Cities Skylines Photo Diary

[Young Drachma]

Decided to start building in the coastal city that I've christened "Nueva Serena" The city has experienced a lot of growth over the past decade and now stands as one of the largest cities in the entire country at a population of 571,444 at the last census. The city's current growth rate is 4% per year.

I'm going to use this dynasty mostly for screenshot pics of the various neighborhoods and communities throughout the Nueva Serena area. Once we've done that, I'm probably going to work on various sports league dynasties that involve team(s) based in the city limits and the rooting interests around them.

It'll probably alternate between being an American city and being a city in my fictional Neloxian universe, depending on how I'm feeling and what game I'm playing. If it were an American city, it'd be the 32nd largest. As I float around the city, it has the absolute feel of a west coast city to me, kind of like an Arizona city that ends up finding itself on the Pacific Coast more than anything.

Anyway, I'm going to do some show and tell and then we'll see where it goes.

[finkenst]

nice water pollution... more importantly, what map is that?

[Young Drachma]

Cape County
The Cape County area is probably the most stable of the communities within Nueva Serena (NS from hereonout) with over 100k in residential population.

The area began as an industrial area and has increasingly commercial and residential over the past few decades thanks to oil and ore reserves in this area.



The two main cities are New Keyport and Victoria Beach, both with just over 50k in population apiece. The Pencil District is an old woodworking community that is rapidly becoming more residential but is currently unincorporated Cape County land. There has been talk of stadiums and resorts at different times which would truly transform the area even more, but NIMBYs have kept them out thus far.



Talk of an airport near the Interstate 18 area which currently is not populated would also spur growth for the whole region, but right now is just a blueprint and little else.

For a sense of geography, you can see the Palm Bay area from New Keyport. The regional crime rate has been falling, but it's a lot higher in the core Palm Bay areas versus here in the Cape. Traffic in the region is pretty bad, so it keeps traveling hard and while we do have mass transit, it's not evenly distributed so people just opt to drive. That's changing though.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by finkenst

nice water pollution... more importantly, what map is that?

I'm working on that! I inherited this map though. I got it out of the workshop, I think it's called Sunshine Bay or something.

[Young Drachma]

I sort of deliberately waited to fix some of the crime problems in the other cities until I can 1) name them and 2) figure out what I want to do with them. Not sure I'm in the mood for any massive reconstruction projects at the moment.

Next up, I'm going to go in and build an airport. We're also going to take a look at some locations for stadiums and see what we can place, because reading those FBCB dynasties are making me want to have a university here AND I want to simultaneously put a soccer team here in my Neloxian league at the same time. Either way, would like to start putting down roots in different parts of the map.

I went back in the map and decided that we're going to probably create a whole stadium development and residential complex over here.



Also I downloaded a mod that translate the populations to a "regional" population because the game does a terrible job of estimating populations relative to the way the size looks. So this is way better.

Using that tool, it says our regional population is 4.3 million people, the 14th largest metro area in the country. Equal to about the populations of both Riverside/San Bernardino and Phoenix/Mesa, which is sort of fitting because it's about what I pictured for this place except on the water.

[Young Drachma]

This is North Holly Beach and South Holly. They are about 85k in population and have been improving from being crime ridden. A recent resort was built along the Palm Bay and that's part of the revitalization but it's really just a wholesale investment in building more parks and such. It's a pretty urban place, mostly residential though there is some industry up the mountain and that's where most of the people work.

Traffic in this area is brutal along the interstate and we're trying to find ways to mitigate the impact it has on the neighboring towns, but it's not going so great so far.

[Young Drachma]

So before I bother introducing you to my Football Manager save, since I'm just currently simming into the future with that anyway, I'm going to do some college recruiting from here.

I decided for simplicity sake to use Washington D.C. as the holding pen for the schools from here, since there are so few and it'll make it easier to add schools there.

My next step is to figure out where all of the high schools are in this city, name them and once we've done that, can add them to FBCB and start following some recruits to see how they do.

Geographically, Suriname is about the same distance from Miami as Los Angeles, so in a sense I'm achieving what I wanted in creating a "coastal city" but rather than western, it's more south.

[bbgunn]

Awesome! I've thought a lot about getting Cities: Skylines.

[Young Drachma]

Just north of the dam in Coleridge Plains, I decided that's where we'd put a baseball stadium and an arena. I'm a fan of the whole "downtown ballpark nested into the skyscraper landscape" thing, so I went for that here. Crime is down citywide, mass transit usage is up, as is the population.



The wider area itself


There are currently 30 high schools in the region:
Forest View
East trinidad
Olin (Heartfield)
Stapleton
Hetburgh
Olive City
Parkway (Westpond)
Marine Park
James Baldwin (Coleridge Plains)
Homecrest
Southchester
Boulder
Thelonious Monk Performing Arts HS
Boardwalk City (Manatee Sands)
West Victoria
Keyport East
Keyport West
Victoria Beach
North Holly
South Holly
Keyport Science & Technology


PRIVATE
Robyntown Academy
Midburn School
Olive Beach Catholic
Silverwich Academy
St. Pius X
Victoria Christian
St. Elizabeth Catholic
Hollytown Catholic

I'm going to add them all to FBCB. I have no idea what I'll do after that. But...I am fascinated by the idea of doing something with it. We'll see.

[bbgunn]

Wow, Coleridge Plains is becoming the Arlington of Nueva Serena.

[Young Drachma]

I am trying to think of sports scenarios for different leagues at the moment and I'm drawing a blank. I'm about to introduce everyone to my Neloxian soccer league again, but for some reason, I'm fascinating with the basketball angle so we're going to at least set that up before I go any further.

I think I'm envisioning a scenario where we track players from N.S. from college to the pros out of HS. I have no idea what the incentive would be besides tracking them, at the moment, but I'll keep thinking.

Before I do that, we're going to use the USA Today HS basketball score predictor to come up with a state boys championship. I have no idea why I care. But so it goes.

Actually, I have an even better simulator that'll simulate an entire season of HS basketball based on real life teams or whatever.

[Young Drachma]

Okay so here's what I think we're going to do.

I'm going to test out a complete scouting dynasty. I'll bring in a class each year (which will include a least one recruit from Nueva Serena) of HS kids that we then track.

I'll do scouting on them and other players, do mock drafts and then go back to college and do it again. Ideally you would get interested and ask about guys pro careers and we'll follow some of those too.

So let's try.

[Young Drachma]

I've given up all pretenses of using these maps for other purposes right now and will just use this dynasty to share with you stuff I'm doing on different maps I have. Because well I'm taking the screenshots anyway.

My latest city is based off a Louisville map. I've renamed it Churchill.



I've spent a lot of time rebuilding the mass transit situation which has improved traffic in the downtown area. But since I inherited this map, I'm dealing with a lot of the pre-existing issues that it came with. Which I prefer over just building the city myself from scratch perfectly, because these challenges are just interesting slash fun to deal with.



Here's a screenshot from University Heights, home to one of the two universities in Churchill. It's a small town with about 10,000 people.



The rural town next to UHeights:



Homewood Hills is a town due South of the downtown area and part of the Tucktown metro area. Tucktown is home to the theater district for Churchill anchored by Pavesi Square.

Homewood is a residential community which is adjacent to a major industrial ore operation, one of the big industrial businesses in Churchill.



Here's some issues with traffic that I'm about to take a radical move to fix.



In the mid-east part of the city (but on the map above, it's Southwest of downtown) we're going to actually relocate a major industrial district to a better part of the outer ring of the city.

Right now, Uptown, Parkwood, Stabletown and Old Bank City are really congested because there are so many businesses there which get deliveries.

It keeps people who work there unable to get to work and while we have slowly added Metro lines to that area, it's nothing like downtown and so, people opt to just drive to work there and while I've successfully cut down on downtown congestion, we've not been able to really fix it coming off the interstate and into the Upper South Side neighborhoods aforementioned.

So the radical solution is to essentially make a New Stabletown and a bunch of other neighorhoods for these businesses but with six-lane roads and better mass transit coverage (specifically subway access) so that the congestion isn't as bad and it's easy on/off access to/from the highway.

Plus it just feels weird to have a major commercial district so far from the main downtown area and I'd prefer to really build more housing in that area rather than resorting to suburban sprawl, so this seems like a better idea to me.

How will I do it? I haven't decided yet, exactly. But I'm about to figure it out.

[muns]

This is beautiful. Great stuff here

[finkenst]

on a related note... Anyone have recurring plagues for no reason in their cities?

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by finkenst

on a related note... Anyone have recurring plagues for no reason in their cities?

You need to make sure you are taking care of the wastewater. Also make sure there are enough cemeteries and cremation spots because otherwise your dead people will rot in apartments and that's bad news for the people living around them.

If traffic is so bad that they can't come collect bodies, that could be causing your problems. Also plumbing issues with waste water and fresh water mixing which people ingest and then it kills them.

[Young Drachma]

So I remade Uptown Churchill by replacing the commercial district that used to be in those neighborhoods. It will be moved to another area, but I haven't decided precisely where. I think we're probably going to create a new commercial district South of Downtown (SoDo) because it'll be too far from the real downtown to call it Lower Downtown like Denver's.

Here's the before and after shots of what we did last night with Uptown. What I dig about this is, if you picture the changes over a particular period of time, then you can imagine there are/were people who worked in Uptown back when it was purely commercial rather than residential and now people who live there who can talk about the days when Uptown and the associated areas were commercial only.

before



after

[Subby]

I'd like to see more bike lanes, tbh.

Beautiful pics.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Subby

I'd like to see more bike lanes, tbh.

Beautiful pics.

I wish the workshop had bike lanes and I would install them for sure!

You did give me an idea though and I went searching to see what people were doing, since I knew there were green cities out there.

Someone has a mod for walking paths that are elevated. I'm going to attempt to make them in the new commerce district I create and see if it works.

Thanks for the idea!

[Young Drachma]

So these maps are a bit more descriptive of the various areas of the city.






This is where I originally considered putting the new commerce "Sodo" district, but turns out, there's not really a good location for that.


But up here? North of Danishtown and east of the Pavesi Square and the Theater district? With PERFECT interstate access?



It's not South of Downtown, but it's far north of it.

I'm open to ideas for what to name this area. There will be other neighborhoods too.

At least one of them will be named the "City Market" district. Probably a North of Downtown district (NoDo) but besides that, other ideas welcomed for the other parts of what I imagine will be a decent sized set of districts that will be mixed-use commercial/residential. The idea here is that you could live and work in the same area to cut down on all of the traffic.

[Young Drachma]

So I wanted to create the “sections of town” whether they are boroughs or just sections and the areas beneath are just neighborhoods with names that can change over time, etc.

These are the established areas anyway, there will be others but I haven’t done anything yet because they’ll need to be built out.

Next I need to do a list of all of the neighborhoods.

[Subby]

Are you building these from the ground up?

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Subby

Are you building these from the ground up?

Normally yes. But lately I've been downloading maps from other people that are prebuilt and then I remake what they did. But I don't have to rebuild the highways and redo ALL of the plumbing and shit because unlike SimCity, this game doesn't make any of that stuff easy (Aka you can't entirely cheat...) and so it can get tedious quickly.

But rebuilding existing infrastructure is a lot more fun and challenging.

[Young Drachma]

Subby's question leads us to my recent situation. This city was way too commercial and had way too many skyscraping for my liking and so I wanted to fix it but didn't realize I could rapidly.

The game has a feature that lets you apply the tax rules or ordinances to individual districts or the entire city. So I put the no high rise rule on every district except downtown and so, the highrises came down and the city is gradually remaking itself. We do have fewer population because of the changes, but it'll eventually even out.

Compare these shots to the ones from above of the same city and you can see the difference. I'll do more details neighborhood stuff eventually, but every time I play I go in thinking I'M gonna do one thing and end up doing 30 other things.

[Young Drachma]

Here's the view of Downtown Churchill all the way from the rural oil patch town of Byrnside.



The city feels more like a real city now with the core downtown area and then residential and other industries on the outside. It also feels like it befits its size now because before with all of those skyscrapers it felt WAY larger than a city of its actual size in my mind.

I've been mostly spending my time lately tinkering with transit and building new communities in the hills that can generate income via oil, ore and agriculture since we have those deposits in the city. It's helped me relieve the tax burden in certain areas.

The high rise elimination in all but downtown and one other area initially decreased population by about 20k but we're now over 200k in Churchill proper and that's about 30k more than we were when I began making changes, so the changes to the commercial districts that I have yet to rebuild hasn't negatively impacted the city.

I'm building a lot of the outer ring cities at the moment, while also going into the interior to prune a bit. There was no subway access in some towns that I think would make good commuter cities, so I've begun fixing that and traffic snarls are down dramatically across the city thanks to the investment in mass transit.

[Young Drachma]

Here's the flyover map of the entire city. It's grown more since this photo, but the areas are basically representative.



My next step is going to be for me to do an entire listing of all of the neighborhoods and areas so far because otherwise it'll be too hard to keep up with whenever it's finally time. Maybe there is a mod for census.

[Young Drachma]

Okay so I managed to get a list of all of the neighborhoods down.

Much like Louisville or Toronto, we've merged a bunch of smaller places into a big one.

Here's the breakdown so far. As I add/build new places, you can just assume they've always existed and we just didn't talk about them before.


CHURCHILL NEIGHBORHOODS
CENTRAL
Downtown Churchill
North Side
Danishtown
Plant District
Dominion Square

WEST CENTRAL
Marsey/Marsey University
North of Marsey
Roslyn
West Side

EAST CENTRAL
Backwater
Far North Side
Turkish Town
Little Jamaica
New Bank City
MKS Airport/Stevenstown

FAR RIVER
Homewood
North Tucktown
South Tucktown
Churchill Gardens (formerly Melodysburg)
Pavesi Square (Theater District)

BY RIVER
Bedside
North River
Governor Park
Expo Park
Winter Hills

NEAR RIVER
Shipchester
Damseltown
South Damsel
Havertower
Stadium City

INWOOD
Dean Park
East Side
Martine Park
Goodman Park
Irvington
Old Churchill
Parsonage Park
Upper East Side
Lanesark

KINGSTON
Belgiantown
Old Bank City
Eastgrove
Stabletown
Parkwood
Gregersen-Hyde
Uptown

OUTERBRIDGE
North by Uptown
South by Uptown

——————
COLLEGETOWN
University Heights
Port Levercott
Eastop
Springcrop

Churchill International Airport

SOUTHEAST ANNEX
Byrnside
Harbison
New Torrington

NORTHWEST ANNEX
Big Spruce
Winston Hole
Elm Park

NORTHEAST ANNEX
Obsidian Hills
Diamond
Forrest
Hermitage

[Young Drachma]

I am working on a parallel OOTP dynasty that I won't spam post here, but that'll take the different sections of town and allow me to create a citywide baseball championship. If I get motivated, I'll probably do the same thing in Football Manager for soccer but with a country that cannot make the World Cup.

It'll give me an excuse to show you each of the neighborhoods and to get more immersed in them, but I won't do that until I'm done building. We are close but not there yet.

[Young Drachma]

Here's the latest view of Downtown Churchill. Notice has all of the giant buildings are gone relative to how it was before and the tallest buildings in the city are only downtown.

[Young Drachma]

WEST SIDE



The West Side borders Turkish Town, Far North Side and Rinskyville (formerly Backwater).

Adjacent to Danishtown (That pink structure in the back corner is the Danishtown Casino) is the West Side, a residential neighborhood of several thousand people. The train runs through town, but there is no station there. There is several subway lines that run through the west side, too, but I don't think there is currently a subway station there. It also boasts a view of Blessed John Paul II Church.

[Young Drachma]

DANISHTOWN

Home to the Danishtown Casino & Danishtown Theater, the area is well known as an entertainment district and residential community. I ended up spending more time building today than taking photos, but I'll shoot more photos later that are more zoomed in.

[Young Drachma]

Byrnside, an oil town and Huston, its commercial twin are far from downtown.

[Young Drachma]

Copying this directly from the OOTP post, but you all won't get any baseball out of it.

Okay so here are a massive amount of updates as I went on a photo taking spree around town. It's a good thing because what's next is a building spree where I build the sister city to Churchill about 40-50 miles away.

First off, here's some facts. The entire map is available for me to build on, so it's a city of 156 square miles, which makes it larger than Baltimore, Charleston, Milwaukee, Seattle, et. al.

Population still hovering around 1.6 million, but there is much growth to come. When I stroll around, it feels like Denver or someplace like that. I can't really decide what state we're in.

I will be getting back to the baseball here shortly, too. But hard to really build a case for different neighborhoods until you've seen them and have a sense of their differences, etc. I'm going to work on that over the next few days to tell those stories.

In the meantime, I'm just going to introduce different parts of town. Churchill merged with the county surrounding it, so technically ALL of this is Churchill, but once there is a city big enough to rival it, they will break away.

For the purposes of our conversation, there are distinctions amongst people living here for what's "Churchill" and what parts of the city are not actually considered part of it for the people living in them. For instance, somebody living in Bedside would never tell someone they live in Churchill. Someone living in Byrnside or one of the mountain towns, would almost NEVER invoke the name Churchill even if a stranger had no idea where it was because they don't want to be associated with the big city, except maybe for their favorite sports teams.


West of Churchill city limits we have Forde, Talbot Slope and Castle Hill. Former forest mill communities, they are becoming residential.



Hennigan is a city in the hills with just over 1000 people. Has the distinction of being the only city in the region with legal weed.





Downtown Churchill is a kind of urban paradise if you have money to live there. Not that there's even a lot to do there, it's almost all residential high rises.





Collegetown is surrounded by a few rural/industrial communities - Seamus, Dred Scott, Dorothilyn which had different names at the start of this dynasty (fyi) increasingly professor families are moving to these towns rather than commuting from the West Side of Churchill as prices increase there. Expect these towns to grow substantially in the next few years.



Hilariously, the baseball stadium is in Rinskyville, which I forgot to take a photo of. So I'll have to get you that later.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the photo diary.

[Young Drachma]

UPTOWN is as far as you can go basically and still be considered "in Churchill" to most people. It's an area that if you look at earlier maps, you can see was a lot more commercial and had HUGE traffic issues. Well now it's a purely residential neighborhood and I'm sort of mystified by how different it is, but it was a very good decision to switch it.

[Young Drachma]

201st is a street just beyond Uptown. Mostly full of college kids priced out of the city, but increasingly turning into a potential extension of that area.

[Young Drachma]

COLLEGETOWN on the campus of Churchill University

[Young Drachma]

The newest development in the city right now are the extensions over at North and South Churchill called Small Island City. It's not on an island at all, but its adjacent to one.

There are about 8000 people living in these mixed use communities that were envisioned for people to be able to walk to work, eat, live and play in the same place. It's also home to a bustling transit station so people can get over to the side of the river for work via the subway.

[Young Drachma]

Obsidian Hills and Diamond are two old mining communities that have increasingly undergone change like the rest of the communities that are reeling from the growth of Churchill as an economic engine. Latter pic an aerial view of downtown from Obsidian.

[Young Drachma]

Pavesi Square/New Churchill is home to the city's theater district, separated by the river but easily accessible via Metro. This is the Greater Tucktown area, home to around 8000 people or so, which also includes Churchill Heights, the hottest section of town for people who want to live "in the city" but can't afford downtown or adjacent.



CHURCHILL HEIGHTS

[Young Drachma]

Bedside was always an industrial suburb of Churchill, but these days more people are moving there fleeing high prices in the Churchill urban core.

It's one of about seven western suburbs of Churchill that provide easy access to the city, increasingly better transit service and good schools. They just have remnants of their industrial past which make them noisy and smelly depending on where you are.

BEDSIDE


You can see Midtown Churchill to the left in this photo of Bedside separated by the interstate highway.



South of Bedside are the other suburbs: North River, Lugarejo, Shipchester, Damelstown, South Damsel & Havertower.

[Young Drachma]

Stadium City is due south of Downtown Churchill, about as far South as Uptown is East. It's attracting an interesting population of recent grads and working professionals due to its affordability, bars and restaurants thanks to the MLS stadium being there.



Stadium City isn't a suburb, it's an exclave part of Churchill.

[Young Drachma]

Another view of Downtown

[Young Drachma]

Arena Square isn't the official name of this area, it doesn't have a name at all. It used to be "Dominion Square" but that was really meant for only a small sliver of downtown. As this area has grown to include the NHL arena and Globe Park, it's growing fast, but there's no name for it yet.

Probably my favorite part of town right now.

[Young Drachma]

DANISHTOWN is anchored by the Danishtown Casino (that pink thing)

It's home to about 1500 people and borders Turkish Town, Far North Side and Dominion Square where another 6000 people or so live. Kind of a touristy area for obvious reasons, but also upscale once you get into the Far North Side.

[Young Drachma]

WEST SIDE is west actually east of but who cares about directions, right? Anyway, it's located just a few blocks from the Uptown area and is home to neighborhoods like Goodman Park (home to the ferris wheel) and Parsonage Park, the city's largest park. Also contains the City Orchestra & St. John Paul The Great Church. In area with lots of culture, but also increasingly more families.



PARSONAGE PARK



GOODMAN PARK actually relocated. It used to be a few blocks west of here, but when the park was built, the neighborhood was renamed and shifted north. And they added the ferris wheel.

[Young Drachma]

RIO VERDE (425) is a community connected by bridges and a resort town far from the city. You can barely see the New Bank City towers from here (squint and you'll see them in the far left hand part of the photo.

The other towns here are Lake Montpelier (1480) and Kalkidian (875)



KALKIDIAN

[Young Drachma]

TORRINGTON LAKE is a small city of 1200 people who thought coffee shops were overrated and just wanted to live by the lake quietly. It's next to the rural oil town of Pitchel.

[Young Drachma]

Byrnside & Huston are twin towns that mostly cater to the oil industry and are the biggest oil cities in Churchill County. They're also a polluted mess.

[Young Drachma]

Still a decent amount of the city I haven't shown yet, but I was exhausted cutting photos. We'll have to do more tomorrow, but that gives you a sense of some of the neighborhoods around Churchill.

[finkenst]

are your neighborhoods/suburbs essentially connected via highways and mass transit only? For some reason, i tend toward the dense urban citybuilding but may try to build a suburb if they're viable.