Cities: Skylines

[Scunner]

I have kind of gotten obsessed with this since it came out last week. Good city building game along the lines of Sim City (the older versions anyway). It has a few flaws, a big one being it can be easy after you've got a small city started up. Challenges really only come from you're own miss-management, like accidentally pumping polluted water into the city because you've put a water pump down stream from a water outlet.

Here's the start of my first city. Only 7k population at the moment and just unlocked the denser zoning, so it's only small housing, commercial buildings and industry at the moment.

[Meesham]

Yer I'm hooked on this game, I think I just hit 30 hours on it. I'm onto my third city, best I've done is around 90,000 inhabitants who then started getting sick and dying. It turned out that the pollution from the waste outlet had managed to reach my water pumps and was making people sick, I didn't know about the hovering over the "sick" icon to see the reason until a couple of days ago.

I played the shit out of all the SimCities (except for the latest one which I didn't buy), I love the genre.

[Dr. Acula]

Completely and utterly engrossed in this game at the moment, 61 hours since I bought it Wednesday night, and before that a good 30+ hours with a pirated version. Have only had 2 cities so far, first one peaked at 180k pop, but due to inexperience and having to reconfigure all the roads, I gave up and started on a new one. This time though, I made sure to focus on making sure the roads could hold all the traffic, and it was perfectly fine up until a few hours ago when I started populating a new area, which added 30k to my 80k population, and now it's all backed up half way across the city -___-

Cities: Skylines

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

Traffic problems, just like a real life city!

[Xsannz]

Completely and utterly engrossed in this game at the moment, 61 hours since I bought it Wednesday night, and before that a good 30+ hours with a pirated version. Have only had 2 cities so far, first one peaked at 180k pop, but due to inexperience and having to reconfigure all the roads, I gave up and started on a new one. This time though, I made sure to focus on making sure the roads could hold all the traffic, and it was perfectly fine up until a few hours ago when I started populating a new area, which added 30k to my 80k population, and now it's all backed up half way across the city -___-

Cities: Skylines

mother of god that alot of roads, looking like auckland there, perhaps just add another bypass

[Dr. Acula]

That's why there are so many roads, because of all the traffic problems! Most of the congestion is sorted, but god you should see the mess it's in now with the new area I added, fucking rats nest.

[Xsannz]

That's why there are so many roads, because of all the traffic problems! Most of the congestion is sorted, but god you should see the mess it's in now with the new area I added, fucking rats nest.

same issue with Sim city the latest 2 versions, the simulated traffic was too high, the maths based on people vs vehicles is way off and as such you get far too much traffic i had 6 lane motorways for suburban streets and they were still full..

[Meesham]

I've sorted out most of my road congestion by using lots of roundabouts and highways, the main problem I have is with freight trains. I have 2 separate rail networks for freight, one for outside trains and one for inside the city and the latter keeps filling up with trains - the game seems to be spawning too many trains as they're not even full. The passenger rail network is on separate lines so it's not that getting in the way either.

[Dr. Acula]

The main problem with this though, is that when the game does the pathing for the cars, it makes them merge at the most inopportune time, which is usually the main cause of massive gridlock, and it doesn't take congestion into account, so making alternative paths is usually pointless unless it's a more direct path with where they're wanting to go.

[Dr. Acula]

I've sorted out most of my road congestion by using lots of roundabouts and highways, the main problem I have is with freight trains. I have 2 separate rail networks for freight, one for outside trains and one for inside the city and the latter keeps filling up with trains - the game seems to be spawning too many trains as they're not even full. The passenger rail network is on separate lines so it's not that getting in the way either.

Got that issue a lot on my old map, thus the need for an internal line for passengers only. A huge contributing factor to the gridlock on the rail though, was all the intersections, since the trains were so long, they'd block each other, making it back up pretty quick, I've tried to avoid rail mostly on this new map, only putting one cargo station on the outskirts of town for bringing in goods.

[Xsannz]

The main problem with this though, is that when the game does the pathing for the cars, it makes them merge at the most inopportune time, which is usually the main cause of massive gridlock, and it doesn't take congestion into account, so making alternative paths is usually pointless unless it's a more direct path with where they're wanting to go.

this is why you have traffic controllers dedicated to this sort of thing in real life.

there should be a base level control of interesting / merge timing that you can click on an intersection and change the timing etc, and they then need to apply an auto pathing calculator similar to the AI of a tower defense game life defense grid, to work out shortest but fastest route taking into account the rulesets, that or allow you to reduce the ruleset o vehicles . trains per capita, or reduce 25% traffic for every  public transport option you have

[Xsannz]

I've sorted out most of my road congestion by using lots of roundabouts and highways, the main problem I have is with freight trains. I have 2 separate rail networks for freight, one for outside trains and one for inside the city and the latter keeps filling up with trains - the game seems to be spawning too many trains as they're not even full. The passenger rail network is on separate lines so it's not that getting in the way either.

Got that issue a lot on my old map, thus the need for an internal line for passengers only. A huge contributing factor to the gridlock on the rail though, was all the intersections, since the trains were so long, they'd block each other, making it back up pretty quick, I've tried to avoid rail mostly on this new map, only putting one cargo station on the outskirts of town for bringing in goods.

low roads and raised rail does this allow for that design, like new york style above ground stations etc.

[Meesham]

Got that issue a lot on my old map, thus the need for an internal line for passengers only. A huge contributing factor to the gridlock on the rail though, was all the intersections, since the trains were so long, they'd block each other, making it back up pretty quick, I've tried to avoid rail mostly on this new map, only putting one cargo station on the outskirts of town for bringing in goods.

Passenger lines are fine and completely separate from freight, bypass lines for stations (there's probably a proper name for it) seem to keep the lines uncongested - although you have a bit more control over the number of trains on the passenger lines. It would be nice to be able to see how much freight each station is actually loading and unloading.

I do have a few intersections as I've tried to make all the freight lines join up in a big loop, I think I might change it to point-to-point as a test and have a bunch of separate lines. I also added a loop road between a freight station and a cargo terminal, that seems to work quite well.

[Dr. Acula]

The main problem with this though, is that when the game does the pathing for the cars, it makes them merge at the most inopportune time, which is usually the main cause of massive gridlock, and it doesn't take congestion into account, so making alternative paths is usually pointless unless it's a more direct path with where they're wanting to go.

this is why you have traffic controllers dedicated to this sort of thing in real life.

there should be a base level control of interesting / merge timing that you can click on an intersection and change the timing etc, and they then need to apply an auto pathing calculator similar to the AI of a tower defense game life defense grid, to work out shortest but fastest route taking into account the rulesets, that or allow you to reduce the ruleset o vehicles . trains per capita, or reduce 25% traffic for every  public transport option you have

Definitely need some sort of control, especially with making the AI choose what lane they use. Modders Have put in some basic control for intersections, and from what I've read, the devs are looking into giving the player more control, as all you can really do at the moment is use certain roads to make sure there aren't any traffic lights, and then plan well in advance. The current pathing algorithm is nearly sufficient, it just needs that calculation for congestion and other optional routes, I think one of the big things is the fact that the engine the game was built on, allows for 65,000 live entities at once, meaning there'll always be A LOT of cars on the road, luckily I've done well to plan my city with decent public transport and the ability to be able to walk anywhere in the city with pretty direct walking routes for the AI to take.

[Dr. Acula]

As you can see, I've got a lot of my civilians walking from the residential area, to a bus stop that is on a completely separate road system, so to keep the traffic from interrupting the bus services

Cities: Skylines

Each of those coloured lines are bus routes, each on their own, independent loop, no other vehicles can get on, and buses can't get off.

Cities: Skylines

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

Your bus is running over your people.

[Dr. Acula]

Your bus is running over your people.

Good! Natural selection at work.

[Xsannz]

Your bus is running over your people.

Good! Natural selection at work.

cant fault this logic, i think our cotton wool society really stops natural selection, we should really allow it to happen.

[Apostrophe Spacemonkey]

This game does look pretty good, might give it ago.


I didn't actually think SimCity was that bad, I don't think it quite deserved the bad rap it got.

The only issue I had with the game with the limited map space. This games looks like you get quite a lot of room to work with.
 

[Dr. Acula]

This game does look pretty good, might give it ago.


I didn't actually think SimCity was that bad, I don't think it quite deserved the bad rap it got.

The only issue I had with the game with the limited map space. This games looks like you get quite a lot of room to work with.

Definitely one of the better ones as of late; a good successor to the originals, such as SimCity 2000. Haven't played the latest SimCity but from the things I heard about it, such as the incredibly small map size, I was put off

C:S is worth a look if you're into the city sim genre.