Been playing a couple of days now, and it's a great game (especially for the price I paid!). I do have some requests in what I think is a decent order of achievability.
1)
Bigger/Stronger brushes in the map editor
It'd be nice to be able to sweep across the map and say "I want a big river and an island here", and to smooth out edges more strongly, rather than having to scribble in major features in the landscape. In addition, a "clip" tool would be nice alongside the normalise tool, so you could set maximum/minimum heights without adjusting sea level. (a "soft knee" feature that would compress rather than hard-limit the height curves at the maximum would be good to put in here too).
2)
Better rail management in automatic multi-rail metro junctions
Too often if you want to split a 4-rail express/stopping track into two branches, the middle rail won't end up in one of the branches. As a result I've had to spend a lot of time making creative workarounds, bouncing rails down to two branches of two and recombining, with unpredictable results, taking up a lot more room. It would be nice if the engine paid more attention to making a Y-junction of 4-(or 6- or
way into something automatically useable without that kind of workaround.
3)
Two-Way Expressways with a few auto-interchanges
I love the flexibility of being able to place individual lanes of a highway, but sometimes it would be nice to say "I want my highway to go both ways from this side of the city to this side" and just do it without having to draw the other direction back again. Obviously I don't want to take the freedom of the one-way expressways away, but this could be a useful tool, like the ability to draw both two-way and one-way metro rails. I can imagine an "auto interchange" engine would struggle to work out anything more complicated than a 4-way crossing without producing something ridiculous, but something
might be achievable. Non-essential, though.
4)
Ability to fade out/selectively view coverage circles
It can get
really messy placing stops in even moderately busy areas.
5)
Hideable/See-thru streets and/or "Focus on specific height"
Setting up complex multi-level transport systems can be a bit hit and miss, with stuff hiding behind other stuff, as others have pointed out. It would be nice to "hide all at street level," even if it left it ghosted so you could see where it was. It would also be nice to be able to see things at 12m, -30m, etc, perhaps with a kind of sliding scale, so you could "scroll" through your network and see where things were, working on the level you wanted.
6)
Stop timetable views
I'd like to be able to click on a stop and see, not just what routes serve it, but at what times on the hour the vehicles are expected. This would enable me to stagger timetables so that routes don't clump up in certain areas.
7)
More immediate information on vehicles in Depot View
"Bus 1", "Bus 2", "Bus 3" etc don't really tell me much, and clicking on individual vehicles doesn't give me much overview. I'd like to be able to see at a glance how many small/medium/large vehicles I have, how many I need, what condition they're in etc. I'll only really need to see things at the level of individual busses occasionally, the big picture is more important on a regular basis.
8)
Automatically naming stops
Especially if we could get the chance to custom name streets and disricts/areas, but even if not, having a stop called "Mulholland Parkway/Primrose" would be better than a long list of "bus stop 3, bus stop 6, bus stop 71."
9)
Snap to grid, more drawable shapes for roads
It would be nice to be able to snap to regular shapes and angles when drawing roads, so that you can be sure roads really are parallel. I'd also like to be able to draw a square, rectangle or circle of road or track. It would really help setting up large areas in the map editor, and circles would be great for roundabouts. (The fact that you can't close a single spline to itself makes me think circles possibly aren't doable in the current engine, but the tool could just create 2 semicircular splines instead.)
10)
See trips drawn on the map
A-la "Sim City 4: Rush Hour": A tool so I can click on a Cim and see her entire journey, beginning to end, drawn out on the map, or click on a building or stop and see all the journeys to/from it. Useful for quickly visualising where people are
actually going. Presumably the routes are already worked out in the engine so it's just (yeah, "just", I know I know, I'm not trying to be an asshole to the programmers!) a case of drawing them without making a mess.
11)
Route finding without placing stations
Some sort of tool to quickly see "is there a route between this point and this other point on the network?"
12)
Placeable sidewalks, ped under/overpasses
This is really a +1 (or +2+5+7) but making interchanges with reasonable pedestrian management is clunky and messy at the moment. It seems as if the splines aren't set up to work that small or to create non-vehicle junctions (hence the peculiarity of making a "pedestrian only" path with a stoplight and black asphalt leading up the first 8 yards.
Perhaps one thing that could tidy things up would be a choice that pops up when you intersect a pedestrian path with another network to create either a regular intersection with a crossing, or a +4m overpass or -4m underpass with stairs (obviously this would break any tram rails and trolley wires but that's fine). The ability to slope ped walkways at a steeper gradient and have the engine replace them with (again, non tram and trolley) stairs would be cool.
This feels like a tricky problem, and might need something weird like a "zero-width" network to work properly, but something to stop the messiness of pedestrian areas and interchanges would be very much appreciated.
Also, being able to set up sidewalk "plazas" to create squares and shopping areas would make for nice looking inner-city interchange locations.
(Can I just say how much I like the elegance of the "teleporter" method for setting up metro stops, too? While it might be nice to place the street level stops manually sometimes, it's great to not have to worry about station layouts. Of course if placeable sidewalks and plazas happened, it would mean we
could worry about them if we wanted to, but it's nice to not have to if we don't want to. Only potential niggle with it - shouldn't the radius of coverage extend from the street-level stop rather than the metro stop itself?)
13)
Green space and parks
Some more trees, flowers and benches popping up around the cities would be great. If this could be tied in with placeable sidewalks and plazas, all the better.
Lastly, some Wish List stuff =)
14)
More network types
Heavy rail, high speed rail, monorails, cable cars(!).
15)
Canals!
Maybe this should come under "more network types" but I'd
really love to be able to draw a canal network with locks going through the city, with barges as well as water-bus access.
Very finally, thanks again for a great game, and for being the kind of company where I feel like a long list of niggles and wishes will actually get listened to! Keep releasing DLCs and I'll keep buying them
