BlakeMW

Office is actually cyan, not blue (within the RGB color scheme, cyan is an equal mix of green and blue so it's technically as much green as it is blue) Zone types are in pairs: [LowR, HighR], [LowC, HighC], [Ind, Office] and this pairwise arrangement makes it not unsurprising that industry and office are joined. As for why they didn't use a color closer to yellow: I think they wanted to emphasize that office is a different kind of "thing" to industry. They both fit within the "workforce" category (both industry and office are primary job providers) but industry is dirty manufacturing with a heavy dependence on road networks, and office is clean telecommunications with little dependence on roads. So they chose yellow to indicate that industry is dirty, and a sky-like color to indicate that office is clean.

As someone who does some web development programming, all I can say "Hurray!". Evergreen browsers all the way, if everyone was using an evergreen browser it would remove so many compatibility headaches. The pace of technological development in the javascript world is skyrocketing, it is honestly phenomenal how much things have advanced in the last year or two. No company which is big in this field (including Microsoft, with TypeScript and such and the prevalence of javascript on their devices) can be interested in supporting ancient browsers. Although IE9 is "only" about 5 years old, it's javascript engine is only 1/10th as fast as IE10, and IE8 is down somewhere around 1/100th as fast. Trying to force users to upgrade away from IE8 to IE9 (hell, even to competing browsers) is an intelligent move. It allows developers to focus on creating content for the current generation of applications. It should also be noted that one of the things which doubtlessly demolished IE's share of the browser usage, was that Google aggressively forced users to upgrade away from ancient browsers with the policy of only supporting the 2 most recent versions of each browser. So it's not like Microsoft is doing anything radical here with an "upgrade or get lost" policy.

Industry benefits from service buildings such as hospitals, schools and cemeteries in the sense that it helps the industry to level up. Actually schools etc are quite an effective way to level up industry. I normally place a lot of my educational buildings in industry and office to help those zone types level up (as residential and commercial are both stupidly easy to get to max level, and education is basically universal so the schools don't need to be in residential.)

Residential demand is closely tied to demand for workers, which is closely tied to unemployment. You can use the population view to see your unemployment. If unemployment is high you wont have much or any residential demand. To get the residential demand back you need to create jobs by zoning more workplaces and upgrading existing ones (higher level businesses employ a lot more people). Or you could slaughter lots of people with the bulldozer, but it seems you want to grow the city not get residential demand for its own sake... Normal low unemployment is 3-4%, high unemployment is up to 20%. Between 4 and 8% is a good target. Normally it's a good idea to use up even low levels of residential demand. Don't wait for the residential demand to be high before zoning, having high residential demand (meaning lots of workers needed) isn't really good.

In my opinion After Dark adds little of value to the game. The one and only feature which finds an active use in my cities is bicycles. Tourism and Leisure is broken and pointless respectively - I mean sure you can use them but don't expect them to do anything different to existing commercial. However I must say, I do like bicycles, I nearly exclusively use roads with bicycle lanes, they reduce traffic by encouraging cims to use bikes, and they don't have parked cars which reduces visual clutter. Bikes also look cool riding around IMO. So for me it's kind of the Bicycles DLC. But here's the thing, the base game is absolutely fantastic value for money and I don't resent spending more on the game, so I'd probably pay for AD DLC even if I used absolutely nothing from it.

For what it's worth, merely upgrading the CPU in a laptop isn't a very cost-effective solution (if it's even possible) since laptop/ultrabook CPUs are like super expensive for the performance you get and all the other components in a laptop/ultrabook are lower performance too. You get far better bang for buck out of a budget gaming build, with a cheap quad-core CPU and a cheap GPU. There are some very nice guides to budget gaming builds < $400 on YouTube. The most pertinent example is: Can a $350 PC Play Cities: Skylines? Unfortunately having more than 4GB does absolutely nothing to help make up for limitations in GPU or CPU. The *only* thing having more ram allows, is it allows you to install more custom assets. 8GB is already way more than Skylines needs, with plenty of room for all the assets you'd want to install on a weak system. For a more capable system, if you're really into custom assets, you might want 16GB.

Intel graphics do work in practice as long as they have enough processing grunt. Older Intel graphics are basically a total no-go, but the versions from the last few years or so, including the HD4400 (which I happen to have in my laptop), do work (for instance the HD4400 is about half as powerful as the minimum requirements GPU, and it plays the game about as well as you'd expect from that - you might get about 15fps on a standard laptop resolution, or a bit more on lower resolution, dropping to about 10fps for a large city). So it runs. But it's not officially supported, and it's about half as powerful as minimum specs so you can't expect much. Unfortunately that CPU is like really wimpy. It's a dual core with a low clock speed, and is a low-power usage version, so it doesn't handle demanding CPU tasks very well. The combination of an under-par GPU and a weak CPU is not pretty. The game will slow down a lot as the city gets larger, and soon cims and vehicles will be moving around in slow motion. (my laptop has a more powerful i7, tho still only dual core and it's pretty crap) You'd definitely want a better CPU, definitely a true quad-core (i.e. not dual core with hyper threading). Both i5 and i7 can work well, usually i5 has better performance to dollar ratio than i7, I think the most important thing is probably that it's quad core as Skylines makes reasonably good use of 4 cores, and also not something power-saving as skylines needs to run all the cores full-tilt.

You can use water pumps to suck up polluted water and use the dirty water in your industry/commercial/office - it's a little known fact (probably for good reason) that only residential needs clean water, industry/comm/office is perfectly happy with raw sewage (this is because cims can only get sick from pollution in residential areas - whether that is ground, noise or water pollution). Sucking up the polluted water will result in it being replaced by clean water from the ocean - it would be slow, but effective (assuming you aren't adding any new sewage to the ocean). There are also mods for changing the color of polluted water.

Long lines work fairly well. I prefer to use a lot of short lines for ease of management, but the cim pathfinder seems to work well enough with either approach. You only need a single bus depot. The only time the bus depot is actually used is creating buses to fill lines. Buses don't seem to ever go back to the bus stop, unless you destroy the line or turn off the depot (turning off the depot will result in all buses returning), so a bus depot would appear to be able to handle any number of buses.

Interestingly cims at least sometimes carry a bike in their pocket (okay, they also sometimes carry a car in their pocket, but with bikes it makes sense). You can see this because cims often bike to/from metro. Also sometimes a pedestrian (especially if forced by a bike lane being the only way to get to where they're going) will pull a bike from their pocket and turn into a bicycle cim. Cims do seem to be willing to bike further than they are willing to walk, at least I've had some bridges which attract bikes but not really pedestrians. So if Cims will bike further than they walk and can use bikes as part of mass transit it is quite likely that bikes really do help to reduce congestion - I'm really not sure if bike lanes do a whole lot, but the road with bike lanes is just as cheap in upkeep as the standard road and it eliminates parked cars so I like to use it extensively.

I'm a very boring person and always use a square grid which looks like this: If you look carefully you see the grid is a square of 4x4 blocks, I divide the square in two with a road which usually ends in a cul-de-sac, making it clearer this is a square grid and not a rectangular grid, also not joining the dividing road adds 6 more tiles which can be occupied by a tax-paying building. This design is rather boring but it is incredibly effective (by the way I rotate the dividing road at random because it makes the grid look much less boring). The spacing between intersections is ideal for reducing congestion and the 3-way intersections cause virtually no congestion because there is no through-traffic and a vehicle hardly ever turns at them. The use of square grids makes it easy to spam buslines (I have a bus line going up and down every single road both North/South and East/West, each line forms a loop up one road down the next), the 4x4 block square grid has another very attractive property - if you spam buslines so that each edge of the square has 2 bus stops (one on the near side of the road, one on the far side) the 8 bus stops will be just enough to max out the transportation rating. As transportation is the most valuable service to provide for leveling up buildings and as bus stops are free to create and as buses provide you with income as fares this will dramatically improve the financial situation of the city. Early in the cities life (as in the screenshot) I just attach the grid directly to the highway. Later on the demands of high density residential/commercial will make this stop working, so usually once I have a nest egg of about $200,000 and have purchased the block of land the highway comes from I bulldoze the existing highway attachment point and extend the highway (as a tunnel) under the city, extending at least 2-3 blocks, I make the required on and off ramps, attaching them all to different blocks to distribute traffic. As the city grows larger the highway tunnel can be extended further under the city with more on and off ramps added to further distribute traffic and it is a good idea to have direct connections to any industrial block as you really don't want trucks trundling along random city streets. Chokepoints are the enemy of good traffic flow. The square grid is ideal for minimizing choke points and distributing traffic evenly, the roads will be well used but because the traffic is distributed evenly and because the spacing between intersections is excellent there will be no real congestion and traffic flow will be smooth. It is hard to improve upon this design for a few reasons. If you use wider roads they cost a lot more in upkeep and come with traffic lights (unless disabled by a mod). Because they take up twice as many tiles there is significant opportunity cost in terms of lost tax income. From a financial situation it's a no-brainer to use the cheap standard road (I also use the more expensive "road with trees" but only selectively for example around a metro station in a residential district because it cuts down noise a lot - but most the time there either isn't much noise or the zone type doesn't care about noise so the standard road or the road with bike lanes works just as well). It really doesn't work at all to mix standard roads and wide roads - because the wide roads have a higher speed limit they act as traffic magnets and because they are attracting traffic like crazy they then cause congestion either on the wide road or the connecting standard roads. You can almost get away without using highways or ramps at all, the square grid of standard roads with bus line spam and metro support is very very powerful. By the time the city grows large enough for it to become congested the game tends to start reducing the number of agents it generates solving the problem for you. But I do like to use highways and ramps and it can certainly be done. The best way to join a highway to the city streets is to use an approach something like a tree's roots, have lots of on and off ramps joined at lots of different points along the highway so it can collect traffic from a large area of the city and so that cims aren't all forced onto the same street to get onto the highway. I like to build ramp tunnels under the city as high speed bypasses - especially between industry and commercial (car traffic is better off put onto buses and metro). One critical aspect to making this work well is to make sure they only connect distant parts of the city. If two nearby parts of the city are connected by a high speed bypass then it acts as a traffic magnet and causes congestion thanks to short-cutters. My normal high speed bypasses might have 3 on-ramps at one end which pulls traffic from 3 different blocks, it then might cross 10 or more blocks across the city and end in 3 off-ramps which distributes traffic over 3 blocks. Along the way there are no on or off ramps because that would permit short cutting and the bypass should only be used by traffic which has to travel long distances. Following these kinds of principles I've created cities which generate in excess of $50,000 profit/week (at population about 80-90k), profit is a good indicator of how efficiently a city is running because a big chunk of profit comes from sales tax which requires the whole industrial->commercial->shoppers supply chain to be working as smoothly as possible.

Unfortunately because the traffic AI is pretty stupid highways are not really a good way to solve traffic problems. I am a big fan of "ramp highways"; because of AI inadequacies 3 lanes is not terribly better than 1 so you may as well go with the much cheaper and easier to use ramp. Also because cims aren't good at utilizing extra lanes it tends to be best to stick with 2 lane roads and use mass transit or bypasses to remove traffic when the road becomes overloaded (roads never become overloaded due to local traffic, it's always traffic driving across the city which overloads a road, so it can always by sent via a more direct & higher speed bypass, ramps make ideal bypasses). As for planning, well that's really simple. Just use tunnels to make buried bypasses and highways, it's not terribly interesting but it's very easy to do and surprisingly economical. What we need to consider here is opportunity cost. When we build a highway on the surface we miss out on the taxes we could have earned from zoning that land. High Density Residential at lvl5 brings in about $4 per square. To be fair we should dock $1 for education & utility costs (which are per-cim or building and not area based coverage) and say $3 per square (as a note: Commercial with BBF Policy can be at least as profitable as Residential with virtually no per-building expenses and can definitely earn $3-4 a square per week) Now consider the 2 square wide ramp which costs 0.32 per unit, the ramp is 10 tiles long. As a terrestrial road it covers 20 squares which carries an opportunity cost in lost taxes of $60/week and it costs $3.2/week in upkeep, making a total real cost of $63.2 As a tunnel it covers 0 squares and because the maintenance is 6x higher, it costs $19.2/week. With a tunnel you are winning big-time in terms of real costs. Now consider the 4 square wide highway which costs 0.96 per unit, the highway is 10 tiles long. As a terrestrial road it covers 40 squares which carries an opportunity cost in lost taxes of $120/week and it costs $9.6 in upkeep, for a total real cost of $129.6/week. As a tunnel it covers 0 squares and the maintenance is $57.6/week, again with a tunnel you coming out ahead. What this means is that tunnels come out as the preferable option for the budget-conscious Mayor, in fact we can be rather less generous with our assumptions about how much a square of residential (or other zone) can earn and still have tunnels the preferable option. The break-even point is $0.8 per square for the ramp and $1.2 per square for the highway. These numbers are comparable to the tax income from industry/office which means in those zones tunnels are still breaking even on the budget balance. But when we consider that tunnels will be shorter and more direct, that they require minimal demolitions, that their on/off ramps and interchanges require a lot less space and that they are far easier to modify (especially with Moledozer mod) we are forced to conclude that tunnels under the city are the way to go. As previously noted, tunnels are not the most interesting option, but in terms of gameplay they are very very optimal, so good it's almost cheating.

On further investigation on mature cities, I am forced to conclude that industry represents a huge economic boost, I suppose it's not so relevant if running unlimited funds mod, but by default here is how it works: If you run Big Business Benefactor, you will double your sales and double your commercial tax income and since it doesn't raise expenses much, massively increase your spending money. However with this policy in force, shops go through goods really quickly and need constant resupply. (BBF isn't essential to the principle at hand, the point is that commercial tax is basically a sales tax and you get it when shops sell goods, BBF just makes everything stand out more). Importing finished goods seems to be fairly ineffective. I've observed that when a full cargo train docks, and the cargo station disgorges vehicles, it poops out about the same number of vans as trucks, that is, it could send out 20 trucks to industry, or 20 vans to commerce. The number of vehicles sent out seems about constant. But industry in effect acts as a multiplier. A truckload of resources, via industry, might turn into say 10 van loads of goods. So those 20 truckloads of goods would become 200 van loads of goods. As such having an industrial supply chain acts as a massive efficiency multiplier on imports and makes extremely commercial heavy, extremely profitable cities possible. No Industry = No boom economy. As such I feel confident saying that a strong industrial sector is an essential part of a fully functional city. It is dispensable in the sense that a city without industry is possible and functional, but it will be more economically subdued. In effect, a city which goes without industry becomes office heavy and commercially weak.

I've been doing some playing around with cities without industry and cities without commerce (the latter is only for testing game mechanics, it is not an intelligent strategy!) Evidence is pretty good that the game uses various feedback mechanisms to determine demand, for example if your present industry is doing well, more industrial demand will be created, if your present commercial is doing well, more commercial demand will be created. The metric of success is likely the ability to sell goods. The converse is also true, if your commercial isn't selling any goods, commercial demand will plummet. Industrial demand is not so sensitive to crashing but it will definitely be hurt. I have tested this by starting cities from scratch and "abusing" the relevant sector by not providing access to what they need, then saving the game when high density is unlocked. In the city where I abused commercial, there was very little commercial demand, and very little commercial moving in. Industry grew rapidly and the population growth was rapid. The city didn't seem to suffer much for the lack of commercial, the only point of pain was a poor budget surplus, commercial is basically free money while industry is basically a drain on your finances with all the garbage, power and water it consumes. In the city where I abused industry, commercial grew well, a significant amount of industry also insisted on moving in before the city would continue growing, but not nearly as much as in the city where industry wasn't abused. The city grew much slower than a city where industry is promoted, it took about two years longer to unlock high density, indicating that industry is a great driver of population growth. Industry is bad in a lot of ways, it pollutes, doesn't pay much tax, cims hate working in it, generates vast amounts of garbage, uses lots of water and electricity and generates much traffic - and the tax income is lousy considering how it costs to service. It's pretty much bad all round. BUT, it's really easy to pump up industrial demand, along with providing a solid transportation network it seems that building primary industry pumps up industrial demand like crazy (at least while the resource lasts), in turn this pumps up residential demand, which pumps up commercial demand. Your city will grow a lot faster with a strong industrial sector. Once the primary resource (oil/ore) runs out the inflated industrial demand tends to crash, but that's okay, because you can dezone the primary industry to free up workers for offices/high density commercial/lvl3 generic industry. Late Game With the rise of a highly educated workforce, and by implementing the "Big Business Benefactor" policy, commercial demand tends to go crazy (I think it's the feedback cycle), at this point commercial seems to become the prime driver of city growth because office always seems a bit subdued. It becomes difficult to establish new industry because cims really don't like to work in industry. Ultimately, everything except lvl3 industry is doomed to failure (unless perhaps you brutalize the education sector). However lvl3 industry is stable in an end game city even with full education. One of the neat things about lvl3 industry is that it generates little pollution, while it pollutes its own block, there is very little spill, just cross the road and the pollution is down to pale red and a couple more grid squares over it becomes zero. This makes it viable to zone blocks of lvl3 industry right inside commercial. Is it worthwhile doing this? I think in principle it is. Without home industry, you need to import goods which means lots and lots of vans. I believe a truck can carry a lot more than a van, so importing truckloads of resource to the commercial blocks, then turning those resources into goods in-place, is likely to reduce overall traffic. (Also I've observed vans leaving the industry, they are normally smart enough to deliver goods to nearby commerce, normally within a few blocks of the industry, so this principle definitely seems sound) lvl3 industry is also a really good employer. A 4x4 lvl3 industry employs 32, while a 4x4 office employs only 27 and lvl3 commerce a mere 20. Also it requires quite a bit less service rating than lvl3 office, being consistent with the amount of service rating required for lvl5 residential, basically offering the best "service to employment" ratio. So all in all it seems there is little reason to begrudge industry a place in your city.