Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2020 9:55 pm Post subject:
Been playing Cities Skylines (Sunset Harbour)
Subject description: (warning pic heavy)
Been playing on my 55" Samsung, with my R9 280x and it runs fabulously aside from ridiculous loading times.
Just some background, I used to play Cities XL/XXL and that was vastly different, more like SimCity where you could trade with cities and establish traderoutes, even with your own cities. Skylines will do the import/export automatically given you have the links connected, and I find only passenger trains will really clog up the few rail links you get, even with rather extensive tonnage of export cargo they seem fine. So that's an entire aspect of the game you don't have to focus on, though it means you have dedicated industry types to develop and use resource rich pockets on the map to do it, which can then import the raw material when you run out. Sometimes it kind of feels like autopilot as the only thing that changes is your money, but the majority of money is in the value-add of refining the resources into higher tier product anyway.
So I played about a week vanilla, which isn't strictly speaking vanilla as Sunset Harbour includes about 30 DLCS, but I mean no thirdparty mods. This experience was mainly to get a feel for the game, learn its paradigm and all that, so that when I started looking for mods, I had a good idea what I wanted, to that effect, I consider this the mandatory mods list:
- Traffic Manager
- Move It
- Network Extensions 2
- New Roads for NE2
- BigCity 25-tiles
- Roundabout Builder
- Automatic Bulldoze
- Electric Roads
Some lessons I've learned playing:
- the single lane on/off ramp for highways has its speed 80 vs the highway's 100 and this often causes bottlenecks where there shouldn't be any, using the 2-lane highway with a speed of 100 for merging is usually best, but with Traffic Manager you can set road speeds mitigating this issuem along with using the lane connector option to force them to stay in their own lane when merging.
- the granularity of height adjustment when making things is rather extreme for the base game and doesn't allow for matching elevation across uneven terrain, as well as the game demanding unreasonably high elevations to clear roads underneath, so this is where Move It comes into play, you can reshape, level, and otherwise finely adjust everything after it's built
- the death waves are annoying, and based on the ages of when you made your residential areas, so assuming you keep making new residential pockets at reasonable intervals, you can avoid a city-wide death wave... the danger of which is that they abandon properties, driving down values, causing more biz/citizens to flee etc, so the Automatic Bulldoze at least clears them out without preventing the death wave -- though there is a lifecycle mod that aims to randomize deaths/immigrants better
- the game loves roundabouts, though small roundabouts are hard to make manually, and very busy areas will just jam up anyway... the Roundabout Builder makes it a snap to make them, and you kind of need Traffic Manager to set them up after anyway, otherwise you just have a pretty version of a traffic light without lights -- one important tip here is that you need to set the road speeds to about equal or 10kmh less than whatever roads are merging, so using a highway for a roundabout is great provided you do that after
- the game ALSO loves T-junctions IF you have Traffic Manager since you can set yield/stop signs and eliminate traffic lights, and this is why you see I'm not using that many roundabouts, I prefer little spits off the main drag that can merge when safe without blocking through traffic -- the game has a nasty habit of adding traffic lights where there shouldn't be
- there's a serious shortage of asymmetrical roads in the game which Network Extensions fixes, as well as providing more lane options for small roads, which comes in really handy for upgrading a previously less used small road from 1+1 lanes to anywhere from 1+3, 2+2 and even 4 lane one-ways --- there are likely parts of the city you'll have to rip out and redo from scratch without these options
Optional functional mods you may want:
- Electric Roads
- Node Controller
- Picker
- Touch This Tool
- Automatic Pedestrian Bridge Builder
- Loading Screen Mod
- Hide Crosswalks
Overall I'm enjoying the ability to design irregular areas that would severly penalize you in other similar games, and as you see there's multiple themes or specializations you can apply to districts you draw, which makes for some nice variety, and prevents the Manhattan look everywhere as things upgrade fully. Also I really like the mechanic of upgrading parks so they have a greater effect on happiness or industry areas which reduces polution. Some people dislike the low poly vehicles and such, but at the focal length you play the vast majority of time, you're only seeing specs on the road anyway.
I played maybe 2 days of the original Skylines some 2-3 years ago and wasn't nearly as impressed or interested as with Sunset Harbour, they've made a lot of necessary additions since those days.
After that winter city exploration of sort with mods and assets, I decided to dig deeper into the available pool of both, figuring out what is and isn't useful. This is the city I started playing Sunset Harbour on, with no mods, which seemed apt for revisiting with mods.
Just as an aside if anyone is interested in seeing before and after development shots of areas as I make them, let me know, likewise I upgrade highway interchanges at times as the area builds up or needs change, I find those kinda neat myself.
As much as I wanted to prove to myself that I didn't need the Anarchy mods to make my things, which I believe I have, I did finally get Fine Road Tools, Fine Road Anarchy, along with Prop & Tree Anarchy and its natural companion Prop Line Tool. Combined they allow you a little more freedom to change things like a ground road to elevated without having to delete and redo it. Perhaps I don't have an advanced grasp of what little minutiae it can do, or perhaps I don't do everything, but I find I constantly have to fiddle with settings and it feels like a mixed bag adding just as much work as it saves.
I tried the Mini FPS Booster mod, but I found it slows things down when ram and swap space isn't used, though it might help lessen the bog hours into the game, it just anecdotally feels worse on my rig.
The Extra Landscaping Tools mod is great for doing vast terraforming, but its sensitivity is ridiculous, and it is really difficult to use to make small changes. I find myself fiddling with the brush settings constantly even while working on the same part. The best feature is the smoothing tool with this, you can get the necessary size and strength to actually smooth the land rather than just slightly soften the edges in vanilla.
The Improved Public Transport 2 mod is another one of those plus and minus outcomes. It makes the basic UI for administering a line cluttered, with some minor wonky layout glitches, but it allows for some useful alterations to default values, like changing the speed limits for everything form bus to monorail, as well as passenger capacity, which for for a bus in vanilla is waaaay too low.
Park Rebalance mod is a nice QoL in that it balances the positive effect of all the parks with low such values, many of them frankly made too little impact for no good reason.
I installed the No Border Limit Camera mod mainly to access the rail connections outside my useable area to tweak with Move It, but it's also nice not hitting an imaginary wall when you're panning around your city for a better look. This is only of those mods you don't notice, because having it seems natural.
Because of my high traffic, I'm always fuxing with road sizes, directions and junction restrictions. To this end there's the More Effective Transfer Manager which is supposed to make the trucking use less road by using the nearest resource or warehouse if possible. I found my traffic totally changed, and got worse ironically, something I was belatedly able to mitigate with Traffic Manager's option to make trucks prefer the outside lane. I'm still not sold on the mod for traffic reasons, but it does make special factories get their good faster, allowing them to make more money.
I had tried the Pedestrian Bridge Builder mod previously, which is handy for making overpass walking paths around roundabouts and other uncluttered intersections, but it is absolutely useless once you have a dense city. The sweeping ramps it makes take up too much space and street frontage. I find myself planning my own paths instead, using Move It to tweak it into place/height/shape effectively. I haven't used it at all after the first few times.
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Been playing Cities Skylines (Sunset Harbour)
