The city of Citysville - LP Cities Skylines

[West Filly]

Dave's Dam Delivers


Pictured: The new hydroelectric facility, which Mayor Spankenheimer has unofficially referred to as "the Poover Dam."

The hydroelectric facility lies SouthEast of the city, downstream of the drained river bed we have been pumping our sewage into, or the "Smooze II: Septic Boogaloo"

Some of the first things I said in this game are that "the poop has to go somewhere" and that I am amazed at how detailed the water/poop physics are in this game. From the first election five years ago to this moment right here, it seems the poop simulation has been a real centerpiece of the story of Cityville.

Right now the story is that Dave has successfully built a dam which consistently produces 140MW of electricity for the city. This is enough to deactivate two of the coal power plants in the city, which Dave has done.

#poopypower

It cost a bloody lot of money

Hydroelectric dams and the extensive groundworks required for hydroelectric dams are two very expensive things. The city spent more than 2/3rds of the fortune in funding that it had after the previous mayorship. That fortune could have been more of a focal point in the election, but now it's more of a

fecal point

[West Filly]

DUDE, Dave, you're the mayor now! Do you have time to meet up with your uni bros? A social would be great, but let's be real here. You know I've been doing some work on cryopreservation, and I reckon it's time we made this research real! Just like your dam. How about I talk it over with you, then we go to the waterfront like in the old days? Let's clear the air with the cryo plans first, and if you don't like them I'll drop it immediately, so that we can chill with no distractions. Especially now that weed is legal here.

How about it?

[West Filly]

What is this unusual building, this concrete block in sight of the hospital and directly next to the Cemetary in Townsville?

This is a cryopreservatory. With consent, people who are dead by today's standards are frozen here in the hopes they may be reawoken by future medical technology. How cool.

[West Filly]

Cityville Spaces Out



Cannabis is now legal across the city, and the crime rate has fallen expectedly. Meanwhile mayor Spankenheimer has spent the city's money buying new plots of land for the city. The first two plots to the South and Southeast were to accommodate his plans to build a dam and reservoir, but much of this land is still empty space for development. A further plot in the East was purchased to provide a suitably unobstructed spot for a radio telescope and a weather observatory. Both of these facilities have brought Cityville's Treasury to within hundreds of dollars of bankruptcy, but the budget is still in surplus for now.

[West Filly]

Mayor Dave Borrows Major Dollar - Buys Bunkers and Disaster Center

In times of a budget surplus and low funds, Mayor Dave has borrowed as much as he can from the banks in order to give us all the disaster resistant city he promised at the election.



One small bunker like this has been installed in each of these districts: Town Center, Ponyville and Riverside Industrial estate. These can shelter up to 1000 citizens.



One large bunker like this has been installed in Townsville and Eastside. These can shelter up to 10,000 citizens.



Dave has built a colossal radio mast which has coverage from the radio telescope all the way to Townsville.



Dave has built his Disaster Response Unit complete with helicopters and vans ready to deploy in the event of a "zombie apocalypse or somesuch"

[West Filly]

One year since Dave's election and this is the extent of the new zoning he has done. An office zone, some housing and a little bit of commercial zone surrounding the office zone.

Using his engineering smarts, Dave realised that the fire station and police station in Lumbermill both have a structural integrity that allows him to pick the whole building up onto a trailer and drive it into a new place. It's actually more common than you might think for buildings IRL. Lumbermill now has no fire and police station. The new development (damtown) has these facilities instead.

One thing to note is that there's a road on the top of the dam which allows it to act as a bridge.

[West Filly]

I thought it'd be neat to stitch together some shots from the game instead of posting zoomed out maps where you have to squint to see what's happening

GLORIOUS CITYVILLE

[West Filly]

You can tell it's based on Europe by the unnecessarily squiggly roads and the head spinning amount of roundabouts.

[West Filly]

Below: the same image with all the new stuff annotated.

[Perrydotto]

Dave is the glorious leader Cityville deserves. Does he have any plans for making that money back, though?

[West Filly]

Dave is the glorious leader Cityville deserves. Does he have any plans for making that money back, though?

Dave's attitude seems to be "it's on loan, we'll sort it out later". To be fair he did go into the election campaign with the slogan "yeah, baby"

Barry's catastrophe was the poop, but will the budget be Dave's downfall? Stay tuned to find out.

[West Filly]

Cityville's meteorological facility gave the city advanced warning of an unusually large thunderstorm. Messages were broadcast via radio to inform citizens to remain indoors.



Lightning from this storm struck many trees, buildings and electrical pylons in the city.



18 buildings caught fire during the storm, all of which were dealt with swiftly by Cityville's fire department. There were no casualties during the entire storm.



Many electrical pylons were damaged during the storm. The city's hydroelectic dam was isolated from the rest of the grid, meaning it could not provide any electricity for Citysville at the time.



The diagram above shows electricity distribution in Cityville after the storm. Buildings shown in blue were powered at the time. Buildings shown in the purplish red colour did not have power.

Until the pylons were replaced, Cityville encountered huge blackouts. The city's sewage systems were also temporarily disabled,causing sewage to back up in some areas. Many of the city's water towers and water pumps also did not have electricity at the time, which lead to water being unavailable in many homes.

Power was restored shortly after, once the damaged pylons had been replaced.

One month after the storm, Dave enacted a new citywide policy ensuring that the city's tallest buildings will have lightning rods built in to them.

[West Filly]

It has now been another year since the last map post, and there's a lot of changes.

[West Filly]

Since Barry Chopra moved the sewage outlets from the Smooze to the SmoozeII, the original Smooze hasn't had enough liquids to remain a river. The river bed started to get patchy and was sometimes dry.

This hasn't caused any actual problems in the city but I wanted to remedy this because it doesn't look good when your main river is now a dry river bed when you haven't actually done anything to it.

Under Dave Spankenheimer, the freshwater sluice has now been moved downstream toward the patchy areas, and another freshwater sluice has been added.

Before

After

[West Filly]

At the start of the year, the Landfill in the site of the old industrial estate was completely full.

Dave ordered this landfill to be emptied into the other facilities. Under Barry's mayorship, enough trash incinerators were installed to burn more trash than the city was generating. This is still the case even now the city has expanded. As this facility was being emptied, most of the waste would have been burned rather than being moved into the other landfills.

In this game a landfill has to be empty before it can be moved or demolished. During the year, the landfill was completely emptied and has been moved close to a road which leads to the new developments in the South.

[West Filly]

Ponyville roundabout used to be the only way to access the industrial estates from Lumbermill roundabout. There was a single road between the two roundabouts which ran alongside Celestia Boulevard.

There has been a lot of new development in the city, which caused traffic to back up on this road. Trucks from the industrial estate were trying to go between the industrial estates and the new developments. Buses were trying to go between Ponyville and the new developments.



The original road between the two roundabouts was destroyed. New roads (purple) now connect to Lumbermill roundabout. Ponyville has also been restricted against industrial traffic, meaning trucks cannot drive on Ponyville roundabout nor can trucks drive onto Celestia Boulevard from Lumbermill roundabout. Splitting the traffic between the two new roads has eased congestion in this area.

Because trucks are no longer allowed to access Ponyville, Ponyville's shops have been torn down and re zoned as residential.

[West Filly]

There's a lot of changes to work through. I need to sleep but here's a thing first





These are just some pictures I found in the thread that I've tried to roughly re create in order to show how things have changed since.

[West Filly]

Okay let's start on the big developments in the South of the city. This could take a while




I'll beferring to the zone diagram above a bit in the next few posts. The green zones labelled R are residential. The blue zone labelled O is offices. The blue zones labelled C are commercial. T and L are tourism and leisure respectively.

At the top of the zone diagram (East) there's a low density residential development building hilltop homes with a view westward over the new developments. This view is shown below.



These aren't just any houses, these are Dave's crazy high tech houses. Eventually these will be packed with all the latest home tech, that will ultimately make them the most desirable homes in all of Cityville. Dave sciences again.

[West Filly]

The tourism district in the top left (SouthWest) of the zone diagram will create places like casinos and hotels in a bid to draw people into the city for a visit. In the few months these have been active, an underwhelming 70 tourists visited cityville per week.

[West Filly]

The leisure district on the bottom left (SouthEast) of the zone diagram will grow places like arcades, gyms and night clubs for the city. Surprise surprise, the former student thought the city could use some nightlife.

[West Filly]

As mentioned before, office zones create jobs for highly educated citizens. Commercial zones create shops that create jobs as well as giving people somewhere to shop at.

The office zone on the bottom right (NorthEast) of the zone diagram was already there, as was the residential zone above (West) of it.



The commercial zone South of said office zones is new, and has already provided the city with huge tax revenues.



Growing the population and the city's zones has brought in new wealth for the city. Dave has already paid off Cityville's loans using the tides of cash that poured in during the latter half of the year.

[West Filly]

Now we move on to the new services. Notice the main avenue running down the middle of the new development. Dave has deliberately left space between this and the zoned land to provide room for services, parks and all manner of new places. Dave has also deliberately left space between the zoned areas to give room for anything the zones may need, such as new roads like the bypass (14).

Where the previous mayor was focused on purchasing and using as little land as possible, Dave knows that good engineering needs room for the future. To illustrate...



Here is the city's traffic heatmap. As you can see, Barry's developments are starting to come under strain as the city expands with new places to go and new places to come from. Because all of Barry's developments were very huddled together, solving the traffic issues will likely require demolition works, where building a new bypass for the new development was comparably easy given that there was room for a new road and roundabout between the zoned blocks.

[West Filly]

1. A neato statue for the city. It should look nice and maybe draw in people.

[West Filly]

2. A carousel park. It should look nice and provide hotel goers with something fun to do

[West Filly]

3. All this new development is making the city thirsty.



A new water tower keeps this area quenched.

[West Filly]

4. A new central bus station for the city. The city used to have a mish mash of bus lines darting all over the place. Now many of the city's bus lines start and end here, allowing for people to hop between buses to access new areas.



As this new development grows, having the city's public transport hubs here will be ever more important.

[West Filly]

5 and 6



5. The medical clinic from Lumbermill has been moved into the new developments.

6. A biodome which grows endangered plant species has been constructed for both science and leisure.

[West Filly]

7. A road which once connected with the main road through the new developments now tunnels underneath it to ease traffic.

[West Filly]

8. A new elementary school is built

[West Filly]

9. Another cool statue.



The ground not being level here bugs me enough that I might relocate the statue, terraform the land, then put it back.

[West Filly]

10 and 11



The roads extending from the residential and office zones in the Northern blocks now attaches directly to Damtown roundabout instead of joining via the main road.

[West Filly]

12. Cityville's bus depot was moved from the Waterfront and now lies near the leisure district.

[West Filly]

13. A new cemetary has been installed.



Not everybody can afford cryopreservation.

[West Filly]

14. A new road is built that bypasses two of the blocks on the new development and also connects the development directly to the industrial estates



Leisure, tourism and commerce all need to be supplied with the goods that keep them going. Much of this comes from the industrial estates, which was starting to put a burden on Lumbermill roundabout and the cloverleaf interchange. The bypass creates an alternate route for industrial traffic, but is also used as a direct route from ponyville to the new developments.

[West Filly]

This new area houses 6000 residents and provides 2000 new jobs to Cityville.

[West Filly]

I'm having a good think about how this LP works and I'm having some thoughts along the lines of "were I to start again with a new city, I'd..." I'm not beating myself up or anything, and ultimately I'm having fun which is the main part. I just have ideas for how things could maybe be better. What I'm doing here is sharing my ideas, and also asking if you have any ideas for how things could be better. On the theme of "if I were to do this again..."

1. I'd make each mayoral term much shorter. Maybe two years.

This is the big one. It feels like I can plow through each mayor's promises in a year or two, leaving the rest of the mayoral term up to my interpretation of how that particular mayor is. It's like you vote for x, x happens in the first year and then suddenly you get y and z with no mandate because there's four more years to fill. In some ways it's very true of politics, but in other ways it feels like you can get five years worth of stuff done in one or two game years.

2.At the election I'd speak out of character about each mayor and their promises.

The mayors aren't just fictional characters, they're different directions that I'm aware the game can take, and it might be better if I spoke less in their voice and more in my voice. I could say for each candidate something along the lines of "what I'm going for with Diana here is a few years where I make the city look nice, with districts planned to have nice patterns in their roads, and with trees and parks designed to have symmetry and good looks."

3. I'd slow down a bit.

With five years to traverse between elections and with so much happening in each year, it feels like I'm blowing by so much stuff without really getting a chance to dive in and explain. As the city gets bigger I have to get less detailed in order to keep the pace. For example, where before I could zoom in and explain the first one way system in the city, now I'm kind of going "we built a bypass, it's here" and leaving it at that. With shorter mayoral terms I could zoom in more without drawing it out any.

4. I'd Hold Longer elections. Feels like 24 hours isn't enough for people to come in, catch up and then place a vote.

5. I'd establish a routine and organise the posts a little. At the minute I've been posting what I feel like posting, which looks a bit random. I need to think of a routine, like having a report every year on the city's stats or a map post every year with explanations of each development, just to hold it together. Some kind of regular feature that keeps all the posts organised. I need to keep on top of the in game dates, for example.

I'm not threatening to end the LP at all. In fact one idea I've had for "starting again" is using this city as a starting point.

[West Filly]

The poop water from the dam was making a bit of a splash at the bottom end, so Dave built a new channel at the base of the dam to keep the poop contained.

[West Filly]

I've been messing with mods that make the game feel a little more like home for me.



Buses are now modelled after the buses that run in my hometown.



The emergency service vehicles are now replaced with their British equivalents. Also Royal Mail vans now carry out some of the deliveries in the city.



A few other vehicles have been added. They're not all specific to Britain, but they're certainly things you'd see around here.

I've added a bunch of ordinary cars, plus a few actual motorbikes to go alongside the game's scooters.

There are some new buildings, too, but I don't think they'd fit in with Cityville.

[West Filly]

One slight change to report

Town Center District is now called The Old Village.

Accurate. Sad, but accurate.

[West Filly]

Traffic in cityville is diabolical. Particularly on the West Cityville exit of the highway (pictured above). There's also big problems on the road pictured below which is called

Nethiah street



Looking at the stats and the traffic view, the problem is quite simple. All the cool new leisure and shopping stuff is in the new developments in Damtown. The main bulk of the housing is in Townsville and Eastside. Everyone is trying to come home from all the cool stuff they did in the South of the city last night. The only way home is via that highway junction.