This is exactly what I’ve been wanting for so long! I’ve always found starting a city from massive highways systems hardly conducive to realistic city/town growth. Thanks Yumbl!!
Yes, I agree. I've been trying to create more "small town American" cities for a while now. Exactly as he is talking about. Off interstates into state highways where small towns of a few thousand people pop up with farm land in between. Maybe a midsize city tossed in there. I don't know why I never thought about replacing the pre-placed interstates with smaller highways. I normally play with tiles locked and slowly progress unlocking tiles. But this would be fun with the entire map unlocked and maybe using one of the service optimizers to localize services to each town.
I always just go into it with a plan to cut back the highway especially with a map that has the highway rolling into the town for a long way before it hits an overpass
This is what City Planner Plays did with Clearwater County. He modified the map before starting to make just a single highway through the map he built on over time, adding highways as he added cities to the map.
He even named the forest and farming industries and residential areas that grew from there after the families that supposedly started the company etc. It was a great series to watch.
I think I caught a bit of that series but got scared off by all the mods. He uses a lot of mods, right? I haven't even touched them yet I'm still a Skylines newb :P
The same goes for a town's starting economy. In the game, we always have to build factories at the start of the game, when in reality, towns and villages grew around farming, fishing and forestry, later adding mining. and so on. Always a bit of an immersion-breaker for me.
I didn't remember that you needed the first milestone ""Worthy Village" to unlock that. It really doesn't make sense that you can build factories before you can build farms. Maybe cities:skylines 2 could have different zones for "heavy industry" and "medium manufacturing", and the "heavy industry" unlocks after the lighter industry. Those two zone types would obviously produce different amounts of pollution. But they could then also be used to distinguish tree plantations from sawmills; food processing factories from farm plots and pastures; oil refineries from oil drilling sites, ... Or maybe that distinction can come from a third zone type, like in Sim City 4. Except that, as "agriculture" is an area specialization, in C:S2 it would be called something like "extracting zone" instead.
@@edh9999 Good point. I never realized that there's actually no need for industry zone specializations and district specializations to be two separate things. If you overlap an industry zone and an industrially specialized district, you'll make them the same type in 99+% of the cases. They should probably be merged into one area type in C:S2.
Not to mention the fact that those factories are the most heavy industry imaginable. Would be nice if there was a 'light industry' option which features things like car dealerships, transport companies, logistics, construction, etc. More warehouses instead of fuming smolestacks. The kinds of industry you would see in a small town or even a bigger city in a service economy. I hate that the game basically forces you to build Birmingham or Manchester in the 1800's, as if the Industrial revolution is just beginning
i feel like the mod Realistic Population 2 would work really well here. It essentially adjusts the demand for zoning and other needs to more realistically simulate a population. I currently play with it in my maximum effientcy industry area builds to give me more of a challenge lol. Love the video!
This is not Cities: Skyline! This is poetry! When it is best. The most northern quarter of Sweden had no road network at all 1930. The large Ore mines up there had just a single track railway to rely on. What you present here is a nice challenge for the path finder Thank U🤠🤠
Yes, they even had an ambulance train so people could be transported to hospital due to the lack of roads (and well, ambulance flights wasn't really a thing)
@@kleinerprinz99 🤣🤣🤣 Who decides whats needed? Apart from Russia Sweden is the talles/longest country in Europe. Almost 2500 km N-S. The 2:nd longest road, E4, is HW around 50%, E6 around 90%, etc. So i guess we have somewhere between 2500 and 3000 km HW.
Your excitement is contagious. Like so many, I get stuck in a "build the population so high that your computer strains to produce 10 FPS" mode. Little River is such a great idea! And C:S has developed in such a way that it's totally possible to create a town like Lancaster, and to enjoy its growth without concentrating on the population number as the end game. Thank you so much for this idea! I'll be watching Little River!
This is so fun. Whenever I start a city I destroy the highway connection and put a dirt road down, upgrading as I grow. It's cool to see that approach on RUclips instead of the highway start
This. So much this. The hardest part for me when I want to find a nice map on the workshop are all the overbuilt highways for what's essentially just a field. And granted, yes they are created wonderfully and there's been a lot of time put into them, but that upfront investment means you also have to match it, meaning you kinda have to build a big butt of a metropolis. I played on a really nice rural map from the UK countryside at one point, sadly it wasn't quite the setting I was going for. However, it gave me the chance to give some history and leftovers to my road system, it was so hecking great! One thing I really do recommend is finding historical satellite imagery of the area you wanna imitate, then stepping back and forward in time, seeing what small changes get made and trying to figure out why. Was there too much traffic? Did the zoning change? Was it diverted to get closer to a highway? The tiny pockets of roads that used to connect are also great places to add in bike infrastructure :3
I one time started a "city" in City Skylines, where instead of making a full big metropolitan area, I started with a series of small towns in different areas on the map. Then as I grew them up, I started connecting more roads together. They also started to expand further out and to touch each other. I never got the map to a one big city, but I wanted to capture the essence of many small towns growing into each other. Complications of the technique: 1.) You have to pay closer attention to your usages (electricity, water, etc.). One small town may need more power, but your power grid will look like it's producing fine. 2.) You have to budget better because all the small towns share one central band account. 3.) You may need to extend some roads further than you want to. To do this, do small roads to be upgraded later (it adds to the realism). 4.) You need to use something like 89 tiles and unlock everything for free, because each town will be developing simultaneously, but also apart from one another.
Thanks, this is exactly what I'm looking for. I would love to see more modified maps like this. I like building small towns and get bored and/or overwhelmed when they get too big. I would also like to see maps that are conducive to building multiple small towns that are self-contained but connected. P.S. Lancaster looks awesome. Yay for Main Streets!
You hit the nail on the head with this one. I have been wanting to see this for a long time now and I'm hoping you are able to contact the developer of the map. I know it's called "CITIES Skylines", but in my opinion, it just looks more realistic creating small towns and farms. Sometimes they grow and become big cities, but not always. I love this idea.
I havent had the urge to play Cities in quite some time now, but this map... the prospect of semi realistic town development? Sign me up. Time to fire up the ol' Cities again Edit: I just noticed there's a shop near Lancaster called Paws-a-tive Training and I don't know whether I should be ashamed or giggling about that lol
I saw that too, when he was zoomed out a bit. It drew my eye to it almost immediately, and I was a little bit disappointed he didn't mention it, as he was "showing us around" his hometown. Seems like someone who described an intersection as (if memory serves...), "cute" and "adorable," would find "Paws-a-tive" irresistable."
Dude, you put your finger on something that have bothered me for years, but formulating it the way you did was so enlightening... Thank you so much, can't wait to try out your map edit!
That parclo! It's precious! 🥺 Now that you've pointed it out, it does feel like a huge flaw in the game's structure to have every map be so highway-dependent.
The last two builds I have worked on were based on resource and industry. I open up the map at the start with the 81 tiles option and have all building options available from the start. Then I look for a good place to build an industry. That area is where I actually build a city as it seems logical from a RW perspective. So I wind up with small(er) towns that all feed the main city I plan to create. I haven't taken the step of eliminating the pre-existing highway infrastructure in the manner you're introducing in this video but I think it is a Great idea! On top of that, I'll use the mods Rebalanced Industries, Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited 1.6.4 and Realistic Population 2 2.0.4 that I have just started checking out. They're a very pronisong trio that have already changed my gameplay significantly. That will make for a completely different playthrough. It'll be like playing a new game where I am already very confortable with how it works and already have the achievements unlocked. It should be interesting. I have a feeling that your video may be the catalyst for quite a few reworked maps that have a more basic starting transportation infrastructure. I'm a huge fan of the idea.
I've been looking at making a map akin to that. Your starting tile doesn't have a three lane highway just go straight to it, but rather you start along the single-carriageway road and build with that at the centre incrementally. A road typically goes from point to point, and then a town springs up along it. Rarely has it been the other way around
I don’t know how long you’ve been living in the DC area but it still amazes me to think back on the at grade rail crossing in Gainesville Va until 2012-2013. Like major highway at grade crossing.
I personally love overbuilding and creating large "racetracks" for people to commute across the city, but I also get the reason why you went this route. The small town charm, stories along the way, strive for realism, and a new way to play is always fun to watch.
I love this idea. A few months ago (before I stopped playing for a while), I started doing this with a map I found of Montreal. It had a really nonsensical starting road/train inlet, but the topography was wonderful and (trees aside) accurate. So I did something like this - I build two outer "big" highways, and then a whole bunch of 4-lane national roads to connect everything. Then at a few strategic places I added some 4-lane city streets to connect to a bunch of "towns", . I was inspired by City Planner Plays' Clearwater County map, and am quite proud of it. I ended up building out 3 of the little towns before getting a bit bored with the game (500h in just under 3 months will do that...) and stopping for about 2 months now. But your video is really inspiring me to try to play again on your map now, and go for that small-town feel and the detail. Love the channel Yumbl!
Thank you very much yumbl for the map, i did a "stress test" where i built an european city with 200K inhabitants and everything went smoothly (traffic sits at 79-85%) and it has become one of my favorite cities too lol
I totally agree with your idea and what you are saying. The towns I've lived in are in England, UK are near a motorway but they are at least a six minute journey out of town, to get to and connected by small roads or a dual carriageway. This idea is spot on.
legit, i'm in Australia and there are 2 major highways that crisscross the state and the neighbourhood state (so single lane each way). Simple T intersection with a turning lane is all there is to connect 2 highways that span 1000km.
This is probably one of the most important csl video made in a long time. The importance of what you did here can not be overstated. I can't tell how many times I started up the game, spent half an hour staring at the 6 lane highway coming into my plot, and then leaving the game without a city. It is amazing how much those highways kills your inspiration.
Originally from Leominster, MA. I have been to and been through Lancaster, NH and it reminds me of the Leominster that I grew up in. Thanks for a trip down memory lane.
When I start a new city, I really like starting simple. Often the go-to beginning for me is that the location starts as a rest stop by a highway, with some small shops, gas station, etc, and then later expands into an actual city. Sometimes I would leave small imperfections that are left over from the initial development of the area, just to feel more realistic.
Riverlands has been one of my favorite maps to play on. Love the road network you designed for that map. I may have to go back and do the same. I’ve always liked the idea of a bunch of smaller communities throughout the map as opposed to one huge city. As always your videos really give me food for thought. I always look at the road networks around me and think about the lessons you’ve taught on road hierarchy and it’s just interesting to see the design and thought (and lack of in some instances) that go into upgrading existing roads and highways. Unlike you, I grew up in a bigger city but have moved to a more rural part of Texas my town has 2 main highways that feed into it. A 2 lane highway and a 4 lane highway. Everywhere I look I see road hierarchy!! Thank you YUMBL, I always look forward to seeing your next videos.
You should really check out Lee Hawkins' "Reddington" series on his RUclips channel (and he's got some early releases episodes on Patreon as well). He actually started with one of the DLC maps (I honestly can't remember which one ATM) and as part of the first and maybe second episodes completely removed the highway system and replaced it with dirt roads. Basically he started back in the 1800s and he's building up slowly overtime with a full backstory and everything. I am definitely going to check out your Little River map though. I actually did something similar with one of the original maps, replacing the highway with a 6-lane national road and then built off of that instead of the highway.
Absolutely love this map idea. I was playing around in the map editor a while ago after watching Clearwater County and thought I should make something similar; like a very "toned down" city start with only national roads. I got way too "in my own head" about it, thinking "who would want this?", but this video here just might have rekindled some motivation!
This makes soo much sense! The town I was born is called Breda..., and it is named after a ford in the river Aa > Brede Aa (which means wide Aa), which became Breda. It all stared with a sand path to the widest and lowest crossing! No highway! :D
I’m so glad that someone finally addressed this. I’m from a similar town as yours in the south where I have to drive almost 2 hours to connect to a major highway (95). I love the idea.
I really feel that small town vibe, my city is just big enough to be labeled as such and it's impossible to organically grow a city like that in vanilla, especially because I'm in Europe!
Started on this map yesterday, love how it plays. I've done simaler using the map editor mode but only ended up with a basic map so to play this way on a pre made map really makes a difference. Thanks mate.
One of the things I've been trying to find for Cities Skylines is a "homestead residential zone". A very low density residential that doesn't need electricity or water from "the grid". That way you can just build service roads that lead to nice views where people would build at first, then organically grow housing off the already cleared path. Another thing I've always wanted was mixed zoning. Residential buildings that stack onto commercial or industrial to give small towns better use of thier space. Building up the use of roads already there before building more and expanding. I think having both of these would make building a small town more organic.
I'm actually doing a small version of this in Storm City, in building up my forestry industry. Instead of racing it up from one to five stars, I built out a ton of infrastructure around it - a camp, a small rail depot, walking paths, and a lot of detailing everywhere. My one star forestry ended up looking like a rural country lumberyard. But as it grows from a little country lumber mill into a major industry, things will get upgraded, especially in the camp. Primitive conditions will give way to much better ones, and eventually the camp will become a town the same way that that little industry will become a major one. Some old stuff will remain, like the lumberyard, and just become integrated into the industry. It tells a story, rather then just plopping a bunch of assets down and waiting for the stars to appear. And it will hopefully make for a great video!
I LOVE this! As a person from Australia, I'm accustomed to travelling through small towns where the main connection is a 'national road' - a two-lane, two-way road, and there's no intersection or bypass at all, you just drive straight through the town while reducing speed. It always struck me as odd that when you begin a new town in CS that you are essentially forced into building a major arterial road that is off the main highway. I will definitely be trying this out and/or modifying my own favourite maps to scale down the roads :)
I've played with this idea a few times myself, and it always feels like the game is fighting me all the way, in every function of the game it reflects it's name, "cities" and "skylines". There's a few youtubers out there who have done a good job at mixing cities and smaller towns, and those are definitely my favorites to watch because you can tell how much consideration for realism they have. Looking forward to see your approach!
It's an interesting take, a different way to look at the game. However, I find myself a little bit concerned as to how CS will actually handle it. I am particularly concerned with how the game is going to handle the problems of spawning incoming traffic and handling outgoing traffic. Will a busy enough development lead to the edges of the map basically failing? I do see that a player could upgrade the highway and road network within the 25 squares over time as needed, but it might fail pretty hard if the connections outside of those squares cannot handle he traffic. The other thing I thought of is that you may want to try using something like the Realistic population mod, so that you could better define the population density within the town. One of the issues of sprawl in CS is that commercial buildings are often quite large but have few actual workers. The same with homes, they often build small apartment block type things that only have 3 or 4 people living in them total, which makes little real sense. So perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider the implications of setting the buildings inside the developing area to be more realistic in population and whatnot. Overall, this is an interesting idea. A different type of starting square and access might be very interesting to see.
The possible solution to it is to pre-modify each growable building you would like to have in your town with RICO, setting up exactly how many households and workers you would like to have there. Even crazier solution (but fun in its own way) is to play a RICO-only city: you place every single building yourself using RICO mod. I played a couple of cities like this, it gets boring eventually, but for a while it's really something else: you have a full control and really have a feeling that you shape your community the way you'd like it to be.
i build my cities like this a lot and with proper traffic management and a good road system like Yumbl set up it should work fine. Also, dummy traffic can be reduced or disabled if it becomes an issue (but really, it doesn't)
I've always tried to do this idea using my second home town as a basis, under 20k population, built up around a paper mill as its only real industry, lots of farming and forests around. Every time I just end up with a massive ballooned city trying to support that, it never actually works out lol. Hopefully this series goes better!
would be really cool to do a train start, like two train lines that cross and one or two country roads with a mod that starts them at really low traffic until your city gets large. a train station on each forming the first main street, and extending outwards naturally. and then as the city gets larger, moving the tracks above or under ground so the city is less divided, and adding more rail for transit
This is great and right up my alley! I did a No Highway City Series and now I have a Trains Only City! I always thought that the blank map with just highways looked weird to an extent and that the first settlers into an area probably first arrived by a train or horse and carriage and not by highway. The overuse of highways leads to more traffic congestion in a sense. I believe building up from small to large is the right way to start but something i did learn from my No Highways is that sometimes the game mechanics can limit you and also over building too fast can also be more than the game can handle. Hopefully with my new city having a good infrastructure right from the start will help. Thanks will be watching!
Thank you for this video. I built a city of 400.000 and enjoyed dealing with problems as they came up but now I am totally burned out and ready to do a build like you are starting!
Here I am watching a video nerding out about intersections and playing city skylines when I hear "Lancaster, NH". As a person who grew up in the white mountains and worked in Lancaster/Jefferson... what a small world.
This is exactly the style of game play that I've always hoped pretty much all of the city builders would do. I seem to drop them because they move to fast from getting started to major metro area. Thank you for making this, I love the concept and the philosophy behind it. I look forward to seeing what you do with it in future streams.
Now do every single map please. Seriously: this is my number one pet peeve. It's why I was so sorely tempted to download City Planner Plays' new map despite not wanting to follow along with him on the exact same map. Having just a regular highway road rather than a giant interstate is so much better for starting a city.
The almost seemingly mandatory highway interchange has always bothered me in C:S. It's like staring at a blank canvas with a huge Bob Ross style mountain already on the canvas. It is a great start in the sense that it has a connection to something familiar--but it limits everything (especially if the player is starting with the default 70k). Anyway, thanks for the video--another great one.
This was the first time I’ve watched one of your videos, and I swear, you turned around with the wizard hat at the beginning, I had my hand on the scroller to skip past what I thought was another RAIDS shadow legends ad lmao. Awesome content
Yes please! I am excited to give this map a try! Love the idea of creating a story/history! I'm thinking about giving this a go, and posting the results over time for you!
This is something I’ve always disliked with skylines. You did this so perfectly! Please make more maps like this and maybe you can have a map pack for a new era of cities skylines. It’s nice when a city starts with this and can be a multi year project that Grow’s from small town to metropolis! This is my favorite video of yours
I love this idea, and I tried to create my own version! I grew up in Ripon, Wisconsin (pop 7K at the time). Our main street is the convergence of state highways 23 and 44. The city's centerpiece is a Mill Pond (common in Wisconsin towns), but I found that CS's terrain mesh resolution is too low to create a realistically-sized Mill Pond, or the creek that feeds it (womp womp). Having a rail connection that goes through the center of the starting tile was also key for me. The little town of Ripon (est. 1849) got its railroad just 5 years after rail mania hit Wisconsin in 1851, and while the original network is significantly diminished, Ripon's railroads are still utilized for freight traffic to and from a factory depot that would fall within the range of a CS starting tile (less than 800 meters from the city center), as well as a grain depot at 1.5km from the city center (adjacent to the starting tile). My map tried to simulate an 1850s start. The roads through the region are dirt, and I've included period-specific train depots for freight and passengers, as well as a wind-mill (which produces small amounts of electricity, water, and sewage capacity), to approximate the conditions around the town's founding. Of course, there was no electricity or sewage, but it was necessary to satisfy the needs of the depots. Ultimately I was unhappy with my creation because I couldn't recreate the Mill Pond, and I wasn't able to scrape together enough of the right custom assets to properly progress from the 1850s to the present day. I like the way you've done this: creating rural infrastructure without the complication of the time element that I was going for.
I am always puzzled by the fact that you unlock trains so late in the game, most western towns and cities of the world had rail even before paved roads. You even unlock metro way before trains, when in reality, there are more towns with rail, than cities with metro. If I recall correctly, both in Sim City 3000 and 4 you had rail almost right away. I would love to play in a map where you start with a road intersection and a small train station.
I love this and I love that you have the same view as myself (and obviously from looking at 5 days of comments so far) that the game needs to be more organic. Being from a small countryside town in the UK I also have done the exact same thing to maps and change the gigantic interchanges and highways severing maps in half. This video alone has resparked my desire to play C:S again!
i come from an even smaller town. its like a 4 farmers one bakery and 2 Restaurant town where people just live with no Industry and only bus connections. i really love the idea to start small with maybe multiple small towns that just grow into each other.
Thanks for taking the liberty to try something new, just following your heart. This is exactly how I play. Franky speaking, I cannot even understand what "complete" is supposed to be. Watching clips is my way of gathering ideas and you, Sir, are very inspiring. Thanks for constantly showing new aspects of this GOAT game.
I've enjoyed playing on a map of Bornholm, an island in the Baltic sea: It's got the real national roads already present, but only that. You can build small villages at the interceptions, build up towns around where the natural resources are. That and playing with the heights. If you want inspiration you can also look at the google maps of the place. Sadly I later found that the bridge coming into the island is bugged and doesn't quite let cars in properly and personally I like to have rail connections to the outside. It takes a really long time to unlock the rail to cargo ship building.
I absolutely love this. I tried building a walkable, realistic small town recently, but it wound up like most of my other cities, just with better transit and traffic. One thing that could add to the small town feel of your map would be to unlock tiles much more quickly or all at once. CS cities are forced by the weird vehicle logic and restricted tiles to develop as an oasis of development in an ocean of nothing. I think if you could develop a lot of little villages here and there, each a few km apart on these nice roads, they would grow and merge together to form an organic shape, like you said. I think I'll try this map, and I'll also avoid using any high density housing districts. Instead, I'd focus on low density multi- and single family housing, with an emphasis on small apartment assets and missing middle housing. I live in a city of almost 100k and we have nothing approaching the skyscrapers CS puts in high density zoning, even without realistic population mods. I'd love nothing more than a Cities Skylines 2 where you start in the 40's or 50's and build a city over decades, with a real sense of change from small roots. Really looking forward to this map!
it's great to watch people that likes to create cities like I do. I never considered to create a RUclips channel, but I decided to o it whenever CS2 release to share my creations too. Channels like this are a great inspiration. In my case, I do something similar to this, because I never liked the idea of starting a city directly from a big highway connection. What I use to do it's independently the inicial tile, but to create a 2 way single lane road to the corner of the map. and I start to build several small towns and once each start to grow, in some moment they join together in a single city. and the big downtown will be the central tile.
So i downloaded you map and it was so much nicer starting on it and didnt feel like i was forced to use the highway connection that usually are there, nice job, make more.
What you're describing is exactly the way I play the game. I've used the Building Themes mod to help create era specific themes, which update over time. It's a nice way to give the game a feeling of history. Using the 80 Tiles mod, I'll even rip out all of the highways and rail and put them in only as necessary, starting with dirt roads and working up to whatever is needed by the individual towns (I build multiple towns / cities per map).
Yes, this map great for small cities. The start tile is where you could build a city like I've seen in North Carolina where the railroad goes through the "downtown" area. I'll use Fayetteville, NC as an example (I was stationed there in the mid 90s) and the CSX came right through town area. If you have a lot of the older American style downtown buildings, this would be a GREAT map for this! A lot of smaller, or similar sized communities around it, with factories, distribution centers, minor industrial areas for employment and to attract outside import and export commerce. Edit: July 28th I started a small city on this map. I'm using achievements unlocked and 81 tiles. I started in the start square and I'm centering the town main road and railroad crossing. I've set Main St as the main road and I've put one way streets along the tracks. I'm centering the middle of town on a small train station with tracks between two one way streets. I'm using a grid for the roads in the city, but the highway/ main street is at a weird curvature, so I'm doing my best. I'm trying to keep to two lane roads as much as possible, but I'm finding a few of the roads can't handle the traffic flow. The two lane National Highway can't handle the traffic of a six lane highway. I love the BIG Roads so I've converted a lot of the roads over, especially to the two lane rural highway. I've had to upgrade a could to multi lane roads and now to an interstate highway. My traffic was down to 70% and ALL the Red was on that one road around the starting tile.
Great video Yumbl! Reshaping the approach is easily my favorite aspect of your content. A map founded on this sort of philosophy is what many people, including myself, have been looking for for a long time. It feels much more natural and comparable to real cities than the game typically starts you with. Thanks for the video!
Thank you so much for the new map. This is exactly what I have been missing and gives me another reason to spend hundreds of ours on a new city. I have been wanting something that I could spend extra time downloading assets and using the 100s of roads I have downloaded instead of just jamming in 4 to 6 lanes. Can't wait to find time to build on this.
This is why I always use the 81 tile start. It makes more sense. I create one main road from the highway to a coastline or area suitable for a city center and start there, and eventually build my way up to the freeway. By then I have an organic-developed downtown that naturally forms
Looking forward to see how the city grows, I really like the idea of a simpler road system start could even leverage the starting rail as a way to limit raod traffic from out of town a bit.
One thing I've done is start new small towns as I opened up new tiles for purchase. Grow slow and expand them towards each other over time and taking advantage of the natural resources nearby as a basis for the town's founding. I've found it kinda simulates that over time growth, expansion and development of the decades.
Thanks for this, I really appreciate this way of thinking. It reminds me of the way I play. On new maps, the first thing I usually do is unlock all tiles and replace the highways with a 4 lane national road from edge to edge without any junctions or interchanges and the just organically branch out from there.
I do this quite often with maps as I found it made my cities really organic. Outside connections mod and wipe all networks. Then build game trails with dirt roads that conform to the topography and go from there. If you can get past the fact that there are big rigs on your 1800's game trails for a while it's fun.
Thank you YUMBL 🙏 I also tried doing this type of thing, where I took a small highway and made it go for a bit, until I began my town, just to make it more realistic :)
This is 100% what I've been looking for!! Now, I wish we had a SimCity 2000 style building through history so I can naturally have medieval buildings and streets that will form an old city center as time moves on.
It's about time I hear about someone from NH outside of NH, I spent part of my time there in a town so small that the folks in the surrounding towns never heard of it, despite sharing a school district!
I’m also from a small New England town, and it does make me sad that Cities doesn’t focus on creating builds like these, because I can’t easily make something that I truly want to make. Glad you’re doing this though, reminds me of home!
On my last map I played, I started off with a small town area and grew it out and instead of adding to that town, bought a few tiles along one of the roads and started again, slowly building between the two and enjoyed that style of building rather than going as big as I can in a small area. I hit a mental block with what I wanted after about the fourth town just because it got to the point managing several places was starting to strain. So I started another map and concentrated more on a smaller area and I've hit that block much sooner with less enjoyment during the process on my current map. Definitely will look for this map, hoping it's still up on steam, that's for sure. I grew up in a small town in MI and it saddened me that C:S focuses so heavily on building a city instead of starting with a town and expanding, so I decided to play it differently and let things grow as naturally as I felt they would. Thank you for inspiring these feelings and bringing a smile to my face, I look forward to checking out the map!
I wish more than 1% of map makers actually made the maps use small roads and undeveloped infrastructure when making the maps so that we don't have to be set to the highway networks they use and also allow players to develop their own road systems, this is so good
FINALLY THE WIZARD HAT, I honestly thought that's how you actually looked until I saw these new videos with the face reveal narratives beforehand. Really loving the new content these days. :) I've always taken issue with how cities start with the highway interchange and see players ask "what is the best city entrance" when in reality, cities just kind of are integrated with the surrounding landscapes and there is no one way in or out. I like that you're addressing this from a realism standpoint.
I really love this map. It reminds me alot of eastern european road systems, where a roundabout on a highway is common, and that interchanges are only made for the trafic they were born with. This should be a new standard for all maps!
One thing to note. In vanilla cities skyline you might not be able to upgrade the highway network going to your city. Which is why the map need to be able to handle whatever traffic the city will possibly have. I remember having one city which traffic was slowed down by a lot of % (less than 60% traffic if i remember correctly) only to realize it was because of poor highway interchange on the other side of the map backing up very far. Stopped playing a bit later and started going into mods.
Man, love the idea. I always thought that 6-lane highway to the center is so unreal. At least here in Spain we don't have highways through the cities (only in large capitals), but national roads are outside cities and towns.
I grew up in rural PA and the farm roads were essentially dirt roads that were crudely paved. The had sharp turns and ran the perimeter of farms. So, in your test build, I'd suggest having a mix of dirt and paved roads. Next, create several small communities and try to organically grow them into one. I now live in Richmond, VA and one can tell where smaller communities merged. A road will change name or you may have an extreme 5 sided intersection. But I think most importantly from a realism point of view is that land developers actually buy and develop the land with the city proving zoning. So the city must compete with land developers on where to place a school, library, etc. Another option is to start your city with just a small train station, pretending it was the 1800's, some single family unit houses (older architecture style) with a few commercial buildings. This would simulate an historic start from which you could then expand from, much like some coal mining cities in West Virginia started. In every city, there has to be a reason for the city to exist. Either vast farmland, a company deciding to build a power plant that then requires workers and their associated houses or something else. Historically, a lot of cities started on rivers and trading by boats was the major commerce. I am not sure if the workshop has a small dock. Combing a timber industry with boat or rail and then adding the associated houses/retail might be an interesting realistic start.
I took this approach with building my current city. I won't say that I haven't overbuilt it per se, but the physical C:S highway infrastructure is extremely limited. For a thriving city of 150k with 80% traffic I only have one major arterial highway (I-55 in my case) and one edge-connecting highway with a spur. Those two are connected through the one and only system-level interchange, a cloverstack inspired by you, with two opposite sides being I-55, another being the edge-connecting highway, and the last side being the spur that continues that highway through until it converts from divided freeway to a 6 lane avenue as it approaches my cities core. Other than that I only have SIX service interchanges between the two: two parclos, two bypass-roundabouts, one dog-bone, and one diamond. All of which work flawlessly. Again, 150k city with 78-80% traffic. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to play the game this way!
This is how I play, start with a small farming village and build from there. My tips are: - Grow your city untill traffic becomes a problem, THEN fix it. This makes for more creative solutions than a pre-planned super-solution. - Change zones and density, but keep road layouts mostly intact. - Don't buldoze your village in order to create a new road network through the center. - Solve traffic problems by adding transit. - Use the system of arterial, collector and local roads. - As you keep playing turn arterials into collectors and collectors into local roads by removing road segments. If a road becomes too busy, downgrade it by removing acces. - Add new arterials outside your city borders, upgrade your small roundabouts if they are still outside the city borders. - As your city grows, you HAVE to transition from cars to transit if you don't want to buldoze neighbourhoods. All of these tips require you to analyse and understand all mobility within your city, instead of just fixing 'red' roads. It's a very fun approach, more puzzle-like, but can lead to very livable and walkable cities. Your no-a-stroad example is a good reference point. If your hometown did increase in population, that street would become busier and busier and you'll be tempted to add lanes and eventually end up with a stroad or you buldoze the shops and turn it into a highway. So what would you do if you wanted to preserve your main street shopping experience?
I think to really make it work, you need to unlock all the tiles at the start. That way you can build out the farmland nearby early, you can build several small towns across the map instead of making the start town too big at first, you can build out the industrial base more realistically, and then connect it all with proper transit. Each little town can be specialized, you have the mining towns, farm towns, lumber towns, oil towns, the manufacturing hubs, the distribution ports, the suburbs, the metro area, so on and so forth.
thanks so much for this map. i've played hundreds of hours of cities, but no map has clicked quite like this one. it's the first time i've managed to reach megalopolis.
This is why I built a map with the historic roads of my hometown and started to grow from a small town there to a big city (currently at 120k people over 1 city, 15 towns around; IRL is 35k)
I tried doing similar things many times, but I wasn't as good as you at it. 1. I made a city where I replaced all the highways with regular 4 lane roads, and built a city so that there's a city centre where 4 roads meet. It was horrible because of the traffic. I ended up concerting them back to highway, then replacing all the connections, then elevating the entire highway etc. In the end, I just had a couple of huge highways passing right through the city. 2. I tried building the city I was living in. Found out there's a limit to how many outside connections we can make. And had a really hard time figuring out how to join highways without complicated interchanges. Because we had none of that in that city(real one). To this day, the entire city of 120km² still has one single overpass for vehicles. In the junction between one of the highways, and the ring road for the city. I gave up pretty quick after failing to make it realistic.
This is awesome! I’ve done a couple experiments like this converting vanilla maps as well. Being able to progress through time with the development of all route systems seems like a much more natural way to develop and play the game
When he was talking about Lancaster I knew exactly what he was talking about. I did part of my growing up in a small town called Reading in Michigan. Very very very tiny. Population 1,000ish. If you look at it on google maps, you can see that some major county roads intersect and run through town. I actually created Reading one time in Cities Skylines. It took me 3 days to get everything as spot on as I could without using mods (I play PS4).
would be cool to do a series on the changing infrastructure as a small town turns in a city sometime. but keeping this a smallish city/town is a great idea. i look forward to the updates.
I've been trying to build like this for years. Start small, build settlements and let the city grow naturally (build small industrial towns). Use the natural land layout, tiny single lane roads following hedges and field lines. Small road junctions until the city really really needs large junctions, like with 100k pop. Also try to use the realistic population mod.
This is exactly what I’ve been wanting for so long! I’ve always found starting a city from massive highways systems hardly conducive to realistic city/town growth. Thanks Yumbl!!
And you practically start by connecting the highway to *drumroll* a dirt road because you have no money 😂
Yes, I agree. I've been trying to create more "small town American" cities for a while now. Exactly as he is talking about. Off interstates into state highways where small towns of a few thousand people pop up with farm land in between. Maybe a midsize city tossed in there. I don't know why I never thought about replacing the pre-placed interstates with smaller highways. I normally play with tiles locked and slowly progress unlocking tiles. But this would be fun with the entire map unlocked and maybe using one of the service optimizers to localize services to each town.
This. I absolutely hate the massive highway enterances in most maps. Most of the time I find myself staring at it, not knowing what to do with it.
@@Hannodb1961 Plus takes a lot of work to rip those massive structures out by yourself when the map never should have had those in the first place.
I always just go into it with a plan to cut back the highway especially with a map that has the highway rolling into the town for a long way before it hits an overpass
This is what City Planner Plays did with Clearwater County. He modified the map before starting to make just a single highway through the map he built on over time, adding highways as he added cities to the map.
Yep! It made for such an organic and realistic evolution of a piece of land with such a great story; something that I've never seen in Cities before.
He even named the forest and farming industries and residential areas that grew from there after the families that supposedly started the company etc. It was a great series to watch.
@@steynthedork *is!! I love and look forward to my CWC sundays almost as much as my Verde beach Tuesdays!
I recommend you Altengrand series from Akruas channel… Right now it’s re-building some part of the city after WWII…
I think I caught a bit of that series but got scared off by all the mods. He uses a lot of mods, right? I haven't even touched them yet I'm still a Skylines newb :P
The same goes for a town's starting economy. In the game, we always have to build factories at the start of the game, when in reality, towns and villages grew around farming, fishing and forestry, later adding mining. and so on. Always a bit of an immersion-breaker for me.
I didn't remember that you needed the first milestone ""Worthy Village" to unlock that. It really doesn't make sense that you can build factories before you can build farms.
Maybe cities:skylines 2 could have different zones for "heavy industry" and "medium manufacturing", and the "heavy industry" unlocks after the lighter industry. Those two zone types would obviously produce different amounts of pollution. But they could then also be used to distinguish tree plantations from sawmills; food processing factories from farm plots and pastures; oil refineries from oil drilling sites, ... Or maybe that distinction can come from a third zone type, like in Sim City 4. Except that, as "agriculture" is an area specialization, in C:S2 it would be called something like "extracting zone" instead.
@@Pystro they could just follow what they've got for industry zones now: the "master building" determines what it will become.
@@edh9999 Good point. I never realized that there's actually no need for industry zone specializations and district specializations to be two separate things. If you overlap an industry zone and an industrially specialized district, you'll make them the same type in 99+% of the cases. They should probably be merged into one area type in C:S2.
Not to mention the fact that those factories are the most heavy industry imaginable. Would be nice if there was a 'light industry' option which features things like car dealerships, transport companies, logistics, construction, etc. More warehouses instead of fuming smolestacks. The kinds of industry you would see in a small town or even a bigger city in a service economy. I hate that the game basically forces you to build Birmingham or Manchester in the 1800's, as if the Industrial revolution is just beginning
metro before train is weird like that.
i feel like the mod Realistic Population 2 would work really well here. It essentially adjusts the demand for zoning and other needs to more realistically simulate a population. I currently play with it in my maximum effientcy industry area builds to give me more of a challenge lol. Love the video!
This is not Cities: Skyline! This is poetry! When it is best.
The most northern quarter of Sweden had no road network at all 1930.
The large Ore mines up there had just a single track railway to rely on.
What you present here is a nice challenge for the path finder
Thank U🤠🤠
Yes, they even had an ambulance train so people could be transported to hospital due to the lack of roads (and well, ambulance flights wasn't really a thing)
wow thats cool!
Does Sweden also not have highways at all because it does not need any?
@@kleinerprinz99 🤣🤣🤣 Who decides whats needed? Apart from Russia Sweden is the talles/longest country in Europe. Almost 2500 km N-S. The 2:nd longest road, E4, is HW around 50%, E6 around 90%, etc. So i guess we have somewhere between 2500 and 3000 km HW.
Your excitement is contagious. Like so many, I get stuck in a "build the population so high that your computer strains to produce 10 FPS" mode. Little River is such a great idea! And C:S has developed in such a way that it's totally possible to create a town like Lancaster, and to enjoy its growth without concentrating on the population number as the end game. Thank you so much for this idea! I'll be watching Little River!
lancaster pa?
This is so fun. Whenever I start a city I destroy the highway connection and put a dirt road down, upgrading as I grow. It's cool to see that approach on RUclips instead of the highway start
I have the 81 tiles mod and start far away of the highway. Always next to a river or coast.
Dirt road small towns can have a very unique feel, when building small.
@@Gerrie_de_B. the only down side I've had is that more of your money is spend on road maintenance before the city gets going
@@PColumbus73 True, but mostly you'll survive that. I also try to sometimes makes smaller villages random located on the map on nice areas.
This. So much this. The hardest part for me when I want to find a nice map on the workshop are all the overbuilt highways for what's essentially just a field. And granted, yes they are created wonderfully and there's been a lot of time put into them, but that upfront investment means you also have to match it, meaning you kinda have to build a big butt of a metropolis.
I played on a really nice rural map from the UK countryside at one point, sadly it wasn't quite the setting I was going for. However, it gave me the chance to give some history and leftovers to my road system, it was so hecking great!
One thing I really do recommend is finding historical satellite imagery of the area you wanna imitate, then stepping back and forward in time, seeing what small changes get made and trying to figure out why. Was there too much traffic? Did the zoning change? Was it diverted to get closer to a highway?
The tiny pockets of roads that used to connect are also great places to add in bike infrastructure :3
I one time started a "city" in City Skylines, where instead of making a full big metropolitan area, I started with a series of small towns in different areas on the map. Then as I grew them up, I started connecting more roads together. They also started to expand further out and to touch each other. I never got the map to a one big city, but I wanted to capture the essence of many small towns growing into each other.
Complications of the technique:
1.) You have to pay closer attention to your usages (electricity, water, etc.). One small town may need more power, but your power grid will look like it's producing fine.
2.) You have to budget better because all the small towns share one central band account.
3.) You may need to extend some roads further than you want to. To do this, do small roads to be upgraded later (it adds to the realism).
4.) You need to use something like 89 tiles and unlock everything for free, because each town will be developing simultaneously, but also apart from one another.
Thanks, this is exactly what I'm looking for. I would love to see more modified maps like this. I like building small towns and get bored and/or overwhelmed when they get too big. I would also like to see maps that are conducive to building multiple small towns that are self-contained but connected. P.S. Lancaster looks awesome. Yay for Main Streets!
You hit the nail on the head with this one. I have been wanting to see this for a long time now and I'm hoping you are able to contact the developer of the map. I know it's called "CITIES Skylines", but in my opinion, it just looks more realistic creating small towns and farms. Sometimes they grow and become big cities, but not always. I love this idea.
I havent had the urge to play Cities in quite some time now, but this map... the prospect of semi realistic town development? Sign me up. Time to fire up the ol' Cities again
Edit: I just noticed there's a shop near Lancaster called Paws-a-tive Training and I don't know whether I should be ashamed or giggling about that lol
I saw that too, when he was zoomed out a bit. It drew my eye to it almost immediately, and I was a little bit disappointed he didn't mention it, as he was "showing us around" his hometown. Seems like someone who described an intersection as (if memory serves...), "cute" and "adorable," would find "Paws-a-tive" irresistable."
Dude, you put your finger on something that have bothered me for years, but formulating it the way you did was so enlightening...
Thank you so much, can't wait to try out your map edit!
Have fun :)
That parclo! It's precious! 🥺
Now that you've pointed it out, it does feel like a huge flaw in the game's structure to have every map be so highway-dependent.
The last two builds I have worked on were based on resource and industry. I open up the map at the start with the 81 tiles option and have all building options available from the start. Then I look for a good place to build an industry. That area is where I actually build a city as it seems logical from a RW perspective. So I wind up with small(er) towns that all feed the main city I plan to create. I haven't taken the step of eliminating the pre-existing highway infrastructure in the manner you're introducing in this video but I think it is a Great idea!
On top of that, I'll use the mods Rebalanced Industries, Lifecycle Rebalance Revisited 1.6.4 and Realistic Population 2 2.0.4 that I have just started checking out. They're a very pronisong trio that have already changed my gameplay significantly. That will make for a completely different playthrough. It'll be like playing a new game where I am already very confortable with how it works and already have the achievements unlocked. It should be interesting.
I have a feeling that your video may be the catalyst for quite a few reworked maps that have a more basic starting transportation infrastructure. I'm a huge fan of the idea.
I've been looking at making a map akin to that. Your starting tile doesn't have a three lane highway just go straight to it, but rather you start along the single-carriageway road and build with that at the centre incrementally. A road typically goes from point to point, and then a town springs up along it. Rarely has it been the other way around
I don’t know how long you’ve been living in the DC area but it still amazes me to think back on the at grade rail crossing in Gainesville Va until 2012-2013. Like major highway at grade crossing.
I personally love overbuilding and creating large "racetracks" for people to commute across the city, but I also get the reason why you went this route. The small town charm, stories along the way, strive for realism, and a new way to play is always fun to watch.
I love this idea. A few months ago (before I stopped playing for a while), I started doing this with a map I found of Montreal. It had a really nonsensical starting road/train inlet, but the topography was wonderful and (trees aside) accurate. So I did something like this - I build two outer "big" highways, and then a whole bunch of 4-lane national roads to connect everything. Then at a few strategic places I added some 4-lane city streets to connect to a bunch of "towns", . I was inspired by City Planner Plays' Clearwater County map, and am quite proud of it. I ended up building out 3 of the little towns before getting a bit bored with the game (500h in just under 3 months will do that...) and stopping for about 2 months now. But your video is really inspiring me to try to play again on your map now, and go for that small-town feel and the detail. Love the channel Yumbl!
Thank you very much yumbl for the map, i did a "stress test" where i built an european city with 200K inhabitants and everything went smoothly (traffic sits at 79-85%) and it has become one of my favorite cities too lol
I totally agree with your idea and what you are saying. The towns I've lived in are in England, UK are near a motorway but they are at least a six minute journey out of town, to get to and connected by small roads or a dual carriageway. This idea is spot on.
I'm also from New Hampshire and I'd say a lot of these interchanges are way nicer than what we actually have 90% of the time, how about a 3-way stop 😅
Seriously, imagine the uproar if someone decided we needed an inverse turbochange or whatever in a rural area. Manch-Vegas says hi!
legit, i'm in Australia and there are 2 major highways that crisscross the state and the neighbourhood state (so single lane each way). Simple T intersection with a turning lane is all there is to connect 2 highways that span 1000km.
This is probably one of the most important csl video made in a long time. The importance of what you did here can not be overstated. I can't tell how many times I started up the game, spent half an hour staring at the 6 lane highway coming into my plot, and then leaving the game without a city. It is amazing how much those highways kills your inspiration.
Originally from Leominster, MA. I have been to and been through Lancaster, NH and it reminds me of the Leominster that I grew up in. Thanks for a trip down memory lane.
That's great. For a long time now I've been more focusing on quaint small rural towns scattered over the map than having one junk of a city.
When I start a new city, I really like starting simple. Often the go-to beginning for me is that the location starts as a rest stop by a highway, with some small shops, gas station, etc, and then later expands into an actual city. Sometimes I would leave small imperfections that are left over from the initial development of the area, just to feel more realistic.
My starts are very grid-ish, only after unlocking a couple of squares I develop a place where that suburb sprawled from.
Riverlands has been one of my favorite maps to play on. Love the road network you designed for that map. I may have to go back and do the same. I’ve always liked the idea of a bunch of smaller communities throughout the map as opposed to one huge city. As always your videos really give me food for thought. I always look at the road networks around me and think about the lessons you’ve taught on road hierarchy and it’s just interesting to see the design and thought (and lack of in some instances) that go into upgrading existing roads and highways. Unlike you, I grew up in a bigger city but have moved to a more rural part of Texas my town has 2 main highways that feed into it. A 2 lane highway and a 4 lane highway. Everywhere I look I see road hierarchy!! Thank you YUMBL, I always look forward to seeing your next videos.
Love this idea! I don't think it would be as daunting to beginners to start with a smaller road rather than a massive highway.
You should really check out Lee Hawkins' "Reddington" series on his RUclips channel (and he's got some early releases episodes on Patreon as well). He actually started with one of the DLC maps (I honestly can't remember which one ATM) and as part of the first and maybe second episodes completely removed the highway system and replaced it with dirt roads. Basically he started back in the 1800s and he's building up slowly overtime with a full backstory and everything.
I am definitely going to check out your Little River map though. I actually did something similar with one of the original maps, replacing the highway with a 6-lane national road and then built off of that instead of the highway.
Thank you Chris! 😊
Absolutely love this map idea. I was playing around in the map editor a while ago after watching Clearwater County and thought I should make something similar; like a very "toned down" city start with only national roads. I got way too "in my own head" about it, thinking "who would want this?", but this video here just might have rekindled some motivation!
This is exactly how it is in my country El Salvador, just regular “Carreteras” with roundabouts and most interchanges aren’t enormous, amazing video!!
YES!!! I'd love a series of "starting" maps, that actually feel like "starting!!!
This makes soo much sense! The town I was born is called Breda..., and it is named after a ford in the river Aa > Brede Aa (which means wide Aa), which became Breda. It all stared with a sand path to the widest and lowest crossing! No highway! :D
I’m so glad that someone finally addressed this. I’m from a similar town as yours in the south where I have to drive almost 2 hours to connect to a major highway (95). I love the idea.
I really feel that small town vibe, my city is just big enough to be labeled as such and it's impossible to organically grow a city like that in vanilla, especially because I'm in Europe!
Started on this map yesterday, love how it plays. I've done simaler using the map editor mode but only ended up with a basic map so to play this way on a pre made map really makes a difference. Thanks mate.
One of the things I've been trying to find for Cities Skylines is a "homestead residential zone". A very low density residential that doesn't need electricity or water from "the grid". That way you can just build service roads that lead to nice views where people would build at first, then organically grow housing off the already cleared path.
Another thing I've always wanted was mixed zoning. Residential buildings that stack onto commercial or industrial to give small towns better use of thier space. Building up the use of roads already there before building more and expanding.
I think having both of these would make building a small town more organic.
I'm actually doing a small version of this in Storm City, in building up my forestry industry. Instead of racing it up from one to five stars, I built out a ton of infrastructure around it - a camp, a small rail depot, walking paths, and a lot of detailing everywhere. My one star forestry ended up looking like a rural country lumberyard.
But as it grows from a little country lumber mill into a major industry, things will get upgraded, especially in the camp. Primitive conditions will give way to much better ones, and eventually the camp will become a town the same way that that little industry will become a major one. Some old stuff will remain, like the lumberyard, and just become integrated into the industry.
It tells a story, rather then just plopping a bunch of assets down and waiting for the stars to appear. And it will hopefully make for a great video!
I LOVE this! As a person from Australia, I'm accustomed to travelling through small towns where the main connection is a 'national road' - a two-lane, two-way road, and there's no intersection or bypass at all, you just drive straight through the town while reducing speed. It always struck me as odd that when you begin a new town in CS that you are essentially forced into building a major arterial road that is off the main highway. I will definitely be trying this out and/or modifying my own favourite maps to scale down the roads :)
I've played with this idea a few times myself, and it always feels like the game is fighting me all the way, in every function of the game it reflects it's name, "cities" and "skylines". There's a few youtubers out there who have done a good job at mixing cities and smaller towns, and those are definitely my favorites to watch because you can tell how much consideration for realism they have. Looking forward to see your approach!
It's an interesting take, a different way to look at the game. However, I find myself a little bit concerned as to how CS will actually handle it. I am particularly concerned with how the game is going to handle the problems of spawning incoming traffic and handling outgoing traffic. Will a busy enough development lead to the edges of the map basically failing? I do see that a player could upgrade the highway and road network within the 25 squares over time as needed, but it might fail pretty hard if the connections outside of those squares cannot handle he traffic.
The other thing I thought of is that you may want to try using something like the Realistic population mod, so that you could better define the population density within the town. One of the issues of sprawl in CS is that commercial buildings are often quite large but have few actual workers. The same with homes, they often build small apartment block type things that only have 3 or 4 people living in them total, which makes little real sense. So perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider the implications of setting the buildings inside the developing area to be more realistic in population and whatnot.
Overall, this is an interesting idea. A different type of starting square and access might be very interesting to see.
The possible solution to it is to pre-modify each growable building you would like to have in your town with RICO, setting up exactly how many households and workers you would like to have there. Even crazier solution (but fun in its own way) is to play a RICO-only city: you place every single building yourself using RICO mod. I played a couple of cities like this, it gets boring eventually, but for a while it's really something else: you have a full control and really have a feeling that you shape your community the way you'd like it to be.
i build my cities like this a lot and with proper traffic management and a good road system like Yumbl set up it should work fine. Also, dummy traffic can be reduced or disabled if it becomes an issue (but really, it doesn't)
Also, if things get really bad, you can always use 81 Tiles...
I've always tried to do this idea using my second home town as a basis, under 20k population, built up around a paper mill as its only real industry, lots of farming and forests around. Every time I just end up with a massive ballooned city trying to support that, it never actually works out lol.
Hopefully this series goes better!
would be really cool to do a train start, like two train lines that cross and one or two country roads with a mod that starts them at really low traffic until your city gets large. a train station on each forming the first main street, and extending outwards naturally. and then as the city gets larger, moving the tracks above or under ground so the city is less divided, and adding more rail for transit
This is great and right up my alley! I did a No Highway City Series and now I have a Trains Only City! I always thought that the blank map with just highways looked weird to an extent and that the first settlers into an area probably first arrived by a train or horse and carriage and not by highway. The overuse of highways leads to more traffic congestion in a sense. I believe building up from small to large is the right way to start but something i did learn from my No Highways is that sometimes the game mechanics can limit you and also over building too fast can also be more than the game can handle. Hopefully with my new city having a good infrastructure right from the start will help. Thanks will be watching!
Thank you for this video. I built a city of 400.000 and enjoyed dealing with problems as they came up but now I am totally burned out and ready to do a build like you are starting!
Here I am watching a video nerding out about intersections and playing city skylines when I hear "Lancaster, NH". As a person who grew up in the white mountains and worked in Lancaster/Jefferson... what a small world.
This is exactly the style of game play that I've always hoped pretty much all of the city builders would do. I seem to drop them because they move to fast from getting started to major metro area. Thank you for making this, I love the concept and the philosophy behind it. I look forward to seeing what you do with it in future streams.
Now do every single map please. Seriously: this is my number one pet peeve. It's why I was so sorely tempted to download City Planner Plays' new map despite not wanting to follow along with him on the exact same map. Having just a regular highway road rather than a giant interstate is so much better for starting a city.
The almost seemingly mandatory highway interchange has always bothered me in C:S. It's like staring at a blank canvas with a huge Bob Ross style mountain already on the canvas. It is a great start in the sense that it has a connection to something familiar--but it limits everything (especially if the player is starting with the default 70k). Anyway, thanks for the video--another great one.
This was the first time I’ve watched one of your videos, and I swear, you turned around with the wizard hat at the beginning, I had my hand on the scroller to skip past what I thought was another RAIDS shadow legends ad lmao. Awesome content
Yes please! I am excited to give this map a try! Love the idea of creating a story/history! I'm thinking about giving this a go, and posting the results over time for you!
This is something I’ve always disliked with skylines. You did this so perfectly! Please make more maps like this and maybe you can have a map pack for a new era of cities skylines. It’s nice when a city starts with this and can be a multi year project that Grow’s from small town to metropolis! This is my favorite video of yours
I love this idea, and I tried to create my own version! I grew up in Ripon, Wisconsin (pop 7K at the time). Our main street is the convergence of state highways 23 and 44. The city's centerpiece is a Mill Pond (common in Wisconsin towns), but I found that CS's terrain mesh resolution is too low to create a realistically-sized Mill Pond, or the creek that feeds it (womp womp). Having a rail connection that goes through the center of the starting tile was also key for me. The little town of Ripon (est. 1849) got its railroad just 5 years after rail mania hit Wisconsin in 1851, and while the original network is significantly diminished, Ripon's railroads are still utilized for freight traffic to and from a factory depot that would fall within the range of a CS starting tile (less than 800 meters from the city center), as well as a grain depot at 1.5km from the city center (adjacent to the starting tile).
My map tried to simulate an 1850s start. The roads through the region are dirt, and I've included period-specific train depots for freight and passengers, as well as a wind-mill (which produces small amounts of electricity, water, and sewage capacity), to approximate the conditions around the town's founding. Of course, there was no electricity or sewage, but it was necessary to satisfy the needs of the depots.
Ultimately I was unhappy with my creation because I couldn't recreate the Mill Pond, and I wasn't able to scrape together enough of the right custom assets to properly progress from the 1850s to the present day. I like the way you've done this: creating rural infrastructure without the complication of the time element that I was going for.
this is great, nice to see a map with smaller roads as a start point as most would be IRL
I am always puzzled by the fact that you unlock trains so late in the game, most western towns and cities of the world had rail even before paved roads. You even unlock metro way before trains, when in reality, there are more towns with rail, than cities with metro.
If I recall correctly, both in Sim City 3000 and 4 you had rail almost right away.
I would love to play in a map where you start with a road intersection and a small train station.
I love this and I love that you have the same view as myself (and obviously from looking at 5 days of comments so far) that the game needs to be more organic. Being from a small countryside town in the UK I also have done the exact same thing to maps and change the gigantic interchanges and highways severing maps in half. This video alone has resparked my desire to play C:S again!
i come from an even smaller town. its like a 4 farmers one bakery and 2 Restaurant town where people just live with no Industry and only bus connections. i really love the idea to start small with maybe multiple small towns that just grow into each other.
Thanks for taking the liberty to try something new, just following your heart. This is exactly how I play.
Franky speaking, I cannot even understand what "complete" is supposed to be.
Watching clips is my way of gathering ideas and you, Sir, are very inspiring. Thanks for constantly showing new aspects of this GOAT game.
Your excitement about this map and about Lancaster somewhat feel so emotional
This is exactly what i needed for my european old town start. Thank you Yumbl!!
I've enjoyed playing on a map of Bornholm, an island in the Baltic sea: It's got the real national roads already present, but only that. You can build small villages at the interceptions, build up towns around where the natural resources are. That and playing with the heights. If you want inspiration you can also look at the google maps of the place.
Sadly I later found that the bridge coming into the island is bugged and doesn't quite let cars in properly and personally I like to have rail connections to the outside. It takes a really long time to unlock the rail to cargo ship building.
I absolutely love this. I tried building a walkable, realistic small town recently, but it wound up like most of my other cities, just with better transit and traffic. One thing that could add to the small town feel of your map would be to unlock tiles much more quickly or all at once. CS cities are forced by the weird vehicle logic and restricted tiles to develop as an oasis of development in an ocean of nothing. I think if you could develop a lot of little villages here and there, each a few km apart on these nice roads, they would grow and merge together to form an organic shape, like you said. I think I'll try this map, and I'll also avoid using any high density housing districts. Instead, I'd focus on low density multi- and single family housing, with an emphasis on small apartment assets and missing middle housing. I live in a city of almost 100k and we have nothing approaching the skyscrapers CS puts in high density zoning, even without realistic population mods. I'd love nothing more than a Cities Skylines 2 where you start in the 40's or 50's and build a city over decades, with a real sense of change from small roots. Really looking forward to this map!
it's great to watch people that likes to create cities like I do. I never considered to create a RUclips channel, but I decided to o it whenever CS2 release to share my creations too. Channels like this are a great inspiration. In my case, I do something similar to this, because I never liked the idea of starting a city directly from a big highway connection. What I use to do it's independently the inicial tile, but to create a 2 way single lane road to the corner of the map. and I start to build several small towns and once each start to grow, in some moment they join together in a single city. and the big downtown will be the central tile.
So i downloaded you map and it was so much nicer starting on it and didnt feel like i was forced to use the highway connection that usually are there, nice job, make more.
What you're describing is exactly the way I play the game. I've used the Building Themes mod to help create era specific themes, which update over time. It's a nice way to give the game a feeling of history. Using the 80 Tiles mod, I'll even rip out all of the highways and rail and put them in only as necessary, starting with dirt roads and working up to whatever is needed by the individual towns (I build multiple towns / cities per map).
Yes, this map great for small cities. The start tile is where you could build a city like I've seen in North Carolina where the railroad goes through the "downtown" area. I'll use Fayetteville, NC as an example (I was stationed there in the mid 90s) and the CSX came right through town area. If you have a lot of the older American style downtown buildings, this would be a GREAT map for this! A lot of smaller, or similar sized communities around it, with factories, distribution centers, minor industrial areas for employment and to attract outside import and export commerce.
Edit: July 28th
I started a small city on this map. I'm using achievements unlocked and 81 tiles. I started in the start square and I'm centering the town main road and railroad crossing. I've set Main St as the main road and I've put one way streets along the tracks. I'm centering the middle of town on a small train station with tracks between two one way streets. I'm using a grid for the roads in the city, but the highway/ main street is at a weird curvature, so I'm doing my best. I'm trying to keep to two lane roads as much as possible, but I'm finding a few of the roads can't handle the traffic flow. The two lane National Highway can't handle the traffic of a six lane highway. I love the BIG Roads so I've converted a lot of the roads over, especially to the two lane rural highway. I've had to upgrade a could to multi lane roads and now to an interstate highway. My traffic was down to 70% and ALL the Red was on that one road around the starting tile.
Great video Yumbl! Reshaping the approach is easily my favorite aspect of your content. A map founded on this sort of philosophy is what many people, including myself, have been looking for for a long time. It feels much more natural and comparable to real cities than the game typically starts you with. Thanks for the video!
Thank you so much for the new map. This is exactly what I have been missing and gives me another reason to spend hundreds of ours on a new city. I have been wanting something that I could spend extra time downloading assets and using the 100s of roads I have downloaded instead of just jamming in 4 to 6 lanes. Can't wait to find time to build on this.
This is why I always use the 81 tile start. It makes more sense. I create one main road from the highway to a coastline or area suitable for a city center and start there, and eventually build my way up to the freeway. By then I have an organic-developed downtown that naturally forms
Great work!
I usually play like that, downgrading all the roads and start slow.
Can't wait to see your city grow
Looking forward to see how the city grows, I really like the idea of a simpler road system start could even leverage the starting rail as a way to limit raod traffic from out of town a bit.
One thing I've done is start new small towns as I opened up new tiles for purchase. Grow slow and expand them towards each other over time and taking advantage of the natural resources nearby as a basis for the town's founding. I've found it kinda simulates that over time growth, expansion and development of the decades.
Thanks for this, I really appreciate this way of thinking. It reminds me of the way I play. On new maps, the first thing I usually do is unlock all tiles and replace the highways with a 4 lane national road from edge to edge without any junctions or interchanges and the just organically branch out from there.
I do this quite often with maps as I found it made my cities really organic. Outside connections mod and wipe all networks. Then build game trails with dirt roads that conform to the topography and go from there. If you can get past the fact that there are big rigs on your 1800's game trails for a while it's fun.
Thank you YUMBL 🙏 I also tried doing this type of thing, where I took a small highway and made it go for a bit, until I began my town, just to make it more realistic :)
This is 100% what I've been looking for!! Now, I wish we had a SimCity 2000 style building through history so I can naturally have medieval buildings and streets that will form an old city center as time moves on.
It's about time I hear about someone from NH outside of NH, I spent part of my time there in a town so small that the folks in the surrounding towns never heard of it, despite sharing a school district!
I’m also from a small New England town, and it does make me sad that Cities doesn’t focus on creating builds like these, because I can’t easily make something that I truly want to make. Glad you’re doing this though, reminds me of home!
On my last map I played, I started off with a small town area and grew it out and instead of adding to that town, bought a few tiles along one of the roads and started again, slowly building between the two and enjoyed that style of building rather than going as big as I can in a small area. I hit a mental block with what I wanted after about the fourth town just because it got to the point managing several places was starting to strain. So I started another map and concentrated more on a smaller area and I've hit that block much sooner with less enjoyment during the process on my current map. Definitely will look for this map, hoping it's still up on steam, that's for sure. I grew up in a small town in MI and it saddened me that C:S focuses so heavily on building a city instead of starting with a town and expanding, so I decided to play it differently and let things grow as naturally as I felt they would. Thank you for inspiring these feelings and bringing a smile to my face, I look forward to checking out the map!
Its linked in the description. Enjoy!
I wish more than 1% of map makers actually made the maps use small roads and undeveloped infrastructure when making the maps so that we don't have to be set to the highway networks they use and also allow players to develop their own road systems, this is so good
FINALLY THE WIZARD HAT, I honestly thought that's how you actually looked until I saw these new videos with the face reveal narratives beforehand. Really loving the new content these days. :) I've always taken issue with how cities start with the highway interchange and see players ask "what is the best city entrance" when in reality, cities just kind of are integrated with the surrounding landscapes and there is no one way in or out. I like that you're addressing this from a realism standpoint.
i love that kind of start and philosophy. I try to do that urbanistic approach every time i play. I preffer an humble infraestructure and grown.
I really love this map. It reminds me alot of eastern european road systems, where a roundabout on a highway is common, and that interchanges are only made for the trafic they were born with. This should be a new standard for all maps!
Thank you so much! What an amazing idea and inspiration! I instantly downloaded the map from the workshop, gonna start a new city on it RIGHT NOW!
One thing to note. In vanilla cities skyline you might not be able to upgrade the highway network going to your city. Which is why the map need to be able to handle whatever traffic the city will possibly have.
I remember having one city which traffic was slowed down by a lot of % (less than 60% traffic if i remember correctly) only to realize it was because of poor highway interchange on the other side of the map backing up very far. Stopped playing a bit later and started going into mods.
Man, love the idea. I always thought that 6-lane highway to the center is so unreal. At least here in Spain we don't have highways through the cities (only in large capitals), but national roads are outside cities and towns.
I'm stunned the game doesn't start like this. Also, "Hi!" from Manchester, NH!
I grew up in rural PA and the farm roads were essentially dirt roads that were crudely paved. The had sharp turns and ran the perimeter of farms. So, in your test build, I'd suggest having a mix of dirt and paved roads. Next, create several small communities and try to organically grow them into one. I now live in Richmond, VA and one can tell where smaller communities merged. A road will change name or you may have an extreme 5 sided intersection. But I think most importantly from a realism point of view is that land developers actually buy and develop the land with the city proving zoning. So the city must compete with land developers on where to place a school, library, etc.
Another option is to start your city with just a small train station, pretending it was the 1800's, some single family unit houses (older architecture style) with a few commercial buildings. This would simulate an historic start from which you could then expand from, much like some coal mining cities in West Virginia started.
In every city, there has to be a reason for the city to exist. Either vast farmland, a company deciding to build a power plant that then requires workers and their associated houses or something else. Historically, a lot of cities started on rivers and trading by boats was the major commerce. I am not sure if the workshop has a small dock. Combing a timber industry with boat or rail and then adding the associated houses/retail might be an interesting realistic start.
Yo I’m so excited for this series can’t wait to see more episodes!
I took this approach with building my current city. I won't say that I haven't overbuilt it per se, but the physical C:S highway infrastructure is extremely limited. For a thriving city of 150k with 80% traffic I only have one major arterial highway (I-55 in my case) and one edge-connecting highway with a spur. Those two are connected through the one and only system-level interchange, a cloverstack inspired by you, with two opposite sides being I-55, another being the edge-connecting highway, and the last side being the spur that continues that highway through until it converts from divided freeway to a 6 lane avenue as it approaches my cities core. Other than that I only have SIX service interchanges between the two: two parclos, two bypass-roundabouts, one dog-bone, and one diamond. All of which work flawlessly.
Again, 150k city with 78-80% traffic. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to play the game this way!
This is how I play, start with a small farming village and build from there. My tips are:
- Grow your city untill traffic becomes a problem, THEN fix it. This makes for more creative solutions than a pre-planned super-solution.
- Change zones and density, but keep road layouts mostly intact.
- Don't buldoze your village in order to create a new road network through the center.
- Solve traffic problems by adding transit.
- Use the system of arterial, collector and local roads.
- As you keep playing turn arterials into collectors and collectors into local roads by removing road segments. If a road becomes too busy, downgrade it by removing acces.
- Add new arterials outside your city borders, upgrade your small roundabouts if they are still outside the city borders.
- As your city grows, you HAVE to transition from cars to transit if you don't want to buldoze neighbourhoods.
All of these tips require you to analyse and understand all mobility within your city, instead of just fixing 'red' roads. It's a very fun approach, more puzzle-like, but can lead to very livable and walkable cities.
Your no-a-stroad example is a good reference point. If your hometown did increase in population, that street would become busier and busier and you'll be tempted to add lanes and eventually end up with a stroad or you buldoze the shops and turn it into a highway. So what would you do if you wanted to preserve your main street shopping experience?
I think to really make it work, you need to unlock all the tiles at the start. That way you can build out the farmland nearby early, you can build several small towns across the map instead of making the start town too big at first, you can build out the industrial base more realistically, and then connect it all with proper transit. Each little town can be specialized, you have the mining towns, farm towns, lumber towns, oil towns, the manufacturing hubs, the distribution ports, the suburbs, the metro area, so on and so forth.
thanks so much for this map. i've played hundreds of hours of cities, but no map has clicked quite like this one. it's the first time i've managed to reach megalopolis.
I’m glad to hear it! Thank you for playing it :)
This is why I built a map with the historic roads of my hometown and started to grow from a small town there to a big city (currently at 120k people over 1 city, 15 towns around; IRL is 35k)
It's so daunting to be faced with a highway junction to build off. More maps need to be like this one - thank you!
I tried doing similar things many times, but I wasn't as good as you at it.
1. I made a city where I replaced all the highways with regular 4 lane roads, and built a city so that there's a city centre where 4 roads meet.
It was horrible because of the traffic.
I ended up concerting them back to highway, then replacing all the connections, then elevating the entire highway etc.
In the end, I just had a couple of huge highways passing right through the city.
2. I tried building the city I was living in. Found out there's a limit to how many outside connections we can make.
And had a really hard time figuring out how to join highways without complicated interchanges. Because we had none of that in that city(real one). To this day, the entire city of 120km² still has one single overpass for vehicles. In the junction between one of the highways, and the ring road for the city.
I gave up pretty quick after failing to make it realistic.
This is awesome! I’ve done a couple experiments like this converting vanilla maps as well. Being able to progress through time with the development of all route systems seems like a much more natural way to develop and play the game
When he was talking about Lancaster I knew exactly what he was talking about. I did part of my growing up in a small town called Reading in Michigan. Very very very tiny. Population 1,000ish. If you look at it on google maps, you can see that some major county roads intersect and run through town. I actually created Reading one time in Cities Skylines. It took me 3 days to get everything as spot on as I could without using mods (I play PS4).
would be cool to do a series on the changing infrastructure as a small town turns in a city sometime. but keeping this a smallish city/town is a great idea. i look forward to the updates.
I've been trying to build like this for years. Start small, build settlements and let the city grow naturally (build small industrial towns). Use the natural land layout, tiny single lane roads following hedges and field lines. Small road junctions until the city really really needs large junctions, like with 100k pop. Also try to use the realistic population mod.