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Introduction to Policies, Park Maintenance and New Buildings
Hello again and welcome back to our Dev Diary. Have you ever wondered what would Cities: Skylines be without policies, city services and buildings? Coincidently those are also the topics of our Dev Diary of the Day.

Policies
So let's start with three new City Policies, which are a paid feature of upcoming Parklife DLC: Prefer Parks, Park Maintenance Boost and Boost Connections. These Policies can be accessed from the already familiar Policies panel. Prefer Parks Policy encourages your Tourists in the area to choose to visit parks more often than Unique Buildings. Boost Connections Policy on the other hand is perfect for all those huge Cities out there, since now your City can receive even more vehicles carrying tourists, increasing the number of visitors in the city! Wow!

Parklife also introduces all new paid feature Park Policies that are active only inside a Park Area. Park Policies are accessed from Park Info Panel and include both general Park Policies and Policies tied to a specific Park type (but don't worry, they still work in every park since you can mix-and-match your new buildings). These Policies change how parks work by allowing you to set extra rules to apply in the desired Park Area. The new Park Policies include for example Advertisement Campaign, which advertises the park throughout the city to have more visitors. Hint! Those with a keen eye can spot the advertisement billboards appear around the City! Animal Ethics Policy is tied to a specific Park type, since activating it makes Zoo animals receive extra care and activities to keep them happy and entertained which results in happier visitors. There's several new Park Policies to choose from, affecting everything from fireworks to garbage accumulation in order to give you the freedom to tailor your dream park!

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Don't they look happy?

Gameplay tips

Use Prefer Parks Policy to give your newly built Parks just that little extra nudge to get them to the next level. The good news? The Policy also affects your already existing parks! Draw in more tourists (and cash) with Boost Connections. Park Policies help boost your Park Areas just where you need them and allow you to have a complete control over your Parks. And when you finally manage to create that perfectPark you can mark it down as your Main Park in the Park Policies to really lure in the wealthy tourists!

Park Maintenance City Service
Parklife DLC is all about the beautification of your city, and Parks are the perfect way to make your city more attractive to tourists and overall, make your city more livelier. So why not give them a boost to push the fun you can get out of the parks over the roof!

Park Maintenance is a new city service that does not only boost parks created with Park Area tool but also existing parks and plazas! The dogs in Dog Park will be wiggling their tails over this new Service :) Woof!

Also not to worry, existing parks will not be made worse by this new service, they are here only to increase the happiness and attractiveness effect of your parks, giving them extra value! To added convenience we also included Park Maintenance in the Info Views. From the Info View players can easily see what parks could use a boost and where the party is already on-going!

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Work work!

So, how does one build and use this City Service? Firstly the Park Maintenance City Service is located in Parks & Plazas menu so that's the place to start.

After building the Park Maintenance Building it will automatically start to send out vehicles to the parks around your city. The Park Maintenance vehicles visit parks about once per two weeks, or whenever is the next optimal time to visit the park, for example higher level Park Areas require more care and love from the Park Maintenance so they tend to visit there more often. When a park is visited, it receives a 20% boost to happiness effect and happiness radius. We have new models for the Park Maintenance Vehicle and Park Staff for the Park Maintenance City Service, so you can more easily spot them amongst the traffic and citizens.

Oh, did I forgot to mention that there is still one new City Policy we probably should mention here: Park Maintenance Boost! With a small fee your Park Maintenance will work double shifts and tend to your parks more efficiently! This will surely blast the fun with parks through the roof.

New Buildings
Moving on the one topic we had a hard time agreeing on: which buildings to introduce here since they are all SO cool?

As a part of paid content, Parklife offers 6 all new Unique Buildings. Each of them have their own little quirks and tricks but this time we're only going to focus on one. A humongous statue reaching high up the sky in a heroic pose - The Statue of Colossalus (heh!) It is unlocked in Milestone Small City along with other level 6 unique buildings. The Statue of Colossalus requires a shoreline to build and as an effect Tourists will stay 20% longer in the City that hosts this majestic statue. In all honesty I can't think of a better way to welcome tourists to my City's harbor.

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A gigantic statue standing proudly on the shore welcoming tourists to the City.

And there's no better building to pair it with than...

New Monument / Castle of Lord Chirpwick
.. the mighty Castle of Lord Chirpwick! Castle of Lord Chirpwick is a big and fancy castle with multiple tower and floors. It will make other cities envy upon yours and attract a ton of tourists to visit.

Besides looking impressive and having fireworks show every night, it also has global entertainment value and it also increases the Attractiveness of all Unique Buildings by 25%! To unlock this skyline polisher player needs to build all Parklife Unique Buildings, but it will be worth the wait.

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While not taking walks in the garden, Lord Chirpwick likes to gaze upon the bay of Chirpshore

New Park buildings and paths

When it comes to buildings inside your Park variety is rewarded and building many of the same building will lessen its effect. That's why we've tried to give you plenty of new buildings, paths and props to choose from. Remember! Park buildings can be placed anywhere, but are most powerful in Park Areas when they receive bonuses based on Park Area level! The free update contains also a collection of props when they previously have been available only in editors.
 
I like the luck of the Colossus (sorry, Colossalus!) and I'm not kicking myself over building up the last stretch of waterfront. Looks like someone in my town is going to be moving house later this month.

How exactly does the boost connections function? Increasing what can come to our existing ports? Have to build more of them? Increased traffic?

Is there anyway to have a city park that is paved by default (to create large custom plazas?)
 
Will asset makers be able to design buildings for use in park districts that do not require road access?
 
The new additions are gonna be fun for sure, and I appreciate your light-hearted attitude, but you guys have a long way to go to attain Maxis (RIP) levels of humor. The self-references and ChirpXYZ names quickly get tiring, gotta be a lot more subtle with your jokes.

Regarding the new policies, will the Hard mod be updated to affect those? And will there be opportunity for things to go horribly wrong for us masochists? I know I get way more motivated when the default state of a park is people vomiting all over the place and I have to fix things than when I just have to "level up" stuff. In other words, please take a page out of Theme Park. And let us exploit unfortunate amusement park and zoo goers by selling them oversalted fries, greasy burgers and soft drinks... Deal with the health consequences later :p .
 
Allow us to build a rollercoaster that shoots cars into the next town over thus decreasing their reputation while our park becomes more popular? :p

Sounds legit :D .

I'd expect at least a few of those to fly off unintentionally if you cut down on the maintenance budget.

Edit: also, I don't get the downvotes. If you're a carebear and don't play with the difficulty ramped up, you'll stay in "city painter" mode, don't worry. So why disagree except for trolling? It's hardly respectful.
 
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The Statue of Colossalus requires a shoreline to build and as an effect Tourists will stay 20% longer in the City that hosts this majestic statue.
This is big. The statue has a global special bonus for having it built. As far as I can tell all previous unique buildings (not monuments, the statue isn't a monument) are just high attraction buildings with unique appearance. Makes me wonder if other Parklife uniques have similar bonuses.
 
When Parklife was first announced, I was a little skeptical about the overall benefits it has to Cities Skylines. But now I see that it may be the biggest game-changer after Mass Transit. I'm super-excited for when this comes out! Just one question: Can you place unique buildings within a park without road access? Will they be serviced from the main gate or do they still require a road for that?

Also, I have a suggestion for the next expansion pack. Cities: Skylines - SPORTS! Professional sports are rather underdeveloped in the game. We only have a dedicated football stadium and a variety of parks, but I feel that more can be done to expand the concept with more types of sports, teams, arenas and policies to ensure their success. Play well enough and your city can host the Olympics! The coup de grâce will be a new road type: racetracks! You can design your own F1 racetrack with bleachers to really sell your city as a racing capital. :)
 
When Parklife was first announced, I was a little skeptical about the overall benefits it has to Cities Skylines. But now I see that it may be the biggest game-changer after Mass Transit. I'm super-excited for when this comes out! Just one question: Can you place unique buildings within a park without road access? Will they be serviced from the main gate or do they still require a road for that?

Also, I have a suggestion for the next expansion pack. Cities: Skylines - SPORTS! Professional sports are rather underdeveloped in the game. We only have a dedicated football stadium and a variety of parks, but I feel that more can be done to expand the concept with more types of sports, teams, arenas and policies to ensure their success. Play well enough and your city can host the Olympics! The coup de grâce will be a new road type: racetracks! You can design your own F1 racetrack with bleachers to really sell your city as a racing capital. :)

You mean "cherry on top"? Coup de grace is a mercy kill.

Racetracks would be really really really really cool. There's already some stuff on WS, so I guess that there's interest too.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=511210743&searchtext=race
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1195591839&searchtext=race

I expect stuff like this will/could be converted to park assets.
I haven't found any F1 cars on the WS...

p.s. I remember there being a driving mod... So a DLC where you can drive various vehicles around your city, not just a racetrack, would also be cool.
 
I'm super-excited for when this comes out! Just one question: Can you place unique buildings within a park without road access? Will they be serviced from the main gate or do they still require a road for that?

Hi!
I'm afraid the old unique buildings will still need a road access but new Parklife buildings do not.

Also thanks for the DLC idea, I think it sounds cool, because sports could easily have pony racing ;)
 
How exactly does the boost connections function? Increasing what can come to our existing ports? Have to build more of them? Increased traffic?

Outside connections in the area add 20% more vehicle capacity than with no policy. Applies to boats, planes, trains and private cars. So a normal connection can handle more traffic than normally. For private cars this means there might be more of them, but for example a train can carry 20% more customers.
 
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Also thanks for the DLC idea, I think it sounds cool, because sports could easily have pony racing ;)

Sure! There can be more than one type of racing course for different sports, since it factors into the building aspect of the game. On the subject of sports, it would be really cool if you expanded the game's winter assets with a customisable ski resort! The current ski parks in Snowfall are unrealistically small. What the game really needs is a large ski resort that you can build to your own design. It would be like a different type of park where you can draw ski pistes and mountain-climbing routes. In creating pistes, the game automatically calculates the direction of the piste depending on elevation, and both ends need to be connected by a chair lift (drawn in like a cable car) in order to function. You can fill your ski resort with amenities like cabins, restaurants, infirmaries and various services. The more successful the resort, the higher the rating and the more it boosts the city value! What do you think?
 
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Anyone else jumping the gun like I am and getting areas ready for specialized parks? I’m building a city on a series of islands and I’ve already pinned an area for a Nature Reserve and a Zoo. Can’t wait till it’s finally out!
 
Anyone else jumping the gun like I am and getting areas ready for specialized parks? I’m building a city on a series of islands and I’ve already pinned an area for a Nature Reserve and a Zoo. Can’t wait till it’s finally out!

Yeah, I got 81 tiles and terraformed some mountains in for my Nature Reserve, deciding how I'm going to fit my elevated metro around my zoo, planning out areas to clear out for a city park and looking for an area for my amusement park.
 
I still think we need to focus on deepening the simulation (Better crime!) rather than focusing on yet more eye-candy.
I agree overall (though a challenging economy and fleshing out the traffic system and mass transit options would come way before crime in my simulation priorities list). However this DLC adds functionality to what most people have been doing at least a little bit (decorate empty spaces to do their own "parks"), so it does improve the simulation slightly both in the economic and immersion department.

@metatoaster Ever considered people maybe disagree with the first part of your post about the jokes? Also if you want people to respect the way you play the game maybe also respect the way they play even if it's different from what you enjoy? ;)
Fair point about the jokes, but Beer Fiends post right below mine is downvoted too and it doesn't mention the jokes. I don't go around downvoting people's suggestions though, and I don't want to take away what they like. I'm asking for some stuff to happen if you play in hard mode and have to drastically cut budgets, or mess things up just for fun. The typical player who plays on normal difficulty with disasters off won't ever see a difference, so what's not to like?

You guys should really watch some Theme Park let's plays on Youtube/Twitch if you don't get what can be fun about a disastrous amusement park. I hope the current simulation of people could be detailed a bit more so you can see their state of mind when visiting the various attractions. Overjoyed kids seeing the giraffes or begging their parents for balloons, slightly naseous people coming off the rollercoaster. One evil park policy you could enable is forbidding outside food to force people to buy from your dubious (or wonderful organic food, if that's your style) stands. Greasy burger + rollercoaster ride = ???

I waiting to see if they extend the networks/roads system and take advantage of those Unity physics to make actual rollercoasters BTW. It would probably benefit the current road placement tools since they'd need to add way more precision and 3D control. If not this time, surely it's worth a follow-up DLC! (Just make sure it also works as public transport so the next popular mod involves launching people across the city on minecarts to get them to work.)