The main complaint that I’ve seen about the game is that endgame cities end up being very similar to each other. There’s not much actual specialization in your city’s overall economic model, the different industries you can specialize in are really just different tradeoffs of pollution versus density, and the oil and mining industries run out of resources fairly quickly. It’s also surprisingly difficult to build slums, or to have a city with both wealthy and impoverished regions. Tourism is barely handled, you can’t really build an entire city as a tourist-dependent resort town. And there are no natural disasters or special events, once your city is stable you can just leave it running unattended for hours. It is fun to play and I’ll be putting a lot of hours into just traffic flow management alone, but I’m hoping that the gameplay is expanded in future patches.
Yeah but is it better than SimCity 4? 
I can live without disasters although I know it’s a popular request and on the dev’s list of future things to add. Hopefully it’s toggle-able so I don’t have to constantly deal with fires, floods*, tornadoes and alien invasions. I could easily see tourist related things (special events, a more robust tourism model) being part of a future DLC just because there isn’t much room for “five new types of trees” style DLC with the Workshop.
*I guess you can make your own floods now if you really wanted to.
So after reading here, I bought the game last week, and there went my weekend. It’s been a few years since I played a city sim game. Didn’t like the direction Sim City had gone.
I’ve only gotten to the size of a small, dense city. So far, I’ve only built two-lane roads and a subway system. I built next to the connecting freeway and a connecting railroad, and traffic isn’t terrible.
There’s no way I can see to build ramps to the opposite lane of the freeway from my little two-lane roads. I did manage to connect one, at one point, and it was like watching Frogger, as trucks darted across the freeway to make left turns.
I’ve named every dog in town. There’s a park in the game, called Life & Death Plaza, or something, and people seem to drop dead there constantly. Or is that just my people being suggestible?
I haven’t used any mods yet, but I appreciate the mention of the tiny park mod. The best cities I’ve lived in had many tiny parks, and I was missing that here.
Am I missing something, or do you need to unlock museums, libraries, theaters etc? My people need culture! Right now we only get tourists at the organic food store.
The monuments category contains tourism-based unlocks such as museums, concert halls, etc. There’s probably also a bajillion you can download form the Workshop.
I’ve noticed that out in the wilds you can find cougars, wolves and deer (at least on the temperate maps) so you need to name all of those as well 
Just a nitpick: “monuments” are super-uniques which unlock at the last population milestone. Museums etc. are “unique” buildings. They all require both a population milestone and some condition to be met in your city. Some are good (build 300 city service buildings) some are bad (have 50% unemployment). Each monument requires some combination of uniques to build. The monuments are like super-service buildings that provide a massive uptick in some particular service. The fusion plant, for instance, provides 16,000MW of power; the hydro dam, by contrast, maxes out at 1600.
Once you have unlocked a unique in one save, it’s unlocked in all saves (although you still need to reach the appropriate population milestone), which is convenient for those uniques that basically require a terrible city; you can save, ruin your city to unlock a unique, then restore and build it in your unruined city. That’s how I got the observatory, which requires 1000 abandoned buildings for 5 weeks. I cut off the power to my city and everyone moved out. Restore and build observatory. Profit.
To enable mods, are you supposed to do something besides click on them in the Workshop? I subscribed to a bunch of them and I’d quite like them to be on, especially the one that turns off that fucking tweety.
Never mind, I found it in the content manager.
Yup, it is Two Rivers. Ah well, good to know. 
Thanks!
They said I was daft to build a city here but I built it anyway. It sank into the swamp
Then I built a second city, and it also sank into the swamp.
The third city burned down, fell over , and then sank into the swamp.
Well maybe not literally, But I do seem to have a problem with floods, fires and people being swamped by shit.
I have huge complexes of offices that are stuck at level 2.5. I keep trying to add things - probably 25% of all my available space is taken up by parks - I have 3 bus routes hitting every area, I even built redundant/extra police and fire stations nearby even though the coverage was good. I put in a metro station. I’ve got the high tech housing policy. I even put in a tax break for offices, I don’t know if that affects growth.
End result? The average level of 2.5 edged up to about 2.7. I don’t know what the hell else I can do except add many redundant bus lines that would both be overkill and cause traffic jams. They’re often near residential high density buildings that easily hit level 5, so the areas are nice enough. What do I need to do to get level 3 office buildings?
Also, does park happiness reach a maximum? Or can you stack parks on top of parks and still increase land value? Low park areas will be red, and high park areas will be teal - perhaps once they hit high/teal, there’s no additional benefit of placing another park. I’m not sure. Is it the same with mass transit?
Last night I was doodling around, adding bus lines hither and yon when I noticed traffic getting worse and worse. A couple important lessons were taught: that adding bus stops on your main roads is a poor decisions since traffic will back up behind the bus when it stops and that the depot will spew forth a seemingly infinite number of buses to try and meet demand, even if it means that 30% of your road traffic is buses. My single depot had 85 buses going at one point to serve maybe 9,500 people. Traffic had ground to a halt and was backed up for miles in every direction.
I was able to fix the problem by turning off the depot and waiting for all the buses to return home, wiping all my bus lines, rerouting them to have stops on side streets and shortening their routes so they served to take people from the metro stops to the surrounding areas in fairly short circuits with a stop overlapping the neighboring circuit. Also, I cut the bus budget to 50% so I only have 25 buses currently going.
The game does a poor job of managing busses it would seem. You can’t manually set the number of busses per route, and they vary. Is it varied based on the length of the bus line? I assumed it varied based on demand, but the number of busses I see on a route that’s getting zero or very few passengers seems to suggest it does not scale down the number of busses on unpopular routes.
I found out that apparently offices respond to elementary and high schools as a service, which is just dumb. Now you need schools in the middle of an office complex? I’ve heard that sticking high value residential among the offices can raise the property value.
I wonder (only guessing here) if overall population is a key here. The idea being no matter how snazzy Podunkville is it’ll never have the soaring office skyscrapers that New York has unless it becomes a major metropolis.
Just a thought. I really do not know.
I don’t think so - I had a booming residential district with level 5 buildings all over the place very early on. I don’t think total population affects anything like that - only local conditions.
Also the buildings have been stuck at the same level even though I’ve added about 20k people to my city since I laid down those zones.
You may find this helpful on getting buildings to level 3: Reddit - Dive into anything
Seems you have to game the system.
I have not tried it and not sure how much it might help but if you are interested and want to be a guinea pig there is a balance mod out: Steam Community :: Error
Has anyone tried squareabouts? Instead of using an awkward circle, you use a square made up of a one way roads then you branch out. That way, traffic can always flow.
Can you make a square using highways? The larger roundabout is made out of highway tiles so it doesn’t have traffic lights at the connection points. You can also use two lane roads since those don’t have traffic lights either. The three-lane and six-lane roads don’t work because traffic in the circle will stop every hundred yards. Anyway, I’ve only ever laid out highways with curves so don’t know if a highway “squareabout” is possible. Maybe you can make tight rounded corners.
I do often make two-lane one-way rectangles with a two-way spur connecting it to the main traffic spine but those aren’t really intended for heavy traffic management.
Can we add connections to the existing Hiway? The game starts with one in the tile, but if you expand to other tiles with the Hiway running through it can we connect?