So, I have been playing Sim City since I was nine years old. I transitioned from 2000 to 3000, to 4 for a very long time. Cities Skylines is a masterpiece right now and have been playing it in my spare time very often. But I have alwas felt that even with the comparatively huge plots Cities Skylines offers that I need more space. I wanted to create a country, connect it, develop its culture and political system, make its politicians fight over infrastructure projects, make its citizens frustrated with traffic, slow trains or housing shortages. That is something that city simulators don’t allow. But I have never thought that there could be more than that. I was happy with Skylines.
But, one day, as I was searching Google for tips on how to add more realism to my street systems I stumbled upon a reddit that linked to OGF. And that has changed the schedule of my last couple of weeks significantly.
I have to say the community’s welcome has been warm, and I can see a lot of great work here. It’s exactly what I wanted to see from such a place, and I am sure I will stick around for a while. So, welcome to Rodana - everyone. I am happy to hear out any type of criticism, hopefully constructive more than anything.
So let’s start with my initial impressions and feel of the game. After talking to the administrators and explaining the type of country I would like to build, I was assigned Rodana. That’s the name I gave it anyway. What you will read next is the message I sent to the admin team when asked about how I see the country I want to build:
In principle, the vision would look at a country in a relatively moderate climate (though cold doesn’t bother me anyway either : ) ). The way I see it being built, in a rather gradual fashion is from a country that went through a regime that was authoritarian – communist, with low investment in infrastructure, but high investment in industry, to one that opens up its economy gradually, but struggles with corruption and botched projects on the way. In this sense, my vision is to start off with a rather poor infrastructure, slow roads overall, bad connections, a small and inconsistent train infrastructure. Meanwhile, the cities are planned out, with most people living in rural areas. After that is done, the plan is to switch into economic change and recovery mode, where infrastructure starts becoming more important, cities start getting suburbs, but because of corruption, planning is a bit haywire, projects don’t get finalised etc. Ideally, this country would not be landlocked since especially during the authoritarian period exports will be very important and a couple of ports will help with that. Later on, tourism would take over instead. In terms of language, I am thinking of something Eastern European, happy to adopt an existing language or borrow elements of another one.
Thus began my country. I laid out the main few cities, named the capital Bucurtown, because I was feeling uninspired and couldn’t think of something better than changing the name of my native Romanian capital. That has since changed as I have been told I am not allowed to use the Romanish language or anything Romanian since another user has been doing that, quite successfully, for a while. That’s fine. Gives me a bit more creative power in that sense. I have met my active neighbours, who have been very friendly and gave me good tips. Litvania is a wonderful place with so much potential and a really worthy neighbour. I aspire to map as well as they do in the near future.
#Current developments.
Currently, I am developing the ports system. As I grew up in a large port area in Constanta, Romania, that inspired me to build a worthy port for both my capital and other cities and town situated on the Egalian lake. That has been my first big adventure. I am currently still struggling with that a lot, so any ideas and tips would be welcome. My approaches have been less than stellar so far.
First I tried just building an area over the lake that would be the port, then zoning it as industrial. That failed as the map would see it as both land as sea. Then, after some digging, I thought that the best way is to set that area as inner in relation to the lake polygon. However, that brings the problem that the edge of the port that is shared with the land is also considered to be coastal. Which makes the map look awkward as well.
That is frustrating in respect to the port here - which is not even visible on the map though it was created yesterday. My big problem there is that I spent quite some time designing it and now I don’t want to do it all over again. If anyone has a fix to this, please feel free to edit the area of the port directly, I grant you my permission.
Look around, tell me what you think, and how I can improve. My only other issue remains topography. While I know it is discouraged I did create forests to stand in for mountains, because I don’t even know how to begin creating a topo map, and that would take way too much time that I want to dedicate in spending with the map editor.
Looking forward to your comments.
And yes, I am still trying to figure out a culture, language and what not for Rodana. But that might take a little while longer.
See you soon. Marius