Cities: Skyrim and the Mass Transit DLC

Last time, I was building freeways and wondering about the rise and fall of commercial zones in Cities: Skylines.

I've taken to using a couple of mods: All Spaces Unlockable does just that, with costs scaling up as you unlock more map squares, and Infinite Oil & Ore Redux, which makes the ore and oil industries a reasonable proposition. The latter was since rendered obsolete by a mod bundled with the game itself, but All Spaces Unlockable is definitely worth it.

I also wanted my city to look a bit more diverse, so I trawled through the Steam workshop looking for more vehicles and growable buildings. I especially wanted more delivery vehicles; donut vans are all well and good, but too many of them start to look a little ridiculous. In case anyone's interested, I put together a collection of assets on Steam that includes all the vehicles and buildings I use. They all work, and as far as I can tell, they haven't slowed my laptop down at all.

Finally, I also tried a couple of custom maps. There's one of Tamriel that's kinda fun, but I really enjoyed this map of Skyrim, so that's definitely one I'd recommend.

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Since I last blogged about Cities: Skylines, the Mass Transit DLC came out. So far, it's the only DLC I've bought, because come on, mass transit. In practice, it's kind of a mixed bag.

To start with the bad, most of the exchange hubs are nuts. The ferry-bus exchange has a regular ferry pier and like ten bus platforms. Same with the monorail-bus exchange, which is also huge. We finally got multi-platform train stations - with platforms for six sets of double track. Six. Who has six sets of tracks? Multi-platform subway stations though? Not included.

Frankly, the only useful transit hub is the metro-monorail-train hub. It takes two sets of train tracks, so for 70 000 cash, it already costs less than two train stations and keeps the intercity trains with like six passengers on them from clogging up your whole intracity train network. You effectively get a metro station and two monorail stations for free.

As for the new kinds of transit, I have to say I'm kind of torn on the monorails. They have the same passenger capacity as trains and you can run the tracks over roads, so it's really handy for areas where you don't have space for rails; but this is kind of countered by the fact that the stations are massively noisy. Also, annoyingly, the roads with stations on them won't snap to your roads but only to the global grid, so that sometimes makes your streets irritatingly wonky. I'm currently mostly using them because the train-monorail hub is the only reasonable multi-platform train station.

Cable cars are very niche, but if you've got steep inclines on your map, they can be darn useful. Blimps I'm still sort of struggling to find a use for; they only take as many passengers as a bus and are darn slow. But really, who cares, because the reason you build a blimp depot and set up a route is to see blimps floating majestically over your city. So I love them.

Finally: boats! Ferries are wonderful. I remember playing on the Black Woods map and desperately wishing I could connect passenger harbors, but ferries are even better. The ferry piers are cheap and fairly unobtrusive, and the ferries take 50 passengers each, which means they can handle more volume that you might expect. I'd say they're almost worth the price of the expansion on their own, but I guess you do really have to like boats for that to be true.

Some of the stuff we got for free with the accompanying patch, and I'm extremely grateful for the opportunity to add and remove traffic lights. However, the stop signs aren't exactly ideal. In one of the developer diaries, Colossal Order intimated that they were originally considering yield signs rather than stop signs, which is disappointing because yield signs would have been so much better. Stop signs are useful for small roads with low traffic joining bigger roads, but any time there's a larger volume of traffic, they'll just create a massive traffic jam. The specific instance given in the dev diary is roundabouts, which are a great example of why stop signs are bad. Yes, if only one road has moderate or heavy traffic, putting stop signs on all the others gives it priority. But if there are two or more roads with real traffic feeding into the roundabout, stop signs are useless as they'll just create a massive backlog of traffic. Yield signs might actually work, but stop signs turn moderate traffic into a total logjam.

On the whole, though, Mass Transit is a pretty good expansion. The weirdest thing is how impractical the transit hubs are, and the absence of multi-platform metro stations is inexcusable, but the boats and blimps are good. I'm happy with my purchase; as with everything on Steam, this too will be on sale, and unless you're some kind of revolting monster that doesn't like boats and mass transit, I'd recommend picking it up.

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As I was writing this, Green Cities was announced as the next expansion. I'm cautiously optimistic; leveling specializations sounds good, and I'm intrigued by the promise of road modding. Might we finally get to place zebra crossings? Apparently we are getting a non-polluting alternative for garbage disposal; frankly, it'd be about time! I do wonder what "sustainable cities" means, though. You can have a city with no polluting industry right now; because you'll then be importing all your goods, that just means you're having someone else do your polluting for you - not exactly sustainable.

Nonetheless, I remain very happy with Cities: Skylines.

Cities: Skylines: Highway to hell, and the Great Commerce Tipping Point

Amidst all the other gaming-related stuff I've been getting up to, I've also found the time to do some more experimenting with Cities: Skylines. Last time, I tried to create a walkable city; this time, it's time for something completely different.

I picked the Black Woods map, and decided to experiment with a city on several islands, connected by motorways. I'll use public transport and invest in walking infrastructure like before, but I do want to see what the traffic gets like if we rely on the pre-built highways to connect different parts of the city together. To make my life a little easier, I'll be preferring offices over industry.

Here's a view of my work in progress. The area on the left is where I started; I next expanded to the island in the center, and next started building on the right. The very regular grid at far right is my massive office zone.

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First, offices. There are three demand bars on the user interface, just like in Simcity: the green measures residential demand, the blue commercial and the orange jobs, i.e. industry or offices. I was building some high-density residential zones, and there was a pretty robust demand for jobs. I decided to fill this by just building offices for as long as the bar stayed up. This is the end result:

The demand stayed up, I kept zoning offices, and the zones kept filling up. The weird thing is that despite all the office buildings operating, having employees and paying taxes, they create practically no traffic at all. My massive office zone was an eerie, abandoned Edge City wasteland, patrolled by the occasional police cruiser and garbage truck.

But hey, it got people jobs and paid my bills.

**

This is not to say that my city didn't have traffic. On the contrary. With all those beautiful highways out there, my cims sure liked to drive around.

Some of the only real chokepoints I ran into were, unsurprisingly, the highway bridges connecting the island to the mainland.

To be very specific, the problem was merging. As long as everyone stayed on the highway, everything was fine. It's when they get on or off that we get into trouble.

People complain a lot about the way cims pick lanes, and it does at times look very silly from a real-world standpoint to see a massive logjam of cars on one lane of a highway, with the other lanes completely empty. However, these complaints are mostly misguided. Cims pick their lanes perfectly logically and predictably - mostly - and it's your job to plan around that. Basically, in almost all traffic situations, you can tell which cars will end up on which lane, and you can plan your interchanges around that.

My issue was that the second exit on the western mainland was by far the most popular. The exit could handle the traffic, but this meant that a majority of the vehicles on the highway would get in the center lane until they passed the first exit, and then switch lanes to the right. The trouble was, this meant that the center lane got completely backed up, especially when different vehicles changed lanes at different times, bogging down the exit.

To me, situations like this are excellent opportunities to experiment. One of the things I tried was splitting the highway into three ramps, one of which rejoined the highway later. I call this the Acme Interchange.

Believe it or not, this kinda works! However, it's not optimal. There were just too many vehicles getting off at one ramp; even when I got them to line up nicely, the sheer mass of cars going down the single-lane ramp created a constant accordion effect; even though the line was constantly moving, every time someone braked or slowed down, a disruption would ripple down the entire line of cars, backing up traffic at the previous interchange.

The only reasonable solution is to split up the traffic among several exits. The interchange started life as a standard cloverleaf interchange, which you can just plop down from the road menu. The problem with a cloverleaf interchange is weaving: when some cars are trying to get off the highway and others are trying to get on, their paths can cross and end up in a horrible gridlock. In a regular cloverleaf, the off-ramps are before the on-ramps, creating a weaving effect. On my island interchange, I'd gone to some lengths to avoid this with flyovers and slightly more complicated on- and off-ramps.

I eventually decided that the only way to fix my original interchange's problems was to build a flyover. If I could route the traffic coming from the right of the picture onto the freeway heading down (it's not always clear where the compass directions are on a Skylines map), that should make everyone's life much easier. That's what I did, creating what I suppose might be called a slightly complex interchange.

It's certainly the most complex I've built. Effectively, there are two crossing motorways, which are connected with a commercial zone at top right, industrial zones at top left and bottom right, and a residential zone at bottom left, the top two via a roundabout interchange. It may not be pretty, and it takes a massive amount of space, but it works!

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The Great Commerce Tipping Point

While I was busy building offices and interchanges, my commercial zones suddenly collapsed.

Out of nowhere, all my commercial zones started flashing "Not enough goods to sell", and started shutting down. I had no serious traffic issues, and there are plenty of external connections. This didn't matter: all of a sudden, my commercial buildings were being abandoned wholesale.

In the picture below, every empty blue zone was a leveled commercial building before all this happened.

So not only did my commercial zones inexplicably run out of goods to sell, but demand for commercial zones also collapsed. I don't know what causes this, and neither does the Internet. I obviously went over my traffic connections, looking for traffic jams and not finding any. All of the zones complaining about no goods to sell were well-connected to the outside connections on the map, which means they should have been well able to import everything they needed. Only they weren't.

Since I didn't know what to do, I formulated a hypothesis and tried it. My thinking was that for whatever reason, importing goods wasn't working. What if I tried building more industry, so I could produce the goods myself?

That worked! At first, the industrial zones also complained about not getting imports:

Eventually, though, when I got enough industrial buildings working, the goods situation went away as mysteriously as it had appeared. I still don't know exactly what happened, but I'm assuming that for whatever reason that isn't actual physical traffic capacity, the outside connections couldn't deal with the necessary level of imports. This would seem to imply that a city with no industry and offices only won't work, or requires doing something quite different. I don't know if that's true or not, but at least I learned what to do when my commerce inexplicably collapses.

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With the goods problem fixed and the last of the nine areas filling up, it was time to call this a finished city, and move on.

Leaving behind a massive traffic jam of cargo ships.

This is exactly like what happens with trains: about half of those ships are traveling between two of my cargo harbors with 4% or 8% cargo on board. Why they don't despawn, I don't know. Some ships do. This doesn't actually seem to cause any problems, because it started long before my goods issues and persisted throughout them; after I fixed that problem, the river was still full of ships:

To conclude: what did I learn?

- offices generate no traffic whatsoever compared to any other kind of zone
- freeway interchanges take up massive amounts of space
- weaving is the highway killer, so think about your merges and build flyovers
- if your commercial zones suddenly collapse because of no goods to sell, see to your traffic situation, and if that's not the problem, build industry. It worked for me.
- Cities: Skylines is still awesome

Cities: Skylines: Walking around Jericho

In Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho.
- 1 Kings 16:34

When I finished my master's thesis last fall, I took the plunge and got a new laptop. This led to not only an obsession with Crusader Kings II, but also to finding Cities: Skylines on the Steam black Friday sale. I've loved citybuilding games ever since I started playing SimCity back when it came out, so having had a look at Cities: Skylines before, getting it was a no-brainer.

Here's my first successful city:

And a more panoramic view:

I'll try to give you some idea how we got there.

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Getting started

Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there.
- Joshua 2:1

Fundamentally, Cities: Skylines is a citybuilder in the classic mold. You start with a patch of land connected to a highway, you zone it into residential, commercial and industrial zones, and build service buildings and traffic connections for them. Where you build stuff does matter, though. For starters, each map has a distribution of natural resources, which you can see in the map mode below. The yellow patches are agricultural land, the green is forest, and the large grey area is underground ore resources. You can have your industrial zones specialize in making use of these resources.

Or just build a whole bunch of offices if you like, those are jobs too!

I wanted to make use of our natural resources in my city, so on the left, you can see ordinary unspecialized industy, and on the right farms.

Below, an area of timber industry.

Farming and forestry, which my city has specialized in, create lots of low-education jobs and don't pollute (no, I don't know how they farm), whereas unspecialized industry buildings can level up and provide more skilled jobs, generating more taxes, but also more pollution. Through the early years of my city, we were basically a farming community.

In addition to providing your citizens with jobs, shops and places to live, some basic services are also a requirement. The two most geography-dependent are water and power. Below are my sanitation plants, working almost at capacity to dump our sewage into the river in a form that doesn't transform it into a giant stream of shit. It's considered advisable to have your water pumps upstream of the drains, especially before you unlock sanitation plants.

As for power, Cities: Skylines has stayed true to the environmentalist ideology of the Simcity series, and the most effective form of power generation in the early game is wind. Obviously, for turbine placement, prevailing winds matter a great deal, but the game is fairly generous with those. The highway in the map below is where my city started out, and I was lucky enough to find some strong winds right next to it that powered our initial growth.

With these basic elements, you can put together the kind of city you want.

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A walkable city

March around the city once with all the armed men. Do this for six days.
- Joshua 6:3

Inevitably, most simulated cities will run into the same problem that bedevils real-life ones: traffic.

You can, of course, try to mitigate this by connecting highways everywhere and building the most complex freeflowing interchanges you can, but I wasn't really interested in solving my problems with motorways.

Instead, in keeping with the Simcity heritage of New Urbanism, I didn't just want to build a particularly efficient city, but rather one where people would walk as much as possible. The simulated citizens of Skylines, called cims, will walk very long distances if you give them the infrastructure to do it; someone's even managed to create an entire city where nobody drives. My goal wasn't that lofty, but I did want to put some effort into promoting walking. That starts with the layout of the residential areas.

Above is a fairly typical residential neighborhood in my city. The traffic view, below, makes it easier to see the road layout. The neighborhood consists of three main roads, with residential streets branching off them, which connect to a central roundabout, from which a broader street connects to the arterial road outside. A proper road hierarchy is key to a functional city!

Having only a single road connection to the arterial road eliminates through traffic from the neighborhood completely, as there's nowhere for it to go through to. To minimize the rest of the traffic, the whole neighborhood is connected to a network of footpaths, which you can see on the map as the grey lanes. While you can get to, say, the commercial zone on the extreme left of the picture by car, it's going to be easier and faster to just use the footbridge to walk across.

The footbridge below connects the commercial zone on the right to the residential area and metro station on the left; the footbridge coming toward the camera on the left connects to the industrial zone where many of the cims from that neighborhood work.

With this kind of infrastructure in place that promotes walking, lots of your citizens will use it. We know from studies that people are healthier and happier if they can make their commute on foot, but I'm not sure if the game models that, and anyway if the only thing you care about is optimizing traffic flow, every cim crossing that bridge on foot is one less car on the road. I've found that even from a purely gameplay-utilitarian perspective, putting some time and effort into incorporating walking infrastructure into your city is well worth it.

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A growing city

When David was told about this, he sent messengers to meet the men, for they were greatly humiliated. The king said, “Stay at Jericho till your beards have grown, and then come back.”
- 2 Samuel 10:5

As your city grows, it becomes bigger and more complex, and so do the traffic problems. As you provide more services, businesses will need more skilled workers, meaning people traveling across the city to get to high schools and universities. More people need more healthcare services, and as they age, deathcare. Basically, for most cities, when a city expands in one area, traffic goes up everywhere.

My biggest problem spots in Jericho were my commercial zones; several people work there, and almost everyone occasionally wants to visit them. Alexandria, below, had the biggest traffic problems.

It's easy to find congested sections of road in the traffic view, which color-codes heavy traffic as red.

Right now, one of the few read areas is an intersection outside Alexandria, leading to the commercial district, a residential area across from it, and the highway interchange at top right.

Ordinarily, I've preferred roundabouts; this was my first really high-traffic intersection:

In his seminal Cities: Skylines guide How to Traffic, real-life traffic engineer drushkey wrote:

Roundabouts are indeed pretty sweet. To be honest, you can ignore almost everything you just read and plop roundabouts everywhere.

Unfortunately, I find myself having to agree with his esteemed Japanese colleague, who's also written an excellent traffic guide: roundabouts don't solve everything, and if traffic becomes too heavy, they actually clog up much worse than signaled intersections ever can. I wish I had a screenshot of the time one of the roundabouts outside Alexandria was in total gridlock. Every incoming road was jammed full, and no-one could move. I actually fixed that problem by demolishing the roundabouts and replacing them with regular signal intersections of much lower capacity. This made the traffic jams go away, because counterintuitively, more roads means more traffic. This is a phenomenon you will experience in Cities: Skylines!

What is traffic? Luckily, in Cities: Skylines, we can find out. Click on any vehicle or person in the street, and it'll tell you who they are and where they're going.

Here, rounding a corner in Alexandria in her hatchback, we find Amanda Davies, a highly educated young adult. She lives at the Moore Residence; creepily, clicking on the name takes us to her house.

Zooming out, we find that she lives in the suburb of Cedar Forest. It's fairly well connected to the rest of the city by public transit, but she's still driving. Why?

It's unlikely to be her job, as she works at the Cedar Forest fire station, which is within easy walking distance of her home.

It's the last piece of information that's crucial: she's headed to the Gigastore to do some shopping.

The particular Gigastore she wants to go to, it turns out, is clear across town in Gethsemane.

That's going to be a long drive, and one where she's crossing some of the densely populated areas of the city. I have no idea why she's not taking the freeway; maybe she visited another shop or a park in Alexandria first.

So if Amanda wants to go somewhere that's too far to walk, how do we make her and everyone else stop congesting our roads? The answer is public transit.

One of the busiest walking areas of my city is on the south side of Alexandria, and not just because the footbridges there connect a high-density residential area with the commercial zones.

It's also the meeting place of no less than five metro lines. If everyone wants to go to Alexandria, the least I can do is get them there.

Cims really, really, really like taking the metro. The clumps of colored figures in the mass transit view are passengers waiting for a particular metro line. The white figures in the image below are pedestrians getting off a train.

This is what it looks like on the surface:

If not for that subway line, every single person in that veritable flood of commuters would be driving a car. Sure, you can create a massive network of high-capacity roads connecting every corner of your city. My aim has been to create a city where people can walk and take a train where they can't walk.

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Tourism

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through.
- Luke 19:1

An interesting feature of Cities: Skylines are monuments, which are unique special buildings that provide a service for the whole city, rather like wonders of the world in the Civilization games. Each monument requires you to build certain unique buildings to unlock it, and both these buildings and the monuments themselves attract tourism, which brings income.

Since this was my first proper game, I decided to try unlocking as many monuments as possible. Since this meant building some potentially spectacular unique buildings, I got my Le Corbusier on and planned out a monumental ceremonial center focused in my city hall. After all, if you think about it, citybuilding games more or less are totalitarian regimes.

Tourists will use outside connections to enter your city; at first, this will mean the highways, but if you build train stations, airports or harbors, they'll arrive on those as well.

This all entails a pretty sizeable investment in infrastructure, and paying for its maintenance afterward. Unfortunately, even in a city with several monuments and a whole pile of unique buildings, all connected to each other and the external connections by rail, the number of tourists arriving by sea was a pittance.

Rail tourists are even worse: the game generates a seemingly endless number of trains going to every station you have that's connected to the outside line, all carrying as many as a couple of dozen passengers. Unless you completely separate your external rail links from any internal traffic, as I had not, the nearly empty tourist trains will totally jam your rail network.

At the end of the day, the tourists don't even produce enough income to pay for the infrastructure they need to get there.

So sadly, I'd say tourism seems to be a complete waste of time. The only reason to have external connections is cargo:

That constant traffic of trucks between the rail terminal on the right and the cargo harbor on the left means imports and exports for my commerce and industry: both less trucks on the roads and higher-level industrial and commercial zones, meaning more and better jobs and bigger tax incomes. As near as I could tell, a cargo harbor was an excellent investment, and cargo trains do seem to make life somewhat easier. Tourism, though, is much more trouble than it's worth.

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Summary

At that time Joshua pronounced this solemn oath: “Cursed before the Lord is the one who undertakes to rebuild this city, Jericho: “At the cost of his firstborn son he will lay its foundations; at the cost of his youngest he will set up its gates.”
- Joshua 6:26

Cities: Skylines is a really good game. This is pretty much the citybuilder that Simcity was always supposed to be, but never really got around to actually being. The level of detail and the way the city lives is simply entrancing. I must've spent hours staring at traffic and mass transit, working out who was going where and how to make the system work better. The info screens are admirably clear, while the general view is genuinely beautiful, both in the intricacies of the details and in the wide sweep of the whole cityscape.

Not everything is perfect, of course. The disappointing tourism mechanic was already mentioned; it sort of destroys the point of many of the unique buildings when they don't seem to be worth building at all. Similarly, the sheer railway chaos the trains can generate, and the lack of tools to deal with it, are a little disappointing. The building interface can be a bit fiddly, especially when building footbridges. These are fairly minor quibbles, though. The only larger shortcoming I think we can fairly lay at Cities: Skylines's door is that while it succeeds at being the citybuilder that we always wanted Simcity to be, it never really makes an attempt to be anything more. In a sense, it's like you're playing a perfect version of Simcity 2000: fun, satisfying, but you can't really help thinking that there's more to citybuilders than this.

Imagine a citybuilder game that made a real, intelligent effort to address the politics of developing cities, and the various economic and social problems in them.

Having said all this, the curse of Cities: Skylines is how damn good it is. Hours will vanish; days if you're not careful. I swear I had dreams about playing it for months. It's a wonderfully engrossing experience to design your city and start laying it out on the map, and so very rewarding to see it come to life. There's alwys time to do just one more thing before you take a break. If you've ever felt the slightest twinge of interest in Simcity or anything like it, it's a fair bet that you'll love Cities: Skylines. I highly recommend it.