Cities: Skylines (The game Simcity should have been)

[Shonky]

Been giving this play over the last couple of days and so far I'm pretty happy with it. It's your typical city building sim, has a few issues but nothing game breaking. It also has Steam workshop support out of the box which will give it excellent longevity if initial response by the community is anything to go by, well worth the sticker price in my opinion.

[wobblysauce]

Indeed, the game is great.. and no mandatory online connection.

[thornz]

Loving this so far. Haven't played a sim city type game since Simcity2000. Pretty simple to pick up and play, but seems there quite a bit of depth once you get into it with ability to specialise industry and farming etc. Quite cool, just watching the city in motion when you zoom in close. You do seem to spend allot of time managing traffic, but I actually quite enjoy the head fuck that is trying to work out how to make it run smoothly.

Be warned though, its a time warp game. Sat down at 8pm last night to have a couple of hours gaming, looked at the clock and it was 1.45am.........

[Shonky]

My experience exactly thornz, I always find I've spent much more time playing than what it feels like.

[ysu]

I was going to post something yesterday, too, but then I've re-built some of the roads instead

It's a great game, I think it is really close to what I think a new simcity should have been like, indeed.
Good fun !

[thornz]

Already spent most of morning at work thinking about the best plan of attack to rebuild the main thoroughfares in my city. The backlog in and out of the main connection is massive. Backed up on the motorway coming in, and then i have a 6 lane on the way out, but with too many intersections causing gridlock.

[ysu]

Yep, similar things here...
I've found that you can replace some of the highway ramps with one-lane roads, and that sometimes helps a bit.
But what seems most important is to get the ranking of roads right, and avoid having crossroads too often. (I guess because the lights aren't and cannot be synced, they cause massive trafic jams)

One way roads work very well in a lot of places! It's not the shortest route, but the fast travel times that matters

[thornz]

Yip, one ways are the way to go. All my industrial zones now have a main 4 or 6 (cant remember, but the biggest one) lane one way down the middle and around the edges, with one ways criss crossing through it as well allowing good flowing traffic, just need to work on my main entrance which is going to require a lot of bulldozing of building I feel to get right. Would definitly do things differently if I started again.

Fire fighters still seem a bit useless though as still have far too many fires in my industrial zones, even with lots of fire stations.

[ysu]

Same
I've bulldozed a lot, yesternight. Spent nearly half a million on the whole project. (which was all my savings - but it was worth it!)

A fire station can only handle one fire at a time as I read, you need the bigger ones I think.

My problem is the mounting number of dead bodies, lately....one cemetery just didn't cut it

[smithcorp]

Put some public transport in, you doughnuts!

[ysu]

I've got about 8 bus routes, 2 loops of subway & some rudimentary trains (mostly for taking people to the oil fields, which is a bloody cash cow I tells ya!)
Also the budget for public transport is at 150% (similarly to fire & police)

Oh and 2 freight train depots, too.

[Shonky]

Put some public transport in, you doughnuts!

Don't forget footpaths as well, I've put in an elevated footpath network across my city with off ramps dropping down where I feel it's appropriate, you'll be surprised how far the citizens will walk before they'll use motorised transport.

[ysu]

hm...that's interesting, Shonky. I'll look into that as well

[Shonky]

Out of interest what sort of population are folks at currently?

I'm sort of stalled at about 20k currently, I've been trying most converting low density to high density but that doesn't have the same affect as it once did and I'm wondering if I still need some low density so folks move in initially on the outskirts of town.

[thornz]

I cracked 28k last night, and still have large demand for more residential at the moment.

One thing I have found, (and maybe it will work itself out over time) is that I seem to get allot of abandoned industrial sites that close due to lack of workers. It seems that because I have a highly educated city with lots of schools, high schools and university, it seems no one wants to do unskilled work. I am almost thinking I might need to purposely create a ghetto with no schools to try create an uneducated section of society to work in factory's.

[ysu]

high 20's here
The density conversion takes time to reap benefits, the buildings need to level up as I see it.

P.s. after the re-build my demands have gone to bust, understandably I dunno how long it'll take to get it back on track, fully.

Thornz; that's mostly due to workers being unable to get to the site (in time) I reckon. I had the same problem, after the rebuild that's gone.

[r8response]

C:S does a good job of simulating citizens.... Even the arseholes

[petey]

Have played a fair bit of this lately. At a point where I'm thinking about restarting, had no foresight in my plans to begin with so have got a clusterfuck of all sorts of things. Traffic isn't too bad on the whole but trying to implement public transport after the fact is messy. Sitting high 20k population also.

[Santaria]

I find I've restarted a few times. Want to get the planning right but it's hard with limited finances, lol.

Sent from my Nexus 5

[Shonky]

I'm on my 3rd map, it's still a dogs breakfast but I've decided to persist with it rather than starting from scratch this time, given I've got about 15 hours into it now it's easier to demolish and rebuild than start over.

[smithcorp]

That looks good. Last thing I need is another game...

[ysu]

I'm on my 3rd map, it's still a dogs breakfast but I've decided to persist with it rather than starting from scratch this time, given I've got about 15 hours into it now it's easier to demolish and rebuild than start over.

Exactly!

[thornz]

Just over 40 thousand at the moment. I have fixed my industrial zone roading, and a few other main routes, and pretty much everything flows pretty smoothly traffic wise. Have a metro system and trains running.

Only thing now is the game is pretty much on autopilot, I have millions of dollars, and its pretty straight forward now, can just buy and build exactly what I want, almost lost its challenge to be honest. Not really sure what to do now.

[Shonky]

40k you say, it can simulate 1 million cims total so you are a ways from tapping it out.

[Shonky]

Some nutcase's city I found on reddit, 9 tiles in total.