Skylines The Limit

[pizza-omelette]

I now finally understand why they called it Cities Skylines and Its hilarious. 

[bob-starr]

Now trams, they can useful or useless. This depends on your density. 2,000 population? Want people to use their cars less? Well, they will not. Personally, I wouldn't really bother with any public transport until your city’s population is around 25,000-30,000. I'm not quite sure why, but people just simply do not bother using public transport, until the population really starts to grow, or they just cannot be bothered to sit in traffic for a couple of days to get to work.

Continuing on, trams are great. Seriously great. From my opinion, I totally replaced local bus routes, and medium distance bus routes, from Lakedale, and my city just seemed to work faster. Not my computer as such, but people being able get to work quicker and get shopping done faster. I think this was mainly because you are able to create dedicated roads for trams, so on medium distance routes (around 1-1.5km round trip, I guess?) the tram can travel full speed without stopping, till the next stop. Obvs.  

More so, they have a higher capacity of seats. Remember, Cities: Skyline only stands for luxury public transport. No standing here! You can wait 24hrs until the next Bus/Tram arrives. Trams have the capacity of 90 by default, whereas, buses have mere 30 people per carriage. The more money you spend of either service, the more buses, equals more capacity. *cough* in theory. More another time, expect a page at a later date.

More Oggleg tomorrow. Or I might add a page on my theory, and practices on how to use multi lane roads, uses of one way streets and basic 2 lane (bi directional) roads.

[bob-starr]

Roads! Speaking of roads, underground 70 MPH Roads! Well, if the games “one hundred speed units” are KPH then, that equates to Approx 62.1 MPH underground roads. Moving on, the first screenshot is a total mess. The highway is hardly finished, people don’t know where to go, and they've probably ran out of free map updates via tomtom. As an alternative, they are probably using Apple Maps and was in such a rush, they forgot to install Google Maps.

To start off by explaining, I've only just realised I have forgotten to add a slip road from; West to North and South to East, respectively. People wanting to take these routes are probably using the unofficial U-Shape road to turn around, and use the ground level roundabout. Never mind, I’ll do that another time.

Anyway, to explain why I have chosen the underground route is because, I have more building space above ground for homes and useful buildings. Furthermore, trucks no longer have to pollute the residential areas, and can pass freely by. What I mean by pollution is, noise. Air pollution is non existent in Cities: Skyline. Everybody seems to have electric cars and trucks! Wow electric trucks. Like that’s going to happen. Ever.

More Oggleg later.

[bob-starr]

Previously mentioned Oggleg, is shown here. This is the entrance to the city via the main south east-west (vice versa) highway. I will create a page more on the lanes being used, and how my motorway junctions work. One thing to learn early in the game is, lanes do not equal capacity. Routes equals capacity, more so, speed does.

The second screenshot, is the junction continuing into the “downtown” district of “main street”. Now, you can probably see tram tracks in the road, these link to the residential areas, and industry. Personally, I hate the word industry, it seems too broad of a term. For example: shops are industry, factories are industry, oil rigs are industry, offices are industry, whatever your current job; is an industry. I'm not going to argue over it, but to keep the term Industrial Area short, I will use the word industry.

Moving on, main street, is basically the current transport hub for the 26,000 or so people that live in Oggleg. My city relies on trams, a couple of short bus lines, and a few taxi journeys a day. Everybody else, cycles, walks or clogs the industry area, with their small match box red, blue and green cars.

One day, Main street was a small 2 lane road, now a 4 lane (either side) super busy high street. The first block consists of “generic” European style shops. The second block, consists of “Luxury hotels” and touristy stuff. Plus it gives the main street a bit of “modernising”.

Speaking of “modernising”, the third screenshot is the “luxury office” block(s). The centre of the residential area, is very expensive already. A few parks, one police station, one GP, a fire station, and a few of the city “policies” in force, greatly improve the land value. Especially if you want those fancy and useless helicopter pads.

Next post, I will talk about the underground bypass, and why I had chosen an underground highway.

[bob-starr]

This was one of the main tourist hot spots of Lakedale. The population was around 20,000 - 25,0000,  there was a small wood industrialised area for additional jobs. 

The tourist district, is situated on the small island towards the south of the area. The area consisted of an opera house, many hotels, bars and beach front attractions. Also a riding stable. The area was mainly designed for higher wealth tourists, and did attract them due to the high land values on the commercial Island (probably). 

A few issues were, the junction connecting commercial island with the southern motorway, and not enough public transport. Most tourists, coming from the train station, decided to rent a car from the mainland and drive to commercial island. 

Oddly, stealing the car by driving out of the city when they decided their holiday was over.  

[bob-starr]

Rule! Before you demolish a road, make sure other roads can handle the extra Traffic! I accidentally demolished a road for buses accessing the Beech district of Lakedale. 

These 30 or so buses, caused congestion on one of major bridges in Lakedale, mostly due to the bus garage being in close proximity to main “Ins” of the district. More so, as the buses were strangely despawning at bus garage, I noticed fire engines close by (assuming the garage must of been on fire), buses were “re-spawning” and causing more congestion in the local area. 

I ended up, deleting the garage, and the bus lines to clear the map of unwanted traffic. This took a good 10-15 minutes of real time to clear up. Afterwards, I slowly rebuilt my bus network for Beech.    

[bob-starr]

This is my second city! Lakedale (default name, I could’t think of a name). With my second city, I decided to create many “towns” with different road layouts. With the major city bang in the middle. 

At first when creating this city, I decided the classic grid type layout would do. The grid layout helps to generate population (est 80,000 - 90,000), and tax income. However, it does contain some strange features. . . . more on that another time.

More so, I have many different ways of getting people on the move (road wise). Such as, Underground highways, Ground level highways, and Elevated highways. 

I will explain the benefits and negatives of these on a page, at a later date. Personally, I feel like you need a mix of all three in your city. This is because, depending on the landscape, Ground level and Underground highways can be quite a pain to establish on steep hills.

Tomorrow, I will probably show off some screen shots from Lakedale.  

[bob-starr]

This is an Early birds eye view of Oggleg. I think the population was less than 500! 

[bob-starr]

Hi! Welcome to my blog about Cities: Skyline. I am currently still playing about with themes, so please bear with me. I will slowly add pages of advice on how to manage your city’s services and transport. The pages will contain link(s) to where I have found the info (if I have used other people's work), and will show you how I have incorporated these ideas into my design. 

Furthermore, on the main page, you will be following the journey of Oggleg. (Total random name made up in my head). I have decided to blog the growth of my third city (yes only third), to help others and new users gain an understanding of the game's AI. 

Also, I will show you how Mods can greatly improve your games experience, and also destroy your city, with updates! Keep in mind, I use the base game (obvs), After Dark Expansion Pack, and the latest Snow Fall Expansion Pack. 

Lastly, this will only be a guide! Do not use the information provided religiously, more so to every word. To add, I will show my mistakes and the ugly of my early city(s).

Thanks for joining in!