So, despite all the other **** going on in my life at the moment, I'm still messing about with CSL a lot, as I'm keen to make the most of my new hardware.
This is just a mini rant really, with no constructive advice, but anyway... I'm finding it really frustrating. My goal is to build the biggest, reasonably well detailed, fairly realistic city I can, and have it look somewhat better than my vanilla flavour modded cities - by which I mean; obviously there's the vanilla game, and then there's mods/assets - the more you move towards the heavy detail work - and making things look good, the vanilla game mechanic breaks down. You can get around this using mods of course (block services are the cure all IMHO), but I don't want to do that, I want my city to work. When you watch a lot of the really good detailers on YouTube, often there cities are totally knackered and plagued with issues that are effectively just hidden by mods. At the other end you get people like Biffa, will slickly running cities, but very little detailing done, and essentially, pretty, but vanilla looking. So, I guess I'm trying to do a lot, I want functional, pretty and real.
So, as you you get slightly more familiar with the various heavy mods (stuff like Procedural Objects), a lot of what you see people like CityWokCityWall, Skibitth, Ajraus and $2.20 doing, starts to actually make more sense, and get's a little less daunting - though I have to say, it takes much longer than you may realise from watching their time lapses. But, it still takes time to learn which mods do which, and how to use them to actually achieve what you want.
One of the things I've noticed is that it really helps if you build a story with your city as you go, think about what an area is, how it works with its surroundings, and what it would look like. I end up looking at how few negative spaces there are in the real world - and it becomes clear that really, every square unit of a map needs to be worked on to make it feel real. Google maps is great for inspiration, but what you then end up realising is...
... it's all about assets. I can't achieve what I want without loads and loads and loads of assets. Quick example. Vanilla low density residential. Most of the vanilla assets, and workshop assets, come pre-decorated, often with hedges and fences. This is fine if you're imagining every house sits on a square plot in a grid system. They don't, not in real life. The same is somewhat true of industrial/commercial areas too - although the bigger the building the less I mind putting time in altering it with props/PO's. So what you end up with, it having to disguise the boundaries of every building you put down, or discard a big chunk of assets. This is a real pet peeve for me. Decent, realistic looking domestic hedge and fence networks seem to be few and far between, and are unable to disguise existing props on vanilla/workshop assets. In any case... if you going for even a somewhat realistic detailed environment, you need a ****ing tonne of assets, or be making your own.
CWCW has recently put out a video series for asset creation which I've not watched yet, but I think I'm really going to need to get my head around it (though at least I can run Blender much easier now).
The other real issue, that I don't just want to fudge with a mod, is the balance of demand. I'm pretty sure the game uses zoning to adjust these first and foremost, with other in game stats then altering them. The amount of residential you have to place down, to stop even one shop going out of business is nuts. And, immediately you hit the educated workers problem. I'm also led to believe it's to do with zoning because Industries DLC assets are not affected the same way. I think this has weird side effects too. My first police station was spawning police cars almost non-stop, in city with ~400 population. Effectively, for even a tiny village you seem to need good coverage for all the services and education, before you can think about expanding a neighbourhood or else you end up with a tonne of crime, unable to build commercial/general industrial. This is a small problem because some of these more important assets are the ones where you feel you need to add a lot of detailing.
Anyway, the TL;DR for all this is that it's not as hard as expected (though please don't think I'm setting myself up as being anyway near as good as those guys on YouTube - I'm not), but it is a lot more frustrating, and a lot more time consuming.
