Ltw

In the picture below you can see an industrial district in my city. The district has several cargo terminals and highways. However, lately I've been coping with quite some abandonment in this area. I've demolished the abandoned buildings and dezoned them. Which makes this kind of a concrete emptiness at some places.

I've been working on a new park. There used to be an elevated tram-line in here but it wasn't used by my citizens at all. Therefore I've demolished it and I've been building this park instead. The park is not done yet though. The pedestrian bridge connects larger parts of the park with each other. These parts have to be developed as well. The idea is that these parts will have plazas, maybe restaurants and other buildings for relaxing activities. The pedestrian bridge will also connect this part of the city to other parts of the city and other parks, therefore it could also shorten travel-times for citizens that need to get to for instance metro-stations. In the picture above you can see a small plaza with a kiosk and small playground. I've been planning on building more plazas like this one in this park, this is great for open spaces that are too small for bigger parks/recreational buildings.

There are two mods that improve the game greatly and also help fix the flaws/annoying parts of the game: Rush Hour: This mod makes travel-patterns of citizens more realistic, which means that citizens are going to work/school/other events at normal times. This creates a rush hour and also means that the streets are less busy at night. This mod makes everything much more realistic and also means that day-night (and the day-night sliders) make more sense. Time Warp: This allows you to set the time at any time of the day. Usually I don't do a lot with that (a lot of times I have things to do with for instance the transportation-screen or other screens that aren't affected by night) but when I do need to build things at day I can change the time, which is quite convenient sometimes. These two mods improve the game a lot in my opinion, which is a great thing about the workshop. Things you don't like about the base game you can just solve by using mods (most of the times).

I've been working on improving public transportation in my city. In general I'm quite satisfied with the way my metro system is working, it is efficient, lots of citizens use it and therefore I could earn a lot of money to pay for a large part of it. However, the other transportation-types aren't that good at all. Buses and trams aren't used a lot and trains are very expensive without getting a lot of money out of it. In the past I've been trying to combine these types of transportation. However, this didn't get the results I was hoping for. Therefore I've started with a new project that will affect my entire city and should improve accessibility of a lot of neighborhoods tremendously. Above you can see an overview of my city. The density in the city is quite high, making it perfect for metro, next to that there are two neighborhoods at the other side of the river (north of the city). Furthermore there are two remote villages on the top-side of the map and one village on the bottom side of the map (on the island). I've been reducing the number of train-lines and bus-lines lately. Which affects commute-times of the two neighborhoods a lot. These citizens weren't going by public transport anymore, which isn't very great for me off course. Thus I've decided to invest a lot in public transportation. This is the first neighborhood I've been working on. This neighborhood has 7600 residents, which doesn't make it very big. However, it used to have a train station, which disappeared when my elevated train stations stopped working. I didn't really bother fixing this because it was expensive anyways. The track is still in use for the remote villages but this particular neighborhood had a bus-connection only, which wasn't used a lot. In order to let people travel with public transportation again I've built a metro-line. starting at the east side of this neighborhood and ending at the central station (which is quite a distance actually). The metro-line has three stops in this neighborhood and only two in the city, which makes it a very fast way to travel. In order to cover the entire neighborhood there is a bus-line which connects 'remoted' homes in this neighborhood to the stations. This approach worked quite well, the metro-line started making money immediately and was used a lot. I've used a similar approach in this neighborhood. This neighborhood has 13.000 residents and is therefore quite bigger. Therefore there are a lot of stops in this neighborhood, which you could also reach by bus. I couldn't connect this line to the central station, thus I've connected it to a big metro-station nearby. For this reason this station has more stops in the city itself. Every station in the city is multi-platform, which means that you could switch lines at a lot of stations. This worked quite well, this line is one of the busiest in the city already and it also boosted passenger-numbers of some other lines. With this approach I'm really aiming for metro. Basically because it is the most efficient way and because it is the most extensive network in the city. However, this shift also means that I have to do something with public transport by bus, train or tram. You could see one of those projects below. In the picture above you could see a tram-line. This used to be a train-line but I've demolished it and changed it into a tram-line. The general idea at the time was to use the train for remote villages, industrial areas and cargo and use tram for inner-city transportation instead of buses. However, this didn't go as well as suspected and my tram-project kind of failed. Now I know that the extensive metro network has a lot to do with the failure of my tram-system. Therefore I'm focusing on spending my resources on metro instead of tram. This also means that out of 7 tram-lines four tram-lines will be deleted. Those tram-lines aren't profiting at all, the other three have decent passenger-numbers and therefore there is no reason to demolish them for now. However, this line will be demolished since almost nobody is using it. Just demolishing the elevated line is a little bit boring though, for that reason I will demolish this and build a park instead. There are some places that are wider than this, but at some places the free space is as small as this. Making it quite hard to build a nice-looking park. Even though there are some challenges involved I think it is worth it because a park at this neighborhood could improve the desirability as well.

Looks great! You could also download the World Trade Center in one piece. The author uploaded a version which needs the sub-buildings enabler. Maybe that helps? You can find it here.

I've been working on a new project near a big industrial zone in my city. In this project I try to solve two problems I've been facing. The first problem is power. I have the power fusion plant, which is great for dealing with power shortages. I've been running it on 50% funding and even then I have enough power for the whole city. However, I've noticed that sometimes (and I mean once every 100 years or something like that) this powerplant is on fire. This happens very rarely but if it happens my whole city is out of power. I solved this earlier by placing nuclear powerplant throughout my industrial zones. However, at the latest fire I noticed that these powerplants couldn't produce enough power for the whole city, even though it should be enough. This problem seemed kind of urgent for me so I started with developing a new area in order to deal with this. You can see a picture of the entire project below. A large part of the area is being used for powerplants. These nuclear powerplants produce twice as much energy as needed. Furthermore the plants are divided in 8 separate assets, which makes it nearly impossible for them to malfunction at once because of for instance fires. If that would happen anyways I still have my fusion plant, which is switched off but could be switched on if necessary. I think this is a great improvement compared to the previous situation. It is more expensive but I think the reliability would improve a lot. My second problem had to do with traffic. Mainly cargo trains. I had several cargo train terminals in the industrial zone next to this project. However, those cargo terminals were quite busy and it lead to a lot of congestion. I've already build another track but this didn't help. So I head to do some major work in increasing capacity. This is what I've done this far: Like you can see the capacity is quite big. Three tracks are in use but I could increase that in five tracks if necessary. However, I don't think that would be needed. These tracks connect several cargo terminals outside of the industrial zone. You could see the cargo terminals below. I've used standard cargo terminals. Didn't really bother to look for other ones because I'm quite satisfied with the cargo terminals. The tunnels of the outer tracks are going back in a loop. This way I avoid trains driving backwards (which is quite annoying in my opinion). Furthermore the efficiency of the train terminals will improve greatly. This way trains won't have to wait that long, which makes it more efficient. The track in the middle connects to a train terminal in the industrial zone itself. I didn't start with this yet because I will have to demolish a lot of buildings in order to accomplish that. I've been planning on doing that but I will have to wait a little bit longer until demand is better. These cargo hubs are connected to 4-lane roads and a highway, which is also connected to the industrial zone and other roads going outside of the city. The tracks are connected to an extensive train-network. Which is also connected to cargo terminals in other industrial districts (such as an oil-district and ore-district) and two cargo hubs. These tracks are also connected to tracks leading outside of the city. This way I've tried to connect everything as well to each other as possible. However, I'm not done yet. There are several things I would still like to do. There is a lot of unused space. However, I didn't feel like zoning this into a 'normal' industrial district. Therefore I'm going to build warehouses in this area. The are between the powerplants and the industrial districts should be developed first. After that I could also develop the area north of that. Other buildings like datacenters, offices and power-related buildings could also be placed in this areas. I'm waiting with this second phase of the project because my industrial demand is a little bit low at the moment. I have some nice RICO buildings but I would like to build them a little bit later. So I will do this in the future but not yet.

After finishing my Brooklyn Bridge project I've been working on some other projects in the city. The general idea is to build big parks instead of infrastructure. I've noticed that a lot of infrastructure takes up a lot of space even though it isn't used as much as I would like. By demolishing for instance railroads and highways I'm getting rid of expensive infrastructure which isn't used a lot. Furthermore the city gets more desirable this way. A negative side-effect could be more traffic at avenues and other roads. This might lead to more noise. However, I haven't noticed such a big change yet. The project I've been working on is the one below: Like you can see there is a lot of infrastructure in this area. On the right you could see a low density neighborhood, on the bottom side of this image there is an European style neighborhood, on the top there is a high density neighborhood and an industrial district. These neighborhoods are split up by a big highway and interchange. Especially the residential neighborhood at the top deals with a lot of problems. It is next to industrial district and boxed in by a highway. The highway is literally going through the neighborhood itself. This bad position of this neighborhood leads to noise, health problems and congestion. Which wasn't a big problem for me because I didn't care that much. I needed uneducated workers in a close proximity to the industrial district and this was a good place for that. However, over time the neighborhood upgraded (this was partly caused by some unfavorable district policies). Thus it was about time to change this part of my city drastically. You could see the result below: Like you can see above the area changed a lot. I've demolished the highway leading to the bottom side of the image and I've demolished the highway at one side. This highway is a tunnel with several exits. Furthermore I've demolished the train tracks, this is a tunnel as well. The line should be restored soon. All this led to a lot of free space. Which has been transformed to a big park. You can see some close-up pictures below: I didn't want to lay down a lot of new infrastructure. In the other parks I've built recently infrastructure was a big deal because the neighborhoods were disconnected from each other. In this park that's less important. Mainly because the neighborhoods are mainly residential and they're connected quite well to other districts in the city. This gave me a lot of space to lay down a big park without intersecting roads. Bicycle-lanes are still important but there are less bridges because that wasn't really needed anymore. Furthermore I've placed some crossings where necessary. Therefore the park doesn't have a urban setting like the previous parks I've built. By completing this park I've dealt with the most urgent issues in the infrastructure of the city. However, abandonment isn't solved yet. Projects like this one should have some influence on desirability and could help. However, this doesn't solve the problem yet. The next projects I will do are dealing with the neighborhoods themselves. There are a lot of buildings that should be demolished. These buildings will be replaced by sportive and cultural assets, such as stadiums, football fields, museums and cinemas. In order to do that properly I have to demolish a lot. I still have to figure out how/where to do that since I don't want to change the entire city into an amusement park. But I think it could work quite well if done properly.

I don't experience a lot of problems with garbage and dead bodies. However, the assets that are in the vanilla game don't have a lot of capacity which means that this causes a lot of problems. I'm also using downloaded assets from the Workshop. There are some assets that work quite well for waste disposal. These are the assets I'm using: Large Advanced Incineration Plant Large Recycling Center Advanced Incineration Plant With these assets I have quite some capacity in my city of around 260.000 citizens. I need to place more than one of those though. However, I can blend this in my industrial zone quite easily, thus I'm not really bothered by that. The cemetery and crematorium in the base game are also quite impossible to work with. I'm not using the base assets at all. Instead I'm using these two assets: V-Cemetery V-Crematorium These assets have a capacity much larger than the default assets. If cemeteries are completely full I usually empty them. The bodies will be relocated to a crematorium (if available). This means that there are less dead bodies if emptying is finished. After that I stop emptying the lot. This results into a steady capacity in cemeteries. I don't have to build a lot of those assets and I'm not emptying cemeteries very often because the capacity of a single cemetery is quite high as well. This approach works quite well in my experience.

It looks really nice! What is that building in the last picture? I would really like to use that in my own city

I agree with Mr_Maison on this point. Industrial zones cause a lot of traffic, which will cause problems. Another good advice is to look into districts, I don't know if you've already done that but that should help a lot. You can make several districts (like a commercial, residential and industrial district in this case) and you can switch on several policies in those districts. In this case it would be wise to connect the highway to the industrial zone and ban heavy traffic in your commercial district, this way heavy traffic will choose the highway instead of smaller roads. Furthermore it is really helpful to switch on big business benefactor, small business enthusiast and industrial space planning in the future (all in the city planning category), this will double the production/sales of industrial and commercial buildings which has a great impact on your tax-revenue. However, this will also cause more traffic or other problems such as not enough goods to sell, thus you have to make sure that you have enough industry/import to deal with that. Therefore I would wait for that for a little while but it is nice to keep that in mind Next to that it is helpful to look at the resources map as well, in general specialized districts make more money than generic districts. Therefore it would be wise to look at the map and zone industrial districts at places where there is oil/ore/forests/fertile land. You can specialize them in the district tab. These specialized zones will deliver their goods to your own generic industrial zones first and after that those zones will export. This makes it cheaper and easier for the industrial zones to produce goods which gives you more tax revenue. You could also buy land based on the resources-map. In my opinion it isn't a big deal if the industrial zones are spread out, I have 6 industrial zones spread out in my city (three generic districts, one farmers-district, one for ore and one for oil). Those zones deal with a lot of traffic which is something to deal with at some point, but in the end the income is quite big, which makes it worth the trouble.

Haha. That might be it The day and night cycle is kind of intense in this theme/LUT. The shadows are quite dark, it looks nice but you can see less. Sometimes I'm even setting the time at midday so that I can see what I'm doing haha. Anyways, I've finished another park on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge today, this park has a highway in the middle because it wasn't possible to dig a tunnel at that spot (there are lots of metro tunnels on different depths and a interchange close to the park, thus I decided not to do that). This makes this park different than the park I've showed before. Bridges are more important and there is less space, I've tried to blend in the highway a little bit by placing trees, but it's still a challenge to do so. You can see the results below (at midday this time ).

Thanks! I really like your trees as well Mr_Maison. I downloaded lots of your trees for my parks and they look great! My LUT is Realistic Warmer and the map has a boreal theme.

Earlier I posted some pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge I was building. This bridge is the centerpiece of a major project I've been working on. The highway that used to be above ground would be underground instead. I didn't want to zone buildings in the free space above ground. First of all I'm dealing with a lot of abandonment at the moment, thus that wouldn't be a great idea. Second I liked it better to build a big park instead. I've completed this project and I'm quite satisfied with the result. Like you can see in this picture the project is quite big. I've made some adjustments in traffic as well. Before there used to be three tunnels and two bridges. In order to make everything less complicated underground I've demolished two tunnels, next to that I've built some roads, the one on the left side is new, just like the avenue in the middle and the bridge next to the rail tracks. Furthermore the park has a lot of bicycle-lanes, this makes accessibility by bike much better. Below you could see some close-up pictures of the park. There are lots of pedestrian paths, bicycle-lanes and bridges. I'm quite happy with this result, I'm also planning on building more parks of this size in the future. In the past I've mainly focused on building parks that fit one housing block. I've had this approach because it is a nice and easy solution for local abandonment and doesn't take up much space. However, having some large parks is a nice addition to my city I think. First I will start demolishing other highways that aren't necessary anymore, next to that I can build some tunnels as well. If abandonment is getting crazy I can also demolish some housing blocks, however, I don't think that will happen since the abandonment-rate is dropping. Concluding, there will be some other projects like this one in the future. I already have some ideas and I will implement those plans when I have the time to do so.

I think a difficulty for the designers of city-building games is the fact that you can't change the game that much. Off course there are lots of improvements to be made (even though many of them have been taken care of in the latest patches) but I could imagine that it would be more difficult to do that. I think it is more difficult than for instance making an expansion pack for a race-game or shooter, in those expansion packs you could just add some tracks and levels and the buyers will be happy (probably). However, games like The Sims also have a lot of expansion packs and even though the problem seems to be similar these packs are quite popular. Those expansion packs come with a lot of new items which makes it 'value for money'. And this makes it difficult for CO to come up with nice expansion packs. They kind of focus on new buildings (like for instance the jail in AD and several buildings in Snowfall) but many people feel like it is not worth the money because you're done with it after you've placed it. We are kind of spoiled with all the great content in the Workshop so adding buildings in paid expansion packs seems to be kind of useless. Don't get me wrong, there are other great things in the expansion packs that were a reason for me to buy it (tourism, bicycle lanes and trams for instance) but they could get more out of it if they would focus on those additions in my opinion. Boformer added a new topic in which he makes some suggestions about how the next expansion packs should look like. The suggestions Boformer is making are great, those expansion packs are quite focused on the limits of the game and don't add in things I didn't really want or didn't even think about. Luckily there are some things of this list that are already implemented but we will have to wait till the future and see what happens.

I've been working on placing the Brooklyn Bridge in my city. It has been quite a challenge but it's starting to look like something. Even though I'm making progress, it is not done yet. It used to be like this: A standard highway bridge with a nice bicycle-lane next to it. It worked quite fine and it looked pretty good. However, I wasn't completely satisfied. Skylines builds these bridges for every highway there is, which basically means that there are a lot of them. Next to that there wasn't any need for a six-lane highway anymore. These are problems that I could live with, but since the Brooklyn Bridge was released on the steam workshop I wanted to have it in my city. However, accomplishing that is quite challenging.. As you could see in the picture above the river wasn't very big. The Brooklyn Bridge needs a large body of water in order to be placed correctly. This resulted in some large alterations in my city. You can see the bridge below: As you can see in the picture above the river is much wider. I had to demolish a lot of buildings to get it done but at the moment I'm coping with a lot of abandonment, so I didn't care about it too much. Furthermore I had to make sure that the water-level is good, which led to some challenges in watermanagement as well. Next to that you've got the problem with exposed subway-lines, reconnecting neighborhoods and height-differences. Not all these problems are solved yet but I'm getting close. In this picture you can see where the bridge will be connected with the land. As you can see the height difference is quite big. In the future I will make the height difference between the part below the bridge and ground level less big. This will require some more space as well. The ends of the bridge on both sides will function as a entry/exit-lanes for the highway. Furthermore I want to use the arches on both ends to connect the different neighborhoods with each other. However, this won't be the biggest change yet. All the changes I've described until now take up a lot of space and require demolishing a lot of buildings. However, the bridge will be the centerpiece of a large project that is noticeable in the entire city. As you can see the old highway is much higher than the end of the bridge. This doesn't matter because the old highway will be demolished entirely. The new highway that will be built will be underground until it exits the city. Since my city is quite big at the moment this will be a tunnel of several kilometers. The place of the old highway won't make place for buildings though. As I've mentioned before I'm having problems with abandonment, therefore it seemed fit to build a big park on this place that goes across the entire city. This will boost desirability and give a new atmosphere to the city. Thus, even though I'm getting closer I still have to do a lot. Anyways, I'm looking forward to it!

A rainy day in my city

In my opinion both After Dark and Snowfall are worth it. Mainly because both expansions are fairly cheap. The expansions add some new stuff that give you more possibilities, but don't expect a lot of changes compared to the base-game. It is very nice to do with bicycle-lanes and trams (I use those features quite a lot in both DLCs) but if you don't miss it you might be disappointed. So have to agree with Judazzz about that. However, I also see paying for the DLCs as a way to support CO. For me that's also an investment in the base-game and free updates. CO deals with suggestions from the community quite well in my opinion (I know this is somewhat disputed, but as a SC4 player my values about that might be a bit different since EA didn't care about that at all). However, CO is also a company that wants to make a profit, thus I could imagine that they would discontinue free updates if they don't make any money from the game anymore. Furthermore there has been a free update recently that adds waterworks, terraforming and some other cool stuff. I don't know whether they would do that if they don't have paid content in order to compensate for that. Concluding, the DLCs are worth it imo, basically because they aren't very expensive and because I want to support further development of the game. However, if you don't miss any of the features in the paid DLCs at all, it might be a waste of money (it would be a little bit too crazy to pay for something you don't use at all). Thus, if the features are appealing to you I would suggest to buy it. You can also buy one of both off course

I've been working on the position of my waterpumps and treatment plants. Since waterpumps and treatment plants have quite some influence on water-levels I thought it would be necessary to make some adjustments in order to avoid a part of my city from flooding if waterpumps fail or treatment plants upstream should be switched on. Partly you can manage water levels by placing treatment plants and water pumps strategically but it could happen that this doesn't work either in some (extraordinary) situations. For those situations I came up with the solution you could see below: I've built a canal next to the river. Normally there isn't a lot of water in the canal (it might even be completely dry in some cases). However, when the water level rises the canal will fill up. This will avoid flooding in some districts. Especially the district on the left side of the river is kind of prone to flooding since it is quite low on some points. I've tested this structure by switching on ten treatment plants upstream and it works quite well! In case the canal fails (which might happen if worst case scenario the waterpumps fail and the treatment plants have to be switched on) I've placed another wall next to the canal, this will function as a barrier in case the canal is clogging up. I haven't had the possibility to test it yet since I don't have enough capacity to switch of my waterpumps. That will be a new project for me, I'm working on making systems redundant so that I get a more reliable power/water supply, I've already done this with power (once I got a major power outage because my fusion plant was on fire, since then I've been building a lot of powerplants that could be switched on in case of emergency). However, I haven't done that for water yet, chances are kind of small that this happens but when those systems fail it could cause floodings because the water levels change quite a lot. That's why I have been working on these water-projects as well.

Yes, that's true. Only thought about the system itself. Maybe I exaggerated the thing about the SSD but the differences between that and a regular hard drive is huge, so it's still worth it in my opinion. Next to that SSD-drives have a long live-span because they don't have moving parts and are therefore less likely to fail. My point is that it is worth looking into those pre-installed packages at eBay. It is more effort screwing those things together than buying a ready to use pc but building your own IKEA cabinet is also more effort than buying an assembled cabinet and still a lot of people are going to IKEA . With those packages you don't have to install the CPU (which could be risky) or worry about cooling and cable-management (which is optional but not necessary). We'll leave the more difficult parts of building a pc out of the equation and the basics are quite simple, especially with those packages. My point is that it doesn't have to be that hard and could save you a lot of money. I've built my pc by myself and it spared me about €200,- compared to an assembled pc with the same specs. Next to that I've also stated in my post before that even if you buy an assembled pc the same issues occur. In my experience they often save money on the PSU because nobody cares about that, however, a good power supply is quite important for your pc to run properly. With all the components of a ready to use pc the same applies, there are certain brands that a good, and some brands that are less good. So critically looking at the different components as if you were building it yourself could really help with looking which assembled pc is good and which pc is less good. But you're right, it could get a little bit too technical. I forgot the keyboard, mouse and screen indeed. These are often not included in assembled pc's though but I guess it could vary depending on vendor. I use a Logitech K330 keyboard and mouse and I'm quite happy about that, it only costs about €30,- and works fine. For screen I don't know exactly what would be the right choice. I use my TV (Samsung B2430HD) as computer screen and I'm quite happy about that. However, I didn't buy this TV for my pc, I just had it laying around so I thought I'd use it for my pc. Financially it wouldn't make sense to buy a TV. But if you have a small TV (mine is 24") it works great, just adjust the settings so that it doesn't burn your eyes out from close distance and it is quite nice to work with. However, if you don't have a TV you could use, you don't have to spend too much to a screen. You can easily buy decent screens for under €100,-

I agree with boformer about this. The possibilities of gaming with laptops are very limited, even if you would spend a lot of money on it. Especially upgrading is quite hard with laptops (in general it would be possible to upgrade your harddrive and RAM but that's about it). If you are interested in getting a desktop for Skylines and other games I would recommend buying an intel i5 processor with LGA1150 socket (which is standard nowadays). These sockets also support the i7 CPU. If your i5 CPU is not sufficient anymore (which could take years) you could upgrade to an i7. If you don't have a lot of money for that you could choose an older i7 model which is cheaper at that moment but works better. Desktop prices could be very cheap. At eBay there are several vendors that sell packages with CPU, RAM and motherboard for good prices. This is cheaper than buying a desktop pc from the store and it is not that much more work since they usually place the components for you, thus it is mainly screwing the motherboard into the case and that's it. Next to that you'll need power supply, I would buy a 600W PSU if I were you, this way you can upgrade your graphics card (or even place more of them if you have enough money) without worrying about power, I could go on and on about which PSU to buy but then I might go a little bit off topic, this article might help though. The case is important as well, and you could save a lot of money on this, I recommend Coolermaster for this, the cases are quite cheap and good. Next to that it is a pro to buy a SSD since it is very fast and lasts forever, Samsung is the best choice for this (especially the price/quality is very good). I think it is best to buy a nVidea graphics card. I have an AMD Radeon R9 in my pc and even though I really love the card itself (it is silent, powerful and fast) I really hate the drivers that AMD is releasing all the time. Every time I have a new driver I have some problems with compatibility issues and Cities:Skylines. The complaints about AMD-drivers are quite common and I haven't heard those complaints about nVidea yet. However, you'll have to get into that some more since I don't know exactly which card is best. This might be a little bit too much information (tried to keep it brief but I can go on and on about what's important, anyways this is the most important information about choosing a pc). However, let's make a list of parts you'll need and how much it could cost: The hardware: CPU (intel i5), RAM (4GB DDR3), motherboard (something cheap, wouldn't worry about that too much in the beginning) - about €350,- The drive: SSD Samsung 250GB - about €85,- The PSU: 600W (I recommend Coolermaster because of the price-quality) - €50,- til €70,- The case: I recommend a Coolermaster mid-tower for this - €35,- The graphics card: Depends on what you want but a midrange card seems doable - €100,- til €200,- This brings you up to a total price between €620,- and €740,- and then you have a very decent pc that could run Cities:Skylines and is quite easy to upgrade. The only things you have to do yourself is screw the motherboard in the case, place the harddrive, place the PSU and place the graphics card into the PCIe slot. And this little bit of work could actually save you a lot of money. However, prices could vary depending on country, thus prices could be lower or higher than the prices I've listed above. In my experience choosing your own hardware is much better than buying a desktop from the store. Often those pc's have a lot of features that you don't want and have cheap components that you want to choose more carefully (the PSU is an example). However, I could also imagine that you would rather buy a computer which is ready to use, in that case the information I gave above could still apply, you could look closely to the components of the desktop pc and see if it would be worth it. This could take quite some time and research but in the end it could be worth the effort.

Things got a little bit crazy over here.. Bicycle-lanes are quite important in my city. This led to some problems with intersecting bicycle-lanes with other infrastructure. The bicycle-lane you could see above used to be placed on the ground, which wasn't that big of a deal because there wasn't a lot of infrastructure. However, when I've build the tram-tracks you could see on the left it was kind of impossible to build a good bicycle-lane without intersecting the track. That's why I've made this spiraling bridge. The bicycle-path goes up to 30m. Even though the height difference is big the slope isn't ridiculous, but still it's quite sportive to cycle here..

Since the expansion with trams is released it might be a good idea to bump this thread. Here are some roads with trams in my city. I've been working on trams since the expansion Snowfall got released. Before there were a lot of bus-lines which was kind of expensive (the bus-lines themselves didn't make a profit and in order to make it work properly I needed buildings like the bus-terminal and several bus-depots). Now I've deleted all the city-lines. The only bus-lines I have are for long-distance traffic (the villages around the city and industrial areas). Furthermore I'm upgrading roads and placing tram-lines. However, this has some difficulties, a lot of roads have bicycle-lanes, which makes it kind of impossible to combine bicycle-traffic with trams. This makes it a challenge to build good tram-lines. Even though this is a difficulty I already have 6 lines and I intend to build more. It's not being widely used at the moment but I expect usage to increase once the tram-lines cover the entire city.

I've done a check on the specs of the Toshiba laptop on this website. However, it seems like this laptop isn't very good for Cities:Skylines (link), the graphics card is a problem. Especially because you have a shared graphics card this could lead to some problems. These cards share the memory with RAM, this means that the RAM has to process certain aspects of the game (like simulation, mods and other game-mechanics) next to the graphics. Having separate memory on your graphics-card is weigh more efficient and leads to better results. In general I recommend using a desktop pc for Skylines. The game is quite demanding. Looking at power-supply the difference between desktop pc's and laptops is quite big. PC's often have a power supply of around 500 Watts. The power supply of laptops is often around 70-80 Watts. This difference usually means that the CPU, Graphics Card etc. is less good in a laptop than in a desktop PC (for instance an i7 mobile CPU is weigh slower than an i7 desktop CPU).