I know people who have a 90 minute commute, this is longer than an entire Skyline's citizen's day. I can't find specific numbers, but if a citizen doesn't reach their destination in just a few minutes they are either reset or may lose that job (or both). A real world city may have 50x more people going to and from work than Cities Skylines, but they also have 50x longer to get there. A big part of why traffic is so much worse than real life is the time scale. The top post on the game's subreddit is a guide by a traffic engineer and their city has an amaaaaaziiiing traffic flow.īut secondly, it's still a game and so it can't perfectly capture real life. Adding well timed traffic lights has turned huge messes of downtown areas of mine into very reasonable looking traffic, without needing to rework the roads or buildings. The UI is a bit clunky, but you can set individual turning lane rules, timed traffic and pedestrian crossing lights (even timing rules that span several intersections!). Traffic Manager: President Edition is an amazing overhaul of this system. This is made worse by citizens just being shitty drivers (even more so than reality) and not following traffic logic very well (merging across 3 lanes at the last second over and over!) and the inability to customize intersections. One bad driver merging can back up literally thousands of other vehicles, which propagates it's way to other exits and intersections, just like real life. The first and most significant, is simply people suck at planning traffic layouts, and this game is much more punishing than other city builders exactly because it simulates every citizen. It's still the best current city builder, doubly so with mods. General consensus though is that Skylines prioritizes "pretty" over "realism", which I'd agree is generally true. You can get better experiences by adding mods like "Rush Hour", "Realistic Population and Consumption", and "Traffic Manager: President Edition". Some mods might as well be requirements for playing the game, and TMPE is one of them. The first thing that jumped out at me is that the vanilla AI just doesn't know how to handle traffic lights. Here's a video I stumbled on comparing the vanilla traffic AI with the TMPE AI across various different types of intersections: It's not a problem with the agent system it's a problem with poor AI programming. But Skylines has several different street types built in, and the game itself uses a more flexible layout engine that doesn't penalize you for doing curves and diagonals.Īlso, the traffic AI is just poorly coded, and there are mods to replace it with better, such as Traffic Manager: President Edition. The SimCity games never really cared much for letting you build different types of streets (SC4 came close, but not to the extent of Skylines), and the game itself made you place everything on a grid where every tile matters, diagonals are a waste of space, and curves are close to impossible. If you set up a proper street hierarchy with arterials, collectors, and local streets, you'll have much better traffic flow, just like in real life. There's a reason why real downtown areas are horribly congested. I think that has more to do with the fact that the game is developed by a European studio (Finnish, IIRC), and in Europe even smaller cities have decent mass transit systems, so it makes perfect sense to them that you should put mass transit in a city of 50K.Įdit to add: Doing a SimCity-style fixed grid layout with two-lane roads is a disaster in Skylines because it's a disaster in real life. for example, who does a city of 50K need a mass transit system?
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