Fair enough. I personally favour the corporations route at this early stage for those same reasons. Having said that, I wouldn't be too worried about cities springing up in the desert etc:
a) Big cities do just spring up in deserts now. I'm no expert, but Dubai, Cancun...
b) The nature of the map means that with turns slow it is pretty unlikely such cities are going to often get to that position.
c) In terms of new cities, you can just make settlers very expensive.
Anyway, yes i agree let's see once you've got the map done.
I have better ideas for all of this, and I mentioned it in Kai's thread.
First, remember that we have changed religions to cultural types. So for cities like New York, Los Angeles, and London, we could solve the problem by adding new "ghetto" buildings for each foreign culture that immigrated to that city. These would have both positive and negative effects: They'd increase the food (closest you can get to a building increasing population), increase production (due to cheap labor) and culture, but they'd also increase pollution, city upkeep, and (if we're going to include it, which I want to) the crime rate. For port cities, additional food could be obtained through another sort of building with a lighthouse style effect, or my own idea, a Cannery building, which gives additional food from access to fish, crabs, and clams.
For cities that "sprung up in the desert" thanks to economic importance, such as Cancun, Dubai, and Las Vegas, the obvious solution there is to use the Worldbuilder to add Great Merchants to the cities, increasing both money and food.
are we going to change the effect of the recycling center?
I suggested doing that, actually, because its current bonus makes it too unrealistically easy to negate the effects of pollution. My proposed revision is to have it give a fixed amount of health rather than removing all pollution from buildings, and in addition, it would grant extra production per resource consumed.
Yeah ok. We can always make incremental changes down the line. I guess just don't be too liberal with awarding level 3 city status to all Western and rich civs that's all I'm saying. In reality, apart from the likes of New York, LA, London, Paris, Tokyo etc (ie the developed mega cities) most big developed cities probably don't have ALL these improvements. As i said though, this is something that we can form more of an opinion on post release- for now let's go with your list.
LA has public transportation? Sorry; I really don't think so. What really strikes me about this list is it's too simple. You may say that it's better for the initial release to give a city buildings it doesn't really have than not give it enough buildings it really does, but I disagree. As was said, it would be boring if all you could build were units, especially since the modern world situation doesn't involve large-scale wars. A number of things need to be addressed, such as this:
America is behind much of the rest of the developed world in terms of public (by which I mean, "railed") transportation. It also no longer has many factories in its own borders; most of America's industrial sector has been outsourced. I'm not sure how we are to handle outsourcing in the mod; my extensive use of civics that modify corporate upkeep could help, as could China's UB, but much still needs to be done. However, America's specialized post-modern economy should make up for the lack of traditional industry; they have the Mall UB (although I personally think we should change that, make it a standard building, and give America a new unique building), Broadway, Rock and Roll, and Hollywood, so it probably evens out.
For that matter, maybe we could simulate the world economy just by adding new buildings. We could add a "Goods Factory" building like in The Road to War, which provides a certain number of naturally, tangible goods, start the game with such factories placed in countries like Mexico, India, and China, and have America be trading musicals, singles, and movies to those countries in exchange for tangible goods. In that case, China's UB would be a replacement for the new Goods Factory Building rather than the standard sort of factory, and America could still have standard factories in some cities like Detroit. Oh wait--maybe not! X) America also shouldn't use as many coal plants as China, or as many nuclear plants as Russia, though how they produce power instead is an issue. At any rate, however, I think one thing we can all agree upon is that we need to add a lot of new buildings, to keep it both realistic and interesting.
Now here's something different: What cities have what wonders, some of them obvious, but here it goes anyway. I don't know everything, so please help for where I left off.
New York: Broadway, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, National Park, United Nations.
Washington: Whitehouse (a graphic exists, so let's add the wonder, as a flavored palace if nothing else), Capitol (I'm pretty sure a graphic exists, though I'm not sure where), Hermitage, Pentagon, Scotland Yard.
St. Louis (Is it in the game?): The Arc.
Las Vegas (Is it in the game?): The Strip, National Dam (My personal opinion is that the Three Gorges Dam should be changed into a National Wonder).
Los Angeles: Hollywood. (This city can also have factories, unlike much of America)
American Cities I don't know: West Point, Oxford University
Not Sure Where it should go in America: Rock & Roll
Honolulu: Heroic Epic, Moai Statues.
Milwaukee (Is it in the game?): Brewery National Wonder. (Come on, we should put it in!)
Beijing: Forbidden Palace, National Park(?).
Hong Kong: Moai Statues, Wall Street.
Tsingtao: Brewery National Wonder.
Paris: Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Versailles, Hermitage, National Epic. (The last may be tricky since it's part of the EU, but the default graphic is the Arc D'Triumph.)
Berlin: Brandenberger Tor, Reichstag. (Graphics for both exist, and have been used in many mods.)
Munich: Neunschwanstein (graphic exists), Brewery National Wonder. (Though again, the EU is tricky with regard to National Wonders; Ireland, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands also are big on beer.)
Amsterdam: Moai Statues.
London: Globe Theatre, Stonehenge, Big Ben (graphic exists), Parliament (I think the graphic exists somewhere), Scotland Yard.
Moscow: Kremlin, Scotland Yard.
St. Petersburg: Forbidden Palace, Hermitage.
Rome: Apostolic Palace, Circus Maximus (graphic exists), Sistine Chappel.
Athens: The Parthenon.
Cairo: The Pyramids (Maybe we should change their effects for this mod), Hermitage.
Alexandria: The Great Library.
Mecca: The Majjid Al Harram (We removed the religions, but let's still keep their buildings.)
Dubai: The Burj Al Arab (graphic exists), Wall Street.
Tokyo: Wall Street, Forbidden Palace.
Whatever City Switzerland gets: Wall Street, Red Cross.
Baghdad: Spiral Minaret(?).
Angkor Wat: Pretty obvious, right? And I'm pretty sure this city is included, since it's even in the normal-sized Earth map.
Timbukktu: Sankore.
I also think it would be cool to be able to rebuild destroyed wonders, by adding specific "ruins" buildings to the right cities, and making them the prerequisites for those wonders that no longer exist.
