MODS for REALISTIC Cities in Cities Skylines!

everybody welcome back to your tv i'm yumble and today i'd like to talk to you about a few mods that i use to change the way that i play city skylines so city skylines at its most basic is a really good traffic simulator and a really good city builder in a lot of ways but i've i've found that it's lacking in realism in terms of population uh realism in terms of how much traffic is generated uh it lacks a little realism in terms of transit and there's actually a few mods that we can use that fundamentally change the game and will also probably change the way you build and the decisions that you make and ultimately your city will look more life like it'll have a more realistic population number wise it'll have more realistic traffic and transit and probably even a more realistic skyline once we're done talking about it let me go into these three mods specifically and we'll we'll go over what they do for you the first mod that i want to talk about is a bit hard to understand i didn't get it at first it took me a little bit of time to see the value in it but it's called ricoh revisited now ricoh is your demand curve it's residential industrial commercial offices which is the demand curve down here the green blue orange the game comes with a bunch of unique buildings and there are also a bunch of downloadable unique buildings from the steam workshop but let's use the let's use this standard the hyper market may have come from a from a dlc but it's built into my game and i'm just gonna place it so this is a unique building which means that it essentially functions as a park right so this is an expansive retail facility retail facility to me screams commercial that says hey this is a commercial building i want commercial employees and commercial shoppers but the game reads this building as essentially a park because it is a unique building what if i wanted this to satisfy that that little commercial blip that we have there we need a little commercial in this city right so i'm gonna use what's called ploppable rico or excuse me rico revisited there's a few different ricoh mods but rico revisited appears right here the ricoh settings so i'm going to pause the game while we do this this is the hyper market this is the building what i want to do is add local so a local setting means that we are we are adding a rico setting on my machine my computer my copy of skylines only you can download buildings that have predetermined uh author settings here you can see the buildings that these are all all different type of buildings alphabetically that i have that are converted already or or to be converted but what i'd like to do is add a local setting because this one is not a ricoh building by default so it'll check that right box there i want this to be a commercial building i'd like it to be we'll say rico high density because it is kind of a shopping center uh commercial high it gives you all these options here you can convert it to leisure tourism uh whatever kind of thing you can think of we can do a whatever we want really but commercial high is most appropriate here i'm gonna go level two i don't really know if the level actually adjusts anything or or what have you but we're gonna go with that and this works in conjunction with another mod that we're gonna go over in just a minute but the final thing experimental don't let that scare you off for that this has never failed for me but i'd like to save and apply changes boom so now this has changed to level two let's see what that has done to this building let's see what that has actually changed it to so now this building is a high density commercial building that's what that blue means there it's going to employ 303 employees it is going to uh what else it's going to require deliveries it's going to have have people shopping there the parking lot is going to fill up because of the nature of that so now instead of being a park it is a it's a shopping center which is actually what it is think about that right that's what a trip um so unique buildings by default are parks and rico revisited lets you adjust and turn that that park into an actual functional building that requires things that's what that symbol means it requires goods right now so that's going to start getting deliveries from our from our highway system this is a new map that i'm building on twitch that's why it's so uh sparse right now but yeah so that is waiting for deliveries things will get passed now what if uh just a same question what if i have another building here which i do you know i'm prepared leah top plaza i downloaded this at some point and it'll go i haven't decided where it'll go it'll probably maybe it goes here maybe it goes somewhere in this area that's that's fine uh leah top plaza let's read the description and see what it is no description this could literally be whatever we want uh what what do we want from this maybe we want people living here maybe we want it to be offices i think people living here would be more appropriate as i see the residential demand going up incrementally so i'd like to take this building currently it's it's a unique building so it's just a park it's just essentially a really tall park and i'd like to build our skyline up using this asset and i want to convert it to residential using ricoh so we're going to add a local setting residential high density residential residential high yup it's all all that stuff this is a level three sure i don't know i i don't actually know if the level matters it could be a level four or level five but whatever we're going to do that and we are going to save and apply chains changes this is modified using another using another mod that we're going to go over in just a second which it detects called realistic population but we're going to save and apply changes now look at that it says 325 households live here that sounds that sounds like not enough probably but we can we can adjust that later using our realistic population menu if we have to um so yeah instead of this being a big park now it actually holds people now people can actually move in and live here and and it actually fills out the skyline whereas zoned buildings these this is what's called plopping we've plopped these buildings these are all custom hand designated hand-plopped buildings as opposed to zoning which is where you which is where you do oh i want to do residential here and it just builds up whatever whatever it wants to this is if you want to let's say have a building that has a bigger footprint so this looks like a five by five when it comes to squares two three four five six maybe it's seven by seven actually seven by seven footprint and much taller than any sort of zoned building if we go over here you'll see there are all kinds of zoned in uh zoned in suburban buildings and then these are the the um i forget what it's called the eco-friendly buildings what is this self-sufficient that's what it is self-sufficient buildings they only get so high you know this is a lower like a literally a shorter area so it's only going to get as tall as say this building here that's about as tall as it gets but if you look at the buildings that have plopped much taller much much taller so you can really fill out your skyline using this mod and actually have tall buildings i get asked that on stream a lot how is your city so tall where'd you get the tall buildings those are unique buildings that we converted using ploppable ricoh and just to finish out the idea here there's a tab down here you can see in the bottom right corner plopable ricoh once you've converted things they show up in these under these tabs where now all of a sudden many of them will be empty because i haven't done them all but now all of them show up here so once i've converted it and and saved a local setting of it leah top plaza right there here's another copy of it i'm not i'm not actually going to build another copy of it but yeah it's been converted so now every time i place it in the future we have a local setting that says hey this is a this is a commercial building and hey this is a residential building all that kind of stuff so those are preserved there forever one more one more thing to talk about let's say you have the move it mod which is not essential for this situation but let's say that you want to build kind of a cool um let's let's call it like a corner building i have these great assets that using ploppable ricoh i've converted them and now we can literally go in and i can say okay i have this 60 degree residential building and i've made a 60 degree corner there awesome so there's an example of a 60 degree building that is residential you'll notice it's floating because in real life in in the real world many cities have lower levels that are commercial this is called i would call this a mixed use building and that's in fact that's what the asset asset creator calls it as well it is a mixed use building and this is its companion so the upper level without a bottom is residential because that's where people live this is the commercial zone so we've got commercial built on the ground floor we've got it happens to be a subway starbucks the yumble yumble tv is not affiliated with any of these entities but yeah you can you can do that the corner is just a cool bonus like i can just take these buildings and snug them up with that 60 degree corner for realism there we go using move it and snapping and now we've got this cool 60 degree corner with a realistic kind of mixed use spread where it's got a bit of a bit of high density commercial at the bottom and then a bunch of residential say condos up top and that happened because of uh ploppable rico because of the ricoh settings re sorry i keep saying that word uh it's not ploppable rico anymore it's rico revisited so please get rico revisited it'll help you fill out your skyline let's go over a couple more mods that help influence this the second mod that i want to discuss with you is the one that i was implying just now realistic population so the way that city skylines works by default is is a bit disproportionate i would call it kind of arcade-ish arcade mode meaning that it's it balances the game in such a way that it it makes things that should be easy a little bit more difficult some things that are difficult a little bit easier what realistic population does is it takes into account the size of a given building and says how many how many people should occupy that building or how many jobs should it have or how many people should shop there so i have realistic population turned on this is a this is an asset that i've converted using ploppable ricoh just like we talked about in that last segment right there's this realistic population button which the menu it it doesn't really matter unless you want to change the settings but using the actual dimensions of this asset using the height and the number of floors and how far apart the floors are and things like that it calculates the area of the building scaffolding it takes all these things into account and it cranks out a number of jobs so you can see that this building which used to be a unique building that is now converted into into a ricoh building an office building is what i used it for you'll see that this has 2 368 workers so holy cow compared to the base game where the the biggest buildings usually have like i don't even remember anymore i've been using these settings for so long in the base game it's nowhere near 2000 like what maybe maybe 100 workers please put in the comments please remind me in vanilla skylines how the how the biggest buildings like a zoned office building if i were to zone office space here it would only open a certain amount of buildings we can we can let that grow if we want to to see what happens um but yeah so the same thing over here this building that's been converted to residential is using ploppable ricoh which we just spoke about and that's fine in conjunction with realistic population this says hey there's 870 homes here that's not 870 people that's 870 households so maybe it's 870 times three you know two adults and a kid that kind of thing times four at times so you can see the spread here it's it's uh 1300 plus another 300 plus 500 so many hundreds of people occupying this one building which is which makes the population more realistic right it makes this area this office building with all these units you can count the number of windows and number of offices and units and you don't have to but if you imagine a building like that in real life you might assume it has thousands of people working in it whereas this building here okay well realistic population is still turned on this is still not vanilla the beauty of it that's a good segue actually the beauty of it is that it still works on zoned buildings so any buildings that you zone in using the the typical zoning tools here right i used an office zoning to produce this building that produced 141 workers which is probably more realistic than whatever low value somebody in my chat once said that i think the highest that it'll go is like 32 people in the in these offices even the tall ones i'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it should be maybe 100 people but these buildings are still under the the rule of realistic populations so they're getting calculated though they are only level two at this point level three but then a taller building so these have like 40 people in them this one has 141 somehow that's i'm fine with that uh this building has 870 households thousands of employees which makes sense to me this hotel has 203 employees plausible based on the size of it right that's a that's a pretty big building this is a commercial building that holds 896 workers i don't think that that counts people shopping at it right there should be constant flow of people in and out based on who who needs to shop there and and whatnot this is still having trouble filling its workers but that's okay we'll build more houses eventually too but yeah using those two mods in conjunction with one another gets really in my opinion really great results and if you ever don't like the results if i ever wanted to reduce that number i don't think i'm actually going to do it right now but if i wanted to say 2 000 2 000 employees that's ridiculous i want i want only 1 000 employees i could fill in that field and click add custom settings and that would magically change that number when i reset the panel i didn't actually do it but you could change that to 1000 workers and boom that's that's really it so with that you get a more realistic feeling in the city those tall buildings are occupied the tall buildings have people working in them and they have energy and they have they're getting past people want to go there not just to visit it as a big park they want to go there to work and live and and shop etc and with that comes more traffic demand right that segues into the third mod pretty nicely we'll get to that in a second but now all of a sudden this place has 2 000 people working here they need to get there they there's many more people living in the city all of a sudden because of your big tall beautiful skyline that you're constructing with these mods they need a way to get there i'm going to talk about how getting there and getting home with that many people can be influenced using traffic manager so here we have an example of a shopping center and transit hub so the shopping center has some some usual suspects here in the u.s target bed bath and beyond best buy you know whatever people people shop there that's great i've also chosen to include parking you'll notice and cars are actually using the parking that's something else and then we've got this transit area here with with kind of a transit hub it's sort of a tram bus train metro all-in-one transit hub it's not detailed or anything but it works it's all it's all going and you might be wondering why did he do that much that much parking there's it doesn't really it's not necessary in city skylines because people will disappear their cars into what has been dubbed pocket cars it's when somebody drives up to a building watch watch in your city before you make the changes that i recommend you'll notice people drive up to the front door their car disappears a person spawns in its place and they walk into the building right that's that's not how it works in the real world and that's certainly not how it works when you're your 100 employee building your 106 employee your your 200 employee building that's that's just not real so in steps traffic manager president edition most people know this mod this is like a very popular very quite common mod to have and i do recommend it for a lot of reasons you can add yield signs you can turn off traffic lights you can add timed traffic lights or do lane connector designations or or lane arrows disable parking there's there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do with traffic manager but what i want to talk about is the much less discussed possibly the the more um not underground but i this wasn't immediately obvious to me so if you go to the traffic manager settings right now i'm just in the normal options menu of the game as you add mods they all populate right here i've got a bunch active right now don't worry about it traffic manager is the one we want what i'd like to do is show you some settings within traffic manager that can really help give you some knowledge about about your city a little knowledge you know we like that so you can affect the simulation accuracy which is fine the the this is the traffic simulation you know which is the main thing of the game you can do advanced vehicle ai for lane changing you can disable despawning which is really really cool if you've noticed that when cars get stuck in traffic they start to disappear over time this button is kind of a hard mode if you know what i mean in fact the whole all of the settings i'm giving you right now are kind of a city skylines hard mode for those of you who have beaten the vanilla game so many times and they want more of a challenge more of a realistic city cars don't despawn in real life so we will stop them from despawning so that that fire truck that was stuck in traffic doesn't disappear and try again only to get stuck we'll disable that that also means that your traffic jam isn't going to go away you're going to have to address it legitimately using legitimate road hierarchy and other means you know traffic manager that kind of thing within this same gameplay menu that's not even what i'm here to talk about i'm just passionate about it what i'm here to talk about is more realistic parking this changes everything sorry it took so long to get to the point but here it is more realistic parking we've used uh ricoh revisited so our buildings are host to hundreds if not thousands of extra people we've disabled despawning so that they can't disappear when they're in traffic now with more realistic parking they can't use pocket cars they have you have to address as a city planner and as a mayor or whatever role you want to take on in this game you have to address that they have to put their car somewhere so this actually gives you an extra menu it's kind of a hidden menu i had to read the wiki to understand this but ready we'll unpause the game i'm going to hit the traffic button and this is this is normal except the buildings have color now if i change that setting in fact i'll do it don't tempt me i'll do it if we disable more realistic parking now all of a sudden the buildings are are just white and we only see the roads this is the default status of of things realistic parking is not turned on so we just see the roads we just see this the spots where traffic is a bit heavier um we see the the spots you know an entrance to a parking lot or whatever or maybe the spot of a traffic jam fortunately there's no traffic jams here yet but if we readjust that setting and put it back to the way i had it it'll actually show how much parking your your buildings need so ready as i said the buildings turn red as they need extra parking so for example this is kind of orange looking that this we may need more parking in this area for that reason our sports stadium our track arena over here apparently doesn't have enough parking it's kind of orange this building with the giant parking garage next to it an empty parking lot it's a bit quirky don't don't quote me on you know the perfection of it but this building may require more parking now that we've added a commercial center right next to it you know so with that you start to think okay i can solve that problem by adding more parking lots and and things or better yet another secret menu this little demand curve here when you click transport click the transport button there's a demand button here and the buildings with extra demand do the same thing they turn red the city is is perfect this is a transit this is a transit miracle in fact because there's there's metro and there's uh monorail and there's trams and there's internal you know or external connections and a metro the metro runs all the way across so all of these buildings are are optimized as far as their transit potential right now maybe that's slightly orange and that's the outgoing demand if you switch view the incoming demand shows the buildings that have incoming transit needs so apparently this building has an incoming transit need so maybe we'll add a bus over here or something like that but yeah if you turn on realistic parking in the traffic manager settings it gives you all these extra things that you have to address so we've disabled the despawning the cars don't disappear we have to give them a parking lot so like this area here boom the parking garage doesn't have enough parking everything's maxed out here we we need more parking or less buildings i'm not going to do less buildings this area is coming along great so eventually maybe this gets swapped out for a better parking garage parking lot combo maybe we'll fix that in the future this area is clearly going to need some help and that's great and you can fix that by using transit and you can measure how well your transit's doing with with how green or how red the buildings are using the outgoing demand and the incoming demand so using all of these little tricks we've essentially just made the game a bit more realistic a bit more challenging and it forces you to make some decisions that you might not otherwise make like a parking garage or a parking lot where before those are kind of an eyesore i don't like to overdo them but for a city with this much traffic for a city with this many vehicles and and frankly this much population those become kind of necessary elements where you have to address the 2 000 people working in that office building and give them a parking garage or you have to add a monorail to get uptown you know you have to add some sort of system some sort of transit system to help address these problems that you've now introduced and all of these things together changes how the game looks it changes how the game works changes the nature of your skyline you make get you may want to get some taller buildings in there you may want to limit areas that you'd put a bunch of unique buildings in and maybe spread out the tall buildings depending on what the what the demand is calling for how much traffic those buildings are generating so yeah those are those are my tips about those three mods that's a realistic population traffic manager and ricoh revisited i'm going to link those in the in the description uh guys thanks for listening to everything i have to say about this it's taken me a long time to kind of decide how to play the game and that's ever evolving but right now these are the settings that i'm using to change the way that my cities function and to change how things look and to ultimately build a better skyline my name is yumble i stream on twitch a couple days a week i really can't thank you enough for subscribing here feel free to like the video feel free to check out the other videos uh whatever whatever you can do to help i really appreciate it and i really love making content for skylines so any support you give is is super appreciated i will absolutely see you in the next stream or the next video thank you for watching

Channel: YUMBLtv

Views: 83,838

Rating: 4.9691553 out of 5

Keywords: realistic population, traffic manager, RICO Revisited, city skylines, TMPE, Ploppable RICO

Id: xK7dNoTX75g

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021