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Contributor/author(s): Rand Huck, Eric Pratt

You want to build a real city based terrain. You want it to be as accurate as possible. You see the mileage scale on the map, but where is the mileage scale in the city? Well, you need to do some headwork on this. If you select a large terrain, which, in the strategy guide says is about 10 miles, and you note that the grid size is [approximately, in this case] 250x250, then do the math: 250 ÷ 10 is 25, so for every 25 tiles is a mile.

You can then count off tiles with the road or other tool (25 x [cost of tool] = [dollar amount you must stretch to reach 1 mile]). YOu can then plant a tree every 25 tiles to chart out your city. And of course, a mile can really be anything you want; SimCity 3000 rules of reality are fairly loose.

Eric Pratt adds the following:

To prove the '25 Tile Mile' theory, I'm going to be a math person here for a minute...

Calculation method: If you query a tile, it will tell you it is one acre. 1 Acre = 0.00156 square miles. Since each tile is a square all sides are equal in length. So taking the square root of 0.00156 gives 0.0395 miles per side. Divide that into 1 mile and you get 25.318 tiles per mile.

Pretty cool, but what I'd like to know is when a sim walks 25.318 tiles, is it really a mile to the sim like we know a mile to be?

I did this calculation so I could place bus stops at reasonable intervals, so sims wouldn't have to hike unreasonable distances to the next one.

See also
Making realistic cities
Simple terrain editing for dummies
Generating custom terrain from bitmaps

Knowledge Tree
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