Send help for the love of God. I've killed thousands and had to restart my Republic so many times making mistakes that it feels like there should be easier ways to avoid. I'm playing realistic mode for reference.
As a general problem, I keep on failing to resist the temptation to build an ugly little 400x400 meter box cram packed with spaghetti walkways and utilities wherever they fit in order to min/max walking and infrastructure range. After 70 hours of the game my first city is actually surviving to the point of net gain and I'm trying to make the next jump. I've carefully prepared before allowing any growth beyond 3000 (I learned my lesson when everyone froze to death... And starved... And ran out of water... And died at 45 due to pollution...) but now I don't know what to do lmao. My people are happy, healthy, and well enough employed by a clothing industry with a food factory and distillery ready to go into production, but I hate trying to do anything in the city because it's so so so cramped. Do I try to make the shitbox less shit? Should I just build a new better city some ways off, or keep new development close to old development so I can still make good use of the infrastructure? Whatever my decision, I can't make a larger city work on buses and trucks alone. The fuel costs and traffic are a pain and I wish I could use all those cool trains or even just trolleys, but I can't figure out how to make it happen lmao. I have learned to save before trying a project only for it to fail miserably and kill everyone or bankrupt me when it completes in 6 months to a year, and I just had to revert because it turns out trolleys can't interact with fuel bus platforms, and my ENTIRE city depends on its platform, so that's not going anywhere.
Where is a quality source for guides on how to build industries, make rail work, and so on and so forth? I've been watching bballjo's videos as well as reading the wiki, and honestly, they're not so good. It's unironically been making me wish I was better at the game so that I could make the kinds of guides I wish I had right now; well scripted and on topic, edited well with pre-recorded clips to clearly show what's going on, and not just saying "this" or "here" or "there" or "that" and using specific names so people less familiar with the game don't lose the thread. Also, digestible. Each guide feels like it should only be 10-15 minutes MAXIMUM, with shorter being better. The longer 'guides' just become too much to absorb at once and harder to sort through to find the bit you actually need. Does anything like what I'm describing actually exist? Or is it all streamers style some guy in a gaming chair rambling more or less on topic for an hour?
Credit where credit is due, I was able to claw a surviving city together by pulling out the main lessons from jo and other ramblers content, but it's getting worse as I get to more complicated systems.
This is a long post that has become more complaining than I wanted it to be. I'm really enjoying the game and I want to progress out of the "early" game, but I don't know how to make train run good or scale up. Please send me good written or video sources for how to city good. Also, don't make me an urban planner after the revolution, at leastv not until I have a couple more hundred hours in this game lmao.
I did the opposite and made a well spaced out organised city where noone could get to work on time, so it’s time for me to learn the ins and outs of transit and travel time or embrace the shitbox I guess.
I may have reached a healthy compromise in this city, and I'm beginning to clear out the shitbox. I've begun upgrading all the roads with streetlights so I need a lot fewer footpaths, the place is really coming together. It's a 350x350 meter box with cross roads going between it, but on a diagonal. All the early housing was lumped towards the bottom and left quadrant because I put my small heating plant on the outside of the top/right quadrant. I wanted everything in range without needing heating pipes for this. Civil infrastructure like shopping center, pool, and theater are in the top left quadrant. I had room for a large kindergarten towards the middle, but also in the left quadrant. That's fairly compact all considered to get a starter population of 1500 ish. School and technical university easily fit near the center of top/right quadrant, along with a small clinic. I knew I was going to demolish the clinic later when I built a real hospital so I wasn't worried about its footprint. As I grew, then, I filled in the rest of the right quadrant with criminal justice stuff and high rise residential buildings and a pub. I was able to add more housing still within range of the heating plant, but just, a little outside the starting houses too in the bottom left. University residences and party hq went into the rest of the top quadrant space, along with one more high density residency building. I did have to get a small grocery store on the other side of town to service those new residency buildings, but easy enough to accommodate because I always stick a meat storage and warehouse on the first shopping center I build, then use 2 ton trucks to distribute to grocery stores as I need them. I forget when exactly, but somewhere around 3000 pop I built a real heating plant with the massive underground pipe required to make it worth it, and that let me begin growing for real.
I guess part of the shitbox life is realizing those early buildings don't have to be permanent. It's fine to build temporary infrastructure, then just demolish it once you can afford upgrades like asphalt roads or larger state services. I guess one mistake I definitely made was putting the police station too deep into my town and now it doesn't 100% cover my industrial park lol. Gonna have to stick a small station up there with just like, 1 piggy pushing his desk ornaments around most the day.