Re: pathfinding. Maybe someone who knows more about this can comment, as I'm not too knowledgeable about the distance tolerance cims have aside from walking. My impression has been is that their tolerance limits should at least mitigate the type of traffic you're talking about to a level where it's not as much of a problem as it would be otherwise.
Re: pollution. In this case put the sewage as far as possible from the water pumps. Might need to buy some more land if your pollution pool is too big already.
Re: highways. I usually use highways or some sort of major road to divide between my Industrial and R/C zones, just because I like having that clear demarcation.
Also, I would at the very least start with all the buildings unlocked. While it's nice to have this dripfeed of services and buildings as your city gets larger, it often leads to unoptimal decisions early on.
Edit: you're also making me want to sit through the 30-40 minute load time it takes me get to managing my city.
finnith on
Bnet: CavilatRest#1874
Steam: CavilatRest
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Huge hint:
Offices work like Industrial and are the best buffer between Commercial and Residential.
Commercial areas produce a lot of noise which can hurt quite a bit of things. Offices do not. An 8 unit strip of offices placed directly between Commercial and residential areas is a good idea for Cim health and happiness.
Well, I think this first city with actual overpasses and an attempt at traffic management and roundabouts is going to die an ignoble death. Everything is flowing fine, but despite 3 landfills they just wont send out more trucks, and garbage is apparently piling up everywhere because the trucks are confused? I maxed the budgets too. Also the corpses apppear to be having a similar problem. I think i've just confused their pathfinding too much?
This thread is marked NSF56K, so the image size restrictions are lifted, right?
Here's what my city looks like now.
I spent a lot of time working my way up the mountainside on the edge of the city, just to establish this little community at the top.
This screenshot I just thought was funny. I think I'm going to want to fiddle with building asset mods at some point, but for now...
In my head, I was hoping for a relatively self-sufficient town, but that has absolutely not worked out. Notably, I was unable to string any mass transit up there other than buses - maybe I should've paid for cable cars and blimps - which meant that I had to maintain the road connection, which then in turn meant that people up top would flood down to work and shop.
I do have an express bus line that goes up the mountainside and deposits people at the bottom of the mountain next to a subway line and a railway station, but there are still lots of people who insist on driving. I wish the game provided me with more tools to figure out why Cims choose a certain mode of transportation versus another. Like, why do some of my Cims cycle and others do not? Could I add more bikelanes to remove more cars off the road? (As it is, I'm just using bikelane roads EVERYWHERE.) Why do some Cims choose to drive instead of taking mass transit? Could I add more bus lines/subways in the right places to fix that?
Heck, the route observation tools for anybody on mass transit is entirely uninformative, and they don't show Cims starting locations at all, which isn't so bad for trucks but is pretty important for figuring out where a particular private vehicle originated.
My solution so far has been to just build bus lines everywhere. I've come to realise that there's no cost to having a shitton of buses, so long as I carefully keep them from stacking up on major roads and causing jams. They make money anyways, annnd as far as I can tell, there's no harm in having a ton of people stacked up at a bus stop waiting. I did remove my older arterial bus lines - they were jamming the hell out of my roundabouts and cannibalizing my metro traffic - but I did notice a significant traffic increase as time went on, so I've reconfigured my bus lines to intra-neighbourhood feeders that run to a metro station.I've weaved bus lines through all my neighbourhoods, shifting roads as necessary to enable proper looping and reversing.
For now, they're mostly all one-way loops cuz in my head, I was thinking that I should keep buses right-turning, but there's not really any difference between right-turning and left-turning in this game, is there? In fact, left-turning's probably preferable in a lot of cases, since cars always jam up the right lane (though this would mean buses would have to change lanes across an entire road). I dunno. I might try pairing up a lot of these loops at some point, but I'm not sure how I'd measure the impact. Some of my loops are so short already, I'm suuure they're cannibalizing pedestrian traffic, having seen Cims do stupid shit like taking the bus around one corner, but again, not sure how harmful it is nor how I would rectify it anyways:
MORE IMPORTANTLY though, I have a question/problem about cargo rail. So I established what I intended to be a rail cargo hub out the outskirts of my city. You can see it at the top of my first screenshot. Then I linked it to a cargo station on the outer edge of my industrial area, planning to eventually encircle it with more industry, so that cargo being offloaded from the station would distribute traffic evenly around the industrial area. (I'm using internal/external rail system separation.)
Except nobody's using my cargo station. Following are two screenshots of the traffic routing on the roads leading into both cargo stations:
And most of the traffic in the second screenshot is actually branching off to the industrial area behind the train station.
So, rather obviously, most of the import/export cargo from my industrial area is preferring to run up the highway instead. This is fine for now, but I imagine that as I expand my city, the highway's going to get increasingly clogged - and the road right outside the cargo hub already is clogged, so this isn't a tenable situation, but I'm not sure how to rectify this.
Should I move my main cargo hub out to the furthest edge of city? That would remove the loop in the internal rail line (cuts through the forest near the top of the second-last screenshot) and maybe encourage cargo to use the rail line instead. Or maybe should I move the cargo station down next to the highway, so the railway path would be the same distance as the highway but hopefully faster so as to encourage cargo to use it? I'm concerned that would just wreck traffic in the local area though....
Any chance of a closeup? Curious on how you placed the schools in relation to everything else.
In short: "Enhance."
My schools are plopped kinda randomly right now. The weird population flows in the game has had me scrambling to drop schools at times and then had them half-empty at others. I've read that my school placement should figure into my mass transit system, since students all take mass transit (?), but high schools are so big and clunky that I find them hard to integrate into older neighbourhoods.
I dunno what a better way to handle it would be. Maybe if I was using more planned communities, I could design a template for a residential area built around a high school in the centre? But for now, I'm kinda playing this game SimCity style - zoning outwards as needed, all dense all the time, and plopping services at convenient locations. Or maybe I should start plopping them at street corners with metro stations, for direct transit access, and to shift the zoning around so there are fewer buildings directly pumping traffic out onto the arteries. That'd screw my road layouts pretty hard though. And since I'm doing a lot of experimentation right now, it'd mess with my ability to experiment with my road layouts and how to manage traffic on my arteries. (Note how much money I have, because I've just been running the game following Cims around and generally messing with the pathfinding AI.)
You people and your "planning". Is that on unlimited funds or did you grow it more organically? (It looks great btw, I'm just salty comparing it to my hellscape)
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
You people and your "planning". Is that on unlimited funds or did you grow it more organically? (It looks great btw, I'm just salty comparing it to my hellscape)
Unlimited funds, all 81 squares unlocked is how I roll. Also, including my 300+ hours on Cities Skylines, I probably sunk a good 1,000 hours into SimCity 4 (and about 20 minutes into CitiesXL), and hundreds more on 3, 2000, and the original, so I wouldn't be worried about your city compared to mine. Yours looks fine and is set up neatly, plus your traffic management is pretty damn solid man. Just keep building and even just observing how actual cities look and function and it'll all come together.
I probably spend a few hours just laying down the initial network of roads, and spend a lot more time than that rearranging things. The airport you see is getting moved ASAP and that bottom right part of the island is going to be a tourist-y trap area with clubs and casinos with a red light district on the upper right half. I'm going to put in an Old Towne in that area that will consist of single square houses using narrow roads only.
The mainland area to the north is going to be a dense suburban area with a block of high-density (no highrise) buildings. I have a ton of large shopping centers like WalMart, Kohls, Target, and Costco so the suburban areas should look pretty nice.
Is there any way to use a large theme like the prismatic future one without killing load times? What beauty mods and rci building replacements do people like to use?
As far as interchanges go, there's so many right now I'd be sitting here for hours just listing them.
I will say these are my go to's:
NETWORK EXTENSIONS 2: This is just a must-have. It adds an insane amount of roads (Including my favorite traffic carrier, National Roads, which are high speed 2 lane roads that have no zoning on them).
AUTOMATIC BULLDOZE: This will automatically get rid of abandoned buildings.
TREE BRUSH: After selecting a tree in the menu, press the + button and you get an expandable circle that does trees in a large area.
SHARP JUNCTION ANGLES: Gives you flexibility on how you can join roads together.
RICO: Gives support to a ton of ploppable buildings.
NO PILLARS MOD: Allows you to remove pillars from roads for particularly tricky junctions. Extremely useful.
ALL 81 TILES UNLOCKED: Be warned that this can stress your CPU if you want to just fill the entire map with your city.
Those should help you get started.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Is all 81 squares unlocked a mod? The normal is like, 9 at max right? Must need a killer pc for that.
Yeah, it's normally 9.
The PC killer is population, regardless of how many squares you have unlocked (they're all rendered during playtime anyway).
This game is CPU and RAM intensive, mostly. I've got an i5-6500 and 16 gigabytes of RAM and I encounter performance problems when I get above 100,000 people. Thought I've found spreading out a population helps.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Is there any way to use a large theme like the prismatic future one without killing load times? What beauty mods and rci building replacements do people like to use?
I have a lot of building replacements, or additions.
I want to say I've got 350 assets loaded (the game maxes at 400, for now). I try to find a nice utilities replacement and school additions. I've got a modular University system with about 15 different buildings that looks nice.
It would also save it for you! It seems like the only options are to remove things individually or as collections, but then if you want it back you gotta go find it again. I should really make a collection of my basic mod pack for the same reason. Can't imagine playing without precision engineering.
Also, do cims just not care about living near power lines like they did in sim cities?
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
It would also save it for you! It seems like the only options are to remove things individually or as collections, but then if you want it back you gotta go find it again. I should really make a collection of my basic mod pack for the same reason. Can't imagine playing without precision engineering.
Also, do cims just not care about living near power lines like they did in sim cities?
Oh that's another mod I got that has helped me greatly.
Are there infinite oil and ore mods? I though someone said those were limited resources unless you mod it.
There are. searching "infinite ore" in the workshop gave at least 3 hits.
Edit: sorry that may have seemed snarky, but was more to just reinforce that the workshop search works and probably has what you want. The reddit also has a good recommended mod list: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/wiki/modlist
Are there infinite oil and ore mods? I though someone said those were limited resources unless you mod it.
There are. searching "infinite ore" in the workshop gave at least 3 hits.
Edit: sorry that may have seemed snarky, but was more to just reinforce that the workshop search works and probably has what you want. The reddit also has a good recommended mod list: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/wiki/modlist
Haha I asked cause I searched for one and didn't find it. I'll use your exact words.
And as for asking in here, we'll I'm looking for some good stuff to start with and then I'll start choosing my own and being sad when they're a broken mess.
So I only just looked at how to unlock various monuments/rewards. And what? Over 50% unemployment? Garbage piling up? is this just to encourage me to see what my cims will endure and still be profitable after?
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
So I only just looked at how to unlock various monuments/rewards. And what? Over 50% unemployment? Garbage piling up? is this just to encourage me to see what my cims will endure and still be profitable after?
yep! I just unlock all monuments/rewards from the start.
I've always played with everything unlocked and unlimited money. The underlying economic simulation is not particularly deep by any stretch of the imagination.
One of the most consistently bewildering things to me is how going and doing a fairly minor retrofit to update your road infrastructure to handle increased traffic seems to almost inevitably result in a cascade of population loss in the range of 10,000-15,000 people. And it's almost always paired with high residential demand!
I can sort of see how this happens on the one hand -- bulldoze a couple high-density buildings, that costs a few hundred people directly. Add more roads, that introduces noise that chops local land value somewhat. I'm pretty careful not to remove or harmfully relocate service buildings and parks with all of this, so I don't think that's to blame?
But the scale of these events has never made any sense to me. It typically results in a rash of abandoned industrial buildings (usually my low-education ones, such as my forestry industry) and sometimes some abandoned commercial buildings (from lack of workers). And it's fixed by adding a ton of new residential space somewhere else in town, which eventually fixes the abandoned building problem, pulls back up value elsewhere in the city, and the population rebounds to what it was before plus the capacity of the new residential areas.
Is it perhaps a coincidence to which I'm misappropriating the cause to my own tinkering? Am I having a rash of elderly deaths from a previous expansion spree as those people have reached terminal age range at times rather close together? I know that was patched to be more fluid, but maybe it didn't go far enough. Or is it a delayed reaction, where people are leaving because of the prior traffic jams that I fixed (because they couldn't get between work and home in time or something?). There's never a rash of warnings like sick people not getting treated or garbage & corpses piling up or anything. Just a steep loss of around 20% of my city's population and a maximizing of residential demand.
Maybe it's the stadium. That city-wide unhappiness spike after a loss might be a factor? It doesn't seem to happen right after that, but maybe there's some delay?
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
There's so much that influences population loss that it can be almost impossible to track down. When I'm remodeling, I'll pause the game first. That'll keep buildings from disappearing when you bulldoze the road they are on if you intend to just rebuild it.
I picked this up while it was on sale and have been having problems starting out. Specifically, I'm playing on the very first map in the drop down, with a river to the west, highway access to the north, and not much else of note.
Flatly: I run out of money during the initial build. I seem to be unable to build a water pump on the north end of the river, a water drain on the south end of the river, wind generators to the east where there's enough wind, and then initial roads around the highway access. The big costs seem to be pipes and electrical lines, which suggests I need to abandon wind power and put something closer into town, and then... just put the water drain right next to the water pump I guess?
As long as the drain is a little downstream from the pump you will be fine, the sewage won't diffuse much against the flow. For power wind generally won't last you long, plop a coal plant in your industrial zone for the begining. Also (and you may already be doing this) build up your base things on pause. Otherwise those roads etc are just costing you money while you zone around them/ build in other things. Taxes can go up to 12% with no real negative effects.
Also the money part of the game just...isn't that great, so don't feel bad if you want to just play with unlimited funds. I'm always torn on it because I don't like just being able to plop services willy nilly, but if you constrain yourself a bit I think it's a good balance.
Lastly don't sweat it if a city fails, especially if it's due to traffic, it's all part of the learning curve.
Thanks, I'll try a few of those. Currently I'm running out of funds immediately, basically, never getting to fail because of traffic. The initial seed money seems insufficient which means I'm trying to plan too large initially.
What is this I don't even.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Thanks, I'll try a few of those. Currently I'm running out of funds immediately, basically, never getting to fail because of traffic. The initial seed money seems insufficient which means I'm trying to plan too large initially.
Make sure you're building with dirt roads to start out.
Also if you haven't, micromanage your power and water budgets early on. They're far and away your biggest cost and the water pumps especially are overkill for the kind of town you can afford to make at the start.
Posts
Re: pathfinding. Maybe someone who knows more about this can comment, as I'm not too knowledgeable about the distance tolerance cims have aside from walking. My impression has been is that their tolerance limits should at least mitigate the type of traffic you're talking about to a level where it's not as much of a problem as it would be otherwise.
Re: pollution. In this case put the sewage as far as possible from the water pumps. Might need to buy some more land if your pollution pool is too big already.
Re: highways. I usually use highways or some sort of major road to divide between my Industrial and R/C zones, just because I like having that clear demarcation.
Also, I would at the very least start with all the buildings unlocked. While it's nice to have this dripfeed of services and buildings as your city gets larger, it often leads to unoptimal decisions early on.
Edit: you're also making me want to sit through the 30-40 minute load time it takes me get to managing my city.
Steam: CavilatRest
Offices work like Industrial and are the best buffer between Commercial and Residential.
Commercial areas produce a lot of noise which can hurt quite a bit of things. Offices do not. An 8 unit strip of offices placed directly between Commercial and residential areas is a good idea for Cim health and happiness.
Here's what my city looks like now.
I spent a lot of time working my way up the mountainside on the edge of the city, just to establish this little community at the top.
This screenshot I just thought was funny. I think I'm going to want to fiddle with building asset mods at some point, but for now...
In my head, I was hoping for a relatively self-sufficient town, but that has absolutely not worked out. Notably, I was unable to string any mass transit up there other than buses - maybe I should've paid for cable cars and blimps - which meant that I had to maintain the road connection, which then in turn meant that people up top would flood down to work and shop.
I do have an express bus line that goes up the mountainside and deposits people at the bottom of the mountain next to a subway line and a railway station, but there are still lots of people who insist on driving. I wish the game provided me with more tools to figure out why Cims choose a certain mode of transportation versus another. Like, why do some of my Cims cycle and others do not? Could I add more bikelanes to remove more cars off the road? (As it is, I'm just using bikelane roads EVERYWHERE.) Why do some Cims choose to drive instead of taking mass transit? Could I add more bus lines/subways in the right places to fix that?
Heck, the route observation tools for anybody on mass transit is entirely uninformative, and they don't show Cims starting locations at all, which isn't so bad for trucks but is pretty important for figuring out where a particular private vehicle originated.
My solution so far has been to just build bus lines everywhere. I've come to realise that there's no cost to having a shitton of buses, so long as I carefully keep them from stacking up on major roads and causing jams. They make money anyways, annnd as far as I can tell, there's no harm in having a ton of people stacked up at a bus stop waiting. I did remove my older arterial bus lines - they were jamming the hell out of my roundabouts and cannibalizing my metro traffic - but I did notice a significant traffic increase as time went on, so I've reconfigured my bus lines to intra-neighbourhood feeders that run to a metro station.I've weaved bus lines through all my neighbourhoods, shifting roads as necessary to enable proper looping and reversing.
For now, they're mostly all one-way loops cuz in my head, I was thinking that I should keep buses right-turning, but there's not really any difference between right-turning and left-turning in this game, is there? In fact, left-turning's probably preferable in a lot of cases, since cars always jam up the right lane (though this would mean buses would have to change lanes across an entire road). I dunno. I might try pairing up a lot of these loops at some point, but I'm not sure how I'd measure the impact. Some of my loops are so short already, I'm suuure they're cannibalizing pedestrian traffic, having seen Cims do stupid shit like taking the bus around one corner, but again, not sure how harmful it is nor how I would rectify it anyways:
MORE IMPORTANTLY though, I have a question/problem about cargo rail. So I established what I intended to be a rail cargo hub out the outskirts of my city. You can see it at the top of my first screenshot. Then I linked it to a cargo station on the outer edge of my industrial area, planning to eventually encircle it with more industry, so that cargo being offloaded from the station would distribute traffic evenly around the industrial area. (I'm using internal/external rail system separation.)
Except nobody's using my cargo station. Following are two screenshots of the traffic routing on the roads leading into both cargo stations:
And most of the traffic in the second screenshot is actually branching off to the industrial area behind the train station.
So, rather obviously, most of the import/export cargo from my industrial area is preferring to run up the highway instead. This is fine for now, but I imagine that as I expand my city, the highway's going to get increasingly clogged - and the road right outside the cargo hub already is clogged, so this isn't a tenable situation, but I'm not sure how to rectify this.
Should I move my main cargo hub out to the furthest edge of city? That would remove the loop in the internal rail line (cuts through the forest near the top of the second-last screenshot) and maybe encourage cargo to use the rail line instead. Or maybe should I move the cargo station down next to the highway, so the railway path would be the same distance as the highway but hopefully faster so as to encourage cargo to use it? I'm concerned that would just wreck traffic in the local area though....
In short: "Enhance."
My schools are plopped kinda randomly right now. The weird population flows in the game has had me scrambling to drop schools at times and then had them half-empty at others. I've read that my school placement should figure into my mass transit system, since students all take mass transit (?), but high schools are so big and clunky that I find them hard to integrate into older neighbourhoods.
I dunno what a better way to handle it would be. Maybe if I was using more planned communities, I could design a template for a residential area built around a high school in the centre? But for now, I'm kinda playing this game SimCity style - zoning outwards as needed, all dense all the time, and plopping services at convenient locations. Or maybe I should start plopping them at street corners with metro stations, for direct transit access, and to shift the zoning around so there are fewer buildings directly pumping traffic out onto the arteries. That'd screw my road layouts pretty hard though. And since I'm doing a lot of experimentation right now, it'd mess with my ability to experiment with my road layouts and how to manage traffic on my arteries. (Note how much money I have, because I've just been running the game following Cims around and generally messing with the pathfinding AI.)
Im looking for nice buildings, interchanges, and unlimited oil and ore.
Unlimited funds, all 81 squares unlocked is how I roll. Also, including my 300+ hours on Cities Skylines, I probably sunk a good 1,000 hours into SimCity 4 (and about 20 minutes into CitiesXL), and hundreds more on 3, 2000, and the original, so I wouldn't be worried about your city compared to mine. Yours looks fine and is set up neatly, plus your traffic management is pretty damn solid man. Just keep building and even just observing how actual cities look and function and it'll all come together.
I probably spend a few hours just laying down the initial network of roads, and spend a lot more time than that rearranging things. The airport you see is getting moved ASAP and that bottom right part of the island is going to be a tourist-y trap area with clubs and casinos with a red light district on the upper right half. I'm going to put in an Old Towne in that area that will consist of single square houses using narrow roads only.
The mainland area to the north is going to be a dense suburban area with a block of high-density (no highrise) buildings. I have a ton of large shopping centers like WalMart, Kohls, Target, and Costco so the suburban areas should look pretty nice.
@JusticeforPluto
As far as interchanges go, there's so many right now I'd be sitting here for hours just listing them.
I will say these are my go to's:
NETWORK EXTENSIONS 2: This is just a must-have. It adds an insane amount of roads (Including my favorite traffic carrier, National Roads, which are high speed 2 lane roads that have no zoning on them).
AUTOMATIC BULLDOZE: This will automatically get rid of abandoned buildings.
TREE BRUSH: After selecting a tree in the menu, press the + button and you get an expandable circle that does trees in a large area.
SHARP JUNCTION ANGLES: Gives you flexibility on how you can join roads together.
RICO: Gives support to a ton of ploppable buildings.
NO PILLARS MOD: Allows you to remove pillars from roads for particularly tricky junctions. Extremely useful.
ALL 81 TILES UNLOCKED: Be warned that this can stress your CPU if you want to just fill the entire map with your city.
Those should help you get started.
Yeah, it's normally 9.
The PC killer is population, regardless of how many squares you have unlocked (they're all rendered during playtime anyway).
This game is CPU and RAM intensive, mostly. I've got an i5-6500 and 16 gigabytes of RAM and I encounter performance problems when I get above 100,000 people. Thought I've found spreading out a population helps.
I have a lot of building replacements, or additions.
I want to say I've got 350 assets loaded (the game maxes at 400, for now). I try to find a nice utilities replacement and school additions. I've got a modular University system with about 15 different buildings that looks nice.
I haven't because I didn't figure anyone wanted to see it.
I can if you want, tho!
Also, do cims just not care about living near power lines like they did in sim cities?
Oh that's another mod I got that has helped me greatly.
No More Power Lines
However, nobody I know likes the purple pollution.
http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=407865240
There are. searching "infinite ore" in the workshop gave at least 3 hits.
Edit: sorry that may have seemed snarky, but was more to just reinforce that the workshop search works and probably has what you want. The reddit also has a good recommended mod list: https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/wiki/modlist
Also @jungleroomx, what are your loading times like? I think I may have downloaded too many custom assets...
Steam: CavilatRest
Upon first loading the city, I dunno... 20-30 seconds?
16 gb of ram and I have the game installed to an SSD.
After I threw in some theme packs....just loading the game takes a lot longer now, like windows thinks it is timing out but it isn't.
Haha I asked cause I searched for one and didn't find it. I'll use your exact words.
And as for asking in here, we'll I'm looking for some good stuff to start with and then I'll start choosing my own and being sad when they're a broken mess.
yep! I just unlock all monuments/rewards from the start.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I can sort of see how this happens on the one hand -- bulldoze a couple high-density buildings, that costs a few hundred people directly. Add more roads, that introduces noise that chops local land value somewhat. I'm pretty careful not to remove or harmfully relocate service buildings and parks with all of this, so I don't think that's to blame?
But the scale of these events has never made any sense to me. It typically results in a rash of abandoned industrial buildings (usually my low-education ones, such as my forestry industry) and sometimes some abandoned commercial buildings (from lack of workers). And it's fixed by adding a ton of new residential space somewhere else in town, which eventually fixes the abandoned building problem, pulls back up value elsewhere in the city, and the population rebounds to what it was before plus the capacity of the new residential areas.
Is it perhaps a coincidence to which I'm misappropriating the cause to my own tinkering? Am I having a rash of elderly deaths from a previous expansion spree as those people have reached terminal age range at times rather close together? I know that was patched to be more fluid, but maybe it didn't go far enough. Or is it a delayed reaction, where people are leaving because of the prior traffic jams that I fixed (because they couldn't get between work and home in time or something?). There's never a rash of warnings like sick people not getting treated or garbage & corpses piling up or anything. Just a steep loss of around 20% of my city's population and a maximizing of residential demand.
Maybe it's the stadium. That city-wide unhappiness spike after a loss might be a factor? It doesn't seem to happen right after that, but maybe there's some delay?
No mod support AFAIK but I think it at least has KBM support.
Flatly: I run out of money during the initial build. I seem to be unable to build a water pump on the north end of the river, a water drain on the south end of the river, wind generators to the east where there's enough wind, and then initial roads around the highway access. The big costs seem to be pipes and electrical lines, which suggests I need to abandon wind power and put something closer into town, and then... just put the water drain right next to the water pump I guess?
Also the money part of the game just...isn't that great, so don't feel bad if you want to just play with unlimited funds. I'm always torn on it because I don't like just being able to plop services willy nilly, but if you constrain yourself a bit I think it's a good balance.
Lastly don't sweat it if a city fails, especially if it's due to traffic, it's all part of the learning curve.
Make sure you're building with dirt roads to start out.