Just thinking out load.
Been quietly trying to get my head around asset creation in CS2, pretty sure I'll be able to do it so I want to continue my London project, starting largely from scratch again.
With the 529 tiles mod, this gives a maximum map area of 13.8km×13.8km. Comparing this to the 17.2km×17.2km available with the 81 tiles mod in CS1 dramatically cuts down the area I aim to produce. On the one hand, this is a good thing, it makes it marginally more possible (though this is still pretty much 0.000001% chance of satisfactory completion) - on the other, it really messes up my plan. Getting some of London's iconic West End in, was just about possible given I'd set the furthest East point as London City Airport and the North Circular road next to (both heavily preferred for outside connections)... with the new, smaller, size of CS2, I'm now well short of that required width.
One option would be to rotate the map by 45°, giving me a max distance of 19.5km from the most easterly point to the most westerly, which might actually work, it just means I've got to re-do the Hi-res overlays I made from Google Maps from scratch, which took me weeks before, and I'll have to do a much bigger one this time (as I can't lock Google maps to a 45° rotation), to then cut the required diamond shape from it. I've also got to find a way of working with the height map since none of the tools I've used will rotate it in the required fashion, or, freehand it.
The other option is to bin off the London City Airport, the North Circular, and the Woolwich Ferry, all of which were plausible outside connections, that's going to put a lot of traffic on Road and Rail.
Even then, I'm pushing it on scale - I'd say it's definitely more consistent with real life in CS2 than CS1, but heavy use of Road Builder and it's janky junctions will be required to keep the roads/sidewalk to realistic sizes.
