Strategy games are normally geared towards PC due to the interface involving a mouse and keyboard. Real-time strategy and tower defense games are the mainstay with most types of strategy games, however, years ago there was an epic city-building simulation: Sim City. The original even released on the Super Nintendo at launch.
- Not only do elevated roads look great in large cities but they also offer a way to circumvent busy city centers to avoid traffic congestion. Elevated roads create pillars which need to be taken into account when building the roads since the pillars take space on the ground. Medium elevated road crossing over the main street in the city. Building elevated roads is straightforward. Just press the PGUP and PGDW keys to set the height. Also note that this particular city has left-hand traffic.
- Im trying to make an intersection with elevated roads, but i cant seem to figure how to elevate roads? Also, my town got wiped with mass death wave, i just started so its not like i have a massive town, its wierd, my health care was in good shape, then BOOM! Everyone dead and hospitals overflooded, why? I didnt had any garbage access problems, and i did had hospitals, and even a distaster.
Mar 25, 2015 - I saw some peoples cities with raised roads and lowered roads, but I see nowhere in game to do that unless I am missing something?
Fast-forward to modern day and the most recent Sim City was a critical failure. A publisher decided to jump on that failure with Cities: Skylines for PC. Selling over a million copies since its launch, Paradox has handed the keys over to developer Tantalus Media to bring it to consoles.
Known as Cities: Skylines – PlayStation 4 Edition, the port worked wonderfully and the controller interface is successful.The idea of a city-simulator sounds boring. Find some land, attract people with jobs and real estate, and manage money.
Sounds like something your parents would preach to you about. However, the act of doing this is incredibly addicting, and that holds true with this game. The way Skylines starts its cities off is pretty straight forward.
Just outside of the area limits is a highway that features two roads. Building roads off of these exit ramps will be how citizens get to the area. From here, players will choose different zones, either industrial, commercial or residential. Higher density areas unlock over time to allow better structures (such as high-rises). The zoning takes places roadside, so there are no block areas that need to be covered.
This can be cured with how the streets are presented.There are a ton of little things that are involved with starting a city. Players will need to add a power plant and either a water pump or water tower to supply areas with both.
Trash and sewage also need to be handled, so a landfill and sewage lines will need to be added. What happens when this isn’t done correctly involves negative feedback (besides the obvious of waterless homes with stopped up toilets). Too much negative feedback will cause people to leave the town. From here, players will keep citizens happy by adding schools, hospitals, and other normal stuff you see in towns. At this point, players will need to choose funding and balance this out. By this time, there will be demand for either more housing, commercial sites, or jobs.
This is indicated by the graph on the bottom right.New structures and areas are unlocked when achieving a certain population. Roads can be upgraded on the fly and structures can easily be destroyed for free. Everything will auto-populate in these marked off areas as long as there is access to them. You will even see places up close that mock real-life corporations (Denny’s for instance). Each location can be tagged to follow those citizen’s feelings.
There is a random twitter bar across the top of the screen that isn’t much useful. There’s bars and graphs to view what areas need what and how people are feeling so things can be rectified to keep them happy all while taxing them like crazy. The most important aspect of all of this is how easy it is to do. The entire interface is very user-friendly and extremely quick. As for the controller, the game does not use the touchpad of the DualShock 4, and it doesn’t need to. Rotating the map is linked to the right stick and searching linked to the left stick. Holding down triangle brings up the menu for looking at finances and other details.
There is no digging for anything, and hovering over a location will lock on to that small point. It really helps with how fast the game zooms in-and-out. Mapping out roads will automatically build bridges if it needs to, and players can easily raise or lower the road on the terrain.Thanks to newer technology, rendering a large city full of what Paradox hopes to a million unique citizens fulfilling daily routines is a lot more stable. Running on a PS4 Pro, there were no major slowdowns as players can view their cities from way above or at street level. The game is very colorful and includes smog over industrial areas, cars on the highway in the distance, and other small details that add some uniqueness to the town. Players will also unlock other connecting areas over time to help connect their towns to make their Meca-Burg. Landmarks also come with time, and everything looks great up close.
Not to mention, the cities offer a day-to-night transition so players can get a different view of their areas. It does not go along with the day as players can put the speed of days on a high setting, otherwise something like that could cause epilepsy. I did struggle with picking out locations at night and navigating, it seemed to be much easier during the day.
The sounds of the populated cities sound the best. While the music is fitting, it doesn’t stand up to soundtrack of older Sim City titles. There were times where no music was playing, so a bit more could have been done with the soundtrack.One noticeably thing missing as a fan of old Sim City titles is the ability to load cities. Players could load places like New York and London and manage something that was already built. Also, with content sharing like it is nowadays, it would be nice to see the option for players to share their cities, but the idea is to build a city from the ground up.
How To Elevate Roads In Cities Skylines Mac
Lastly, there are expansions and mod-created content on the PC version of the game, and this is missing on the console version.Closing Comments:Cities: Skylines – PlayStation 4 Edition brings an excellent city-simulator to consoles offering an amazing interface and excellent visuals. Everything is straightforward in terms of gameplay and the game feels like a modern take on the older and excellent versions of Sim City. While the console version may lack some of the content the PC version does, there is more than enough here to keep anyone busy.
Cities Skylines is out today and although many of you will have watched numerous videos of the gameplay over the past few days I’ve put together this guide which should help you get off to a good start when it arrives on your PC.Covered in this guide is everything from building placement/roads, zoning and zone density, utilities, industry, districts, transport, pollution and more. Read onThe StartWhen starting your city you need to find a balance between speed of zoning and cashflow. Go too slow and progression will be snail pace. Go too fast and the chances are road networks will end up a bit of a mess. Keep your cool and enjoy it.Use the game speed toggle to slow things down or even pause the game when you’re thinking about layouts.
Speed the game up only when you are happy that the city can function and there are no impending issues that need to be dealt with.Building Placement and RoadsWhen placing an important building such as a hospital, fire station or police station next to a single small two way road, remember that in the future you are likely to want to upgrade that road. You can’t upgrade a road if one of these types of structures are present. However, you can move the whole building for a fee. With that in mind, leave space next to or near the building so you can move it later prior to clicking the upgrade road button.
One method is as follows:. Upgrade the road section next to the building.
Move the building from next to the small single road. Upgrade the road where the building was.Moving a building any distance will cost the same amount no matter where you move it to on the map.Increase land value to boost happiness. Place parks and recreational buildings next to areas that need a boost. Again, check the sphere of influence of each of these buildings before placing them down.Cemeteries are vital city service to remove the dead. They do however fill up.
They can be emptied and bodies are moved to either another cemetery or a crematorium.Landfill sites will also become full. These can be emptied and waste moved to another fill site or to an incinerator.When emptying a landfill site or cemetery, it can take a long time so be careful where you place these. You may want to make use of the land they are on later for something else. They have to be completely emptied before you can remove them from their location.
You can alternatively move these buildings as above.Don’t forget you can elevate roads with PAGE-UP and PAGE-DOWN keys. This is really useful if you want to get traffic to the other side of highway without creating another junction which may have the potential to clog up with traffic.Be creative!
The freeform road tool is excellent. Sure a grid city is nice, but have some fun with the road network.Zoning and Zone DensityZoning is quite straightforward, select the zone type you want and paint the squares next to the road. Late in the game you can change zones to high density but you have de-zone selected zone first before applying the high density. You can’t simply apply a high density colour on top of a low density colour. De-zone it first.When you de-zone an area, all the buildings on the zone will deconstruct and be lost.
They will be replaced when a new zone type is applied.Water and ElectricityPay attention to your water pipe system. You want to supply water as cheaply as possible so cut down on the cost of laying pipes by checking their sphere of influence when placing.
Run pipe in parallel with roads and assume you will create more roads adjacently so run pipes between the two parallel pipes for maximum coverage of an area.Pylons are only used to transfer electricity over long distances or where buildings are not touching each other. You do not need to place pylons down to link up every building. As long as one building is powered, the buildings next to it and each other will also be powered.Hydro dams are expensive to build but they are also quite expensive to run. If you do build one, keep an eye on how much money it’s sucking away from the balance.
You can always turn it off from time to time if you have enough power from other sources.Wind farms are great for clean energy but make sure you place then in area where there’s strong winds. Check the wind information overlay before placing wind farms down so they are placed in an optimal location.Be very careful where you place dams. You can flood your city!Industrial and Commercial ZonesKeep taxes as low as possible which will keep residents, commercial and industrial zones happy. If you do increase taxes, keep an eye on happiness levels, especially on industry.Make sure industrial and commercial zones have enough workers. Keep an eye on the residential demand bar.Make sure industrial zones can be supplied with goods easily.
This is achieved by good transport access to those zones. This can make or break your cashflow.Excess goods manufactured in your city will be exported so make sure you’re industry is healthy to boost funds.Fertile land industries give off no pollution and can import the resources required to function if none are available on the map.Forestry industries utilse a renewable resource and give off a small amount of pollution.Oil industries provide high tax but are emit high pollution and are electricity hungry.Ore industries produce high ground pollution but less so than oil. They require more electricity than other industries.DistrictsDistricts can be viewed as subsections of zones. These specialise in a particular industry and can also have their own policies.
To get the most out of districts, place specific industry districts on top of a particular resource. This means that industries in this district can utilise the local natural resources.Apply specific district policies to these districts to make them more efficient. Remember though, policies cost money to keep running.PollutionWhen placing a sewage plant, make sure the output flows away from your water supply.
Place it downstream and check the arrows on the water to see which way it is flowing. Don’t poison the people!Noise pollution will affect residential zones so make sure inhabitants are not affected by this, keep them away from industrial areas.Reduce noise pollution by placing trees and parks, placing roads with trees and placing Highways with sound barriers.Wind farms also cause noise pollution and upset residents so keep them away from housing.Nasty toxic pollution doesn’t travel by air in Cities: Skylines which is one less thing to worry about. It is only transferred to surrounding areas via the groundTrafficGood traffic flow is essential so avoid four way junctions and traffic lights.Use roundabouts to keep traffic flowing and you can always tweak the standard templates by adding or removing junctions on a roundabout with the road tools. The Steam Workshop also includes some pre-made junctions if you’re looking for something a little more elaborate.Use one way streets when possible, it can stop traffic clogging. It’s not always easy to do this at the start but think about it later in the game by changing some of the roads.Connect your cities to roads that were already on the map when you started the game.
This can provide extra access and exit points to your city and improve traffic flow, especially into industrial zones where goods are imported an exported.TransportAs a city get bigger public transport will be required. If you place a train station, metro or bus station make sure you have set a start and end point for the route. This can be a little fiddly but persevere and make sure it’s connected up so a route is formed.For ferries and freight you need to make sure the water level next to the dock is high enough for a ship to dock. If the water level is too low no ships will turn up and the building will be a waste as far as I can tell.ControlsUse the WASD hotkeys to move around, PAGE-UP/ PAGE-DOWN for elevating roads, B for bulldozing.
It makes life to much easier and you can always tweak all the hotkeys via the game menu.Master the hotkeys!Mods and MapsIt’s a good idea to get the game basics down before experimenting with other people’s mods. Once you have mastered the game fundamentals try the mods to enhance the experience.A mod definitely worth your while is the which will open up more than the nine squares available as standard on each map.If Chirpy is getting annoying. Use to remove him from your game.Check the for updates and look for new maps, buildings and game enhancements.Don’t be scared to mess with mods.FinallyHave fun and enjoy the game. If you have any further tips you want to share, you can and I’ll make sure they come to everyone’s attention in future site updates.Update: with more tips.