CITY TIPS: Reviewing a Frozen City of 350,000 Cims by an Expert Player!

hello welcome back to city planner plays city tips where i take a look at your cities and give you tips on how to improve them it's an opportunity for the community to come together and share ideas and not just look at my builds and it's a chance for you to get a city planner city score what this isn't is an opportunity for negativity or roasting i'm here to help not poke fun at you or make anyone uncomfortable this should be a relaxing experience we get constructive feedback from me that you could use to improve your city so today we are looking at a build from alpha dragon this is a north county white emerald city on the map frozen shire and they have identified themselves as an expert city skylines player so we're gonna take a look today and find out if they are right so they provided a brief story and i'm gonna read the story to you in just a moment but what i want to do first is go over how i review the cities so first of all i'll give you a score for your map selection two i'll give you a score for your city layout and relay configuration three i will give you a score for your land use planning four i'll give you a score for your transit network five i will give you a score for your city services six your overall aesthetics of your city and then i will give you an overall city planner city score uh so as i mentioned alpha dragon provided a bit of a backstory for this build which i absolutely love i've asked for that it's you know some people give it to me some people don't but alpha dragon gave me an excellent backstory so here goes a frigid metropolis developed after large deposits of ore were discovered developed around the grid the city tries to maximize the heat island effect to keep the place somewhat habitable the county has a few city centers located at key points where resources were discovered parks are scarce given how cold it is but the few staples that we have here are major attractions we even managed zoo in a prestigious engineering school here you'd be lucky to see a day above freezing here but that's part of the charm constant winter winter wonderland whether you like it or not one way the city offsets its costs is through an extensive toll network tolling was done here as an alternative to a high roadway tax and to allow for such high standards of roads uh so i can't wait to dig into this and dive in and see what this looks like and give this builder a score okay so the first thing we're going to review is the map and this is frozen shire which is the map that came with the snowfall dlc and in my opinion this is an absolutely wonderful map not only are all resources available which if we take a look at this you can see we have deposits of oil ore and even some someplace some fertile land where you could grow some crops which they are doing so they're really taking advantage of everything that that's at their disposal things are available in the map is is absolutely wonderful one of the things that i think is really unique about this map is that even though it's a map that came with the vanilla version of the game it really is well designed to take advantage of the 81 tile mod which you can tell that this builder has done and i just really appreciate the way that they have uh taken every square into this map and done something with it it's not surprising this uh this particular builder has been working on this map for two to three years and wow i'm really glad they shared it with us uh so this builder seems to have taken uh the time to really maximize the use of this map and picked a map that will fulfill their vision so as a result i'm giving them a score of five out of five for their map selection so next let's take a look at roadway configuration and city layout and this is an area where i i'm really impressed with the map so we that the way that they've designed on this map so first of all you can see that they're really going up and and building in and up to the map edges uh where there are mountains and it looks very natural and well laid out i really like what they've done here they've really done a good job respecting roadway hierarchy and we're going to dive into that in a minute but one of the reasons that it's so impressive is there's no transit in the city and we take a look at our traffic flow we're at 80 percent wow so that is really impressive to have a city with this amount of development no transit 80 traffic flow and one of the things that's really impressive here is they have tolls all over the place so they have this level of traffic flow in a city with this many tolls very impressive now one of the things that i i will critique a bit is that we lack connectivity in certain areas so if we take a look right here for instance if you are coming from this spot and trying to make your way over here you gotta funnel over this bridge right here which is a local bridge and i guess that's a local connection but this is really likely gonna function as something of a higher class let's take a look you can see what this what this means so we've got this bridge and there's a lot of utilization on here this is really functioning kind of as a collector so this is maybe where roadway hierarchy has deviated from just a bit and one of the critiques i have is that where we do have higher classification roads to make these connections there are also interchanges so that's a bit problematic in my opinion so i'd like to see some more higher classification connections and maybe a few more of them that said the builder was very specific in their notes to me stating that they did this on purpose they wanted to to really emulate a true city and this is what happens sometimes you have highways acting as significant barriers and that is certainly a problem here so as a car dependent city to maintain this level of traffic flow they've really had it had to add a lot of detail and look at some of the detail that they've added here this roundabout is absolutely stunning they've gone through add their lane markings and everything is crisp everything is beautiful they've accommodated pedestrians through this roundabout it's a long bridge maybe longer than i would have liked i would have potentially added that right here or something of that nature maybe right here to have a shorter crossing rather than to have this extensive network there's no way in in the world that two bridges would be built it looks neat but it's just not not not reasonable so they have gone through and will lighten this up so it's easier to see lane markings everywhere everywhere and uh you know making biffa happy we have a lane mathematics being adhered to which is awesome uh because that means that you have better traffic flow now one of the things i if when i go into tmpe that you can notice we'll turn on our lane connectors and you'll see that they've had to use these in a couple of places let's not see it right now i saw it earlier but there are a couple places yeah where they where they've had to kind of cheese things to make it work i've got to zoom in a little bit here let's see if i can find one of these places okay so here's a good example through the tolls they've got a lot of a lot of uh lane correction going on which is totally fine but it does lead to some issues in certain areas where you've got the ai it doesn't really know what to do because of all of these connectors and it's trying to transition before and that can be kind of a trap i don't know that there's many ways to fix this short of getting people out of their cars and you know this is just kind of one of those issues that you can see in the game interestingly we have the ability to make a choice here and i think it's creating some issues here's a spot where maybe lane mathematics should have been adhered to a little closer and we could have added a lane here to to make this line up rather than having the switching occurring here because you're giving people options and they're options that are confusing them so just that something to think about there in general though really a great job with the transportation network there are a couple of things where you know maybe you could have toned it down just a bit i mean there's a lot going on here but really beautiful job look at this just absolutely splendid the way that they've gone through and given every area in here the the attention it deserves just really splendid work i could look at this roadway network all day they've done so much they it's not just the roadway network they've gone through and made targeted pedestrian connections to make sure that people can get out of their cars uh if it if they if they so desire in this frigid uh climate uh negative negative one fahrenheit that is that is brutal that is that is wisconsin in january some of the other things i really like look at this just their use of of some of these assets that have they have these walls here just really makes it look natural and appropriate and i just love it and they've really stuck to their guns with the use of tolls excellent excellent work excellent work so for roadway network and overall city configuration i think that they've done an absolutely excellent job there's a story here with the roadway network the roadway network follows proper hierarchy even though there's not a lot of connections in some areas i think that it makes sense with the story that they're trying to tell and truthfully in some of the areas i think it makes perfect sense you don't want to overdo it on bridges i've seen cities bridge bridge there's a lot of bridges here but not an overwhelming number uh it makes sense to me and because of that i'm going to give them a score of 4.5 out of 5 for roadway configuration and city layout next we're going to take a look at the land use planning of the city so one of the things that immediately jumped out to me is that there is a very good mix of uses so looking right here for instance we see that we have low density residential we have a commercial corridor this corridor right here provides connectivity to another part of the city great access to these these uses and we have a mix we have commercial offices high density residential low density here there is a logical progression to it there is there are very few kind of random skyscrapers and when they are there they make sense there are little activity nodes i'm really impressed with what they did here and you can even explain some of the decisions that they made here so right here for instance this is a very residential area there are very few jobs in this area but there is a commercial corridor here one of the interesting things is because there aren't jobs here you see that everyone is funneling down this one road to get to the highway totally logical but they've made this a community it's not just a big suburb that that you have to drive everywhere for everything there is a little bit of neighborhood charm here and uh when you get into the denser parts of the city what i really love here is that you see that single blocks first of all they put parking in which is kind of kind of neat it makes it feel a little bit more reasonable reasonable realistic and i appreciate that but what i like to see and what they are showing here is you have office commercial residential in close proximity to one another and just that isn't that's an impressive mix and it's not just this one area i could pick any area because they've done this everywhere so i just wow wow excellent work here they've even buffered some of these more noxious uses from the residential now one of the things that i struggled with and this is going to become a theme a little bit through here and this this could be me this could be the builder it could be the mod set that they have we'll see that there are some polluting uses that are in close proximity to residential uses and i can't tell how bad the ground pollution is because there's some sort of conflict here so i don't want to dock them too much for that because it could be something that's lost in translation you know between them sending the save to me or the mod set but that said there are still some issues that i see here we have these uses that we'll take a look very high polluting use right here and there's a residential use right here that's very close and that pattern exists in a few different places right here we've got some snow dumps and an incinerator and some residential uses right here i would not want to live right here there's a highway there are uh in industrial uses right here there's an incinerator so to me this is not a very appropriate place for residential uses it does happen though and because the builder is trying to provide a realistic city layout i get it so my main concern is that there is something that is preventing this from having issues and everyone's happy it's it's almost completely leveled up and that to me is not at all reasonable so that's the one thing i'm going to dock points for in this beyond that i think that they've done an excellent job really making sure that density is where it's appropriate they have a high-rise ban throughout most of the city except for where they want to target their density and they transition their use as well you see that we have some some mid-rise here low rise here uh the interesting thing is that the coast is not the focal point of this build uh the coast is where you have your industry so as a result it makes sense to not make this your high value uh residential area with a bunch of you know skyscrapers poking out from there the river is the focal point of this build it's where all of the transportation corridors come together as a result that's where you have your density it tells the story and it makes a ton of sense so as a result i'm going to give this builder 4.5 or 4 out of 5 for their land use planning and that again is just the result of the polluting uses near the residential uses so next we are going to take a look at the transit planning for this city and i mentioned that there are no transit services available here so it's hard to give a score for this one truthfully because there it's not there's not even a passenger rail line that i could find we have lots of rail but it's you know freight stations and and things of that nature the only transit so to speak that we have is a passenger airport which for some reason for me is not working incredibly well i'm not sure if it was working better for the builder 21 passengers not not not outstanding that said it is well designed uh but uh to me that's just kind of a part of the the normal transportation network so i am not going to give a score for transit score of zero out of five okay next up we are going to take a look at city services so that is everything from electricity availability and uh you know the the overall utilities to the schools police departments and all of that so we'll start out with electricity and you can see that they're greatly over producing which is not a problem i think that's fine particularly in a winter build where you have uh you have to worry about heating so i think it makes perfect sense and one of the things that you'll notice right off the bat is that things are spread out and that is genius i love that they've done this and then you'll notice some other things that they've done that are really creative right here for instance they have an electrical relay station they brought this asset into the build and to add some realism and i love that so the interesting thing about the electrical realize it produces five megawatts of power so they've used it in targeted areas uh so that they don't have to have lines all over the place so really creative use of that asset they've used windmills as kind of a feature of the city which i really love so right here for instance they have these windmills and it's not just you know we need power they've actually made it a feature of the city and an attractive thing that you can you can feel proud of that said it would create some noise pollution so that's i guess something to be aware of and i'm not sure how effective these would be i guess very effective but but it would certainly create some noise pollution but even at that just to take something that's utilitarian and and turn it into something that is you know absolutely a feature of the city and the build is really impressive so we also have a couple other things to look at because this is a winter build so they have water and heat that they need to maintain so we have these these heat pipes all over the place these are not underneath the road where they belong so that is one thing that i i take a bit of issue with it's fine you know i understand that at some points you might just want to cover everything and conserve your nodes particularly when you have a population of almost 350 000 sims but to me that breaks from the immersion just a bit so that's something i will be taking about a half a point off for so just something to be aware of there if you want to really create an immersive city put your water pipes underneath the road where they belong but even at that even with this particular service everything is really spread out so if they were to play with natural disasters there is very little a chance that the city would break because they've made a massive water complex and when you take a look at this we'll take a look at their heating they're over producing here as well so their heating system is not going to take their power system offline at night for instance so we can take a look at that now we'll make it night everything is just fine uh they're not running into problems with their heat they're not running into problems with their power they've taken great care to make sure that the build is running effectively so very impressed with their utilities with the exception of the water pipes on the road where they belong so utilities are a feature here how cool is that how cool is that so let's take a look at the other city services you see that they have ample death care ample health care throughout the entire city and it's spread out well throughout the entire build very impressed by that and you know even though not every place is within green in this coverage area there's still not many problems there are some six citizens and that is because of the distance so that would be something if i were looking at ways to improve this build this is probably one of the places that i would do it because there are pockets of areas where you know having a hospital right here and i don't know if the appropriateness of this based on the surrounding land uses but i know that there is a demand for some sort of healthcare service in this area same over here there's a lot of clinics but there are areas where the coverage could be better and maybe it would help take take care of some of these six citizens my sneaking suspicion is that the six citizens are because of the pollution so we take a look at our death care we've got a lot of deceased citizens too now these numbers are alarming when i take a look at it but one of the reasons they're so alarming is the city is so huge so when i see that there's 1 400 deceased people i freak out but this is the result of having a massive massive massive city now they do rely heavily on cemeteries now one of the problems with that is that you know these fill up so that's something that i would keep in mind they're probably going through here and doing quite a bit of manual emptying to make this work they do have you know pretty significant crematorium capacity but but yeah they're cemetery capacities absolutely through the roof and as a result they have them all over the place so that would be a concern to me we take a look at our child health care or child care you know good coverage there you see these peppered throughout the entire community they've really focused on it which is awesome and eldercare as well they've they've placed an emphasis on that so great job fire coverage the hazard is a little bit high here so that's something that you know i could see that they might want to focus a bit more on they do have coverage throughout the entire build uh for the most part but there are areas where it's not great and when we take a look at our land uses over here thankfully it's not industrial or anything that's super flammable but it you know this would be an area of concern uh the other thing is with the lack of connectivity in this area local connectivity it would take a while for the fire trucks to actually get here so that would be a bit of a concern for me and i'm not seeing any fire watch towers in some of these areas that have a lot of trees so to me that's another concern i'd probably want to go through and add these that said i'm not sure that the builder has natural disasters so that might be one of the reasons that those are not present next we'll take a look at our police coverage the crime rate is low that is the mixture of two things one blanketing the entire map with uh police stations there are a couple areas where maybe the coverage is lacking a bit but they have a policy applied to the old the entire map that is really helpful here and that is they have the recreational use policy which uh slightly reduced crime rate hugely increased police budget and then harsh prison sentences so you know people aren't going to commit crimes here so that is something that they have they've really focused on they have plenty of capacity lots of detained criminals and a low crime rate for a city of this size there are a couple areas where there are issues but you know that's going to be in the in the densest of areas and even there it's not that bad it's just a couple of couple of buildings with issues so uh in general impressive impressive job there uh one of the places where there are issues is with trash collection so our the garbage capacity in this city the processing status is is on the border right now so i guess i have a bit of a concern with that what we see here is that this is one of the few city services that's not quite as well spread out it's really there's a big concentration of facilities here one up here a couple of them over here but there are areas there there's just swaths of property that are all dependent upon these larger services so as a result of that what we're gonna see and this right here is actually a snow dump now that i look at it so i believe nope that's a landfill so uh what what that ultimately means is that you're going to have these facilities going all over the map to actually be able to to serve the entire community and you see it right there this one landfill they're driving all over the place and that is just you know an issue with the number of waste management sites throughout the city so a couple of issues here that i that i see um one of the things that i've struggled to find a place to discuss those is the city budget and i think that this is probably as good a place as any to discuss it you'll notice that i have unlimited money on and that's because the bank balance is really an issue so when i open up the economy menu you'll notice that for a city of this size it's not really generating any taxes and i tried to fix this i'm not sure if it's the mod list if it's something wrong with the build something is off and as a result it's not collecting enough tax revenues from uh the citizens here even though it's everything's cranked up to 12. so as a result it's bleeding money and there are certain areas where it's bleeding money that you know are not very very helpful so one of them uh you know we're we're seeing this huge amount of money being spent on the rail network it's helpful and that's keeping traffic off the road i would say that that the amount of money spent on on on the airports relative to the amount of utilization is probably not great but you know kind of is what it is uh with the story of this build they are making money from their campuses they're making money from uh their uh their industries it's just that these zoned properties for some reason are not working even their roadway budget they're making quite a bit from their tolls so it's really unfortunate that i can't see this work appropriately because i'm guessing that if the tax revenues were right this would be working so that's the one place where i will dock a point as well so for city services i am getting a score of 3.5 out of 5 and that mainly is because of the money and then again some of the issues with the city services that were relatively minor all things considered so next we're going to take a look at the unique features of the build and the creator mentioned that there are not a lot of parks in this particular city but i think that they're wrong and they if we take a quick look you're gonna probably agree with me so let's turn everything on and we'll take a look so right here we've got a massive park we've got another park right here we've got a nature reserve right here we've got a trade school over there it's not a park but we've got a national park right here a nature reserve right here like yeah they've done a pretty good job and even when we take a look at all these little parks all over the place excellent job having coverage with that and having some unique parks we also have these industry areas we have an ore extraction site and we take a look at it it's really well laid out we don't see a lot of traffic around here and one of the things i really love is this oil industry that they created over here a little bit of a concern that it's a cul-de-sac so when we take a look there's one way in one way out pretty impressive though that this thing is not breaking down with only one way in and out a little sad that they have to drive through this residential neighborhood to get to this industry area but i think one of the reasons this functions so well is they've really relied on rail to to make this industry area work so good job there they've also created a trade school campus over here that is kind of tucked away well designed and well utilized so the coverage for education i didn't really go over this uh in the previous section but it's it's pretty good the only place it's not completely covered i guess is university it's kind of borderline right there that totally fits the character the build this is kind of a blue collar town and they've made a beautiful little trade school campus here let's let's let's play with the light a bit let's admire this just a little bit some lights on nice little campus parking here well it's a it's it's a compact campus on the edge of town wow what a nice little campus i mentioned previously that they have taken some of their utilities turned it into a park and made it an amenity how cool is that what a great idea so this is not a park that you know has a gate or anything but they've made it into an area where people could come and check it out to make it a feature at the area and where they have included parks even when they're small they work really well so this park right here not huge or decent size and it fits in the area really well now i don't know if we'd see rhinos in a place this cold my guess is we wouldn't but the game allows it and they're taking advantage same with lions again maybe not something that they would love but that's fine one of the things that i absolutely love they've done about this that they've done with this build we take a look at our unique buildings here they they don't have a lot of them and to me that makes perfect sense so looking at our unique buildings right here we have an aviation club we have a uh a frozen mountain here uh a frozen fountain here very cool over here i believe this is a winter market which makes total sense in this build and then downtown really we we don't have all that many which i think is fine one of the things that i do critique in some builds is kind of the over reliance on unique buildings so when we take a look at these right here we have the transit tower aquarium the science center an academic library and really that's that's kind of about it so not a lot over here at ice hockey arena and to me that's fine the result of this is that when we look at our land values they're not over inflated anywhere let's get all this stuff off we see that the land values are highest downtown they taper off over here that means that we have some affordable housing in different parts of the city so there are stories being told here by the unique building placement and i really really appreciate that i think that they've done a great job the assets are appropriate they make sense in terms of the scale so we don't have random big buildings popping up throughout the throughout the area the trade school is great everything is unique and well integrated and as a result for unique features i'm going to give them a score of 4.5 out of 5. okay and our final category is aesthetics and i've already mentioned it this builder has spent a lot of time making sure that their their build is incredibly detailed and this really extends to all aspects of the build they've done a lot of work here so they've done things like add this key wall here to make this topography work for them i really like that that's really really great they've done a lot of other things that i think are really creative as well so i mentioned and i'll keep coming back to it i love that they made the utilities a feature here um the topography is mostly respected there are some places where maybe they ignored it i want to show you the effect of this so to me this reminds me of san francisco where they this this city was built on a grid someone uh didn't really care about the the terrain they said we're building this grid here because that is what we're doing and truthfully it doesn't look that bad i think it looks really good truthfully so they're building on this hill it's very steep i wouldn't want to drive on this in the winter imagine going down this hill and it's a little bit slick you're gonna slide down and command right into this building but i guess there's a tree blocking you so you know that that's a thing but in general they've done a good job respecting the terrain now i in the very beginning i brought up this view where we can see that they've built up to the mountains and not any further and i love that they they kind of have this road ringing this to prevent themselves from overdoing it and building into the hills too much i think that is wonderful one of the places i was particularly impressed so they have key walls along most of the waterways except for here along the river they stopped and now i think there's a real tendency for some builders myself included to encroach upon the waterway and make some pretty unsafe uh building decisions they haven't done that at all here and i want to show you the level of restraint so if we turn on our grid here you can see right here there's a parking lot they didn't pull it too far down they stopped or they terraformed one of the two but it makes perfect sense they could have zoned right here and had a real sharp cliff they decided not to that is wonderful so i really really appreciate what they've done here with respecting the terrain in this particular way i think that they've done a good job there generally there are just a couple of areas where again the terrain they've kind of just gritted over it that is fairly fairly common so i think that this is an absolutely stunningly beautiful build they've brought in some unique assets man they've just done a good job they've done a really good job with the overall aesthetic even things like this uh this is this is an oil refinery in oil industry and i believe if we take a look it is a five-star industry so it is productive and yet it's still absolutely beautiful this wouldn't be something that i would look at coming into the city go ugh it's still not bad to look at which is really really impressive so for overall aesthetics i'm going to give this builder a score of 4.5 out of 5. and you know some of this again goes back to the broadway network network done a great job with it just overall great job so that leaves us with one thing left to do we need to give them a city planner city score and we tally all of the things together and we get a score of 26 out of 35. it is absolutely masterful i i've got to say it i this this kind of build i'm going to turn this off so we can admire it let's take it tonight as well this build just wow you can tell that that they've put two to three years into this this uh i think it was planner pete the discord server that once told me that uh his wife refers to his uh city as his banzai tree and this is clearly this person's bonsai tree it is their labor of love their passion it is what they uh they do to unwind on a day they put great a great deal of thought and effort into this build and it really shows every square inch of this map has detail and thought one of the things i don't think i've really highlighted much are the districting so there are districts literally everywhere they've they've they've really it's gone above and beyond i really really love this build they've done a great job and i really appreciate that they've taken the time to show us their bill because it's really outstanding uh so i want to thank uh give give one more round of applause everyone to uh alpha dragon or alpha dragon for showing us this build if you want to take a look at this there's going to be a link to the map down in the description they're obviously an expert builder they've spent a lot of time with the game and mastered it the only thing i'd really love to see here would be some transit i would expect that in a city like this we would see bus service at a minimum i mean this is way too many people to not have any transit service at all you don't need subways you don't need rail you don't need trams you don't need you know metro nothing you could just have bus service and that would be reasonable to me that's the one major critique of this build that i would love to see so if the builder decides to add that i would be really happy to take a look at this again but excellent job again if you want to submit your city uh there is a link in the description to the submittal form and i do have a number of them but when things jump out to me like this city did you get picked so thank you so much for joining me i hope that you enjoyed this let's give them a brief city tour take care bye-bye so oh you

Channel: City Planner Plays

Views: 109,704

Rating: 4.9504871 out of 5

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 winter, cities skylines winter maps, cities skylines winter theme

Id: HcYoOOXNgvU

Length: 38min 46sec (2326 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 09 2021