[protomyth]

They do a lot of sales. About four sales let me catch up pretty cheaply. Skip the decor stuff and buy the stuff that actually adds play items.

As for mods, really the move it and traffic manager president edition is basically a minimum to not be frustrated.

[grawprog]

Honestly, despite my op, the one I would really like is the park management one. The one that lets you designate custom size parks and stuff. I mostly got disheartened and pollutey when I realized I couldn't turn the large forest into a park. So I cut it all down and proceeded to lower the quality of life for all.

I was tempted once to grab them all during a sale, it would have been $40 down from like $160 or something, but I also don't want to get sucked into a game like that. Games like civ and simcity eat too much time i've been down those rabbit holes before. Even as it is I spent literally two days straight doing nothing but playing this game when I started that map.

[brailsafe]

I feel the same way about it being a time suck, and the same way about the parks expansion. I did end up getting the parks expansion for free when they had some event recently, and it's ok. It's ok, but sort of just that. You still have to build entrance gates on flat edges of roads, and you can only place park specific buildings inside, which is just annoying. I like the addition of bike transport though. One of my biggest gripes with the game is that I can't see where a given workforce is living, so I can't really work on bottlenecks in their commute. Otherwise, I've found that uninstalling the game occasionally helps me get out of the Skylines zone for a while, then I reinstall when it's raining and have some fun.

[grawprog]

>that I can't see where a given workforce is living

With the early game it wasn't so bad, like one or two districts, but as the city grew, it became too much, hence the residential surrounding industrial stuff.

Most of the dystopian stuff came from my frustration with limitations in the game. The massive amounts of roads and bridges came from the traffic congestion problems and my lack of patience in rebuilding roads or designing transit lines, though i do have 3 massive metro lines that crisscross the city.

The interesting thing to me was the disparity in my city and the dystopianness came from my negligence and lack of patience or caring. The ghettos and ramshackle neighbourhoods built themselves around the zones i built out of just the hell of it much of the time. A lot of it came from stuff the game just generated. Zooming into the close up view in some areas was kinda heart breaking.

It mostly showed me how intentional negligence leads to some of the most nightmarish outcomes and that the games modelling of neighbourhoods based on zoning and surroundings is scarily accurate.