Oof that's too complicated for my brain in terms of vidya games.
Your best bet is just to track the traffic that's flowing through congested intersections to see if it's actually going to somewhere the intersection feeds to or if it's passing through the general area to get to somewhere else. If there's too much through traffic on a local road, that means that that road is too appealing to random drivers, and that somewhere along the line, you have to provide them with an option that looks better. Huge bypasses aren't sufficient if drivers never reach them, so sometimes what you need to do is to make it more obvious at the intersection that the local road isn't going to be able to accommodate heavy traffic, so they'll know to avoid it unless they directly need it.
two things I really hate about this game and make it hard for me to get back into it, and its the two things SimCity did better.
and they both involve early power.
The stupid not-sims are too stupid with their power. I literally have power lines on the other side of the road, right next to them, and they built right there against the road.. but their stupid little thing wont stretch across the road to get the power..Which brings me to..
Cant plant the powerlines inside the neighborhood either to give them quick access, because it blocks construction which means you are wasting space and have a huge ugly boil in the middle of it. At least in sim city you could make over the road connections without eating up space, as buildings would soon replace the power lines and carry the power through the block.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Oof that's too complicated for my brain in terms of vidya games.
Your best bet is just to track the traffic that's flowing through congested intersections to see if it's actually going to somewhere the intersection feeds to or if it's passing through the general area to get to somewhere else. If there's too much through traffic on a local road, that means that that road is too appealing to random drivers, and that somewhere along the line, you have to provide them with an option that looks better. Huge bypasses aren't sufficient if drivers never reach them, so sometimes what you need to do is to make it more obvious at the intersection that the local road isn't going to be able to accommodate heavy traffic, so they'll know to avoid it unless they directly need it.
The way I manage this is that I build neighborhoods with sub-optimal road paths, which are fine for the people living in that neighbor, but are bad for through traffic. Lots of bends, and non-straight paths, with only a couple of enter/exit ways in to the neighborhood. Box that neighborhood in with nice through arteries, and the traffic will tend to naturally flow along those arteries.
Something like this (bad mspaint skills incoming):
two things I really hate about this game and make it hard for me to get back into it, and its the two things SimCity did better.
and they both involve early power.
The stupid not-sims are too stupid with their power. I literally have power lines on the other side of the road, right next to them, and they built right there against the road.. but their stupid little thing wont stretch across the road to get the power..Which brings me to..
Cant plant the powerlines inside the neighborhood either to give them quick access, because it blocks construction which means you are wasting space and have a huge ugly boil in the middle of it. At least in sim city you could make over the road connections without eating up space, as buildings would soon replace the power lines and carry the power through the block.
Yea, Powerlines need to be about 75% of their cost and have about 2x the range.
I actually downloaded a couple small 1 square buildings that generate a bit of power. One looks like a repeater station and one is a set of solar panels. They are enough to power a couple pumps or sewage drains, or to get the initial residential units off the ground at the beginning of the game.
I like my cities to look more organic and tend to look at real ones on Google maps for inspiration. So they might end up looking like a sack of octopuses dropped onto a pile of legos, but dammit it's MY city.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Anyone used the underground power lines mod? Was thinking of checking it out. Also grabbed the power substation mod for use with things like pumps. Thanks to @webguy20 for cluing me in that these existed.
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Damn does this game look good with the night mode. I started a new city to get a fresh take on things. I can't wait till I have a large enough town to zone for night time districts.
Oof that's too complicated for my brain in terms of vidya games.
Your best bet is just to track the traffic that's flowing through congested intersections to see if it's actually going to somewhere the intersection feeds to or if it's passing through the general area to get to somewhere else. If there's too much through traffic on a local road, that means that that road is too appealing to random drivers, and that somewhere along the line, you have to provide them with an option that looks better. Huge bypasses aren't sufficient if drivers never reach them, so sometimes what you need to do is to make it more obvious at the intersection that the local road isn't going to be able to accommodate heavy traffic, so they'll know to avoid it unless they directly need it.
The way I manage this is that I build neighborhoods with sub-optimal road paths, which are fine for the people living in that neighbor, but are bad for through traffic. Lots of bends, and non-straight paths, with only a couple of enter/exit ways in to the neighborhood. Box that neighborhood in with nice through arteries, and the traffic will tend to naturally flow along those arteries.
Something like this (bad mspaint skills incoming):
but..but..
that's so inefficient
I want my grand cubes of densely packed sardines, The only corners are where 4 neighborhoods meet, and don't even begin to mention high heresy of curves
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Did someone say curves?
Mmm Mm. Nothing gets me hotter.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
Has anybody played with the roads with bus lanes yet? My city is getting to that point and I'm excited. between that and tunnels/overpasses I'm hoping for much better traffic.
Does anybody know if they ever fixed the infinite stack of trains happening when you start placing a lot of rail stations?
Has anybody played with the roads with bus lanes yet? My city is getting to that point and I'm excited. between that and tunnels/overpasses I'm hoping for much better traffic.
Yep. From what I could tell, not only buses and taxis use the red lane, but also police cars, firetrucks and ambulances use it to avoid the regular traffic. So they get a thumbs up from me.
Now, if only the garbage trucks would make use of them too.
That is a pretty great way to make sure the emergency vehicles get through, but will fire trucks still get stuck behind one another in one lane of a 6-lane road? I lost a few industrial districts that way!
I like this setup, but usually avoid having more than 4 inner spokes for the first 2-4 rings. Combining the rings like ripples in a pond is also interesting and fun.
Whenever I see a street layout like that, I think about how terribly annoying it must be to navigate as a driver. There are, like, no optimal paths! The choices! They would be too much.
So is there any downside to just educating the shit out of your populace and having zero industry? Other than it feeling vaguely wrong, I mean. I always wind up with too few uneducated workers to support an industrial zone and just replace everything with offices.
Your commercial zones will just have to import everything so there will be much more traffic.
Really? I would expect it to be less traffic in general. A truck delivering imported goods only has one endpoint in the city, so you just need good highway connections to the commercial zones. A truck transporting within the city has both endpoints in the city. Unless it happens to be delivering nearby, it's going to spend more time on neighborhood and city-level roads than the truck coming from the highway. Plus, with cargo harbors/stations you can just create local sites that provide goods just like industrial zones would, except with a much smaller footprint, no pollution, and no need for accessibility to residential commuters.
Account not recoverable. So long.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The way the game handles industrial stuff is sort of bad. Lots of industrial workers in the modern world are much more educated than their counterparts from a hundred years ago and accomplish far more work with much less effort, thanks to machinery and computers. People may look down their noses at classic blue-collar jobs, but, say, an experienced, educated welder is highly valued in industry and simply cannot be easily replaced by a cheaper, younger individual just out of college.
It's pretty silly in Skylines that Industry is set up such that it thinks factories are still run by masses of uneducated drones, instead of having machines doing the bulk of the work. I should not need swathes of crappy neighborhoods with no schools to have industrial areas, because the end result is that I simply have no industry and just deal with the traffic instead of having massively inefficient areas.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I just picked up a mod that keeps everyone from being 100% educated, so that way there can still be some industry and low level commercial.
I think a better mod would change industry to using educated workers, ideally as they level up. Farm/forestry shouldn't require workers that don't even have kindergarten schooling, that's just rediculous.
I just picked up a mod that keeps everyone from being 100% educated, so that way there can still be some industry and low level commercial.
I just create a hellish ghetto far from any schools, generally separated by a giant swath of industry, for the lower classes to eke out an existence.
I'm a visionary like that.
I haven't tested it, but there's a new district policy the encourages people to work over education, and states that only a small percentage of people eligible will go to school. So that might solve the industry ghettos.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Unless it's changed with After Dark, you don't actually need uneducated citizens at all. Keep unemployment at around 8-10% and educated workers will fill every job. They have a preference for jobs matching their education level but will take whatever's available if they can't find what they want in a reasonable period of time.
Unless it's changed with After Dark, you don't actually need uneducated citizens at all. Keep unemployment at around 8-10% and educated workers will fill every job. They have a preference for jobs matching their education level but will take whatever's available if they can't find what they want in a reasonable period of time.
Yeah, I always make a point of zero'ing out the residential demand but never the industrial/commercial, and always match more industrial zoning with more residential. The slight unemployment rate means that all the jobs are filled, including forestry/farming. It just also means that 100% of those low education jobs are filled by overeducated workers (say, a high schooler in a no education job). I don't know if there's any penalty for it.
Unless it's changed with After Dark, you don't actually need uneducated citizens at all. Keep unemployment at around 8-10% and educated workers will fill every job. They have a preference for jobs matching their education level but will take whatever's available if they can't find what they want in a reasonable period of time.
I guess I could do that by restricting the supply of offices, but then I might as well be restricting education. Both of those choices grate against my utopian desires.
It seems like the optimal strategy really is to eliminate industry. The only reason to keep it is you're really attached to the idea of producing your own milk and furniture internally. It's just sad because industry is the most interesting of the zones, what with the individual policies you can set.
I like to keep industry around simply because I like the way the farms look. Plus, the gravel roads I always use around my farms don't have any streetlights, giving the area a very different feel at night than the rest of the city.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I like to keep industry around simply because I like the way the farms look. Plus, the gravel roads I always use around my farms don't have any streetlights, giving the area a very different feel at night than the rest of the city.
I love farms too. I usually build a small town a few "miles" outside of the main city. Think Small Town, USA.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Unless it's changed with After Dark, you don't actually need uneducated citizens at all. Keep unemployment at around 8-10% and educated workers will fill every job. They have a preference for jobs matching their education level but will take whatever's available if they can't find what they want in a reasonable period of time.
I guess I could do that by restricting the supply of offices, but then I might as well be restricting education. Both of those choices grate against my utopian desires.
It seems like the optimal strategy really is to eliminate industry. The only reason to keep it is you're really attached to the idea of producing your own milk and furniture internally. It's just sad because industry is the most interesting of the zones, what with the individual policies you can set.
The main gameplay reason to educate cims while keeping industry around is financial: Education is tied to land value. Educating cims will allow for higher-level residential development and greater tax income. Similarly, producing goods locally provides better tax revenue than importing (with increasing returns the longer your in-town supply chain is). Finally, office tax revenue and job density are both a fair bit worse than industrial, and it's much harder to get to L3 to boot. (Industry tends to require more expensive transportation infrastructure though.)
In my experience, unless you really go hog-wild with producing everything you possibly can locally, and maybe exporting goods to boot, you'll still have plenty of job demand to soak up with offices, so it's not like you're choosing one or the other. But of course the point of Skylines is ultimately to make a city you like; it's not really hard enough to require a ton of optimizing and penny-pinching. If you feel better about giving all your educated cims cushy office jobs, you can certainly do that.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Don't have After Dark yet, but what I've seen so far makes me want even more for their to be something to do with the cities beyond just building them, like, I dunno, having a detective agency which has procedurally-generated mysteries to solve or something like that. Digging up clues during the day and mixing it up with crooks and dames at night would be a pretty rad thing to do with each of your cities you build.
The city-building is fun, sure, but at this point, this stuff looks as nice as hand-crafted cities other games just use as settings.
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
As much as SC13 was a letdown, I did love the industry supply chain system. Building oil wells, refineries, all the way to microprocessor and TV factories. I loved all that. If CS had that, I would be in heaven.
Yeah they'll just get stuck behind each other in a line. I've lost many industrial districts that way, and loved every minute of it.
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mastertheheroProfessional Video Editor & Book AuthorRegistered Userregular
I don't know why but I've been having a hard time getting motivated to play this game. I'm really not a fan of the graphics and the music and from that alone I feel like I would prefer to just continue playing Sim City instead. I know that SC13 was extremely limited and lacked the necessary features to be a true Sim City game but man the graphics and music were so much better. The future cities expansion and all those other things had a charm that this game is still lacking for me.
I also found myself getting disheartened playing Cities Skylines. The additional freedom to expand your zones and do all these other things has actually made me less motivated to build. I'll start building a city, hate how it feels, then just want to give up and not do anything with it. I don't know, can't really figure out what it is.
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Your best bet is just to track the traffic that's flowing through congested intersections to see if it's actually going to somewhere the intersection feeds to or if it's passing through the general area to get to somewhere else. If there's too much through traffic on a local road, that means that that road is too appealing to random drivers, and that somewhere along the line, you have to provide them with an option that looks better. Huge bypasses aren't sufficient if drivers never reach them, so sometimes what you need to do is to make it more obvious at the intersection that the local road isn't going to be able to accommodate heavy traffic, so they'll know to avoid it unless they directly need it.
and they both involve early power.
The stupid not-sims are too stupid with their power. I literally have power lines on the other side of the road, right next to them, and they built right there against the road.. but their stupid little thing wont stretch across the road to get the power..Which brings me to..
Cant plant the powerlines inside the neighborhood either to give them quick access, because it blocks construction which means you are wasting space and have a huge ugly boil in the middle of it. At least in sim city you could make over the road connections without eating up space, as buildings would soon replace the power lines and carry the power through the block.
The way I manage this is that I build neighborhoods with sub-optimal road paths, which are fine for the people living in that neighbor, but are bad for through traffic. Lots of bends, and non-straight paths, with only a couple of enter/exit ways in to the neighborhood. Box that neighborhood in with nice through arteries, and the traffic will tend to naturally flow along those arteries.
Something like this (bad mspaint skills incoming):
Yea, Powerlines need to be about 75% of their cost and have about 2x the range.
I actually downloaded a couple small 1 square buildings that generate a bit of power. One looks like a repeater station and one is a set of solar panels. They are enough to power a couple pumps or sewage drains, or to get the initial residential units off the ground at the beginning of the game.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
but..but..
that's so inefficient
I want my grand cubes of densely packed sardines, The only corners are where 4 neighborhoods meet, and don't even begin to mention high heresy of curves
Mmm Mm. Nothing gets me hotter.
Does anybody know if they ever fixed the infinite stack of trains happening when you start placing a lot of rail stations?
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Yeah I tend to build cities like this
Yep. From what I could tell, not only buses and taxis use the red lane, but also police cars, firetrucks and ambulances use it to avoid the regular traffic. So they get a thumbs up from me.
Now, if only the garbage trucks would make use of them too.
I like this setup, but usually avoid having more than 4 inner spokes for the first 2-4 rings. Combining the rings like ripples in a pond is also interesting and fun.
Whenever I see a street layout like that, I think about how terribly annoying it must be to navigate as a driver. There are, like, no optimal paths! The choices! They would be too much.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Really? I would expect it to be less traffic in general. A truck delivering imported goods only has one endpoint in the city, so you just need good highway connections to the commercial zones. A truck transporting within the city has both endpoints in the city. Unless it happens to be delivering nearby, it's going to spend more time on neighborhood and city-level roads than the truck coming from the highway. Plus, with cargo harbors/stations you can just create local sites that provide goods just like industrial zones would, except with a much smaller footprint, no pollution, and no need for accessibility to residential commuters.
It's pretty silly in Skylines that Industry is set up such that it thinks factories are still run by masses of uneducated drones, instead of having machines doing the bulk of the work. I should not need swathes of crappy neighborhoods with no schools to have industrial areas, because the end result is that I simply have no industry and just deal with the traffic instead of having massively inefficient areas.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I just create a hellish ghetto far from any schools, generally separated by a giant swath of industry, for the lower classes to eke out an existence.
I'm a visionary like that.
I haven't tested it, but there's a new district policy the encourages people to work over education, and states that only a small percentage of people eligible will go to school. So that might solve the industry ghettos.
I thought I was the only one!
What's that? You guys don't like living in the middle of a large oil district? Say goodbye to your one med center you ungrateful bastards!
Yeah, I always make a point of zero'ing out the residential demand but never the industrial/commercial, and always match more industrial zoning with more residential. The slight unemployment rate means that all the jobs are filled, including forestry/farming. It just also means that 100% of those low education jobs are filled by overeducated workers (say, a high schooler in a no education job). I don't know if there's any penalty for it.
I guess I could do that by restricting the supply of offices, but then I might as well be restricting education. Both of those choices grate against my utopian desires.
It seems like the optimal strategy really is to eliminate industry. The only reason to keep it is you're really attached to the idea of producing your own milk and furniture internally. It's just sad because industry is the most interesting of the zones, what with the individual policies you can set.
I love farms too. I usually build a small town a few "miles" outside of the main city. Think Small Town, USA.
The main gameplay reason to educate cims while keeping industry around is financial: Education is tied to land value. Educating cims will allow for higher-level residential development and greater tax income. Similarly, producing goods locally provides better tax revenue than importing (with increasing returns the longer your in-town supply chain is). Finally, office tax revenue and job density are both a fair bit worse than industrial, and it's much harder to get to L3 to boot. (Industry tends to require more expensive transportation infrastructure though.)
In my experience, unless you really go hog-wild with producing everything you possibly can locally, and maybe exporting goods to boot, you'll still have plenty of job demand to soak up with offices, so it's not like you're choosing one or the other. But of course the point of Skylines is ultimately to make a city you like; it's not really hard enough to require a ton of optimizing and penny-pinching. If you feel better about giving all your educated cims cushy office jobs, you can certainly do that.
The city-building is fun, sure, but at this point, this stuff looks as nice as hand-crafted cities other games just use as settings.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I also found myself getting disheartened playing Cities Skylines. The additional freedom to expand your zones and do all these other things has actually made me less motivated to build. I'll start building a city, hate how it feels, then just want to give up and not do anything with it. I don't know, can't really figure out what it is.