CITY TIPS: Giving Tips on How to Improve a City in between Seven Lakes

[Music] hello welcome back to city planner plays city tips where i review your cities and give you tips on how to improve them today we are looking at artificial ideas city of large shores this is a patron and i thank you for your support really means a lot to me so this map is the seven lakes map that came out with the mass transit dlc and the build is completely vanilla with a couple of dlcs included artificial idea indicated that their skill level is intermediate and they provided a story for the build the town was built on the back of logging which grew into a thriving forestry industry after growing a successful fishing industry as well the city became fairly wealthy and began to look towards importing goods and tourists through a point the sightseeing district were specifically designed to bring in scores of tourism dollars downtown has become a dense grid of high rises interconnected by metro and bus lines but still experiencing significant gridlock at critical locations so hopefully i can help diagnose some of those issues today and figure out how we can fix them so let's take a moment to talk about what this is this is an opportunity for me to review your cities and give you tips on how to improve them it's an opportunity for the community to share ideas rather than just look at my builds and it's a chance to get a city planner city score what this isn't is an opportunity for negativity or roasting remember i'm here to help not poke fun at you or make you feel uncomfortable and everyone in the comments i i hope you show the same level of respect they've taken the time to show us their build this should be a relaxing experience where you get constructive feedback that you could use to improve your city so without any further ado let's look at how i score the cities we're going to take a look at the map the city layout and roadway configuration land use planning transit city services unique features aesthetics and then we will give a city planner city score so without any further ado let's hop right in first up let's take a look at the map so this city like i mentioned was built on the seven lakes map which was part of the mass transit dlc and i'm gonna come out and say it i love this map this reminds me of the madison area which is built on five major major lakes with numerous small ones around it geography like this means that your city has great potential but also a significantly constrained geography and you can see that right here lots of options for where to build your city but the geography is a significant constraint so that's something to keep in mind with this map in the game this is a heavily forested map which is different than madison we have a lot of agriculture around us there's also a couple of pockets if we pop in here and we take a look where you'll see that there's an ore potential a potential for a small or industry and obviously there's a ton of water so that that's an opportunity on this map as well there's only one highway connection which is a unique constraint this map that i actually kind of love there are also two railway connections one coming from the south and another coming from the east so that should weigh heavily on where you place your industries and because there are two railway connections it means that you could import resources if needed to create other industries so this map if we take a look at the terrain is mostly flat but similar to madison if you look out in the distance there are hills which means that there are some opportunities for some really striking views if you plan your city appropriately you could have views of all the lakes and then all of the hills in the background there's also the opportunity for a ship route if we take a look we pop in here you'll see that we actually have one ship area we also have the ability to make airlines as well so some real potential on this map now one of the unique constraints like i mentioned is the lakes themselves there are opportunities to come through and have your transportation corridors come through these little isthmuses that are created throughout the map there was one here that was moved and we removed and we will we will get into that a little bit later on in the video but it creates a really unique opportunity to either set up transportation networks in the water or to route all of your transportation through those corridors so if you like this map and you want to know more about it i would highly recommend you check out lee hawkins more money less traffic series 2 where he builds on this map and explains just what opportunities this map has because there's really a lot here if you take advantage of it so for this particular map i'm gonna give it a score of five out of five i love this map i think there's so much potential here and it's so unique next up we're gonna review the city layout and roadway configuration so if we pop right in here you can see that the principles of roadway hierarchy have for the most part been relatively respected and i appreciate that they've done a good job right here we've got our arterial branching off into three collectors that distribute traffic throughout the city and you'll see that throughout this there aren't they're not over building their collector network uh there are a number of connections that have been made throughout the city and uh we're not funneling traffic all that much there's a couple of places where that's occurring and i'll highlight those and ways to fix it that said there are a couple of questionable decisions that i'm going to highlight uh first and foremost there's a lack of connectivity generally in this city you can see it right here as we come through off of our highway which i really love that they didn't take this highway and just bulldoze it right through the city i think it's very appropriate to just stop it and let your city form around a local roadway network particularly there's only one one highway why why get overly uh highway centric but right here you see that we have this road which has one connection here a bridge over it here another connection here and a roundabout to go south so i think this is a traffic management idea but i question just a bit so i appreciate that there are pedestrian connections through here but we should really look at our block lengths so if we take a look at this so we'll pop through here this is 1457 feet so i think a good way of figuring out your block lengths is to actually compare them to real places so here's a graphic of a variety of american grids and their block lengths and what you'll see is that none of the grids have blocks that are this long now i know this is an extreme example but i think the reason why this is important is new york city though it's very walkable one of the reasons it's walkable is there are cut throughs between these blocks because the block lengths are insane and where there are no cut throughs it's not walkable for everybody so that's that's a limitation of that it's a reason why you need mass transit in new york to be successful and i would think that the block lengths actually make transit new york city more successful but it's not just there we'll look at some other block links right here you could see that we have a block now there is a path through here and a couple things popped up that that happens from time to time easy enough to fix we can just de-zone that but if we take a look this block length here is 1400 or 1041 feet again that is longer than new york city and what this means is that when we pop in here and we take a look at where people are going they're not really walking on these paths and uh honestly the walking path the trips aren't great generally you're not even able to get a block up now part of that is that because this is vanilla there's not a great way to and i'll fix this real quick there's not a great way to make this mid-block crossing happen now the one way that i would do it is if you have just normal roads here you could upgrade just the segment and maybe you don't love where it's coming you could fix that by you know deleting and trying to create your own nodes so we we could certainly get creative about that but even having this here you're gonna start to see people cross because i've created some crossings if you want this to look a little bit more natural you could certainly extend that to the end of the block really it's it's your call there but that's the only way that you're gonna create reasonable mid-block crossings this one just happened to be perfect the node must be in just the right spot for these couple of blocks this one's not so not not great but what that's going to do is if we pop in here we can see that there's going to be more north-south trips through here so that's really valuable and that means that more people are going to be more willing to be pedestrians so that is is is a bit of an issue in in my opinion the other thing is we've just we're trying to solve problems that we've created so right here we've added a bridge to address the lack of connectivity and that to me that's creating more problems and it's solving it'd be better just to have the connection here i understand there's a metro station here and maybe the reason this bridge exists is because at one point there were just too many people crossing the road backing up traffic but that's because there's a lack of options so what you're seeing is everyone's coming through this corridor and there's no way to get off so they're all forced to come down here disperse up and around and i bet you this bears out if we take a look at the trips on here yeah you can see that everyone's coming up through here and then they have to disperse left or right or take one of these few entrances in here tons of traffic look at all of this traffic on this road this road right here is functioning as an arterial and that's why it's totally backed up i'm gonna venture to guess that if we just add a couple of connections through here traffic flow will probably improve some i'm gonna get rid of this bridge too and i feel like i'm a bull going through a china shop as i just knock all this stuff down we'll do a little bit of vanilla traffic management as well now i do have traffic manager installed and i could certainly use that but i'm gonna i'm gonna keep this true to the vision of the author and uh you know only use the junctions that are available to us so if we come through here let's speed this up for a minute and see what happens so we just got traffic to reach 80 by adding additional connectivity so that's just dispersing the traffic from this road into other locations and if we had even more connectivity throughout the city you'd see even more of this this is a two-lane road so this is really functioning as a local collector whereas i look at this as like a major collector bordering an arterial so i wouldn't i wouldn't worry about all the connectivity through here it's a good thing so that's one thing that i would i would really focus on so some other transportation and city configuration issues so this bridge right here to me seems forced i don't know why this was built but i don't think it would be built in reality so for the time being that would mean that this area lacks a bit of roadway connectivity until you're able to purchase more tiles it's important to realize that the the builder only has four tiles unlocked right now so they have more tiles to work with if they're gonna stick with the nine and if they wanted a road going all the way around the lake that's certainly a possibility in the future but right now it's not that big of a deal that this isn't there in fact i think it's more of a problem than a solution so i would much rather see a small bridge going to this island if you if you really need that bridge or you know something like that rather than this big bridge across carrying a bunch of traffic which brings us to our rail network so this is is a kind of combination land use transportation issue and that is we've got our rail network coming in from the south and the east and we've got our industry over here which means that this bridge is necessary because of our land use decisions so we've got all of this freight traffic that needs to get to the industry area and vice versa so if we take a look at this and i'll get into the correct view we look at this you can see that this freight traffic is coming all over the place so and a lot of it's going across this bridge meaning it's going through these neighborhoods making them loud so you can see that right there as well this is a loud road not one that you want to live next to so this neighborhood cypress glen right here in general would be a loud neighborhood because even though there are sound walls here you've got you've got a highway right here and then really a collector that's functioning as an arterial with freight traffic going right by it another collector right here with freight traffic coming from the fishing industry just a lot of traffic a lot of heavy traffic going by this now to the author's credit they have upgraded some of these roads and they've given some buffering in space and their land uses are helping things we are at least if we have all of these high traffic corridors having uses on there that that makes sense with that traffic so on the rail side of things one more thing that i need to point out so there's some things going on here with this rail network this did not come with the map like this this is something that the creator put in and it's just far too too sharp now i think i know why they did it and i i understand so this is a passenger train and i've ridden an amtrak i actually rode the amtrak from denver to uh to san francisco to a wedding once and one of the things that was great about that is you got some really striking views unfortunately the speed going through the mountains is not great and you have a lot of train track just like this where it's curvy and windy and what you see is the trains have to slow down to make it around all these angles so i try to straighten some of these out and maybe even moreover ask if this is the best location for the cargo train terminal and the train metro hub there might be a better location and uh you know you wouldn't have to have this over here necessarily if your industry were in a different spot but we'll get to that in the next section uh my my biggest concern uh right here is the fairies so there's a very big emphasis on fairies to the point that we've actually taken this lake and joined it up with this lake and i just don't think it makes sense for a city of this size so from an aesthetic thing it's it's great but the utilization low the cost of this project would be very high um so i i'm not sure that that makes a ton of sense and now you're paying for bridging and fairies uh so the the other thing uh to mention is the pedestrian control so i to me the pedestrian network here tells a story this was maybe at one point not a highway but instead a local road or uh maybe even just a traditional intersection at one point and there was so much pedestrian traffic coming through here that it created massive gridlock so the creator decided to build this pedestrian network to alleviate some of that and i think it's just overdone if you want to have a big pedestrian network like this i'd recommend you know starting this a little bit closer so rather than having these ramps come right up people can cross streets it's certainly safer this way but this would be incredibly expensive and to me it just looks overdone you also end up with an amount of pedestrian traffic in some of these areas that doesn't necessarily make sense for what it is and i think it it covers up for some of the the landis decisions so rather than having this in a dense area it's kind of off to the side with big pedestrian paths so i would i would definitely reconsider this area think about these pedestrian paths see if you can shorten them up if you want to keep the large pedestrian paths that's certainly an option as well it is heartening to see all of the pedestrian activity though that is absolutely excellent and the final thing i want to touch on is the traffic controls very pleased to see the way that they've gone through and very clearly thought about the priority of the roads here so what i'm seeing is that they're looking at the traffic and then coming back in and adding junctions where they make sense we're prioritizing our main roads we're signalizing where our main roads come together it's just thoughtful roadway uh roadway planning this right here i'm glad to see that there are stop signs here because this distance between the roundabout and this local road connection are inadequate otherwise this would be very very dangerous this reality i would expect to see lots of crashes here thankfully not reality so we're not going to see the crashes so with that roadway configuration and layout lots of good things a couple of things that could use a little bit of rethinking and retweaking and in general rather than planning the roadway network this way where it seems like the roadway network came first and the city came second i would really think about the land and plan the roadway network around the land um so this is a good example of that it's just there's no it's not really telling me a story it's telling me um that it's kind of a suburban layout along the coast rather than utilizing the coast and making the most of the of the coastline what we're doing is kind of just creating a an interesting visually interesting layout but it's not maximizing the coast and i don't know that we're maximizing the waterfront with this roadway network so for this i'm going to get a score of 2.5 out of 5. next up is land use planning and this is some this is one of the things that the the map creator really excelled at i really like what they're doing here so first of all what i see is a really nice mix of uses and uses that are logically placed so we've got along our major thoroughfares you don't really see much residential which is good because those are not really but there's not really a great they don't really flow well together and as a result these these corridors have a lot of noise a lot of activity and that's that doesn't work well with residential properties it does work really well with commercial properties they need that visibility to be successful and that's what they're getting when you put them on a collector or an arterial the other thing that i see is that employment uses like these offices are right along these roads as well and buffering from this residential so very good nice to see them back to back there's no big monolithics uh monoliths in terms of zoning uh there are there is a lot of single family but that's okay one of the things that i like the most is what they've done with their heights so what you can see here is it's very clear to see that they have a height restriction in this area right here and i guarantee that if i pop in here and take a look we're gonna see under policies there is a high-rise ban right here that high-rise ban is gone so they've they have this corridor along the main drag coming in and it's it's kind of like wilshire boulevard in in la where you have a corridor of high rises and opens up into the downtown area i love that that is really thoughtful in terms of the way that they're terracing this and uh you know transitioning between the building heights that would help with shadows that would help with views and generally it would make the place feel more inviting so what i do not like as much as that it's very condensed so i mentioned that this is four tiles so what you're seeing is that it's just a couple blocks away between the densest of the dense and the lowest of the low density and same thing over here it's a block separation between high rises and forestry industry so i would love to see this city sprawl out a bit so i don't mean let's have suburban sprawl forever you could have urban neighborhoods that spread out quite a ways and i'd love to see some of these industries have room to breathe and expand they don't necessarily need to be this close to the downtown area that said it does fit within the narrative of what they were saying maybe the maybe the bigger critique is that these high-rises maybe just aren't warranted just yet and if if there wasn't the focus on the high-rises you could spread things out just a little bit more uh so in general um i i like the way that they've laid things out i did mention earlier that i do question the location of the industry so the main reason for that and so i think that the location of the industry tells me a story the map creator wanted the industry to be close to the highway and that makes sense on most maps but because there's only one highway inlet outlet i think it actually makes more sense to locate the industry near the rail that's historically where it would have been located and on a map like this if you wanted to be able to cut in and combine these lakes and tell a story floating logs down down the river that's that that's something that you would change the lakes for uh you'd create a lake for that even so i could see the industry area being really successful over here having great access to both of these rail networks without a big extension and then giving the city proper room to spread out this way and and this way so that that's something that i i would definitely reconsider but in general lots of good stuff happening here and for land use planning i'm going to give them a score of 3.5 out of 5. okay so next up we're taking a look at transit and there is a lot going on in terms of transit here so let's hop in and take a look so the utilization for the transit network for a city of this size so we've got about 35 34 and a half thousand residents just have 3 000 resident trips per week a little under a thousand uh tourist trips that's pretty darn impressive uh so the bus network in this community is phenomenal so let's take a look at this i'll get this out of the way let's close this down a little bit what you'll see is that there's been a great deal of attention paid to the bus network so we've got all of our lines named we've got counter-clockwise and clockwise routes their system is logically laid out and in general i like what they've done the only critique i have of the bus network is that there are not transfer opportunities you're forcing people to walk a block or two potentially not the end of the world but it's something that could be improved like for this line right here having some interface between this downtown line would be helpful otherwise you're really only circulating people through the downtown area maybe from this metro station and maybe that's that's the way that they've designed it i just think that you know having opportunities to not force a transfer between the bus metro bus would be good being able to go from bus to bus would be very very helpful so just uh one consideration there another thing that i noticed is that there is a great deal of utilization of metros so let's take a look at that right now so we've got three lines coming through here so we looked at this earlier let's pull this over here so this is the train metro hub and i think this is maybe the asset that spurred the entire metro system could be wrong about that but right here what we see is that our metro system has two lines that come and meet here i guess there's a third line let's see we've got oh yeah a third line branching off from here that goes all the way up to the shore site district which is you know a really high density district along this area which is an interesting decision i'm not sure how i feel about this but if it's going to exist i'm happy to see that it has high capacity transit that's a city of this size it's probably a little bit too much and the utilization of this tells me a story and that story is that people are using it because there aren't other ways to get around so i i talked a little bit about this our traffic flow has improved after we made those couple of couple of changes but our pedestrian experience in this community is not great and uh that is partially because we had a whole bunch of paths and no way to cross the road so obviously we could go into traffic manager okay so we could certainly come in here add a node and then come through and you know we could we could add a signal here then either through traffic manager or honestly we could even do this i believe node controller we could go ahead and switch this crossing there we go so node controller could help us with this and there we go we are adding the ability to cross this would really improve things and i wonder my curiosity if we added a whole bunch of crossings if this wouldn't ultimately end up leading to lower transit utilization which might sound crazy to you but the reality is right now with walking being such a precarious option in this city it would be faster to take transit even for short trips so i think that if we went through and shortened the block lengths or added all of these pedestrian connections and you can see all the utilization that we're seeing now people are crossing left and right through here we added all of these i think what you see is a whole lot less transit utilization and that might decrease the need to actually have some of this high capacity transit so i would be very curious about that i could be wrong and i haven't added enough connections most likely through here to really fully test that but that would certainly be something i would be thinking about the other thing now that we've got the content creator packed so if we take a look at an individual line what we're seeing is that these vehicles are completely full before they get to one of these stops so they've had to increase the vehicle count now with these great high-capacity metros uh we have the ability to have 500 passengers in one of these uh one of these uh on one of these routes uh on each vehicle um uh thanks to biscuit for for putting those together in the content creator pack so this is something that if you're gonna do this and it's gonna be configured this way this is how i would solve it because ultimately that's that's the only way that you're gonna not have all that passing so that's that's a bit of an issue to me so i go through here i do that for all of these [Music] and ultimately that means you're gonna have less passing and you could probably have many fewer vehicles on here and save a little bit of money on that service so something to consider now finally i really want to take a look at the ferry system because what i'm seeing here is that we've got one route that has some passengers and that's this route that also has a metro going basically the same route and they're cannibalizing each other so to prioritize the ferries so much in this city and have the metro is probably a problem if you get rid of the metro this ferry is going to just go gangbusters so i would choose one or the other i certainly understand the the the fairy for the aesthetic purposes but that would certainly be a consideration uh the ferries don't carry a lot that's one of the unfortunate things there's no other vehicle you'd have to see if you could pick one up from the workshop or something with an advanced vehicle selector but without that to me it just even though we're seeing some utilization it's underutilized and not really worth the cost so uh and this is the most successful line that's the other thing to keep in mind the other lines that we have we have one over here that's going to the fishing industry downtown it's not really doing much of anything at all we're seeing one passenger on a ferry that line will be shut down so fast so that's uh i i would generally look at this city and ask does it just make more sense at this size at this population at this density to really focus on walking and uh the bus service and you know waiting for higher capacity transit till to a future a future date and time it's just a little bit too much right now that said it's still a really fantastic transit network to see that kind of utilization of city this size is fantastic and as a result i'm gonna give them a score of four out of five so next up we're gonna take a look at city services so i'm gonna go right down the list and we'll see how things look so first of all let's start with our utilities and what you can see is that we are really producing some power and that is great we have overhead i am a little dubious about using the lake for wind power i just don't know that i agree with that decision it impacts the views and it would be pretty unsightly and you have a view corridor right to it and from all the high rises you'd see that as well that said we're doing well there water we've got great water coverage i like that over here what we're seeing is a little utility campus starting to form we've got water coverage here we've got trash uh that's great and the one thing that i love and i'm gonna give a point for this is we've got an artful use of water pipes mastering water pipes underneath the road where they belong i will forgive this little island because look at some of these look at that that is that is good i like that this is a work of art so really really impressed with that uh that said one of the things i i thought was interesting is the water uh pumping system is really dispersed and i thought about that for a while and i actually agree with it so if you were to pump all from one leg what you're going to see is you're start draining the leg you're going to start to pull water out faster than the game can replenish it so that would be a problem so it's good that you know we've got water pumps here we've got water pumps here we've got water pumps here and here i just wonder if there's a way to clean it up a little bit that would be something i would think about or like this i really like using the water towers too i think that that makes some good sense uh but but the coverage is really good there uh if we take a look at our garbage capacity we uh we're doing pretty good there as well there are some problems with with picking up trash i think a lot of that has to do with the roadway network and the lack of connectivity and we could resolve some of that uh doing adding more connectivity like i mentioned i do question as well how dispersed the uh the trash collection is i don't think it needs to be this dispersed in a city this size so i would look to create a little campus here like you've done with the water i think it would look really neat i think it would feel more organic in a community of this size and as long as your roadway network issues are sorted out i think it would function really really well because you've done a great job with roadway hierarchy so next we need to take a look at some of our other city services like healthcare so the healthcare in this city i think is probably a little overdone and i think this has to do with the roadway network but you can't argue with the results 88 citizen health is excellent uh the the death care interestingly this has improved since i started up so death care there were a bunch of bodies piling up i think that the roadway connectivity we added through here has cut the number of deceased people waiting to be picked up in half so just showing how a little bit of roadway connectivity can really work wonders and i think that with a little bit more you you're perfect on your death care now child care and elder care are places where this build really excels so your child care 95 child health care really impressive elder care 92 lots of elder care facilities you know i i initially was thinking wow this is a lot but maybe it's not the life span is 83 years and this translates into supremely happy citizens everyone's loving life except for this person oh that's a commercial building they're not happy and we see that uh yeah there's not enough goods to sell that's again traffic problems so uh in general looking very good there now we move on to fire coverage so this number is lower than i think it should be so i believe that this person does not have the natural disasters dlc enabled now i have it so as a result you're gonna see the forest light up like i i don't know an apple it looks it's it's really really red uh the city itself is pretty good there are a couple of areas that aren't great um i think that they could there's a lot of fire departments and i i i'm thinking that this is again the lack of roadway connectivity because when we take a look at our police departments there's like nothing there's also not enough jail capacity and our crime weight rate's a little higher than it should be and our coverage just isn't good to me again that's roadway connectivity the roads even though i added those connections through here the police cars can't drive on those so if we were using the vanilla plus plus road pack and we had pedestrian roads through there that that would do the trick that would solve some of these issues because they can still drive on those so that might be something i would i would consider the other thing is just we've got our small police department so if we take a look right here in our downtown our densest part of the community we've got a little baby police station and then over here another little tiny one and we've got our main police department over by the theme park there's a lot of density here so that makes some sense but i would think that the downtown either should have this larger police station then i can always get these wrong police station police headquarters the police headquarters should be downtown with a police station over here or we need another police headquarters and that would solve everything and you could see if i go through and i add this it just kind of solves all the problems there are still a couple we don't have great coverage over here but we're we're in a much better place that also works to remedy our jail cell issues we could honestly probably use another police department over here that's a terrible location right on that collector but that that kind of blankets the city and coverage and hopefully gets uh the people out of the forestry main building that are apparently embezzling so i think that that uh is is one of the the bigger issues there uh so again water pipes masterfully placed coverage pretty good for almost everything really happy citizens that's super impressive and because of all of this i'm going to give them a 3.5 out of 5 for city services great job so next we're taking a look at unique features and unique features are things like buildings parks universities so things like this and things like this and also things like this so let's take a look so first of all i just want to really commend this author or this map creator on their restraint often you'll see that people are just really overdoing it on the unique buildings but right here you can see that there really aren't that many of them we've got the city arch we've got a statue the mall of moderation a boat museum a couple of taller buildings over here and then the museum of modern art and it's being used in a way that it really accentuates the coastline i love that use buildings purposefully use them in a way that they make sense rather than just using them as a way to boost land value and that's exactly what this person is doing so excellent job using the unique buildings now moving on to the the park life dlc is obviously in here and they have done a really nice job incorporating some of the features of that right here we've got some hot air balloon tours we've got a really nice theme park here and one of the things i love about the theme park is first of all it'd be visible from the downtown area kind of an advertisement for it visible from the transit another advertisement for this and then if you were up here you're at the top right here going down the roller coaster you have a view of all of the lakes and of downtown how cool is that now it's a little bit rough around the edges i think there's a couple of things that can be done to clean it up a little bit but in general i think it's well laid out it makes sense and i like that it's along the water i just wish that this power plant wasn't here that's it's like one of those things that uh because it's there it's what you would see it's what you'd focus it would be the the presence here you just kind of got a number of ugly buildings that are are facing this and if this is the tourism attraction i'd want it to be a little bit more um buffered from those sorts of uses uh the other thing there is transit here that makes it very successful i would love to see a little bit more work done with this particular pet crossing i don't know that a roundabout is the best choice of junction for here truthfully so i i think i know why it's here i think there were probably some issues when this collector was connected directly up to here that led to the roundabout going in but it's it's just kind of awkward to have um a roundabout with a use like this directly on it it's not i don't know that i've ever seen that you would definitely want to keep your land uses off from the roundabout and have some sort of access road to the roundabout that the landis itself is on so just a consideration there uh if you're going to have this this here i would i would make it not a roundabout and just make it a road i can't i can't upgrade that and i don't know that i have anarch i do i do so i would just formalize that as some sort of circular road and go ahead and just add a crossing there so now people could just skip this if they want and if they want to get here they can they have options now from a traffic standpoint this kind of stinks you could certainly prioritize that movement through here and hopefully that would improve things uh honestly it's probably just not the the best choice for this area but this is this is a way that you could handle it to make it a little bit more reasonable at least now this isn't a roundabout and you could have a land use on it so something that you could do not not a lot of great options here but i would certainly this i would get rid of that i i don't like that i think that it makes the park look a lot better not to have that too and you can clean up the fences a little bit so just a couple of things there and then i want to get on to what i really really love so i talked a little bit about this forestry industry this is artful i love it it's big it's doing a lot and it's it's it's really producing a lot as well so this industry is profitable uh and you can leave it just like this you're just producing logs and shipping it off somewhere else i like that if that's what the game plan is we do have the ability to ship it right here traffic flow not too bad there is a little bit of cheesing here but i'll allow it one of the ways if we take a look at the cheesing you can see in their junctions i've got a junction here to try to make that circular pattern happen i think that there's a more artful way of doing this but you can't argue with the results what we're seeing is that the traffic even though it's red it's flowing and that's ultimately what we want the traffic was getting really good now that we've made those couple of connections on the main drag so if you wanted to you could certainly what we're looking at here is we got 208 tons of raw forestry products being generated and most of that is just being outputted as raw forestry products so we have 25 tons being turned into plain timber and that 24 tons is worth more than 130 173 tons they were just dumping out as raw logs so just something to keep in mind your city's it's profitable most of the time this thing could be just printed money by turning some of these forestry products into finished goods or if you wanted to go the next step beyond that unique factory goods but even at that not every city has to do that you can be totally fine having your forestry industry just like this and i love that they've made sure that the trees inside their forestry industry line up with the trees and the map makes it feel so good and that's wonderful they've done a great job with that so uh in general uh for unique features i think that they've done a pretty darn good job and finally i want to highlight their fishing industry obviously this is a big part of what they're doing on this map and it's it's really really impressive it brings life into this water so this is the seven lakes map and you have made the lake a really big part of the community so that's really impressive if we take a look at our fishing routes you can see that they're just all over the place and that's great we're really taking advantage we can even extend this further if you're going to join these lakes up i'd love to see fishing routes going through there i'd love to see fishing routes on each of these lakes truthfully unless you're going to specify what the purpose of each of the lakes are it would really be a way to breathe even more light and life into this area so in general for unique features i think that they've done a lot i'm really impressed and i'm going to give them a score of 3.5 out of 5. and then finally we are going to take a look at city aesthetics so for aesthetics i i you know this is something that is really challenging when you're starting out with the game even at the intermittent you know intermediate level it can be challenging and there are some good things happening here that highlighted some of those things and there are some bad things happening here i'm going to highlight some of those as well so in general i think that they're well on their way they're taking a number of things and running with it that i really like i like that they're using fences here to to create a buffer to channelize some of their zoning and to create a nice ambiance here that's really great and there are little details like that throughout that said there are also a couple of small issues throughout that that kind of crop up things like jagged fences things that aren't quite as as clean as they could be uh right here there was a where a road necked down from a four lane to a two lane before entering this roundabout roundabout i turned that into a four lane just to to clean up the aesthetic of it and then there are things like all of these pads that look really nice but don't function as well as they should i really like a lot of things about this city but the aesthetics i think could use a little bit of work i didn't highlight the city park as much as i should have in the previous section this park has a lot going on it's it's a nice park and it's it really brings nature into the city but it also has some problems like this clinic seems to be dropped into the corner of it so there are small issues like that but my biggest issue with the entire build is the key walling i don't know if that's i don't know if i can use that as a verb but i'm going to anyway key walling so uh the key walls before i understood how to use them i avoided them and then once i understood it you just it's really hard to go back so if you're gonna have all of this stuff along the coast it's really nice to clean it up with a key wall so i'll show you what i mean so right here we've got this fishing island so we'll relocate this temporarily oh it wants to be on a roadside or a park there just go there for a minute so we could go ahead grab a key wall and start to clean this up a little bit and then you can move this right onto the key wall and it snaps so that can be really helpful now obviously i didn't do a great job with this ideally you know i could i could certainly be a movement master and and come through here and and do all of that and that's not really fair to to ask of them considering that they've built this vanilla but it's certainly something that with enough patience in vanilla and enough uh you know kind of fussing around with it you can do a lot of really neat stuff and make this look really nice and i think it really cleans up the aesthetic of the build so that is something that kind of throughout there are little key walls so i'd say either go with them or get rid of them and if you're gonna go with them you gotta use them all over the place so here in particular it would have really cleaned things up but i'm okay with it not having them as well uh it's just it's just it's kind of nice to see some consistency there um so there is a lot of detail in the neighborhoods in terms of uh pads and parks um and i i do see some some trees i don't know if they're snuck in there or not or that's that's the vanilla assets so it's just that the zoning happens to work for it lots of trees throughout the building the side to fill it in make it come to life so some good things there but i do think it's a little bit rough around the edges things like this pedestrian path so this is one of the places i'm gonna go a little bit lower um so again key walls i'd love to see a little bit more attention to some of the detail and uh you know even though there are things like that there are there are there's one thing i i just got to point out so i said that i disagreed with the functionality of this but i really love the idea of this train so i mentioned uh going to den going from denver to san francisco the views on this would be absolutely striking if there weren't the trees there or in places where there aren't so there are a couple of choices here that from an aesthetic standpoint are great function maybe not so great um but for this i think with some of the issues that i see in the build we're gonna have to give it a two out of five now you know what that means we need a quick drumroll because we are about to give the city planner city score and this city gets a score of 24 out of 35. and with that here is where the city lines up with the other cities that we've reviewed so it's it's got a middle of the pack but it's good and it's it's got good bones i think that with a little bit of tweaking you could see this really function well and really really shine and one of the things that i'm going to be doing with some of the builds that we've previously reviewed is just do a kind of a mini five minute review of the way that the creators have improved the maps after some of the feedback not just for myself but from the comments and i would absolutely invite this creator to come back with another map because i think i know that this map is a is old at this point i this this map was submitted last year but i just really love the seven lakes map i love what they've done and i wanted to take a look at it i would invite them to submit another map we'll see how they take the feedback and iterate and improve and with that one last thing that we've got to do is take a look around this map but before we do that if you like this video please hit the like button if you aren't subscribed please consider doing so and i really thank you for taking the time to watch this build with me let me know what you think of my score is it high enough is it too high are there things that you would like to see improved what did you love about this tell me what you loved about this because there is a lot to love here there's certainly some critiques uh but there's a lot to love here it's a really nice looking city like you take a look at night and good planning leads to an attractive city and they did a good job so let's have that quick city tour take care bye-bye [Music] [Applause] 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Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 73,515

Keywords: cities skylines, city builder, city planner plays cities skylines, city planner plays city builders, cities skylines tips, cities skylines city fix, cities skylines city tips, cities: skylines, cities skylines traffic, cities skylines transit tips, cities skylines zoning tips, city tips, tips city skylines, city skylines tips, cities skylines modded gameplay, cities skylines modded build, cities skylines modded maps, cities skylines downtown modded

Id: nylQkFYePh4

Length: 53min 35sec (3215 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 22 2022