The greatest city in the history of Cities: Skylines.
I started out making nice little boxes at the top and then things devolved pretty quickly. Also pay attention to all my poop floating out into the ocean. The water simulation is pretty advanced. Map size is good. All my buildings are in the starting square (I bought the second square to fuck with the highway but haven't expanded yet). i'm having a lot of fun, and the game is pretty cheap (I got my Steam copy for $20 from GMG, $30 normally).
Annoying things:
No terraforming once your game begins. I had to rebuild the entire highway because a slight hill made it impossible for me to just move the interchange over a bit to get access to some farmland. Which sucks because...
There's not a lot of fine control for road placement. Curves are annoying to do correctly. The snap tool doesn't completely make sense. Sometimes the road is curving even though I have it set not to.
Upgrading roads is really annoying and there's no undo button. I accidentally clicked on a roundabout with the upgrade tool and it added street lights, ruining the purpose of a roundabout. It really ruined my traffic plan. The only way to fix it is to destroy everything (including the buildings using the roads near the roundabout) and rebuilding it. I'm starting a new city because of how annoying this is.
That last two points are important because almost everything has to be connected to a road. See those nice green areas I left for the houses at the top of the map? Can't place parks in there because reasons.
This is my farming district:
I was so certain that bridge was going to help divert incoming industrial traffic but I haven't seen a single vehicle use. You can see my other district which only exists to ban trucks from using that road in an attempt to solve some traffic problems. It didn't help.
My highway fuckery:
That stupid A bridge thing actually worked wonders even though it's a pileup waiting to happen.
I like to pretend these are the dinosaur gas stations even though they aren't green. In canon badfotown everything gas station-related involves a dinosaur.
I like this place much better. Focusing on forestry instead of farming. I wanted to follow a sim around and see what he did. Albert Murray has been at that park for over two weeks and I'm worried about him.
Garbage collection is one big difference from other games I've played. In other games you build a few dumbs far away and that's that. In this game your dumps need to be easily accessible because your garbage trucks have to actually navigate traffic.
Also if you have a dump set to empty its trash to an incinerator, it will stop garbage collection for that dump. I don't understand this. Why can't I do both? The result is I have to have extra dumps just to get access to more garbage trucks.
I'm not sure police stations matter. Crime rate must be bugged or something.
There are off-shore wind turbines that feel like cheating. They are pretty cheap to build, have low upkeep, provide a shit load of power, don't cause any pollution and the noise pollution doesn't matter because nobody cares in the middle of the river.
The traffic stuff is out of hand. Not in the "oh wow it's a challenging puzzle" kind of way but in a "the game doesn't handle some very basic traffic things that would make this a whole of a lot easier" kind of way.
There's no way I can tell to just make a one way stop on to a main road. It has to turn into at least a three way stop. This doesn't make sense. This is basic neighborhood shit.
Emergency vehicles don't act like emergency vehicles. They don't use the extra unoccupied lanes. Nobody pulls over for them. They take shit routes.
There's this weird thing where cars will pileup in a major intersection if you have a subway station near sometimes.
I was trying to figure out why garbage and cemetery service was so crap even though I had good coverage, and it's apparently because services try to fix the furthest away issue whenever a truck goes out. So if I have a dead person next to a cemetery and a dead person all the way across the city, it goes to pick up the guy all the way across the city first. This explains so much. Good coverage means nothing. You're just kind of fucked and hope for the best.
It's really terrible for garbage. It also doesn't help that my landfills and incinerators only operate at half capacity no matter what. Even set their budget to 200 percent. Nothing changes. It's bad enough that my garbage trucks hop on a highway to drive all the way across town to pick up trash instead of just picking up trash in the district I put the damn incinerator in.
Also, my citizens got too educated and they started fleeing my industrial areas because they were too smart to farm or cut down trees or whatever. There's no way around this. You need uneducated people. I had to create a ghetto with no schools and no public transport to get to schools to solve it.
I built a bridge over a river and demolished it. A few cars disappear. A few drop then disappear before hitting the water. Most just keep driving along the air.
It feels like they made a game to hit key points people complained about with SimCity 2013 (like small cities) but sort of went 80 percent on everything else. The result is a game that's immediately engaging but has a lot of bugs and/or bad design that's really annoying as you go on.
