In a game where the gameplay isn't meant to be a challenge, the graphics become relevant again, and I like dropping down to street level and exploring my town while I rake in some money for my next round of new construction.
I like using the first person mod and stalking people basically from their viewpoint, it really brings the city to life.
Traffic management is the one thing that's been a real challenge for me so far. Good gravy. There aren't even 10,000 people trying to get to work and my central boulevard is already bumper to bumper.
If you're having trouble with traffic
see this guide here made by a real traffic engineer. It looks like a lot of information but there's only a few things you need to keep in mind (and I'll be copypasta'ing from an older post of mine here):
1. Have traffic from smaller roads flow into larger roads, which flow into even larger roads/highways, and so on.
2. If possible don't clog your traffic into a few areas, try to spread them out.
3. Major mass transit systems are most effective when they follow major roads/highways.
4. Bus/metro/etc. routes shouldn't go long distances, generally speaking, and should be more like crisscrossing circuits - your citizens can, will, and should be switching bus lanes if necessary. This prevents buses from clogging up areas.
5. Sometimes traffic is caused by having too much of one type of RCI in an area - you might just have to delete a few buildings to fix things up.
Thanks to this I've pretty much never encountered any serious traffic problems. Just remember and be prepared to delete large sections of your city as needed to rebuild things as necessary.
The game has a hard cap of 1,000,000 population, so the bustling metropolises you can build in this game are about the population of Quebec City, Glasgow, or Albuquerque. Given my traffic problems, maybe that's a blessing. The citizens of Los Angeles, Delhi, and Toronto are surely cheering the fact that I can't make their commutes any worse (although some might say that I
couldn't make it any worse, so might as well have a go...
).
Apparently what happens is that the taller buildings tend to have less people than they would in real life (so for instance a big skyscraper might only have 15 families living in it). This way unlike SimCity 2013 where you had the illusion of more people with less buildings, here you have the illusion of more buildings with less people. Or someting like that.
The original Sim City required you to be extremely careful at first and make lots of backups so you could restart just before things started to go really badly. But it was a great feeling of accomplishment when you finally managed to pull it off.
The later versions were intentionally made far easier so people wouldn't get so frustrated.
Sim City 4 finally made the game more difficult to play so it was at least somewhat of a challenge again. But it lost a lot of what made the original game so great.
And now Maxis seems to have gone off the deep end again with their collaboration with EA Sports.
On Cities Skylines, I will mention that on the challenge vs. sandbox scale, it leans towards the latter more than SimCity, so if the challenge aspect is really important to you Cities Skylines might seem a bit too easy (though that's only if you manage to master the traffic aspect, which some people have a really tough time with).
I've put 60 hours into Skyrim in the past month and I've only covered maybe 40% of the available vanilla content. Too bad I've maxed out my primary skills already, so leveling is awfully slow.
You're going through the game faster than me! D:
