Dear Developers,
A wishlist.
I love Skylines. It's the best city builder period. I can't drive a car with rocket launchers or a helicopter on missions with a sassy PA system through my cities (hint hint), but it's good in every other way! Largely in part due to the engaged community of modders, and the fact the game isn't abandoned by its developers like other builders were. I've spent hundreds of hours playing, trying mods, sharing my cities with friends, and exploring. I get happily lost optimizing my mass transit networks, following Joe-Bob on his way to the Fish Stick Factory, or enjoying ambulances almost tipping over going around curves to go save someone. I've definitely reached the limits as far as city scale can reasonably get while still being playable and having a reasonable simulation. Over the years, I've narrowed down my major issues with the base game I hope can see some attention.
#1) Hearses and Garbage Trucks need to be able to district-lock. When you have a city that spans 3.. 5... 9 tiles across, city service vehicles, especially hearses and to a degree, garbage trucks ambulances, and others seem to break. They'll go on a 10 minute excursion from one side of the city to the other and then back again, meanwhile skipping buildings right next to their most recent stop. The cross-town travel is no big deal for a small city, but a big sprawling city with long highways and 'burbs on the outskirts wreak havoc. Optimizing the route occasionally to fulfill "the closest" request, not necessarily the oldest, could go a long way as an alternative.
#2) Placing and adjusting things; Let me "break the rules" with a built-in anarchy mode and move-it feature. If I want to make a road intersection that squeezes in at 15 degrees, let me! I want to move my coal powerplant a hair so it overlaps the road a little, let me! I'm totally okay with it looking funky while I tweak and tune. I like sharp, nearly parallel ramps and off-ramps on highways, and sculpting perfect traffic circles, I don't mind if the road looks funny while I'm midway through building them. At the same time, alignment tools for roads/bridges/tunnels are great to have features to make things realistic.
#3) Parametric units for curves and lengths of sections. Snapping to the grid is awesome for making boxy parallel roads, but making curved things with symmetry and repeating them over and over is very difficult. The community made some great tools for this like Fine Road Anarchy and Fine Road Tool, but I'd like to see some built-in support for these concepts.
#4) Traffic Manager President Edition: I can't really play the game without this, at any kind of large scale size. It adds near professional quality traffic signal controls, junction restrictions, road signs, speed limits. They added some amazing features to the game in their mod. I hope it inspires you! Look, traffic circles are great, but sometimes they just take up too much room and a properly set up 4 way traffic light is what you need.
Always play with stuck vehicle de-spawning OFF. Traffic flow 80%+ with 200k population. That's a GOOD feeling.
#5) Train block-and-chain-signaling. Look at how OpenTTD or even Factorio does Trains. You can design awesome networks that prevent congestion with simple rail signaling.
#6) The blue see-through map stuff when you start having roads intersect close by or the terrain elevation sharply changes. This gets really annoying.
And finally, I would be remissed if I didn't mention my best friend's main request; #7) please add an export feature to take the map and dump it out as an FBX or some other standard 3D model format. Suddenly, the simulation can be used to create VR worlds, driving games where the cars have rocket launchers and you deliver packages, or chopper mission excursion games where you save injured people, put out fires, sass traffic jams, and chase bad guys
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