Mentioned upthread is that it’s by the Cities in Motion people. Isn’t that game all about traffic management? I’ve never played it to have an opinion on it but you’d hope that they can patch in some traffic fixes.
I personally haven’t had a town long enough to see any traffic issues but that seems to be the most common criticism so far.
This is when one ways come in very handy. Some larger roads will also form different intersections depending on whether a road is merging into or a lane is splitting out of that road.
You may find it worth watching Quill18’s quick tips for Cities Skylines here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=e1yNaa83I2E#t=389
I queued it up a ways into that video for some tips I found helpful.
While these are not the tools you want it shows a means to game the system within the game for better results. Not ideal I know but what we are left with for now.
As an aside on my first city I didn’t realize I was drawing out one-way roads. My city seemed broken and I could not figure why. Apparently I drew two one way roads “from” the highway so no one could leave. Whoops! :smack:
Quick questions about power lines:
Go damn, there’s already over a thousand items in the workshop!
I picked up 5 new buildings/houses, which will randomly spawn along with the other buildings, and 3 new ploppable parks!
Sweet!
Last night I looked and there was something ridiculous like 350 different styles of intersections already. I’m sure most are of questionable value but, yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of options here.
New random buildings will be nice since, even in my small trial towns last night, I noticed a bit of repetition in my neighborhoods. I know that’s inevitable but the more variety, the better.
The range on power lines isn’t very far at all.
Unlike Sim City, where the zones transfer power, it’s the buildings that do so. They have a radius, which may actually be larger than power lines.
Ah, thanks. I get it now.
Auto-save would be nice (there’s one in the workshop, apparently, but an official one would be better). Got my city up to 5,000 residents and was just getting ready to expand when my computer crashed (with the message “the computer restarted for a reason.” Thank you very much). Lost a solid hour’s work.
Yeah. While it has worked rock solid for me it has occurred to me that I am hours into a city before realizing I haven’t saved once. Losing it would suck.
While we are on about a wish list I really wish there was an “Undo” button to undo the last thing (or series of things) you did. It is annoying to not get a road just right and having to delete it bit-by-bit.
There’s now a first person mod too:
Came across this tip for spacing your water pipes.
Short version is at the beginning of your city you lay out a line of pipes that cost $440 long then add a spur, then another $440 and a spur and so on all the way across your starting area. Then, as you need new pipes you just extend the spur that will meet your needs.
Here is a short (1 minute) video that illustrates it far better than I explained it.
I’m having a weird problem where a couple of blocks on the easternmost edge of my city keep going out of power and then getting it turned back on. I’m generating 30 more MW than I’m consuming, so it isn’t a lack of power. And both of those sections are directly connected to other parts of town that stay powered.
It’s unclear whether those units are the furthest from the power generator (which is where power outages start if you’re not generating enough power) because I have a hydroelectric dam and solar plant at one end of the city and a wind farm at the opposite end. I wonder how it calculates power shortages when you have multiple plants - does it simulate each individual power station feeding the closest units? So if you had one power plant generating 100MW, and one at the opposite end generating 50MW, would the outages start to occur about 2/3 of the way over towards the lower power station?
Since every side street having a connection to a main road ends up creating a new stoplight, what I think I’m going to start doing is disconnecting 2 out of every 3 side streets from the main road, and then taking the middle one and making a fork in it connecting the other two side streets. That way you only have one traffic light per 3 side streets, and you won’t get jammed up so bad on the main roads. Maybe even one stem for every 5 branches. I’ll experiment.
A feature the game should have that I just thought of. I hate wrecking structures to rebuild new stuff, even though it’s all silly sim stuff I feel bad for wrecking people’s houses to widen a road or what not. But you get off really easy - the structure will have to rebuild and re-level, but there’s not much real cost to it. But there should be an actual game mechanic that allows you to destroy people’s buildings in order to place new stuff or build new roads, but you should have to use eminent domain, and pay the property value out of your budget to do it. That way you can still use eminent domain when you need to, but it’s discouraged and costly. I think that would be a fun mechanic.
Okay, so I discovered that highway ramps aren’t just used for highways - if you place them right, they’ll create no-intersection connection between two roads, when merging one onto the other. That’s enourmously useful for managing traffic in high density areas.
I’ve got a city of 25,000 people and a cash reserve of over a million, so I think I’m doing pretty well.
Is there a limitation on how far people will commute for work? I decided to place some industrial stuff on the other side of the highway, far away from my residential area, and it seems like most of the places are short on employees and lots are being abandoned for lack of employees.
I have been experimenting a lot and re-starting cities a lot and have found the initial setup process tedious when doing this.
So I decided to do a pipes setup per the perfect spacing deal I mentioned earlier. I go to each map and do the work to make the pipe setup. I then save it as “Starter Pipes: Green Plains” (or whatever the map name is).
Helps a bit when staring out.
Here is what my Green Plains starter looks like as an example (and yeah, I know there is a broken connection to my sewage plant…took the pic before I saw that).
I am having a real problem remembering I can expand to other areas. I feel compelled to make high efficiency cities in a grid. I forget there is room to spare in this game. It is a real struggle for me to make nice open areas with meandering roads.
Not the game’s fault. My shortcoming. Just saying…
Oh boy, this game is sounding good. Like most, I was really disappointed with SimCity and I’ve been forced to play my old Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom to get my city building fix! Can’t wait to try this out.
Ran into a really annoying limitation. I finally got capital city sized, so I can build a cargo harbor. I built my industrial district on a river in the hopes that I’d be able to get a cargo harbor one day. I’m on a map where there’s a river that exits to the left of the map, and an ocean on the right. My industrial zone is sitting on the river.
Here’s the problem: When you try to place a cargo harbor, it points you to nearest ship exit, and the body of water you want to place it on has to connect to it. But it determines the nearest ship exit by proximity rather than pathway. So when I try to place a cargo harbor near my industrial zone, it gives me a dotted line out to the right - to the ocean, and says “cannot connect to cargo exit zone” or whatever it calls it.
But if I move a couple of miles down the river, to the left, now it correctly displays the cargo exit zone as being on the left side, down the river. But it’s the same river. The ships have a clear path to go down that river to exit. But because my industrial zone just happens to on the right side of the divide of what it considers “closest”, my industrial district gets the ocean exit point on the right it can never reach.
So I can’t connect that district to the harbor exit path, even though there’s a clear path the whole way.
You can use pedestrian walk ways (found in the decoration tool) to make them go even further without grabbing a vehicle.