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.
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.
Next I added some more tiles on the edge, which also looks like the view from the neighbours window.
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.
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):
Large wind farm in a valley by a river. 
Suburbia. Yep, SC2k really like the ‘burbs. 
Planetary defense missile silo. 
A small hydroelectric dam in the wilderness. 
Farms along a river. 
Farms, a small down and a highway. 
Large seaport at the navigable head of a river. 
An island town. 
A mine, smelter (coal power plant in game) and shipping port. 
Nuclear power plants using the river for cooling. 
Another hydroelectric power plant on a river.
Creative Misconfiguration 