I got this on Saturday evening, played a little to get a feel for it then started a new game and played solidly on Sunday and Tuesday and built this city over those two days.. this is the middle bit of it:
Great game... I know how great it is because on Sunday I got up and started playing, then felt hungry and thought it must be time for breakfast... went downstairs and realised it was actually time for lunch!
Haven't really done anything with trains and only a couple of bus lines but loads of metro stops. I'm appreciating the lack of natural disaster type events and how generally it's not a game where everything is on the knife edge of falling apart all the time - you can build up the city and then spend time trying to work out how the fuck to sort out a particular junction/set of junctions so the traffic flows better.
Traffic logic is bloody annoying at times - the junction at the south end of the office district that is in the top right segment in that picture, the one that connects to the highway - that had traffic queueing back into the residential district, all the way along to the unique building roughly parallel with the north end of the office district, because everyone needed to be in the RH lane to enter the highway and refused to use either of the other three lanes that would taken them all the way to the on ramp! I sorted this out by making those bits of roads into highways with off ramps into the office district and then using the trick of compressing down the number of lanes after a junction that Crispy posted earlier to create proper merge lanes - as soon as I did that, the traffic jams just vanished.
I'm going to have to spend some time in the asset manager to try to create some road junctions I think are missing - in particular a Y shaped piece to merge together two one way roads - every time I try to do this, I get a junction where none is needed (see the southern end of the cloverleaf junction north of the Butler district for an example - both ways should just flow but give way to each other instead). In general, they don't seem to have handled merging lanes at all, and I don't understand why there isn't a 4 lane one way road, and also a 5 lane one would be useful for forcing merge lanes. There are times at junctions where I want to give people a free right turn and it'd be great to have a way to set that up without mashing up a district with highway on ramps which don't quite work as free right turns anyway. Also when you have two one way streets / highways running next to each other, it should be possible to setup a crossroads/t junction which would be treated as a single junction, not as two junctions - I'm thinking in the asset editor I could make a 12 lane road to achieve this.
I failed to set it to left hand drive which was a mistake as at least one of my one way systems runs the wrong way.. I've spotted a mod that lets you turn one way streets around which I'm going to add into my games but I've already cross connected this one and I cba to change that when I know I'm basically done with this and once I've got over my cold I'm going to start anew.
Tempted to go for some kind of 1960s technocratic utopic grade seperation dream as I suspect this game will reward that even though it failed so badly in real life. Can't wait for someone to do a cycling mod which adds bikes and different types of bike lanes in.
Anyway, brilliant, and was £23 which is a great price, was expecting it to be £40 and would have waited for a price drop/sale to buy it if it had of been.
