• When City Planning in Cities Skylines creates a city with only one road [RTGame]
    17 replies, posted
https://youtu.be/-p5cgG8fB3o
I got City Skylines a few months ago and I've had so much fun with it but there is a skill curve. You get to certain point with your city when you realize that all your traffic is fucked and you have to tear the entire city of a 300,000 people in order for people to move an inch. I'd probably be a certified city planner by the time I get good enough at it.
for real though, how would a city with one road work?
It's simple, you just keep going. You'll get to your destination eventually. It's even better than the real world because no one has to know directions. If everyone drives at the speed limit you can just say "Come on down to The Burger Gorge, just 10 minutes down the road from the freeway." and everyone will be able to tell how far away they are from the Burger Gorge.
Yeah, it's a tough game to play in that aspect. If you don't enjoy the feeling of finally getting a large city going, then creating a new save and never going back to the old one, C:S might feel a little pointless to play. Even myself, who enjoys starting cities from the road infrastructure up, sometimes I have to take breaks because I know my city sucked and it's tough to muster the motivation to go through the whole process of starting a new one.
I love the game but my budget started to die when my city got to a certain size and I didn't know how to save it, so I did what I always do in that situation; told myself I'll fix it later and then never went back. I should go back.
I like making small communities and keeping them small. Individual streets and districts carefully named & maintained by the local sheriff's department. Then I get greedy and I start expanding haphazardly so I can earn more money to build giant skyscrapers and monuments, the city growing into a vast and complex web of terrible road-planning and strange neighborhoods, fires breaking out frequently even in places that are well-covered by the brigade, garbage disposal not doing it's job because the streets are backed up for so many blocks it becomes an impossible task to clear up effectively, crime & mortality on a constant rise because emergency services can never arrive on time - and so it keeps going, on and on, outwards, landmass by landmass, until I have no more space to fill, and my pockets are lined with cash from my low-tax-high-commercialism dystopian nightmare of a city. Then there it still is. My original, tiny little community. Pretty as ever, chugging along just fine.
The problem with Cities Skylines is that the traffic AI is retarded. What works in the real world might not work in Cities Skylines. For example I had a city with serious congestion problems in the downtown area so I did what engineers do in the real world, I built a bypass that goes around the city centre so those who don't need to get there can simply drive past. The AI simply ignored it and I had a deserted freeway surrounding a gridlocked city. The AI always, ALWAYS picks the shortest route, not the one that would actually make sense. You can ban heavy traffic but that only gets you so far.
Yep, while C:S is a great game and the best city builder this generation by far, I was really disappointed with how the traffic works, especially since I remember the developers sort of bragging about how intelligent it was before it was released. Which is a shame, because while you can obviously create efficient megacities if you learn how the game works, it involves really stupid 'solutions' that would never be applied in the real world
It's not the shortest route, it's the fastest route. The AI will pick a winding highway before they pick a straight dirt road if the speed on the highway gets them there sooner.
I don't know exactly how the AI is programmed, I can only go by what I'm seeing. The AI seems to ignore completely empty roads and fast bypasses with no lights and intersections in favor of bottlenecking the few roads that cut straight through the city. It's really frustrating. I've tried everything from elevated roads to tunnels and four lane highways and the AI only seems to use them if I force them by removing other connections.
Yeah, it's this mod here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=583429740 It helps improve traffic by a huge margin.
a good thing to be aware of when using this mod is that to actually utilize the features that improve traffic AI, you need to load up a city first, THEN go to settings, and enable stuff like dynamic lane changing and advanced AI
Not really true, they actively prioritize freeways over low level roads. I thought the traffic was retarded at first, but the more I learned about it and how much goes into the decisions the drivers make the more I got to appreciate it. If you have issues with cars not taking the freeway, the freeway probably doesn't lead where they want to go. No point getting on a freeway that you can only get off 5 miles past your desired destination.
I'll load up an old city and experiment this weekend. But, let's say you have identical road types, all leading to roughly the same destination with only small variations in travel distance. Then the AI will prioritize the route that is physically shorter, even if it's not the fastest. There could be another road going parallel to the other one, but because it's a little bit longer the cars will not use it. The game already tracks data on traffic density, if only they could program the traffic to favor roads with less traffic even if the actual distance is a little bit longer to spread the load on multiple roads. That's basically what I do in real life, I know it's a bad idea to take the main road during morning rush hour, so I drive a slightly longer route and get to my destination faster because that way I can avoid the traffic jams.
dude no https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/942831990291418461/F572BCD730507E08C0E4C0AD19FBFA9D9BC0E7FF/ why are you making me do this
The Traffic AI in Cities Skylines is easily the worst part of it because they will prioritize distance over time because the time it takes doesn't matter because a second is like 3 days or so. If this was a 1 to 1 simulation this would just be fucking stupid as any intelligent driver with experience inside a location would know to skip over that but because these are all new drivers everytime there's no learning the backroads. Additionally, they will take backroads even if the freeway is supposed to be the option to take. They operate like Google Maps and etc which actually have a tendency to cause traffic jams instead of alleviate them because they'll take roads often designed for not nearly the volume that these GPS systems create. A recent study and 1 to 1 simulation found that even at a population of only 15% or less, GPS compliant drivers will actually avoid a traffic jam and then cause several more as the backroads designed for local traffic get overburdened.
They do prioritize freeways no matter (traffic itself is a non-factor in their decision making) what so if you build your city like a real one (with districts made up of a low level grid and a freeway connecting those districts) you'll get perfectly normal behavior - cars going up on high level roads to go a large distance, then down to lower level roads as they get closer to their destination. https://imgur.com/a/WdJim If you have jams on low level roads it means there's no good freeway access, if there's jams on freeways it means there's not enough offramps to drop down to low level grid.
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