Welcome to Newberg
Here’s a new Cities Skylines II city that I’m starting. And it appears that I can only name cities with a -berg suffix. The next one will be called Iceberg. I’m serious.
It never fails. After a few weeks or months working on a city, I’ll start getting tired of it and have some things that I want to try elsewhere. That’s what I’ve always loved about city building sim games, especially if you can disable the mode where you’re trying to keep the budget balanced and turn off disasters and such. Just live in a sandbox mode and build a city.
And that’s where I was with Wisterberg. It was well-established, and that had started with a basic concept: to build the airport and some major transportation lines first (train into the central city and the freeway connection into the central city), and then build the downtown and see where it goes from there. It had gone far from that basic concept, and to be fair, there was another concept to build neighborhoods or suburbs outside of the main city that could stand on their own if they needed to.
But Wisterberg is just in a growth mode, and I think that’s where I tend to lose interest: It’s established and growing, and has a framework. I can come in and throw in some new areas of interest, but it’s basically fully developed and is just going to keep adding residential, commercial, office, and industrial zones.
So it was time to move on and try something new.
I chose a map that I’ve never used before…at least used much. You can see it in the photo above. It’s an oceanfront area, bounded by some seemingly impassible hills, but there’s a pass in the middle of them (which I won’t be able to break through–I’ve disabled most of the mods and add-in DLC for this city).
The city will focus its development on the oceanfront and the river.
As much as the city as I can will be built on a standard grid. I’ll attempt to encourage walking and transit use over cars. But roads will also use roundabouts liberally. I’d like to try naming streets intentionally, and not letting them all be named by the game.
The standard map that I started with includes a freeway passing through the city area, and another freeway that spurs into the city itself. I’ll build off of that spur.
Here’s the basis of the city. If you’re wondering why there aren’t many connections to Main Street (we’ll call it that for now), it’s because I’ve found that people coming into town tend to try to use the first connection into the city they get to. So while I’d like to drive them down to the second roundabout on Main Street after the freeway, where another major street is now, I needed to provide one more outlet. And that non-roundabout connection above the roundabout there? That’s gone. I took that out.
Let’s establish some directions, just to make things clear: In the picture above, we’re looking north. The city’s grid will be north-south. The river runs along what currently is the east side of town, and the ocean is the south edge. The water pumping facility is right on the river, and next to it on the left is the first of the city’s water treatment plants. The road here south of the freeway eventually runs to the geothermal power plant.
I’ve got the basics zoned up and people are settling here. Next steps: I need to build an industrial area, start establishing the transit system, and make some connections to the outside world. Tune in next time!
