Another CiM Beta-AAR: Berlin '75

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Welcome to the second Cities in Motion AAR. If you haven't read the first one, you can find it here. As with the first AAR, keep in mind the game is still in Beta-phase and some things will change before release.

Most of you have played the open-beta version of CiM by now and thus know how about the game-mechanics and such. So I will focus on those things in the game you haven't seen yet. Let us first take a look at the several new options for scenarios and campaigns. In the campaign a series of twelve separate scenarios are linked together. Each of them has its own story and objectives. Playing through them you unlock the cities you can then play in sandbox-mode one after the other (so says the manual).

The first scenario puts you straight in the middle of bustling '20's Berlin (which is the largest city in the game). In contrast with a just started sandbox game the streets of Berlin are already crowded with cars and people. In the sandbox it always takes a while for both to appear in large numbers.

I'll leave the campaign for what it is for now. There are a bunch of nice scenarios to choose from, a few in every city, and then there is the sandbox mode. In a separate AAR I will take a look at the editor and give it a try, perhaps start building my home-town with it.

There are five sandbox maps available. We have already visited Tutorial town and Vienna. You have seen screenshots from the 'puzzly'-Amsterdam map. The third map is Helsinki.With all the water and small peninsulas it looks like a really interesting map. Your transportation system will be prone to traffic-jams I guess.

The map I choose to play is Berlin. I set the year to 1975 as I like older vehicles more then modern ones. In the manual you can find a list of vehicles with starting and end dates and a little description of the vehicle's history. Berlin 1975 it is!

 

[delra]

How come you have Berlin and we don't? How do I get bumped to your level of clearance? Could you show some actual route planning for income? I'd like to see some bus routes that actually make $$$...

 

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Sightseeing Berlin

Berlin is big, really big. As you can seen from the minimap in the last post most of the 1280x1280 map is filled by 1975. I actually guess the build up area of Berlin is twice as large as Vienna. Berlin has a lot of avenues and highways criss-crossing through the city, but also many small streets and alleys in the center of the city. After opening the map I panned through the city and lost my way quite a few times. Berlin will prove to be a very nice city to play in. It has a lot of areas where the roads, railroads and the river make some interesting twists and turns.

Just after surveying the city I get my first mission, some chap has build a hotel outside the city-center and wants a line to it from the city. No problem mate, I was planning to do something like that anyways. And so, the sightseeing-line is born and I take you on a little trip through Berlin.

[video=youtube;vWFYMw6fWos]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWFYMw6fWos [/video]​

Departure point is the new hotel, situated on the river and very close to the highway it will be mostly frequented by businessmen and cheapskate-tourists. Having crossed the river we soon arrive at the Jubilee car-factory. The building looks neat. As you can see it has a test-track on the roof, which is/was very rare. In fact there was no car-factory with a test-track on the roof in Berlin. There have been only two of those. The famous Fiat Lingotto-factory in Turin with a long rooftop track. On this building the Jubilee factory in CiM is clearly based, although it is much smaller. The other factory with a roof-top test-track was that of the Belgian car maker Imperia situated in a small valley close to Liege.
Crossing the river again we drive through a large park, the Tiergarten, before finally arriving at the Brändenburger Tor.
Moving south we come to the Potsdammer Strasse and enter the small streets of the city-center. Already they are very busy while I haven't flooded them with trams and buses, this can prove to be quite a challenge. As you can see some of the stops are getting crowded, time to insert a few more buses on the line. Next we arrive at the station and the 'Riesenrad Am Zoo' before we return to our departure-point by way of the Strasse des 17.Juni (what hap pend on that date?).

To conclude this little sightseeing-tour of Berlin I can say Berlin is big (check out the minimap in that vid to see how little of the center we have seen). The small streets in the center will be a challenge while the larger avenues give us some much needed space to put down tram-tracks and bus-lines. While the Spree is not on the map as it is in Berlin it feels like the small winding river it actually is. Time to get building!​

 

[Rautatie]

Could you please post 2020-era maps for Helsinki, Berlin and Amsterdam?
Also, the name of the Strasse des 17 Juni comes from the 1953 workers uprising in East Germany. As Wikipedia says, ''The Uprising of 1953 in East Germany started with a strike by East Berlin construction workers on June 16. It turned into a widespread uprising against the Stalinist German Democratic Republic government the next day. The uprising in Berlin was violently suppressed by tanks of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany and the Volkspolizei. In spite of the intervention of Soviet troops, the wave of strikes and protests was not easily brought under control. Even after June 17, there were demonstrations in more than 500 towns and villages.''

 

[ChrillSwe]

How come you have Berlin and we don't? How do I get bumped to your level of clearance? Could you show some actual route planning for income? I'd like to see some bus routes that actually make $$$...

Singleton Mosby is not running the open beta. He's using a closed beta, and clearly a beta with all cities available. This is not available to the public, since they cannot just release the full game for free

 

[keeveek]

This game is sooo much superior that i thought! I thought it will be another city builder, but it seems itll be much more than that... Managing the city in 70's ... that's new!

 

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This game is sooo much superior that i thought! I thought it will be another city builder, but it seems itll be much more than that... Managing the city in 70's ... that's new!

The editor actually feels like a 'paused' city-builder. When you are finished building your city you can use it as a sandbox to create a transportation-network in it.

 

[unmerged(233017)]

Lol, is that a Vienna E1 tram on the starting screen there?

Anyway, looking forward to your new AAR. Berlin looks quite interesting.

 

[unmerged(18239)]

Anyway, looking forward to your new AAR. Berlin looks quite interesting.

Berlin is interesting indeed and I will continue soon. Have been toying around with the editor for some time and it looks like a serious lot of work to build a city because of the almost unlimited detail you can put into it. Dustbins, grafiti on walls and even garden-gnomes......

 

[co_martsu]

Garden gnomes are my favorite! And thanks Singleton Mosby for your excellent AAR, keep up the good work

 

[jonlucero]

Great AAR! I'm now so much more dismayed by the fact that my comp did not/cannot run the game..

 

[Jósef Beck]

Hello,
how is the Berlin Wall implemented into the game? Building a network in both parts of Berlin during the '60s or '70 feels quite unrealistic.

 

[Zarine]

They said that the wall is only in a scenario.
During a sandbox game there won't be any wall.

What I don't know is if it's possilbe in this scenario to build a metro line from one side to the other or to build a line above the wall... Or even with an helicopter line.

 

[delra]

You already can fly your helicopters above the airport which in reality would cost the pilot his licence. So why not above the Soviets...

 

[Jósef Beck]

Riesenrad Am Zoo

Who came on the idea of designing Bhf. Zoologischer Garten as a terminus? It seems like the whole Stadtbahn, a major rail axis through the heart of Berlin, is missing. And, in Picture #1, is this tower meant to be the Funkturm? The graphics and the AAR are fantastic, though.

 

[Philemon1976]

I am so sorry about the Siegessäule being not modelled, but ok, you can't design every landmark of a capital.
I am very curious about the rest of the city!

 

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Phase One

The Berlin map is a very interesting one. On the whole it is not much larger then the Vienna map but when you are playing on it you soon discover the center of the city is just massive and the map feels three if not four times as large as the Vienna map. It is also less 'organized'. The Vienna map has the inner-ring with the center, the stations to the west and south and then the suburbs and industrial areas. In Berlin it is different, everything feels more chaotic. One moment you think you are close to the edge of the city as you are panning through a commercial area with a lot of offices, turns out there is an urban area west from it, and then there is a college and a department store and more urban areas. This makes Berlin a great map to play as you will have many more lines covering three-quarters of the map.

Let me take you on a tour of phase my current Berlin Transportation-Network “Phase One”.
The plan was to first run circles of tram-tracks trough the center of the city (which turned out to be very big and thus a lot of lines (six so far). Underneath this I would lay a metro-network , and radiating from this center of activity many bus-lines and smaller tram-lines.

Yet again the most bustling part of the entire line is a station, the one to the south of the Tiergarten.
Here converged four tram-lines, four metro-lines and a bus-line.

The northern terminal of the metro-line, at the moment, is at the Jubilee factory, just across the Spree. I had a bus-line in place right from the start which turned out to be very crowded. So after making two extensions to my first metro-line I added this extension to the north. It is quite profitable.

From the Tiergarten-station (just beyond the hotel) we work our way to the south, here a lot of tram-lines converge, three of those run along one of the broad avenues of Berlin, these avenues are superb for tram-lines. As you can see I have six tram-lines build, four of which in this part of the center, two more to the east.

A little bit more to the east along the avenue are the hospital and the commercial area with just beyond it another broad avenue leading to the Tempelhof airport. As you can see the metro-lines from the Tiergarten station have their most eastern lying station right here. From here they turn north towards the Brandenburger-Tor.

I haven't quite build my tram- and metro-lines into that area yet though. North of the airport the lines go past a college and a departments store (there was one of these in Vienna, there are three in Berlin). There is one more metro-station north of here, the current terminus of the eastern part of the line. As you can see I have not build much north of the river Spree yet. Much more can be build to the south and west as well. Berlin is big!

Far to the north two bus-lines are already in place, one to the secondary airport, and one through the farm-villages (put it there because I was asked to do so in a quest).

 

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I am so sorry about the Siegessäule being not modelled, but ok, you can't design every landmark of a capital.

It would have been great but it is understandable the devs limited the landmarks as these buildings can only be used once and due to their size are taking them a lot of work modelling. Sure hope it will be possible in the future for the players to design and include their own buildings like with SC4

Hello,
how is the Berlin Wall implemented into the game? Building a network in both parts of Berlin during the '60s or '70 feels quite unrealistic.

The wall is implemented in one (or more) scenarios but not in the sandbox map. Here Berlin is just one big city. Where should it be?

 

[Rautatie]

What is that big construction site near Potsdamer Platz? Could you take a pic of the same place in 2020 for example so we could see what they have built there? :>

 

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What is that big construction site near Potsdamer Platz? Could you take a pic of the same place in 2020 for example so we could see what they have built there? :>

I am curious about it as well. Will take a pic soon.