Cities: Skylines

[Macman]

Deluxe Edition aswell

[Pob255]

I've been playing this all week and I've been watching let's play, streams and lurking on /r/citiesskylines since the 3rd when the NDA lifted.

It's a great game, not without flaws but still very good and is chewing up my time.

The traffic system is a bit quirky and some times the UI is not telling you what you think it is, although that seems to be more of a simcity2013 fault as it can be easy to assume it works the same way when it doesn't

A couple of cases in point, when you put down say a hospital, you get green road highlights showing coverage . . . not quite, the green is upgrade fulfillment coverage, not service coverage.
In simcity house/shop/industry upgrading was based on happiness and road size, in skylines it's based on service fulfillment, basically the buildings want to be within a certain range of services to upgrade doesn't matter if they are being serviced or not, the up shot of this means an ambulance will happily drive across the whole map to go and pick up a sick person.
One area is actually reversed, low tier residential wants to gain education, the schools don't have to be in range for people to go off and get education at a school so you don't need any services in range to get past tier1 residential.
But in simcity the green showed the area of effect in both happiness and coverage range, so if your buildings where outside the range they get no service at all, in skylines it's just a happiness thing not an actual service thing.

Not figured out the way the game decides which hospital will send out an ambulance yet but you cannot just drop in a new one next door because an ambulance is already on it's way so the one you just put down will not send an ambulance out even though it's next door.

That's one thing you have to remember, it takes time for the traffic to update and unless you've just demolished the path the traffic was taking it's not going to react to changes until new traffic spawns.

Beware wide roads, they are often no better than 2 lane roads and in tight grid cities are often worse because they make traffic lights, so when you use them you want as few intersections as possible, with 2 lane roads it doesn't really matter too much, as there's no lights cross roads are not an issue (in sim city you wanted T junctions because of the US system of right turn on red, not so in this game) 90% of the time I stick with 2 lane roads and highways/off ramps.

Goods traffic is the biggest issue I find, so careful planning and possible demolishing and rebuilding is needed.

My biggest gripe is steam & steam workshop, although in a way it's a good thing as it means I cannot play it at work but it does mean that if you have no internet connection then all your mods and mod buildings stop working.

[Dooms]

Reddit user is doing weekly posts on mods:

Week 1 : http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylin...musthave_mods/
Week 2 : http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylin...musthave_mods/

Most of them we have covered above but there are a couple that I didn't know about that I will be getting asap!

Elevated train tracks (can run on top of roads): http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylin...le_new_mod_on/

Zonable pedestrian paths (pedestrian plazas!): http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylin...blic_services/

Auto Line Colors (Automatically names and colors lines as your add them): http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylin...ine_color_mod/

Persistent Resource View (Finally, you can see where you're going when you're trying to build roads to your farms and oil fields): http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylin...urce_view_mod/

[Macman]

Cheers for that. Elevated Train tracks! Will be a nice addition.

Now to fit football, golf, Cities, work.. argh!

[Macman]

Anyone got screenshots of their cities?

[Dooms]

Started again last night so haven't got anything worth showing with my new one.

I'll take a couple of my last city that I wrote off @ 47,000 population (still growing)

[Pob255]

I'm dreading opening up my city, spent about 4 hours on it last night I was over 70k pop and we had a brownout. (IRL not in game)
pc didn't shutdown but the game ended up in a weird quarter size screen, I could hear it still running but couldn't interact with it so had to kill it from task manager.
I'm not sure when my last save was but I'm probably lost most of that.

Before I play again I'm getting the autosave mod.

[Macman]

Clicky

[Pob255]

Tis I feared, I didn't save last night so I'm back to as my city was on sunday

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile.../?id=413529484

I'd nearly doubled the size of this thing.

[kopite]

Saw this whilt browsing imgur last night http://imgur.com/gallery/v567L

Looks like a fun thing to do to your city

[Dooms]

MacMan - That your city? What size is it currently? Looking like it will fill out nicely

Pob255 - Ah man that sucks! I think I'll also download the autosave mod tonight as that would be very depressing

I Continued my new city last night and got to 10k population. Internet was down last night so screenshots didn't upload, will post soon as that is sorted... in the mean time I leave you with this:



They are metro stations!!

[Dooms]

Some of my new city. Upto 10K population now:


Grid to start (will be downtown) and then growing more organically. Top left will be forestry expansion. same view showing zoning


Traffic is looking OK at the moment except for a single roundabout that the bus depot is using.

I didn't really have traffic issues in my old city until I hit 35K but this time I have the highway to build off so hopefully things will go better

[Pob255]

Traffic is looking OK at the moment except for a single roundabout that the bus depot is using.

I didn't really have traffic issues in my old city until I hit 35K but this time I have the highway to build off so hopefully things will go better

I've adopted the bus depo idea too, it works really well, I've got one for each of my residential blocks.

Although I've made sure to separate them, so no traffic other than buses use the area, one is in the middle of the roundabout at the entrance of my first city area, the 2nd is in a one way section off the exit side of my 2nd city area.

Here's some of my general tips.
Dirt roads, they have a few uses I'll use them heavily when laying out highway intersections or roundabouts, by laying down a road you're making a grid of snap points which you can then use to neatly align your high way sections.
Another use is because of the low speed traffic tend to avoid using them as shortcuts, it seem to calculate route based on distance X speed, but ignores traffic levels, same trick can be used in reverse with off ramps and highways, you can "generate long cuts" which traffic prefers to use because of the higher speed.

Goods traffic, this is what really plagues me, especially at cargo train stations. I've taken to making anti clockwise off-ramp roundabouts after seeing this http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/...609E8D8BF879D/
What I do is put down a bit of unconnected road where I want the train station, place the station, delete the road, now draw out a cross with dirt road, connect the ends with off-ramps using the arc tool.
I've tried a few variations and one thing I'll say is make the loop big enough, it's easy to get giant tail backs of lorries entering and leaving, try to make the loop big enough to hold the entire tail back.

Dams are tricky but are amazing when you get them working.
most people (esp let's players) are under the misunderstanding that a river needs high flow for a dam to work well, it's not it's about water level difference.
The greater the slope the river is on the better the dam will work.
Also the water has to reach the top of the dam before it will start producing electricity, this is confused by the way water spawing works in c:sl.
Water comes in 2 forms, sea level and spawners.
Sea level is a minimum height for water and as both a very large, low flow rate, spawn area and drain area.
Spawners are confusing because they are both a spawn point and drain point, if surrounding water levels are lower than their set point they will actually drain water, if the surrounding water level is lower than their set point then they will spawn water.
this means that even if a river is flowing if the spawner that's making it is lower than the top of your dam then the water will not rise high enough for it to work.
So to find good place for a dam to get decent power out of it, look for a higher elevation river, it can be a bit tricky, look around the map with the camera as low as you can get it.
Remember that water in this game is a more like custard in consistency, it's rather gloopy in it's flow dynamics and will take a long time to fully settle.
Pay attention to low areas both behind your dam and directly in front of it, these places area the ones that will flood, esp if they are below the height of the dam.
The area directly in front of your will suffer quite a bit of water level fluctuation, even after your dam is working, it can take up to a year in game for the water to fully settle down.

Edit: Don't rely on the traffic map, it's a bit misleading, only the brightest red areas are potential trouble spots, it's just a representation of traffic volume, not flow, as long as the traffic is moving and not stopping/building up/slowing down too much, then it's not an actual problem.

edit2; most of my city is powered off a single dam, it's off the bottom of the screen in my screen shot a couple of posts up, it's producing around 600mw, although I've still kept most of my old power stuff as well just in case and I'm generating +13k cash so the cost isn't much.

[Dooms]

I've adopted the bus depo idea too, it works really well, I've got one for each of my residential blocks.

Although I've made sure to separate them, so no traffic other than buses use the area, one is in the middle of the roundabout at the entrance of my first city area, the 2nd is in a one way section off the exit side of my 2nd city area.

Yeah I'll be cutting it off with direct access to the highway soon. It was just OK at the start.

Dirt roads, they have a few uses I'll use them heavily when laying out highway intersections or roundabouts, by laying down a road you're making a grid of snap points which you can then use to neatly align your high way sections.
Another use is because of the low speed traffic tend to avoid using them as shortcuts, it seem to calculate route based on distance X speed, but ignores traffic levels, same trick can be used in reverse with off ramps and highways, you can "generate long cuts" which traffic prefers to use because of the higher speed.

I noticed this as well. It's not distance its just time to location along set path, I'm not sure if that takes traffic lights into effect tho? I only use dirt roads in my farming area (and prob will in my forestry) - I know its not as efficient as possible but it just looks a lot lot better for those applications

Goods traffic, this is what really plagues me, especially at cargo train stations. I've taken to making anti clockwise off-ramp roundabouts after seeing this http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/...609E8D8BF879D/
What I do is put down a bit of unconnected road where I want the train station, place the station, delete the road, now draw out a cross with dirt road, connect the ends with off-ramps using the arc tool.
I've tried a few variations and one thing I'll say is make the loop big enough, it's easy to get giant tail backs of lorries entering and leaving, try to make the loop big enough to hold the entire tail back.

Ah so that's how you do the single entry/exit point like that. For Cargo loop I do the following (pro excel skills incoming!)



I keep my internal and external railway links separate. Cargo comes from outside via train and sea and then is taken to my internal cargo trains which then go into the cities industrial and close to major commerce areas and visa-versa - There never seems to be any backlog with this method.

This can stay as self contained (need to add fire station) or add it to the highway - you shouldn't get much road traffic from it.

So to find good place for a dam to get decent power out of it, look for a higher elevation river, it can be a bit tricky, look around the map with the camera as low as you can get it.
Remember that water in this game is a more like custard in consistency, it's rather gloopy in it's flow dynamics and will take a long time to fully settle.
Pay attention to low areas both behind your dam and directly in front of it, these places area the ones that will flood, esp if they are below the height of the dam.
The area directly in front of your will suffer quite a bit of water level fluctuation, even after your dam is working, it can take up to a year in game for the water to fully settle down.

I've not played with dam's yet, seen you can get some damn (heh) good power generation from it

[Allen]

Need to get some screenies up myself I think. Not got anything special yet, working on a simple (block) layout. I did get a city up quite large, but something happened, all my Industry and Commercial started shutting down but I didn't know why, then people started leaving and I gave up.

My biggest problem is envisioning how my city will look when I start, so I end up with an old and new area which looks crap, and due to the distance apart they struggle to thrive.

Which maps do you guys start on? I don't recognise yours Dooms. Also, that addon in the bottom right looks cool, I don't want to rely on too many addons too soon, but that looks like it could potentially stop power and water shortages before they become problems, which is much needed in game I think.

[Dooms]

Need to get some screenies up myself I think. Not got anything special yet, working on a simple (block) layout. I did get a city up quite large, but something happened, all my Industry and Commercial started shutting down but I didn't know why, then people started leaving and I gave up.

So this can be multiple things and this is what I've found out myself:

General Industry is REQUIRED. It supplies goods to your stores and when you get high density commercial if you don't have enough bog standard industry then you won't have enough goods and they leave.

General Industry requires poorer more uneducated areas of your city to supply them with workers.

Ore/Oil Industry runs out of resources very quickly, its good for a quick cash boost but then expect to turn it into something else (or back to general) pretty quickly.

My biggest problem is envisioning how my city will look when I start, so I end up with an old and new area which looks crap, and due to the distance apart they struggle to thrive.

I seem to always start on a grid, its easier to get everything sorted and some good people/income coming in and then I start expanding. When I hit 30,000 people last time I had quite a bit of spare cash that I could take a bulldozer to whole areas of my starting area to redesign.

Which maps do you guys start on? I don't recognise yours Dooms. Also, that addon in the bottom right looks cool, I don't want to rely on too many addons too soon, but that looks like it could potentially stop power and water shortages before they become problems, which is much needed in game I think.

That map is either the bottom or 2nd from bottom map on the list the game ships with, I can get you a name later on when I'm home. The addon is great when you first start off as keeping an eye on water/power is a pain in the ass.