I took advantage of the current C:S DLC sale on the PS Store last night and bought the Industries content. Had a quick play around with it and really like the bigger buildings and tiles it offers over the standard industry stuff. Struggling a little to integrate it into my current map as warehouses etc are so much bigger that i'm having to re-work areas especially the roads, which is causing havoc with my newly installed bus routes. They're really a pain to reconnect lines once they've been broken. Not fully figured out how the specific products react with the warehouses and supply routes, but i'll get there. I'm also puzzled by the way 'Industries' overlaps with the standard games industry content in regards to creating districts and assigning a specific industry to it.
As I understand it the industries DLC is intended to work alongside the old specialised industries. So if for example you create a DLC forestry industry you can then create an old specialised forestry area nearby or even within it and those will take products from your DLC area.
Overcharged Egg does it in this video:
He gradually replaces generic with DLC and old specialised forestry building. You can also still have generic industry of course, I don't know if eventually you can meet demands entirely with the DLC stuff, I've not progressed that far personally.
It's really not that well balanced though, you're going to end up with a lot of traffic and vehicles not going where you expect/want no matter what you do. Factory right next door to the lumber factory that needs lumber? Nope, they export it out of the city instead!
Putting warehouses nearby storing the stuff that the factories need seems to help, set on balanced.
The real challenge though is making sure you're producing the right amount of stuff for your current factories. You can do it manually writing it all down but someone did make a spreadsheet calculator that does it for you, if you wanted to do that -
When I put my old city details into that it soon showed where I'd gone wrong, I was producing far too much raw product which was keeping all my lorries busy exporting, so there was nobody left to deliver to the factories.
I've probably asked before, but which of the other DLC is worth buying?
I've bought most of them now with this recent sale. Haven't really got into snowfall or campus yet, I bought the latter because I liked the idea of doing bigger more realistic universities, instead of the one building ploppables which get hard to make unique. If you don't care about that, Campus probably not so worth it. But it's basically like Industries in that you define an area, build it up and level up adding new parts etc. Snowfall should be good for the complete change of pace, it comes with a lot of new features regarding heating, clearing snow etc, but as I say not played with it much myself yet. Just got it now while it was on sale. It also comes with trams, so essential if you want those in other non-snow cities.
Parklife is great if you want to build a much better variety of parks instead of the boring ploppable ones, four different types with a ton of assets. You can build a big New York stlye central park, nature trails in forests, theme parks.
Mass Transit is almost worth it just for the new roads if you're into designing realistic Euro cities without big wide 3/6 lane highways running through them like US cities. You get two lane highways and even a two way regular road highway which works well as a fast ring road, plus some others. I've not really got into the other bits of it yet, but you get more transit hubs, local ferries and cable cars, blimps etc. Depends whether you want those sort of things in your city I guess.
Green Cities has a lot of new buildings in all areas, as per the name if you want to build a green city or green area this is what you need to replace the polluting, ugly stuff. New ways to make power, green water outlets etc. Also as I said above the housing is really nice, modern and clean designs, not cartoony like some of the vanilla stuff.
The only two I don't have now are Natural Disasters and Sunset Harbor. The former is obviously only worth it if you like the idea of a disaster destroying your city at random and having to deal with it, Sunset Harbor seems to be pretty random in terms of content.
So in summary IMO
Parklife
Green Cities
Industries
Mass Transit
Are the four you'll get the most out of in every city, with the most new features and buildings. Snowfall, Campus and Natural Disasters only if those things really appeal to you, as I say, or if you really want trams in the case of Snowfall.
