Do YOU Hate your Starting City in Cities Skylines 2? Do This... 

Haha oops looks like we’re calling in Straten Island

What to do if i hate myself to start with

One thing to keep in mind when building parks: what do people in real life use parks for? The main things would be exercise, dog walks, and children playing. A good park for exercise would have some form of a loop path for running, with some trees along the path for shade. Dogs enjoy walks that have bushes close to the path for smelling and open areas for play. Reactive dogs also benefit from a more windy/curvy path to cut lines of sight from triggers/small animals. Children and their parents benefit from more open areas to keep line of sight on their child. With only a few trees to provide shade/climbing opportunities. Keeping these small details in mind can really boost the realism.

Cities 2 is impressive but im waiting for at least a couple of years for the creators to do their thing and make all the fantastic buildings that are available in cities 1. Thanks 2 dollars you got me building after seeing you border town build.

Just a tip for 4:33 if you have problems with zoning attaching itself to the wrong road: Build a pedestrian path alongside the road you don't want zoning on, almost like an extra wide sidewalk, to block the connection. The zoning will usually attach itself to the next available roadside instead, and then you can simply delete the pedestrian path afterwards.

since the name Jersey comes from the island of Jersey in England, why not name one of the neighborhoods Guernsey? They are neighbor islands. It would fit the theme

If you keep moving back your river water level on the map, at some point you're going to have to build Niagara Falls to cover the height difference :D

33:00 That Scoccer field should be the other way round with the stands looking out over the water instead of at the buildings

You could call it Empire City as a nod to New York being the Empire State

I picked that map too, I like how you finally moved the water to the previously abandoned creek bed to the left of the city, I’d been considering that. Also, for zoning adjustment you can draw paths along roads you don’t want zoning to face then delete them after buildings come in. Love your channel, I enjoy your commentary and the thought you put into a city

Hi TwoDollarsTwenty, when I see you zone and trying to explain how well some parts of your city look like, I can't help thinking how you must miss CS1. Plopping a specific building or prop, moving them around to place them at the exact right place, placing a full grown tree, ... Those were the times.

You should make that dense industry neighborhood based off of Lawrenceville Pittsburgh. It’s like almost all row houses and was created around the riverfront industry. Would work really well

I started a Philadelphia style city. Kinda the same. It's turning out really well. I'm working on the jersey area across the river now.

First and foremost loving the OG Sim City 4 soundtrack! Loving the videos and excited for this build. I think you should take inspiration from east coast American coyotes in general, sort of how Oceania was a mix of Aus and Kiwi cities. The neighbourhood with the college reminded me of Baltimore , Philadelphia , Boston especially with the autumn trees.

I think it's always difficult when you're used to a previous game, and then you're suddenly playing its successor. I've already started over like 15 times :'D

I am truly enjoying watching you play the new game. It feels just a little bit special being here from the start. I'm hoping for the community assets to be available asap, as it will for sure elevate the series!

I like that he played SimCity Music in the background. Nice Vid!

This city definitely need "Timeless Square" lol. I really enjoy your landscaping-heavy style. Thanks for the inspiration 😊

I'm definitely glad to watch you play through CS2! It's gonna be a minute before I pick up the game as-is, but I look forward to seeing how that all shifts around

I love the direction your city is going in! Definitely keep the avenue with the grass and trees on the waterfront. Also that triangular shaped park with the row houses next to it makes for a really cute neighborhood. You inspired me with that little overpass bridge thing, I know exactly the place I want to put one in my current city. As for struggles getting your city off the ground, I think it’s normal. I’ve so far only played 1 city since I started Cities 2 and there was like 4 times in the beginning where I wanted to start over but I told myself real cities don’t start over and I persevered and now absolutely love my city! My traffic is absolutely out of control though 😅

It reminds me a lot of Boston, or some of the towns on Long Island near me (albeit a little larger, haha) at it's current stage. Once some taller building come into play, it'll really start to take shape... I can't wait to see how it turns out! 😁😁😁

I also think Fortune city would make a great name

To avoid the issues with the Quays, add land above the water level for them, or drain the water with a water-wall. Makes it much easier, and avoids the "in water" issue as there's no water there

It’s so crazy to see you take inspiration from the area I live in, like I recognise what your getting inspiration from and it’s so cool

You’ve actually inspired me. The way you build is great and I think it will be a fantastic series

I've been using the narrow pedestrian paths to manipulate the zoning. Drag the path along the road you dont want your buildings on, but dont delete it until you fill in the zoning. If you dry to delete the path before you color it in, it will try to put some of the zoning back on that road. If you zone it first and then delete the path, the zoning will stay that way permanently, and keep it paused and delete the path before it starts building, it may even give you a few squares back depending on how much space you have and you can get the full zone potential. I agree its a complete step backwards but this trick has at least been making things easier for me.

I really enjoy watching your videos and I think you did great progress with the city🥰 The city takes shape and I feel you struggling with the game, I think we all have to get used to a few things still and some bugs need to get fixed.

How you realize your grids/road layout. Always so awesome. Cheers

Thank you for your work and time you put into making this video🥰❤

Haha, Even before the New Tealand joke I was thinking its looking like Dunedin, NZ. High school up on the hill, suburb up on hill with bridge over entry. I'm liking it

20:50 this would be a great location for a Pittsburgh, PA-inspired neighborhood. Hilly Eastern US city with forests and workforce row housing from the industrial era

Ohhh could I hear some awesome sim city 4 music… I love those tunes and used to play this album on repeat like nothing else 💙

2:25 perfectly recreated the area around the Holland Tunnel

The industrial/rowhouses part kind of reminded me of Georgetown or Alexandria in Washington DC, check them out as inspo! They should also add row commercial buildings.

looking great so far. I agree the terrain and landscaping is really challenging to get to grips with. It's a shame that Fences, Quays and Rocks arent in the game day one as only having trees and bushes as detailing options is really quite boring and doesnt suit many urban or industrial areas

If you build a road near water and zone down into the water, when the buildings spawn, they will raise up perfect 90° land pieces (these will disappear if you bulldoze). You can use these buildings as something for quays to snap to, enabling you to make perfect 90° angled quays. Using pedestrian version is easier. If you make the water depth be five bands (or lines) lower than the height of the buildings and set pedestrian quay height to 1.25m, it should be just about perfect. Once you have the quays set up, you can demo the buildings, the quays will remain at proper height) and fill in the parts of land that go back beneath the waves; or place something else on top of them instead. I used this trick to place a massive paper mill with a perfectly sharp quay edge against the water.

I'm thinking that a name of one of the Channel Islands could fit for the name of the city, since Jersey is among those islands. Something like New Burhou?

I actually had a different plan for the river which worked great, I built a Dam at the Edge of the map, It actually made much more sense when you want the map sit closer to the sea level as you could just skip about 100-120m of height and as a bonus 800MW of Electricity (I actually managed to build a 1.5GW Dam but the two Transformers can only handle 800W). The Dam actually gave me 1.9M Service Trade Income per month. It takes time for the water to adjust though so just block the source first then slope the river because I experienced a lot of floods when I landscaped the river first.

as a Brooklynite I have to say your New York City and NYC plan is pretty cursed lol. Also Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens are part of New York City, not just Manhattan.

That bridge up by the college reminds me of the rail/trail bridges over Broadway in Kingston, NY (up the Hudson from NYC). My wife, when she worked for a public art non-profit in Chelsea, did a wrapping project on them a couple years back.

good video for using the simcity 2013 soundtrack, it rocks

tomato

I find it wild how many people I've seen say it's a step backwards not having the zoning toggle. We had it for like a month, lol.

Can’t wait to see this all completely finished.

From what I can tell, zoning aligns to the *most recently placed road*, not whichever road is larger/higher in capacity. Fortunately, if you use paths to break/realign zones, they'll stay that way even after you remove the path. I completely agree about the lack of zone toggling, it was such a quality of life feature at the end of CS1 its absence genuinely feels like an oversight. Hopefully it'll be added soon in an update.

Make sure to include journal square a subway/light rail connection to Manhattan with lots of shops and luxury apartments on the street

Yeah I was really hoping for two things in CS2. One, Way more road and sidewalk customization and two, a better way to cleanly/automatically fill in empty spaces between propertylines. Also the fact that parks are again just this stupid square units that are needed for happiness is bugging me. I'm still having fun though.

YES! I would like rolling hills like prairies, rather than coastal ranges. Mountains belong in the distance ... looking all majestic and not domineering the entire map!

I like CS2, but it does often feel like 2 steps forward and one step back, like with not including key walls. That's not even including graphic issues, just game play. I'm hoping, like everyone else, they'll fix a lot of this stuff with updates and DLCs

Here's a name suggestion for some future neighborhoods. Considering Two Dollarton is gonna be an East Coast city, why not name one of the future developments Harmonsburgh? Inspired by Pittsburgh and Harrisburg of course. Awesome video!

Zoning is attached to road build first. Thx for great vid

What’s ironic is there actually is a swamp behind jersey city

New Fortune would make a great name

Looking good. The ability to allocate game function to areas and buildings, like RICO mod would be cool. Eg - turn a green space into a functioning park. - make a zoned building into a functioning welfare office or health clinic. etc.

One city that is pretty close topographically is Ishinomaki, Japan. You should have a look at it for industrial warf inspiration. Also, I really think you should have called your new city "New Gotham" ! But maybe the name will appear as a district somewhere.

I know you said no more money puns, but...you should have two adjacent neighborhoods named after the first two movies of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western trilogy: "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More." "Fistfulla Downs" can be the name of a high-end neighborhood for college professors adjacent to the college on the hill (Fistfulla College?), while "Fewdollas Moor" can be the name of the broader upland area on the other side, dominated by a lower-income student housing neighborhood.

You can draw your key roads first and then terrain remove around the roads to make nice looking keys

Love the Simcity 4 music!

Lets goooo been waiting on this one

Not having a zoning toggler is driving me insane

There are two neat light rail lines in New Jersey near NYC. The Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, and the Newark Light Rail.

I enjoyed the Simcity 2013 music in the video 2D20 :)

Somewhere, when you almost named it New Tealand, Biffa dropped his cup of tea.

The name New Yorvik is catching steam over on the Discord and Patreon.

You can use paths to temporarily (or permanently)remove the zoning from a particular street (in order force the zoning to stick another nearby street). Just run a path along the side of a road to remove zoning, or run it behind your buildings in order to limit the depth of the zoning.

When you changed the direction of the river it would've been really cool if you did that by damming it and adding a channel rather than just terraforming it to your will :)

Zoning has been my biggest nightmare in this game. Especially because I was used to plop the growables for detailed build in CS1. But mostly because zoning seems to be often non logical in CS2

Any look you want for the dense suburbs of New Jersey and Staten Island would be good!

You should build a island based on Stockholm, Sweden

Ive been playing with dev console on. it lets you remove that different colored grass by using surfaces and its great. also it lets you move paths into parks like you could in cs1. not best solution but makes things much better honestly

you could try to use the developer tools...that could help you with detailing (similar to rico mod from CS1 and also surface paintings) Biffa made a video about it

For the ridge and hillside districts or the areas with more terrain differences, you should look at Pittsburgh, PA. Many hill communities all around to draw inspiration from with weird and steep road networks. Maybe a few moderately poor placed bridges and tunnels could bring it all together lol!

is that one of the Sim City 4 themes at 8:55 and 12:40 or smth? great taste

If you call the City Two Dollarton you should definitely make a District or maybe a big Shopping Mall that's called Twenty Centre.

Flip that soccer field around so the stands are closer to the city and have a view of the water!

Use develop mode to fill out those gaps between lots.

One of the best things about CS2 is the water model when terraforming it does seem to cause massive tsunami which is great because that would always bug me in CS1

We desperately need an option to chose what street the zones are on, as well as a built in line tool for hedge rows and the like. There was just so much content in CS:1 that wasn't included in CS:2. I'm not even talking about mechanical things like in some of the DLCs, but basic UI stuff and tools that are missing for no good reason at all. Kind of like the contour tool fight that happened prior to release. Things like that just need to be part of the game.

OMG YOU FINALLY POSTED

For the name of the main district so far, how about New Guernsey or Guernsey City since it’s inspired by New Jersey? Guernsey is another channel island aswell as jersey so would make sense

A area fro the city can be called Pennston named after Pennsylvania, the State next to New York. And New Jersey. And this DOES NOT have to do with the penny!

I’d like to see some high rises/skyscrapers in the quays that go out into the water, kinda like Rotterdam

Keeping with the theme of Jersey (the clothing) I think the new city should be called Cardigan :)

you can paint concrete, spawning assets etc. , you just have to activate the developer mode in steam

The zoning issue could seriously be fixed if they just had the option to toggle zoning on either side of the roads.

Staten Island or The Bronx would be good inspiration if your going to be building with terrain challenges like that. Although I will say the elevation changes are not nearly as hard in most cases as it is in CS2.

"a little bit incomplete" got me laughing hard, feels more like they forgot twice as much than they actually learned

I've been having a lot of the same experiences as you when playing through my first through city attempts. My Tips: Don't build with the Snap to Guidelines on. But DO keep snap to cell length on at all times (unless you're building a diagonal road through existing zones cells). This will keep your grid tighter and should help eliminate the huge ugly gaps in your zoning. Determine where "down-wind" is as soon as possible and make sure your industrial zone has plenty of room to expand without impediment. The game will make you build industry en masse. The air pollution will mess up your city if not taken into account. The industry you zone at the beginning, move away as soon as you can. This will keep ground pollution from making citizens sick later. Build 10 farms as soon as possible (of any size) to get the Dairy Factory building for the increase 1% in production for free. My Complaints: I've started and restarted more than once upon learning important pieces of information that aren't explained well. A good example is that the Incinerator plant doesn't produce electricity if your city is too small, so its not a good development purchase early game. Creating quay walls with roads is extremely tedious and needs overhauling. Offices come way too late into the progression. Building footprints and road zoning, as you mentioned, can be frustrating. The height required to clear cruise ships and cargo ships is massive and smaller more realistic options aren't in the game. Building on slopes has the exact same issues as the first game. The grid system is worse at detecting building zones. Balancing finances can also be frustrating. You can leave the game running with no changes to your city or economy and see your finances fluctuate wildly. The number of busses and trains for the depots is also frustratingly small. Telecom is super expensive and somehow none of that cost is past onto your population (the way it is with water and electricity). The size and scaling between zoning types also takes a dramatic jump in building height levels. It can be difficult to zone a proper city that increases in density and build height. You also cant affect residential taxes by zoning type, which is ridiculous. Overall: The visual bugs and whatnot I expect to be patched so I won't mention those. Just a whole whack of small things. Overall, the game is fun and has a lot of potential, but as it stands, this feels incomplete in a way. Personally, I know I'll stick with it because I truly have faith in the dev team and paradox to make the necessary changes to improve the gameplay and experience.

The game feels like a big step back from Cities Skylines 1, it's a shame. Maybe it will be better in the future but for right now it's bad! Also loving the new background music, very relaxing to hear while watching

The zoning grid is only attached to one road. And we can't change any thing about that. It makes no sense, especially when we were able to zone on every side of grid in C:S1

"Filling it up with trees isnt really much of an option" *Goes to terrain editor, selects trees, and adds trees* WOW! Looks like adding trees is indeed an option after all!

Man, SC4 music is great

I have to ask, is there already a SimCity 4 station out there? Because I absolutely LOVE SC4's music. As far as the video, I am really enjoying this series. Your attention to detail is great, and I love your planning. Thank you!

Could you create an instructional video on how to make cities look good on terrain with varying elevations? Your work is amazing!

I have a lot of medium housing, mixed housing & low rent housing in one of my district so a lot of cars tends to full up car lots and roadside parking( I don't like cars parking on roadside), so instead of using wide sidewalk or grass & trees, I up the roadside parking fee up to $20 then $50 and cars still keep parking on the road making $170,000+ and your citizens don't seem to mind it, this is all still in boom town milestones. so it a good way to make a bit of money without consequences. and I hope there will be some buildings with parking lots in them like how they have in Victoria Melbourne apartment building. and a Australia Theme.

Getting really big Montreal vibes out of this series so far with rivers and a parkland hill

I would be easy to make it my kind of place to live, put one mid house as far from the city in the middle of the woods ;-)

For your next series, I'd love to see you do Archipelago Haven next, if they dont add new maps that are even more exciting. 😅

What you are doing is very similar to what happened in boston, boston was just a small peninsula but they took land from the hills and they filled the water with it to gain more land so maybe the areas where you removed the hills you can call them (name) hill, and the place filled with land could be (name) lake or pond or canal and main roads named after important features, and also a name for fake statin island could be something island and i recommend shutter, idk why but just came to the mind and considering the movie shutter island you can make a history about that island of a mental asylum or a prison and fill it with forestry and maybe the bridges to the island are new considering it was a prison so it would have been disconnected but as the city grows they converted the island and contributed it to the greater city

If you far enough in the game you unlock the city bridge, witch looks a lot then the Brooklyn Bridge. 👍