Ceres Garden City
                        =================

1. Introduction
==============

Ceres Garden City is the second successful city that I have built 
with SimCity 2000. I spent several hours on it, off and on, from 
the middle of May until to beginning of June 1994.

I would like to acknowledge the following sources of information 
and inspiration which I used in building Ceres:-

1.   Nick Dargahi's and Michael Bremer's book "SimCity 2000 : 
     Power, Politics and Planning", which provided several useful 
     ideas and tips. I will refer to this as "the book" in the 
     paragraphs that follow.

2.   Caleb John Clarke's city "Calebpolis". I borrowed several 
     general ideas concerning the geographical terrain (and the 
     placement of the mayor's house), but at the start, I set out 
     to construct a very different kind of city (on another 
     world). Calebpolis is featured in the book, and can be 
     downloaded from the Maxis Section library of the Game 
     Publishers B Forum.

3.   Anant Chandra's planned city "D25", which can also be 
     downloaded from this library in PLANNE.ZIP. I borrowed the 
     idea of the 4x4 blocks containing the mixed zone types of a 
     3x3 block of one zone combined with 1x1 blocks of other 
     zones (which I understand came from a Computer Gaming World 
     article). Since Ceres was not built on flat terrain, this 
     was just a general strategy which could be used only where 
     the terrain suited.

2. The City
===========

The first city I built was a "cram the population in", with 
arcologies. But I wouldn't want to live there. I would be happy 
to EMAIL it to anybody who wants to see how not to build a city. 
So with Ceres, I set out to build a desirable city, and in this, 
I think I have succeeded. 

I started Ceres at 2000, and stopped it in 2441. It now has a 
population of 88k (but it did go up to 90k so I could get my 
Llama Dome). It has low crime, low pollution, light traffic, high 
HE and EQ, high value and no unemployment. The mayor's rating is 
currently 89% (although this seems to vary in the range 79 - 89%
yearly)

Taxes are currently at 8% (with separate levels for different 
types of industry) and the city makes between $800pa - $900pa. 
Its "break even" point is about $600pa - as it needs to make this 
much in order to be able to replace the satellite beam power 
plant every 50 years. None of the money making ordinances such as 
sales and income taxes, legalised gambling and parking fines, are 
enacted.

3. Strategies
=============

I envisaged Ceres as being established on a world (in another 
star system) which was colonised in the 25th Century. At that 
time there is (will be?) FTL travel and other colonised worlds. 
However, the fact that the city year is 2441 is merely a 
coincidence. If I ever get around to it, I'll finish the novel 
which features the world on which Ceres is located, and I may 
even be able to get the novel published, who knows. But 
certainly, if and when there is an ability to print or import Sim 
Cities into other graphics programs, I'll have something to which 
to refer if and when I write the scenes that take place in Ceres 
itself. 

Since I placed Ceres in this context, I felt justified in 
"cheating" when I built it, as the simulation factors that are 
built into SC2000 do not wholly apply. But I didn't use a money 
cheat, or edit the money bytes directly, after all there had to 
be some challenges. But I regard much of the rest as a cheat.

Firstly, the everlasting hydro plants. Ceres has 2GW of hydro 
power, the water which generates it comes from 2 small lakes on 
top of a mountain. I suppose it must rain a lot.... - not ideal 
for the nearby airport (which I actually envisage as being the 
spaceport). But look at it this way - anybody who has FTL, and 
came from another world, would probably find satellite beam power 
and fusion power a bit of a doddle and the relative costs would 
not be as much as they are in SimCity 2000. And I didn't want to 
be bothered with finding money for a new power plant every 50 
years in the early years when funds are scarce. Anyway, the hydro 
plants proved to be insufficient to power the city, so I had to 
add satellite beam power at a later date. 

Then there is the zoning. From the book, I learned that each type 
of zone has to be within reach of the other types of zone in 
order for it to develop, but the relative numbers of tiles of 
each zone type do not matter on a local basis, although it does 
matter on a global basis. So the basic strategy was to have 4x4 
blocks, which contain a 3x3 high density block of one zone type, 
with 3 1x1 low density blocks of the other 2 zone types, on the 
opposite corner. Small parks were used to fill out the 
intervening space as the following diagrams show:-

Residential: R R R p  Commercial: C C C p   Industrial: I I I p
             R R R p              C C C p               I I I p
             R R R c              C C C r               I I I c
             p p c i              p p r i               p p c r

Where possible, the 3x3 high density blocks would be on opposite 
corners of an intersection, but the layout did not allow me to do 
this all the time. In some squares, instead of the high density 
block, there is a municipal building such as a school, police 
station, fire station or hospital, although when this happened 
the 1x1 light zones did not always follow any of the above 
patterns. This strategy is similar to Anant Chandra's planned 
city, except that his uses only 2 different zone types in a 
square, and uses trees instead of parks. I used parks in the 
zones because I already had densely forested hills, and I also 
used trees as a buffer between polluting and non-polluting areas.

This zone strategy is mainly responsible for the light traffic, 
and the strategic addition of bus stations reduced the traffic 
even further. I found that bus stations, which are 2x2 blocks, 
went very well with libraries, also 2x2 blocks, on opposite 
corners in a 4x4 square. It also allowed me to start the city by 
developing completely separate residential, commercial and 
industrial areas. This also applied to the airport and the 
seaport - they were not actually connected to anything for a long 
time after they were built (because the book said that the 
simulation only checks if the ports are there, not if they are 
connected to anything). Ceres does also have a subway, but 
because of the zone strategy, the simulation does not think that 
it is used very much. Actually, it is a subway which turns into a 
railway, and is primarily used to connect the important areas of 
the city, and because of the sub-rail bug, the simulation does 
not think that anything passes from the subway to the railway and 
back again. But I believe that if Ceres was ever built, the 
subway would probably be much more extensive.

Keith Plunkett
CompuServe ID: 70734, 423