I’ll beat the drum I was beating earlier: Cities: Skylines is easy on an easy map, and challenging on a hard map. Sure, you can easily build a beautiful, functional city with no traffic flow problems if you have a ton of land to work with. It’s not so easy when you’re hemmed in by mountains and oceans, and you barely have enough room to grow your city as it is. I’d be a lot further along in my island map game (maybe I’ll write about it this weekend) if I didn’t have to spend probably a quarter of what I take in on building tunnels.
If I ever get motivated to fire this up again I will play on a hard map to try it out.
The map layout certainly can impact the difficulty of the beginning of the game, but I’ve found that if you’re patient, you can wait out any issues you may have. Cities: Skylines’ economic model is pretty forgiving. There’s never much chance of a death spiral and collapse. (The Garbage issue and the Cemetery issues being a couple of notable exceptions.) You will just have slower growth.
The issue I’m having with the island map is that there just isn’t enough space to do everything that’s economically required. I can’t produce goods locally, because there’s no room for pollution without seriously impacting health, because there’s no room for housing besides next to everything else. It’s hard to import enough goods, because there’s no room for a highway system with sufficient throughput to move things from cargo ports to the rest of the island. Certainly, there’s no room to do it without spending probably millions of Skylines-bucks on running train tunnels through the mountain range to the other end of the map.
D’oh moment! Note to self: Of course the solar power plant doesn’t work at night.
Do solar power plants store their energy in batteries like home solar panels. If so, they should supply power at night!
Edit: Yes they do!
Yeah… Not according to Colossal Order.
Solar power in real life is not intended to be the only power source for a city. The solar power plants are connected to a grid with multiple different power plants.
What you can do in the game is to have solar power plants operate during daytime, to handle the peak usage, and have other power plants that supply night-time power.
You can use this to save money by adjusting the power plant budgets for day and night-time.
Yeah I know, but you weren’t crazy for thinking they might.
The night shots looks waaaaay better than many of the daytime shots. I expect one of the first mods to be a ‘always night’ setting. I assume it already exists.
Similar to the first image, but looking the other way.
An overview of the city, minus the cargo port, Commerce Park, and the new residential community of West Haven, on the island past the end of the Strip, behind the camera in the first picture in this post. (You can see it in the screenshot in my other post.) This photo looks east. (Actually, going by the sun, it looks west, but I haven’t had the time to rename all my districts yet, so I’m going to write as though it looks east.)
I started building in Central Bay. At the beginning, the cross-island expressway running down the middle of the photo (atop the mountains in the middle of this part of the island) was only one lane in each direction. The upgrade was expensive, and the elevation change on some of the exits is just nuts. There are two separate places where offramps corkscrew to get down to street level. The ramps leading to Cliff Heights and North Beach climb over the peaks of the central mountain range before they go back down to city level. The westbound onramp at Central Bay runs through a tunnel and joins the highway on the left, because there’s no room to maneuver an onramp around to the right side.
The mountain range basically cuts the city in two, too. The only ways across are the road through North Pass, the expressway exits to Cliff Heights and North Beach, and the tunnel between the Strip and Cliffside, and the subway system. (The game probably glosses over the difficulty of building a subway on a relatively low-lying island, but I’ll allow it.) Each side has semi-independent services, given the difficulty of getting across the mountains. It’s difficult to tell, but the built-up areas in this shot are pretty much the only areas that can support building. Everything else has too much elevation change.
To limit local pollution and keep the downtown part of the island pretty, all the city’s garbage has to flow along the expressway to Incinerator Island north of West Haven, out of frame to the bottom left, and all of the city’s imports have to flow along the expressway from the cargo port at Commerce Park to the various commercial districts. The blue status icons popping up in Cliffside, Cliff Heights, and North Beach are reminding me that I missed out on expanding my import capacity, and I’m only just now getting out of a cycle of no goods-close down-abandon-bulldoze-repeat in my commercial zones, after building a second cargo port.
I plan to further deal with that problem by adding a new cargo terminal, the cargo port with a rail connection, and running a cargo rail system under the mountain range and around to the south side of Central Bay, where I can build a rail station and distribution center. I’m playing with an all-tiles-unlockable mod, so once I finish up all the unlocks, I’ll be able to expand to the ring reef further east, where I’ll site the future tourist trap. (The part of the ring reef visible at left isn’t part of the playable map.) Expansion of the city will continue to the south. The expressway will loop around that way to provide fast access. There’s another mountain I can hug, so as not to rob myself of any usable space.
For a little bit of added challenge, I’m not using the rail connection for cargo: the off-map connection terminates at a passenger station, and that’s all. I justify that and the highway connections as representing ferries from the rest of the archipelago. I’m leaning against connecting the highway at the top left of this picture, because the highway and rail connections in use right now flow through the same place, my notional ferry port.
By the way, if the new smog effect annoys you, the community has provided this:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=523824395
A “disable industrial smog” button after I went to such lengths to get rid of my dirty industries? I am aghast. :P
That mod should include the caveat “you can’t spot red flags when you view the world through rose-tinted glasses.”
My interest has been piqued in this game and the new expansion. Are there any disasters like in the SimCities of old? I’ve also heard the cities follow a European model. Does this mean that there is the capability to start off of a community that has been there for centuries or longer, incorporating old ruins as eyesores or tourism opportunities?
No to both.
There’s no disasters beyond what you create via pollution, or inadvertent flooding due to badly placed dams or bridges. The only random “disaster” is the possibility of fire, but if you have a fire department, it poses no issues.
The “European” model mostly refers to the cities being generally greener, citizens having tolerance for higher taxes, and public transportation being more viable than in most US cities. Also, there is a “European” building theme that’s a cosmetic thing. Oh, and you can choose to have cars drive on the right or left sides of the roads.
Fishbreath and lordkosc, what maps are you building those on?
Using the Tenasi River map found here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=418775081
I’ve found it well designed, challenging, and fun to build on.
Bora Bora - Vaitape Island. It’s by a guy on the Steam workshop with a lot of numbers in his name.