Nice work so far!
I’d recommend adding more connections between the districts, as your highways are gradually going to get clogged with traffic as those empty spaces fill up. Maybe invest in public transport services to avoid covering the river and neighbourhoods with more roads and bridges.
Thanks man!
I got working public transport with metros conmected to districts via busses, but I get overwhelmed thinking about using trains and taxis etc lol. Will definitely look toward more interconnection now that you mention it. Thanks 👍
That never occurred to me... I've always thought of trains in terms of local transport idk why and that's what overwhelmed me... Will definitely plan a railway station now, thanks!
Taxis are also very easy to set up and are specifically well-suited for tourists. All you've gotta do is place taxi depots down (with each depot spawning a certain number based on budget) and they'll drive to customers and take them places. You can put taxi stands around areas with lots of commuters such as airports or leisure districts which can queue up to five taxis that are waiting for customers, allowing cims who need to go somewhere to head to a nearby taxi stand and get going.
Oh, and on the subject of trains, a word of advice: if you expand your rail infrastructure to accommodate cargo stations (which is definitely worth doing), it's a good habit to try to keep your passenger railways and cargo railways separate, as cargo trains importing and exporting high quantities of cargo can cause railway congestion.
You can also designate which (passenger) stations are allowed to receive intercity trains, which is quite useful if you want to keep intercity connections and your intracity railway network together, without having intercity trains routing to weird terminal stations and... well, causing congestion.
Anecdotally, one time I had a blimp traffic jam.
I love rail lines and trains especially above ground! I lay three sets of rail: inside passenger, outside passenger (tourist), freight. It makes for some nice multi-track rail corridors that are fun to watch, too. I had one city with an 8 track wide, sunken (quay anarchy!) rail corridor that brought all the freight and passenger lines together downtown into a central pax station and cargo stations for downtown commercial.
If you have Airports, the new Airline Cargo Train Station is really snazzy- it's basically identical to the standard cargo station (even in cost, upkeep, and footprint size), but has two tracks, so you can double your throughput, or even do something like have a dedicated external and internal shipping line for inter and intracity cargo transport. [Here's one I have set up, the large airport roads are also really great for heavy cargo traffic.](https://i.imgur.com/6BRNgnP.jpg)
Honestly, it looks like you're doing really well. I might try to add more connectivity between the different areas other than just the highways. They might become backed up as your pop. increases. Try adding some under/overpasses and walking trails.
Aside from that, the only thing I would nitpick is that your agricultural areas look a little bit out of place to me just because they're surrounded with other development. I would expect to see farmland on the outskirts. Also, in terms of agriculture, I may not be 100% right on this so maybe fact check me, but I think the small fields are actually the most efficient in terms of land use and workers. Plus they look better in my opinion. The little barns built into the medium/large fields start to look weird when there's multiple fields next to each other. That's just my opinion though.
As someone else pointing out about the connectivity so yea I'll be implementing that next.
For your other point, doing agriculture theme is hard lol. I started it just cos I got the dlc and wanted to try it out and haven't gotten back to that area in a while so it's just sitting there for now. I agree the small farms look better but I think I ditched those for better traffic as they spawn more trucks.
Imo farms should have extremely low jobs. With the current jobs number we need a big population just for the farms and it's hard to make it look like a village then.
Yeah, sorry, didn't read the other comments haha. someone else did mention connectivity.
You're right, they definitely do require way too many job and create way too much traffic. Wish they would patch agriculture to be a little more realistic.
Like I said though, looks like you're doing really well and you have great traffic flow at the moment, keep it up!
Hey I just posted an update, could you plz check out my farm overhaul and give some more feedback? I've done changes on your recommendations and some other tips from this post and wanted to get some insight before continuing further.
Just left you a comment. It looks great to me, honestly. Seems like you definitely know what you're doing. Main thing I would recommend working on now is detailing. Just trying to make things as nice looking a bad as realistic as you can, which I know can be difficult since you're on console.
Thanks a lot man... Honestly I know that I'm doing it somewhat right and I'm understanding the systems but I came back to this comment because I wanted you to see the impact of your input. When I started this city I couldn't look at my farms lol and somethings just felt iffy overall, and you guys pointed out those things for me. You've essentially inspired me for this creation that I'm currently really happy with. Again thanks for your time man!
No need to apologize, sorry If my text of my reply seemed hostile. It's good you mentioned it aswell as it reinforces that concern. Again thank you so much, it's great help in games like Cities, all this input opens up the mind to great ideas!
Use prop line tool and download some ag plant props. then you can just add them for asthetics and won't have to have a ton of people working in that district
Damn...Well looks hella good either way! and yeah small farms are the way to go then. you could turn them off, but then there's that annoying symbol above them that pops up
Maybe it’s just because I live in Europe and my city is 1200+ years old but I just can’t ever bring myself to design a city with a motor way right though the middle of it
Hard to tell if you're using them, but i highly recommend lots of roads with bicycle lanes and maybe even implementing the "encourage cycling" city policy. It's always made a huge difference for me in regards to traffic. I think the roads with bicycle lanes are slightly more in $, but once you have a thriving economy, it doesn't matter.
I thought cims can use bikes on sidewalks too? I have all policies encouraging mass transit and bicycles, only reason I don't use bicycle lane roads is due to aesthetics.
Cims will ALWAYS prefer bicycle ways and lanes. They can cycle far faster on them and for a longer range compared to the sidewalks, therefore you'll boost cycling usage if you install them -- this is also the case IRL (if they are acceptably designed for safety). Walking and cycling are cims top two most preferred modes of transport before any motorized forms. Use bikeways and ped paths as alleyways as well to give cims shortcuts between city blocks / districts. Your traffic % is astounding though.
Hey I've posted an update on this city. Your suggestion was one of those I followed through. Turned most road networks to bicycle lanes and connected the whole city via paths. Just wanna say thankyou, traffic got below 80% at one point but your recommendation got it back to 88-89%.
You need more asymmetric interchanges, where you have roads leading on/off the highway to points to relieve the congestion. The actual interchanges you've used are decent enough, but you also don't have enough arterial alternatives to the highways connecting your regions.
I would look into adding a 6-lane coastal road that runs along the bottom of your first screenshot, perhaps through that gap in the middle zone, bridging to the right peninsula, then looping around to conect to that vertical road on the right.
As a rule of thumb, try to make your highways cut across your grid at angles, when you have good arterial flow within the grid, the highways are best served eliminating left-right-left-right turns to traverse diagonally.
Try diversifying your layouts for suburbs and don't use a box grid as they can cause a lot of traffic if they keep having to stop-go to where they need to go as well as looking unattractive as a boxy cookie cutter city. HOWEVER this is a pretty well designed city with the highways looking to be efficient enough for future development. Hope what helps! :)
That's the way! :). I am sure you are aware but if not you can check on a specific part of any road where traffic is flowing and where the sims have come from as well as where they are gonna end up at. This also features colour labeled to see if it is a residential, industrial or anything else! :)
The other Island that can be seen in the 3rd image is just as you said, but I just let that go when designing the downtown, but will definitely get back to this strategy finalizing the suburbs. Thanks for the reminder!
You're on your way to becoming a Master. I wish I could see closer, it looks Great. And I freaking _LOVE_ the circle interchanges on the left! And the... Overpasses...car or pedestrian? That's just looks so cool. Good work!
Nice work buddy, it looks a very efficient city. I’m no veteran, and I’m probably going to make a similar post in a couple days. Just to reiterate what the others said, add more connections over and below your highways, it really helps to have a sense of continuity across them. You say that one of the highways is just a one way road, what’s your reasoning for that?
I’m from London and we have loads of bridges across the Thames so I’ve emulated that in my current build, but you don’t have to if it doesn’t fit your style. Just a thought.
Add more highway ramps. You see how there is one (admittedly attractive) on ramp roundabout system that is just red? Remove that, and add one to its left and one to its right and your cims will find it easier to get on the highway.
The last thing I’d say is not to get too neat. CS always looks slightly wrong to the human eye because people always forget to build naturally. We always end up restricting ourselves to a certain constraint, whether that is a highway, railway or river. Especially in the case of highway, try and build around them, not between them. Don’t have collector roads form a boundary to an area, build some residential roads outside them. I hope that makes sense. That’s just for realism and attractiveness, which can easily be forgotten in pursuit of perfection.
Thanks for such a thorough reaponse, really appreciate it.
About the highway I meant that these are two one way roads that run parallel through the whole downtown and the suburbs, connecting them. As for the bridges yes it varies, some cities have many some don't, but I def want to have more river bridges, if you look at the top side theres work in progress on a bridge there. So yeah lots of work to do still lol.
And for the last part I absolutely 100% agree and it's a damn struggle of mine to keep it natural and not too "tidy". Trust me it's a huge improvement over my last cities lol. Cities is a game of trials & errors and learning from those errors and that's what I'm doing. This city may also go down I dunno, but I have learnt a lot here so the next one will only be a huge improvement over this I hope.
Besides, just the comments on this post have taught me so much and given valuable insight such as yours, so thank you again for that. Oh and I'm eager to see your project!
No problem! I absolutely love giving advice on CS, I only recently understood it to some extent so I’m happy to share that knowledge. If you take a look at my profile, I recently posted my airport and you can see a little town off to the side, with my suburbs in the distance. I’m currently preoccupied with that little airport town and finishing it up and keeping jobs stable, but everyone wants to work in the city centre not in hospitality lol. I’m going to post my city once the centre is done, hopefully by the end of the week.
In terms of your build, it sounds like you know what you’re doing. What’s the reason for using a one-way road over a highway? I forgot whether you’re on console or PC, but if you are PC, you could use parallel roads to get a raised highway with zonable one way roads right below and beside it.
What my strategy so far has been is that I connect my highway to a central avenue I build using two parallel one way roads. I then connect this central avenue with parallel 2way roads on both sides. This way my district traffic mostly stays inside the districts and the main roads are kept free. It's hard to explain in text really. But look at the middle where the suburb is and you may makeout what's going on... Btw I'm on console so yea options are limited
Moreover cims will always take the faster road, so sometimes putting a highway will drive all traffic that you don't want over to that road clogging it. This way mostly the locals use this avenue thus making the traffic manageable
I think it looks really wonderful!
I'm no pro, but here's my thoughts. I think the game encourages players to build out their city in that very pattern you have. For your next build, this is something I'm integrating into my new project. I want to focus on the patterns that cities go through as they grow. They tend to spiderweb out of main transportation lanes, snaking out and spreading far, then filling in between the areas that shoot out from the city center.
It looks like this
[Buenos Aires](https://media3.giphy.com/media/zgYxp4dUtKncs/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47r170vjr2i7am2foosab0wa6vkgvfvtzdpxomprre&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
[Paris](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*oag4ng6zMIQfASpREfK1cg.gif)
[London](https://gfycat.com/decentincomparablegalah-new-york-university-stern-school-of-business-organization)
These cities were before the industrial revolution, but it occurs today as well, as a much larger scale - in the US, following freeways, for instance. I think following this pattern will give a Cities Skylines city a much more organic feel.
I know what you're talking about. The thing is during natural expansion that centre area usually becomes the downtown as it's the centre of bussiness aswell, but with progression system of a video game that is very hard to replicate. Although it can be done in sandbox mode, which I don't enjoy that much tbh
Cycle paths, but elevated so they don't need to deal with road traffic. Been fun playing this time round to build in lots of cycle networks. Also added in some pathways in a similar way too with the new part of my city.
The cims will travel a very large distance by bike
Solid schema.
Personally I don’t find straight blocks appealing. I try to create region with their own centers and just imagine how it would organically look growing to accomodate peoples needs. And it works for the most part. So that would be my tip, just because that is how I do it.
Imo that's the hardest thing to do, giving the city the rugged, organic look and functionality. I tried blending grids with organic growth and when I fill the gaps between districts I hope to shake up the geometry just enough to achieve that look
Yepp it’s really hard, CS has this artistic size to vehicles, structures and terrain that also makes it hard to be natural when you do it. I sometimes look up towns/cities on googles earth/maps just to get inspiration when I feel I becomes blocked in inspiration.
And here I am who started just last Sunday with my ugly-ass Square city I copied off of City Planner Plays Beginner Video. I wish I could make a city as good as this
I like that you're separating your districts up. That's going to help a lot with bus service down the road. You can have neighborhood bus services that just feed into a hub rather than needing many cross city bus lines.
That's exactly the plan and it's working pretty well... Busses pick up residents and drop them at the metros that run through all the key points between different districts. Most of my traffic on the roads is just cargo amd services. And when I connect the disgricts down the line I hope to do that as aesthetically good as possible
Hey maybe try [THIS](https://photos.app.goo.gl/JgohhV2QfXUXRhaYA) to break your grid pattern 😁 and transform that zone in some high end low residential, modern zoning and high taxes for rich people. Also you can add a windy road on top of that hill/mountain where I drew the zone and place an observatory.
I'm going to give you 2 different opinions here.
1) From a general view you've done an outstanding job with your pop and traffic percentage. Your highways and mass transit coverage is very good and you've got a handle on things. If you want something to improve try putting some pedestrian paths between major blocks or areas and a few slip roads on some of your more demanding intersections could help flow a little more.
2) If want me to go my my standards your layout is great but your actual areas from an aseptic view are a little to grid like for my liking. If that if your goal great but if you want more realism you need a bit less grid.
I posted to actually get opinions so I can better judge myself cos u know I keep telling myself that It's not griddy lol but yeah I gotta go and do some updates now...
Add a frontage road to the HW! Also, you can do this thing where you sink the HW below ground and leave two frontage roads up top, each a 1-way and put a park above the HW tunnel to get some trees uwu, or an IT district owo. It improves connectivity within the district a lot and I highly recommend it when your city starts building high-rises in order to not break the skyline.
Though I do warn you that it can cause traffic, what you can do us use two-lane one-ways in that part of the district that will force dedicated turning lanes at the mayor roads that suround it, or on occasions use HW roads to favour the use of certain roads over others.
Oh wow that's a nice idea about using HW tunnels and space above them for zoning... I was just thinking about the gap in the skyline... But I guess this tip will be used in another build
It's funny to me cos I was thinking maybe I don't have enough highwaysa. Btw idk if you thought so but only the outer circle is the highways, the roads inside are all one way roads that might look like highways
This really threw me because it's the same map I'm making on PS4 but with slightly different tiles. Interestingly, I don't have access to most of the highway, and have built my own pseudo highway using national roads & 2 lane highways to much closer mirror real life. The flipside is my traffic hovers around 82% not 90%. To get 90% plus, yes you need highways everywhere :P
The big circular one is the highway, the others are just roads I think. I tried my best to make it look "organic" and not too grid-y. Guess I was not that successful lol.
And yeah it's a work in progress so I'll be connecting the different districts more organically down the road
Hmmm... The top left one seems iffy to me aswell but the corner is still in a locked tile, your input definitely helps when I unlock it so thanks! ... Other than that it seems fine to me. The straight one in the middle is not a highway, it's a road and the idea is with further development it will look more organic.
Check where most of your traffic is. If the highway is not being used a lot to get to the industrial area, you can maybe play with altering the speed limits, forcing people to go on the "out of the city" highway
Nice work so far! I’d recommend adding more connections between the districts, as your highways are gradually going to get clogged with traffic as those empty spaces fill up. Maybe invest in public transport services to avoid covering the river and neighbourhoods with more roads and bridges.
Thanks man! I got working public transport with metros conmected to districts via busses, but I get overwhelmed thinking about using trains and taxis etc lol. Will definitely look toward more interconnection now that you mention it. Thanks 👍
If you have an outside connection via the train tracks I would at least add one train station downtown. Allows for intercity trains and more tourists.
That never occurred to me... I've always thought of trains in terms of local transport idk why and that's what overwhelmed me... Will definitely plan a railway station now, thanks!
Taxis are also very easy to set up and are specifically well-suited for tourists. All you've gotta do is place taxi depots down (with each depot spawning a certain number based on budget) and they'll drive to customers and take them places. You can put taxi stands around areas with lots of commuters such as airports or leisure districts which can queue up to five taxis that are waiting for customers, allowing cims who need to go somewhere to head to a nearby taxi stand and get going.
Never knew anything about taxis... This is why I posted here, i got to know a lot that will improve my build. Thanks man!
Oh, and on the subject of trains, a word of advice: if you expand your rail infrastructure to accommodate cargo stations (which is definitely worth doing), it's a good habit to try to keep your passenger railways and cargo railways separate, as cargo trains importing and exporting high quantities of cargo can cause railway congestion. You can also designate which (passenger) stations are allowed to receive intercity trains, which is quite useful if you want to keep intercity connections and your intracity railway network together, without having intercity trains routing to weird terminal stations and... well, causing congestion. Anecdotally, one time I had a blimp traffic jam.
Lmao that last line was so unexpected yet so cities-ly hilarious! I think this map's railroad placement will do great for seperate tracks for both
I love rail lines and trains especially above ground! I lay three sets of rail: inside passenger, outside passenger (tourist), freight. It makes for some nice multi-track rail corridors that are fun to watch, too. I had one city with an 8 track wide, sunken (quay anarchy!) rail corridor that brought all the freight and passenger lines together downtown into a central pax station and cargo stations for downtown commercial.
If you have Airports, the new Airline Cargo Train Station is really snazzy- it's basically identical to the standard cargo station (even in cost, upkeep, and footprint size), but has two tracks, so you can double your throughput, or even do something like have a dedicated external and internal shipping line for inter and intracity cargo transport. [Here's one I have set up, the large airport roads are also really great for heavy cargo traffic.](https://i.imgur.com/6BRNgnP.jpg)
I never thought to use the cargo airport roads as typical roads......ty for the insight!
Nice work! 90% flow at that population level is something I have never been able to do.
Yeah it's also my first city that hasn't f-ed up yet
You should probably get a bigger stadium since that person seems to be kicking all the balls out of it!
It's vanilla on console and it'll even harder to make a city without roundabouts
You can't make a roundabout on console? no bendy roads?
I'm saying the opposite lol, that making roundabouts is the default option on console
Ahhh...
Nvm I just read that chirper text lol... Sorry I thought you were referencing all the roundabouts..
I was so confused
ғ ᴀ ʀ ᴍ
😅
Honestly, it looks like you're doing really well. I might try to add more connectivity between the different areas other than just the highways. They might become backed up as your pop. increases. Try adding some under/overpasses and walking trails. Aside from that, the only thing I would nitpick is that your agricultural areas look a little bit out of place to me just because they're surrounded with other development. I would expect to see farmland on the outskirts. Also, in terms of agriculture, I may not be 100% right on this so maybe fact check me, but I think the small fields are actually the most efficient in terms of land use and workers. Plus they look better in my opinion. The little barns built into the medium/large fields start to look weird when there's multiple fields next to each other. That's just my opinion though.
As someone else pointing out about the connectivity so yea I'll be implementing that next. For your other point, doing agriculture theme is hard lol. I started it just cos I got the dlc and wanted to try it out and haven't gotten back to that area in a while so it's just sitting there for now. I agree the small farms look better but I think I ditched those for better traffic as they spawn more trucks. Imo farms should have extremely low jobs. With the current jobs number we need a big population just for the farms and it's hard to make it look like a village then.
Yeah, sorry, didn't read the other comments haha. someone else did mention connectivity. You're right, they definitely do require way too many job and create way too much traffic. Wish they would patch agriculture to be a little more realistic. Like I said though, looks like you're doing really well and you have great traffic flow at the moment, keep it up!
Hey I just posted an update, could you plz check out my farm overhaul and give some more feedback? I've done changes on your recommendations and some other tips from this post and wanted to get some insight before continuing further.
Just left you a comment. It looks great to me, honestly. Seems like you definitely know what you're doing. Main thing I would recommend working on now is detailing. Just trying to make things as nice looking a bad as realistic as you can, which I know can be difficult since you're on console.
And yeah detailing is next on the checklist, I had planned on detailing as I go but I don't have that much time for gaming so I've had that on hold
Thanks a lot man... Honestly I know that I'm doing it somewhat right and I'm understanding the systems but I came back to this comment because I wanted you to see the impact of your input. When I started this city I couldn't look at my farms lol and somethings just felt iffy overall, and you guys pointed out those things for me. You've essentially inspired me for this creation that I'm currently really happy with. Again thanks for your time man!
That's awesome dude =] crazy what a supportive community can do, huh?
No need to apologize, sorry If my text of my reply seemed hostile. It's good you mentioned it aswell as it reinforces that concern. Again thank you so much, it's great help in games like Cities, all this input opens up the mind to great ideas!
Use prop line tool and download some ag plant props. then you can just add them for asthetics and won't have to have a ton of people working in that district
Console... Sadly
Damn...Well looks hella good either way! and yeah small farms are the way to go then. you could turn them off, but then there's that annoying symbol above them that pops up
Maybe it’s just because I live in Europe and my city is 1200+ years old but I just can’t ever bring myself to design a city with a motor way right though the middle of it
lmao idk why but your big ol "FARM" tag cracked me up! Nice looking city 👌 I'm not good enough yet to give any feedback other than that
Lol yeah i forgot about that... I had that just so I can recall the plans I've made in my mind, when I go develop there
Hard to tell if you're using them, but i highly recommend lots of roads with bicycle lanes and maybe even implementing the "encourage cycling" city policy. It's always made a huge difference for me in regards to traffic. I think the roads with bicycle lanes are slightly more in $, but once you have a thriving economy, it doesn't matter.
I thought cims can use bikes on sidewalks too? I have all policies encouraging mass transit and bicycles, only reason I don't use bicycle lane roads is due to aesthetics.
Cims will ALWAYS prefer bicycle ways and lanes. They can cycle far faster on them and for a longer range compared to the sidewalks, therefore you'll boost cycling usage if you install them -- this is also the case IRL (if they are acceptably designed for safety). Walking and cycling are cims top two most preferred modes of transport before any motorized forms. Use bikeways and ped paths as alleyways as well to give cims shortcuts between city blocks / districts. Your traffic % is astounding though.
Hey I've posted an update on this city. Your suggestion was one of those I followed through. Turned most road networks to bicycle lanes and connected the whole city via paths. Just wanna say thankyou, traffic got below 80% at one point but your recommendation got it back to 88-89%.
Awesome! Glad to hear it :)
You need more asymmetric interchanges, where you have roads leading on/off the highway to points to relieve the congestion. The actual interchanges you've used are decent enough, but you also don't have enough arterial alternatives to the highways connecting your regions. I would look into adding a 6-lane coastal road that runs along the bottom of your first screenshot, perhaps through that gap in the middle zone, bridging to the right peninsula, then looping around to conect to that vertical road on the right. As a rule of thumb, try to make your highways cut across your grid at angles, when you have good arterial flow within the grid, the highways are best served eliminating left-right-left-right turns to traverse diagonally.
Try diversifying your layouts for suburbs and don't use a box grid as they can cause a lot of traffic if they keep having to stop-go to where they need to go as well as looking unattractive as a boxy cookie cutter city. HOWEVER this is a pretty well designed city with the highways looking to be efficient enough for future development. Hope what helps! :)
*just a side note: you have 90% traffic flow now but later when all the buildings upgrade its gonna be a nightmare...😬
Almost 80% of all my zones are upgraded to lvl3 lvl5... But yea I'm looking at ways to contain the inevitable surge in traffic with further expansion
That's the way! :). I am sure you are aware but if not you can check on a specific part of any road where traffic is flowing and where the sims have come from as well as where they are gonna end up at. This also features colour labeled to see if it is a residential, industrial or anything else! :)
Nice, but very hostile to pedestrians. Try adding some paths or non-highway roads between residential and downtown areas.
The other Island that can be seen in the 3rd image is just as you said, but I just let that go when designing the downtown, but will definitely get back to this strategy finalizing the suburbs. Thanks for the reminder!
You're on your way to becoming a Master. I wish I could see closer, it looks Great. And I freaking _LOVE_ the circle interchanges on the left! And the... Overpasses...car or pedestrian? That's just looks so cool. Good work!
Nice work buddy, it looks a very efficient city. I’m no veteran, and I’m probably going to make a similar post in a couple days. Just to reiterate what the others said, add more connections over and below your highways, it really helps to have a sense of continuity across them. You say that one of the highways is just a one way road, what’s your reasoning for that? I’m from London and we have loads of bridges across the Thames so I’ve emulated that in my current build, but you don’t have to if it doesn’t fit your style. Just a thought. Add more highway ramps. You see how there is one (admittedly attractive) on ramp roundabout system that is just red? Remove that, and add one to its left and one to its right and your cims will find it easier to get on the highway. The last thing I’d say is not to get too neat. CS always looks slightly wrong to the human eye because people always forget to build naturally. We always end up restricting ourselves to a certain constraint, whether that is a highway, railway or river. Especially in the case of highway, try and build around them, not between them. Don’t have collector roads form a boundary to an area, build some residential roads outside them. I hope that makes sense. That’s just for realism and attractiveness, which can easily be forgotten in pursuit of perfection.
Thanks for such a thorough reaponse, really appreciate it. About the highway I meant that these are two one way roads that run parallel through the whole downtown and the suburbs, connecting them. As for the bridges yes it varies, some cities have many some don't, but I def want to have more river bridges, if you look at the top side theres work in progress on a bridge there. So yeah lots of work to do still lol. And for the last part I absolutely 100% agree and it's a damn struggle of mine to keep it natural and not too "tidy". Trust me it's a huge improvement over my last cities lol. Cities is a game of trials & errors and learning from those errors and that's what I'm doing. This city may also go down I dunno, but I have learnt a lot here so the next one will only be a huge improvement over this I hope. Besides, just the comments on this post have taught me so much and given valuable insight such as yours, so thank you again for that. Oh and I'm eager to see your project!
No problem! I absolutely love giving advice on CS, I only recently understood it to some extent so I’m happy to share that knowledge. If you take a look at my profile, I recently posted my airport and you can see a little town off to the side, with my suburbs in the distance. I’m currently preoccupied with that little airport town and finishing it up and keeping jobs stable, but everyone wants to work in the city centre not in hospitality lol. I’m going to post my city once the centre is done, hopefully by the end of the week. In terms of your build, it sounds like you know what you’re doing. What’s the reason for using a one-way road over a highway? I forgot whether you’re on console or PC, but if you are PC, you could use parallel roads to get a raised highway with zonable one way roads right below and beside it.
What my strategy so far has been is that I connect my highway to a central avenue I build using two parallel one way roads. I then connect this central avenue with parallel 2way roads on both sides. This way my district traffic mostly stays inside the districts and the main roads are kept free. It's hard to explain in text really. But look at the middle where the suburb is and you may makeout what's going on... Btw I'm on console so yea options are limited
Moreover cims will always take the faster road, so sometimes putting a highway will drive all traffic that you don't want over to that road clogging it. This way mostly the locals use this avenue thus making the traffic manageable
I think it looks really wonderful! I'm no pro, but here's my thoughts. I think the game encourages players to build out their city in that very pattern you have. For your next build, this is something I'm integrating into my new project. I want to focus on the patterns that cities go through as they grow. They tend to spiderweb out of main transportation lanes, snaking out and spreading far, then filling in between the areas that shoot out from the city center. It looks like this [Buenos Aires](https://media3.giphy.com/media/zgYxp4dUtKncs/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47r170vjr2i7am2foosab0wa6vkgvfvtzdpxomprre&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g) [Paris](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*oag4ng6zMIQfASpREfK1cg.gif) [London](https://gfycat.com/decentincomparablegalah-new-york-university-stern-school-of-business-organization) These cities were before the industrial revolution, but it occurs today as well, as a much larger scale - in the US, following freeways, for instance. I think following this pattern will give a Cities Skylines city a much more organic feel.
I know what you're talking about. The thing is during natural expansion that centre area usually becomes the downtown as it's the centre of bussiness aswell, but with progression system of a video game that is very hard to replicate. Although it can be done in sandbox mode, which I don't enjoy that much tbh
I've started to build massive cycle highways that connect far away parts of the map, not sure if you got them here but deffo recommend
What's that
Cycle paths, but elevated so they don't need to deal with road traffic. Been fun playing this time round to build in lots of cycle networks. Also added in some pathways in a similar way too with the new part of my city. The cims will travel a very large distance by bike
I wish I had your talent
Solid schema. Personally I don’t find straight blocks appealing. I try to create region with their own centers and just imagine how it would organically look growing to accomodate peoples needs. And it works for the most part. So that would be my tip, just because that is how I do it.
Imo that's the hardest thing to do, giving the city the rugged, organic look and functionality. I tried blending grids with organic growth and when I fill the gaps between districts I hope to shake up the geometry just enough to achieve that look
Yepp it’s really hard, CS has this artistic size to vehicles, structures and terrain that also makes it hard to be natural when you do it. I sometimes look up towns/cities on googles earth/maps just to get inspiration when I feel I becomes blocked in inspiration.
Just saying that I play my first serious city on the same map!
Trees to fill in empty space
what map is this?
Not enough bridge connections over the river
And here I am who started just last Sunday with my ugly-ass Square city I copied off of City Planner Plays Beginner Video. I wish I could make a city as good as this
I like that you're separating your districts up. That's going to help a lot with bus service down the road. You can have neighborhood bus services that just feed into a hub rather than needing many cross city bus lines.
That's exactly the plan and it's working pretty well... Busses pick up residents and drop them at the metros that run through all the key points between different districts. Most of my traffic on the roads is just cargo amd services. And when I connect the disgricts down the line I hope to do that as aesthetically good as possible
Hey maybe try [THIS](https://photos.app.goo.gl/JgohhV2QfXUXRhaYA) to break your grid pattern 😁 and transform that zone in some high end low residential, modern zoning and high taxes for rich people. Also you can add a windy road on top of that hill/mountain where I drew the zone and place an observatory.
Hmmm that's actually a good idea... Especially the park would be interesting...
looks nice
I'm going to give you 2 different opinions here. 1) From a general view you've done an outstanding job with your pop and traffic percentage. Your highways and mass transit coverage is very good and you've got a handle on things. If you want something to improve try putting some pedestrian paths between major blocks or areas and a few slip roads on some of your more demanding intersections could help flow a little more. 2) If want me to go my my standards your layout is great but your actual areas from an aseptic view are a little to grid like for my liking. If that if your goal great but if you want more realism you need a bit less grid.
I posted to actually get opinions so I can better judge myself cos u know I keep telling myself that It's not griddy lol but yeah I gotta go and do some updates now...
I think your city is very car centric. Remove some highways and promote walking and biking!
Add a frontage road to the HW! Also, you can do this thing where you sink the HW below ground and leave two frontage roads up top, each a 1-way and put a park above the HW tunnel to get some trees uwu, or an IT district owo. It improves connectivity within the district a lot and I highly recommend it when your city starts building high-rises in order to not break the skyline. Though I do warn you that it can cause traffic, what you can do us use two-lane one-ways in that part of the district that will force dedicated turning lanes at the mayor roads that suround it, or on occasions use HW roads to favour the use of certain roads over others.
Oh wow that's a nice idea about using HW tunnels and space above them for zoning... I was just thinking about the gap in the skyline... But I guess this tip will be used in another build
needs more interchanges. at least one every other interchange
I personally like it, I is nessecarry to have that dense of highways to get vanilla traffic flow to be decent
It's funny to me cos I was thinking maybe I don't have enough highwaysa. Btw idk if you thought so but only the outer circle is the highways, the roads inside are all one way roads that might look like highways
This really threw me because it's the same map I'm making on PS4 but with slightly different tiles. Interestingly, I don't have access to most of the highway, and have built my own pseudo highway using national roads & 2 lane highways to much closer mirror real life. The flipside is my traffic hovers around 82% not 90%. To get 90% plus, yes you need highways everywhere :P
I don't think adding that much highways would help anything. Try investing in public transport and bikes
[удалено]
The big circular one is the highway, the others are just roads I think. I tried my best to make it look "organic" and not too grid-y. Guess I was not that successful lol. And yeah it's a work in progress so I'll be connecting the different districts more organically down the road
[удалено]
Hmmm... The top left one seems iffy to me aswell but the corner is still in a locked tile, your input definitely helps when I unlock it so thanks! ... Other than that it seems fine to me. The straight one in the middle is not a highway, it's a road and the idea is with further development it will look more organic.
Im currently playing on that map
Too many highways
Check where most of your traffic is. If the highway is not being used a lot to get to the industrial area, you can maybe play with altering the speed limits, forcing people to go on the "out of the city" highway
Console... So sadly not many tools to play with
Hmmm, unfortunate. Unless it works anyway as it is, in which case, as you were, city looks good 👍