oneupcanuck

After about a year of play time on and off I have finally completed my city. I achieved my goals of constructing the Chrysler, Empire State buildings and Football Stadium megastructures but I could not entirely fill the map due to my system bogging down under the intense strain the simulation was generating. Too bad the game only can use 1 cpu core. I never thought I would enjoy this game more than Sim City 4 but I really did have many hours of fun creating this huge metropolis. It's amazing to see the finished product after all the work that went into it. It took so long becuase I like to micromanage every detail about how the city is layed out. I only started to use the auto-zoning tools near the end so I think the city has a unique and realisitic look. Hope you enjoy the picture gallery and thanks for checking out my journal. See the pic gallery here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150463942552285.359232.539127284&type=3&l=bfb892cf28

It's been a long time since I did any update but I have been playing a lot. Going to upload a bunch of new pics later today. THe city is massive now with 1.4 million pop. I'm pretty darn proud of the virtual place I made. Never thought I could like a city sim more than SC4.

I haven't updated in a while becuase I've been frantically racing towards 500,000 pop so I can get highways! During this period of rapid development I ran into major traffic issues. The main reason for this is becuase I built most of the new heavy industry sectors far away on a small flat strip of shore between the ocean and sheer cliffs. There is only one main access corridor but it's an expressway. This expressway runs the entire lenght of the industry zone and through the rest of the city. Since residential has become much more dense traffic has begun to build up to the point where even parts of the expressway have heavy traffic. but the real problem is the bottleneck where it turns into an 80 cars /min avenue where it runs thru the industry section with the seaport bfeore going back to an expressway. I built an above/below ground subway system although it is a small one which helped provide a secondary acess method to the industry. It was very difficult constructing above ground and it's a pain to go back underground just to build the stations. I expanded the bus transit lines but they are extremely expensive so I haven't used them extensively. My plan is to build the most efficient road network possible. I 've already started by keeping intersections on expressways and avenues to a minimum and to not use long stretches of 2 lane roads or small streets. Recently I also constructed a small airport on the west of the city which has helped the office sector a lot to provide passenger service. Other notable events were the coming of the Elites! Yes, those ultra snobby super rich have finally moved into town and they sure are picky. I developed a nice neighbourhood just for them with winding quite streets, lots of greenry and ammenities such as the Carrefoure Hypermarket and Cathedral. I've also built another support town to produce holiday resources and expanded the 1st support city which now has massive farm areas with silos to boost production and many oil harvesters to supply the glutenous appetite of my main city's huge industrial might.

So I finally hit 500,000 pop and now I can finally build that big, huge highway through my city that I always wanted right? Wrong! Well, the game's design tools really try their best to prevent you from doing what you want with a highway. First of all, the intersections are huge unmodifiable pieces that must be placed first before building the highway or connecting roads itself. It's very difficult to make things connect properly. For instance, you must use the large luxurious avenue to connect to a avenue/highway interchange,no other types will work. There doesn't seem to be any way to build an elevated highway. As soon as I started raising it, the tool would snap it back to the ground. Since the connection types are so limited it makes it neraly impossible to build a highway running through your city which is kind of the point of having a highway in the 1st place. Since you can't easily run roads under or over the highway, it will instead divide your city in half if you're not careful. After some testing, trial and error I found a way to make it work for my city. As you'll see inthe screen shots below I downgraded the highway to an expressway intersection when I needed it to cross my existing expressway. For the next avenue connection I used a T-interchange which worked well for my situation. For the rest of the highway I plan to build a cloverleaf in the south area near the shore. These types of interesctions let you easily connect highways together and I want to have a highway running east towards my main industry, south towards what will be the future downtown commercial core (on the island) and west to provide quick transportation from a far distance to the commercial area from residential. There will also be north arm which I'm in the progress of building now. The goal is to use the highways to go through the middle of my city to facilitate fast traffic flow from most areas all the way to downtown.

PS: play the metro tutorial, it will explain all you need to konw about laying metro underground at least.

Hi, I recently built my first metro rail line and did run into some challenges but figured it out. The way it works is you have to build the entire line all at once and plop down subway stations as you go. You can also hold shift to raise or lower the line. Sometimes you need to lower the line further underground so it doesn't interfere with infrastructure. You can also make the rail go above ground so you can have a more normal looking rail line which is what I did but it took a lot of work. But you must remember to bring the rail underground again whenver you want to place a station since the only type is a subway station. After you build the line it is still possible to extend the line by clicking the metro station from menu and click directly on an existing metro station alreayd build at the end of a current line. You can also delete metro stations along the line but can never add them again to the middle of the line so you have to plan this very carefully. Also remember metro is insanely expensive. I built a fairly small line that cost me 20,000 / mo so i had to delete some of the stations and switch to a smaller train.

Cities XL 2011 is quite similar to SC4 but the focus is in different areas. You have obviously a much better graphics engine and tools to build better roads and realistic cities with the "packs" so you can make themed areas. Three is more emphasis on building and trading resources here whichis an interesting change. The main differnece is in zone placement, in this game once you place a zone it develops almost immediately and will never change wheras in SC you have to wait for the zone you built to develop and it can be rezoned and the buildings there can change and grow over time. It's a trade off because you have more control in Cities XL over how your city develops but you loose some of the dynamic growth and randomness from Sim City but you had less control and it also made that game more difficult.

I uninstalled my old version of cities xl before installing the new one thinking i had to. I tried backing up my old city but the game doesn't seem to store it as a file i can access anywhere. But if you just leave the old game installed, then install the new one it will prompt if you wanna import.

I know what you mean, I've also been wondering why no company until recently has developed a 3d city sim. I was hoping SC4 would have been 3d but Maxis said current hardware could not support it. Cities XL 2011 is a pretty good game. It has it's issue but I find the different approach to city building a bit refreshing especially the aspect of trading resources and the great road construction tools. It now has something similar to region play but it's for trading resources only but I find it more engaging than SC4's region play due to all the factors of balancing trading. In SC4 region play seemed to be inplace so you could build really large cities across many "maps" but in this game each map is so big you really don't need more than one for each city.

Here we go, my first city in the revamped Cities XL 2011. I used the map "Delta River" to start my city. ( I will upload pics a bit later when I have access). I wanted to build near the edge of the map so I could benefit from a city link nearby and not have to spend a lot of money building roads. My strategy initially is to be very conservative and efficient to build up a profitiable city. The area I chose was a flat valley nestled between two mountain plateau's. I built up a large heavy industry sector within this valley area right to the edge of the map with one main two lane road running through the middle which served as the main corridor of transportation between the small town and the industry. My first big error was not realizing that I could build avenues with higher capacity from the beginning. ( I just didn't notice where they were in the menu) So here I was waiting as my city developed for the avenues to unlock meanwhile my city began to get severely congested by all the traffic. Traffic became gridlocked at around a population of 30,000. Apparently I was doing enough other things right because I kept getting messages saying "despite all the problems your citizens are still happy" and "traffic is totally blocked" lol I tried building an alternate road that snaked up a hillside and down back into the industrial sector and placed skilled worker houses. This area was a bit outside the city proper and although the environment was very appealing, the people hated driving so far to reach city services and unwind at the town bowling alley (which was one of the only entertainments spots in town). Finally at a pop of about 50,000 I got access to the bus system and quickly put in a bus line along that all important tiny road to the industry that was the backbone of my city. The people immediately flocked to the buses and there is now finally some relief. The dirty industry farthest away has now developed and some manufacturing has moved in. Elsewhere in the city I built a harbour port on the coast with a long road connecting it to the city and starting building some hi tech industry. I'm now in the process of building a large avenue on the perimeter of the city and trying to get as many people using it as possible. That's all I have for my first entry. I'll get some pics up soon and I hope you check back from time to time to see how I'm doing. Thanks for reading.

For offices to thrive you need to ensure the following: close to passengers (within access to city links), not affected by pollution, have sufficent access to resources they need to buy, and have enough supply of residence demanding office jobs. You should get familiar with the various analysis tools and overlays that show the limits of your city link, pollution and other factors because all the tools are there to help you strategically set up your city. Goodluck

Originally posted by: YannickMtl Thanks to all of you. But all of you is talking about Omnicorp. But it doesn't help me though. I'm all for building a network of cities, it's what I want to achieve with the game, I want every single city on the planet to exist and each of the cities will have their own identity. But seriously, if I start from scratch again, building a new city again, at what point do you ask yourself that it's time to make the 2nd city? ... and then the 3rd city?, and then 4th? I mean, If I don't buy any tokens from Omnicorp, that means I need the tokens from the other cities. But in exchange of what? What if the other city doesn't want to give anything to the other city. It's way too complicated. I wish I could build all the 150+ maps available. I don't think it's possible to have a functional trading system. And OmniCorp should be available for any city, It's kinda sad that once you make a lot of deals with OmniCorp, you cannot do it again with any other city.quote> The strategy I used was started to build my first city then once citizens started complaining that there wasn't enough fuel or food, I decided to start a 2nd city with the sole purpose of supplying my main city. I started a new city that will be the industrial power with fuel, farms and water. The only thing it doesn't have is holidays. Once I got the 2nd city up and running and started selling the excess fuel and farms to my main city, it's really starting to take off now. So basically just use the support city on an as needed basis whenever they start complaining. I don't really want to build 2 huge cities becuase it would take forever so I"m trying ot focus on just 1 as much as possible.