Threads like this are cool. Thanks for sharing your experiences and strategies. I always find it interesting to see what other people are doing. It's funny, I also had looked as my city at 500K and figured it was a mess and went through a re-org.
It's interesting to note we have some similar strategies around fire, police, and hospitals too. Like you, I bulldozed just about every service building except the largest ones. I have the entire land available unlocked for the full 50x50 board. I found that I could cover everything I needed for a huge city with only 4 large police stations and 4 hospitals. Fire proved to be a little more difficult because a deluxe station only covers 22x22 unlike police and hospitals which cover 24x24, so I had to augment the coverage with a few more smaller fire stations.
Recently I've been camping at my current level and generating as many disaster and shipping keys as possible. I'm shooting for enough coverage to get 100% boost from transportation, about 75-80% boost from education, and a combined 100% boost from casinos and landmarks. This means LOTS of universities (I'm targeting a total of 8), heliports (9), Washington Monuments (9), and luxury casino towers (9).
Parks, I may only target 25% boost and do enough to make sure every single residence gets at least covered. My park of choice is the Peaceful Park. I need to do some more calculating, but I suspect that if I tried to get a much higher boost out of parks by placing more of them, the boost from them is not as great as if I gave the park space to more residence buildings that are heavily boosted by everything else.
And entertainment, the space these take up sucks. I'm about to bulldoze 2 Sydney Opera Houses, and maybe the 2 ferris wheels I have. I posted in another thread that I discovered I can only have a maximum boost of combining entertainment, gambling, and landmarks together for a total of 100%. Gambling and landmarks are just so much more efficient at space usage than entertainment.
I'm trying to shoot for a city with a population of at least 2,000,000. Yesterday I was at 93 residences with 790,000 using the layout strategy that I think will get me to where I want. Early next week will be interesting as I'll have laid out a little under half of what I want (I've sized utilities for 275 residences, so I'm covered for quite some growth). That should give me a good indicator on how this'll scale out. I'll do a bunch of testing with parks then too to see how effective they are in this strategy.
