Some People Are Amazing....

[Kaede]

I see a lot of great and amazing cities on here everyday and it motivates me to try myself. But i came to this crushing reality that im not creative. This game is super hard man. How do you guys do it? Everytime i get on i never know what to do. Place a road down and then stop playing for 5 months and then come back to it to repeat these feelings.

[grapplehoeker]

It's not about a lack of creativity, but rather not having any clear idea of what it is you're aiming to build in the first place ;)
As an analogy...
If your construction crew came to you, the architect, on day 1 and asked you to show you them your plans for the work to be done and you show them a blank sheet of paper... then naturally they'll lay a few roads, build a few buildings and then head home and ask you to give them a call when you have something better for them to do.
If they turn up again out of curiosity in 5 months time and your plans are still blank, then of course, they'll just head on home again.

Start with a plan, a goal, a vision, and then see it through to completion.
This could be as simple as building a fully functioning city of 50k population, or 100k.
It could be just to be able to unlock some or all of the monument buildings and use them.
Or you could go the detailing route and disregard functionality for the sake of making it a work of art.
There are tons of ways you can go about this, and whatever you choose is fine, just as long as you do have a plan and stick to it until it's done.

[lozacenz]

Originally posted by Murasame:

I see a lot of great and amazing cities on here everyday and it motivates me to try myself. But i came to this crushing reality that im not creative. This game is super hard man. How do you guys do it? Everytime i get on i never know what to do. Place a road down and then stop playing for 5 months and then come back to it to repeat these feelings.

Well, if you play without turning on the infinite money and 'unlock everything' mods, creativity's barely relevant in the early game. Watch a few tutorials, learn what works and what doesn't. Given a choice between two or three non-terrible options, pick one at random. You have a few levels of things being unlocked after that where simply solving the problems presented (making sure you have enough fire coverage, getting other services established, getting your population up enough to unlock the next level, etc) will guide a lot of what you do and beyond that a simple grid is enough for now.

Eventually, the existing highways, rivers, and hills will get in the way enough that your next bit of expansion needs to be further away, and perhaps not perfectly aligned to your old grid. One road or another will get overloaded with traffic due to exactly where you did or didn't place things and you'll have to redesign intersections or lay out public transportation networks, the services you all ready built will be in the way of where you want to upgrade a road. Maybe you can move them, maybe the main road needs to go somewhere else. Things like that.

Sure, the end result isn't as Amazing as if you spent 10 or 50 times as many hours fiddling about with Move It and the various anarchy mods etc and just generally being utterly insane/artistic, but it's still pretty good.

Personally, I get most of my enjoyment (and probably most of the unique character of my cities, to be honest) out of the rail and tram networks. Building them, omptimising them... using a first person camera mod to Ride on them :D (that said, Trams need a few work shop assets to be good, because the default track options are Very limited.)

But they're both easier to get your head around, and more fun to build, if you've got a city up and running and then build a rail network to service That City.

If I have infinite money and everything unlocked from the start... I either end up playing it exactly the same way anyway, or laying out some districts, half the rail network I want to build around, a few bits of residentual... and then just giving up for one reason or another, as simultaniously there is no direction but at the same time Everything must happen but if you do too much too quickly deathwaves will screw up your city constantly later...

So, yeah, in my experience the trick is to focus on one thing at a time, be almost Intentionally imperfect, because all the Cool stuff comes from how you fix the problems those imperfections cause once your city gets bigger.

Well, unless you're one of the very people you're talking about who make those insane awesome cities. (also, most of them clearly have unreasonable amounts of RAM in their PCs, as the amount of mods and custom assets they use would pretty much cripple the game's ability to run otherwise. (or at least, trying to do so And Record Video Of It would choke the PC)... then again, it's been a while since I last paid much attention to such things. Maybe it's not so unreasonable now?)

[Stealthy]

I've played vanilla until today and made city of Rennes, which is also uploaded to workshop.

One thing to do is paint a "mental image" first how you roughly would lay out areas. It doesn't have to be in detail, just where you put commercial, where residental. Where would the main road be etc. Then you can start working towards that and if you don't like grid based cities, follow the height contours with roads. They can be used in vanilla game by first selecting the road tool and the road you want, then click countours button on info panel. This way you see the elevations and can create some more natural shapes on the roads.

After that you have some rough city laid out and then you can start fine tuning and fixing things if something doesn't work or please your eye.

[Kaede]

OMG thank you guys for the nice comments. I was not expecting this. I will take this into account. So i just gotta visualize whats in my head and take it one step at a time? Cause ive watched tutorials and such and well thats great and all but i wanna make my own design. cause i wanna have a good looking city that i always see here in the feed.

[Stealthy]

Originally posted by Murasame:

OMG thank you guys for the nice comments. I was not expecting this. I will take this into account. So i just gotta visualize whats in my head and take it one step at a time? Cause ive watched tutorials and such and well thats great and all but i wanna make my own design. cause i wanna have a good looking city that i always see here in the feed.

Pretty much. You could also try this:

Use unlimited money and unlock all mods, which are included in the game. Then buy all 9-tiles at the begining from the areas you want your city to be in. Then place 1 railway station in the middle of each square and paint districts around them and label them according to areas they will be. "city centre" "residential 1" "Industry" etc. This way you have your rail network in place, stations where they will be and they will give you some focus points.

Then start building around them and slowly your ciy merges together as a one big city, like they grown in real life. This way it won't be just one solid grid, but a realistic looking layout. Of course without mods like Move It! and such, it will not have the finer detail. But that should come after you make your main layout. Then you have time to tinker around and fine tune places.

Have a look at Rennes from workshop. That will give you some ideas and pointers on roads and such, how to keep traffic minimized etc.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1582868192

[Effixel]

Well Murasame, I am in the exact same situation as you: I have no imagination at all, and usually my cities end up being an ugly, gigantic grid.
However for my latest map I've tried to do something different. It's still not great compared with other people's job, but it looks a bit better:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1591288708

my trick here is, instead of having main axes being straight lines, I twist them a little right and left. Thew still start and stop at the same point, but at least it looks a bit more natural. The fact that the map is an island makes it easier, because I just have to follow the coast to draw one of the roads. The others just cut across the island to separate it in several smaller districts. It's still very artifical, but I am quite pleased with it.

[Detail]

I remember when I first started, I felt the same way. My cities were pankcake straight grids with little deviation from that. I had the creativity from Photography and Graphics design, but lacked the necessary skills to transform those ideas to the great maps which players have created.

I usually start with a set of ideas, some come from previous maps, but others come from just observations in real life and or the new assets that you either find or you see on the workshop everyday. There are some very creative people in this game, whatching their vids can provide inspiration and fresh ideas. Susvripe to their channels, talk to other players and challenge yourself.

I think mastering Terraforming along with the techniques to do good slopes and elevations and the myramid of other features are very important. I invested alot of time mastering techniques which are critical, and with this game you never stop learning. Producing something other than just flat maps takes alot of time. I like to start out with terrian first, then I mold my ideas and the structure around that. Right now I'm doing a hugh project and have that map up to 100K. A couple of elements are mountain cities of about 5K, it's different than a flat Vanilla map, but here are a couple of screen shots of the work in process. Some areas in high res follow the standard grid pattern, others are free form to balance that so it doesn't endup lookinjg "Blocky".

I do have a general plan in layout in my mind when I start, but once at least for me I get into it it rapidally changes.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1594718524
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1594719119

[Detail]

Murasame I had a couple other thoughts I forgot to mention here are some more shots. Just brielfy parks and what I call transportation cooridors work effectivily to get the block aspect. They use many squares and break up the normal grid of street after street. Adding curves and angles also breaks up the blockyness. There are such great assets aval you just have to add the creativity.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1594775708
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1594776244
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1594776570
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1594780405