| Welcome to Grand Fromage Citybuilder LP 3: The Final Countdown: Legend of the Five Eminent Domains
This is a multi-game LP that I've been noodling on doing since last year and had to delay for assorted reasons, some technical (bet you can't guess what that refers to), some conceptual. The time has finally come. Okay great it's city building, what's this multi-game thing about? Well! You may have heard there was a big new citybuilding game release in October 2023. The first game of our multiple games!
Cities: Skylines 2 You may have also heard the launch didn't go well. Personally, I had zero technical problems with the thing--it didn't run that well on release, but within a couple weeks they'd patched that to an acceptable degree. Still, it was quite a bit more bare bones and lacking than we'd hoped for (even though to be fair, compared to the original release of the first game, there is more), and after putting 70 hours or so into a city I felt like I'd seen everything and it was time to take a break until mods. Now, mods have come. Somewhat; as of this OP we are still waiting on assets. With all the patching and the mods we do have, though, I feel like the game is in something of a playable state. We'll see about that! Can I bitch about Cities: Skylines 2 in this thread? I'm real f*ckin' mad about it. I would prefer you don't! I'm not going to stomp discussing the games we (I) are (am) playing, including criticism, because this is not a full audience participation LP so I do want discussion topics going on. But if you just want to vent about how much you hate Colossal Order there is a thread in Games that is better suited. Game The Second:
Cities: Skylines As one would expect, there was a Cities: Skylines 1 that came before 2. The LP may end up in fact being more about this game. That's because here we have a complete package: many (many) DLCs, some of which I don't have. Many (many) mods, and many (many (many)) assets. Some consider this the all time best city builder. For me it's a comfortable #2, and I hope the day will come where it's knocked down to #3 by the sequel. This was the other technical problem preventing me from doing the LP. One of those mods was hosed up and I couldn't load a city. In the intervening months, whatever mod that was has been fixed and I can play again.
The mods are rather vital to the enjoyment of this game and our project specifically, which is a Japanese city. Those thousands of assets allow me to build with entirely custom content and thefore have no compromises. Game 3? 4? Yeah sure probably. I did say multi-game, not double game. Will it be SimCity 4? SimCity 3000? SimCity 2000? CitiesXL? It's definitely not one of those! What about something like Anno or Tropico? No. I am something of a purist; I know those are tagged as city builders on Steam, but to me they are not. Those are production management games. I like them, I'm not hating on them, but Anno is the same genre as Factorio, not SimCity. The only games I consider city builders are games about making cities, not about making production chains that use the graphics of cities. There may be some I've never heard of, I might take a peep around and see if there are indie ones to check out. Workers & Resources? Man I ain't got the time to get a PhD in video gaming (maybe; I have it but have never played it(now that it's 1.0 who knows(it does look like it's more Anno than SimCity though))). OpenTTD? Transport Fever? Those are transit management games. Nope! Earlier you said this isn't a participation LP. Not full participation, as in everything goes by goon vote. I'm not going to say no votes or anything will ever come up but this is mainly me posting screenshots of cities and discussion around it. I'm thinking along the lines of the Simtropolis city journals from the glory days. I'm also going to talk about city planning in Japan, as well as some other parts of Asia I'm familiar with, and maybe even throw in some pictures of real stuff. Who knows. Posts about the games will live alongside more general city discussion, hopefully. My previous Cities: Skylines LP had a bit of a frame story of Korean history. Currently I'm thinking the Cities: Skylines 2 one will have a story of sorts and the other(s) will not. But who knows man. That said! Suggestions always welcome if you see something that looks wrong, or have an idea, or want to see me build a particular type of thing, or whatever. Even if I'm not running votes a "hey what about a bar area near that train station" post is encouraged. Post away! Are you just going to get bored and stop posting eventually like the last two? Honestly? Entirely possible. These games have no defined end state and no story, so "get bored and stop playing" is kind of the natural conclusion. Cities: Skylines does have some built-in game limitations like the node limit--once you get there, you can't build anything else. I have never hit the node limit so that would be a good goal. Skylines 2 does not have those limitations, though eventually your computer will catch fire. Is this tedious fake Q&A format how you're going to do every post? Nope. The Plan For Cities: Skylines I have a city already underway that we will be checking in on. This is a fully modded to the gills, no zoning, every building placed by hand kind of insane asylum thing. Here we are exploring the joys of details, Japanese (-ish, mostly) city design, and trains. An early project here will be building a rural community from scratch, in addition to the urban areas. For Cities: Skylines 2 we will be building anew in a realistic style. This will be an American (-ish, mostly) city because uh, that's the only thing you can build in the game as of the writing of this post. Once assets come online I may start a new city, or do two at once. This city is underway and is designed as if it is pre-car midwest-ish, though of course you can't actually do a historical city at the moment since there aren't assets. Grand Fromage f*cked around with this message at 18:06 on Jul 2, 2024 |
| #?Jul 1, 2024 18:54 |
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| #?Jul 4, 2024 10:19 |
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| Table of Contents Cities: Skylines 2 Junction City: Chapter 1 --- Cities: Skylines Makurazaki: Chapter 1 Grand Fromage f*cked around with this message at 00:45 on Jul 3, 2024 |
| #?Jul 1, 2024 18:55 |
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| Junction City: Chapter 1
Welcome to Cities: Skylines 2! The first thing you are presented with in a new game, as you might imagine, is the map selection. The game comes with these 13 maps. They all kind of suck.
Fortunately we now have mods, which includes maps. I got a bunch but none of them really hit the vibe I was going for, so I decided to make my own.
The map editing is a little hosed, I could not for the life of me get the climate to be the way I wanted it which I imagine is going to be an ongoing pain in my rear end. But! I imported a heightmap, did some modification, and we're off.
This is the full map. The outer portion is the "world map", which is the area visible beyond the border of the playable area. Expanding the playable area is possible in principle, though the means to do so doesn't exist yet. Supposedly, maps can be of arbitrary size--the only limit is what your computer can handle.
This is the playable area. I flattened it out quite a bit because CS2 continues in the long tradition of citybuilders not really handling rough terrain well, so it's easiest to just not.
Welcome to Junction City, in the summer of 1876! Not so much of the "city" part yet, but we do have a junction. 1876?
That's better. If you have good eyes you may have noticed the problem here. We got a bunch of modern cars driving around. In Cities: Skylines, you can go to the workshop and get some horse-drawn cart vehicle assets, disable all of the cars, and make it look historical. Unfortunately, CS2 does not have any of this yet. So uh. IN THEORY this is a historical city founded in the 1800s. Without assets there is no way to actually make it look like it. We're just going to roll with it. Use your imagination.
Basic services are required. Water, for people to drink.
Poop, for people to not drink.
And we begin! Cities all have a reason to exist; Junction City's is in that map. A fertile plain at the confluence of two navigable rivers, land access through hills, and pre-existing country roads and a train junction. It's a prime place to make food and move things. And it's located in (indistinct mumbling) which puts it at a roughly equal distance to other major cities. The national government was talked into selling off some land, as it previously owned this entire region and had not developed it beyond that pass through infrastructure, and people rushed right in to grab it and set up shop.
Couple big farms and some people. A good start.
Last week the economy was patched and is now quite a bit harder to deal with. No more free money. We're well into the negatives and on track to bankruptcy. Not an immediate problem, but one that has to be dealt with.
You also no longer get literal millions of dollars thrown at you for milestones. As for milestones, I decided to keep the unlocks/tile buying because I do like the sense of progression it makes.
Mayor Davis decides expansion is the way to get the budget in shape, and at the moment Junction City is a rough ridin' frontier town where the mayor's word is law and also everyone else thought it was a good idea too, anyway.
One of the major expenses is buying electricity from the neighbors. The state government is interested in electrification though (electrifying the frontier in 1876? look the game requires electricity get off my back) and so significant support was available for building our very own coal power plant. Moving the coal is also made simple by the river. And now we can sell power, it's good all around. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that the power plant maintenance is far more money than we could ever hope to make selling power, and thus the budget is worse off than it was before. Mayor Davis suggests that we just didn't think big enough and should expand the generating capacity of the plant. Later that week, after Mayor Davis' unfortunate accident involving a ditch and an out of control wagon, Mayor Parker suggests placing advertisem*nts in eastern papers describing our fertile land and all of the undeveloped lots available.
The land rush begins. At first it's chaos, people claiming whatever they can get their hands on, but after some discussion it's agreed to lay out a street grid and put together lots that would allow the city to function.
Areas for homes and businesses are surveyed.
In a bit of forward-thinking, a strip in each block is retained as city property. This right of way could have several uses.
Hopefully we won't have to worry about flooding.
People are moving in to make their claims, but we still have a real labor shortage. Junction City's farms are big and expanding.
Mayor Parker's ideas worked a lot better. More people filling jobs, paying taxes, producing agricultural goods we can sell, means more money for the city.
This seems fine and like a long term solution.
I hadn't really paid attention to the signature buildings before. Is that windowed part supposed to look like Baltar's lake house in Battlestar Galactica?
So, in Cities: Skylines 2, the tiles are a lot smaller than they were in the first game and there are more of them. As you progress you get permits that let you buy up tiles. With the economy rework patch, these tiles also have a maintenance cost based on how much buildable area they contain and what resources are there. This means they're ridiculously expensive in custom maps like this, because I've painted the whole map with fertile land in order to make real looking farms. Fortunately the 529 Tiles mod lets you adjust it. I've cranked tile maintenance down to 25%. May adjust it later.
The new "let's make money" plan is to get into this newfangled industrial revolution stuff. Factories rise next to the coal power plant to do uh, factory stuff. The area directly north becomes a lumber industrial area, so our factories are processing food and wood into whatnot for selling. That sounds dangerously close to Anno poo poo and it kind of is, I don't like the game taking that direction. But it's not actually something you have to manage closely, it's more abstract. We have a lot of food, therefore factories pop up that grind flour or can peas or whatever.
The city lots are starting to fill up, and some people in Junction City have money to burn and different ideas about the direction of our still new town. |
| #?Jul 2, 2024 01:21 |
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| Loved the color draining and the mayor accidentally dying in a ditch after proving to be incompetent. This will be interesting to follow. Is one of the games Highrise City? Or would you prefer no speculation? |
| #?Jul 2, 2024 12:41 |
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| When you unlock districts, please name one Daejon. |
| #?Jul 2, 2024 19:18 |
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| Poil posted:Is one of the games Highrise City? Or would you prefer no speculation? From what I have seen of Highrise City it is more of an Anno type management game, so it doesn't particularly interest me. I'll dig up a video play of it and see what it's about. Yaoi Gagarin posted:When you unlock districts, please name one Daejon. Daejeon Koreatown would be a good idea. Maybe assets will come in a reasonable timeframe. |
| #?Jul 2, 2024 23:53 |
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| Makurazaki: Chapter 1
Welcome to Cities: Skylines! Makurazaki is a city I started around a year ago. It is Japanese, shockingly enough from the name. I also wanted to do tropical, so it's uh, I dunno, a bit of Japan south of Kyushu that is not Okinawa. Or it's just Kyushu in the future who knows. Anyway! I did not make this map which is why it looks good.
Once upon a time there was a mod called Building Themes, which allowed real minute customization of how your cities looked. You could create a theme, use the browser to choose which buildings are allowed to spawn in that theme, then apply it to a district. It was great and wonderful, it eliminated vanilla buildings, and you could just say hey, this is a low-rise mid-wealth Japanese residential area, set the theme up to reflect that, and off you go. Until the mod broke. And the mod creator never fixed it. A successor mod appeared, but it didn't work properly. Or, to be more specific, it worked for some people and didn't for others. I was one of the others.
Thus I was left with a dilemma. The vanilla content in CS1 sucks hard, way worse than CS2's (which is itself not the best) and I want to build cities in a particular theme. Without the mod, the game was impossible to play. Until I remembered that you can plop buildings. Many of the most beautifully detailed cities you see are all plopped buildings, everywhere. Could I do that? Would I go insane?
As it turned out, plopping buildings isn't too bad! You can set up Find It to help you out, and while it's certainly far slower than zoning, speed isn't everything, is it? If you want to build a city that looks exactly the way you want it to, it is the way to go. And thus Makurazaki was born.
Every single thing in this city was placed there intentionally. Exceptions of course are props and whatnot built into buildings, though sometimes I do adjust those. But every building, every prop that isn't part of a building, every tree that didn't come with the map, I put there. As I mentioned before, there was a long period where something was hosed and I couldn't load the city, so this isn't a year of play. It's maybe a month at most.
So for this post we're just doing a little tour. This is Inaricho, the first area I built. Very much your standard Japanese urban residential area.
If you've been to Japan you can spot detail missing all over here. There's a lot more I could do to make it look perfect, but I am not that level of detailer. If you want to see some real staggering poo poo, check out Ryuichi Kaminogi's YouTube channel. The one flaw I really don't like here is that the roads are too wide, but eh. Sometimes you have to make some accommodations to the fact that this is a game and it functions a certain way.
Inaricho's density increases over by the train station and the edge of the mountains.
Most of this detail comes with the station model, but I put those vending machines there. That sort of little stuff is everywhere in the city.
What would big city Japan be without transit?
Inaricho's central intersection.
Now we're leaving Inaricho and taking a main road toward downtown. "Downtown" can be an ambiguous concept in a Japanese city, there are often several places that you could call a downtown. Any major train station has a cluster of density around it.
A large industrial area. Often industry is more mixed into the city in Japan than elsewhere. To make this work in CS, I have a mod to turn off all pollution otherwise it goes nuts.
It's annoying how grade separation is kind of required by the simulation. There are a lot of at-grade crossings in Japan, but the game does not know what to do with it and will cause a backup of death if you do it anywhere even remotely busy.
Custom shrine, Todaiji, currently the largest in the city.
The most recent districts I've built, Kamisakabe and Minowa. Unsurprisingly I think these newer areas look better as I got more reps on building this way.
The main drag in Kamisakabe, kind of an Akihabara situation going on.
When I figured out how to use retaining walls.
You may have spotted some weird artifacts where roads don't match up. There's nothing to be done about that, I'm using different sets of roads and they don't always work together smoothly. One must simply ignore it.
Across from Kamisakabe Station is the first shotengai I built in this city.
Traditional shopping streets, often partially or fully covered, often located near stations. In real Japan these are sadly an endangered species, many of them fading away as the owners of the stores literally die off, or are put out of business by competition with big box retail and increasingly the internet. It sucks, shotengai are great places and Japan's small retail owns.
Some shotengai are still pretty lively, either just in a good area or having tourist appeal. This is one I visited in Nagoya where most of the businesses are still open and there are lots of people around.
Others, like this one in Osaka, are just hanging on. These are often referred to as shuttergai. The "we're closed for the night" shutters came down and have never gone up again.
Downtown looms in the distance.
Downtown is an ongoing, extremely unfinished project. It's also definitely NOT inspired by anything from another game.
Time to go to night! Even though this is a Japanese city, I do have a bunch of other Asian content so a little Hong Kong Town area is fun for variety.
Again. Legally Distinct Downtown.
Todaiji at night.
This is my newest industrial area. This little train station inspired me to make a rural village, which will be the first major project in Makurazaki.
There's also this area to the west of Minowa, which has been laid out and is ready for buildings.
And always there are problems to solve, like this bullsh*t. Remember what I said about the level crossings. In real life this would work fine but the game has completely lost its f*ckin mind about it so it has to go. That is our quick city tour of the alternate universe of All The Mods. We will get to know these neighborhoods a little better over time. Next post will be explaining a topic about real Japanese city design and why things look as they do. I cannot spoil the topic lest you go read about it yourselves. (Also please do not expect a post a day pace I just wanted to get both started off so you know what's up) Grand Fromage f*cked around with this message at 00:46 on Jul 3, 2024 |
| #?Jul 3, 2024 00:43 |
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| This is cool. |
| #?Jul 3, 2024 02:56 |
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| While the setup and detail might not be perfect, the illusion of a Japanese urban zone is very impressive on first sight. The only thing i started to miss are the elevated brides and walkways above vehicle traffic in the inner districts. But i am not sure if skylines even supports those. |
| #?Jul 3, 2024 12:06 |
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| #?Jul 4, 2024 10:19 |
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| OutofSight posted:The only thing i started to miss are the elevated brides and walkways above vehicle traffic in the inner districts. But i am not sure if skylines even supports those. You can do them but they're annoying. There are a couple assets that work but you can only place those in specific circ*mstances, or you have to build it yourself and put invisible pedestrian paths to make it functional. I did that for one of the train stations. I think I might've gotten some new walkways that I haven't tried though. Still re-orienting myself in CS1. |
| #?Jul 3, 2024 17:22 |
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