City building thread

Had a good thread that just got archived, post your favorite city building games and discuss them.

pic related, Caesar III.

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2nd for mixed area-walker systems

1. Football fields
2. Administration centre at the bottom, with office spaces, youth centre at the top
3. Kindergarden, in a sort of corral created by surrounding blocks, itself in a middle of big grass field and fenced
4. School
5. Community gardens (slightly "above" them are garages)
6. Shopping pavilons
7. Post office, with another shopping pavilon (due to a large ramp for post, it was used for decades by a furniture shop)
And the shot itself is taken from the top of church tower.

A lot of other facilities aren't mapped here or it would be impossible to even pin-poin them on this particular photo, but this is but a small part of the entire neighbourhood. The other shool had a swimming pool and there is also clinic right in the middle of the entire "estate".
And as you might notice, there are also some houses, mostly predating the construction of the entire lot (just like the church), while the entire city district was build as a suburbs, right next to the forest, but it was cheaper/better/more efficient to build blocks rather than 200 houses and run out of space and funds.

So yeah, so much for "depressing, dark and dirty commieblocks". In fact, the modern apartment areas are depressing, since they are all crammed together with no greenery or services around them - just one shitty building next to another.

depressing and will soon be full of niggers

I bet it would make a pretty efficient town/small city with Cities: Skylines. Have you tried to recreate your place in that game? Cause this looks dope as fuck and would be probably fun to pull in the game.

>Niggers
>In Poland

>poland
I mean you guys are pretty much niggers so he's not wrong.

ah, carry on

>trying to reinstall Cities Skylines now that the hype is over and the community is semi-dormant

Does anyone have a list of good mods? All mine are lost or out of date, last I remember there were two competing traffic AI improvements and a whole raft of other shit necessary to make the game playable.

There was a bit of issues with lights (and thus traffic), since C:S has some serious issues when 3 and more roads combine together and always puts light on them. While there is literally a single crossing with lights in the entire area, as most of it is a residential zone anyway.

But due to the way how C:S scale things, by the time I've did half of the neighbourhood, it felt like I was doing some major metropolitan area and not, you know, a suburb.

Literally wait for a month longer.
Next week they are going to release new DLC finally fixing traffic in-game, then it will be another 2 weeks for patching and then play.

May be of an interest to some: I work as a town planner IRL. If anyone has any questions I'll do my best to answer.

>Next week they are going to release new DLC finally fixing traffic in-game

>release game with fucked up traffic AI
>fix it with DLC

Oy vey

>tfw nothing will ever really satisfy my autism

There's just not enough systems and games are too easy.

>Community gardens
Is there ANY city building games that has those things? I mean it would be a REALLY fun feature to have and yet there is not a single game with those.

Want to hear the better part?
They've hired for the project all the guys who did traffic mods and basically implemented mods on official level.

But crafty merchant jokes aside, this will finally fix traffic without any need for modding and provide nice help tools for road building.

Let's start with most obvious question:
European, American or other?
Because this is going to SERIOUSLY affect everything else.

SimCity 4 has community gardens, but it's a building with as much functionality as a paved square of land. What do you expect from it, anyway?

British and Irish planning systems. There are five separate planning systems in Great Britain and Ireland alone.

The rest of Europe varies as well. Mostly due to different political structures.

I studied the US system as a part of my Masters (which is generally required to go anywhere in Planning). I can't work as a planner in the USA due to different ethics etc.

>Enjoy city management
>Enjoy expanding city that is already built
>Hate building from the ground up

So... why Brits are so fucking obsessed with building suburbs around roundabouts? Looks like crap, is not exactly the most efficient use of land and yet all your new housing developments are done "in circles"
Wtf?!
Some tax cut for making it like that or something?

Mod SC4D. If there's a more robust city builder out there, please tell me.

Play one of the preset cities in SimCity

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Most of the depressive commieblock pics are from Siberia or Urals, where those commieblocks were built literally almost on top of the factories

It's just not enough man. Just not complex enough.

Even Factorio feels simple

SimCity 4 seems to be the last good game before everything got simplified to hell.

Put landmark in one place, surround it with grid and break this grid when needed. If you look at most cities the oldest part has vertically and horizontally placed roads and later on as city expands, it grows around places of interest like stadium/university/etc. in irregular pattern.

Play spacechem.

To explain you have to really zoom all the way out. Planning has two levels. Central and local. Central government will generally be involved with all the planning law and regional strategies. Also it will have many different sections like a water/road service. Most roads i.e. motorways and most public roads are actually not dealt with by planning authorities in local government. They are dealt with by the central government road service. They don't need approval for these roads and are essentially statutory undertakers which basically means that they are awarded rights to do things.

For example, all advertisements aka signage in Britain and Ireland require approval from a planning authority. But road signs do not because they have basically permitted development rights to do that. It would clog up the whole system with so many applications for road signage.

To answer your question about roundabouts. I work in the public sector. Nearly every design decision is made privately by property developers and they basically design so they can fit as many housing units into a site as possible because more houses equals more money. There are generally policy requirements for open space as apart of these developments so it isn't just a sea of concrete so they provide green space and landscaping to improve the amenity of the area.

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Already beat it.

DW? Dominions IV? Dorffort? Aurora?

Additionally, most roundabouts are located at the edge of settlements. That is where most land is zoned for housing.

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Not much new ideas can be used for this genre. So far we just play with balancing stats for desired class of buildings, managing resources required to build structures or optimising the flow of agents. You can mix and match them as much as you like, but in the end unless someone will figure out new methods, everyting will feel repetitive.

Cities: Skylines, if you remove the fucking "unlocking" mechanics via mods, is pretty fun. Sure, requires fuckload of modding to be fun-fun, but it's the closest thing to "real" SC5

Tried to get into DF but failed. I think I'll wait until Toady actually fixes the Interface and once Stonsesense is fully interactive.

It's all just subprocesses that need to be optimized. Even if it sates my autism for a bit, it quickly becomes boring.

Are you guys the reason every new street and building in Britain is SHIT?

youtube.com/watch?v=EfbJgzt7-E0
0 A.D is pretty good, and it's free

Any of the cities skylines dlc wothwhile? Picked up the base game yesterday as it was on sale. I've already invested several hours into it.

It's also AoE clone (and pretty bad if you ask me) and not a city builder.

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If Caesar 3 just had roadblockers like Pharaoh en Empire it would have been GOAT of all time.

Pirate DLCs.
No, honestly, this is standard procedure for Paradox games - buy baseline game, pirate DLCs, because most of them exist solely to "fix" things "broken" in vanilla game.
It's like those anons described with the upcoming traffic-related DLC:

couldn't you limit the amount of blocks by hand painting areas to reduce suburb blocks from forming? I remember SimsCity4 having a mechanic where if you formed a 3x2 area it could become a rich house.

>Just make up that people think commie blocks are bad because of a lack of amenities
Nice strawman.

What's more amazing is nobody modded that for past 20 years.
I mean how hard it is to add this thing, if 95% of game operations and data is in notepad files?

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I've never been happy with any of the city builders I've ever found.

I hate walkers from Caesar and how they make you build cities in unconnected blocks.

Tropico seems actually broken, because I keep building houses that even poor people can afford right next to work places and people still choose to live in a shack one or two squares over rather than fill up the house.

Banished seems like what I want at first, but there's a severe lack of content that gives it no replayability. In the span of a couple days I got everything there is to get out of the game.

Anno isn't what I want because of the whole island-based nature of everything, and so many aspects of building construction, resource production, resource use, etc, just don't sit right with me.

I'm not really interested in the ones based on modern cities, I want something more low-level where producing the food the people will eat, etc, is critical to gameplay.

Not him, but I also don't understand the whole "commie blocks are bad" meme, so enlighten us all

>hurr i'm too intelligent for citybuilders
>but df interface is too arcane, waiting to be fixed :^)
wat did he mean by this?

>Tropico seems actually broken, because I keep building houses that even poor people can afford right next to work places and people still choose to live in a shack one or two squares over rather than fill up the house.
Which means you are charging too much/not paying them enough. The easiest way of solving this and few other issues in Tropico, especially 3 and 4, is to build tenement early on and make it free from any charge. Then just kick out people who earn 10 or 15, and in the end you are with elderly. unemployed and similar living there, thus greatly decreasing shack issues.

For Banished - Colonial Charter.

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Tropico works completely on cost of living, not ease of access. If you want poor/low wage workers living somewhere, reduce the rent on the buildings.

I see. In that case which are worth my time in downloading? Night life looks decent, sbow stuff doesn't look too interesting

Ever looked at The Settlers? Specifically the sixth one, it has the comfiest town-building of any game i've played.

Yes and no.

Again, as mentioned above, nearly all new buildings require approval from planning.

Here is generally what happens:

There is land zoned in a plan which will have been created over a 5-10 year period, went through long periods of research, public consultation and independent examinations. There are three states of any land. Let's use housing as an example. If it zoned as housing then that is where the government wants housing and housing is acceptable there. In England, generally, there are a lot of green belts around settlements so that cities can't sprawl out into the countryside, housing is not acceptable there, there are many other zonings where housing is also not acceptable. Then you have land with no zoning, housing can be approved there under policy.

So why does everything look like shit? Well the design of the buildings are down to private architects. There is a public and private interest in planning. The planning authority determines applications that are submitted. Design is completely subjective and there is no way to really make a decision on design. It is up to the decision maker. In most cases, a property developer will design like 5 different house types for a housing estate. The quality of the design depends on how much money they want to spend on it in terms of materials etc. That has nothing really to do with planning. All we assess the building on is whether it impacts on the character of an area. This usually only applies in the countryside where obviously a building which looks very urban will not be acceptable. There are different design elements of buildings which will determine this e.g. roof type, materials, fenestration, height, size of the building etc.

So tl;dr planning facilitates development, there is a presumption in favour of development but the actual design is mostly the fault of the private interests i.e. developers and architects.

So all games have to appeal to me for some reason?

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (pic)
Zeus and Posidion were all great games .
I still load them up every now and then
I wish they had a true successor

There are so many factors that go into the design and layout of housing that I could not cover it all. In a nutshell it's:

Developers try to fit as many units as possible into an area and design the properties so they are desirable. More units = more money.

Role of the planning service: To make sure that they don't basically create a slum with too many properties on the site. That the design does not impact on the existing surroundings and that it doesn't look too stupid. At the end of the day, the facade of the building is what the homeowner/developer wants. It's very site specific as well. Some design elements are acceptable in some places and not in others. This could even be the difference between two streets.

what's the best, most recent, city building game?

CitiesXL?

Hell is other people, and the first circle of hell is a building of high population density surrounded by public grassland.

All of them, really. It's a package deal. Don't think about DLCs like some extra content in Paradox games. Instead, treat them as a baseline game elements sold separately.
And wait for the traffic DLC, because it solves 90% of issues the game has at this point, so MAYBE (but that's just wishful thinking) the game will regain at least part of it's hype.
You know, how EU3 turned into a great game after In Nomine and then went into being best EU game ever with Heir To The Throne expansion. But for first 3 or so years it sucked so bad it was unplayable.

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Explain. I live in London and I haven't seen a single new street or building in nearly three decades.

... because?

anno 1404

What Council area do you live in London if you don't mind me asking?

Best out of new ones - Cities: Skylines.
It's still subpar to SC4 in many aspects, but at least doesn't outright blow and is moddable, so go figure.

>Which means you are charging too much/not paying them enough.
Except that's completely fucking wrong.

I built farm blocks with about 4 farms on each side of a road with country houses all along the road, inbetween the road and the farms. I ALWAYS maxed out the budget of the farms, everyone working there had wealth of well-off or rich. I used a housing edict to lower the required wealth of the country houses to poor despite also having a maxed budget.

Despite all there, there was still a plethora of shacks surrounding those farms, filled with people who were well-off or rich because they were working at the farms, while the country houses just a few tiles away had many open spaces for families.

It's broken. Any other reason they would be living in shacks over the country houses, such as wanting to be close to services like clinics, don't fucking apply because the country houses are no further away than the shacks.

>For Banished - Colonial Charter.
I dislike mods in general, but I actually did try this mod when I was playing Banished. You know what I didn't like about it? No fucking support to find out what any of the changes or additions to the game do.

For example, one of my issues with the original game was the lack of variety of housing. CC addressed this by adding several new types of housing.

But CC also made it so that the new housing had a limit to the size of the family which could live in it, which I knew because of the in-game descriptions of the houses. But the old housing didn't say anything about a limit on family size. Does it have a limit that isn't mentioned or is it still the same? If it's the same, why would you disincentivize me from using all the new buildings by putting this arbitrary restriction on them?

There were so many other things added, but I couldn't figure out what they did or how they worked because the in-game help wasn't updated for all the mod-only stuff, and there was no wiki or anything online.

I hate Cities: Skylines because they refuse to allow people to raise the object limit so I always hit the limit in my games and I can't expand my city anymore even though I can run it fucking fine. But no, 'it has to run on the minimum specs we published 3 fucking years ago'. Fuck those hair dyed Scandinavian pieces of shit, luckily the odds of a muslim driving a truck into one of their family members is getting higher every day.

I always liked commie blocks. Feels kind of cozy. I guess it's nostalgia since I used to live in Eastern Europe for a while, but still. Those identical multicoloured buildings in UK for example are full retard for me.

>He didn't delate shacks
You've just confirmed yourself as an idiot.
People won't move from shacks on their own in 9 out of 10 times. Just delate shacks and make sure you have nearby free spot in some building. They will move on their own.
Also, build military base and kick all soldiers there, along with their families. It's one of the best investments in game, as it provides you with healthcare, high living quality, empties quite a few apartments in other buildings and your soldiers are more loyal and better trained. What to ask more?

>Banished
Like I've said, you are retarded and only didding yourself deeper. Your excuses are so lame and just plain lazy you sound like a trendemous casual who wants to play one of the least causal game type in existence.

>Open properties
>Edit 3 values
>...
>PROFIT!

What about Lethis?

London is so densely populated that you'll never see new roads in central London.

Like you can see certain policies in place for London here (this is the real plan).

A lot of restrictions on building heights around St. Pauls since it's such a focal point for the city.

All the brown is conservation area, so all buildings will have to be sympathetic to the characters of those areas. If the buildings are all listed, they can't even be demolished without permission - imagine in London they would all be old buildings.

never played it

>>He didn't delate shacks
I did that, too. They kept cropping back up.
>You've just confirmed yourself as an idiot.
Says the guy who can't spell delete.

City region I'm working on at the moment. Shame I started it before adding more mods desu. I still think simcity 4 is the best out there.

As soon as a brownie wants to build a Mosque in those areas they'll approve it in no time, don't kid yourself

Well, it depends where exactly they build it.

Any decision can be legally challenged - by anyone.

If you can't deal with population in Tropico - you are retarded. Forrest Gump retarded

I'm not asking that, I'm asking what's his problem with new buildings. I'm sure everybody in London knows all about building problems in London, the newspapers never shut up about it.

The EU is forcing them to take in niggers unfortunately

>build more aqufiers

Fair enough. I'm not familiar with issues in London.

I imagine most new buildings would be resisted due to the historic core.

Clockwork empires? Basically creating a colony all over again, but the settlers have their life outside of executing your orders. Little lovecraftian elements with cultists and such.

youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

>EU
>forcing Poland
>to take niggers
Sup Forums as always is bending reality with it's mind

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Anyone here /artistically impaired/?

I know how to do it, I've seen a trillion of pictures, yet I can't make an aesthetic city no matter how many times I retry. I always fuck it up with the roads, or the rails, or anything in general.

Just like IRL
once people build their shanty settlements you gotta break their shit down to send them to new housing.

That's me. I only know symmetry and straight lines etc.

Symetry and straight lines are GOAT.

Emperor is still my favorite.

That's why I love playing SC4 - I can make everything in grid and it WORKS. Other games demand that you apply some covoluted solutions and if not, then fuck you and your traffic.

>Best music
>Best visuals
>Best campaigns
>Best walker management
>Best production chains
>Random seed maps
>Multiplayer
What to ask more?

If you mean SC3/4, the basic idea (at least for suburbs) is to go ahead and build a supergrid, but space the streets far apart. Then go random with the roads within the streets.