Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Cities: Skylines - 3/20 hours

I am a terrible mayor. In my first city, people started dying left and right and nothing I did seemed to stem the tide. Bodies were piling up in residential houses as both my budget and my population suddenly crashed.

As near as I can figure, the problem appears to be that my medical clinic and/or cemetery was in an inconvenient location and the resulting traffic kept people from using them effectively.

Fucking traffic.

That was the part of SimCity 4 I couldn't quite figure out. And now it's returned to make my life miserable once again. I've managed to stay ahead of a healthcare collapse by proactively building a lot of medical clinics and multiple cemeteries, but looking at my traffic grid, I haven't actually solved the problem.

I really should figure this out. It's the sort of engaging, technical problem that thoroughly intrigues me in real life. The issue I have in games is that I don't like tearing things down to make room for wider roads or transit buildings. It's silly, I know. Logically, selective destruction has always been a necessary part of creation, but I guess I feel guilty for knocking down these virtual neighborhoods. Maybe it's because I've seen too many movies where the villain was an evil land developer.

It's probably vain puffery at this point, but I've decided that my mission for the next 17 hours is to finally figure out simulated video game traffic and build a city with a functional transportation infrastructure. It will be my greatest challenge yet!

(I mean, granted, it's not as sexy a pitch as "repelling the alien menace" or "surviving the post-apocalyptic wasteland," but it's the sort of thing that both excites and intimidates me).

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