Downtown Ideas

[Kastle117]

Hello again my fellow Mayors!

Current Situation:
As I was growing my city of 60,000 people, I noticed that the skyline I once envisioned never really came to fruition. I made a dedicated downtown center with many services and parks and the buildings never grew tall. They were all fairly small and short and were not taking advantage of the carefully laid out grid I planned. There is plenty of room for taller buildings but they all divided up into smaller zones.
Instead, other downtown centers popped up where I didn't really plan on. I wasn't going to enable the 'Disable High-rises' policy, so I just went with it. The office zones are notorious for growing tall buildings in random places when the land value and transportation are good. It just looks off having tall buildings in random locations which brings me to my next point....

Possible Solution(s):

1. Instead of having just high and low densities, add in medium densities to help with the transition from suburb to downtown. It's weird having to make a circle district zone for disabling high-rises, but still having a higher density. Most cities don't go from 4 stories to 50 within one block. So can you add in a medium density and get rid of the high-rise ban policy instead, it just makes more sense that way.
2. There are not enough tall buildings in the base game. I see many of the same office skyscrapers and residential condos. Can ya'll add in some more high-rises? I was almost a little disappointed about that, with this being a great city builder and the skylines looking the same in every city I build. Also, there are hardly any commercial high-rises, I've only seen one so far.
3. In addition with 2, taller buildings are much welcomed. I see way too many short and stubby buildings in my downtown centers. This is called Cities: Skylines after all... It is nice to have some variance, but the amount of shorter buildings outnumber the taller ones.

Remarks:
In my defense, I have been playing this game for almost 400 hours now on Steam. I have had previous experiences with SimCity 4 Rush Hour, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, SimCity 2000, and the very first SimCity. I am an avid city builder fan. And I absolutely love this game.
I know how to get my buildings to level up, so please don't tell me to add in more services and parks because my downtown centers have plenty of those. Most of my buildings are level 4 and some are level 5, and they refuse to grow any taller.
If you all have any other ideas you'd like to throw in, please feel free to do so!
The below image is the main city I'm talking about. This is the dedicated downtown center.

This city below is an older save, but still has a rather nice looking downtown center.

 

[Teldaril]

I agree with you that there are very few very tall buildings in the base game for the name "Skylines".
And i would like to see some official work there, but i think they completely forwarded this task to the modding community.

One thing you can do to immediately get taller buildings is the workshop. There are tons of skyscrapers for zoning, as unique building and as RICO building. ( not enough in a futuristic style i would like to see )

Another thing you can do to immediately get a better transition between high density and low density is the games style manager or Building Themes:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=466158459&searchtext=themes

There you can create an own style for your "medium" size density.

 

[Kastle117]

I agree with you that there are very few very tall buildings in the base game for the name "Skylines".
And i would like to see some official work there, but i think they completely forwarded this task to the modding community.

One thing you can do to immediately get taller buildings is the workshop. There are tons of skyscrapers for zoning, as unique building and as RICO building. ( not enough in a futuristic style i would like to see )

Another thing you can do to immediately get a better transition between high density and low density is the games style manager or Building Themes:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=466158459&searchtext=themes

There you can create an own style for your "medium" size density.

I would like to have those assets, but having too many hurts performance. I'm already seeing a hit and I only have 3 mods active and less than a dozen assets active. I've seen people say that they have over 1000 assets and hundreds of mods and it just blows my mind. At that point it's not even Cities Skylines to me. I remember playing SimCity4 Rush Hour and I downloaded many mods (Network Addon Mod for instance) and assets from the Simtropolis website and it didn't even feel like the same game anymore. I don't want to get to that point with Skylines. I didn't buy Skylines to download dozens of assets and mods, I want the devs to put in the work and dedication instead. They can optimize the game when they add stuff in, we players and programmers can only go so far to modify the game. You might as well create your own city builder at that point lol. All I need is the Achievement Enabler, Eco-Pump Wastewater thingy, 25 tiles, and First Person Camera. As for assets, I'll just stick with my own for now. I don't want to bog down my performance too much, and I have a decent PC: AMD FX 6300 3.5 GHz, nVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4GB, and 8GB 1333MHz RAM. Although I am wanting to upgrade within the next year, (need more RAM and better CPU, this is my first build BTW)

Cheers,

Kastle117