SilentMage

Here's my city as of now, simply named Williamsburg. I plan on creating a City Journal once it's "done". =)

Ohh, good point on the "losing money" part. I wonder if taxi drivers make more or less based on the wealth level of the person being picked up - if that is true, then taxis likely can break-even or turn a profit for you in tourism-heavy districts in a city. That said, it costs me $192/week for one taxi stand, and my cabbies haven't even broke $100/week yet. That said, the incredibly low cost to manage, coupled with the lack of profits, likely brings the benefit of making the city more tourist-friendly, especially if you don't have a comprehensive mass transit network.

I recently added my first taxi depot in my city of about 30k. I spent about an in-game day watching the cabs to see where they went to pick people up and, more importantly, where they were dropped off. I placed two taxi stands at two highly trafficked locations (based on some cabs going to those areas through the course of a day) - the stands are on nearly opposite ends of the core of my city, though I haven't seen the cabs use them. Note that I don't yet have any forms of mass transit in place yet, though I've been planning to implement buses in my next session (I've carved a space for the depot next to a highway junction for easy access to the core city). I highly doubt the taxis are making a dent in traffic - 25 cars is a drop in the bucket - but I do think they are a cheap first step towards planning more expensive bus and subway routes.

I think that in the end, we need more metrics accessible to the player in the form of graphs and even raw data, spreadsheet-style - which I honestly would love. I imagine that if there was a way to better expose that information via a mod, someone would've made it by now... I've seen others complain about the lack of data that you have to work with when dealing with managing your budget and taxes, for example. A more detailed city statistics window would be very handy in getting a firmer grasp into things like industry output, commercial goods demand, and raw numbers like total electrical usage (MWs) used split between RCI.

My second and third city reacted like yours it sounds like - basically didn't want to load because of mods. I, too, have started from scratch, removing most growable buildings and other structures unless they've been recently updated to have nighttime lighting. I kepts my custom vehicles, even though a lot of them haven't been updated with working headlights yet. I also dropped the LUA I was using, too - visually, I'm just going back to basics for now. Definitely not! I am seriously loving this expansion!

I successfully managed to load my vanilla city (the first city I built, mod-free) and decided to not do anything - just sit and watch the game play out until the nighttime transition. Once the sun set, I suddenly saw a wave of "no power" icons over just about every neighborhood! I panicked at first and thought it was a bug - but then I realized that I had only wind power and solar power plants generating all of the energy for my city, the majority of which was solar. When I queried one of the plants, it said that no power was generated at night... which means I'll have to seriously rethink my power generation strategy for the future! I didn't fully explore electricity options, but industrial batteries for storing solar power better exist! Barring that... we need more dirty and nuclear energy options!

There are now scores of high-quality mods available via the Steam Community, including actual mods. Some examples: Traffic Report Tool: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=408092246 Configurable Transport Capacity: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=414326578 Improved Assets Panel: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=417430545 Improved Mods Panel: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416033610 Lots of new buildings are available, too - growable and ploppable - and more and more of them are unique structures and not re-skinned vanilla buildings, too.

Also, I love the heavily-forested areas of Northon and the manicured parks of Livewell. Which custom assets are you using?? I found the train station and farm plots, but the parks I cannot find.

It says: An error occurred You are not allowed to use that image extension on this community. Halp! Yeah, for some reason the image functionality here won't accept Steam-hosted images - most likely because the source URL doesn't end in a traditional ".jpg" or anything like that. I've been taking my screenshots out of Steam and re-uploading them to imgbox for hosting.

Hello Everyone! Sorry for the delay - work was particularly demanding yesterday thanks to some snarky folks DDOS'ing one of my organization's domains. Anyhow... the history of Great Bay continues! After this (or maybe the next) set, I'll mix things up a bit with an "Intermission" type submission. You'll see what I mean! =) Ln X: As simonmd said, you can easily adjust the color and name of a train line by selecting one of your trains and clicking the "Modify Line" button. This opens a new window where you can select a color from a massive selection that's similar to managing colors in Photoshop. Update 4: More Neighborhoods, More Transit Welcome to Kobi Town, a district that was designed primarily as a commercial and office hub for north Great Bay. Being that it sat between two sets of railroad tracks, access to the area requires crossing elevated pathways, whether it's by car or on foot. Several pedestrian bridges connect Pruce Heights and Whitlow to Kobi Town, all of which are surprisingly well-traveled. The two closest to the Pruce Heights train station serve the most people that want to shop in the bright stores that line Kobi Town's Railroad Street. The concrete canyons of Kobi Town also have a dense, if not small (area-wise), residential area at its northern-most point: high-rise complexes with cheap shops on the ground floor and discount wares for those that want to walk into the shadows for a good deal. Definitely not as glamorous as the Railroad Street strip, but still a great area nonetheless. All of this growth has not gone unnoticed by the now-multi-generational Miranda neighborhood. Although many of the original houses still stand by the river shores, their view has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Skyscrapers replaced trees, the sounds of howling wolves replaced with the constant hum of traffic in the distance, and the starlight replaced with 24-hour street lights. The younger families that moved in don't seem to mind, though the older, "first-generation" folks that have survived this long to see the changes can't help but shed a tear to what was lost. Of course, despite the opinions of some, Great Bay's continuing growth goes unabated, as the western interstate went through a significant extension project, connecting the western-most highway to the northern tip of Rossway Village. This would bring new blood into the aging district - as well as paving the way for another massive expansion of Great Bay! Stay tuned for our next update, as the largest residential district is planned out, dirty industry decides to simply move out, and a science center moves in! =) Lastly, if there's any particular area of focus you readers would like to see more of, please let me know! ~SilentMage

I still hope that despite the mess, modders here still upload their work to Steam (alongside having their direct downloads that we're used to seeing here) so that those that want to manage there asset installs via Steam can do so versus manual installation...

That's assuming the modder actually uploads it to Steam. It does appear that more modders outside of Steam are trending towards manual installs and not providing Steam links...