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I'm continuing to mess with this in my city, my whole industry area is basically shut down due to lack of materials even though there are regular rail and ship cargo shipments coming through to multiple stations in the heart of the industrial sector. I'm wondering if I'm running up against one of the agent limits? My population is only about 130K. Seems like industry just refuses to pick up goods for itself. There isn't much traffic in the industrial area, mostly because about 75% of the businesses are abandoned.

I've had the same issue with two different cities. It weirdly seems to get worse as my cities grow bigger past the 100k mark, even though my cargo connections (rail and ship) have both been improved as I grow. My traffic is also pretty good, no major bottlenecks. Lots of "no raw materials" over industrial buildings and I've given up on coal and oil power plants completely. At this point I'm convinced that imports/exports are at least somewhat bugged.

I both understand this criticism and fail to see why it's fundamentally different from any Sim City game. (I skipped SC2013 but played the rest) For me, "building a larger, nicer city" is the only goal I need, and the tools to do so are pretty good in this game. The game does miss some civic buildings that SC always had, I would like to have: museums, more government buildings, zoos, more stadiums, libraries, etc. but custom content is already making up some ground. And as you said, expansion packs and DLC should flesh things out more. Again, I didn't play 2013, but if you think this is a snoozefest, trying playing vanilla SC4. Call it barebones if you like, I think those bones are an excellent start.

I would enjoy this. I've been checking the workshop every single day since the games release and every day I find 4 or 5 if not more really exciting new assets or mods that improve the game. It would be nice to have a place to share the best of those finds here.

Well... you can download mods on simtropolis but I think most of the ones on here are also on steam. I doubt any other website has much unique original content considering the game just recently came out and the steam workshop is the default place for mods. I agree that 90% of the stuff on steam is crap but there are hundreds of really great mods and buildings on there too. I recommend sorting by "most popular" and once you find some authors you like, follow those people so that you can also get a "followed authors" feed of only stuff that you're interested in.

I do have to admit I miss Region play. For all of the flaws (the endless commuter loops annoyed me to no end) I at least liked the sense of being able to spend years on one giant project. When I start a new city in Skylines it feels like I am abandoning the old one but in SC4 I was just always working on the next door neighbor. I have a feeling that this was probably the secret to the game's 10+ year lifespan for many. I wonder if it would be possible to mod a similar system into C:S - just a simple visual display of your savegames, and eventually some neighbor deals etc.

Those are all great points, and I think it's very true that different people play these games for vastly different reasons so of course this is a complicated debate. I have seen many people on other websites say that C:S isn't challenging enough, or that it's too hard, but I think I align with many here who just want to make visually interesting cities. Personally, after playing Skylines and looking at those screenshots now, the isometric view just kills any realism for me. That's not how perspective works in real life, at all. As much as I love all of the beautiful BATs, those shots just look like nicer versions of all the Sim video games I grew up with in the 90s. Not try to argue anything here, I'm just really enjoying the full 3D.

Great job with these, much needed variety that looks good but doesn't stick out too much.

I understand where you're coming from with the criticism about building sizes, but other than that I can't help but totally disagree. I've never seen a single screenshot from SC4, not even the heavily modded, heavily photoshopped stuff from all of the wonderful CJs here, that looks "photo-realistic". The isometric camera view was great for it's time but it's not 2003 anymore and at this point we're comparing apples and oranges. I understand that the textures and details on some of the models people have created for SC4 blow the models from C:S out of the water, but those buildings are for a 12 year old game with an isometric view. Again, apples and oranges. To me, This is a level of realism that SC4 can't compete with on a fundamental level. Vanilla SC4 didn't have much in terms of sprawling industrial areas or parking lots or all of the things that a lot of us like to add for realistic looking cities. These things are already arriving in mods for C:S as well. I love SC4 as well and I will continue to play but to say it is more visually realistic than C:S is crazy.

Not my work, just wanted to pass this mod along that was released today. It's not quite the day/cycle everyone wants (not without lights in all the buildings), but it is pretty fantastic for anyone who wants dramatic lighting effects in your city. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uygg3OFl0og The timing/strength of everything is also fully configurable. Steam link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=420230361&searchtext=

These are really fantastic and realistic. Great job.

A few shots of the CBD in my new bayside city, McKinley. (on the McKinleyville map from the workshop, I'm not very creative with names )

I agree 100% - The traffic simulation is not horribly broken. It's just that all the little cims are using the same GPS optimized route to get to their destinations, and if everyone's going the same way, there's no point in using 3 lanes when they would all have to merge back into one lane eventually later. Sure this isn't realistic because real life drivers don't realize this and cause other problems by driving aggressively, but if you have a mile long backup on a six lane road, it is not the simulations fault. You to provide more options for traffic to get where it wants to go and reduce obstacles (usually poorly designed intersections) that slow it down along the way.

In my experience it's very important to use landfills and cemeteries along with your incinerators and crematoriums. The smaller processing plants have a lower capacity to hold bodies/trash, and oftentimes when you see that they have only sent out "2/27" vehicles, it is because they are already at full capacity. Remember that they need time to process each "shipment" that comes in. The landfills and cemeteries have huge capacities (as long as you remember to empty them when they eventually fill up) and will constantly bring in more bodies/trash and then send their vehicles right back out again. I think people ignore this and build only incinerators/crematoriums once they can afford it, which leads to some of the massive emergencies that people complain about. I usually put at least one cemetery in each residential neighborhood and build 2-3 major landfill centers with good highway access around the city. And then of course I supplement with incinerators and crematoriums. Overall a good storage to processing facility ratio is roughly 50/50.

Sadly SC4 is just too buggy on my new Windows 8.1 laptop, regardless of the mess of transferring plugins and props I would have to transfer to keep my old savegames working. As much as I love it, SC4 has always been a buggy mess on every computer I've played it on, and in the end that's what has killed it for me. 100+ hours into Skylines and I'm not bored yet. It's a different game but the time has just come to move on.

These are all very nice, great work.

Glad these are on the workshop. Great job.

That's good advice. In the case of forest/agricultural there is no choice of course. In my case I had a forest industry which needed employment so I tried to make dumb cims. Good thing though it turned out to not matter. Maybe all the industry specializations are red herrings, after all lvl3 industry seems to employ more highly educated sims than ore/oil. Supposedly the raw materials help the economy or something but that is hard to quantify. I haven't quite figured out the specialized industry either. Supposedly they help by producing raw materials for your generic industry that you would otherwise have to import, but I haven't managed to set up an efficient industrial production chain that doesn't still abandon from lack of workers from time to time.

Hmmm... sorry that stuff's not working for you. Are you on mac or PC?

There are at least two really great recycling center mods on the workshop as well!

To elaborate on this, even though industrial areas complain about overeducated workers, the answer is not to make your cims less educated. Education is is necessary to keep your city profitable and growing, and it is also almost impossible right now to make some neighborhoods less educated than others. The answer is to level up industry to level 3 wherever possible, so that they will actually use educated workers (and pay more taxes and create less pollution.) You also have to be patient and let the simulation catch up. If you zone a huge area of industrial at once there will inevitably be a crash where the whole area abandons until the population has grown enough to fill those jobs. Often they are the last jobs people want to take.

There are several awesome coal plants on the workshop that are more powerful than the default, along with larger and more realistic solar farms, which I use for a more balanced and realistic set up.I also use a mod that makes ore and oil infinite, just because I play at a slow pace and don't want to have to move my industrial areas around constantly. I would hope that they change this in a patch, it seems obvious that an oil field should last at least 10 years, not 6 months. I wouldn't go so far as saying that green propaganda in the game is a bad thing, but just that it's a bit silly to have to plop a million windmills at at the beginning of the game as the most cost effective source of power. Coal should be cheap and dirty, just like in real life and in Sim City. It's worth noting that the theme of the game is somewhat futuristic, with the late game buildings generally becoming available in game year 2030 at the earliest and having things like the space elevator and what not. So I'm sure that's why they decided to make green energy such a focus.

Really loving all of these custom skyscrapers, especially the NYC ones, great work heblem. As a side note, I saw these size comparisons posted in the workshop comments by steam user "obv", and I thought they were interesting: I personally do not mind custom buildings being scaled down a little bit, just because the biggest growable skyscrapers are so tiny in comparison to all of these user made buildings, but unfortunately the modding community has not settled on a standard scale yet. I've been very disappointed by a few buildings that were way too small to do justice to the real thing and some are just too big to fit in my current city since i'm not making Dubai or Manhattan. Thankfully it is simple enough to open up the asset editor and tweak the sizes of things for my own use.

It looks like 81 tiles might be possible after all, and coming sooner rather than later: http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding/comments/30fv0h/experimenting_with_81_tiles/