I've been playing more Cities: Skylines. I stopped playing my first city after it had obtained a population of about 130k spread out over 4 main high-density urban areas and a few smaller ones. It functioned reasonably well, but I was at the point where, much as I expected, I wanted to do some things differently, knowing then what I didn't know at first, and not feeling like doing a massive retrofit.
Recently started my second city. Went for a regular, infinitely repeatable block pattern. Arguably boring and unaesthetic, but I want at least once to see if I can design for maximum efficiency. I named the city New Grestin. Thematically, I mean it to be in Arstotzka, the country of the Papers, Please game. An advanced, super-modern, scientifically efficiently planned but utterly uncreatively built industrial city. With city blocks that are big, grey, square and glorious.
It's a great game, seriously. Beats any version of Simcity hands down, even Simcity 4. One thing that bears mentioning though, the designers show their spots as designers of traffic and transportation simulators. While traffic management is only one game feature in C:S among many, it's certainly the most critical one, the one that matters the most for determining success and failure, because so much else in the game depends on it. Most municipal services work by sending out service vehicles like police cars and ambulances to wherever they're needed, and they need to get there by road, and preferably not get stuck in congestion on the way. Education? Need to get the students from their homes to the education buildings efficiently, which means planning traffic accordingly. Industrial and commercial development? Your factories need to sell their shit, and your shops need shit to sell, so the shit will need to get smoothly from the factories to the shops, which risks congesting the roads and preventing workers and raw materials from getting to the factories, causing them to shut down. Or you'll just import/export the shit, and congest your highways. Overall city finances? Even if traffic-related expenditure items like road maintenance and public transportation aren't a huge part of the budget, they are easily the most variable part, one with the most potential for smart savings through efficient planning or creating money sinks you might avoid. Oh, and those ambulances which got stuck in traffic? If they take twice as long to pick up the sick because the streets got congested, you now need twice the amount of them than you needed before, at twice the expense and a bit of extra congestion on top...
