Marla_Singer

If you don't have the curiosity to even try CSL, that's good for you and it should be respected. Many of the older SC4 players are like you and will not even try CSL. Some still play SC4, most don't. However, the good thing with CSL is that we have now younger players, who actually never played SC4, and those finally have a game to discover and enjoy the city-building genre. In that regard, yes, the "crown" has been passed. Thanks to CSL, city builders are not dead. And we could only be grateful to Colossal Order for this.

Alright so at last episode we were about to start creating the rail network. And here it goes. Important notice, for those of you who haven't yet downloaded the terraform tool mod, I strongly advise you to do so. It's really THE must-have tool for anyone who want to build realistic railway networks. Here's the link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=411095553 So in order to build my rail infrastructure I decided to go first with cargo. Indeed more and more trucks are generating congestion on my roads and I really need to find a solution. So I've built my first freight station right in the middle of my industrial area, directly connected to the outside for exports. My final objective is to get a harbor in downtown, as well as a main railway station for passengers. Both infrastructures will have their dedicated tracks. In order to prepare all that, I need to build a viaduct loop to connect my initial freight station. Meanwhile, the city continues to grow progressively. The wind turbines from the beginning are starting to generate a high volume of noise pollution. So I stopped to devellop them on my hill and use instead the new water version I just unlocked. And there it is! My city development has reached the area where I want to build my central station! Considering my region is rather hilly, I don't want to waste too much flat terrain with my infrastructures. Hence I decided to sunken my rail within the city center. Meanwhile, farming trucks start again to cross my city in order to get access to the freight station. Another one in the agricultural area seems required. That wasn't planned first, and I need to build quite a huge rail viaduct in order to make the connection. Fortunately I still have enough room to make all that quite smooth. The city is booming. That feels good! Wind turbines, even at sea, aren't enough anymore. I unlocked the solar plant which apparently has a quite good production capacity. Let's hope it will allow me to breath a bit more regarding power requirements. In the same time, I finally unlocked the water treatment plant, thanks to which I will finally put an end to those ugly dark waters. It is now time to devellop my city westward. I'm building a new motorway in order to prepare further expansion. Now that the city generates a lot of money, I can already prepare my freight rail connection to the future harbor. It's in trying to build those ramps that I'm really growing impatient for tunnels to come in the game! Everything is starting slowly to get organized. I'm polishing a bit my Northern connection to the industrial area in installing a new mall. I'm progressively getting rid of my wind turbines atop the hill, and build instead a nice park. Harbor unlocked! Right on time. For the matter, I'm installing my harbor exactly where the real Ajaccio harbor is located in real life, right in front of the historical city. I won't be able to recreate this one unfortunately! I'm polishing the development of my southern suburb of Campo dell'Oro, right to the mouth of the Gravona river. Unfortunately, the polluted waters take time to get washed away. Let's be patient. My motorway starts to get really congested. And my buses alternatives are saturated, I will need to find other solutions. My solution: building a commuter rail network to serve the future suburbia. This will require massive expansion of my rail infrastructures even in downtown... This is coming next on a future post!

Thanks guys for your fast replies! Alright so in the beginning of the game, we don't have access to all infrastructures and zoning. Hence I decided to start my city not at its central core, but in the suburban area of Campo dell'Oro. That's the place where is located the airport in real life, but it won't be the case in my city. I need more room to devellop. The small town grows slowly. I do what I can to hide my dumps. But as you've probably seen above, what worries me the most is that streams are pushing my polluted waters directly to my pretty beach. I will need years to wash that! I'm inaugurating my first mall directly near my beach. Now things are starting to look nice. And here we are, I finally could unlock my first new terrain tile. My first action is to make sewers more distant, but unfortunately I fear it is too late to save my beach. There it is: industrial specialization unlocked! I can build my first farms. Building specialization is very good to absorb the huge industrial demand we have at start. Unfortunately it's not necessarily easy to keep getting the low-skilled workforce it requires. Alright I know, we've seen that already a million times, but yes, I couldn't resist to add a little landmark to my city. I've located it on the Aspretto peninsula. Agricultural trucks generate lots of congestion in crossing the whole city to reach the motorway. If I want to solve that problem, I have no other choice than to unlock the neighbouring tile in order to create a new direct junction between my agricultural area and the motorway. I can't wait to finally reach 12k population in order to FINALLY get rid of those ugly polluted waters... Now this is it. The city extends in direction of the central city of Ajaccio. Let's admire the nice transition between the motorway and the avenue (it may sound silly but it took me a long time to end with this). And the dense zoning gets unlocked right on time! We're finally touching the real thing: changing this hamlet into a real city! Small town is becoming bigger... The development is now fastly accelerating. I've already unlocked offices... and trains ! Let's follow that in the next post.

Hello everyone, this is my first ever city journal. Here goes with the head principles of my city: first I want to represent as faithfully as possible the region of Ajaccio on the island of Corsica, which is in real life an average metro area with a population of about 100k; then to build my own city on it and explore where the game would lead me. My city will be imaginary and I hope that it in the end it will turn into a thriving metropolis, far bigger than the original. However, I want it too still look realistic so I won't necessarily go with crazy overpasses and so on. My given mission is that the place still looks pretty in the end, to create a place where I would like to live in. Building the map Ajaccio is located on a rather pretty large bay surrounded by mountains and forests. However, it still hosts rather flat areas which are perfect to make rise a city. Thanks to the magic of video games, the area even hosts oil... but we cannot exploit it untill later in the game. I've shared the map on Steam, so if you're interested you can download it from here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409634464 Here's the full area with the 25 unlockable tiles. Since there's a lot of water and mountains I won't hesitate to use the mod allowing me to unlock them all in the end. All real beaches in the area have been reproduced faithfully, I had tons of fun using Google Maps. The mountain! Unexpectedly, since we've discovered oil in the region, Corsica started to build motorways in its mountains, something which doesn't exist in real life. Once we've mastered the use of the slope tool to prepare terrains before laying roads and rails, we discover a great freedom to build very realistic infrastructures. I've posted a guide here : Now that everything is done with landscaping. It's time to settle this new territory! I will go further about it on next post.

First thing, if you like SC2013 more than CSL, that's good for you. To each their own as we often say. However, I'm simply correcting this specific point because it's just not true. Colossal knew perfectly how to manage an agent-based simulation based on a 24 hours cycle, they did so in CIM2. They've actually chosen to not do it in CSL, because it actually brings more harm than good. And having played the game, I actually fully agree with their choice. The reason for that is that considering the very large size of maps, simulated traffic actually takes several minutes in order to cross the whole city. Hence you would need your 24 hours cycle to run very slowly to have people getting at the office before it's time to leave back home. In CIM2, that was 24 minutes, but it turned out to be too short. Meanwhile, your rush hours only happened during specific slots that you had to wait for in order to see how your traffic is handled, then you had long minutes of total emptyness during night time. That turned out to be just dull. Overall, the continuous time from CIM1 worked a lot better and was much funnier, as you could directly experiment tweaks on your traffic and see the impact. I'm personally glad this has been taken back in CSL. And sorry to say, but you get much more convincing traffic flows with continuous time and fixed jobs and houses for your cims, then in having sims going to the first available house. Now once again, if you have fun with your game and I do as well with mine, then everyone's happy and that's all which matters.

If you disable death, your city will fastly become over-populated as Cims do reproduce themselves. Now what, would be interesting is that, instead of leaving the city, the people who has no place to live would devellop shanty towns. I know that's not how we dream our cities but most cities at least once in their history have experienced them.

When I see videos such as this one. I just say wow. And that's only 5 weeks after release. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlIXneOwy1M

Ctrl+Z in the map editor only works for terraforming (editing terrain heights), hence it can only be used once terraforming tool toggled. However considering the soft hills you're building on, it may have no visible effect to undo terraforming after having built the road. My map is pretty mountainous so that "undo" thing really helped me a lot to put my rails and motorways without disfiguring my landscape.

Oh. And of course, to answer the question, the road is layed perfectly flat. No ugly bump.

You should first prepare the terrain with a bit of terraforming. 1. Select the "slope" mode 2. Right click on the highest point in which your road will be. 3. Go back to your starting point and drag left click to the highest point... this will generate a perfectly soft slope. 4. Lay the road in both directions. 5. Now go back to terraforming and press ctrl+Z to erase all your unwanted terrain changes. The road will remain perfect, and the rest of the landscape will get back to its natural shape. 6. If you're on a very steep terrain, you can even generate bridge in simply changing the direction of your one way (exclamation mark)

The fact EA has closed down Emeryville gives a good hint on the answer, unfortunately. The problem of city builders isn't that they don't sell, but that they require time and thinking to be produced. CO may be a team of only a dozen people, but it's been 6 years now that they are working on it. Their very smart idea was to start with the succesful Cities in Motion, which allowed them to generate revenues while developping their experience in agent-simulation without needing to develop all the other elements of a city builder in the same time. With CIM2, they've brought the 3D engine, so they really had solid foundations on which they could start to work on CSL in 2013. So yes, I think it's pretty honnest to say CSL is more the result of 6 years of development rather than only 2.

That's probably because you've bought it on Steam. That's how it was for me... Steam automatically registered the serial number from my download. The game has various useful shortcuts which I learnt to use constantly: B - bulldoze on/off space - pause game W,A,S,D - navigate on the map R - tilt the camera to get an orthoimage perfect view from atop (very useful to build perfect road/rail curves) F - tilt the camera down to control elevations of what you work on (very useful to control the height of bridges) 1,2,3 - change speed

Sorry I haven't checked the video but a tip if you want to have nice esthetic roads is to level the terrain before laying motorways and rail. I agree it can be expensive (I needed to download a money-cheat mod because of this) but the result is great. Instead of using the flattening tool, the best is to use the soft slope tool : firstly, click right where you want your road to end, then hold left mouse button from your starting point untill meeting that end point again. You will get a nice soft slope. Bumpy roads and rails are no more. This works in-game with the terraforming tool mod. If you use it in the map editor, once you've layed your road, you can even press Ctrl+Z multiple times to restore the terrain as it was before you layed the road... The road will stay as you build it and the terrain will be back to its original state. The result looks totally natural : The game generally needs a big height difference to propose you building a bridge. So when I want to build a small bridge with a low height, I actually dig deep all the area which I want below the bridge, forcing the game to propose a bridge. Then, once the bridge built, I level it back in its initial shape. This can give very natural look to motorways. Here's an example :

Well... all business simulation games tend to have this flaw... it's hard at first and after a while money grows on trees. And guess what? That's actually the same in real life. The whole thing comes from what economists call the economies of scale. The fact that the more your produce, the cheaper it is per unit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale Indeed, that's not in money that lies the interest of the game, it's in growing a city and making it work properly. It's the simulation which matters! Of course some can believe that "you can buy all solutions to your traffic issues", as I've been told once, but that's not really the question: you're the dude who need to solve the puzzle, and you're free to do so the way you personally consider the best, according to your own tastes. Personally, I always considered money to be a nice athmospheric feature in that kind of games, but it has never been the core issue. It's too easy to cheat with money when you have the time on your side. Even with the slightest positive budget, how hard is it to simulate 200 years in fast speed and become super rich this way? That's simply not the purpose, to be rich. The purpose is to build a super city, to explore the limits of your own imagination and to see where it guides you. Now this being said, for those having fun with figures and budget balance, a recession mode could be interesting. And considering how the game is simulated, it may be brought in in various interesting ways: real estate bubble exploding, commodities price falling down if you're an exporter or moving up if you're an importer. Maybe there could be fun things to be added in there.

You're totally right. A good movie can only be judged as so if we still remember it 10 years after. The same is true with a video game. However I disagree about your parallel drawn with SC13 because of their obvious and huge differences in reception. SC13 succeeded to draw very high expectations one year before its release thanks to a great promotional campaign: the team was huge and solidly financed, the new 3D engine was sold as a revolution, and the trailer were indeed very promising. So promising that it incited me to buy my new computer. But it turned out that I didn't even buy the game. The release was such a disaster, the price of the game so expensive that I actually preferred to wait until it all calm down; and then, I realised that the maps will never get bigger than their vanilla version size and this has immediately killed my will to purchase the thing for such a high price. Cities: Skylines is a very different beast. The SC4 core fans remained totally cold to its announcement. I personally knew the potential of a city builder developed by those who created CIM but when I was talking about it to SC4 fans, their answers were only skeptical, probably because of all the past deceptions. It's only very late that Simtropolis started to wake up, actually, just the week before release, when in-game videos started to spread over the web. At this point, one month after release, we only know that the key principles of the game work great, but indeed we have no clue whether or not it will turn out repetitive and boring after a while. Of course the older city builder fans we are will probably stay the longer, but the younger dude, who never played any SimCity at all, will he stay or not? It's him who'll tell us if a renewed community can stick around Cities: Skylines or not. At this point, I'm feeling very optimistic, but you're right in saying we can never be sure.