Cities: Skylines (the Sim City we deserve)

  • Thread starter Akira AC
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The winter build is coming along nicely.


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Nearly a month since my last post, I'm still yet to start properly. I have a lot of assets, mods etc, it's just finding the best way to start with the opening street, detailing it and going from there. I don't mind if one street takes an evening, but so far, I haven't been decisive enough to even do that.

I bought a notebook specifically to jot ideas, though, as an aid to actually being productive.
 
VXR
Nearly a month since my last post, I'm still yet to start properly. I have a lot of assets, mods etc, it's just finding the best way to start with the opening street, detailing it and going from there. I don't mind if one street takes an evening, but so far, I haven't been decisive enough to even do that.

I bought a notebook specifically to jot ideas, though, as an aid to actually being productive.
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On a scale of one to ten, where 1 = playing the game as intended, zoning based on demand, operating with a budget, using milestones etc, and 10 = plopping every single thing by hand and basically ignoring all game mechanic limitations... what are you aiming for?

My ongoing 'Cooper county' has basically every single building, road, path, bush, decal, prop, hedge etc. placed by hand, it's immensely time consuming, and on the residential areas, it just becomes incredibly monotonous. I find it best to start with something you can build out from. A station for instance is a good one, a lot of towns in the UK are literally divided up by railway lines, so putting in the lines first, can naturally help you divide up a residential area from an industrial area for instance - then you naturally build a bridge to link them at some point and those roads might then become your towns main roads (i.e. commercial/office) etc. etc. etc.. I find it's more organic that way, and helps keep you interested. Just my 2¢.

On the subject of Cooper county, it's got about this far...

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Focusing more on GT7 at the moment, waiting for my next burst of inspiration for CSL, though I did place down a Nakatomi Tower asset in the area south west of the lake, having decided that area was going to be 'L.A.' than the main city in the middle, which is more 'N.Y.'
 
MatskiMonk
On a scale of one to ten, where 1 = playing the game as intended, zoning based on demand, operating with a budget, using milestones etc, and 10 = plopping every single thing by hand and basically ignoring all game mechanic limitations... what are you aiming for?
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That's the good thing about this game, there are many different ways to play it.

I personally sometimes start from scratch, and build up a city. I am not that detail focussed, and the closest I get is choosing a specific theme for an area, to specify the types and style of buildings that can spawn. Or sometimes I'll start with Scenario, which has a lot already built, and then once I have completed the scenario I carry on expanding.

I don't think I could do building by building for something that can be potentially so large, that the detailing could be missed.

I like the approach Biffa on YT is doing for his latest videos, where he is collecting the buildings and creating bespoke themes for different areas, and then going into parts of that area for detailing. Occasionally he will go in and do it by hand if the default spawning is not placing the building the correct distance from each other, as in the case of the UK terraced housing on his UK city build.

I don't think I have the imagination, patience or computing power to go down that route. It is interesting to see what can be done, and pick up some tips along the way. ;) :)
 
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I like to place each building one by one. I doubt my computer could handle very big cities anyway, so there’s no rush 😅

I don’t do much detailing though, usually it’s limited to fences and trees.

As for the start of a city, I usually think about why and when the city was founded. Once you’ve got a rough idea of that it’s easier to come up with a road layout that makes sense for that context.
 
Thanks for the replies guys. I'm definitely edging towards 10 territory, as I want to craft a world in minute detail (the ideal in my head). Good shout on starting with a station.

I'm using the Teignmouth map on the Workshop because it's much flatter than the Land's End one I really wanted to use, which has massively tumultuous topography and nothing fit properly. It already has a rail line based on the real one and the most easterly tiles run to where Dawlish Warren is. Ripe for a station and some holiday camps, but then I worry what I make is too close to existing settlements. It's a nightmare!
 
Turns out that it’s not one new DLC, but about half a dozen. And the first ones are coming next week.

It’s one free update, one mini-expansion, three content creator’s packs and a bunch of radio stations. Best of all, it seems like they’re finally making assets for a combination of expansions, like pedestrian paths with tram tracks for example.

 
eran0004
Turns out that it’s not one new DLC, but about half a dozen. And the first ones are coming next week.

It’s one free update, one mini-expansion, three content creator’s packs and a bunch of radio stations. Best of all, it seems like they’re finally making assets for a combination of expansions, like pedestrian paths with tram tracks for example.

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Mostly the Financial Districts is the most intriguing to me, sounds like it'll just be another zoning option with particular assets and policies.

eran0004
I saw a PC for sale today with 128 GB RAM. Then I saw the price tag and decided to stick with the 8 GB I’ve currently got 😅
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I'm now going to investigate that upgrade to 64Gb!

<... goes off to PC thread ...>
 
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The new bank buildings sound interesting. They reduce crime by sending out vans to collect money from commercial zones.
 
FINANCIAL DISTRICTS - MINI EXPANSION
RELEASE DATE: 13TH DECEMBER 2022

Boost the economy of your City with a financial district, and use your funds to invest in the best industries for your population. Financial Districts is a mini-expansion from Colossal Order that adds the new feature “Investments” and more than a hundred assets to the game.

Financial Districts’ key features include:

Investments
Invest your money wisely and improve the lives of your citizens.
Many sectors await your support such as deathcare, healthcare, oil, ore, farming, generic industry, and logistics. Keep track of your investments with the new stock trading tab.

Stock exchange
Level up your investment funds with the stock exchange. This new building also unlocks the tax income bonus for office zone buildings in its area.

Bank buildings
Money, money, money! Banks add a new service to your city and improve its safety thanks to their transport vans that, while collecting cash from commercial zone buildings, decreasing the criminality rate in the area.

Financial District Specialization
Unlock a new district for office zones when you reach the “Big Town” milestone.
Financial Districts feature a new visual style, and generate higher taxes than basic office zones but decrease happiness.
The tax income bonus increases if a stock exchange is nearby.
 
I’m taking a trip to the city archive today, hoping to find some blueprints of the city hall and a few other local landmark buildings.

Update: great success! This is a power plant from 1892, built to power the electric street lights.
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I bought a new laptop with 16 GB RAM, a proper graphics card and an SSD drive. The game performs so much better! The city loads in just over a minute, and that's with high texture quality. On the old computer (a potato with 8 GB RAM) it took around 7 minutes with medium textures. The framerate is good and the input lag is gone.

I didn't know if the city would survive a change of computers, but it appears to have done so. The things that didn't carry over were mainly the mod settings, the most annoying of these were the lighting and LUT settings, it took a bit of time to tweak these.

I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that with more processing power I'm also getting more active citizens, because I got a huge increase in demand for parking, which led to some traffic jams as they were driving around the city searching for somewhere to park.

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I like the look of some of the new financial district buildings, especially the corner versions. It seems like the buildings are designed as a set, so you could essentially build a whole block as one big building. The small bank and the skyscraper bank looks pretty nice as well. The level 1 stock exchange looks okay, but I’m not a fan of the upgraded versions.
 
eran0004
I like the look of some of the new financial district buildings, especially the corner versions. It seems like the buildings are designed as a set, so you could essentially build a whole block as one big building. The small bank and the skyscraper bank looks pretty nice as well. The level 1 stock exchange looks okay, but I’m not a fan of the upgraded versions.
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Despite upgrading my PC for it, I've not picked up any of the new DLC yet. Looking forward to it, but it might be something I investigate over the festive holidays.

After recently toying with a few a things, I think I might abandon my current 'BIG' map, 'Cooper County' in favour of a 'new' version...

2000 hours and still not 'completed' a city :D
 



It's out now, downloaded it on Xbox last night.

I've only played for a few hours but I can see already that this can help generate large amounts (ie: millions) of city income.
 
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The new financial district is taking shape. I like that the building height is tied to the level, which makes it easy to create a height transition.

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I also started on a cargo harbour. My favourite part of the build was to do the rail connection, it was quite tricky to find a good solution to it since the main rail corridor runs along the hills and has to drop quite far to reach the sea level. A design criteria I had was that the slope couldn't exceed 1.5%
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Well, for no real reason other than procrastination, I made a map, that's basically flat, with road, rail, and ship connections at ordinal points (air run at 45° across the map in two bands).

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The map is as simple as possible to facilitate easy building of top to bottom, edge to edge, medium-to-high density - with moderate detailing and using all DLC functionality with exception of enabling disasters.

It's very much still under construction but my starting junction's getting a little complex. 8 way...

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So far40 out 56 connections made. Once they're all in there'll be a lot to do - intersection marking tool, and junction smoothing aside, I want to delete all/most of the standard pillars and find some more imaginative ways of holding it all up.
 

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