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Kaspar
2017-08-01, 11:50 AM
So I've started running a gangster themed game, set in in a futuristic megacity with a billion inhabitants. Basically think Mega-City One from Judge Dredd.

Any suggestions on how to make the city feel properly gargantuan?

legomaster00156
2017-08-01, 11:57 AM
It's not going to be easy, because regardless of just how large your city really is, the players will only ever see a very small percentage of it: that which the campaign takes place in. Even if two plot locations are thousands of miles apart, only the two locations matter; the space in between is just filler.

CharonsHelper
2017-08-01, 12:06 PM
I'd just have fluff about everyone being in really cramped quarters all the time. Then occasionally have someone mention wanting more space and/or lack of food etc.

gooddragon1
2017-08-01, 01:20 PM
+very rapid transit railways
+terminals with information on the city
+monuments and parks
++a waterfall monument/park

TheYell
2017-08-01, 01:39 PM
Have the two ends of the city in separate time zones.

Passports to move around in it. The lower class people are sentenced to the Burrows and the 1% enjoy the rooftops.

A dome.

BRC
2017-08-01, 01:59 PM
The key is Implying Scale.

The City doesn't have a name. It does, but nobody who lives there uses it. It's "The City".
Don't mention the edge of the City. Everything is bordered by More City. I guess if the city is on a shore, you can have "On the Shore" and "Not on the Shore", but otherwise, various places in the City are just locations in space. Meanwhile, keep any given scene local. Contained to a few blocks (The Financial District), or a single stretch of endless freeway if it's a vehicular chase scene or something.

Don't try to map the City itself. Have places in the city, but keep things around them as vague as possible. The Financial District is full of gleaming skyscrapers and smiling policemen. Meanwhile, Market Square is full of gangs and squatters living in the ruins of old Banks and investment firms. They might be next to each other, they might be on opposite sides of the city. It doesn't matter. Give each location a strong feel and sense of character. That's more important than it's physical location.

In fact, make travel times across the city basically arbitrary. With Traffic, it could take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to get from any part of the city to any other part.

Above all else, remember that The City Goes On. They could be in a firefight with the police, but a few blocks away, life will be going on. Nothing short of a massive storm, wide-scale blackout, or full-scale invasion is going to impact the city as a whole.

Aliquid
2017-08-01, 02:13 PM
individual buildings are massive, packed together, each with a decent sized 'footprint', and hundreds of stories tall. The bottom floors will be so deep in shadow that they never see the sun.

Have the players adventure only in one building at first... get to know it well and realize how big it is, how many people and businesses and amenities are all in that one building. A building that has a base that is 1,000 by 1,000 feet, and is 500 stories tall would have more than 100 acres of floor space inside of it.

Then they leave the building and realize that there are tens of thousands more buildings just like it out there.

Mr Blobby
2017-08-01, 08:01 PM
Imply it's huge, don't simply tell the players it is. Look at things like 'signs you grew up in London / New York / Tokyo / Hong Kong etc' listicles and then simply turn them up to 11. Random thoughts:

- Most people live, work and hang out in their own arcology tower. Visiting a relative in a different one is approached the same way we would for a fair-distance daytrip in RL. Perhaps in this world people with similar ideas on how to live, politics etc cluster in their own 'arcs'; so one might be a hippyish commune, another a rather strict Christian 'traditional family' setup etc. So it could be quite the culture shock going from one to the other. Each arc has their own 'leadership' [elected mayor? a council of elders? the CEO? etc]

- When the country is referenced, it is simply called 'Out There' or the like.

- Have some 'old' buildings still around in comparison. The tiny spire of a medieval cathedral, the 'high-rise' 20th Century towers which look like toys etc.

- Physical space is at an utter premium. Poor people live in 'cage housing'. What I call 'housing porn' shows feature 'snazzy' apartments which possesses a separate bedroom, a 'kitchen' which actually has an actual oven [not just a small hob/fridge/grill unit] and boasts an actual bath in the bathroom. Pets such as a dog or cat are true status symbols for the rich. This has led to people generally owning less personal possessions - for where are they going to store the stuff? This has led to much more lives in public; communal kitchens/bathrooms, eating at restaurants, kids spending most of their times at playgroups etc.

- There's no personal space. All pockets have secure zips for people are used to constantly being alongside others [to stop pickpockets]. Conversations are usually conducted at near-shouting levels due to the buzz of other conversations, adverts yelling at you and other electronic gadgets. Women are used to being groped [accidentally or not so] by the sheer crush of people; one of the best-selling products is a top 'for the larger girl' which minimises their twins and has a special fabric which means the stray hands feel less personal. It's common for people to be sitting alongside each other having a 'personal conversation' via text messages.

- Social conventions have changed. Standards for sex, nudity and bodily functions may have cratered simply due to the crush; city-dwellers are *used* to chatting to the guy/gal standing beside you while showering, getting fully dressed/undressed in front of others is okay and most of them grew up hearing their parent[s] getting it on in the bed two metres away from you. New social rules have developed, such as explicit code-words for showing romantic interest etc. Interestingly, this way of living might have seriously eroded the current binary way of looking at gender. Or created a 'morality police'. Or knowing humanity, both.

For me, showing such signs to me in a game would be worth more than simply *telling* me 'this place is huge'.

MarkVIIIMarc
2017-08-02, 01:05 AM
Give the PC's a couple sense of scale problems.

Remember when the Terminator was hunting down all the Sarah Connors?

Have a NPC drop a hint on them a certain police officer named M. Jordan can help. Then have the players go to the nearest precinct to see him only to realize there are 4 M. Jordans there and about as many at each of the 10,101 other precincts so they have to narrow it down a bit.

Give them something easy to accomplish but with a seemingly easy time limit. Then have them spend most of that time in transit only to arrive just before time is up making it interesting.

Underground in NYC is super neat and multi-layered. I can only imagine creating a dungeon crawl in such a complex place as the old subway tunnels.

Abemad
2017-08-02, 04:04 AM
You could look at Isaac Asimovs Caves of Steel, even though his cities are smaller than what you need, they capture the feeling of megacities.

Asimov imagines the present day's underground transit connected to malls and apartment blocks, extended to a point where no one ever exits to the outside world. Indeed, most of the population cannot leave, as they suffer from extreme agoraphobia.

Cluedrew
2017-08-02, 08:02 PM
Hmm...

Distort Distance: The as the crow flies distance between two places is almost irrelevant. It could take you an hour to move across a building, but two major points are connected by a 1/2 hour bullet train line (which departs every 15 minutes, 45 minutes tops) even though they are separated by dozens of such buildings. Personally I would get rid of many personal vehicles, those are for intercity travel, which is not an issue here, but that can very with the exact aesthetic you are going for, people walk or take the endless network of public transit. Apply the results to areas, people will likely consider things near to each other, and hence group them together, if they are connected by transit, especially if they is also have a similar feel to them. The fanatical district... I'm keep that typo, might be shaped like an 'L' with the longer arm 30 times as long as it is wide.

Make it 3d: Very little says mega city like taking an elevator to a completely different section of town. You live on floor 60, and so have to pass through the entertainment district (floors 73-81) on your way to work on floor 97.

Personalize Sections: Maybe officially you live in floor 60, unit 447 of ward 12, district AJL. But if you tell someone that you would say the West Rail District, Quin's Ward. If you ask, or look it up depending, you might even be able to figure out where those nicknames came from. Especially if it is supposed to feel old, history has built up in every corner over the years. People might feel a great deal of attachment to their home ward, maybe even saying they are from Quin's Ward even though they moved to Wings Feet 15 years ago.

Bring in Green: This is an odd one that is very dependent on what you are going for. But have built in green spaces, nothing says the city never ends like people having bio-domes scattered about. Sure they are manicured parks and not "the great outdoors" but it is the closest that most people in the city will ever see. 150 floors below the top of the city as it is.

Mr Beer
2017-08-02, 10:31 PM
Bring in Green: This is an odd one that is very dependent on what you are going for. But have built in green spaces, nothing says the city never ends like people having bio-domes scattered about. Sure they are manicured parks and not "the great outdoors" but it is the closest that most people in the city will ever see. 150 floors below the top of the city as it is.

Since this real estate is worth a lot, it's not like a normal park today. I would have dystopian-level surveillance and punishment for things like walking in unauthorised areas, picking flowers, littering etc. Maybe it's not for the benefit of all, only a 'full citizen' or the wealthy can enter parks, maybe there's an annual fee. Some parks are free to all but only 1,000 people can be inside at any given time so there are lengthy queues outside the doors at all times and you need to get there in the middle of the night to be guaranteed entry.

Perhaps a park pass is a job perk for working folk and that's what people do on holidays, take the family to the park. Only they have to queue all night, huddled in blankets and avoiding the panhandlers and possibly more sinister types working the line.

Cluedrew
2017-08-03, 07:04 AM
I don't think increased price of real state is a given. Nor is the city feeling like a dystopia, although I wouldn't be surprised given that it is an adventure setting. Still when you have 3d space to work with, the value of space could actually go down a lot because now you can slice it up so much more than in a 2d space. The lack of real 3d megacities mean it is just a guess.

Mr Blobby
2017-08-03, 08:55 AM
Extrapolate from reality; look at property prices in the nearest we have to megacities in RL; London, Tokyo, New York etc. And it *was* stated at the start they were thinking of a cityscape like in say Judge Dredd. The nearest example we have I'd say is Hong Kong - and yes, it is mainly built upwards.

Zurvan
2017-08-03, 09:30 AM
Have the two ends of the city in separate time zones.

This is brilliant.

goto124
2017-08-03, 09:54 AM
Have the two ends of the city in separate time zones.

I wonder what the border between the two time zones looks like, and how laws deal with activities that go across the border.

Has anyone heard of the restaurant so large, the waiters were blocked by the curvature of the earth?

Mr Blobby
2017-08-03, 10:58 AM
Chances are, a city - whatever the size - would remain in the same timezone. Several nations which straddle them often pick a single time; China here is an excellent example.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-08-03, 11:15 AM
Chances are, a city - whatever the size - would remain in the same timezone. Several nations which straddle them often pick a single time; China here is an excellent example.

But this is a a Megacity

CharonsHelper
2017-08-03, 11:20 AM
Chances are, a city - whatever the size - would remain in the same timezone. Several nations which straddle them often pick a single time; China here is an excellent example.

Not everyone in China actually uses Beijing Standard Time. Further west there is a 'local' time. (albeit - some of that is politics)

Cealocanth
2017-08-03, 11:43 AM
To add to what has already been said, you could take some advice from H.P. Lovecraft. When thinking of vast unimaginable cities in written fiction, probably the first thing that comes to mind is the description of the city from At the Mountains of Madness.

I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond. Of course we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all—there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.
Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. “Corona Mundi . . . Roof of the World . . .” All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world—of the daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity.
For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave-mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from 10 to 150 feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks in many cases as large as 4 × 6 × 8 feet—though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size; there being innumerable honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city’s heyday.
The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed. Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the field-glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands—decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance.
In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau’s interior to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings; and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times—millions of years ago—had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought pre-human, I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did. Of course we knew that something—chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness—was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had.
For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth’s history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land of Lomar are recent things of today—not even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations—even weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.

Samzat
2017-08-03, 12:06 PM
there should be supersized versions of regular city infrastructure. City parks the size of large national parks (which could have a small group of hermits living in hidden areas of it) police stations that look like futuristic fortresses, because i feel like if a megacity had a series of police raids it would look more like a military invasion. Have the city be criscrossed by magnetic rail trains and freeways, and some sort of aircraft to climb vertically. Airports should be needed to cross to a different district of the city. The biggest gangs have upwards of a million members, and their leaders live like a king. If these megagangs have a gang war, it is likely that several blocks will cease to exist.

Aliquid
2017-08-03, 12:21 PM
I don't think increased price of real state is a given. Nor is the city feeling like a dystopia, although I wouldn't be surprised given that it is an adventure setting. Still when you have 3d space to work with, the value of space could actually go down a lot because now you can slice it up so much more than in a 2d space. The lack of real 3d megacities mean it is just a guess.I think previous comment was referring to the value of green real estate. Open parks would be highly expensive real estate.

A 1st floor unit within a 400 story building would be dirt cheap. A rooftop patio with actual sunlight... well that's going to cost you.

In the end it is all "supply and demand". If the city is big enough to provide for the population with room to spare, the real estate will be cheap. If the city isn't big enough to cover everyone, then people will be fighting for space and prices will go up. Also, the individual prices would vary by the other real estate... refer to the old real estate saying "location location location"

FreddyNoNose
2017-08-03, 02:22 PM
How to make a megacity feel mega?

Maybe you need to build up its self esteem!

DigoDragon
2017-08-03, 02:53 PM
Here's one--the city is so large it has several dungeons underneath it for players to discover and explore. Forgotten tombs no longer found on city maps, old parts of the city that were built over after an earth quake that hit it decades ago, spacious sewers and warrens and maintenance tunnels being used by a thieves guild or a nest of monsters perhaps? Maybe these dungeons connect different parts of town. Interesting and useful if they get PCs into places you normally have to pay to get in, or aren't allowed at all.

Mastikator
2017-08-03, 03:31 PM
Mega monuments. Think of a couple of absolutely insane constructions, like a space elevator.
Buildings in the center so vast and awesome they could dwarf entire towns.
Areas with so much pollution that breathing the air there may kill you.
Dead districts, where homeless and criminal elements take refuge.
Rich areas so densely packed with wealth it competes with small countries.
Super high speed underground public transport with so many levels you can't even picture it.

Mr Beer
2017-08-03, 06:32 PM
I don't think increased price of real state is a given. Nor is the city feeling like a dystopia, although I wouldn't be surprised given that it is an adventure setting. Still when you have 3d space to work with, the value of space could actually go down a lot because now you can slice it up so much more than in a 2d space. The lack of real 3d megacities mean it is just a guess.

Parks in any city are valuable real estate, because you could have a bunch of normal sized swellings or shops there instead.

Exactly what a billion+ population futuristic megacity is going to be like is open for debate of course. But since it's a gangster-ridden place and reminiscent of Megacity One, it seems a given that it's going to be a dystopia or at least have dystopian elements.

Keltest
2017-08-03, 06:44 PM
There should be people everywhere. They shouldn't be able to sneeze without somebody popping out of a building or from around an alley to say "bless you". Anything attention grabbing will attract crowds, anything noisy will cause people to investigate. You can tell how safe the area of the city is just by watching how people act going about their business. Roads are periodically blocked by maintenance crews doing repairs/cleaning up trash/building something/slacking off instead of doing their jobs.

Tipsy_Pooka
2017-08-04, 12:56 AM
So I've started running a gangster themed game, set in in a futuristic megacity with a billion inhabitants. Basically think Mega-City One from Judge Dredd.

Any suggestions on how to make the city feel properly gargantuan?

Break your city down into boroughs; each one, a city in its own right. Each borough has its own culture, style, and dialect. Almost as if they are separate countries. When narrating, emphasize the differences while traveling between these "sub-cities".

VoxRationis
2017-08-04, 01:04 AM
Include geography that no city of normal size would have ever developed. Cities are generally reluctant to climb up onto hills--though it definitely does happen as the population increases and sprawl continues. A mega-city might well build over small mountains, or into the ocean, or across a canyon, filling up the chasm and spilling out over the sides to boot. (If the area in the canyon was settled first and became the downtown or historic center, pressure from elites could well have caused city builders not to bridge the canyon as one might expect, making travel times oddly difficult in spite of the highways and light rail such a city would be capable of.)

Beneath
2017-08-04, 03:44 AM
Seconding distorting distance. I wouldn't go quite so far as to make relative position completely irrelevant except in the very built-up areas; from high enough in the less-tall areas you can at least see what direction the taller areas are in. But, yes, distance is measured along mass transit lines, traffic, etc. How people get around will be important to decide.

Also seconding that each neighborhood or borough should feel like a town. Final Fantasy 7's Midgar might be good inspiration here (only with fewer wandering monsters); the Sector 5, 6, and 7 slums all have their own character and function as basically-complete RPG towns, and there's an implication that the Plate neighborhoods are similar (if richer) though you never spend much time there.

Re:parks, conflict over their usage will be a big deal. Parks, especially in a dystopian megacity, might be privately-owned, or expected to pay their operating expenses if government-owned, and charge admission.

Land will be expensive. The value of land is based on what's near it, and in the middle of a city land is near quite a bit. closer to the edges it might be worth less; without natural constraints the city will sprawl out; as things go further away, land values decline and therefore the land will be developed less (it's economical to build a skyscraper when land is expensive; when it's cheap, a bunch of two or three-story buildings are more economical), until you gradually get out to rural areas. The presence of mass transit will affect land values around it, of course, leading to suburbs. A megacity will have devoured many, many rings of suburbs. A city with natural barriers to growth will have this pattern just cut off at the barrier, unless it expands in. Things like NYC's Central Park don't happen unless someone deliberately makes them happen

You might, in a large enough city, see "indoor parks" that are basically giant greenhouses with artificial lighting. Admission to these will probably be pricey.

Privacy will be an expensive luxury. Speaking of which, in a megacity dystopia, every square inch of everywhere is probably being surveilled by someone (possibly including the inside of private residences), but they don't have enough people to have human eyes on every minute of surveillance footage they take. Eluding surveillance is more about not being flagged by the algorithms, not being recognized, not having them notice you're up to mischief than it is not being seen by the camera.

If your city has homelessness (i.e. does not have a governmental agency ensuring that every person in the city is housed) then you'll need to figure out where they live. If you're doing the Caves of Steel thing, that means figuring out which buildings they're in, otherwise you have streets and alleys. Remember that the same economic concerns that apply to parks apply to streets, though; they will likely be no wider than is necessary for their function (another reason to use mass transit). You can't, though, take in the large amounts of goods the city will consume, or remove garbage, on a passenger subway line, though, so you will still see trucks on the surface for that most likely. A building might have its several lowest floors dedicated entirely, or nearly so, to waste processing and staging, with a small area for unloading and staging of inputs so they can be taken up by elevator. Most people wouldn't spend time in that area unless it breaks or they need to get out of the cold somewhere they won't be seen.

A truly big city might have multiple levels of bridges connecting its tallest buildings because the number of person-hours needed for the amount of traffic that happens between the upper floors makes crossing at the top difficult. Or if the upper-floor residents want to avoid the people who live on the ground. Flying cars that dock with the upper floors might be part of this, but flying vehicles are inefficient for within-city mass transit compared to, say, elevated or underground trains.

Storm_Of_Snow
2017-08-04, 08:59 AM
Have the two ends of the city in separate time zones.

Don't know about timezones, but you could have players be forced to take a flight from one end of the city to the other, as it's quicker and easier than the transit trains - think something like Boston-NY-Philadelphia-Washington. And all they see below them for the entire flight is city blocks and the road network - all the way to the horizon.

Interconnect the buildings - if you're on the 15th floor of one building and need to get over to the next one, you don't go down to ground level and walk across the street, you go up to the 20th and walk over the skywalk. And layer things - your 20th floor skywalk's 6 floors above a pair of regional transit rail lines, 10 floors below a major highway, 25 below the local power station and 40 under an interblock park, with fibre-optic runs bringing a little natural sunlight down (when they haven't been broken, robbed out or some gang's charging people for their use).

Even the airport's at the equivalent of the 40th floor and has worse approaches than the old Hong Kong Kai Tak airport. :smalleek:

Meantime, that skywalk (and the rest of the outside of the block) is constantly being modified and expanded by local residents to expand their living space, make spaces for fast-food shacks, newssellers and so on, making what appears from a distance to be little concrete blisters or pimples on the outside of the structure, to the point where some neighbouring blocks have actually started to coalesce into each other, forming superblocks.

At lower levels, people may need breathing masks to filter out airborne pollutants and CO2.

legomaster00156
2017-08-04, 09:24 AM
On the topic of air travel, planes are practically non-existent, at least as we know them. There's just no room in the city for the massive runways and wingspans they they require. Most aircraft tends to be helicopters, or some similar, currently not invented craft.

goto124
2017-08-04, 09:44 AM
How about cable cars?

GolemsVoice
2017-08-04, 09:44 AM
Managing a modern day metropolis is already pretty insane, and many cities are always just a few bad days away from (local) chaos. For your megacity, you could now go in three directions: An administration who cannot handle the additional stress (or just doesn't care), perhaps limiting itself to a few blocks (which might itself be as big as a normal city) where order can be maintained, a draconian government that keeps order by strict, dystopia-style management, or a kind of government by blocks or housing units, where rich blocks might have a board of property owners, poorer blocks might have citizen's committees, and some blocks might even be gang or corporate controlled. Each of these blocks might have different rules, for example, rich blocks will be maintained by private security, while poorer blocks might have some kind of neighbourhood watch or voluntary firemen, and so on.

Storm_Of_Snow
2017-08-04, 10:32 AM
On the topic of air travel, planes are practically non-existent, at least as we know them. There's just no room in the city for the massive runways and wingspans they they require. Most aircraft tends to be helicopters, or some similar, currently not invented craft.
London City airport's runway is 1500m and flights go direct to a lot of European destinations (which is effectively the sort of distances I think we're talking about - 300 to 400 miles, up to 1,000 at absolute maximum) - you could potentially run that across the top of a number of city blocks, and put the hangers, taxiways, gates, cargo facilities and everything else you need underneath and connect them to the runway with elevators, like the flight deck on an aircraft carrier.

kyoryu
2017-08-04, 10:36 AM
Differences. The key is differences.

If it's just all one big blob of sameness, it won't feel large at all. What will make it feel large is if you have very different-feeling sections of the city - different enough that they feel like separate locations.

Some sections can feel similar to each other, but they should be separated by a large number of areas that don't.

Play up the differences. Make people travel through them at times.

It's basically the same thing as other terrain. If you describe the world's hugest plain, and then just say "you cross it in <x> days", it doesn't feel big at a gut level. Maybe at an intellectual level, but not a gut level. You've gotta change things up within that. Make some areas have different critters. Make some areas have no water, maybe some have an abundance of water. People measure distance not so much in terms of miles, but in terms of unique experiences.

hewhosaysfish
2017-08-04, 01:33 PM
- Have some 'old' buildings still around in comparison. The tiny spire of a medieval cathedral, the 'high-rise' 20th Century towers which look like toys etc.


there should be supersized versions of regular city infrastructure. City parks the size of large national parks (which could have a small group of hermits living in hidden areas of it) police stations that look like futuristic fortresses

Combine "old buidings" and "supersized structures":

An old building spared demolition because of its
historic value. The buildings around it have grown to become skyscrapers that tower over it. The towers have been connected by bridges. New buildings were then built atop those bridges.... The old, historic building is now entirely indoors.

Aliquid
2017-08-05, 10:20 AM
Combine "old buidings" and "supersized structures":

An old building spared demolition because of its
historic value. The buildings around it have grown to become skyscrapers that tower over it. The towers have been connected by bridges. New buildings were then built atop those bridges.... The old, historic building is now entirely indoors.I like that idea

XmonkTad
2017-08-06, 02:26 PM
At lower levels, people may need breathing masks to filter out airborne pollutants and CO2.

I like this. Instead of the city having richer neighborhoods it has literal class stratification. Lower city is poor, upper city is rich. Upper citizens fly from the penthouses of one mega-building to the next. Upper-Middle citizens use the highly efficient moving walkways that go efficiently from building to building, as they are the newest. Lower-Middle uses the older walkways, which are already in a state of permanent nighttime, as sunlight is blocked by walkways that are higher up. Lower class shares the dark and dirty streets with automated, unfeeling, industry.

Elevators rarely carry people, only freight...

But I'm getting carried away. To OP's point of making the city feel large, start small, and then as you get further into the story expand the scope. Getting the characters invested in a tiny apartment they call their own is going to be a lot easier than getting them invested in 100000 identical skyscrapers.