The Principality of Gabtoria (Entry 27: Complex Roads are Complex!)

[89James89 1,169]

The Principality Of Gabtoria

 

 

OOC: Right then, as you've probably all assumed, I've got the new Cities Skylines today and as with most city building fanatic I couldn't wait to get my hands on. Now I also like documenting things and decided what better way to document it than to do a CJ for you all. Now this will be written as with my other CJ's in a character form (hopefully with all the wit and banter that you've maybe seen in Garton).

 

Please also note that I have no idea what I'm doing. What your about to see in this CJ is me leanring how to play the game through trial and error as this is my first ever city in the game. Now I also love terraforming (as anyone who frequents ST chat will prbably know) so that was my first port of call (I want a unique map lol) rather than the actual game.

 

Anyway enough random stuff lets introduce you to the newest nation on Earth,

 

 

The Principality Of Gabtoria

 

Hi all and welcome to what we hope will be a successful and fledging city state. Formed and goverened by the great Crown Prince James Gabb (self titled). This nation has been formed by the prince and a few other like minded people who, after some altercations involving the the current monarch of England, a helicopter, some twine and a monkey has been set the task of forming a tiny independent state on the edge of the UK.

 

You see although this altercation may have caused a near fatal accident for several very important people, the Crown Prince has ties said royal family and rather than suffer the embarassment of having to admit that the Crown Prince may be a bit, well stupid, they called in some favours and banished him to a small spit of land off the coast of Norway and told him to do with it as he pleases as he now owned the land, just don't set foot on British soil again please.

 

So, completely oblviious to the sighs of relief as he left, the Prince and anyone willign to go with him set out to see thier new land.

 

This is what greeted them as they passed overhead.

 

 

 

 

Now amazingly despite his failings and stupidity, someone must have been looking out for him as the area didn't really look half bad. Fed by the river Von this delta type place had a enough land and adequate (though not loads) of resources (OOC: accept for wood, there's tonnes of that, all 250k trees that the game allows you to add to a map in fact). As you can see the area is made up of several natural harbours and a few islands that make up the spit and a whole load of pine trees.

 

Anyway the Queen coudln't have hated him that much as they also made sure that the region had a partially built railway stub and a fully functional, though slightly odd looking highway loop (please for the love of god slow down for that corner its fairly sharp and dangerous).

 

 

 

Anyway, with the advanced team having arrived and set up a tents to survey the area it allowed me to get some more photo's of the place that we'd soon be calling home. Below you can see some of the nicest images I got including a lovely view of the railroad and highway bridges crossing one of the rivers in the area on its way to the odd stub and several showing the terrain and dense forests.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway that's all we've got for this first look at the region. Sorry if you were all expecting a huge town or something but you know, we've got to start somewhere and good things (might, I'm not promising anything) come to those who wait.

 

Till next time

 

Harry Blogs (advisor to Crown Prince James Gabb)

 

 

(OOC: Well there we go, my first 4 hours or so in the game was spent fiddling with the map editor lol. Hope it was interesting to just see the landscapes in the game even if we haven't got to the actual towns yet.

 

Join me next time when I promise there will be at least some town development

 

Cheers

 

James)

 

 

 

 

  Edited July 2, 2015 by 89James89  

[JP Schriefer 5,591]

Beautiful landscapes!

[NielsC007 499]

Looking forward to the next entry!

[jmsepe 2,039]

Looks like a great start in here.

[iviaarten 534]

Very nice map you've made James. Looking forward to see more

[89James89 1,169]

Replies:

 

 

JP Schriefer: Thanks, landscaping with 3D results is a nice breath of fresh air!

 

NielsC007: Thanks and here you go.

 

jmsepe: Thanks, hope you continue to enjoy our progress!

 

iviaarten: Thanks glad you like the map. it was pretty fun to mess around with it.

 

 

 

 

 

Entry 2: Wow this is a huge hamlet!

 

 

Welcome back everyone to our little principality. Join me and prince Jame.....

 

What do you mean he's not here?

He's on a diplomatic mission?

To Oslo?

For 4 months!

And I'm in charge?

 

Would have been nice to have been told this before all the people arrived. Well at least apparently the Prince has sorted out some basic street plans before he left.

 

 

 

For the love of...... How did that make any sense? (OOC: For some reason the game was trolling and started me here. Stupid game lol).

 

Right screw it people need houses, lets just get them settled in and then worry about what the hell the Prince was thinking (maybe I should have stayed in England). Anyway skipping forward a couple of months we can see that people have decided to move into the area.

 

 

 

As we can also see they've decided to start complaining about the lack of water and electricity as well. God these people are sure demanding we've only been here a few months. What happened to all the generators we gave them?

 

Oh right they ran out of fuel.

 

Opps.

 

Right here's another prettier photo this time with a frigging huge windmill ruining the vie... I mean providing electricity complete with lovely pylons, a poop pipe making sure that the lazy residents don't have to walk the 10 metres or so to just dump their buckets into the river themselves (screw the environment, we need to get some income before we worry about that!).and a water tower that actually doesn't look half bad at all.

 

 

 

Moving on again with all the basic stuff in place we saw a bit of a housing boom (ok it was actually more like a sparkler than a boom but it's still progress) and more people started moving into the area.

 

 

 

Now at this point Prince James decided to actually return to the settlement and with it bring some good news!

 

 

 

Yay, apparently were now a rather huge Little Hamlet (not sure how this works). More importantly what this means is that we now have access to actual stuff that might help our growing town a little bit including a proper school and a dump (because apparently up until this point they hadn't realised they were creating rubbish or something).

 

Anyway we'll helpfully have more on this next time but to close up this entry so I can have a word with our wonderful Prince on why he'd made some rather odd choices.

 

Anyway here's our lovely take on a mainstreet where you can get pretty much anything as long as its sold in one of these shops! Very lovingly framed by a power pylon and the water tower.

 

 

 

 

Finally here's our lovely industry. A necessary evil to provide a reason to actually come here. No jobs no peoples.

 

 

 

Anyway till then!

 

Harry Blogs (Advisor to Crown Prince James Gabb)

 

 

 

OOC: Now you probably all noticed that I've changed my filter in game to try and get a slightly different to normal look to the city. Not sure if it's going to stay but I think it suits the northern style and setting that I want for the CJ.

 

What do you guys think?)

 

 

 

[iviaarten 534]

Love the new filter. Looks really nice and misty. I think it suits the town.The dirt roads add to it as well.

[SimsRealtor 20]

I love it! The customized Map brings more realism to the game and the neighborhood (or should I say Little Hamlet ) wraps around the river perfectly giving it a "just starting out" feel. Looking forward to more updates and hopefully blacktop! Lol 

 

Sincerely,

Trevor! 

[LovelyQuirrel 3]

Hey are you using any "extra" cash cheats here? Wouldnt make sense since you started using dirt roads! Hope to see more  

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Really beautiful pictures, the place looks run down but those colours sure look awesome.

[89James89 1,169]

Replies:

 

iviaarten: Thanks glad your liking the filter. I thought it fitted the style of the town as well so I'm glad you agree.

 

SimsRealtor: I'm not sure what a blacktop is I'm afraid but I'm sure its a good thing. As for the small town feel I'm really glad it's coming across. I wanted to show it developing slowly over time with all it's ugliness and flaws.

 

LoveyQuirrel: Nope not cheats at all and all in hard mode too. I do have the 25 tiles unlocked mod though.

 

Lnx: Thanks, glad the whole small backwards town feeling is coming across and it looks like the filter is staying around!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Entry 3: You did what!?

 

OOC: Just a quick word before we start this entry regarding how I'm playing the game.

 

Basically I'm not using and money cheats and playing the game on Hard mode. I do have a number of mods installed though and are adding more as they're released. None of these however are in any way cheats, so far just being a camera mod and the unlock all 25 tiles mod.

 

 

 

 

So anyway I'm back with some more growth to report form our lovely (bit of a strong word bute'll get there I'm sure) town. Starting off where we left off though we get to see that people have have suddenly decided that sickness is a thing as this occurred.

 

 

 

This would have been a perfect time for our prince to actually try and help out but he'd just left again on another diplomatic visit, this time to Copenhagen so again I was left to sort out the mess ( so much for never leaving the Princes side what with being his Aide and all, I think workload donkey would be more suitable as a job title)

 

Anyway with health being a rather big factor in, well living, I quickly had a clinic built to try and contain the issue before we became a ghost town.

 

 

 

Well it solved one problem at least. Anyway as I was trying to come up with a solution to the rolling blackouts I received a e-mail from our prince with some good news.

 

 

Looks like were growing again which is just what our power supply is doing as well as I've just commissioned a new Coal power plant. Windmills are great and all but they don't really do that much in the way of providing energy and I mean we have a industrial sector pumping out pollution anyway so a power plant isn't going to hurt too much.

 

Or so I thought.

 

You see at this point our lovely prince returned and declared that the town would follow a forestry approach to industry. Brilliant. And your demolishing all the factories to make way from the new businesses.

 

Ah then the power plant may stick out a bit.

 

Oh well I'm sure the surrounding forestry plots will suck up some of the pollution. Anyway here's the redeveloping industry with the power plant in the back and lovely rolling hills without wind turbines.

 

 

 

Also apparently the prince has decided that we need to start a new village at the end of the highway that actually uses that stub (as this actually makes sense you see). Anyway this is the are we mean.

 

(OOC: Finally I get to stop the game trolling me and get the tile I wanted in the first place.)

 

 

 

First though, before the prince gets carried away with building a new town at the end of the spit of land we've got some slight crime issues in the newly named town of Riverside. Also judging by the fires that have just started getting a bit bigger than your neighbour with a bucket can deal with, the crimes may be arson related.

 

 

 

 

Oh and the other issue is we don't really have any money left as the prince just spent it building a road to the end of the spit. Luckily the Norwegians were happy to lend us some money at a extortionate interest rate. Oh well beggars can't be chooser's and we need some police and fire fast.

 

Anyway with these issues being taken care of thanks to the money influx we had a little traffic issue to sort out. Basically while cars could get from the newly developing Gabtoria Point (the area at the end of the spit) to Riverside (where all the industry and therefore most of the jobs are) they couldn't get back.

 

This was the solution......

 

 

 

Oh dear god something went horribly wrong here. Should really not have left the prince to design this. Where do we start in explaining the cock ups.

 

Right upgrading the exit road to a actual road makes sense seeing as the traffic is going to only increase over time I suppose. As for the whole bottleneck on the incoming highway, that was a major mess up. Basically someone got the wrong post it note and started demolishing the highway (OOC: I misclicked while trying to delete a mess up overpass lol).

 

Fortunately someone stopped them in time before they demolished loads of the road.

 

Unfortunately we haven't yet got the resources to replace the stretch of highway (OOC: My town isn't a high enough level lol) so we had to make do with a two lane one way road.

 

Rather luckily however, this causes traffic to slow down so that the hairpin exit lane that was accidentally created on that side of the road by the prince forgetting to tell the workers to make it one way, isn't a dangerous. Needless to say sorting this out is going to be a headache but oh well, at least some good news came in the form of a further grant from UK (for the prince being a good boy and staying away and all) which meant we could at least pay the Norwegians back and try and plan on how to sort out this before we end up with a huge accident.

 

Right anyway that's all I've got for this entry so let's finish up with a overview of the whole growing town(s) so far.

 

 

 

Right, hope you'll all join us again next time.

 

Harry Blogs (you know the drill by now)

 

 

 

OOC: Bit of a bigger entry here as quite a lot of things happened fairly fast. Hope you enjoyed watching me screw up the interchange lol

 

 

 

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Those lumber yards look really great. And talking about mods, I have already favourited the ones I want to download- there are at least thirty of them!

[iviaarten 534]

ow god, those poor trees

 

Still loving the look of the region and town. And yes, those intersections do make me cringe a bit....

[89James89 1,169]

Replies:

 

Ln X: Glad your liking the CJ! I love the forestry buildings as well and that;'s a lot of stuff to download lol.

 

iviaarten: They love it, I'm giving them all a purpose to life lol. Yes them interchanges are a bit cringe worthy but don't worry we've sorted it out a bit!

 

 

 

 

 

Entry 4: It's all mines!

 

 

Right I'm back and am happy to say that this happened pretty much immediately after we left off from last time.

 

 

 

Which you guessed it, means we can actually try and fix that bodged highway interchange that we managed to screw up last time!

Right let's get to it!

 

 

 

Excellent this will work well.

 

Wait what do you mean a traffic planning official has deemed it dangerous?

 

We have to redo it?

 

Couldn't he have mentioned this before we built the damn thing

 

Fine.

 

Several more months later and we then have this.

 

 

 

Does this roundabout suit you better?

 

Yes.

 

Thanks god for that.

 

Right anyway next up we have some more industrial expansion courtesy of our citizens complaining about a lack of jobs.

 

(OOC: blame Neilsc007 for the boatload of interchange images, he kept telling me my interchanges were too dangerous.)

 

 

 

Though we do now seem to have a slight issue with providing jobs to our people, in our power plant running out of coal (OOC: At least I'm pretty sure this happened) for a little while which as you can imagine is a bit of a issue. Apparently they were having a bit of a problem receiving the coal imports from Norway.

 

Now luckily out prospectors (eg some kids playing around with a spade) have found deposits of the black gold further up the highway so were gonna set up a mining operation there.

 

First however, we had a little bit of a more sombre issue to deal with in the form of our first death.

 

 

 

Yes it's in a school (OOC: dammit Colossal Order that's pretty morbid of you lol).

 

Apparently they wont move the body until we have somewhere to bury it either which is a bit of a issue given that it's in a Primary School and all.

 

Anyway we have this lovely place where we could fit the needed chapel and graveyard located in this nice new neighbourhood of Gabtoria Point.

 

 

 

Excellent, now that's taken care of lets get back to our coal problem. Where are we?

 

WHAT!

 

We have to re do the interchange again?

 

Oh for the love of god why did no one think of making the interchange accessible from both incoming and outgoing traffic in the first place.

 

Oh well, several more months of headaches and several tonnes of Superglue and we have the final design for the interchange done.

 

Seriously I'm not changing this thing again alright?

 

 

Right with that done we could now begin our mining operations. Several years later and this is what the small mining town of Prenston Mines looks like. Quite probably the most uninviting place to live for several hundred miles but hey its all good. You might notice we also had to construct another coal power plant in the area,. We also plan on moving the other power plants here eventually but were kind of broke at the moment and we owe Norway a fair bit of money again so that'll have to wait. Anyway here's the current state of Prenston Mines.

 

 

 

And that's all for now. As usual though we'll leave you with this perfect example of class divi.. I mean the overview of our growing towns, from left to right the nice pleasant neighbourhood of Gabtoria Point with its shopping and suburbs and also a new roundabout interchange coming off the end of the highway which is frankly a lot safer and looks a lot better, Riverside which is slowly cleaning itself up but still has a rather working class feel to it thanks to the industry present and then Prenston Mines which you should probably avoid if you can help it.

 

 

 

 

Anyway till next time.

 

Harry Blogs

 

 

 

(OOC: You may also have noticed that I accidentally changed my filter at some point between the entry 2 and half way through this one but don't worry, we've got he drab filter back!)

 

 

 

 

 

[iviaarten 534]

Awwww.. I sort of liked the interchange with the dirt roundabout, sad that it had to go

Overal I love the look of the whole region. That mining town is amazing as well. You're really getting a great atmosphere in this CJ.

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

Loving the curvy layout of this town while those dirt roads rock in that dark green coniferous scene! Also that diamond interchange looks very smart.

[jesper107 113]

You've got a nice tone in your writing. Enjoying this!

[SimWarrior 10]

Awesome little town you have there! It has a very nice atmosphere, almost pioneer-like.

 

Perhaps you should move that sewerage outlet further downstream though, its polluting the whole peninsula...

[Mymyjp 1,052]

You da man, Prince James, you da man.

[89James89 1,169]

Replies:

 

iviaarten: Thanks I'm glad your liking the regional growth and I liked the roundabout interchange fail thing as well. Don't worry though I'm sure I can do it again at some point.

 

Ln X: Thanks, I like the trees and the rather, well dirty look it has and the diamond interchange is definitely the most efficient of the interchanges I made.

 

jesper107: Thanks glad your enjoying my writing!

 

SimWarrior: Thanks for your kind words. It's a little backwards out here at times but its all good. As for the sewage we may have to take a look at that at some point but at the moment we have a slightly more pressing issue.

 

Mymyjp: Damn right I'm the man. The residents of Prenston Grove may not agree though.

 

 

 

 Entry 5: Crisis Management Part 1: Oh Dear God!

 

 

(OOC: This entry may seem a bit weird in places but bear with me and I'll explain everything at the end)

 

 

Right everyone James here. For reasons that will soon become clear I've decided to take charge of things from the muppet that you guys have been hearing from up until now.

 

Why you all ask?

 

Well let's just say the we've had a rather major issue come up here in Gabtoria. Also this time I'm not even exaggerating.

 

Anyway, carrying on from last time we've got a picture of the continued growth of the area around Gabtoria point. This growth now means that Riverside is now a part of Gabtoria Point as continued spread has bought the two settlements together.

 

 

 

As you can also see in the above image, we changed the rather odd highway stub to a roundabout which is (apparently) safer and everything (I still liked my old stub but hey). I may have to admit though that it looks better.

 

And then things continued to get better with a town upgrade as you can see below.

 

 

 

 

…..

 

 

And then things took a rather severe nose dive. Take a look at this picture below.

 

 

 

Yup that's a severe garbage problem right there. You see my esteemed assistant had a little while decided to empty the full dumps into the other dumps that were a bit further out of town. Sounds like a good idea right?

 

Well it would have been had he remembered to give them the memo to start working again when they'd finished emptying. Instead they emptied into the other dumps, filling them up and then just sat there not working themselves leading to this.

 

However this was quite easily recoverable once I'd got back from my important diplomatic meetings and ordered the dumps turn back on again. What happened next wasn't so recoverable.

 

Take a a look at this picture below.

 

 

 

Sure there's some smoke belching factories in the background but overall it looks like everything is ok right?

 

Wrong, very wrong.

 

Firstly this road started to be a issue. The dirt tracks couldn't handle all the lorries (especially when wet) and traffic was at a standstill but a simple road upgrade, although costly, fixed the issue.

 

 

 

Secondly and definitely more importantly, while this issue was being resolved my assistant had been burying other issues that were arising including this one.

 

 

 

Oh dear god.......

 

As you can imagine this wasn't the best thing to ignore (Dammit Harry!). You see, the pollution generated by the factories and the coal power plant hadn't exactly been too kind to the people of Prenston Grove. The complaints from the doctors in the area were rather unwisely being ignored by my wonderful assistant which meant they went from bad to worse and fairly quickly.

 

So much so that eventually the doctors in the area shut down their clinics due to overworking and stress thanks to the huge amount of patients they were having to see (OOC: See below for more on this).

 

This then resulted in a rapid decrease of population in the Preston area and due to this, a rapid decrease of tax income so much so that the bottom line currently looks like this. (OOC: Again see below for details on this

 

 

 

Yes, as you can see the city really isn't in that good a state. Prenston is slowly emptying and although it hasn't hit the industry that much yet if we keep losing population like this its definitely going too.

 

Luckily we have a contingency plan in place but you'll have to wait till next time to see if that actually has the desired affect that we want it too (mainly due to us not having the faintest idea if its going to work or not).

 

Till we hopefully have some better news.

 

(Crown Prince) James

 

 

(OOC: Right time for a explanation as to what the hell has gone on in the city since you've last seen it.

 

Well basically somehow or somewhere a mod or asset(s) I installed had somehow slowed the loading of my game down to a crawl. So much so that it would hang up half way through loading and would just freeze for like 2 or 3 minutes and if I tried to click anywhere it would freeze and crash the game.

 

As you can probably guess this was a bit annoying so, after verifying all the files in steam and still not solving the problem I did a clean reinstall of the game, clearing all the assets and mods.

 

Unfortunately I didn't really think this through very well as when I then loaded up the game, a ;arge number of buildings had disappear including all the medical facilities that were located in Prenston which, as you can see in the above entry, had some rather bad side affects. Taking into account that a number of custom houses I had installed we also lost a large portion of the population and this is why, were now in this siutation.

 

But don't worry, we'll sort it out, maybe, ok there's a slight chance our idea will work so lets just cross our fingers.)

 

 

 

 

 

[iviaarten 534]

Ouch, hope you get it sorted out soon and it will all work out in the end. It's such a lovely town, well, not so lovely for the residents maybe, but hey

[Mymyjp 1,052]

LOL! you are hilarious, even with serious issues...and that icon..never saw it before.

I am sure you will get it all fixed out...love your layout btw!

[Airplane09 13]

You have a really nice town here! I really like its atmosphere. I hope everything will get back on track with your game and you'll continue with this skyline.

 

I have some suggestion for you :

 

- why don't you upgrade some more roads? At least the main ones: the entrances and exits from the highway and the roads that have heavy traffic.

I believe that the people are also getting sick from the dirt.

 

- I also suggest banning heavy trucks from residential areas, now that you have unlocked this policy when your town levelled up.

 

- Moreover, I think that a commuter bus between your towns would be great. Maybe, you could have your bus services free (you've unlocked this policy), anyway, its up to you.

 

Thanks again and I'm looking forward to your next entry.

 

airplane09.

[89James89 1,169]

Replies:

 

 

iviaarten: Yer the residents might not agree and don't worry we may have solved the issue!

 

Mymyjp: Thanks, glad your liking the town and the narration even if things were beginning to fall apart around me.

 

Airplane09: Thanks, glad your enjoying ti and don't worry I think I've got it back.

 

As for the suggestions thanks! Luckily we don't have a heavy traffic issue as no trucks pass through residential areas thanks to the zonal separation (at least I don't think they do). As for the road upgrades at the moment most of them are fine, the only ones that may be a issue (as you might see next time) are already paved roads and buses may well be on the horizon!

 

 

 

 

 

Entry 6: Crisis Management Part 2: Hey it worked!

 

 

Right then lets see. Prenston is,let face it, screwed b ut don't worry we have a plan (or rather I have a plan everyone else doesn't seem that keen on it for some reason).

 

What plan is that I hear you ask (probably while grimacing and not really wanting to hear the answer.)

 

This plan!

 

 

 

Yup, your seeing it correctly. Basically I've decided we need to move the entire residential area of Prenston to the area on the opposite side of the river to Riverside. A slightly crazy and drastic idea admittedly but we have bit of money to afford it and we cant afford to keep losing people and my tax money so desperate times calls for desperate measures.

 

Anyway despite having a bit of money saved we still had to cut costs in some areas such as this new T-junction interchange where we couldn't afford anything more expensive than a one way two lane road leading to the new settlement Nielton.

 

 

 

Anyway with the new road built people started moving from Prenston to Nielton meaning we could move onto another issue that had popped up in Gabtoria. Apparently some developers had decided to develop over some of the parks in the area (OOC: side affect of removing all my asset downloads lol). Anyway thanks to this, this happened.

 

 

 

God dammit can't something just go right for once. Predictably this had knock on effects such as a large swathe of industry going out of business thanks to a loss of skilled workers but oh well Nielton was going strong so it was all good. Plus more people wanted commercial anyway as you can see by Nieltons commercial strip here.

 

 

 

So yer, apparently I think it's safe to say that my plan worked rather well seeing as this happened shortly after Nileton was built.

 

 

 

Yay success and with this comes the decision to expand the are around Nielton with these high tech expansion plans.

 

 

 

Anyway with this we continued to expand. As you can see in the final image below we decided to move people back into the area near Preston Mines. Just like before however they started to get sick. Actually listening tot he residents and reading the letters very quickly revealed that they were suffering from dirty water (OOC: I learnt how to read a tooltip lol).

 

As such we replaced the water source and disconnected it from Preston Mines.

 

Which worked!

 

Which also means we probably only needed to do this to have solved the problem in Preston Grove in the first place.

 

SON OF A.....!

 

Oh well, whilst I try and find Harry so I can bang his head against a wall or something here's a overview of the area so far. From left to right you have Gabtoria and Riverside Conurbation, Nielton and then the new Preston Grove.

 

 

 

Join us next time for part 3 of the who recovery thing where hopefully, I won't have killed Harry.

 

Crown prince James

 

 

(OOC: So yep, it turned out after having moved all the residential population from Preston to Nielton all I had to do was seperate the water source in the original Preston Grove. Oh well live and learn and all that.)

 

 

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

I'm glad things are back to normal! You create some of the best rustic scenes in Cities Skylines.

[iviaarten 534]

So happy you managed to get it to work again Regardless of moving a town that didn't have to be moved, the layout and town still looks lovely as ever. Glad it's not become a ghost town.

[89James89 1,169]

Replies:

 

Ln X: Thanks glad you like my rustic scenes and I wouldn't get too used to the normality. Things may be about to get a bit worse lol.

 

iviaarten: Lol yer the whole moving the town thing was a bit of a hiccup on my behalf for not reading the tool tips lol.Glad your liking the town layout I'm trying to keep it as naturally growing as possible as that's my main draw with games like this. As for the working you may want to hold off on any praise just yet lol.

 

 

 

 

 Entry 8: Crisis Management Part 3: Why traffic why?

 

 

Right well were back and after the last entry you'd imagine we were on a high here, all go and everything, riding the wave of success.

 

Well we were.

 

Then it started to go a bit awry again.

 

Anyway lets read on and find out why.

 

Well it started off well. I hadn't killed Harry and the city continued to grow leading to this.

 

 

 

Which then meant that we hit 10k quickly so took it as a perfect time to get this overview image for you all.

 

 

 

So we had a lovely growing city having overcome the previous entries issues with flying colours.

 

Which is when the flying and the colours turned into a nose dive and a blackout of the traffic kind.

 

You see it would be safe to say that while we'd been happily expanding we may have forgotten about the whole traffic network. Which led to this.

 

 

 

You see having rebuilt a new Prenston Grove a little distance away from Prenston Mines and Industrial Estate but still connected it to the road to the Industrial sites the traffic was pretty horrendous on the single lane road so we had to upgrade the road to a 4-lane to help try and alleviate some of the issues which, as you can see below kind of helped though the intersection just out of the picture is still al little bit jammed up'

 

 

 

Now with that problem solved the traffic issues turned into some sort of frustratingly large Whack-A-Mole and we ended up with nightmare here which is even more of a issue than the last one.

 

 

 

Now given that this leads to a rather large part of the cities industry (Riverside Forestry Area) stagnated traffic flow would be a big issue indeed so we had to sort this out. As usch we decided to upgrade the roads through the area too try and handle the traffic better, which led to this.

 

 

 

How? Why? What is this?

 

How did this create more traffic issues?

 

About this time, it appeared the Whack-A-Mole decided to get a bit more difficult as this then also popped up.

 

 

 

For the love of God, why me.

 

Anyway screw it lets try and sort out the Riverside issue first. Well desperate times call for desperate measures so here's our solution to the problem (well at least for now). Basically we took the Nielton Interchange that existed at the other end of the Riverside Forestry Estate and added a couple of slip lanes to it to try and help with the traffic by giving it another way in. Doesn't exactly look pretty but it does do the job (the traffic is from the last image you saw. Yes it is that bad).

 

 

 

So that's two out of three traffic issues worked out for now. Don't worry though we do have a plan for trying to sort out the huge mess that is the Nielton exit roundabout but at the moment we don't really have much in the way of city funds. Mainly thanks to the fact that a rapidly growing city brings more than one issue, this time in the form of trash and power.

 

May I therefore present the lovely Riverside Incinerators and Presnton Powerplant both of which are greatly needed by the city (though definitely not in a environmental or beautification sense, that's for sure). Still seeing as we mine coal in Prenston Mines, there both pretty cheap sources of energy (and the incinerators are slowly getting rid of the landfills as well as a bonus).

 

 

 

 

Anyway as I said that's all we have time and money for today. It's now time for us to sit back and try and make some money while deciding on a way to solve the remaining traffic issues in our city which has apparently grown again.

 

 

 

And we now have the option to expand again meaning we can spread the problems out even more (this is entirely likely as I'll probably forget about the traffic and get signature happy with planning proposals in the new area (OOC: I get distracted easily lol))

 

Anyway, let's hope I can make the next entry a bit more positive and less of this road to nowhere nonsense.

 

Till then

 

Crown Prince James

 

 

(OOC: See kid's this is why when you have a plan it's best to stick to it and not get carried away expanding. This was not what I intended for part 3 at all lol. I assumed we'd everything back on track by this point.

 

Boy did the game prove me wrong!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[BLANKBLANK 4,414]

For me I don't rely on the traffic volume view I look at the flow of vehicles. If there are significant delays on a road and its clogging up nearby roads then it is time to act!

[iviaarten 534]

Hehe, looks a lot like the growing pains I had in Forkton.

 

I little tip on the roundabouts; build the actual roundabouts out of highway or highway ramps, and the entering lanes out of roads. This will make it so that incoming traffic has to yield. (Normal road roundabouts are essentially just a series of intersections in close succession in a circle. They're actually pretty bad for traffic.

 

Back to the CJ, man, I love how realistic and organic your city looks, especially in the first picture. Well done. Who cares about some little internal problems when it's looking that good

[TabascoJack 5]

Great journal!  I'm enjoying reading of your whack-a-mole traffic as I'm beating my own moles about their heads with a large hammer...