Succession game!

[stiiknafuulia]

@Spockyt: Mind posting the link to the save? Even if Calad has yet to appear, it'd be fun to take a look at it.

 

[Spockyt]

@Spockyt: Mind posting the link to the save? Even if Calad has yet to appear, it'd be fun to take a look at it.

I was just about to start uploading it (I had internet speed problems,I was getting about 1 download.) but Norton has declared it a malicious site and is now blocking it. (TinyUpload. I had the previous save download page favourited.) Do you have a reccomendation for a alternate upload/download site?

 

[stiiknafuulia]

I was just about to start uploading it (I had internet speed problems,I was getting about 1 download.) but Norton has declared it a malicious site and is now blocking it. (TinyUpload. I had the previous save download page favourited.) Do you have a reccomendation for a alternate upload/download site?

Can't you just unblock it (or turn Norton off for a sec)? Most every file upload site has issues with antivirus softs. I used Wikisend earlier, but iirc it gave ItalianGuy a false positive, so it might be that it's not one of Norton's favorites.

 

[Calad]

Hi. I will go to holiday for this weekend so person after me can take my place. I will do my turn after him.

Nice to see city growing, I think I may do more harm than good on my turn

Also dont hesitate to pm me, I will look this forum quite often but not every thread.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Hi. I will go to holiday for this weekend so person after me can take my place. I will do my turn after him.

Nice to see city growing, I think I may do more harm than good on my turn

Also dont hesitate to pm me, I will look this forum quite often but not every thread.

Good to hear from you, Calad. So, what do you think our policy should be regarding additional mods? Is it fine to use mods that don't affect the save (so long as they're not money cheats and the like)? E.g. Fine Road heights mod, Add Crosswalk mod etc.

Btw we no longer need to debate whether we'll use Ingame Terraform mod or No Pillars mod... They're now both obsolete for us, since this just happened the day before yesterday:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/content-update-1-1-0-is-live-on-retail.856707/

So... The game got updated, and they added tunnels (!!) and European style buildings! I wonder how this affects our game?
We only had one minor mod enabled, so theoretically we shouldn't have any problems. I sure hope the patch will affect old
saves... This might be just the thing we need to keep the looming traffic nightmares at bay!

So, since Calad will skip one place, it is now ItalianGuy's turn (if I'm not mistaken).
@ItalianGuy: Your turn has come up in advance, please stand by for mayoring.
@Spockyt: Did you manage to neutralize your anti-viral pestilence? Where is the divine SAVE, that we may marvel at it and loathe ourselves for never being able to equal the achievements of the One, the Only... Lord High Mayor?

 

[Spockyt]

Good to hear from you, Calad. So, what do you think our policy should be regarding additional mods? Is it fine to use mods that don't affect the save (so long as they're not money cheats and the like)? E.g. Fine Road heights mod, Add Crosswalk mod etc.

Btw we no longer need to debate whether we'll use Ingame Terraform mod or No Pillars mod... They're now both obsolete for us, since this just happened the day before yesterday:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/content-update-1-1-0-is-live-on-retail.856707/

So... The game got updated, and they added tunnels (!!) and European style buildings! I wonder how this affects our game?
We only had one minor mod enabled, so theoretically we shouldn't have any problems. I sure hope the patch will affect old
saves... This might be just the thing we need to keep the looming traffic nightmares at bay!

So, since Calad will skip one place, it is now ItalianGuy's turn (if I'm not mistaken).
@ItalianGuy: Your turn has come up in advance, please stand by for mayoring.
@Spockyt: Did you manage to neutralize your anti-viral pestilence? Where is the divine SAVE, that we may marvel at it and loathe ourselves for never being able to equal the achievements of the One, the Only... Lord High Mayor?

I'm just uploading it to the workshop, and once I've done that, he file should be ready. Also, we had a mod? I'm sorry, but I didn't use it, what ever it was. And 1.1 was updated halfway through my playthrough, so there is a small tunnel network.

I'll edit this when the save is uploaded to the workshop (first time ever!)

EDIT Woo! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=447275893

 

[ItalianGuy]

Fine road height mod is not compatible with 1.1.0.
I'll use only no-consequence mods for my turn, like line color mod, mass transit UI, extended building info, etc.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

@Spockyt: Thank you for uploading the save! (Whaddayaknow, Steam actually works very well for this.)


A 'few' comments after a small glance:


-- Wow! My first reaction was, 'is this the same city?!'. There are many new areas and even existing ones have been expanded greatly.
While this has decimated our budget (from $48k / mo to $ 11k / mo), somehow you've also managed to gather over $ 2 million in cold,
hard cash for the next mayor. A very good job imo.

-- At the same time, I'm a bit worried about the rate of change that happens within a single turn (not just yours, but everyone's).
As we get more money, things will only escalate further. More money also means longer turn times, due to 'pause creep' (it's no wonder that
it took you so long for your turn, with the way you totally transformed the city! I don't know how you had the patience with all those crashes ).
Imo we should change to a 1-year turn time for this next turnset, in order to keep the city recognizable for each player, once the save comes back
to them. (Part of this is the fact that we have 7 players; with 4-5 the problem -- if it is one -- would be much smaller). I'd appreciate a comment
from Calad on this, but I think that you, ItalianGuy, could try to play for one year, see how things look with the rate of change compared to your
last turn, and then play another year if it seems appropriate. The other players will just follow your example, so that everyone gets to play either
1 or 2 years.

To be fair, JerkyJerry (aka 'The Great Service Reformer') is partially responsible for giving us a swimming pool full of cimoleons to spend at our leisure. Jerky move, that.


-- You seem to be an even bigger fan of hi-rises than I am. Tbh the city is becoming a bit too blocky for my taste (although CO is to blame for this, too, in that as buildings level up, they become more and more blocky). ... I might choose to renovate some areas on my turn for pure aesthetics (including some self-made monstrosities). In the past, time was of the essence and money a concern as throngs of new people had to be accommodated... Now that we're rich, some improvements can be made to make the city a more liveable-looking place. (Note: I didn't say 'liveable'. All you have to do is fool most of them most of the time. )

-- Sort of related is the issue of you ruining Varsity Heights. Sorry for being blunt, but in my vision it was meant to be a typical European 'university district', in that it has small buildings, with lots of parks and paths and plazas etc all over the place, to give it that nice and cozy 'mecca of higher studies' feel. Right now it has... Hi-rises. Uggh. To be fair, you couldn't know my plans, and might've overlooked to infer them. Or you simply disagreed, which is fine too, since our opinions hold equal sway in this game. However, the residents of those hi-rises had best brace themselves for dynami--, hmm, renovation. The pendulum swings both ways (odd how those resemble a small wrecking-ball -- a mere coincidence I'm sure).


-- The road around Copper Cliffs is no longer a precarious mess thanks to you. I never thought of using six-lane roads -- they took up too much space
and were too expensive, I thought. But what a difference it makes for the traffic! --Or is it the new tunnels? Perhaps it's a combo effect; either way,
thanks for clearing up that particular knot of asphalt.


-- On the other side of the traffic coin, I'm not sure what the logic was in building the metro system? It seems to make wild turns here and there for
no apparent reason, although the general form is circular and it covers most areas of the city, which is good. Is there some sort of limitation as to
how you can draw the tunnels under the ground? Or were you still in a fever when you drew up those blueprints (you can freely confess; we're all mayors
here and have drawn plans under the influence of various diseases and substances! )?


-- Our Fire budget is still blazin' out of control (although this is more Jerry's ugly legacy). $ 45k is no where near the limits of being considered
decent or appropriate; in fact even fairly outrageous people would blush rather healthily at it. I wonder if they're driving around in gold-rimmed fire-trucks and using
Coca-Cola for extinguishing (so they can drink on the job, so to speak)? Be advised that in my term I aim to slash-and-burn this budget,
and damn to Hell the consequences (cue operatic concerto of sirens). --What do we need the money for, you might ask? Well, there's this
golf-course in Dubai that I've been eyeing with *importing* in mind...


-- Most of our Industry seems to have been replaced with Offices, and you've also build many new Office areas. I recently read that it's good to build
them in between Residential and Commercial areas, since Offices don't care about the noise pollution that shops produce (must be all those cash-registers ringing
all the time!), while it's the bane of Residential zones. This seems to be what you've aimed at; while nice, I'm not sure how I feel about all the regular
industry being relegated to the dustbin or history. Perhaps it's due to the current bug/feature where after you build a University, all the people will quickly
get educated (even if they live on the other side of the city), leaving no workers for the 'smoke-stack' industries? In this case it is, while lamentable,
more understandable.


-- I noticed you renamed 'Brown Pond' to 'Blue Pond'. Nice touch, since the nearby muck has been cleared; although the pond itself
was never polluted, it sort of gained that name by association (not to mention because I hated the way it hamstringed our traffic options,
due to bridges being too costly at that point in time).


-- Is there any district among the many that you created that you'd like to 'preserve' for yourself, meaning that you wouldn't like it altered (even
though technically in this game anything goes, we've adhered to certain gentlemanly deals so far, regarding 1 'personal area' per player)?


Note to @ItalianGuy:

-- I see that somewhere along the way, in all this confusion and excitement, the intention to build a harbor got side-lined, and as a result we still have none, even though
the citizens requested it a good four years ago. The next mayor should aim to rectify this; with our oodles of cash, frankly it doesn't matter where you build it,
and you might as well build three while you're at it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now for some comments in pictures (as well as some humor):

http://imgur.com/a/LgtEo#0

(I realize that the comments are mainly neutral/negative, but it simply makes for better drama. I'm more than happy with the way you ran the city,
even if the rate of change is a bit extreme (due to the 2-year turn time + growing wealth, as mentioned previously).)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On mod use:

The mod we used was simply the 'Unlock All Areas at Start' mod; apparently it's not needed after it's done its thing, so, we're all good.
--If we use it again, though, there's a bug with it that will need to be avoided somehow (in our current game it didn't turn up):

Basically it sometimes happens that zones and pedestrian paths become invisible outside the initial starting tile, rendering the game
pretty much unplayable. Luckily it can easily be tested for in the beginning; just something to be aware of for the potential next game.
(Btw it wasn't the patch that caused this bug, as I encountered it some time before.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@ Everyone (especially @ItalianGuy, since you're the next player -- although you may already know about these issues):

I recently read up on hearses and garbage trucks and their pathfinding problems in the game. While our city has managed without problems so far, as have many others, when the problems do hit you, they can often be insurmountable. Imo to be safe rather than sorry, we might opt to use these three mods in the next game:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=433249875&searchtext=aris
(ARIS Enhanced Hearse AI)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=439582006&searchtext=aris
(ARIS Enhanced Garbage Truck AI)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=421028969&searchtext=aris
(ARIS Skylines Overwatch (dependency for the other two mods, required to have them run properly)

Here is an illustrative piece about the problems with hearse and garbage truck AI:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=419601634

The main things to be gleaned from it, if you didn't bother to read the whole thing:

-- "An incinerator plant has a consumption of two full trucks per week."
(This means that we should delete all our incinerators and replace them with landfills asap!)

-- Never let a landfill begin emptying; it can royally screw up your traffic!

-- You should scatter your trash and deathcare services throughout the city, not concentrate them
(as several mayors, myself included, have done so far). (The AI mods would help in this because they
make deathcare/trash services district-based, meaning that the trucks and hearses serve their own
district first and foremost -- how it should've been from the beginning, imo.)

-- Never put long stretches of roads without any turns near landfills etc; the trucks can only turn
around in intersections, meaning that they can go across the whole map to turn with the wrong kind of
road-layout! (This problem is very well illustrated in that linked Steam post; if nothing else, it pays dividends
to take a glance at that part of the rather long post.)

---

A more general note about one odd quirk of the game, related to death care: there are so-called 'death waves',
that can overload your deathcare services when hundreds of people suddenly die all at the same time. This is due
to people building huge residential areas all at once (which, e.g., I did during my turn); all cims live to the
same ripe old age in the default simulation, meaning that once all those residents who arrived in a short period
of time turn 80 (or whatever the 'death age' is), then you're in for a rude surprise as their corpses start to litter the streets!
--There is a mod to address this issue (surprise surprise), but I think we'll be ok so long as we remember
not to build huge stretches of Residential all at once, but rather zone the roads and then fill in the area gradually
with houses, assuring smooth departures once the number of those residents' allotted days is up.

--That's it... Whew, I feel like I've already played my turn even though I only wrote a comment! Ah well, ain't nothing
better to do.

Fine road height mod is not compatible with 1.1.0.

Yes; I noticed that as I tried using it for the first time yesterday. --This is the trouble with using too many mods: if a patch breaks just one of them, we have no way of knowing which one it is, and must decipher it manually (or scour the forums for the info), then inform all the players to disable it, then re-enable it once it's updated, etc. Therefore we should stick with 3-5 mods, imo, if we opt for them in the next game.

 

[ItalianGuy]

I'm playing now, only 1 year. For the aris and those AI improvers, feel free to use them from next game, but be aware that they are incompatible with Traffic++ and Traffic Manager. (no problem imo)

EDIT: I'll use high res screenshots for my journal

 

[ItalianGuy]

Here is the save (zip) http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=08153916056941276280

I'll write the journal and update the post, but I don't have time today... maybe tomorrow.

EDIT: just a bit of comment on my turn:
It was a one-year turn, and I found a lot of abandoned buildings due mainly to death services. I spent the whole year doing 3 things: planning bus routes and pedestrian paths to serve metro and train stations (I placed them only where stations were), plopping an overwhelming quantity of crematoriums thorought the city, about 2-3 per district, then I started to plan my mesa, and it's still quite empty. The last thing I did was placing a private bus lane, I won't spoiler the suprise, just look at my mesa when you play

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Wow! That was a fast turn! I take it you felt like one year was enough play time? If not, feel free to play another one; I was only making a suggestion after all. It's kinda hard to judge the appropriate time, because some players like to pause more than others... You can do a lot more, and in a more fine-tuned way, when you keep pausing the game. I'm not sure how to solve this problem in an elegant way for future games tbh.

Iirc, it was either crematoria or cemeteries that were also nigh-useless due to small capacity. Hopefully it was cemeteries, since you went with crematoria. (Side note: nothing is a better start to your day than to stare at the pipes of three different crematoria when you eat your corn-flakes at the breakfast table. I'm sure the cims agree, and will flock to our newly beautified city! )

About the AI improvement mods: I guess one could use them if they do not affect the save... But wouldn't it wreak havoc if a player used them and the next player didn't? The vehicles' behavior would change drastically inbetween turns, leading to possibly weird traffic jams that could be 'solved' merely by reactivating the mods. I think it's safest to abstain from their use if all players won't be using them. For the next game though I think we should use them (they'll all count as 1 mod for inclusion purposes), just to be on the safe side trash and corpse-wise.

EDIT: So, that would make it Calad's turn again. Since he'll probably remain on his holiday for some time, I'll probably play my turn, too, before him. However, I'll wait until you guys write your reports before I post mine, just to keep some semblance of order. I'll take a look at the save and plan some of my moves in advance, and I'll probably play tomorrow or early on the day after.

The roster as it stands:

Calad -- skipped until after stiiknafuulia
ItalianGuy -- just played
stiiknafuulia -- will play Sun or early Mon
Myquandro -- will resume after Calad (or, if he remains on holiday, go next I guess)
TheChaoticVoid *
JerkyJerry
Spockyt

* We can keep TheChaoticVoid on the roster or opt to drop him. FWIW, he still hasn't responded to the pm I sent him ages ago about his skipped turn. We might be wise to assume that either something's happened to him (accident etc; it's terrible to think of, but they do happen), or he's simply forgot about the game or the forums and moved on to other things. @TheChaoticVoid: if you're out there, please pop by and tell us what went wrong with your last turn, which never materialized. While I wouldn't wait for a week again, you can play your new turn if you have *some* explanation to give ('aliens abducted me' is good enough for me ).

 

[Spockyt]

So today I'll e writing up my journal, and in a comment to your comments Stiiknafuulia, (which I found funny) with the tunnels, I attempted to use them to relieve traffic, but also provide a easy new way around, but I tried to demolish a little as possible to add the entrances, and to cover the entire city (and made the motorway going over Point Myquandro to going under and round.) and with income, I lowered all taxes from 12% to 10%. Feel free to reraise them if needed. High-Rises, I usually make my SP cities entierly HIgh-Rises, but for this, I tried to use a mix. Varisity Hights, I don't think I touched, did I? Copper Cliffs, I tried to make traffic run bettter through there, but I mostly just lowered the industrial there, removed some roads (and some of the Waste Burners, there was way too many across the city.) Smokestack District (and others) I slowly de-industrialised (is that the term? Or even a word?) to save on sound and noise pollution right next to people's houses (another motivation for removing Waste Incinerations.), but I didn't place any offices, just Oilton. While I consider Yoggington and Tregonwell (didn't work) to be my personal creation (feelfree to expand them) Datlof is my personal hilltop village, and building the road was a nightmare. I thought moving the Sewage over and up(and upgrading) would be a good idea, didn't notice it didn't get the water. Tregonwell Shopping Village was thriving...then it wasn't, I didn't notice the rst of the abandonement, probably due to me being Mayor.

Woah, that is a very large wall of text, sorry.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

Woah, that is a very large wall of text, sorry.

Pshaw! That is barely a *fence* of text compared to my titanic fortresses!

Regarding Varsity Heights: maybe it wasn't you, but some mayor decided that hi-rises best suited a university environment. Anyway, it's all sorted out now; I couldn't wait and almost finished my turn already. There was a *lot* to do in a single year! It almost took me the whole day to play my turn (not that I'm complaining; I haven't had this much fun in a long time! ).

I will update this post and upload the save once I get done playing (there's still 10 days left until the end of the year, but as I'm beautifying the city, I can keep the game paused and just go nuts with the pedestrian paths, etc). For now I will simply state the following:

-- The traffic in our city is beyond horrendous! Regardless of the tropical environment, I wouldn't want to live there until the chaos gets well and truly sorted out. I guess when you design a city by committee, what you get is a city that is designed by committee. Anyway I have created three new roundabouts (one of them underground -- I wonder if those exist irl?), laid some bus lines and doubled the number of weekly metro passengers (as well as laid quite a few new metro lines as well). Btw I recommend that you use the Extended Mass Transit UI when laying down new lines and routes; I know I won't be playing without it anymore. You'll see what I mean once you try it out. It seems though that what the city needs is a comprehensive highway network; despite my efforts, there are narrow mountain roads that are meant for the occasional goat-herd, and yet are carrying countless monster-trucks day in and night out. Where to lay those new highways is a question for the ages... I'm tempted to start a new game on a totally flat map, and test out those new European buildings while I'm at it. But hey, we've stuck it out so far, so let's see what kind of magic the next player can whip up (Calad or Myquandro, it depends).

-- It seems that pedestrian paths are a viable form of transport, and not just a fancy decoration. Down at the new tourist port that I built on the beach, the pedestrian bridge is packed with throngs of tourists all the time! --Especially with the use of the mod that lets you zone buildings along pedestrian paths, it might be possible to make a city that runs mostly on walking (sorry for that! ). For the next game I think this might be a fun idea; while I've tried my best, and will try some more, many of our districts are so tightly built that it's impossible to fit pedestrian paths in them without tearing up the whole neighborhood.

-- The building of an airport is now possible, having reached 50k citizens (we already almost had that, but it took my whole turn to recover from the effects of the 'zombie plague' that befell us after Spockyt's reign. ). I left it for the next mayor, but it might be fun to discuss our options as to the best place for it.

-- Although I leave you with only $ one million, the city's income is in a good place and many new projects are possible. If you raised the taxes back to 12 %, from the 9-11 % where they currently are, I'd imagine you could make well over $ 50k / month (right now it's $ 32k). I don't recommend it though, since the demand is low as it is. (Although only now do I remember that there's apparently no trusting the demand graphs. Namely, demand for Residential exists almost always, regardless of the graphs. Would've been swell to remember that before playing my turn... Ah well. I've improved logistics, so the next mayor can reap the benefits of growth that it should enable.)

-- I noticed that the Fire budget had dropped to $ 35k (was it your doing ItalianGuy?), so I left the stations alone and even built a few more (mostly in areas which had absolutely no coverage. I'm kind like that.).

-- Etc etc... I will finish my turn and post the report sometime tomorrow (well, I'll try and wait for your reports, Spockyt and ItalianGuy, to keep this chronological somewhat -- for our lurkers' benefit ).

 

[ItalianGuy]

Sadly I didn't open the budget panel during my turn, otherwise I would have noticed the ridiculously low taxes. I never allow taxes below 12%. During my regime that is unacceptable! It shall never happen again!

Anyway, when I have time (uploading high res screenshot takes ages and I won't do it next time), I'll create my journal and upload it. In the meantime I like browsing the forum on my iPad, it lets me read and post very quickly whenever I have a couple of minutes.

EDIT: Sti, did you see my special bus lane?
EDIT2: I forgot to name stuff on my mesa in Italian, I'll do it next time and I encourage you all to name things in your personal town using your native language.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=09554689404498847777

Here is the save; I will write the report today but only post it after the other two players. In the meantime feel free to make comments
and/or ask questions, in case some of my acts seem cruel or unusual (I hope you won't be polling the citizens on that though... ).

As for who's up next, if possible then I think Myquandro should possibly restrain himself (yeah, I know *I* didn't do it)...
For a day or two so we can get the backlog of reports cleared, and see if Calad will return from his holiday. If you absolutely
*must* play though, I'm pretty sure Calad won't object to it.

Btw, Traffic++ just got updated *and* made compatible with Traffic Manager. While I can live without the latter, we NEED Traffic++. Now. End of discussion.
Just open the link and see for yourself.

http://imgur.com/a/xeSHW

Sadly I didn't open the budget panel during my turn, otherwise I would have noticed the ridiculously low taxes. I never allow taxes below 12%. During my regime that is unacceptable! It shall never happen again!

Well, I've read that if you raise Residential taxes over 9 %, the citizens will object to it (meaning that less people move into the city I guess). I'm not sure where the 'pain threshold' lies with taxes though, and if this differs between the zone types; maybe a future mayor will be bold enough to experiment? Anyway, if one million is not enough for you, then neither will 100 be.

It may just be a subconscious thing that I use low taxes, being a Finn and all (like the game's designers). I mean, in Finland if you make any money at all, your taxes will total nearly 50 %...

EDIT: Sti, did you see my special bus lane?
EDIT2: I forgot to name stuff on my mesa in Italian, I'll do it next time and I encourage you all to name things in your personal town using your native language.

'Sti', hmm... I'm not sure I like this nickname. It sounds a bit female to me. Then again so does 'stiiknafuulia', so I guess I've got no one to blame but myself.

As for the bus lane, you mean the Death Bus? Nice color choice there! I'm not sure what you have in mind for your mesa, but the road layout did seem interesting. Btw I also forgot to name things in Finnish... I neglected my resort almost totally during my turn, as pressing concerns required my attention elsewhere (read: I was choosing new furniture for my manor--, err, *office*). This injustice will be rectified in my 3rd term amid grand gestures, pomp and fanfare, rest assured!

 

[stiiknafuulia]

[I screwed up somehow and made this into another post; my apologies. Consider it an appendix to the last post.]

EDIT: Btw a few notes regarding traffic for the next mayor: if possible, you should take the time to name our bus and metro lines descriptively. I did this for one line, but most of them are named by numbers alone, and while the Extended Mass Transit UI mod helps to view them, it's still not perfect. So something like 'Central -- High Towers -- The Hub', etc would be nice I think. I know there's a lot of lines and more will be needed, but it'd help future mayors significantly.

And another note: when laying down new roads and metro tubes, if you demolish old ones while doing it, all the lines that went through that part will have to be deleted and re-done from scratch, or chaos will ensue down the line (pun intended I guess). The game's algorithms are not advanced enough to take care of this situation, leading to stuck trains and buses. The most important lesson from this is to build right the first time. Saves you a lot of time and hassle, as I learned rather bitterly during my term (there may still be a few broken bus lines; if you have the time, you might want to check up on them).

And a final note: As a general rule for the mass transit network, all bus lines should run by a metro station, 'gathering' up the people from the nearby neighborhood. And all metro lines, or most, should go through the Central station (the track layout makes this fairly awkward; it's something to be corrected by an industrious mayor). I didn't name it yet, but it's fairly obvious which one is the Central station (I will point it out in my report pics so it's absolutely clear). While I'm not sure how realistic the game is in this regard, I had good results with this pattern so far (100 % trips saved for one bus line! ), and this is how transport networks work irl, so might as well go with it. Ofc if you have a better scheme in mind, feel free to ignore this; in this game there are no hard-and-fast rules, only recommendations.

EDIT2: There is a mod that lets you control the number of vehicles on your bus lines etc... Would come in extremely useful. I sure hope they'll integrate some of these awesome mods into the base game at some point, as it's getting hard to keep track of all of them. It doesn't bode well though that CO hasn't even recognized the problems with the hearse and garbage AIs (although that may have just been one PR person's opinion).

 

[Spockyt]

EDIT2: I forgot to name stuff on my mesa in Italian, I'll do it next time and I encourage you all to name things in your personal town using your native language.

I did name buildings in Datlof (or was it Yoggington?) with references, (and would have done more if I had time. The first year it felt like it was going on a long time, and the second year passed in a instant.) and the Ill-Fated Tregonwell Shopping Village is a local reference.

And nicknames.. it could be worse from me, for you. I always mix up the letters in your name, so who knows what would come out.

 

[ItalianGuy]

It took too long, so I scaled the screenshots down. Enough is enough!

Here is my journal:

Spoiler

I connected the metro stations to the sorrounding areas with bus lanes. The most important rule is giving a bus stop to all, the line shape is not important.

While looking for good bus lane places, I discovered a lot of areas without proper pedestrian paths, so I built some. Remember: cims will go to bus stops if they're not too far by walk.

These paths connect different districts to bus stops and then to metro! How useful is that?

Almost the end of august and I remembered about my mesa. It was like that, it wasn't bad but it had to go. Bye bye tax payers. Welcome bulldozer.

And this is the result after 4 months of intense work. This will be a dystopia area, where every cim will live like a mindless robot. Now that I think about it, they are...

Merry Christmas, zombies! Here I give you some homes -evil grin-

The end of the turn was spent doing some other stuff for the mesa and I also created a black bus lane and named it "The Death Bus". Of course it will change next time I play because it will be an italian name

 

[ItalianGuy]

I have 2 suggestions:

1. Using the mod that adds pedestrian crossings: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=427258853 because it improves pedestrian paths use
   
2. Setting taxes to 9% and managing them with policies, so we can have customized taxes for our personal kingdoms towns.

 

[stiiknafuulia]

I have 2 suggestions:

1. Using the mod that adds pedestrian crossings: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=427258853 because it improves pedestrian paths use
   
2. Setting taxes to 9% and managing them with policies, so we can have customized taxes for our personal kingdoms towns.

Does that mod require use by all players? If not, then I will definitely use it; if yes, however, then it might be too much of a hassle to get people to dl it, since it's such a minor thingy.

The more I think about it, I think it's by far the best to make a clear list with links to all the necessary mods in the very first post of the next SG, and play with those mods only for the duration of the game. Just 3-5 of them. This way there should be much less chance for crashes, confusion, etc. So for this game we might as well stick with mods that won't affect the save.

I forgot that you can adjust taxes by district. Since some players favor higher tax percentages, maybe we could go the other way around and make the default something like 11 or 12 % ? Then if you want to give 'special incentives', you can go to 9 % or even lower in 'your' district(s).

I've finally finished writing my report btw; I will wait for Spockyt to post his and then go ahead and post mine.