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Think I'm gonna end up starting over, I got my city above 10k population but now the early roads I laid down just can't handle the traffic. I have to ask how people here handle the zoning demands. Do you always build more when demand is high or do you ignore demand until you know the section you just built is working properly?
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Nov 10, 2015 01:24
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Ignore demand, until it actually fucks something up real bad and kills my city. And then I keep ignoring it while I mutter angrily to myself about ungrateful cims.
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Nov 10, 2015 01:48
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njsykora posted:Think I'm gonna end up starting over, I got my city above 10k population but now the early roads I laid down just can't handle the traffic. I have to ask how people here handle the zoning demands. Do you always build more when demand is high or do you ignore demand until you know the section you just built is working properly? The only one I really pay attention to is residential, since it is the key to city expansion. For the other two, I only provide new zones if there are no immediate issues with the existing ones (most notable a lack of workers). A simple way to get rid of “excess” commercial or industrial demand is to simply de-zone and/or raze existing areas of that type and then re-zone them the way they were — for some reason, de-zoning does not make demand go up, and re-filling slots that already existed still counts as fulfilling demand. Beyond that, I prefer to have my demands hover somewhere around ¼–⅓, since that shows that there is room for expansion, but not an absolute critical need at the moment. Only when a demand starts to quickly rise past 50% is it really worth supplying something right this minute.
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Nov 10, 2015 02:07
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So build residential always, and commercial/residential when they get over half. Got it. I'm assuming the starting square is the center of the available tiles, so the initial stuff you lay down can be converted later into a downtown area? Also taxes, is there any real need to keep tweaking taxes or can they be put at a certain level right away and left there?
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Nov 10, 2015 02:15
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njsykora posted:Also taxes, is there any real need to keep tweaking taxes or can they be put at a certain level right away and left there? I've played many cities (without unlimited money) and never once touched tax levels. YMMV. Tippis posted:The only one I really pay attention to is residential, since it is the key to city expansion. For the other two, I only provide new zones if there are no immediate issues with the existing ones (most notable a lack of workers). A simple way to get rid of “excess” commercial or industrial demand is to simply de-zone and/or raze existing areas of that type and then re-zone them the way they were — for some reason, de-zoning does not make demand go up, and re-filling slots that already existed still counts as fulfilling demand. Doesn't this make it take longer for the buildings to upgrade to their highest level?
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Nov 10, 2015 02:25
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Longbaugh01 posted:Doesn't this make it take longer for the buildings to upgrade to their highest level? Probably, since you wipe out any progress that has been made. Not that levels really matter that much: in the early game, you don't have enough services to make higher levels viable, and in the late game, sheer volume means that losing a few jobs per tile makes no difference.
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Nov 10, 2015 02:38
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njsykora posted:Think I'm gonna end up starting over, I got my city above 10k population but now the early roads I laid down just can't handle the traffic. I have to ask how people here handle the zoning demands. Do you always build more when demand is high or do you ignore demand until you know the section you just built is working properly? You could also just bulldoze everything and re-do it. Stuff grows back really quickly and there's really no downside to large-scale razing in this game. Nobody gets pissed, at most you'll lose some income for a while but cash is easy to get. Never feel too bound by what you already have - the game is extremely forgiving.
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Nov 10, 2015 02:42
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Pretty much. The only thing I've found that maybe needs some consideration before you raze it is anything to do with water. Aside from the obvious issue of creating flash floods if you remove a dam, there are also some similar disasters on a smaller scale that can happen if you move around water pumping stations. In one city, I had placed a whole bunch of them just after two rivers joined and later decided to split them and move them further upriver. Somehow, even though it was the same number of pumps and the same (total) water source, this move apparently changed how much water was passing through the fork. So suddenly, waves started lapping over the shores further down the river and started flooding some of the previously safe buildings there. To make matters worse, this isn't necessarily something that can be restored due to how the water physics work, at least not without a terraforming mod. Water that is carried inland by a freak wave will often have no way of escaping, and will just pool up and render an area wholly unsuitable to build on. Not enough that it makes the game give you the “can't build on water” warning, but enough that anything that is built immediately counts as flooded.
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Nov 10, 2015 02:56
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njsykora posted:Also taxes, is there any real need to keep tweaking taxes or can they be put at a certain level right away and left there? What I like to do (trigger warning for monumental  ) is bring all my taxes down a couple points right at the start, then pretend my cims are voting on ballot measures that will, say, cut industrial taxes, or increase commercial taxes for one year, or stuff like that.I'd really like that kind of thing as an actual game feature, so your district could vote itself a heavy vehicle ban or a smoking ban or something, but it probably gets too tricky to balance impact and fun with that kind of poo poo.
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Nov 10, 2015 03:37
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ExtraNoise posted:Now that I've got a computer that can run this game, I'm having a lot of fun with it. But I think I'm having more fun making things for it than making things in it:
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Nov 10, 2015 03:52
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Ignore the demand meter in most cases. Here's my recipe for knowing what to build at any given moment: 1) If I want to grow the city aggressively, start with adding residential. 2) If unemployment ever goes over ~12%, build stuff that provides jobs. 2a) Check goods imports/exports. If I'm importing goods, build industrial. (Optionally, check raw materials and build out your supply chains if needed/desired.) 2b) If local demand for goods is met, there's at least a sliver of commercial demand on the meter, and there aren't any buildings complaining about a lack of customers, build more commercial. 2c) If no need for goods or commercial, build office. 3) If unemployment ever dips below ~5%, build residential. That's pretty much it. Steps 2 and 3 (especially combined with death waves) tend to form a feedback loop that naturally produces slow growth, so you can just gradually tack on bits and pieces to your city by keeping the unemployment seesaw balanced. If you want to get fancy you can learn to anticipate population cycles and flatten out the peaks and valleys by zoning residential at just the right time. The graphs are handy for this. There's zero need to respond to the demand meter for its own sake. There's no inherent penalty to ignoring it, and sky-high (or flatlined) demand for a zone type might or might not reflect an actual problem with your city. You can use it as a vague suggestion or warning system, but you're better off basing your decisions on the actual data available elsewhere - unemployment rate, housing availability, goods demand, lack of worker/customer complaint bubbles, etc. This stuff, for example, is totally unnecessary: Tippis posted:The only one I really pay attention to is residential, since it is the key to city expansion. For the other two, I only provide new zones if there are no immediate issues with the existing ones (most notable a lack of workers). A simple way to get rid of “excess” commercial or industrial demand is to simply de-zone and/or raze existing areas of that type and then re-zone them the way they were — for some reason, de-zoning does not make demand go up, and re-filling slots that already existed still counts as fulfilling demand. There's no such thing as "excess" demand. It doesn't do anything bad for demand to exist. Just ignore it if you don't feel like building that zone type. Also thirding this: Bold Robot posted:You could also just bulldoze everything and re-do it. Stuff grows back really quickly and there's really no downside to large-scale razing in this game. Nobody gets pissed, at most you'll lose some income for a while but cash is easy to get. Never feel too bound by what you already have - the game is extremely forgiving. There's nothing wrong with starting a new city if that's what you feel like, but you should always expect that your initial build-out will need to get blown up and redone, or at least heavily modified, as the city grows. This is especially true when you're new to the game, but even when you have a good sense of how things work it can be hard to anticipate how everything will interact over time. Learning how to diagnose and actually fix traffic problems is basically the only mechanical challenge this game offers, so at some point you'll probably want to get to grips with it.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:19
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Yeah exactly that. The RCI demand bars are a massive lie and I think have done more to confuse and upset players to the game than anything else. CO should have made them better reflect reality or given some different form of feedback to help direct players. The main thing to ignore is C demand. You can basically not build any in a city. Citizens don't actually need jobs, unemployment does pretty much nothing. The existence of jobs gives R demand, that's all its good for. You should be playing by maximizing R and minimizing everything else, this ensures a healthy city with no employment problems. Really, ignore RCI and only look at unemployment. Also jobs can take a really really long time to shuffle around so it's possible to be sitting at 20% unemployment while tons of workplaces abandon due to lack of workers, it's silly. The main thing in skylines though is just be patient, don't trust any of the info the game gives you as being up to date or accurate, and just develop a gut sense of what your city needs for the long term. Short term problems will sort them selves out eventually. Just get your overall employment balance right and push as high unemployment as you can while maintaining growth.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:28
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Yeah, with commercial I also get "NOT ENOUGH EDUCATED WORKERS!!!!!!1" a lot even when the city in general and that area in particular are neck-deep in education facilities. After a while you learn to just ignore them. Building commercial when it's not really needed was the main thing I kept tripping over. "Oh look C demand is sky high, let's build a bunch of commercial zones... oh look, they're all abandoned." It's weird but commercial is super finicky while offices are basically insatiable. (And industrial will bitch about not enough educated workers, take a long time to finally fill up with workers and then basically be cool forever.) It kind of feels like R and I/O interact somewhat but C is just off by itself and basically  .
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Nov 10, 2015 05:37
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That's weird, I never had any trouble filling commercial zones.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:41
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Eric the Mauve posted:Yeah, with commercial I also get "NOT ENOUGH EDUCATED WORKERS!!!!!!1" a lot even when the city in general and that area in particular are neck-deep in education facilities. After a while you learn to just ignore them. Yeah you need way, way less commercial than the game will lead you to believe. Over-building commercial can really screw you since it creates a lot of traffic from shoppers and especially goods deliveries. You can get away with a few large blocks of high density commercial in a large city and no one will really care.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:45
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Yeah the economy is weird and seems more complex than it is, it's actually dirt simple which is what trips people up. There's not really such thing as C demand or I demand, there's only the need for jobs which you R demand depends on. Industrial/Office demand is a real "demand" in that if you have it it means the economy think you have enough workers to build more work places, which will then increase your R demand and back and forth allowing you to grow. So where does C fit in? It doesn't really. C demand is like I demand in that it gives you jobs which boost your R demand, but the bar is also based on a totally arbitrary formula based on a "demand" for shopping and leisure. The problem is, parks and landmarks also fill this role, which is why when the game first came out people complained that it "killed" their C demand so CO gave it a huge boost way beyond what any city could ever support. You don't actually need commercial zones, maybe not at all. Parks do basically the same job, not that it's a job at all. Residents don't complain that there's no shops, but they do complain if there's no parks. Parks are like commercial except never bitch at you about workers, don't create truck traffic, and don't gently caress up their shipping pathfinding and whine about a lack of products to sell, nor do they make noise. I only build C for realism's sake. I assume there's little shops and services in the ground level of most residential and office buildings and view C as like mega shopping centers and build it extremely sparingly. It cuts down on truck traffic big time and has no downsides. Less commercial means less need for goods which means less need for industry, which again is a huge reduction in traffic. You can basically have a city that functions almost entirely on apartments and offices. I kinda wish the economy was more like in cities XL with a more inter-dependent chain of resources/services. I want to build commercial because I have to to have my city function nicely, not because the economy in the game is actually simplified to the point that it's meaningless.
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Nov 10, 2015 05:47
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I tend to prioritize commercial because it seems to provide more tax revenue than office, and also because it has slightly higher job density. I also don't particularly mind the increased traffic from having a healthy amount of commercial and industrial zoning; again, that's kind of the only real challenge in the game, so why deprive yourself of it?
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Nov 10, 2015 06:24
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Count Roland posted:Where did you get those nice chemical tanks? I really enjoy industrial zones, harbours and trains, but am so far terrible at putting them together in a way that doesn't result in massive congestion. Ngon has made a nice collection of storage tanks. Paved areas are just concrete brushes from ultimate area fillers or industrial parks seen so far that the props turn off. If you try out the fillers, do yourself a favor and get Road Anarchy as well. Placing the filler brushes without it is like trying to lick a running woodchipper clean. Baronjutter posted:What sea walls you using? Still looking for good industrial sea walls. Sunken Wall Assets Reloaded has a set of industrial walls, they look pretty OK for harbors. People should make more industrial assets in general, the workshop is really lacking in this department. Where are the oil pipelines, refineries and coal piles? Drydocks!? 
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Nov 10, 2015 09:11
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There aren't any good UI mods are there? My parks section is getting really unwieldy and takes forever to scroll through. Not to mention the amount of parks without icons that reorder themselves whenever I download a new one and having to hover the mouse for 1-2 seconds before it tells me what it is. I'd be happy with something as simple as 3-4 rows shown at a time instead of just one long scroll bar.
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Nov 10, 2015 10:34
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I'd been assuming that I needed to feed commercial zones to the gods of urbanism just to keep growth up. I've had RCI demand seemingly at 0 forever, with only commercial occassionally peeking up, so I've been doing nothing but zoning commercial with residential not far behind and maintaining a steady growth rate of +50-to-+150. Only downside, as said, is that I end up with a ton of abandoned commercial zones in the long run, but I don't care, I finally unlocked airports.
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Nov 10, 2015 12:46
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One more thing, is there any major penalty to ignoring abandoned buildings? Will they be refilled eventually or automatically demolished? Having to keep playing whac-a-mole with them is super annoying especially when they're in a cluster of small buildings.
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Nov 10, 2015 13:10
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Commercials main purpose seems to be making money. My city is filled with all kinds of silly vanity buildings and parks, yet the income (during daytime) is hovering around +60.000
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Nov 10, 2015 13:13
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Abandoned buildings pretty significantly lower the value of properties around it, I forget by how much. There is, of course, an auto demolish abandoned buildings mod. Sometimes abandoned buildings will get reoccupied. Depends on a lot of factors really.
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Nov 10, 2015 13:15
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You can ignore abandoned buildings and they'll eventually go away on their own. It takes a while, though, and their neighbors won't be happy about the abandoned building next door.
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Nov 10, 2015 14:04
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Supraluminal posted:There's zero need to respond to the demand meter for its own sake. There's no inherent penalty to ignoring it, and sky-high (or flatlined) demand for a zone type might or might not reflect an actual problem with your city. You can use it as a vague suggestion or warning system, but you're better off basing your decisions on the actual data available elsewhere - unemployment rate, housing availability, goods demand, lack of worker/customer complaint bubbles, etc. This stuff, for example, is totally unnecessary: The most that will ever happen in the game if you leave them maxed out is that you will occasionally get helpful chirps that local businesses want more local industry or something to that effect. In reality they don't — they can get their goods just fine from outside connections (a good train network, especially combined with a few well-placed cargo hubs, can completely remove all practical need for industry without filling the inbound roads with trucks). Friction posted:Commercials main purpose seems to be making money. My city is filled with all kinds of silly vanity buildings and parks, yet the income (during daytime) is hovering around +60.000
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Nov 10, 2015 14:13
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Bold Robot posted:You can ignore abandoned buildings and they'll eventually go away on their own. It takes a while, though, and their neighbors won't be happy about the abandoned building next door. I installed the auto-demolish mod and it's awesome, just see the abandoned icon pop up briefly then it's gone. That plus not being so worried about rebuilding roads has helped my new city get going and running a lot better. Watching employment figures and education levels has helped me plan things out way easier than just doing what the bars say I need.
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Nov 10, 2015 15:08
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I must be weird in that I like abandoned buildings around sometimes just because it's more realistic.
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Nov 10, 2015 22:44
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I just fix whatever problem caused the building to abandon in the first place and something pops up to replace it soon enough. I'm not sure what people do to have abandoned buildings in such large numbers/so frequently that the auto-bulldoze mod is necessary.
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Nov 11, 2015 00:53
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Supraluminal posted:I just fix whatever problem caused the building to abandon in the first place and something pops up to replace it soon enough. I'm not sure what people do to have abandoned buildings in such large numbers/so frequently that the auto-bulldoze mod is necessary. Yeah if I get any warnings above buildings I freak out, something is wrong with my machine and must be fixed.
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Nov 11, 2015 00:59
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Is there a less-lovely first person mod that will put the camera right on top of the vehicle instead of clipping it into the middle of it?
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Nov 11, 2015 05:47
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Bold Robot posted:Is there a less-lovely first person mod that will put the camera right on top of the vehicle instead of clipping it into the middle of it? If you're using the same FPS mod I am, you know you can change the position of the camera, right?
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Nov 11, 2015 06:17
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Uhhhh okay guys I need some help or pointers here I cleaned out, reinstalled, and added a bunch of mods a few days ago. Fine, worked well, having fun. Suddenly yesterday whenever I start the game I get this instead:  (That's not a running copy of Morrowind by the way, just my background). So I figure a mod hosed up, I try reducing their numbers, etc., no joy. I remove them all. Same result. Verify game cache, nothing wrong, still does it. Reinstall, same result. Uninstall, remove every last trace of the game's files I can find, reinstall - and that's when I took the picture. Music still plays after an appropriate load time, but it's this teeny-tiny window, and I can't find anywhere outside of the game to change graphic/video settings. Anyone got any ideas?
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Nov 11, 2015 06:43
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Man I got really excited someone was working on a morrowind TC for skylines  Wish I could provide any help. One thing I really hate about modern games though is how they scatter files all over your computer, and even a full "uninstall" can leave some loving settings file somewhere dark and secret that when you re-install "fresh" end up picking up those bad settings.
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Nov 11, 2015 07:12
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Try Alt + Enter to toggle full screen.
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Nov 11, 2015 07:52
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Dunno-Lars posted:Try Alt + Enter to toggle full screen. This. This same thing happens with SW:The Old Republic constantly.
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Nov 11, 2015 09:42
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Longbaugh01 posted:If you're using the same FPS mod I am, you know you can change the position of the camera, right? No, which is why I asked? How do I do this?
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Nov 11, 2015 14:04
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Dunno-Lars posted:Try Alt + Enter to toggle full screen. Longbaugh01 posted:This. This same thing happens with SW:The Old Republic constantly. Well that was an embarrassingly simple solution  Thanks goons, it's fixed now.
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Nov 11, 2015 16:38
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I impulse bought this game last night, and I went to bed at 5am because I lost track of time while playing. I do regret purchasing this 
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Nov 11, 2015 18:07
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IAmThatIs posted:I impulse bought this game last night, and I went to bed at 5am because I lost track of time while playing. I do regret purchasing this Don't worry. It gets worse with time.
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Nov 11, 2015 18:36
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Do drivers in Sweden not have to pull over for emergency vehicles?
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Nov 11, 2015 19:05
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