Thomnar – Multiple Tile City

One of my overarching goals for a re-implementation of SimCity 2000 is making city sizes much larger than the 128×128 tile minimum. This is based on one city I made where I built a 25 tile city in a 5×5 grid by manually reconciling the edges. Here’s a little more about that city. The city’s name, Thomnar, doesn’t mean anything but just sounded good.

The final result represents somewhere around 100 hours of work spread over 8 years while I was in high-school and University. Most of this was spent reconciling the edges of the maps, building out the actual cities and then a little bit in Photoshop stitching the screenshots together.

When building it, I tried to keep in mind how many North American cities looked. A dense core giving way to poorly planned sprawl, lots of horrible land use around roads, and true wilderness on the outskirts. Lots of power plants and other services to support the city, but given I have no way of moving power/water between tiles, each tile did need its own power and water utilities even if adjacent plants would be enough to power it.

thomnar-5x5.jpg
Thomnar, in its current full glory. Current population, 833,010 sims.

The first tile is actually based on the Charleston scenario city. When I finished building the city, looked like half the city was missing, so I added another tile on top to balance things out and make it look better.

thomnar-teaser
The second, continuation tile is at the top. Population: 250,760 sims.

Next I added some more tiles on the edge, which also looks like the view from the neighbours window.

thomnar neighbours
The neighbour’s window in game.
thomnar-teaser2
What I imagine the city’s neighbours would look like. Population: 395,900 sims.

Next I filled in the corner tiles to get a 3×3 grid, and then decided that the city looked weird without surrounding towns and wilderness, which resulted in this 4×5 grid.

thomnar-teaser4
4×5 grid of Thomnar. Population: 748,920.

From the 4×5 grid, I added another set of tiles to get the full square 5×5 grid. I created another couple of tiles that aren’t included yet, but by then, reconciling edges was starting to feel like a chore, so I stopped work on the city.

Gallery of some of the neat details I added to the city (if anything looks quirky, it’s because the images are rendered outside of the game using in-game assets):

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