake to the southwest, but with three tiles available for purchase right now… And the goal of creating a secondary highway connection, I think the two main options I’m thinking about right now are to create a super-square of land to the northwest or to the southeast.

The southeast option was pretty tempting for some more interesting terrain shapes to work with, including an island! But… The northwest brings with it a rail link to the outside world. :)

Expanding the Highway Network

Apparently I’m silly and didn’t capture any screenshots of the original expansion before I started filling in other areas. But I’m continuing to use the 4-lane National Highway road option included in the Road Network Extensions 2 mod, that I’ve been using in the original tile so far.

The National Highway approach isn’t without flaw — it can make it harder to manage on- and off-ramp behaviours when you have both directions managed by a single piece of road. The major benefit it adds is mostly in the initial convenience of placement. And if you’re not dealing with super high volumes of traffic — it’s perfectly fine. If you are dealing with high volumes of traffic… Well; the traffic manager mod can help ensure people aren’t doing unintended turns across lanes of traffic.

For now, convenience is the name of the game and I’ve put together a bit of an ugly junction (especially when compared to the interchanges already placed in this map) joining the northern stretch of highway to my new national road.

The surface view might be a bit confusing about where everything goes — so I’ve included the below ground view as well, which also incidentally shows the arrows for direction of travel. If it wasn’t already clear — I’ve set the map up to run in left-hand driving mode, matching New Zealand’s (and what I’m used to) laws and conventions. :)

I had to use the Anarchy mod (prevents collision checks) to get the exit tunnel on the right there to go in so close to the road and the railway, but it still looks alright — except perhaps a little odd not to have any barriers with them being so close. Hehe.

More of the highway should become clear with other screenshots as we go — but I created a 4-way roundabout junction along the way too, with one way passing straight up and down the area, with the other two intended to head to the new zones created.

Which leads us to the one done today…

Building a New District

The original plan as you might be able to see with the slider below to the right, was to keep the new district fairly independent. Not really much in the way of linkage between it and the existing districts (the tip of Tales of the Aggronaut can just be seen in the lower right).

Congestion on the highway as people started to move in and otherwise do business with this region very quickly changed my mind on this point.

The highway stub visible in the planning stage was originally intended to head into the Ore industrial area yet to be built in that area (but indicated way back in Part 1)!

In the built-up version you can see I’ve extended that further, and it actually joins not too far from the interchange I built and showed in the prior section to provide access for vehicles looking to get to this district specifically (and soon, the ore industry area) without needing to drive in traffic otherwise aiming to get into the original zones.

I’ve also added a little scenic-route road directly into Tales of the Aggronaut for local commuters.

The make-up of the zone is high-density commercial to the north, with a thin line of office-buildings to act as a noise shield between that commercial area and the high-density residential sitting below, occupying most of the central stretch. Sitting below the high density residential as you get closer to the existing districts we drop back to low density residential (albeit again with some narrow local roads to provide tighter proximity of building) and finally some low density commercial for local shops and convenience stores.

It didn’t take too much in the way of people moving in here to get…

Trains are unlocked!

I don’t know if I’ll do anything with them in the next part or not, but soon I would think.

I also didn’t yet add in any local public transport options to the new district. Or name the new district. So those are certainly things to be done in Part 7.

Even though I didn’t go overboard with the office space, it still would have consumed some of the industrial demand the city has — but if I can muster enough, I want to get the Ore Industry area started up next. If the demand doesn’t yet exist, then another residential district, perhaps off the other arm of the highway will be necessary first. :)

Hmm… This sounds dangerously similar to planning. I’ll have to keep an eye on this.

In any case, the comparison shots! I took a day-time shot for better visibility for this one. :)