CorpusDei

Felt like mucking about with the map editor and used terrain.party as a starting point - the area around Fort William in Scotland... I didn't expand the area to include Ben Nevis as that may well have been overkill and the region is hilly enough! Basically, a large loch, surrounded by hills and mountains - I suspect this is going to be a challenge to actually get a large city built on if/when I ever start playing on this map Anyway - some screenies (I really hope this forum has an automatic resize on how images are displayed)... Overview: And some scenic shots:

Looks awesome ... but would it not be the Yakuza rather than the Triads in Japan? -_^   </pedant>

I wouldn't be at all surprised if, a few months down the line, they just roll that initial pre-order content into a patch or make it available as (perhaps paid-for) DLC... wouldn't be the first time that's happened with games; pre-order exclusives aren't always exclusive in perpetuity.

I think it could be done properly now - but you'd need to build the engine from scratch I fear, rather than relying on Unity... and for what's really a pretty niche gaming market that's a big ask, even bigger if you consider that CSL was built by just 13 people. As an aside, I play both SC4 and CSL. In SC4 I enjoy "fighting the engine" using mods to try and get it to do things the game was never originally intended to do - hide the grid, build overpasses, seafronts (although my latest industrial dockland has just about driven me crazy) and so on - building a functional city is, weirdly, almost secondary ... almost. With CSL it's more about building that functional city - managing the traffic, zones, happiness of the Cims and the supply and demand that's just beginning to bite me on the bum ("not enough products to sell" - too many offices, not enough industry). So while the games are ostensibly very similar, for me they "scratch different itches"...

Much as I like CSL - gotta admit both SC4 (SPAM) and C(X)XL have got it well and truly beat in the farms department (actually, the farms in CXL are probably one of its best features). This is one of the better farms I've managed in CSL: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=447312247

Odd thing with Skylines is that I'm having more problems balancing the budget now that my city is up to about 85k residents than I was when it was smaller... I suspect it's because I've now got some massive spawling 'burbs; they still need services even though the population density is lower and, therefore, generates less tax income. Every other city builder I've played (from the original SimCity on the Amiga) starts tricky(ish) but soon gets to a point where you could fill all the public swimming pools with cash, ya know, if the game engine permitted

Only problem is that it causes occasional city-wide blackouts when it draws 1.21 gigwatts of power...

Well it's already in place for industry so I doubt it's completely impossible to apply to residential - but the residential buildings would need to know what "type" they are. However, the fact that European buildings are assigned to the Euro-themed maps implies, to me anyway, that residential buildings must hold information that could be used for that somewhere... I doubt it would be a simple fix but I'm pretty sure it must be possible.

Then you're doing something wrong; good transit routes are basically key to everything in C:SL - that and adjusting your budgets - get those right and everything runs relatively smoothly (until you expand somewhere without taking into account the effect that'll have on traffic elsewhere). Get it wrong and you'll have massive traffic snarl ups that prevent garbage trucks, ambulances, hearses and so on from reaching their destinations in a timely manner and the complaints will rack up, buidlings get abandoned and so on... ... which is a good thing - it seemed like pointless busywork to me which distracted from the core "building a city" part of the game; there were some good points with SC2013 - but the oil/mineral magnate path to build the HQ wasn't one of them - especially since the "cities" weren't big enough to really house that kind of industry, for example: Neither C:SL nor SimCity 2013 actually challenge the player much; they give you a playground and you challenge yourself - personally I prefer C:SL as it doesn't try so hard to force in artificial challenges (monuments are about it - and I've not even bothered attempting to unlock them yet).

So very, very much this.

You can till make overpasses with the tree road. The trees just don't show. Oh yeah - you're right; I'm sure it wouldn't let me raise roads when I had either grass or tree-lined lanes selected... my bad :|

Just to eliminate the obvious - you are using a standard road right; not one with grass/trees on?

I find the standard power stations slightly laughable (the same was true, to a lesser extent, of the SimCity games as well) - they're tiny; half a dozen oil power plants for what basically amounts to a large-ish town? I tend to use sub-stations early on as you'd not really have a power station of any stripe to run a small town, for instance: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=437070032 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=421612123 Later on, when I can happily drop a million credits on a power plant: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=407843049 Only problem is though, I think because of the size of it, the police don't seem to be able to cover it. Even if you plop a Police HQ next to this building it'll still generate crime.

... Planet Rock?

I don't think those count either - zoned up a load of light residential and was able to place trees; though maybe trees are destroyed by roads, I'm not sure. I'm running a downloaded map (Miksatonic I think, based on the fictional area in the HP Lovecraft stories) which has quite heavy tree coverage to start ... and then I installed the Tree Brush mod; hit the + key a few times and you get a tree painter akin to that in SC4. Then go utterly OTT around the your highway system and you'll find the tree cap isn't that hard to hit

It doesn't seem to, or there may be a separate cap for buildings/parks with trees on; I can still plop parks with trees even when I could no longer actually plant trees (got bulldozer happy to remove some excess in the end).

In and of itself I don't think this would be a bad thing, but without the control infrastructure in place it's simply a no-go. If you're paying for something there's a certain expectation of some degree of quality (ok, maybe not with Goat Simulator...) so a paid for mod should be a) worth the money, b) not cause any compatibility issues in itself and c) do what it says on the tin; in the UK you can get Trading Standards involved if an item is not fit for purpose, though I've no idea if this has been tested in court with regards to digital goods. To do any of this well, mods would need to be "signed" by the developers. It can work in this way - if you ever played X3 Terran Conflict a lot of the content there came from the XTended modding team (who made the XTended mod for X3 Reunion). The developers, Egosoft, worked very closely with the modders to roll many aspects of the XTended mod into the game and then pushed it out as a new release - everybody wins. Without some sort of digital signing in place it leaves everything too open - from "rip-off" or really poor quality mods or, conversely, to modders actually being legally liable for their mods (in theory). That's the infrastructure that simply isn't in place on Steam at the moment and I don't even think it would be possible (or desirable) for a small studio, like Colossal Order, to actually vet all the submitted "paid for" mods and sign those deemed worthy.

Depots. All local bus lines converge at a depot, and there are many depots. Each depot also has a metro entrance (once the city is big enough to warrant a metro). The metro also links up all other depots, any ports and railway systems. This way your Cims are pretty much never more than 3 stops away from anywhere, they can: take the bus to anywhere on that route take the bus to a depot and then onto another bus to their desintation take the bus to a depot and then take the metro to their destination (I've dropped metro stations at universities, around the CBD and high tourism areas) take the bus to a depot and then take the metro to another depot and catch a bus from there to their destination It's probably not perfect but it seems to work well enough for me. Also footpaths and pedestrian bridges. I've managed to massively reduce congestion at a couple of (badly planned) intersections by simply providing footbridges; the pedestrians take the bridge rather than snarl the traffic up at crossings it seems.

As an aside, with regards to limits... I discovered there's a limit to the number of trees you can have on a map yesterday. I really need to tone down my tree planting addiction :|

That's fine if you want to edit assets on a per-instance basis but I suspect being able to attach parks to pavements would be an neater long-term solution. Not sure I fancy the idea of hacking the hexcode to be honest, ModTools looks saner!

Heh - the abundance of Matt325b's BATs here is starting to make it look like one of my cities - nice!

That would actually do me nicely - in SC4 I tend to build like little blocks of flats with a shared communal garden (i.e. no road access) the closest I've managed in CSL is tree ploppables... is it the traffic++ mod? http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=409184143

Ummmm ... somewhere in that mess : https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.5183453,-1.9974667,12z I was kinda happy when I discovered someone had actually had a crack at making Spaghetti Junction (Gravelly Hill Interchange, M6 J6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelly_Hill_Interchange in CS:L ... they must be mad!