Darth Apple

There is a recent mod that (supposedly) finally allows the vehicle limit to be increased. I'm not entirely sure how they got around the 64K pointer types within Unity, but I believe this is an issue that Unity themselves fixed in later versions of the game engine. If Cities skylines updated their game to use a newer Unity engine, it would have theoretically been possible. It's unclear whether this is the case, or whether some different means was used. (Or whether the limit simply re-allocated, as the actual vehicle limit is only 16K out of the 64K agent limit in the base game. It seems this is more likely). I'll look into some actual stats next time I pull up the game, but it's had interesting results so far. I did have a ~200,000 pop city that had real time enabled. And of course real time generally creates massive traffic jams that can saturate 6+ lane highways (each direction), but being that the city was approaching larger populations, it was starting to hit the "ghost town limit" with the vehicle counts/traffic where previously congested roads were nearly empty. I will say that this mod made a noticeable difference and put traffic back on the roads. Not quite at the level of a new save game, but the traffic definitely did get heavier. Might be worth us doing some more research into this and seeing how it works. I suspect they simply re-allocated the agent limits so that the vehicle limit was no longer capped at 16K out of the 64K agent pool. Even if this is the case, it's still a welcome change (though it's worth noting that pedestrians count towards this 64K limit as well).

I've created fairly extensive monorail networks in the past. At first, I started using them over very steep waterways where subways couldn't be built. I started building subways in the downtown areas and monorails to stretch out to the periphery. Over time, I started to come up with more detailed ways of approaching the problem. The number one thing I learned is that stations don't actually have to be that close together UNLESS they got too busy to handle the traffic without large numbers of waiting passengers. Sometimes, a station was simply too busy. When I saw one, I'd supplement it with other mass transit or bring a subway closer in that direction. But more often, I'd split the monorail line and create a second one that covered the other side of the neighborhood. The trickiest part is keeping the lines from having contention with each other. Putting two separate lines on the same track can cause problems on busy lines. Planning to have a line go across the city in a uniform manner helps tremendously with this. Monorails are generally much more tricky than Subways in this game, especially since CIMS are less likely to hop on a monorail than on a nearby Subway line (for some reason, the desireability of monorails is less than that of Subways. Not sure why.)

In my opinion, it's never good to be too stingy early on. I always run a deficit for the first in-game year or so, but I do so very carefully. I invest strongly in education right from the very beginning. As soon as everyone is educated, the tax revenues increase significantly. It ends up creating a very healthy revenue stream that contributes to everything I do from that point on. Of course it goes without saying not to take this too far. I usually try to start out with a city of 4-5K and keep it there until I'm in the green. I also don't build any highways or fancy infrastructure until everyone gets educated, usually a year or two into the game. This has done well to prevent me from running out of money too early on. This is, of course, much harder to do if you're playing without everything unlocked.

@ChirpyNado - Move it had a little disaster there I see. The rules of physics no longer apply in the world of Cities Skylines.

Very interesting desktop @Toby Ferrian! Love the background. @Turnstyled - Solus is very nice. Love it.

I'm loving the new look! Pretty excited to see things fresh again. Nice work @simtropolis team.

I actually really liked Cities XL back when I had time to play it. The notorious memory leak was actually not much of an issue because it's very easy to evade simply by returning to planet view and by going back into the city every 30-45 minutes or so. Because that so happens to be the easiest way to save your city, I was never bothered by that at all. I'm sure they have taken the time to fix that in the new game though. The lag will hopefully be better as well. A few concerns really made the game a little harder for me in the end, however. The cities didn't have a whole lot of low-level life to them. One of the really nice things about Cities XL was that the cities were freakin' huge once you had the time to really get them built up. You zoom out and you look from the vantage point of a nice little hill in your city upon the skyscrapers in your downtown area with the suburban areas in the background, and there is a huge level of satisfaction just knowing that you built this! But then, when you feel like going deep into the neighborhoods of your cities, it feels more boring and lifeless. Apparently Cities XXL is supposed to fix some of this. We'll see how well they do this. The trading system was too integral to the game. It got to the point with large cities where it was flat-out frustrating to constantly keep everything in perfect balance. That is part of the game of course, but if you want your city to grow, everything has to be in perfect balance, and especially once you get larger cities, that's when it starts to feel more like a school project than a game. I wouldn't mind if there was a little bit of a grace interval when it came to variables where businesses would adjust a little bit if there was so much as 0.5% more workers than were needed in the city, and Cities XL was very particular about this. It gets really frustrating to build larger cities because of this once the city needs get more complex. Of course, that's not even to mention the awful bugs in the trading system! They have made no announcement or comment on this yet, so we'll see what they decide to do with this. Hundreds of residents for a little house, seriously? I'm honestly not bothered by the fact that all lots are the same size with the same tier (tier 1 and tier 2, then high densities of course being larger). The cities are so large that it's perfectly fine for me. I do sometimes think it'd be nice if they tried to make the occupancy levels a little more realistic. However, in the grand scheme of things, it's really not a big thing to complain about. Other issues, however, include the difficulty in upgrading roads, the poor parks and areas systems, etc. None of these details are dealbreakers, but they do make some very simple traffic issues a little harder to resolve without demolishing stuff. It's hard to go out and demolish a bunch of houses to make a very small adjustment to the roads in an area once you finally do get a historic feel of some sort. We'll see what they decide to do about some of these issues. The roads in the game are great. The highways and mass transit were horrible. The highways look the same in the trailers for the new game, which is a little disappointing. Hopefully they have at least made some improvements, because honestly, they were barely usable in previous versions of the game. If not, I guess mods will be the solution to that problem. However, the latest trailer for the game has a train in it. This seems fairly promising! Overall, the new game looks like it will at the very least address some of the performance issues and will also address the lack of low life feel in the cities, which is promising by itself. The fact that there is a train in the most recent trailer means that there is the possibility that some of the transportation options have been revamped a bit as well, but we'll see. I think it's a game I'll be buying. Now, for Cities Skylines, I have to admit, I'm flat out impressed. As long as they don't go bankrupt when they are 90% finished like Monte Cristo did, we may have a great game on our hands, but I'm not saying anything here that hasn't been said before.

Love the high rises along the waterfronts. The night pics have a very nice feel to them.

I suppose not having the launcher visible would help. I'm using an extension that allows it to be access without the activities panel, but it autohides by default if anything is open, which helps. I don't really use the desktop often, but I suppose I like having something other than blank space to stare at when I do see the desktop. I'm stubborn like that. One thing that I like about Gnome 3 is that the workspaces actually work properly. In unity, I don't see the purpose of having the workspaces at all because of how they are implemented, but unity's interface is simpler and more straightforward in some other respects. Overall, I like both environments, and find it hard to really decide which I prefer.

I still play it occasionally, but I'm almost always booted up in Linux nowadays. I don't feel like taking five minutes to boot my PC up in Windows to play. Yes, I'm that lazy. Cities XL is a great game, but it got boring for me after a while. The constant bugs with the trading system and the lag as the city sizes approach 1 million or so gets annoying after some time. Perhaps I should give modding the game another shot to occupy some of my free time.

@Nonny: Ubuntu users unite. This is mine, running Ubuntu and Gnome 3 (with a few extensions). Click for full size.

Banned for having a scary avatar.

Nope. Tonraq?

I thought SC4 was supposed to be an escape from the real world.