This is such a lovely game, having a blast with it. I love being able to make roads the way I want, makes for interesting and creative cities. It's such a refreshing game and I haven't been addicted to something like it in quite a while.

LasTLiE

United States428 Posts

March 21 2015 14:34 GMT

#166

Been having quite a bit of fun with the game so far. Made one pretty plain city and then decided to try something odd for a new city, so I've been playing around with a hexgrid-based city. I'm up to about 40k population and things are going mostly smoothly. The traffic flow seems to be easier to manage than a square or rectangular grid city, although it has several disadvantages. Lots of space is going to waste in the middle of the hexes, due to the size of the hexes some of the larger public service buildings (university, hospital, etc) can only be placed at the very edge of the grid next to either a zone wall or a highway. The traffic for low-density areas is basically nonexistent and high-density areas only have troubles at connections to highways (or in my case bridges to other land masses).

This has become a pretty good game to play around with while listening to podcasts, so I imagine I'll be putting in quite a few hours in the coming weeks/months.

Ota Solgryn

Denmark2011 Posts

March 21 2015 18:08 GMT

#167

OK! Love this game... But; How do you solve that stupid start with the highway. I always get a big traffic bottleneck on the off ramp or close to it.
Started 4 cities now. And when I get close to 5000-10000 citizens there is a huge ass bottleneck. Sometimes even before....
Halp.

LasTLiE

United States428 Posts

March 21 2015 19:02 GMT

#168

A couple of tips to try and help traffic woes:

Destinations on left and right - If all the vehicles on a road are making right turns to get to where they're going, then they'll all get in the right-hand lane ASAP and cause a lot of congestion. Easiest way to fix this is just make sure that there are possible destinations on the left- and right-hand sides of a road. This is important to remember when first starting out an area and laying down roads and initial zoning, as it can be a real pain to fix later on if it's already become a problem.
City too densely packed - When you're starting out it can be tempting to just put everything right near the highway on/off area, but it's generally better to spread out some. If all the traffic going to Residential, Industrial, and Commercial has to use the same couple of roads, then there will inevitably be congestion there. spreading out and having multiple roads feeding in to areas can fix this.
Additional exits - If you own the tile with the actual highway on it, you can always just bulldoze some of the highway segments and add in another highway on/off template. Before you demolish anything though, make sure you've got the cash saved up for the template and a lot of road. This will become pretty important as your city gets bigger and you'll have lots of traffic going to lots of different areas.

If you post some screenshots of your cities, it'll be easier to give exact advise to fix your problems.

Don_Julio

2220 Posts

March 21 2015 20:10 GMT

#169

On March 22 2015 03:08 Ota Solgryn wrote:
OK! Love this game... But; How do you solve that stupid start with the highway. I always get a big traffic bottleneck on the off ramp or close to it.
Started 4 cities now. And when I get close to 5000-10000 citizens there is a huge ass bottleneck. Sometimes even before....
Halp.

A roundabout will serve you well early on. Plan ahead to expand the highway. Get a dedicated highway exit for your industrial area.

DannyJ

United States5110 Posts

March 22 2015 20:10 GMT

#170

I keep having dreams about traffic congestion...

I haven't used it yet but there seems to be a mod out now that lets you remove stop lights in intersections. I hope it really works.

MrCon

France29748 Posts

March 22 2015 21:17 GMT

#171

You can also do it the "legit" way

[image loading]

Gorsameth

Netherlands22190 Posts

March 22 2015 21:20 GMT

#172

On March 23 2015 06:17 MrCon wrote:
You can also do it the "legit" way

Not really. Only 2 lane roads (and highways) do not create traffic lights when roads join them.
At some point your going to have roads lead to your 6way which will create traffic lights

Mysticesper

United States1183 Posts

March 22 2015 21:46 GMT

#173

This is what illustrates my frustration with traffic AI -- not evening the load on the lanes they can take, despite having two right turn lanes onto a two-way road, they all still pile up on one lane.
[image loading]

Also things like this happen in certain cases when the lane load balancing just doesn't occur:
[image loading]

Though going back to a previous image, this certainly fixed the latter issue alternating between highway and 6 lane, so it forces right turns and cars don't switch lanes till they get to their turnoff, and they slowly merge one by one as they progress down.

ticklishmusic

United States15977 Posts

March 23 2015 00:35 GMT

#174

Yeah, the traffic AI is really bad. 6 lane roads are almost useless since only one lane gets used, unless you do some pretty crazy shenanigans to convince them to use all of them.

I also wish there was an option to zone service buildings, so like a crematorium would only send hearses within a certain area. The way it works now makes traffic so much worse, like I get a fire truck in my residential district to go like 4 squares over to put out a fire in my industrial area, and by the time it gets there the building has burned down.

Ota Solgryn

Denmark2011 Posts

March 23 2015 13:48 GMT

#175

The more I read about this game and the more I play I have come to the conclusion that this game is actually a traffic sim.
The rest is just there to make it pretty. But still, it's kind of fun.

Plansix

United States60190 Posts

March 23 2015 13:54 GMT

#176

On March 23 2015 22:48 Ota Solgryn wrote:
The more I read about this game and the more I play I have come to the conclusion that this game is actually a traffic sim.
The rest is just there to make it pretty. But still, it's kind of fun.

To be fair, a lot of city planning is about getting shit in and out of the city, including people. But it would be nice if they expanded on the other aspects of the game. But I look at the game as a model train simulator where is also simulates car, plane and subways.

QuanticHawk

United States32130 Posts

March 23 2015 14:04 GMT

#177

I finally broke and bought it... and it chugs on my damn comp

. I really only toyed with it for like 20 min and it crashed. But obviously Im gonna drop all the settings and try again. But in that limited time it looked friggin awesome.

Dangermousecatdog

United Kingdom7084 Posts

March 23 2015 14:11 GMT

#178

More like a traffic sim that doesn't work properly The traffic logic is so very bad and makes no sense.

GrandInquisitor

New York City13113 Posts

March 23 2015 14:12 GMT

#179

On March 23 2015 23:04 QuanticHawk wrote:
I finally broke and bought it... and it chugs on my damn comp

. I really only toyed with it for like 20 min and it crashed. But obviously Im gonna drop all the settings and try again. But in that limited time it looked friggin awesome.

Are you using a laptop? A lot of people report problems where their computer defaults to using integrated graphics, and they go away when they force it to use the GPU instead.

QuanticHawk

United States32130 Posts

March 23 2015 14:15 GMT

#180

On March 23 2015 23:12 GrandInquisitor wrote:

Show nested quote +

Are you using a laptop? A lot of people report problems where their computer defaults to using integrated graphics, and they go away when they force it to use the GPU instead.

Yup. Lenovo ideapad G510 if specific model makes a difference. I will go poke around when I get home to trouble shoot. I think SimCity 4 had similar issues for laptop user iirc?

also thanks!