I’m a hardcore fan of Cities Skylines 1 and have been playing it for several years now. One issue I have though is how I go about making a highway system. It seems so complex, I don’t understand how I can connect place to place in a reasonable way and I feel like the only proper way to do it is to ravage through regions of my city to make massive interchanges and efficient routes. My strategy as a result is just using 6 lane roads as my “highways” and kinda just avoiding the idea of highways altogether. I’m so bad at it that my idea of creating an on/offramp is retrofitting roundabouts. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this and also how to get my mind thinking of the right ways to make good highways.
the only proper way to do it is to ravage through regions of my city to make massive interchanges and efficient routes
Accurate simulation then.
You can avoid the need for highways if you minimize car use via pedestrian-only roads and tons of public transit.
In game however, you have the advantage of being able to know the future of tech unlocks and plan ahead a bit, so you can leave rights of way open for highways, metros, etc, later. You also have the vehicle cap, so practically if you properly understand the roadway mechanics you can trivially satisfy all possible demand, though I think planing metros and streetcars is more of the fun.
Or you could also do what I do and just play with unlock all and build it all at once, staring with the outlying towns and growing out words towards higher density block by block, but while less frustrating to do higher detail in said way it does also remove of the character of growing individual areas.
That image also makes me so sad.
I always go with the following strategy:
- Tons of public transport to ensure that local commute doesn’t have to rely on cars. In general, if I start to get the feeling that I need to place a highway in the city to solve the congestion problem, then I look what route is under served by public transport.
- Buses or trams (if I want to be fancy) for shorter routes, metro for longer distances.
- Passenger trains for inter-city and longest local transport.
- Cargo trains in industrial hubs, but careful with those, as they tend to generate a lot of traffic when trucks come and go. I usually do some sort of a traffic sponge (one-way road that leads only to the cargo train station) for trucks to wait without blocking other traffic.
- I use highways sparingly and only for longer distances, like connections between cities. I try to build them outside of the city, so it would also act as a bypass - the cars which are not going into my city but through it won’t generate traffic in the city itself this way.
- Tons of public transport to ensure that local commute doesn’t have to rely on cars. In general, if I start to get the feeling that I need to place a highway in the city to solve the congestion problem, then I look what route is under served by public transport.