SimCity 403: Interlacing RC

Residential zones are where people live; commercial zones are where people get happy. Without question, one of the best strategies to employ in SimCity 5 is to interlace your commercial and residential zones so that after they are through with work, the people who live in your city don't need their car to go have a good time. They can simply walk next to where they live and go see a movie, buy some clothes, and party.

How to Interlace Zones

At first, you might think: oh, I can just mix up residential and commercial completely randomly and it will all just work out.

Ha! You fool!

The ideal way to interlace is to zone the corners as commercial, wait for the commercial properties to develop into large buildings, then zone the remaining land in between the commercial buildings as residential.

Interlacing and the Simeter

So, in another post I talked about the simeter (SIM + METER) -- the exact perfect measurement to pack in your RCI buildings as tight as possible. The simeter is 250 simoleons worth of dirt road wide. A perfect block of interlaced residential and commercial properties is going to be 1 simeter by 4 simeters (250x1000 simoleons worth of dirt road).

My One Sided Argument

So, you have your 1x4 square, and now you think, okay, I'll put commercial in the corners. But, there's a catch. You should only zone one of the long roads. Why? Traffic. If you zoned the entire square, there's no telling which direction the building will face. It could face one of the little sides or either of the big sides and you want all of your buildings on this block facing the same way so that residents can step out of their house, walk right next door (not around the block) and buy what they want.

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