Cities Skylines Photo Diary

[Young Drachma]

I go back and forth between using the original name of this city (Helensburgh) which I came up with randomly and the renamed version (Ameliaville) but for context, it's the same place.

It's just the people voted to change the name of the city back to its original name, so...that's what I had to do.

I've been wanting to showcase the various neighborhoods for awhile and at least give a capsule of the different areas, their populations and perhaps what makes them interesting or distinctive or who lives there because I don't really know right now.

I'd prefer to do this before I go building anymore areas in the city, especially now that San Felipe exists, because I can't really decide where else we'll build right now and when I do, I need to really understand people's motivation for moving further out other than financial reasons or whatever and perhaps, I can use these stories as a way to stitch the identity of these new communities and to decide whether they're even part of the city or not.

In game, the population is 659,090 which translates to about 5.5 million people in real #.

Here are aerial views of the neighborhoods on the South Side of town.



Pillsbrookis the Southeast quadrant of the city with an estimated 833k people living there. Average rent there is consistent with the rest of the city at about $1,829/mo for a 2 BR. But home values there are WAY lower than the city average ($403k) at $193k for a single-family home. Needless to say, the Pillsbrook area is growing as a result. Many of the neighborhoods there are actually not named, most people opting to claim "South Side" residence for whatever reason.

Pillsbrook reminds me of Queens. Homes where you can still have a driveway, decent subway access to the city with bus lines too and relatively affordable, but quite boring relative to the downtown area or other parts of the city.


Stobben



Stobben is in the South/Southwest quadrant of the city. It's home nearly a million people and is the most populated charter of the six. Stobben is growing like a weed due to its proximity to Downtown and with an increased number of young people moving there due to be priced out of downtown and the lower downtown in recent years.

There is a party district called the Playhouse district which isn't really much about theater anymore, it has a lot of clubs.

I'll highlight the other parts of town in a future post.


My next task is to get down and show you the various neighborhoods themselves, but wanted to do a high level view of them before I did that (even if I've done it in the past...)

[Young Drachma]

With the new mass transit DLC out for Skylines, I've gone back to the beginning of my Helensburgh map, renamed the city New Halifax and I'm going to rebuild the suburbs and remake neighborhoods all over again. A lot of the older mods cause conflicts with loading old save games, so I needed to start at a vanilla save to be able to get the game to load.

It'll be an interesting opportunity to relearn the city again, and also rework the transit situation around the city. We'll see if I do a better job this time of making it feel more like a functional city than last time and how the suburbs grow, too.

[Young Drachma]

Mayoral elections

One of the wrinkles I'm adding to impact the way I grow the city (or not) is through mayor elections. They'll be randomized , so it's not like I can influence the election really. But we'll have different candidates who'll advocate for different things and based on how they do in the primary, we'll do a runoff election of the top two candidates. Because it'll be a lot of chaos, in theory, you could have fringe candidates mucking things up.

While the Mayor influences policy, the "City Manager" is the non-politican we get to play in our story and who'll actually carry out the policy prescriptions related to higher/lower taxes, growth in certain areas and so forth. There will be council members who voice concerns for their particular areas too, but I haven't decided how that'll impact anything.

Really, I just want to be more deliberate about how we grow this time. Growth is already happening around the city and of course, there will be suburbs that sprout up outside of the city limits too and might eventually factor into the story, but...I'd just be intrigued to see how it changes the direction of what we do and how we do it around the city.

Here are the current political parties in the city:
Advanced Civic League (Right-Wing party. Favors lower taxes for businesses, increasing policing in neighborhoods and limiting growth to the suburbs rather than in the core city.)

Compromise Movement (Centrist. Pro-growth, moderate on policies like drug decriminalization, NIMBY and spending on infrastructure.)

Citizens Alliance (Left of center. NIMBY. Pro-education spending. Hard on crime. Likes Parks.)

The Nature League (Left-wing. Wants fewer roads and more mass transit options. NIMBY. Wants more dense housing options to bring down rents and fewer single-family homes in the city limits.)

Contemporary Party The Contemporary Party are the incumbent party in office and have led the city for the past 26 years. Mayor Amos Marcotte is retiring after turning a sleepy city into a booming metropolis and now the race to replace him is huge. TCP are a left-wing party that favor heavy spending on local social welfare, moderate taxation and investing in growth.

Rural Peoples Party RPP are a small, fringe party mostly concerned with agrarian concerns. They're against annexation of small cities outside of the city limits, want rules enforced on single-family development and typically oppose multi-family dwellings, mass transit or anything that would disrupt the "character of rural life."

Progress League This left-wing splinter is full of Contemporary party exiles (and others) who felt their party was too in bed with corporate interests. Progress favors more local schools in neighborhoods, expanding transit access around the city, bike lanes and stabilizing tax rates. They're also adamant about removing industry from the core parts of the city in favor of more housing, a big wedge issue between the two parties.

Here are the primary candidates for each party in the '21 election:

Cory Bates (ACL)
Harvey Franco (COM)
Sophia Flynn (CIT)
Wendy Sargent (NAT)
Aurinda Sinclair (CNT)
Georgine Gibson (RUR)
Keven Turcotte (PROG)

The top two candidates advance to a runoff.

[Young Drachma]

I did the election via a draft pick lottery, that way, I could ensure that the result wasn't completely insane but that minor party candidates had a theoretical chance at advancing to a runoff.

Parties in order of polling rank:
Contemporary
Progress
Citizens
Civic
Compromise
Rural
Nature

After the primary election, the top two vote getters were:

Aurinda Sinclair & Cory Bates.

Keven Turcotte came in 3rd, Sophia Flynn 4th, Harvey Franco 5th, Georgine Gibson 6th and Wendy Sargent 7th.

The runoff is interesting because you have two different visions for the future of the city over the next term. In either case, you get a status quo type of moving forward, except I think ACL might be more aggressive about a lot of things that Contemporary would probably be less interested in (like increasing police spending) and the city itself would probably stay relatively staid. Entertainment options probably won't expand much.

Anyway, the general election happens and with Contemporary polling with a 6 point lead heading into election Sunday.

In the end, Contemporary wins the election 52-33 (with 15% of the vote abstentions.) Aurinda Sinclair becomes the city's first female mayor.

[Young Drachma]

First order of business (naturally) is figuring out what road we can name for Amos Marcotte, longtime mayor.

Now that Cities Skylines has named roads, it's an easy thing to do.

There is an avenue that stretches from way East all the way through downtown past the Outer West Side and then loops back around. Seems appropriate for a guy who shaped the city's future through his work.

Here's a view of the newly named Amos Marcotte Blvd. from downtown looking west. I stuck a monorail track around a loop West of Downtown, just because I could, but so far nobody is really riding it.

[Young Drachma]

I created a parallel FM league (taking over New Zealand) that has 16 teams based in this fictional city of New Halifax (and suburbs). I'm working on simming a bunch of years and then the idea is to see whether enough talent ever develops to propel the country out of the doldrums.

There is no promotion/relegation in the league and the top 5 teams after the regular season (of 30 games) make the playoffs.

[Young Drachma]

The first part of the Ironwood redevelopment Initiative is a neighborhood called New Northeast.

Ironwood is just east of Downtown, separated by the M1 highway.

Here's the before of Ironwood:


Here's Ironwood after the industrial buildings started being cleared:


That view of the Mountain has to be worth a significant addition to rental properties, especially for rooftop decks.


Here's the present view of what is now known as the New Northeast neighborhood

[Young Drachma]

Went commuting last night with two different people around town.

[Young Drachma]

New city. Called Las Annitas.

[Young Drachma]

The city is over a million people (adjusted for realism) and I'd been wanting to put an arena in town since that seemed like a realistic want. I was trying to fit the United Center into downtown, but ended up downloading the Jazz's former Delta Center because it was a bit easier to fit as a rectangle, but only because I razed a corner on the far north end of downtown

Here's the before and after (post-eliminating the street anyway)

[Young Drachma]

I'd been wanting to build an anchor suburb in Las Annitas. Yesterday, I managed to do it. It's called Santa Miranda and I merged it with Cape Ainee, a far east side neighborhood in Las Annitas and so now it's for sure the largest suburb.

There's a rail station, a subway stop and two bus lines that service the area. (Maybe 3, actually.)

These views give you a glimpse of the area looking towards downtown in the distance.




Far edge of Santa Miranda (a neighborhood called Dos Miranda) which is home to a soccer stadium & the HS baseball field.



Aerial view



Cape Ainee (now part of Santa Miranda) Everything you see in the distance didn't exist initially, I've expanded the city a lot.

[Young Drachma]

Had to do some rebuilding. This is the view of the city from Heart Lake.



The stadiums are in an area of Messier renamed City Center





Most recent neighborhood view of the city:

[Young Drachma]

I wanted to build a new arena in (the city formerly known as Helensburgh) but wasn't exactly sure where I wanted to build it.

Ultimately decided on the South End of town. Razed the businesses inhabiting that block and it looked like this:




Here's the after when the arena was complete.

[Young Drachma]

I hadn't been able to play Skylines in a while because I was using it on a work machine for a long time, then I switched jobs and my local machine can't run it. I finally got a cloud machine last weekend, so I could run it again (I didn't want to buy a computer ONLY to play Skylines, but I considered it.)

For the uninitiated, what I've done over the years is take over existing save games and redevelop cities because I don't have the time to invest in building cities from scratch as I used to (and even if I did, it's probably a bad idea for me to spend days at a time doing it. Because trust me, I would...)

I like the constraints of having to build within a city with roads, highways and so forth, because it makes me deal with infrastructure and take a more measured approach to growing and changing the city, rather than starting from scratch and doing whatever I want. (Which I like doing too, but there's a time and place for that.)

So I'm building on another city. This time, I named it Chisholm. I'm working on some redevelopment projects, the population remains fixed from when I first took over (181k in game....)



So far, all I've done is add a few stadiums and remove some of the spawned skyscrapers to make the city look more realistic to me. I'm getting a feel for the city limits, renaming neighborhoods.

The first real development project I can foresee is turning a largely industrial agriculture area of the city (I've named it Hogwood) into more mixed use residential/commercial.

Also for my own immersion, finally started posting pics on Instagram of my city work.

[Young Drachma]

I got back into the game last fall, but the latest city build I had I lost when I let my cloud gaming rig lapse. I'm working on a new city now that I've enjoyed way more because it was under 20k population when I started and now we're nearing 100k.