Is there a way to see a Layout Grid in Sim City 5?

Question

Is there a way to enable a layout grid, or a mod which would allow me to view the city using a layout grid?

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In Sim City Classic, all zone types (residential, commercial and industrial) were 3x3 units. Regardless of your road layout, as long as it is a grid there were always six units of space between roads.

Sim City 5 sorely lacks a grid outline, which makes it extremely difficult to determine the maximum size two fully developed buildings of a zone type could end up using. Build too little of a zone and those larger buildings won't appear while buildings too large of a zone will end up wasting lots of space (you can't put parks between buildings like in older versions).

I don't care if the largest RCI buildings are measured upwards of 20, 30 or more units, I would simply like to be able to get the most out of the city layouts. Thus, I am looking for a way to enable a layout grid, either through a in-game setting, or even a mod.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

The built-in road guidelines, which appear after mousing over two existing roads, will position themselves as necessary for the biggest possible RCI building to fit (not guaranteed to fit all ploppable buildings). So if you only ever draw straight lines and 90-degree angles, you'll end up with a perfect grid shape that has no wasted space (until you have to fit parks etc in, and there's not much you can do about that). This works for curved roads too, though it's only for parallel roads (not the spokes that cross them) and gets progressively more out of whack as you chain them together.

However, there's a catch - the guidelines assume you'll never mix roads and avenues. So drawing a road off an avenue's guidelines will give you too much space, while drawing an avenue off a road's guidelines will be too small. There's not much you can do about this unfortunately (or at least I haven't found one).