Cities: Skylines

[Vasari]

I can't seem to get one way roads to face the right direction. I'm trying to upgrade them at the city limits and they always point towards the highway which disconnects the road. Is there a button to toggle which direction they go?

[Nappi]

As far as I understand, the direction of traffic on one way streets is determined by the direction you draw them in.

[Gerretic]

That's correct; they default to the direction in which they are drawn. I saw a post from a dev somewhere saying they're patching in the ability to reverse the direction. I want to say this was by right clicking but since that's typically the cancel out of a road button I'm not sure? Possibly this patch is already deployed; I haven't played in a couple days.

[Vasari]

I guess there's a bug with upgrading roads to one way, they always seemed to point the wrong direction. I was able to bulldoze the whole thing and put down the right roads. I get the feeling I'm going to have to rebuild most of this corner of the city because it's a real mess right now.

[Dewar]

Part of the fun for me so far has been being able to just let things be a mess. In SimCity, the build area was so small that I felt like I just had to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of it. I'm having a lot more fun just tossing roads around and living with the consequences.

[Coods]

I'm actually starting to progress far enough to require building my own highways. Here are some awesome highway and interchange designs from the reddit.

 

 

[Nappi]

I'm at 125,000 citizens and the traffic is seriously starting to kick my ass. Apart from the messy roads and messy traffic, I'm pretty happy with my first city.

 

 

I just built the Space Elevator which is supposed to greatly boost tourism. My income from tourism is now 400 credits. The upkeep of the thing is 16,000 credits. Don't rely on tourism for your income.

[Brett E]

I guess there's a bug with upgrading roads to one way, they always seemed to point the wrong direction. I was able to bulldoze the whole thing and put down the right roads. I get the feeling I'm going to have to rebuild most of this corner of the city because it's a real mess right now.

Don't you just have to drag in the direction you want it to go?

[Pepyri]

Tourism can spike up real hard just by giving it a few extras. I went from 0 tourism at 100k+ population, to making a profit of ~1200 off of it each tic. Like anything in this game, initially it's painful, but eventually your investment pays off.

[Ewan]

What do people typically do with their initial low density settlement? I have a problem that whenever I unlock the high density stuff I kind of seize up and don't want to do anything more to my city because my little town suddenly feels shitty and redundant in comparison. I have now built 3 cities to the point of unlocking high density but cant bring myself to go back to them.

[Pepyri]

I intentionally place the low density areas in such a place that I can effectively make them a high-cost neighborhood, then I raise taxes on them like hell. With the right stuff around, a home makes you a hell of a lot of money- not as much as high density does, but there isn't a huge difference if I remember right.

[miffy495]

Ok, these screenshots are killing me with how beautiful they are, but I've never really got into a Sim City game beyond the tutorial. I just haven't been grabbed. Is there anything extra here that would pull me in? These pictures REALLY make me want to jump in, but I'm really hesitant given that the genre has never really done it for me when I get into actually playing it.

[toblix]

I'm forever doomed to restart at the first sign of trouble with my infrastructure, which I'll be doing for a while, I think. My biggest issues at this point (taking in to account that, in total, I love this game):

• Upgrading the roads is so destructive and unpredictable, I feel like I have to have this wide apron of available space around every road I build, and because of how zoning works, I feel like there's no way to take later expansion into account. Once you need to upgrade a road, you have to bulldoze everything around it. Of course, this is very true to real life, and I don't really know if tearing down a few blocks actually is as terrible as it feels.
• Road architecture is awkward. I don't know how people get these nice intersections in the screenshots, mine are bulky and bloated and have weird kinks everywhere, and I still haven't figured out how to transition effectively between the different types of road. I see that off ramps let vehicles leave the highway without slowing down, but apparently there's no way to make them merge onto another type of road without doing a full stop first, which seems weird. This should be possible, yes?
• I would like a drawing mode that let me specify start and end points, and then define curve control point(s). Doing it the current way is so imprecise.
• Hey, remember in EA's popular video game franchise SimCity™ when they made roads also carry water, sewage and power. That was such a great idea! Having to place power lines is bad enough, but then going back and remove them and repair zoning scars is the worst.
• There's very much repetition of buildings, which looks weird in my lame screenshots.
• I guess I'm mostly concerned with road traffic ... I would love a tool that let me select a car or some points or whatever, and see how it calculates that it shouldn't use my brand new asphalt and concrete pillar knot of wide-open road, and instead line up in the dirt road traffic jam along with everyone else.

[Gerretic]

• Upgrading the roads is so destructive and unpredictable, I feel like I have to have this wide apron of available space around every road I build, and because of how zoning works, I feel like there's no way to take later expansion into account. Once you need to upgrade a road, you have to bulldoze everything around it. Of course, this is very true to real life, and I don't really know if tearing down a few blocks actually is as terrible as it feels.

 

I was antsy about this at first but I think you just have to do it. In my experience buildings rebuild pretty quickly after being demolished by a road construction and it's not been a huge problem.

 

• I guess I'm mostly concerned with road traffic ... I would love a tool that let me select a car or some points or whatever, and see how it calculates that it shouldn't use my brand new asphalt and concrete pillar knot of wide-open road, and instead line up in the dirt road traffic jam along with everyone else

 

Check out the Traffic Inspector mod in the Workshop, if you haven't already. It's not quite what you're asking for, in that it won't determine why cars are choosing to pathfind the way they are, but it will at least show you a car's planned route or all planned routes passing through a particular stretch of road.

[toblix]

Oh cool, I'll check that out. I didn't know they could mod in new tools.

[Vasari]

I'm really anal about not using mods because they turn off achievements. I'm getting really good at bulldozing derelict buildings.

[Gerretic]

I believe there's a mod to make achievements work with mods.

[Vasari]

Oh my god there is.

[Henroid]

My biggest problem with the game at the moment is the way the initial highway entrypoint into your city works. It becomes a traffic clusterfuck and I can't think of a way to reconcile it. One of the routes is your input and the other is output. I actually started a city once not realizing the game was that smart, so I didn't have the input section linked up to my city. Population didn't grow and it took me a bit to figure out why.

[Gormongous]

My biggest problem with the game at the moment is the way the initial highway entrypoint into your city works. It becomes a traffic clusterfuck and I can't think of a way to reconcile it. One of the routes is your input and the other is output. I actually started a city once not realizing the game was that smart, so I didn't have the input section linked up to my city. Population didn't grow and it took me a bit to figure out why.

 

Yeah, I don't entirely understand why they made the traffic simulation so deep and so fine-grained if they give the player only the most basic tools to manage it, especially with highways. Seeing stuff like Timboh's twenty-three different types of interchanges on Steam Workshop, there's obviously a well-developed base of knowledge for this stuff out there, so I'm not entirely sure why the player is expected to create their own from scratch. I guess maybe it's a remnant of the design philosophy that informed the Cities in Motion series?

 

Also, Timboh's commentary on every single one of those twenty-three interchanges, including how common they are, where they can be found, how cost-effective and/or modern they're perceived to be, and what the advantages and/or disadvantages are is nothing short of wholly engrossing.

[Henroid]

I dunno if I have a problem with the tools to manage the traffic. Again, my beef is with that initial entrypoint. The entrance and exit to the highway are SO CLOSE together. If you link them together right there, sure it technically functions, BUT the traffic will build up because you run into that frequent / short intersection problem that causes traffic buildup. So I guess it's a matter of how far apart to split the initial highway entrance / exit before giving them some sort of linkup.

[Brett E]

Well one solution to the initial highway problem is make you own map in the editor, that's what I've been doing, it's taken a few tries but I think I'm close to something I'm happy with.

Yeah, I don't entirely understand why they made the traffic simulation so deep and so fine-grained if they give the player only the most basic tools to manage it, especially with highways. Seeing stuff like Timboh's twenty-three different types of interchanges on Steam Workshop, there's obviously a well-developed base of knowledge for this stuff out there, so I'm not entirely sure why the player is expected to create their own from scratch. I guess maybe it's a remnant of the design philosophy that informed the Cities in Motion series?

 

Also, Timboh's commentary on every single one of those twenty-three interchanges, including how common they are, where they can be found, how cost-effective and/or modern they're perceived to be, and what the advantages and/or disadvantages are is nothing short of wholly engrossing.

 

I agree, I think the game expects a bit too much from the player, doesn't really provide the tools and certainly doesn't teach you much about the right approach. There's a good discussion of the game on Three Moves Ahead and one of them said that really it's still a traffic management game.

 

I don't want to come off as too negative though, I'm enjoying the game but I find it frustrating that at a certain point my city will descend into chaos and it's not so much that I'm bad at the game (well it's partly that), it's more that I'm not an expert on traffic theory. It brings up an interesting question of: Is it fair to expect this degree of outside knowledge in order to be proficient at the game?

 

This person seems to be managing traffic well, I keep looking at it but can't quite replicate their success.

[ronniesoak]

The Hype on this game has made me buy it, thank you this forum thread.

[Henroid]

Is there any detailed info about what it means to have specialized industries?

[Jutranjo]

I dunno if I have a problem with the tools to manage the traffic. Again, my beef is with that initial entrypoint. The entrance and exit to the highway are SO CLOSE together. If you link them together right there, sure it technically functions, BUT the traffic will build up because you run into that frequent / short intersection problem that causes traffic buildup. So I guess it's a matter of how far apart to split the initial highway entrance / exit before giving them some sort of linkup.

 

Have you tried linking them with more one way roads into our lord and saviour, a small roundabout?