Watching an actual civil engineer nerd out over Cities: Skylines 2 is some of the most wholesome city building content out there
You may remember Real Civil Engineer as the twisted mind behind the poop-powered city made in the original Cities: Skylines game. Well, he’s back again and turning his hand to Cities: Skylines 2. Aside from pulling a few vaguely sewage-related antics this time around, he’s been heartily nerding out over the road tools, assessing their realism, and passing ten years worth of engineering judgement on the game’s starter highways.
In his recent video made in collaboration with PC Gamer, which you can watch above, RCE starts off buying up all the land with his unlimited cash. And, of course, he wouldn’t be worthy of the title of former engineer if he didn’t make a point of re-designing the starter-grade separated junction to make it cheaper, despite having started the game with unlimited money. So he sets about replacing the tunnels with a nice bridge, complete with retaining walls. The ease with which he’s able to do so—using the elevation step tool—is a real testament to the versatility of the tools..
Watching a dump truck swerve its way onto an off-ramp he jokes, “The roads might be realistic, not sure about the driving.” It seems pretty realistic to me considering some of the manoeuvres I’ve witnessed on British roads.
All this messing around building bridges is great, but as RCE points out as he realises he’s gotten distracted, “There’s no point building a junction if there’s nowhere for people to go.”
He proceeds to get caught up again talking about building trees and the practical application of something called ‘visibility splays’, which I will certainly be implementing if I ever feel the need to add a junction to the inside of a road curve—something any good city designer will tell you is sacrilege.
The actual building of his first city only goes on for a few minutes, but the video does—in wake of RCE’s poop-power legacy—go into some detail around why it’s a good idea to place mains water pipes above sewage pipes. Though RCE does make it clear that curving sewage pipes was a mistake on Colossal Order’s part. “Devs, whilst you did amazing doing the separate heights, you shouldn’t have curved your sewage pipes.” I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks there.
What a final note to ruminate on. And remember, you too can obsess over intersections and the curvature of sewage pipes come October 24, when the game will be released on Steam and Microsoft Store.
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