If I asked you to build me a shed out of wood without using a ruler, you'd think I was batty. And you certainly wouldn't stand inside the thing for fear it would kill you. The game mechanics of SimCity 5 do not provide a ruler. How, then, are we supposed to build our cities? How big is a city site in SimCity 5 anyway? How do we measure such things? Can we ever say, "make your road thirty foot/meters/whatever long?"
Well, that's a complicated question to be sure. Any attempt to measure space in your city site requires us to compare something in real life to something in the game. The word from Maxis/the Internet is that the cities in SimCity 5 are exactly 2km by 2km. That equals four square km or 1.544 square miles. So I decided to test that. How, may you ask? I got tricky.
Traditionally, we measure things by using rulers. However, when a ruler is unavailable, we use landmarks. There are many landmarks in the game that represent real buildings and structures. I combed through all of them until I found one that was perfect for the job: The Sears Tower (it's not the Willis Tower, ask anyone from Chicago).
From SimCity to Reality
The Sears Tower in real life is 229 feet x 229 feet at the base of the building. What I did was ring the building with dirt road, leaving part of the road unconnected. I took the above photograph to show you exactly what I did. I then completed that road again using dirt road. This cost me 147s.
Now I know the gap in the road is 147s long and -- when I crunched the numbers -- I discovered that if the edge of the Sears Tower is supposed to be 229 feet, then the missing section of road was 252 feet.
So 252 feet of dirt road costs 147s. Easy-peasy. That's just over one and a half feet per simoleon.
So to get the size of the entire map, I simply ran a dirt road from one edge of the map to the other. I came up with 4,037s in dirt road. That works out to 6,288 feet -- roughly 1.2 miles. Since it's the same high as it is wide, that's 1.44 square miles for the Clearwater city site.
How Big is Clearwater?
The 1.44 square miles of Clearwater is not the 1.54 that Maxis was telling us about. But here's why. It turns out that Clearwater is not the same size as most of the other maps. The other maps ARE 1.54 and Clearwater just happens to be slightly smaller. I suspect this has something to do with why it was the board of choice for the beta test.
But back to the question. How big is 1.44 square miles? In Oregon, there is a town called Phoenix -- population 4,538. It is exactly 1.44 square miles.
If that's too vague a comparison, here's another: Central Park, in NYC, is 1.317 sq mi. Clearwater is just slightly larger than Central Park.
For what it's worth -- since I happen to be something of an expert on such things -- Clearwater is also five times the size of an Xbox Minecraft seed.
Introducing: The Simeter
I conducted an experiment in which I set up a city and spaced the streets apart by varying distances. The first two streets were 50 simoleon of dirt road apart, the next two 100s of dirt road apart, 150s, 200s, and so on. I then zoned the streets in residential, commercial, and industrial -- then ran the city to see how the zones developed.
The streets that were 250 simoleons of dirt road apart were the perfect distance for low-density buildings in all three zones. The buildings in this range abutted each other perfectly leaving no wasted space.
As for medium- and high-denisty buildings, we're going to have to wait on that until I can get back into my city -- the server shut down.
Between now and then, I propose to you the following idea. It's called the simeter (SIM + METER). It's very simple. Using roads and how much they cost to lay, we can measure our cities and generate quality building standards that will allow us to create amazing designs and efficient grids that will propel us to the top of the leaderboard.
While I am interested in the medium- and high- density results (I'll be revisiting this topic again soon), I feel confident that 200 simoleons worth of dirt road (the same as 400s of low-density road, 800s of medium-density road, etc) should be a standard simeter. If your grid is laid out in rectangles that are 1 simeter wide by however long you want them to be, your RCI buildings will be as packed in at the start as they can possibly be.
Elevation
Changes in elevation disrupt the process of measuring perfect grid cities unless you're willing to do that math. I was able to work out the numbers for Clearwater because that city site has no hills or cliffs. If I had tried the same in Norwich Hills, to compensate for the ramps and cliffs, I'd have needed to know how high they were and there's no way to know that...
or IS there?
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