City_Borders

Having grown used with 3D I can say I am the opposite, I cannot really live without it anymore. SC4 has some limited off-grid functionality with NAM, but still no true elevation control. Likewise with city building and features, we will agree to disagree. No, Blender does not count, lol. As for SC4, I still like the game, played for literally a decade. Though I do play other city builders now instead. One thing that may make me revisit this would be better public transit management tools. A-Train is a comparable isometrical game with good such transit management tools. Guess I got too used with CS and TpF lol.

I did work on a SC4 region with 60 x 60 large cities region before. Work was well underway, but sadly could never finish it before moving to CS and TpF 1 and 2. Not including region play, Transport Fever does have potentially bigger maps than anything mentioned in the OP, with sizes approaching 25 x 25, which can be customized to 1:2 to 1:5 ratios - i.e. 41 km x 14 km. Like CS, filling the whole map will be an issue due to game mechanics - agent based system - and hardware limitations, though at least there is no hard cap on the amount of things you can build. https://imgur.com/i4HF3Vc And a zoomed in image of the largest urban area, located in the bottom right corner in the image above: https://imgur.com/7uofFdJ Cities Skylines 2 is likely going to have maps as big or larger.

Anything that allows you to build a city of some kind for me qualify as a city builder. Personal tastes will vary of course. I do consider Transport Fever 2 a city builder, thanks to its mods and tools. No matter what kind of city management features are there, all games simplify simulation significantly so they cannot really be compared at all with real life.

The game does slow down a bit but it is more than playable for me anyway. Zoning does take a while to pop up after 250k+ though, and do not expect to use the fast forward buttons after that threshold, there is not much difference with the default play.

Transport Fever 2 is a tycoon game that plays similarly to OTTd - you transport passengers and cargo and get money for it. On the process, cities slowly grow. However, it also offers the tools to make it a visually appealing city builder as well. No, no management tools like health, education, hydro, etc. If you want this then this game is not for you. The only thing from SC4/CS that you have control over is transport - roads and public transport, where it is better than the latter, especially SC4. If you do not mind that - i.e. just want to focus on building and looking at your city, or just want to focus on the traffic aspect, then it is a considerable alternative to SC4/CS. Like CS, TpF2 is a full 3D game. It is newer and has better graphics, better road and rail building tools, no ingame limits like segment/building limits, and much better public transport management tools. It is also less "blocky" than CS or SC4 as the minimum blocking square sizes are very small - i.e. a vanilla 1x1 house occupies over a dozen of these square blocks, unlike SC4/CS where they occupy the whole square. As result of this, downloadable buildings and roads come in all sorts of sizes. The big improvement over its predecessor TpF 1, as a city builder, is that it now the game allows you to plop new towns in the game. This enables you to very quickly build sprawling cities - faster than CS will ever be. Ploppable buildings and other assets allow you to complement them. No direct control over zoning - like its predecessor, by default all cities are built with a similar amout of RCI to each other. However, a mod allows you to change these values to any of your liking, so you can quickly plop new residential, commercial, and/or industrial neighborhoods, or a mixture of them. Mods also allow you to decrease the maximum cap of RCI per building, which is good if you want to buld big - this is an agent-based game like CS so performance is a big consideration. The main disadvantage over SC4 or CS is that its mod base is much smaller, especially non-transportation methods. There are good options here and there though, enough to add variety and detail to your cities. I made a guide for this if anyone is interested: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2538066706 Some images from one of my cities:

OTTd is already on the list above. If you are interested in its gameplay then you may want to check Transport Fever 2 as well. Plays mostly like OTTd, but with 3D graphics and gameplay. Think of it of a baby from OTTd x Cities Skylines. Also allows you to build decent looking cities, especially if mods are used. Define "city builder". Any game that allows you to build decent looking cities for me meet this criteria. Yes, you are referring to its gameplay, unfortunately the game is very road-centric indeed, but it still a "city manager" first of all, not really much different from SimCity 4 except on the traffic - SC4 is the polar opposite, where road - and public transport - traffic is of little importance, especially with NAM active.

I posted this on the Steam forums, but this game, or more likely its sucessor at this point, requires: - A much better mod manager. Right now it leaves a lot to be desired. They should get a page from Transport Fever 1/2 where mods can be individually activated/deactivated per save, and you can see which mods on any save are active, and if any are missing. - Better road/track building tools. Like SC4/TpF roads should be draggable across multiple roads instead of having to click on each. Building bridges and tunnels is much easier on TpF as well. - Get away from the ingame limits, or at least allow users the option to do so. In particular, segment, building and prop limits. - Merge "trains" and "subways" into one single category. They are both rail-based methods of transport. I would go as far as to merge trams too. Allow users to select rail stock, electrification methods and fences if any around tracks.

Because of the stupid engine limitations (regarding segment, route, and prop limits, specifically) and the instability (after every game and mod update) of CS, among other quirks, I have used Transport Fever as my default City Builder - note: NOT management, never cared about it even in CS/SC4, but just building - for a long while. I have been playing on this region for a while now. It is based in a real life metro area (actually, a number of them); props if you can guess it without looking at the tags. The map, whose savefile is at 1.25 GB and growing, pushes computers' limits to the maximum, and is about 32.8 km by 16.6 km - which feels bigger and less blocky thanks to much smaller increment/block size than CS (for example, a zoned building in CS can normally be 1x1 to 4x4 big, while TF buildings occupy at a minimum somewhere around 15x15 much smaller blocks) - and would have hit CS limits regarding segment, agent, route, prop, and even tree limits, long time ago. Only downside is the lack of mod diversity; decent amount but most of them are European-based. Transport Fever 2, which was released back in December, has more mods, including many imported from TpF 1, and more mod diversity, but I started this region before TpF 2 was released.

Anyone heard of Theotown? In my opinion the best city builder available for mobile devices, and by far the best free one. It is a 2D game with isometrical projection, and with all the usual basic services such as zoning, landmarks, education, hydro, security, parks, roads and transit, etc., as well as plugins, it reminds me of a mixture of SC4 and SC2000. There is a number of difficulty levels, or you can just play in sandbox mode, with no need to worry about finances. Maps have a decent size. Yes, it is free, but "P2W" (if there could be such a thing in city builder games...) does not get in the way of anything really (I do not need to mention examples...). The only - slight - limitations for a casual gamer that I have seen are the requirement to watch ads for each plugin downloaded (or you can spend diamonds, they are not hard to get for free), and that the highest speed forward is blocked out. Tunnels also require some diamonds, but again, not much, unless you build lots of them. Also, no online requirement. Also on Steam, for a few bucks, if you are interested. Image provided is from a city of mine, made in less than an hour over a couple of sessions.

Thanks, they are two screenshots from the very same map, of different locations, of course. Mods can be found in the Steam workshop, or in TransportFever.net, the equivalent of Simtropolis for TpF. I prefer Steam workshop as the mods are easier to get there (instead of having to download and unzip them, not too different like we do in Simtropolis, but I have gotten spoiled ;D) and over half of the community in the TpF.net is German, and is pretty much a German-based forum. However, a few nice mods are only obtainable there. You can use both the regular workshop (Skylines method) and mods that were put them on a separate folder (SC4 method), so in this aspect, TpF offers the best of both worlds. Yes, you can start a game, the earliest would be 1850s. I cannot comment much on them because I usually start new games much closer to the 2000s, and use contemporary stock almost exclusively, except in a few touristic routes where steam-based trains would make sense. I can tell you that you do start with dirt routes and 19th century looking architecture, that is slowly replaced by newer roads and buildings as you progress, and people using more and more cars (so that you have to offer better services, or lose ridership to them, not very different like happened in real life). The AI will automatically create new streets and buildings and expand on its own. This might not be good if you are a micromanager, I actually like it overall. There are three zones, the usual RCI, although you do not have direct control over them (well, RC use the same set of buildings), if you are not happy with, say, an industry in a specific place, you can either continuously demolish it (or wait for further development) or use the plop town buildings. There is land value, higher are usually located close to stations with high ridership, and will attract more dense buildings (thus generating more ridership) but making further expansion more expensive (it is much cheaper to demolish a building that is valued 50$ per m2 than one that is valued over 1k$ per m2). Late game is a wash of white modern contemporary buildings, but you can set in a new game to allow all architecture styles, so that you have a mixture of all of them. Or download one mod that allows brutalist architecture from the 50s-80s to be used in a contemporary setting. Many great mods and maps are available in the workshop. I suggest curved stations (from the developers of the game) and plop town buildings, and go from there. I think the game is on sale right in Steam now, in case you do not want to wait for Transport Fever 2, which should be released at the end of this year. While your opinion and respect it, I think it is a little close-minded. When CS came, I had my reservations and similar instant thoughts (I have played thousands of hours in SC4, after all, and have tons of mods for it), but nevertheless did try the game eventually to give it a fair try, and eventually grew to own most DLCs in both PC and the PS4, and subsequently moved on to Transport Fever. All three games are very good, and all have their flaws; I still play all three. Comparing TpF (or almost anything, for that matter) to that monstrosity that was SC2013, though... Unlike the latter and SC4, Transport Fever is a big improvement over the original Train Fever, while keeping the core mechanics intact, and Urban Games, for being a small development team, have continuously listened to the community, adding improvement and performance patches over the two years of so since it has been launched; so I believe that will still be the case for Transport Fever 2. Anyway, TpF is a modern transportation simulation, but with better city building capabilities than the other way around for SC4: I am not a super-detailer (not in TpF, not in CS, nor in SC4), you can find better close-ups elsewhere (i.e. realistic houses/properties with fences, gardens and other addons, different streets textures, castles, rail fences, etc - I have these mods but I am too lazy to use them lol and prefer just to look at the bigger scope of things in all these games). From a city builder perspective, some of the shortcomings of Transport Fever will be addressed in the second installment, such as street traffic lights (right now you need to put them manually like props in CS...), one-way roads/motorway intersections (currently only available in a mod with limitations), among others. This is what Transport Fever can do right now, from a transportation management aspect. You can of course change the color of the routes at will, for me, I assigned red to all air routes, light blue to passenger ferries, marine blue to cargo ships, black to cargo trains, and any color (including the ones mentioned) to different passenger trains. The second image is just train routes. You can by default turn on or off any specific number of icons (as the former pictures show, with all icons hidden). Should be similar, but improved, in the next installment. Relatively few people use air (a decent rail route will destroy air ridership on a similar air route in most cases), and this is expected to be fixed in Transport Fever 2. Like in OTTD, there are cargo chains (farm>food processing, for example), which will remain and likely be expanded upon in TpF2, but my focus in this map is in passengers: Maximum size from a heightmap is 36 megapixels, or about 575 km2 (i.e. 24x24 km, or any combination leading to 36 megapixels, this map is around 42x13 km I believe, so the pictures above only display a small part of the whole region), in comparison with CS' fixed 18x18 km (with mods). New ingame editors in the upcoming release should greatly ease map creation and editing, compared to the current release.

Announced just a few minutes ago, Transport Fever 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zaV9Up9g6w It [very likely will] be a refinement on the existing Transport Fever game, itself a refinement of Train Fever, which was mostly crowd funded. No DLCs for TpF, but frequent updates have been made in the two years or so since the game has been first released. Both plus the just announced sequel developed by Urban Games, and published by Gambitious Digital Entertainment. For those that do not know about Transport Fever, it is to OTTD like Cities Skylines is for SC4; furthermore, mods and map editing allow it to be a decent city builder (not simulator, no education, health, etc) as well, while being better than C:S in the transportation aspect (highly configurable train stations, train path signs, road/rail building is much smoother, etc). It is also more stable (especially when heavily modded) and does not have the developer-imposed limits of C:S (37k segments, 10k nodes, building/prop limits, etc), and has the ability to run bigger maps, both of which are big pluses, unless you play on a potato. From the website: Two Transport Fever selected screenshots from a map I have been playing on. There are downsides; the big one for me is the inability of terraforming in water, which will hopefully be rectified in the upcoming release. Also, the modding scene, while significant, is very European-centric, and given the emphasis in transportation, rail-centric (i.e. not many modded buildings). A bigger player base would help fix that in the next game. Expected release of Transport Fever 2 is Q4 2019. Cannot wait. Website: https://www.transportfever2.com/

Yes, some of the below can be addressed in some way or another with mods, but they do not apply to the console versions (I play the PS4 version as well), are limited and/or unrealistic in scope, and/or are so good and convenient that it should just come by default. 1 - An increase of some of in-game limits that severely impact gameplay in larger cities, especially ones using 25/81 tiles mods, namely segment limit (36k), node limit (32k), and agent limit (64k). These can currently be indirectly addressed - to a point only - through the use of numerous mods, but it is ridiculous not to even give people the option to increase the limits, just to avoid bashing from people using PCs with the minimum requirements. Not to say that console versions cannot even use mods to mitigate these limits, especially the agent limit one. 2 - Medium density residential zoning so that one is not forced to use districts and policies to ban high-rises from growing or mods to prevent developments from advancing in stage. Allow 10 or so deep zoning squares instead of 4 squares deep from a road for urban developments, higher for farming developments (maybe 50 or so). Allow stuff to be plopped up first without having to plop a road first. 3 - Farming with its own zoning policy instead of being a specialized form of industry (come on, it is the oldest form of mankind-made development). Allow fields to be generated from a large zoned area (akin SC4) instead of forcing people to manually paint the ground and plop vegetation/decoration to create farms (see also below). Separate high-tech industry from generic manufacturing industry. 4 - Players should be able to choose the default starting city tile. 5 - Get rid of the goods/materials system. Only thing it does is to needlessly choke up the agent limit numbers and cause industrial and commercial abandonment in large cities when it should not be there. In real life cities with bad traffic, many deliveries are made at night, and it does happen during the day one way or another, so this is not the issue CS tries to make up. As long as you have external connections (and landfills/cemeteries, respectively) this should be taken care of automatically. Some delivery traffic could be simulated, for the sake of making these areas a little more lively (not that industrial areas in real life have the ludicrous amount of traffic that CS industrial areas have), akin to the current simulation of only a maximum number of cims at a time, even if the city population is higher. 6 - Things get on fire too easily, people get sick too easily, bad AI and agent limit limits garbage, ambulance, police, and hearse actions. Services need to be rebalanced (i.e. sick people do go to hospitals themselves), and in particular, healthcare needs to be made more useful while deathcare needs to be seriously toned down - one likely will spend more in crematoriums than in hospitals and clinics in any given city... Also, as in #5, bad traffic should not impede garbage and body collection (i.e. night collection or slightly delayed collection). Policies are way way too expensive and almost worthless (i.e. free fire alarms have little impact on fires). 7 - Automatically create intersections when plopping a long stretch of road over other road segments at the same height (akin SC4, right now one is forced to build each intersection first, otherwise it says space already occupied). Better looking vanilla highway intersections. 8 - Businessmen/women come to the city to do business and leave, more or less like tourists, staying in hotels, but they go to offices and industries instead. Increase number of tourists. Hotels should really be generic commercial (in many hotels businesspersons are the main customers). Some cims would also go out (and back) for out-of-city business/tourism. Allow airports to pick up a large amount of intercity traffic by default, especially as the city gets larger. 9 - Allow players to set % of transportation mode to be used (intra and especially inter city). Allow airports, and to a smaller degree, rail stations and harbors, to act as inter-city hubs (instead of intra-city only), so some visiting cims may not even step foot outside the hub (i.e. Atlanta Airport is a good example). Only allow relatively full inter-city vehicles to be spawned (right now way too many of them come and go, very often empty or with a couple of passengers only, but clogging up traffic nevertheless). 10 - Attenuate the lack of educated workers problem - in real life someone from outside the city is likely going to fill that position. Instead, if education is bad to begin with (numbers of the three education categories in the red), offices and stage 3 industry will not want to move in the first place. 11 - Provide an option for roads to build roadside electrical poles/underground cables/water pipes automatically. They would be costlier than the default roads, obviously, and could be enabled and disabled at any time (especially for the water pipes, as they contribute to the segment limit...). 12 - Water pumps right now remove way way too much water out of whatever water source you are using. This should be greatly attenuated or disabled altogether. Smaller water flows could be channeled through underground canals/large pipes. 13 - Cims are way way too weak to noise pollution. Yes, it is a nuisance, but not a health hazard on par with truly polluted areas (air and water pollution). And metro and monorail generates more noise pollution than (currently useless) airports? Instead, cims may move out of noisy areas (especially, rich cims, wait, the game does not have wealth brackets, hmm...) if newer less noisy areas are available. Mainly for the console versions: 1 - Terraforming and/or map editor tools for the consoles versions. 2 - An inbuilt option to disable visual notifications (no road access, hydro, sick citizens, etc.) and district names so that one can actually take screenshots or just look at the city without seeing a boatload of warning squares and huge words floating above the city. Should be default in PC as well. One could dream but region play and/or out-of-city commuters would be very nice as well. Personally I would get rid of the agent system and stick with a simplified random simulation system like SC3000 that would permit a nearly unlimited amount of segments and nodes. Very large cities ironically suffer less than smaller ones, simply because smaller cities generate way more traffic than they should be generating, hit the agent limit, and no more traffic can be generated to fill the extra roads...

This happens if you do not open up a data view while you're in a city. To avoid having this happen with your regional view, open up a data view (e.g. the traffic congestion data view) before saving the city. I have been saving a few cities following this tip either going to the data view first or not and this has worked wonderfully in all of them. Would explain too why the cities would change to the bugged layout only at times and vice versa. Thanks again for the help!

As per title. Ever since I have updated my NAM with the latest version my region transit view has started to show black lines along every single transportation mode of at or above ground, which I believe to be associated with RHW as per the NAM FAQ because normally they do not appear on the transit region view map. I am wondering what may be causing the game to show these lines? I believe I have downloaded a standalone version of this region view mod before (and as I did not like it then as I do not like it now I deleted it) but I am unable to find out what may be causing this right now. I can only think of the NAM (even though I remember something about an option to disable this mod which I remember clicking but I am not sure). I hate these black lines (especially since I have a ton of railways and it completely messes them up in region view). As such, would anyone know the precise name of this mod contained in the NAM it so I can find it and delete it for good? Interestingly after saving a city the latter would not necessarily convert to the new layout with black lines all over every single road way but only now and then (like 50% of the time after saving and getting out). Thanks in advance for any help and for the amazing mods developed over the years.