Ravs,
You continue to amaze.
I only have one minor (yeah, he says, as he gets out the large power spanner) issue. I guess it's because I have some human geography training and studied Von Thunen and some other oddball theories like Central Place Theory and so on. It seems to me the layout outside the XT line is a bit problematic as it stands.
On a flat plane, with equal access to various resources, your people will tend to evenly distribute. There will be several classes of business (some common, some less common, some rare) and if you map out each separately, they'll tend to distribute evenly across the overall space.
Right now, the space between 'Racoon City' (or whatever you are calling it) and the Port has a high density cluster then lots of separate individual multi-storey buildings. That just doesn't quite sit well with me. Neither does the way the greebler crushed together the main buildings.
With any amount of actual space, there would be clear traffic lanes. The current overhead shows some *really* constricted areas for traffic (be it maglev, groundcar, air raft, etc) and some really open ones... right beside one another. This sort of clustering only tends to happen with really good reasons. And it is an urban planning failure I suspect. :0)
Now, how could we rationlize this a bit, or at least make it a bit more aesthetic? We could spread out the one large cluster into several smaller clusters. We could populate the space between the multi-storey buildings with a bunch of one-storey buildings (homes and such). We could (I mean 'the royal we' which really means Ravs) also see that a lot of terrain was added - trees, small hills, ponds, roadways, etc. With all of that stuff in place, it wouldn't look so much like a plain across which people had distributed themselves in an illogical (and economically odd) fashion.
If you look at overviews of real cities, you tend to see a central node grow up, but then as it does, a low-storey sprawl occurs if the geography allows. If you have something like a river going through or a seaside or something, people sprawl along it, claiming the good real estate, in preference to equal distribution sprawl.
Then, someone develops some core business in the burbs, and another (smaller) business node develops, smaller than the core, but getting its own sprawl around it. The thing is, the sprawl density change rarely looks as dramatic (yours transitions from a high desnity middle to very scattered buildings really fast) as what we see in your diagram and almost always follows some geography (which we really don't have on the flat plain between the Starport and Raccoon City).
So, if you add some intervening terrain, green belts, roads, etc, you can probably justify someof the layout, but the transition from high density urban greebling to scattered single buildings out to be more gradual as well.
That's just an aesthetic complaint with the area between Racoon City and the Port. The Port is coming along smashingly and the City is fine too.
Great work. Feel free to ignore us critics if you want :0)
