BorisS1990

Yeah, getting the rivers to work right takes alot of tweaking with the whole dynamic water thing. 1. Keep the slope minimal. Too steep and the water will flow way too fast. The number you use to set the height for the level tool, I find that a 20 unit difference from one end of the map to the other is a good slope for a large river. 2. Make sure the slope is smooth and even the whole way. No random drop offs or flat spots. That will cause bottlenecks and create those waves. This makes adding waterfalls a real PITA. 3. If you have smaller tributaries joining a larger river, the main river should become bigger after the junction to accommodate the extra water or you will get flooding. However it should also narrow down slightly as it goes along. It seems some of the water gets lost the further it goes. It's a bit of a balancing act. When making a map, making a good river is really the most time consuming part for me. I never place water spawners in the middle of the river because it just makes it unrealistic. I like to do it the "right" way. As such the river is the first part of the map I make when I start with a blank flat plain. Once I get it working right, then I move on to everything else. Adding a river into an already made map is just torture.

Here's some ideas that might fix the issues people have with service vehicles in this game. 1. Allow emergncy vehicles (Ambulance, Fire and Police) to go through traffic. I know that making cars actually get out of the way is not likely to happen since it would require AI changes. However a more doable solution I think would be to simply allow emergency vehicles to clip through other cars and ignore traffic signals, but only when on their way to a call. Sure it's not very realistic looking to see them clipping through cars on the road, but I think it's more realistic than having them just sitting there. And honestly, how often are you zoomed in close enough to your city to notice? Perhaps have them get a speed penalty while going through cars so that traffic is still something you should address to improve your response times. 2. Allow service buildings (Garbage, healthcare, deathcare, police, and fire) To service specific districts without actually being placed in them. I know there is a mod that makes it so that any service building in a district will only serve that district, but that means each district has to have each service building in it. A trash incinerator looks a bit out of place in your beach resort. So my idea is to add a little scrollable list in the info panel of service buildings. That list contains every district in your city plus a "No District" option. You can select a building and check or uncheck multiple options in that list. The idea being that you can plop a service building anywhere in your city, then check which districts you want it to service ("No District" will have it service any buildings outside of a district) and it will serve only those districts even if it's not in them. So you can still have a more centralized trash complex. Just assign each different incinerator or landfill in that complex to focus on a specific area. This would just give you more control over how your services are used. I'm not exactly well versed in how this game works under the hood, but looking at the mods that have already been made, I think these would be entirely doable with modding.

Not sure if this has been addressed yet. Kinda skimmed the thread but it' s a bit long. Anyway, would it be possible to make all roads be able to create a neighbor connection? Some of the NeXt roads don't make a connection when dragged to the edge of the map. They run off the edge but the purple connection arrow doesn't show up on some. I noticed this is also the case with some of the vanilla roads. It seems only one-way road types, including one-way highways can make connections. I guess because the game was originally made so that only highways could be used to make connections so CO never bothered making a two-way connection for roads. However train tracks and ship and air lanes use two way connections so perhaps those can be adapted. Would be nice to make small country roads act as neighbor connections in addition to the highways.

Pretty cool. I was under the impression that the map editor wouldn't let you make a map playable until you have a highway connection to the starting tile. (The little checklist that chirpy gives you must be satisfied) The other option would be to make an initial highway connection with a bridge. Then once you start the game, use the Cross the Borders mod (allows you to edit things outside your city limits) to demolish the whole bridge and connection and build a port. I imagine having people come in only a boatload at a time would help keep the death waves to a minimum.

This is good news. I don't foresee any performance issues with this, just like the concerns people had with unlocking all 25 tiles (which proved to be unfounded) because that terrain is already there. Everything on it is already being simulated as is, so it's already straining your performance as much as it ever will. The main benefit I see to unlocking that border area though is not necessarily for expanding your city, since you will likely run into the population and maximum building limit before you even fill up the original 25 tiles. But mostly I want this to give me access to the edge of the map and possibly allow you to move and add extra neighbor connections once you already have a city running. As it is, you add your 4 connections in the map editor but once you start a city they are pretty much permanent. Even if the 4 connection limit is raised you can't add any more or move them somewhere else because you don't have access to the edge of the map. This would possibly fix this, allowing you to add more connections as your city grows or move them somewhere else to a better position.

I'm guessing the reason that they are all not to scale is because you wouldn't be able to fit much of NYC on a Skylines map at the right scale.

Actually what you made is the Brooklyn Bridge. The Manhattan Bridge which is right next to it doesn't have that much complicated spaghetti work. I recognized it by the two return loops that go back to connect to the FDR Drive

BTW if you have some standing water in an area, you can place a water pump to suck it up.

Not entirely sure if this is how it works but it's something I noticed with my city. When you start your city. Everyone who moves in is an adult. All roughly the same age. They go to work and are productive members of society for the most part. Everything is going fine. The bust comes when all those adults all suddenly become seniors at roughly the same time and leave the workforce. If your town hasn't grown much since the original development. That means that the majority of your population is suddenly out of the workforce and you will notice industry start having a hard time finding workers. Those seniors will also start dying off all at the same time, placing a huge strain on your deathcare system. And with noone working in the landfills and other city services, a whole bunch of other things start to fail. This will put your city into a death spiral. both literally and figuratively. It seems the key is to start very small, so you don't have a huge population boom all at the same time and then steadily grow little by little. Constantly bringing in new bodies so that once the original settlers get old, they are no longer a major chunk of your overall population and you have a good supply of younger citizens to replace them. Once you get past the original bust, your population seems to stabilize and even out so it's not a huge issue afterwards. As long as you avoid any large sudden growths in population. I had this happen in my city where a few years into the game, almost all of my industry started telling me they had no workers and shortly after a bunch of people started dying. Only while looking over all the info views did I notice that I had a really large number of seniors and it kinda hit me. Only by zoning more residential to attract new people and making a bunch of cemeteries to bury the old folks did I manage to save my city from disaster. Curious if anyone else noticed a similar pattern. It's cool the unexpected problems the simulation can throw at you and you pretty much just have to figure it out.

unemployment raises crime. Also lack of education. So shut down the schools and bulldoze the factories.

Does the industry use heavy trucks to deliver to shops? Do the hotdog and donut vans count as "heavy traffic"? Basically if you ban heavy traffic in an area with shops will they still be able to get deliveries? I banned heavy traffic in a part of my city and the commercial is still running fine. Just curious if the game makes an exception to heavy traffic that's delivering to a destination in the "No trucks" zone and simply bans "thru-traffic" or if the delivery trucks don't count as heavy traffic. Might explain why some people have issues with their coal or oil powerplants being restocked with fuel. Because I'm sure the ore and oil truck most definitely count as "heavy traffic". So you will have problems if you place a powerplant in a district with a truck ban.

The forestry industry doesn't clean up pollution perse. Pollution only really cleans up by itself over time. The forestry is just to let you use the land for something and make money while you wait for the pollution to dissipate. Instead of just having an empty patch of land sitting there.

It doesn't have to be a highway spur that splits off from the regular highway. That's just how all the maps that come with the game are designed. The map editor lets you make your own maps and place down a starter highway any way you want. I made a map where the starting tile has the highway run straight through from one side to the other with just a simple on and off ramp connecting to a road off of which the town is built. The idea being that the town simply sprung up along an existing route.

Why do you want to increase land value in industrial? I'm pretty sure industry doesn't care about land value. In fact it drops land value specifically because it's industrial.

Pretty sure some old guy just decided to go for his morning walk and had a heart attack

Awesome interchange Kei. Must have been a pain getting all those big curves so perfect. My city is getting kinda cramped on the other hand so I try to keep mine compact. Here's another one I made to connect the highway to the freight terminal. Already posted it in another thread but thought it belongs here.

Yes, if you want a US style city, the grid is pretty much a must. But don't make it just a big monotonous grid like most of Manhattan. Switch up the direction and orientation of the grid. Essentially creating separate patches of grids. More like Brooklyn. And then just try to throw in some oddly shaped blocks and curved streets to mix it up a bit. Another tip is mix up your zoning. Alot of people zone just a separate big blob of residential then a separate blob of commercial, and a separate blob of industry. I usually make my city mostly residential and just pick some random street and zone commercial along it. Then pick out some individual intersections and zone for a couple commercial shops and offices right in the corners. The industry does kinda get it's own neighborhood and area mostly to itself but it's still very much connected to the rest of the city. Not just a completely separate island all by itself out in the corner of the map somewhere. Also just try to have some real city in mind to use as inspiration. Not necessarily copy it, but just take some hints from it. For example I use NYC for my town of Belvedeere. Mostly because I've lived here for 15 years now so while I try to not rip off of it too much. All the cities I build still just end up looking like NY by default. Now, this thread would be useless without some inspirational examples. So let's see your realistic cities to help the OP out. An overhead view of Belvedeere: Neighborhood map: I do mark out some neighborhoods before I actually develop them just because it helps me remember a cool name I might have come up with at some moment. Zoning map: Traffic map: To better see the street grid And some glamour shots for fun: An interchange that pretty much just serves the freight terminal. Took alot of adjusting before I made it flow well and look clean. But still gets clogged up a bit when I have to empty out several landfills since the incinerators are right there. So the conga line of garbage trucks can cause a mess, but it was MUCH worse before. A freight rail line hugging the coast of the Auburn District. Coming from the freight terminal and will lead to another future terminal and seaports. Just a weird way of having the highway cross the elevated rail tracks. Don't always design with absolute, straightforward efficiency in mind. Sometimes it's nice to just make things a bit more complicated than they need to be. And a pretty scenic shot: From a rooftop on Railroad Hill, overlooking Old Belvedeere, and the Auburn District.

Yea I got the same issue. Tried to make an account before the game released, but it won't let me post anything and won't let me merge them. IDK, it's just kind of a PITA issue I never bothered to sort out. I prefer Simtropolis anyway. It's better organized with separate sub-forums for CJs, Concepts and Experments and various other stuff. The Paradox forum pretty much dumps everything together into one forum except the modding stuff. Just annoying to sort through it all. Plus this is kinda the main place to be for city-builder fans in general. But you don't need any sort of account with them to play. Just a Steam account. You can pretty much ignore the log-in window in the main menu. Making an account through the game does give you a bonus park but whatever. It's not that special anyway I'm guessing. And I'd rather make my own parks.

I never played any of the vanilla maps that have the silly stubs in them. First thing when I bought the game, before even building a city, was go into the map editor and make my own map. There, the highway just runs straight through the staring tile from one end to the other and a simple diamond interchange to give access to the streets. The diamond is not the most efficient way of getting cars on and off the highway, but works well enough to start with and is alot more realistic looking than having an entire highway just dead-end into your little podunk town. So if you want to use the vanilla maps, I personally would just load them into the map editor and readjust the highway around the starting tile to something that makes a little more sense.

I had it happen after adding the mod that removes the "film grain" effect. Which it didn't even do BTW. But all was fixed as soon as I removed the mod. Seems that some mods will mess with that.

Could very well be. I noticed it in some of the pre-release live streams. The players would start spamming schools as soon as possible. And soon enough their industry was all going abandoned due to lack of workers. While the offices were doing just fine. Also when you open the info panel for an industrial building, if you have educated workers filling uneducated positions, it will say you have "overqualified workers" there. So the game does seem to take that into account. So guessing you have too many educated workers that would rather sit in an office than stand at an assembly line. Damn spoiled cims these days. Don't know what it means to put in an honest day's work So if you want to have industry, make sure you have a steady supply of idiots around.

Yup. Guess I got my new sig for the forum. Edit: Or not. Seems Simtropolis does not deem me worthy enough for a sig yet.

Here's the first real interchange in The city of Belvedeere. Basically a 3-way interchange with on and off ramps from the bridge for street access, and something like 6 streets running under it. Still gotta get an elevated train line across this mess somehow, coming from the industry at the left, to run along the shore line by the industry on the right.

Adjusting the population should already be possible I think. The building editor does allow you to set the various stats of the buildings. So it's just a matter of loading every single building in the game into the editor and changing it's occupancy stats to a more realistic level. Kinda tedious but doable. But then you would run into the issue that the devs were trying to avoid in the first place. You would hit that 1 mil limit pretty quick. Atleast if you like building a skyscraper forest. If you make the city more realistic with just a small highrise core and alot of sprawling low density covering the rest of the map. And waste some of the space on big airports and sprawling parks, then you could probably stretch that 1 million out pretty far. Bigger issue I think would be the traffic. It's already bad enough and that's with your population spread pretty thinly across the map. What about when you have a city block that can house potentially thousands of people. How's your road network gonna handle that?

Curious how difficult it would be to implement atleast limited terraforming tools into the city building portion of the game. Afterall, the ground is already changeable (as you see with roads and buildings leveling the land around them) we just don't have the tools to directly control it. But then we DO have the tools in the map editor. Would just be a matter of enabling them in the building mode. Since the terrain editor is still just running in the in-game engine. So theoretically they should just transfer over. And then just try not to flood your city by accident.