OFB Shopping Districts... really necessary?

[AllenABQ]

I really haven't played OFB much yet, just experimenting with a test neighborhood to see what setting up the default district is like.

I'm in the process of starting a new neighborhood called "Port Kingston" with all my own custom-made townies.  Auto-generated townies and NPCs are using the CAS face templates to get rid of ugliness.  Consequently, I don't want Bluewater Village added to my town because it introduces a whole raft of sims based on the old templates.

So now I'm wondering if even making a shopping district is worth it.  I have yet to establish a custom Downtown area vis-a-vis Nightlife.  I was thinking of splitting the shopping buildings up between the downtown area and the neighborhood.

Anybody with a Prima Guide or experimented enough yet to tell if there are any disadvantages to doing this?  Adding a whole new sub-neighborhood just seems like excess clutter.

[Braveheart]

I was wondering exactly that same thing Allen. In my opinion and from what I have seen so far in OFB it does seem redundant. If you can create businesses within all of the neighborhoods, and also in any residential lot, then the whole business district is sort of silly.

[angelyne]

I'll chime in and say I was wondering the same thing.  I guess lots of people are !  I noticed that the game adds 80 new characters to the game, and they are uggggggly.   

I was thinking of attaching the village in a test neighbourdhood and just moving the interesting business to the lot bin, so I can reuse whatever is interesting.  From my limited glance, it seems the characters aren't interesting anyway, they have no skills on top of being ugly.

I really would prefer to have a single neighbourhood with no downtown/no shopping district. I can't stand the loading times.  Beside the smaller scale please me better.  Something akin to a small town with a little downtown core with a couple of shops restaurant and entertainement centers.

[BlueSoup]

If one wanted the shops from Bluewater village though, couldn't it be done where you add that and whatever else sub-neighbourhoods & Universities you want, then do the deleteallcharacters?

[Pyrobon]

As said in the Prima Guide, it really does have a function..except in cases like that of Angelyne, who wants to keep everything small.
Downtown and shopping disctrict works like extensions of your neighborhood...bassically so you have more "space" to put things.
Expansions keep bringing new type of lots or new features, and if we had an already populated neighborhood...the idea is you can use the new districts or extensions to be able to keep expanding.
In that sense, it seems pretty logical to me.

[simmiecal]

My understanding is that you don't have to add the sub-hood if you don't want it. If you want the lots, create the sub-hood in a test neighborhood you don't care about and then lot-bin the lots you want to add to your "real" neighborhood. Delete the test neighborhood but you still have the lots in your lot bin to add. *I am only speaking about empty lots - not lots with people living in them.*

From the prima guide (from the pages you can download off the exchange):

Actually the shopping district has no special functionality: businesses may be established in any kind of neighborhood (base, downtown or shopping districts) except universities and sims may reside in a shopping district as well as in base neighborhoods and downtown. What associated neighborhoods provide is a physical expansion to the base neighborhood and a pre-made Maxis designed destination that highlightes new features of this expansion pack.

Edited: looks like Pyrobon beat me to it.

[Pyrobon]

Hahaha is ok  . Its good you quoted the prima guide. I just dont think people should look those districts as something negative, obviously for the reasons you gave. If you don't want to add it, don't add it. And if you do, there IS an use to it.

[angelyne]

If one wanted the shops from Bluewater village though, couldn't it be done where you add that and whatever else sub-neighbourhoods & Universities you want, then do the deleteallcharacters?

That would work alright.  Except it would delete all your families, townies and npc's.  So that strategy would work only if you are starting over.

I don't think anyone minds the extra real estate the shopping district provides (except for the extra loading time).  What I object to, and I suspect that Allen feels the same way, is the 80 plus extra characters that will dumped in your neighbourhood folder.  Considering there is a limit to how many characters you can have (although the limit at this time is uknown), I rather not add a bunch of unwanted sims to my 'hood.

PS I should add that you can add a blank shopping district to your hood as well. 

[Ancient Sim]

If the idea is that your Sims go regularly to their business lot to work, it really needs to be in the same neighbourhood because of the loading times, so I'll probably add the business lots to my main one.  At the moment I'm playing the new Business neighbourhood, but I may well abandon it and go back to my back-up because I don't really want all the new families.  I restarted Pleasantview so I could greatly reduce my playable lots and this has added too many.  Only problem is that it will be hard to remove them and clear up all the leftover stuff without SimPE - it's excruciating playing without access to it.

And I noticed that the new characters weren't using the better-looking templates.  I've got an influx of big-mouthed fuglies and I'm having to give them all surgery via the DMA thingy as soon as they appear on anybody's lot.  I must have gone wrong with one of them, though.  My 9-year-old son saw her and said "Ugh, what's wrong with her mouth?" - maybe I should have left that one alone.

[angelyne]

And I noticed that the new characters weren't using the better-looking templates.  I've got an influx of big-mouthed fuglies and I'm having to give them all surgery via the DMA thingy as soon as they appear on anybody's lot.  I must have gone wrong with one of them, though. 

The new characters aren't generated randomly, therefore they aren't based on your template.  They have been created by Maxis. If you take a look at the template neighbourhood folder for the new expansion, you'll notice 80 or so character files sitting there.

[AllenABQ]

If one wanted the shops from Bluewater village though, couldn't it be done where you add that and whatever else sub-neighbourhoods & Universities you want, then do the deleteallcharacters?

Yes, I'm sure that's entirely possible.  In fact that's what I was initially thinking of doing.  But then after getting a look at Bluewater Village I thought about space conservation.  Some of the buildings are cool, so I'll drop them in the lot bin like angelyne was planning to do and re-use them elsewhere.  I don't want the sims that come with them though!

As said in the Prima Guide, it really does have a function..except in cases like that of Angelyne, who wants to keep everything small.
Downtown and shopping disctrict works like extensions of your neighborhood...bassically so you have more "space" to put things.
Expansions keep bringing new type of lots or new features, and if we had an already populated neighborhood...the idea is you can use the new districts or extensions to be able to keep expanding.
In that sense, it seems pretty logical to me.

I have no problems with expanding if extra space is needed.

But one trick I found to maximizing neighborhood space is to use any of several camera mods that are available over at MTS2.  GunMod(?) has the best.  After getting a feel for it, I was able to adjust the parameters slightly myself so that now I have a great neighborhood view that makes a ton more space available for placing buildings but doesn't allow so much zooming or lateral movement that you can see the edges of the map (except at an odd angle sometimes).

It also helps that I have SimCity 4000 so I was able to go in and create my own terrain and lay down roads to define the neighborhood strictly for this purpose.

http://www.hairysims.com/images/Port_Kingston.jpg

I'm not done decorating yet, but this pic gives a pretty good perspective of the playable area.  The lot in the foreground is a restaurant on a 4x3 lot.  So as you can see, LOTS of room in the neighborhood alone, and an accompanying downtown means I won't be running out of space soon.

Don't need no "shopping district"!! 

[Pegasys]

I don't think they're necessary at all, but the extra shopping district can be helpful if you've run out of room in your existing neighborhood. I wasn't going to add Bluewater Village to my Pleasantview at all, but at the last minute I caved and added it - but I'm not really going to play it right now.

As a couple others have mentioned, my Sims who have community lots have them in the same 'hood they live in to cut down on loading times. Makes a big difference.

[Sandilou]

I can't help wondering...if you delete all characters and then run a business, aren't you limiting your customer base?  I see all those surplus townies, downtownies, dormies and npcs as potential clients or employees. I was wondering how others who have deleted all characters were finding it.

I don't delete all characters, but I do use a seperate user account (XP) for each custom neighbourhood and I delete the Maxian hoods.  The game runs much faster.  I agree that the main purpose of each new neighbourhood is to show you key aspects of the game.  Eg, Strangetown abductions, aliens and weirdness; Pleasantview family life; Veronaville - a themed neighbourhood with a built in storyline.  Bluewater is like a playable tutorial.  I'm using it to make all my mistakes in before I return to my own custom built hoods. 

Eventually I anticipate dumping the families in Bluewater and keeping the neighbourhood.  That's what I do with the Uni campuses when I attach them to a 'hood.

[AllenABQ]

And I noticed that the new characters weren't using the better-looking templates.  I've got an influx of big-mouthed fuglies and I'm having to give them all surgery via the DMA thingy as soon as they appear on anybody's lot.  I must have gone wrong with one of them, though.  My 9-year-old son saw her and said "Ugh, what's wrong with her mouth?" - maybe I should have left that one alone.

LOL... That's because they are a pre-packaged set that comes with the game.  It bypasses the random generation step that makes use of the replacement face templates.

[Dark Trepie]

So the shop townies or whatever you want to call them are generated with the Maxis default CAS templates?  Blech!

And they did such a good job on the Downtownies too.  (well...most of them)

[Renatus]

And they did such a good job on the Downtownies too.  (well...most of them)

If you like big cartoony bug eyes, they did. Ick.

[AllenABQ]

So the shop townies or whatever you want to call them are generated with the Maxis default CAS templates?  Blech!
And they did such a good job on the Downtownies too.  (well...most of them)

I don't know that shop townies fall into a separate category.  I think they just come as a group in Bluewater Village that is simply copied over from the game disk.  If they are like normal townies, then the CAS replacement templates should work fine for creating new ones.  You'd just have to start creating your own shopping districts instead of using the BV.

Anyone know if creating a custom shopping district automatically causes the game to generate a set of new townies to act as its workforce?

[angelyne]

I've decided not to create a shopping district and so far it's working really well.  All my townies and playing characters are my customers, and to my surprise when I tried to hire someone, there already was a couple of sims with appropriate talent badges.   The strange thing was that the townie was one of my own custom creation. (or might have been a downtownie, can't remember). So maybe talent badges are assigned randomly?

In any case my hire didn't even last the day, but that's another story.

[Sandilou]

Sorry - off topic -  Angelyne, your avatar is sooooo...cute!  I just love the way your cats are cuddling!   Our older dog used to cuddle with our younger cat - before we got another puppy.  We have pictures on a phone somewhere.  I'll have to bribe my sons so that I can upload them.

[angelyne]

I know isn't that picture just adorable?  I get them at http://www.cuteoverload.com/

[Regina]

Allen, your Port Kingston is very nice!  I like the fact that you have some nice geographical features but at the same time have plenty of flat land for building.  I love building houses into hills and such, but I don't like the way I end up bouncing around in the lots when I scroll--that is so nerve-racking!

I've been going along the same line of thinking lately about my neighborhoods.  I get tired of the extra load-times going from neighborhood to neighborhood.  In one recent neighborhood I started the family in the Downtwon area.  This way I have the benefits of them being able to go to lots with the special Downtown NPCs that don't show in my main neighborhood (Mr. Big, Diva, etc.) without the extra load time.  I've also been making lot templates, for various uses.  For example, one is made from a cute little lot I downloaded.  It has a clothing store and another area that can be used for a coffee shop or grocery store, just depending on where I decide to put the lot.  I think when I get my new 'puter I'll start making the lots a little bigger.  For now I stick with fairly small ones that I can get plenty of mileage out of--no mega-malls in my game! 

Of course I also like the whole 'franchise' thing about the Lot Bin.  So, Loopy Larry starts an eating franchise in one area of the neighborhood and he decides he wants to spread out--no problem!  Before you know it, you could have Loopy Larry's franchises taking over your neighborhood--and what's more, every single neighborhood in your game!  Mwaa-haaaa-haaaa!!  (Of course Loopy Larry wouldn't be able to go with all of them. LOL)

[TheCheat]

So maybe talent badges are assigned randomly?

All Townies and NPCs are randomly assigned Talent Badges on the first loading of a neighborhood after installing OFB. All playable Sims get no badges.

[idtaminger]

I've noticed that in Bluewater Village, there's a road that runs real close to the water. Can you place lots on the side near the water? And how is the effect? I have quite a few beach lots, and its weird when the water ends abruptly within a border. Do beach lots near the water look better in anyway?

I've yet to get the game, but I'm curious.

[Li'l Brudder]

I places a community lot there called the beach and lowered the terrain in the back by the water just for a look.  Water came out of the ground, but it is a glitch.  Sims can walk in it.  It's like they are swimming!

[idtaminger]

Water came out of the ground, but it is a glitch.

Hmm...but a good glitch, no? Or does it look funny?