I bought Cities: Skylines not long after it came out, having enjoyed 20 hours of Simcity 4 according to Steam - it felt like longer, in a good way. My initial impressions were good, but somehow I didn't manage to really get into it, though I played long enough to get near the final city size milestone (when you attain certain population sizes, you unlock new buildings, features and extra land to build on - in a nice touch, the game comes with a dev-made mod to remove this progression and unlock everything immediately if you so choose). Recently I made some time, being tempted by the recent-ish patch which added European style buildings, and have now got up to 25 hours, enjoying nearly every minute.
One very important thing to note is how well the mods work and how nicely they're integrated into the game. It's all done through the Steam workshop, but in-game there's a content manager to easily activate and deactivate mods (with filters to pick out certain types of mods or search by name), and it advertises popular mods which you can click on to go to their Steam pages. I have a bunch of extra vehicle models, more parks offering different sizes and shapes, and most importantly Traffic ++ and Traffic Manager.
These two mods add a range of features, from different kinds of bus lanes and pedestrian paths to the ability to manually set how lanes connect across junctions, or to set up your own traffic light sequences. This might sound like a lot of tedious micromanagement rather than fun, and I should stress that for the most part the vanilla game will be fine without them. I had none of these mods while building my first city, and I didn't feel like I was missing anything. That said, now I have them I can't imagine playing without them!
These two mods add a range of features, from different kinds of bus lanes and pedestrian paths to the ability to manually set how lanes connect across junctions, or to set up your own traffic light sequences. This might sound like a lot of tedious micromanagement rather than fun, and I should stress that for the most part the vanilla game will be fine without them. I had none of these mods while building my first city, and I didn't feel like I was missing anything. That said, now I have them I can't imagine playing without them!
Traffic ++ reorganization of lanes
Traffic behaviour in the base game is not perfect, especially when it comes to three lane roads, which you would think would at least allow more traffic to queue. But because of how the AI drivers work (assuming driving on the right), you tend to get massive queues in the right hand lane, moderate-low queues in the middle, and very light traffic in the left hand lane. This mostly comes down to the right lane by default being valid for turning or continuing forward, so most traffic ends up there. The other lanes are (I think) only used by cars which are planning to turn left at some point in the future, or going much further along. With the mods, it's easy to fix - I simply adjust the links so cars in the right lane only turn right, cars in the middle only go ahead, and cars in the left only turn left (or if there is no left or it's a quiet road, they can go ahead as well). This results immediately in a far better spread of traffic and better use of those three lanes. The screenshot above is an example of this.
Traffic Manager defining light settings and intervals
Cities is about much more than just traffic of course, but it's probably the part of the game with the most obvious and varied visual feedback - traffic jams are a clear indicator of a problem, while streams of vehicles flow smoothly is a pleasure to see. Building upgrades sometimes make a big difference, but often don't really seem to change much between stages, while traffic flows are always a mix of different models and types, with decent variety even before you start adding vehicle asset mods to your game. It's very easy to just float around your city watching people on their way to here or there.
Typical European parking
So far I've been making fairly conventional, dense cities focused on roads, with public transport a nice extra rather than a focus (I favour a subway system since it doesn't add to traffic and is easy to integrate in dense blocks of structures), with mixed districts of residential, commercial and offices separated from the industrial zones that also contain my power plants. But I'm tempted to try either a city with a much heavier focus on public transport, or a far more dispersed city (perhaps simulating the feel of having suburbs or small towns surrounding a central city area). Mods give me the ability to force my citizens into very specific or restricted patterns of movement, but how will the game systems handle it? I'll hopefully do an AAR detailing my experiences sometime soon. I'm far from done with Cities: Skylines.
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