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.