Thanks for the answers!
With the zone brush tool you can, theoretically, fill any of the 1x1 squares however you want. I'm not sure how it works practically but what I have noticed from playing our current alpha the game will find buildings that fit even smaller sizes. Might not go under 2x2 though.
Not really higher density, more higher quality.
When you zone an area, you choose between low and high density (provided you already unlocked the high density zones). When some conditions are met, like educated citizens and high land value for instance (but not only), the buildings in the zone upgrade. The consequences are different for industrial, commercial and residential zones of course but overall, the buildings have better results for the city and for the citizens.
Don't worry, you will get your medium density buildings precisely with the leveling of the buildings inside the zones
A low level high density residence will basically look like projects, and a high level low density residence will look like a nice villa or a really good apartment building.
Thank you, we can't wait either
To me it seems unnecessary complicated to leave all that to the zone brush. Wouldn't it be a good idea to let us have some filters when we zone instead?
For example, before we zone we can set a what type of development we want (dense mid-sized apartment, high tower, commie block) or a specific style (modern, colonial, arabic, chinese, or whichever styles will be released).
Every building could have a number of tags and when we zone we can then specify which tags we want in this neighbourhood.
I remember that Cities XL were supposed to have a feature like that, but like most good announced features it was stripped out of the game in the end to make room for the online part.
How is that unfortunate? ^^ Although Solna is a horribly boring place now that you mention it...
I love Solna, mainly because the world's best football club are located there. But suburbs in Stockholm are generally boring. There's no density. Small apartment buildings are often located side-by-side with single-family houses. After looking a little closer to the picture I see that the large white houses may not be small apartment buildings but rather large single-family homes. The picture still looks realistic and reminds me of Solna though.
So I tried to paint this map in a sensible way, I hope I managed. Basically the first solid square is the starting 2x2km block on this map. Once you unlock the next segment you can expand in any of the four ways indicated by the shoddily drawn arrows. So if you theoretically expanded into the lined square, you could then expand in any direction from that square too. So it's a dynamic growth. You could, theoretically, continue expanding only that way and get a 2x16km map.
Okay. So roughly half of the nine segments that we have available are active in that city?
It looks like a decent sized city. It's great that you will let us override the limit though.
I don't know how the game mechanics works but would it be possible to let some of the districts go into some sort of "sleep mode" where only minimal amount of simulation takes place if we go over nine sections? Similar to the regional play in SC4, but maybe with a little more simulation in the inactive parts. Or is it essential that all districts are active if they're built up for the mechanics to work?
Yes! The decoration tool will allow you to fill that with plenty of nice stuff to make it look more realistic and used.
Working on it!
Don't think we have graffiti but a lot of sidewalk assets and variations.
Yes, decoration tool!
I'm pretty sure that's built using our park tool thingy.
That's great!
Looking forward to a dev diary about the "park tool thingy"
Oh yep, sorry I didn't see it in the big post.
Unfortunately, we don't have plans to make special assets for the shorelines for release. But the good news is that according to our code genius right here, it should be really easy to implement for modders provided they find the time to make the special assets. (Even if you want to create beaches in theory !)
EDIT : Whoops, I forgot to mention that we have a few assets like parasols and deck chairs that get along very well with the sand brush in the map editor. So you can already work with this.
That's a little disappointing but I understand it. I agree that there's probably more important things to get done at release. But alongside wall-to-wall zones it should be of high priority for an expansion so that we can build realistical city centers.
