UrbanLegend

Airports? I know that it already includes airports, but it would be cool to have highly customizable airport zones. Similarly seaports and rail cargo stations. Maybe like a whole logistics DLC that lets you create working intermodal container yards, rail yards and seaports? Park Life could have included golf courses and beaches.

I noticed that too.

It would be cool if there was a golf course park with the new DLC. I'm fine with the sequel being a few years off. I'd like to see the next version to be a big leap forward, not an incremental upgrade. Really between all the DLCs and mods, Cities Skyline is almost a completely different game from it's original release.

I don't have a name for it yet. I'm going for a large American-style seaport city with a mix of very old and ultra modern. Lot of New York and Boston influence. Not just the cities themselves, but also the sprawl and satellite cities surrounding them. Old street grids coming together at different angles.

"Kill the city builder"? No. If anything Cities Skyline did the opposite IMHO. It demonstrated what is possible and reinvigorated the genre after the lackluster SimCity 2013 and several dull Cities XL entries. I mean don't forget SimCity 4 is like 15 years old. Which is not to say the OP dosen't have a point. CS is sometimes clunky. It often feels like an unpolished "early access" game. It's more of a city "painter" than a sim. Ultimately the problem is that the technology isn't quite there yet to have a city simulator that lets you model an actual city in 3D. New York City is over 300 sq miles and several times larger if you include the greater metro area. But do you really want to be plopping down streets and zones from New Jersey to Connecticut?

Space Engineers is an interesting choice for comparison. Much like Cities Skylines, that's another game I feel where the technology hasn't quite kept up with the player communities imagination.

Well..yes and no. Let me explain what I mean. For the standard little 4x4 buildings, sure, you zone like any other city builder. But for large skyscrapers or buildings that occupy a city block (say 8x16), you need to manually plop RICO buildings. That's fine I guess. For the visual cues, I was thinking more like SimCity 4 where a building would look sketchy if it dropped in value. Like you would have the same building, but props would change to indicate high crime or whatnot. I don't think CS does that. And maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think CS has "rush hours" in the early morning and evenings where traffic increases because everyone is off to or from work at the same time. I don't get a sense that traffic fluctuates at all during the day.

I would love it if Cities Skyline was more of a city simulator than a city "painter". I really don't want to hand craft every building and prop. I want to build transportation and other infrastructure, zone, and then have the buildings develop organically. I want to see the buildings in the neighborhood provide visual cues as to what's going on with respect to value, education, abandonment and so on. I want to see my Cims travel to and from work, school and recreational activities at appropriate times of day.

Yeah, I don't know why "death care" is such a thing. Like is body disposal a major consideration in civic planning? But I can see it being important if you are simulating every aspect of every Sim (or Cim)'s life from birth through schooling through career, recreation and death. I think that's what they tried to do with SC2013, which is why the cities were so small. CS, with the 81 tiles mod, your cities almost become too big to micromanage at that level.

Ltw - I think those are all great ideas. Ultimately, I think it's a technical issue of simulating the interactions and economics for 50, 100, 500k residents or more. SimCity 4 abstracted this a bit since the technology was nowhere near being able to simulate individual citizens. Cities XL created what felt to me like an artificial class structure. SimCity 2013 tried to do this, but people were put off by the tiny Hoboken sized city lots. For Cities Skyline, I would simplify what you suggested to make it more like SC4. A lot of the metrics like wealth, crime, happiness are already there. I would just add more visual cues through props and decals to show what is going on in the neighborhood. The same house or apartment condo would be covered in graffiti or have broken windows and trash in the yard if the scores were low. Higher scores would display similar indicators.

I thought CO did a great job adding things I wanted to the original game. Day/Night cycles and nightlife, weather and disaster (although I rarely use), new transportation options. Moders have taken care of much of the rest. But my main complaint with CS, really all city building games since SC4 is that none of them have really combined all the elements to create a living breathing city in the sense of people going to and from work, commuting patterns, neighborhoods gentrifying and decaying and so on. CS is a great city "painter". YouTubeists like Strictoaster and Flux Trance create beautiful cityscapes, but they are really like virtual train sets. I don't really want to plop a bunch of trailers and check cashing shops near my intermodal rail terminal and call it my "wrong side of the tracks" neighborhood. I want a neighborhood to be the wrong side of the tracks because I zoned some light residential and commercial between the rail yard and the highway and that's what developed. I also think some of the graphics are a bit clunky and feel "Beta" version. Like why do I need to use a half dozen mods and a dozen more props to make a realistic highway interchange?

Continuing my work on Iron River Valley region. The main city that sprung up around the Iron River Steel Mill is now called Ironchester. Growth is blocked to the north by Evergreen Hills State Park, so most of the sprawl has extended to the south and west over the river. There are some upscale housing developments and Evergreen Hills Country Club to the north. Fairview University is to the east. Not pictured to the south are some industrial areas such as some large distribution centers, a chemical plant, cement factory and the Iron River Valley Rail Yards (an older version can be seen in the Show You Rails thread). For the Downtown Ironchester, I really want to keep that feeling of an older, mid sized industrial city like Pittsburg or Buffalo that is gradually transitioning to modern. Mostly older buildings, but a couple modern skyscrapers that look like the architect tried to blend the old with the new. The old Viaduct District (so named for the stone viaduct that leads to one of the three main river crossings). Iron River Valley Mall the north of Evergreen Mountain. The farmland to the left (north) will be a site of future housing development. Cement factory south of Ironchester. A chemical plant is also visible in the upper left corner.

That's fantastic! But you should get the orange traffic barrel, traffic cones and saw-horse style barrier props.

Night time at the Iron River Valley Rail Yard. This yard isn't just for show. Most of the region's railroad tracks funnel through and around the yard, so many of the trains in the pic are actually moving. (one of the traffic mods prevents the trains from tracks occupied by prop cars). Aerial shot of the yard at sunrise.

Iron River Valley I want it to feel like an old Rust Belt steel town. The map is Snake River (which I think is based off of Ohio). The steel mill below makes extensive use of RICO buildings and props and is largely inspired by the Bethlehem Steel plant in Pennsylvania near where I went to college. From the regional shot, you can see the 1 mile square Public Land Survey System grids, invoking a location further west such as Michigan.

I've been actually looking at maps and sat images of cities other than New York and Chicago. New York, I see out my window and Chicago is too much a "Jeffersonian Grid" city. Although technically, thanks to Thomas Jefferson and his Public Land Survey System, pretty much any American city west of Pittsburgh will consist of a grid of "superblocks" of avenues, a half mile on a side. Look at the Theme Editor mod along with custom growables. It lets you be very specific in what you let grow in your districts. For example, I have themes like "brownstones only" for a Brooklyn feel. "Old Brick buildings" to give an old manufacturing city or historic district look. Various suburban styles that are more realistic than the default houses. "Warehouse" industrial zones. Ultra modern. So on and so forth. Look at the various city road layout styles - European cities have lots of random narrow streets. Newer American cities tend to be built n the PLSS grid and spread out with few skyscrapers outside the urban center. Cities constrained by geography like New York, Seattle and San Fran are basically several massive intersecting grids.

I kind of feel like the fact that I need Move It, Sharp Junction Angles / Road Anarchy, No Pillers, Slope Limiter, Fine Road Heights and some terrain editing mods in order to make decent looking complex interchanges and highways means they kind of half-assed developing the road making interface. Even with those mods, splitting 4 or six lane roads into two 2 lane one ways, off ramps or highways still looks a bit wonky.

It's actually pretty cool. You can adjust the "difficulty" to affect how badly your cities get flooded (including not at all). It's not just flooding either. You have the ability to add all sorts of drains and outflows to manage water flow. I tried it out in a relatively flat desert city. Immediately, I had trouble with my sunken highways and rails flooding until I install drain intakes. The other problem was finding a place to put the water.

A couple suggestions: Most cities don't have hundreds of 40 story skyscrapers. Unless you are recreating Hong Kong or Manhattan or something out of a dystopian nightmare, limit your central business district to about 10 square blocks of custom skyscrapers and growables. Surrounded by a mile or so of high density with skyscrapers turned off, surrounded by low-density sprawl American cities west of the Ohio River are often built on the Public Land Survey System or "Jeffersonian grid". Basically a grid of "sections" 1 mile on a side, divided into half and quarter sections. You can see it in mozymoo's recreation of LA and in other cities like Chicago, Las Vegas and Phoenix, AZ. For CS, I recommend using half-sections 100 squares to a side. Don't be afraid to deviate from the grid every now and then to conform to terrain or just to add variety. Cities should follow the terrain The older the city, the more dense and irregular the roads (compare Boston to Las Vegas). The "slope limiter" mod is great for helping you design your rail, avenues and highways to confirm to the terrain, rather than creating unrealistically weird, super-steep ramps. This will give your city infrastructure a realistic winding, flowing look Avoid huge swaths of uniform zoning. Yes, you can have large office parks, industrial sectors and suburban housing developments. But mix a bit of commercial with offices and industrial (i.e. corporate offices near the factory or local stores and shops where the workers might eat lunch). Maybe add some high density condo complexes among the low density homes. Don't think in terms of one big city. Think in terms of neighborhoods and boroughs (using the district painter). How do people enter and exit each district? What is the purpose of the district?

Intersection of two major highways near the downtown of my desert city Al Madina. Mostly just a directional T interchange with a number of additional exits to connect with service roads and three major surface avenues.

You know what? I'm not an IP lawyer, but once a user makes their content available, it shouldn't just disappear from everyone's computer if the owner throws a fit. "Submissions become the property of the company" and all that.

That's my main beef with the game. The max growable building size is 5x5 of those little grid boxes. Which to the scale of the roads is about the footprint of a townhouse or one of those pencil thin supertall residential towers you see in Manhattan. And that's great for building dense Brooklyn style neighborhoods. But it sucks for creating central business districts or office parks where the footprint of the building is the size of a city block. And if you have malls, warehouses and big box stores, they might take up more than a few blocks of space.