City Skylines, Building London - Part 1

West London: Chiswick and Shepherd's Bush

After watching Doctor Benjy's brilliant Cities Skylines series I felt the itch to play it for myself. I wasn't really aware the game existed, even though everyone else seems to be, but had been looking for a city sim after reminiscing about Sim City, Caesar III, and Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom - all games that consumed many hours of my childhood. If Benjy was building New York then I figured I'd build London! I've just moved from Deptford to Birmingham so it seemed like a good send-off to the city. 

The first job was to spend 4 hours stripping back my laptop, which involved deleting so many files as well as some help from AVGTuneUp (13+GB of junk!)... next job was buying and installing the base game. A sensible person having never played Cities before would have just played with the game to learn the ropes but I was insistent that my first project would be London. My prayers that someone had already made a London map were answered by Skye Storme who has made a brilliantly scaled an accurate base map and a time-saving list of London based mods and assets! Once all these were also installed and after 3 crashes and buying some DLC I was good to go. 

The map loads up all the way over in the west, mainly due to Skye's bias towards the west but as I plonked down awful junctions and accidentally built a lot of very US looking buildings I quickly realised it was a blessing. By the time I get to my beloved Aragon Tower, I'll actually be a competent Cities player! Two restarts due to bankruptcy later, I had built a financially stable Chiswick. The focal point of the city is the Chiswick Roundabout and having figured out how to name roads I was more proud of my dodgy looking M4 than I should have been. 

As seen below Brentford has been re imagined as an industrial wasteland but if it's any consolation I did squeeze in Griffin Park so Brentford FC at least have their moment in the sun as London's only football club. 

City Skylines is like the old city simulators refined, a simple game tuned beautifully. The detail is breathtaking but never overwhelming, so long as you keep water, electric, waste and taxes balanced you can't go too wrong. There are little bars that tell you when to 'zone' areas for residential, commercial and industrial so once you've got a good balance of that to you're free to play however you want. You can mark out custom bus lanes, mess with traffic, name hospitals and fiddle with dog parks to your heart's content while most stuff ticks over on its own. 

As the little blue bar was telling me my city was desperate for a serious commercial zone I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon building Westfield shopping centre - unlike Brentford and Chiswick I'd actually spent some time in the Whitecity/Shepherd's Bush area. As Westfield built up I got distracted building a massive residential zone in Shepherd's Bush (see below). Some of the road names are right and it's roughly accurate but as the scale isn't exact it's more of an artistic impression of London... The culmination of all these new people meant I unlocked hospitals, so Hammersmith/Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital becomes my first of many hospital zones nestling just below the currently empty Wormwood Scrubs. 

With the sun setting over west London and outside the window in real life it should have been time to wind up but not without starting a bit of the famous underground network. Tube station mod at my mouse tips I plonk down four central line stations; Shepherd's Bush, White City, North Acton and Hanger Lane. The later creating the strange new district of Hanger Hill, my attempt to get people to actually use the damn line... Hanger Hill contains one office block (occupied by an accountant) and a large IKEA because what bigger draw is there than IKEA! Sadly it only coaxes 2 people onto the underground, the rest use their cars. Hopefully these Londoners will learn to love the underground like real Londoners do (love/hate) or perhaps my mod is broken... 

There is just enough time to start on Fulham before I log off for the night. Fulham Palace goes in with Bishops Park but for now Craven Cottage can wait... Fulham FC and Chelsea FC will arrive tomorrow!