Yep, that's what i do, but i'm still missing some sort of trade between cities.
I'm thinking about a regional supply/demand bar implementation for certain resources and utilities. Currently, all the needed stuff comes from outside connections. Well, these outside connections should be replaced with actual availability of goods and resources in your other cities.
Generic industry in your city A should stagnate, if there are no oil/ore/forestry/farm goods coming from cities B, C and D. This would force players to actually construct specialized cities based on the needs of the global economy and not simply get everything from outside connections for little cost.
Actually, I am trying to do that myself, somehow.
One reason I stopped playing the game for a while is because I am taking my time off to work on a whole country with something like 12 possible metro regions (81 tiles each).
I am designing a whole map in 3D, simulating a real life Caribbean island/chain, simulating wind, ocean currents, wild life, ore/oil deposits, so on, so forth. Then I will have each of my cities working as some sort of specialized unit (stress on the SORT OF).
I am also working on a background history and culture/politics environment for that country, so, some cities will have historic sites like the last native village of the Taino, a Spanish Mission, Forts, a Dutch town, a deactivated British military base, an American base, some large tenement crowded cities from the decade my island was a communist dictatorship (I am even designing a 3D "Caribbean friendship park" with Fidel and Che statues, and also a "Ronald Reagan park" built after we Americans "liberated" the country so our banks and oil companies, err, the people of that country could enjoy free trade, liberty, soda machines, fried chicken, french fries and justice for all).
So, I will connect my regions with highways and railways (and ferries and ports after the release of the new DLC) and those will be the external connections for each of my edited maps.
The only problem is that the "simulation" of that interaction between the cities and regions will happen in my mind only, as any city will still have anything that is not available in the city coming from outside.
To build a city with no background history makes no sense to me, especially in an awesome game like this where each citizen is simulated and may have their own sort of "mind".
Unfortunately, I dont see a way they could provide a regional approach to this game on a DLC, as I dont see any of the necessary logic built in it as it is right now. Perhaps, we will have it on a Cities Skylines 2, or even a Cities:Nation?
I would love to have politics also, and a city council, and elections, and see my policies influence voting, and have to work hard to win elections every six years, and have trade unions, and town halls, and all sort of pressure groups, and lose an election in a district because crime is too high and other candidate promised to have more cops in the streets, like a hardcore mix between this game and Urban Empire (UE is too easy, and also too biased to the left). But this may be talk for another thread, and let us not get ahead of ourselves, lol.
