Cities Skylines 2: a phonecall from sweden

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Cities Skylines 2: a phonecall from sweden

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

pwnyXpress posted:

So overall I can see that this game offers tons more than SimCity did, but don't a lot of the problems seem a bit reminiscent of that debacle? Odd things like the commercial bug and weird water issues?

The biggest one, and probably the number one reason I haven't purchased yet, is because it seems people have to do stupid convoluted things with roads in order to get functional traffic, which certainly brings back some bad memories.

Cross posting since a traffic model discussion is super relevant for page 1.

The most basic traffic conceit is at first glance kind of limiting but arguably realistic: cars get in the lane they need for the next intersection after the previous intersection. This leads to all the reactionary screenshots of 6 lane one way roads with miles of traffic backup because there is only 1 way to go at the end of that road. That basic conceit leads to needing to create some realistic traffic networks. It is neither Sim City 13 at release (traffic backed up because the AI didn't actually know how to turn in different directions), and importantly not the model from SimCity 4 where bigger roads solved everything by just providing a literal bucket for traffic to sit in out of the way.

The actual issues where the game stands to improve are getting into slightly gamey stuff you may never actually get into if you build your networks otherwise realistically. Basically, merged intersections are far superior to lighted intersections due to a Google car sort prescience that allows anarchy merges to be incredibly efficient. There's some cool opportunities for the devs to address this with slowing down the insane merges and making lighted intersections faster, either with an AI tweak or lighted intersection design tools since a lot of the lighted intersection issues are with cars doing crazy turning stuff but not wanting to do it unless the intersection is completely deserted.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 17:53

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 07:44

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Spaceman Future! posted:

The clean fix for the lane issue would be to have agents only switch to their "optimal" lane within X distance of their desired intersection and encourage non public transit ai to scatter between lanes between those distance checks. I wonder how computationally expensive that would be, because the alternatives are wierd game only intersections and road splits as a workaround. Not that its an absolutely massive deal but I hope its on the list. Also enforced minimum spacing between city buses on a line would go a long way to cleaning up weird traffic jams on otherwise open roads.

It'd be interesting to see if there's more they can do with it, but by the time you have traffic lining up you have serious issues with your network, that you might not even necessarily need merged intersection strangeness to fix. Moving traffic down road with an AI that likes to zipper merge might fix some earlier jams when the traffic line extends past a previous intersection, but you still have the root problem causing the back up in the first place no matter when they choose a lane.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 18:11

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Slickdrac posted:

And a bidirectional split off that works as efficiently.

No kings, no gods; only yields.

Alternately, this is the future open to us with Google cars.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 18:18

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

SPACE HOMOS posted:

So, is there a good ratio of commercial next to residential? Do offices work best next to residential? I always end up blobbing them in large swathes and wonder if there is a good way to disperse them.

I build my city center blocks out of 4 lane avenues with juicy, twisty neghborhood cores. I put commercial on the intersections, occasionally a whole strip so as to be a shopping mall. I mix offices freely depending on the flavor of that block I want to achieve.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 18:30

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

mlmp08 posted:

It seems a bit odd. In one place, the trucks immediately switched to my bypass. Then I build pretty much the exact same style of bypass elsewhere and the only cars that seem to use it are utility vehicles like garbage trucks and hearses while the commercial trucks just sit in traffic all day, one block over.

How long have you waited? Routes are generated at spawn unless forced to regenerate due to a road being deleted.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 19:11

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

totalnewbie posted:

I was referring to the sort of thing posted above where sliding a 2 lane road segment into a 6 lane road actually improves efficiency. This shouldn't be the case, obviously.

I don't know if we have the same definition of obvious. Because after playing the game it becomes obvious you want as many lanes going into an intersection in a direction as there are coming out. Which the ideal set up takes into account, while the brute force method ignores the idea.

But what people are actually saying is you don't need to get that deep into it unless you want to. Its possible to make entirely functioning road systems without the perfect 6 lane trident.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 19:22

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Spaceman Future! posted:

Higher / better would make sense in C:S too since the lower you are the greater your chances of being flooded in poo water by a badly thought out drat placement or fluctuating river. So long as "higher" was measured from a gradient from the lowest average tile on your overall map rather than having an all raised tile map be a richie rich enclave otherwise its just exploitable design.

Tying a land value bonus to clear water shores and malus to poo poo water would also have the benefit of giving a gameplay reason to build water treatment plants instead of outfall pipes.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 19:51

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

totalnewbie posted:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you or the post we're referring to was saying, but it seems to me that if you just have a normal 6-lane road, only the outside lanes get used, even though it causes traffic to be backed up and cars could be taking the middle lanes to bypass turning traffic.

However, by inserting a 2 lane road, you force cars into the middle lanes first, which then move to the outside lanes when needing to turn.

This is a flaw in the AI, as the proper behavior should be that vehicles utilize the inside lanes (i.e. through-lanes) first and only use turn lanes when necessary, until such time that the through-lanes are congested which will quickly cause congestion on the turn lanes. This would be when your road has reached its actual capacity, where traffic couldn't be improved directly by fixing that particular stretch of road. That's what I mean by improved AI and gaming the system.

I get that it's not necessary and I've got some pretty lovely intersections and on/off ramps that magically work, but it would still be nice that roads would operate at maximum capacity without having to resort to weird tricks. One benefit is that a six-lane road actually becomes much more of an improvement over a 4-lane road than the current system, where they both end up using just the outside lanes and so the extra two lanes essentially become wasted (at least, in that particular scenario).

If its a flaw with anything its with the intersection generating code, since the issue is with only the outside line being assigned as turning lanes. Note that the "right design" might still not even lane balance if the 2 lane branch roads don't have compelling reasons for cars to turn both right and left downstream.

I guess my point was the more common impact on gameplay is that every time you design an intersection, and this is easiest to see with 1 way roads, you should be asking yourself do the ins equal the outs. With the wrong trident example you have 6 lanes coming in, 2+2+6=10 lanes coming out, which the game doesn't like. In the right trident, you have 6 lanes coming in, 2+2+2=6 coming out and the lane assignments all come out making more sense.

This is also applicable in making your streets look more like the suburbia I am used to: You can have 4 lane roads going all about, and in intersections you absolutely must have better balanced you can expand out to a 6 lane. for a single stretch of road.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 21:59

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

With commercial I had dead demand after unlocking high density until I built a late first freight terminal around 20k. Since then its never bottomed out and is nearly insatiable now. I don't have any overlapping parks for the most part except my downtown where I have offices forced to level 3.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 22:17

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Fish Fry Andy posted:

I can't see any difference.

For junctions of two highways I haven't needed anything more than this. By the time you are worrying about balancing traffic lanes on a highway, you probably need another highway going a completely new corner of your city.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2015 22:34

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Ofaloaf posted:

I made a t-intersection of highways, but then decided I wanted to carry on the bit beyond the T and I already had a rail line and some roads laid down and I guess it's just

Excitement Rating: 5.4
Intensity Rating: 6.6
Nasuea Rating: 8.0

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 00:16

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

The old abandoned park underneath flooded Poop Bay is presumably where the drug lords stash their smuggler's submarines when not in use

Arsonide posted:

How do you guys deal with the early game off ramp? It is terrible and I hate it. I wish it was a 2 lane/six lane road or something. I would just bulldoze it and make something better, but in the early game you don't have any tools to do highway ramps or highways, and in the late game, you've already built around the lovely default ramp.

The game is fantastic, but this triggers my OCD so hard.

Just connect it with whatever you like the look of best and if you don't like to bulldoze large swathes in the name of progress, its not a bad idea to leave an unbuilt corridor open for a future highway spur when you unlock highways.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 02:38

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Zotix posted:

So what's the best way to handle traffic coming off of the starting highway?

Before you get big: I don't care, looptheloops if you have to.
After you get big: more highway.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 04:02

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

meatsaw posted:

Now that I'm paying attention to these things, probably 75% of the roads where I live are 5 lanes, or 4 lanes with a left turn lane in the middle. Not sure what that would buy you vs. using 6 lanes, but it could replace the seemingly useless 4 lane. I also didn't like the way merging one ways (like ramps) into the game's 4 lane causes a traffic light, but I guess there must be a logic to it.

4 lanes with trees look awesome is all the logic I need. They make up the large scale grid in my city centers and keep the poors from parking on the main streets, another aesthetic coup. If you have a particularly busy intersection you can expand the road nodes nearest to the intersection up to 6 lanes for better turning lane assignments, but I guess that doesn't help if you have a mid block turning issue. I don't think I run into that between a granular grid size, and local neighborhood roads in each block linking 2-3 of the faces of the block.

BTW merging into a 6 lane also causes lights. The only freeby intersection for 4 lane and 6 lanes are 1 way out branches.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 16:31

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Guys I had a slight panic attack when faced with the infinite prospects of the first highway connections. Can anyone help me fix this interchange?

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 18:09

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

zedprime posted:

Guys I had a slight panic attack when faced with the infinite prospects of the first highway connections. Can anyone help me fix this interchange?

OK I gave up on improving that interchange because I heard you can alleviate traffic through other means. I made an early rail station to try and take some truck load off the road.

I heard you should avoid level crossings? I think I managed to...

Yeah, that seems to check out being above the road. How about this down stream, does it count as level if they are both 100 feet in the air?

Perfect!

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 18:51

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Ofaloaf posted:

They haven't, though. I peaked at 9600 before zoning high-density; an in-game year later, I'm now hovering at 8400, give or take, and it hasn't bounced back at all.

If everything is still peachy in your city, it might have been a boomer die off. The game can be slightly slow about filling in existing households after that.

e.
Boomers :argh:

zedprime fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Mar 17, 2015

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:42

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Ofaloaf posted:

Where the devil are statistics? I'm dumb and haven't figured out all the controls yet.

In the escape menu.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:54

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Ofaloaf posted:

Budget went from weekly revenues of $3000 to a deficit of $4000.

Make sure you have a tight ship with your policies while you recover, partial residence and partial industrial/commercial employment all eat into you tax rate, while policies are flat cost per building.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 00:10

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Shibawanko posted:

A lot of the screenshots posted so far make this game come off to me as something where you build one giant highway intersection with a bunch of buildings surrounding it as an afterthought. Can you get creative the way you could with SC4?

The absolutely giant highway intersections are mostly superfluous, I haven't needed anything fancier than using this for new spurs off the preexisting regional line.

However dropping a highway spur with frontage roads or other cleverly designed local distributed service method is the easiest way to vacuum up wayward traffic from a clogged artery. That doesn't mean there isn't untapped buckets of spergdom for crazy person one way networks that reduce the frequency you need to connect to a highway.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 15:22

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

PT6A posted:

When people post pictures of cool looking cities, could they also attach a traffic map? I want to see just how good/terrible I'm doing in comparison.

Traffic maps are questionable as benchmarks because a red intersection can mean anywhere from a popular but well designed aspect of a thoroughfare, to traffic hell on earth.

Based on discussions and close up shots, I'd expect if you can keep traffic from disappearing in grid lock you are in the upper quartile of sick noscope road designers.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 17:58

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

MikeJF posted:

Yeah, the game needs graphs and displays for things like traffic that actually show problem areas.

Someone make a mod where every time a vehicle times out the Willhelm scream plays, because that's already what it feels like in my head when I am troubleshooting a broken piece of the network and the cars start disappearing.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 18:05

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Galaga Galaxian posted:

My first city, Firston (formerly Firstown), isn't doing too bad traffic wise. Except in the Industrial district and the bottom-most off-ramp in this picture. Not sure what to do about the offramp that doesn't involve building several ugly offramps.

The frontage roads on the highway really helped congestion early on, but I wonder if I should be making them two-way instead of one-way.

Frontage roads should be one way, but with u-turns preceding lighted intersections and following any exits from the highway. That will probably fix your broken traffic jams.

e. similar to this, but I like to do it with on ramps to make it even crazier http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=407055883&searchtext=texas

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 18:08

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Galaga Galaxian posted:

Dumb question, but what do you mean by a u-turn? A way to get to the frontage road on the opposite side?

[edit] Oh, a "Texas Turnaround" huh? I haven't seen these where I live in central California, despite plentiful frontage roads (ours are two-ways though). Neat!

Its funny that lately I've been paying attention to freeway overpasses and interchanges while on the road. It helps that my job involves a lot of driving.

There's different ways to use frontage roads but when it comes to quickly servicing industry the good old Texas solution of MORE CONCRETE MORE FASTER works real well.

There's also plenty of room for two-way frontage roads that basically serve as the residential and commercial arms of the highway, but probably not near concentrated industrial areas in this game.

e. a good next step in the more concrete more faster philosophy is to connect those 2 lane side roads you have industry on directly to the frontage road.

zedprime fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Mar 18, 2015

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 18:21

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Slickdrac posted:

At the very least, some kind of rhyme or reason for how saves and items are ordered would be nice. Maybe I'm not catching it, but it just seems to put things in whatever order it feels like based on the wind direction at the moment.

I think I figured out the arcane currents organizing saves, or as close as any mortal can. They are listed alphabetically, then at the end chronologically listed are any made in the current game session.

Canuck-Errant posted:

You know the trident intersection from earlier?

I made a Devil's Trident for merging inward:

The more awful things are put together with 2 lanes and ramps, the more I think busy merge intersections should ruin the health of your cims to represent the godawful car crashes that would result in the real world.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 18:32

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Kanfy posted:

Not sure if it's been posted but someone claiming they're a traffic engineer wrote a whole bunch of words about handling traffic.

This is a few notes about turn lane usage (which should come naturally using his scheme anyway) from being what should be the official tutorial that pops up like Clippy when you start a new city for the first time.

A little mascot like a Clippy made out of roads would make a good companion for Chirpy too.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2015 18:47

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Nitrousoxide posted:

Burial being a city provided service seems really weird to me. Is this a thing that is provided in European countries?

I expect its as simple as asking "what's another service on a different period from all the basic services?" during development and burial being the least awful idea.

I have taken to leaning into the booms because the RCI feedback during a busts allows for even bigger boon/busts and I'm scared of playing at a speed faster than base despite my city being stable.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 00:01

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Domattee posted:

What do you mean with "reverse flow of water"? Does the dam itself start pumping water the wrong way or does it just back up so much that it overflows.

Depending on the volume where the outflow of the dam is, the outflow can flood the river at the bottom of the dam, which can backflow over the dam temporarily stopping the flow at the dam outlet, which allows enough time for the tidal wave to propagate down the river and probably flood everything. And then probably do it a couple times before the system manages to hit steady state.

The water physics in this game are awesomely broken and I kind of hope they aren't fixed. I moved a dozen water pumps at a dam inlet upstream to make room for water treatment plants to supercharge the dam. Moving the pumps caused a momentary imbalance in flows until a tidal wave crested the dam, ran downstream and across the bay, and flooded my reclaimed land neighborhood.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 03:03

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

zedprime posted:

The water physics in this game are awesomely broken and I kind of hope they aren't fixed. I moved a dozen water pumps at a dam inlet upstream to make room for water treatment plants to supercharge the dam. Moving the pumps caused a momentary imbalance in flows until a tidal wave crested the dam, ran downstream and across the bay, and flooded my reclaimed land neighborhood.

I uploaded the save because I spent entirely too much time the other day preventing the flooding of my reclaimed area without reverting any further than that one save so it might provide a momentary diversion from sweet roundabouts if you haven't witnessed the horror of working on river dynamics while paused.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 03:28

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Note to self: When you're about to run out of sewage capacity and decide to add a new drain pipe to the poop complex, make sure you actually build a drain pipe and not, say, a pumping station.

California has always been a pioneer in poop to drinking water technology.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 16:29

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Croccers posted:

I find a lot of the issue is that most seem to over-plop bus stops.
Cims will walk pretty drat loving far to get to one so you don't need one every block and turn.

Nonsense, do you want a functioning transit system or do you want enough hearts poo poo out of office buildings to get skyscrapers.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 17:51

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

The Mantis posted:

Idgi

Level 3 office buildings are notoriously hard to get to level up due to "wanting more services." Every service that makes something poo poo a heart out at placement counts as credit so duplicated service covering is required, and overly placed bus lines is one part of that you can do.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 18:11

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Baronjutter posted:

I'm still having some odd problems with employment. I've got 12% unemployment but still tons of factories will abandon due to lack of workers, but only level 1 factories. If they survive long enough to upgrade they do fine. The same with low density commercial, I basically can't build it anymore because it will abandon due to lack of workers, yet high density is fine.

Why aren't any of these 12% unemployed people working these jobs? The moment the building upgrades it gets flooded with workers, and it's not workers moving in from other jobs as there simply are not other level 1 buildings in the city to work at. When my city is 100% no level 1 buildings I'll have no buildings complaining about employment, it's but when I build a new work area I have to do it very slowly as the level 1 buildings will abandon.

Do we know for sure how employment works? It seems educated people will maybe only work a level or two below, but a highly educated person perhaps will never work at an uneducated job?

I haven't plunged super in depth into it but at least I've seen 12% as an oddly normal saturated job market. A job-saturated healthy unemployment ranges from 3-15% depending on the boomer age demographics, so I expect its stuff like students and retirees counting as unemployed.

Highly educated people will be lumberjacks in the right saturation.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2015 21:34

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Unkempt posted:

It's some kind of land boat.

https://gfycat.com/ObviousLightheartedChrysomelid

Every ship captain in this game is a drunk Italian.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 00:06

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

give me thread posted:

That is awesome! The water in this game seems pretty well done so watching that flood must have been quite a treat haha.

On another note, I found some kind of firefighting guitar instrument. drat traffic lights!

How about round the corner, through a house and down the hill. Its like those pictures of luxury cars parked in front of fire hydrants with the hose ran through but with a house.

I was too busy laughing to take a screenshot on his return trip when he walked across and floated down from the roof of the shack at the bottom of the hill on the corner.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 00:46

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Breaking news for people trying to balance highways by balanced right and left exits :siren:

Highway traffic behavior is for through traffic to avoid "local lanes" which are those which have exits within a personally undetermined length. Nearby exits on the right and left will turn cims into crazy middle lane campers and render your highways as good as ramps.

Macaluso posted:

Hey guys made a layout that solves the traffic problem

How to solve your traffic problem: Just don't have traffic lights!

The only real "traffic" is where people come into the city via the highway, and I've literally never seen them have a big single file backup. It's just the only place in the entire city where the cars have to stop for a second.

I knew 2 lanes were overpowered but my soul just died a little looking at those shots.

Wait, where is the industrial? Industrial is the only real traffic generator.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 04:00

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

Control Volume posted:

Re: the intersection, I still think the diamond interchange is the best starter, since it's simple, it looks good, and it's cheap to build.

example:

The most important thing about the opening interchange is that you don't have highways yet. If you're smart you don't have anything other than 2 lanes yet, because 2 lanes are all you need for a long while and the wider roads make you sin against the holy yield.

Control Volume posted:

Huh? It's just a stack interchange, but that's not something you want to build right after you start a map.

Now that's a stack interchange I want to drive irl providing there's no other traffic because that's some race course quality curves.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 05:18

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

It is an ingenious satire of how public service views social media because I've been getting tweets about sound pollution from the apartment buildings next to the lumbermill for 20 years and I keep thinking "well the doctors close, you'll be fine."

Eagerly awaiting airline disaster tweets. I'm not sure this checks out against the relevant building codes...

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 05:31

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

ShootaBoy posted:

So I started a new town to try and not have a hosed road system for once, but randomly, once I'm in the neighborhood of a few thousand cims, my income just starts dropping really rapidly, I'm talking making 1,000ish down to sub 500 in a few minutes. This is happening when I'm not even touching anything at all. Anyone else have this happen?

Do you have any credits per building policies running? Those can be killer to your budget before you hit the free money stage and would explain a sudden jump.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 05:49

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 07:44

zedprime: Jun 9, 2007; yospos

TomR posted:

So much traffic.

Oh god that angled merge. You even have that bypass laid out you could use to hook back into the left-bound highway at a reasonable angle instead of that... thing.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2015 19:34

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