It seems Sim City 3000 is popular, so an update on Paradise City.
It's 1927 now, and Paradise City has been debt-free for 9 years. Nearly 41,000 people call Paradise their home, a modest growth rate considering, but Axl has started making some city services available.
Here's the 30,000 foot view:
Most of the farms have closed due to pollution, although off to the east, a new Paradise Farms development has been started, with three new farms providing fresh wheat and more wheat. The roadways around the lake indicate planned future highways and avenues, and the outline of the future lakeside downtown area; farther southwest is the coast. You can also see the expansion of various neighborhoods.
Axl's home neighborhood has recently opened a marina:
Because what rock star doesn't want a nearby marina? It probably should have been opened closer to the mayor's house, but the plan is to have one at each end of the lake, and perhaps one on the smaller lake as well. This is the most prosperous area of town, with all those green lawns and some fancy shops, as well as a hugely popular bus route around the lakes.
Bus routes... we invested a lot in public transit, both trains and busses. It seems the trains are popular in industrial areas and the busses in residential ones. In these close-knit quarters, busses won out, but I haven't given up on rail. Subways remain far above our modest budgets, and at any rate, in the primarily low-density areas we have, public transit does not collect enough in fares to cover its expenses. But it has noticeably reduced traffic around the lakes.
Next up is a close-up of one of the old-school Paradise Farms, and the residential areas near it:
Happily, the farm continues to exist with the houses nearby, despite the fickleness of Sim City 3000 farms, which seem to take every excuse to disappear. The areas by the farms, as well as the areas between the lakes, are nearly the only areas of the town with positive aura - that SC3K concept of well-being that can be hard to pin down. Farms, it seems, are good for the soul.
Finally, one of the larger new neighborhoods, southeast of the lakes:
We've gradually been expanding up onto the higher elevations, terracing our residential areas, and now having that nifty medium-density commercial zone including a shopping mall near the hospital. Several medium-land-value rowhouses are visible, and we've been designating these as historic markers of our progress. The industrial areas are all former farms, which were incrementally taken over by industry. Trees provide a partially-effective pollution blocker and theoretically increase aura, parks and ponds are more common in new developments, and our newest power plant is visible, belching pollution into the air but keeping the lights on. A less-polluting oil plant was considered, but as it would have cost roughly two years' worth of revenue versus a bit over one year's worth for the coal plant, it was ultimately not pursued.
A police station is also visible. We now have multiple police and fire stations, enough schools for all the students, and thanks to that hospital in the screenshot, enough hospitals as well. Now the petitioners want a jail - they say our law enforcement is not the most effective without one. What will it be next? A library? A museum? A zoo? All three? Probably. Oh well, we're profitable now, so we're on the way towards Paradise City actually being a desirable place to live. Right now it's just... adequate, but moving up in the world.
I've also enjoyed playing with, rather than against, the terrain. I remember most of my Sim Cities being vast expanses of grid-based sprawl, rectangles upon rectangles. Here, in part because I couldn't afford to flatten all the terrain (only enough to try to encourage farms), I've done much more of only localized flattening, while building at multiple elevations, and as a result the city has a more organic appearance.