Stories 2022-08-14 Swamplands Game-play
2022-08-14T12:40:00Z Started savegame on Swamplands, all outside connections, suitable area for building 71%, base theme: boreal.
Goal is to reach population 100k today as quick as possible while still enjoying the game.
Addons used: CargoHoldFix, ExtendedGameOptions, FirstPersonCamera_Updated, Harmony, RealPopRevisited, RoundaboutBuilder, ShowIt, TMPE.
This is my first time ever playing with Traffic Manager President Edition (TMPE).
This is unpaused moment, how initial setup got done, water, power, roads and zones, we start to grow from there.
2022-08-14T12:46:00Z First save game for Swamplands_1 file name.
2022-08-14T12:50:00Z Little Hamlet population 380.
Okay taxes is on and landfill placed, now lets continue the long growth phase until we reach high density zones so we can really start busting some heads 
Was drawing roads in 2D top-down mode quite zoomed in so didn't see... that in industrial zone they ran out of water pipes and already one building got abandoned, yikes
2022-08-14T12:56:00Z Worthy Village population 800.
2022-08-14T13:01:00Z Tiny Town population 1.2k.
Activated parks and recreation policy.
2022-08-14T13:04:00Z Well now I'm waiting for buildings to come up and population grow. Most likely will be not before next milestone before need to even think about buying the next terrain grid tile.
This terrain is better than previous one I played, but still I don't like this swampy watery theme, gimme some hard ground I can build mega cities on.
2022-08-14T13:11:00Z Boom Town population 2.2k.
Cemetery and bus depot became available in this milestone, cemetery is essential for life heh.
Saved game for Swamplands_2 file name.
We are indeed growing. Slowly. That is how life is with real population addon in new savegame start
2022-08-14T13:41:00Z Saved game for Swamplands_3 file name.
Saved game for Swamplands_4 file name which is the last of the four rotating file names, now I get to take a restroom break without fear of losing progress 
2022-08-14T13:57:00Z Busy Town population 4.6k.
Painted new districts, PMC Farmland 1 and PMC Forestry 1. They are specialized industry but I'm not going to bother with that industry DLC main building nonsense, just regular "paint & go" works for me.
Looking mighty fine, doing good progress.
2022-08-14T14:37:00Z Big Town population 7k.
High density zones, metro, incineration plant and university are now available. Yeehaaw! Now we are going to start making some real well not money put breeding population
Getting that same no educated workers issue on high density commercial buildings now when I'm using the life cycle something addon. Okay need to take that into consideration before creating those huge jobs generating zones.
2022-08-14T14:58:00Z Small City population 10k.
This milestone gives us cargo train station and two good policies. Activated small business enthusiast and big business benefactor policies.
First metro subway track done.
Hmm I never seen ground getting polluted by sewage water in a river, hmm how come. Oh well guess I'll replace that sewage pipe with inland water treatment plant, should fix this problem.
Created PMC Oil 1 district for specialized industry, however same issue as commercial and other specialized industry, not enough EDUCATED workers. That life cycle addon really throws stuff out of whack.
Hmph I'm not sure what to do with that. Shall we just run the city "as is" without growing it on time acceleration until we have enough educated workers for these jobs?
Or maybe I've just over extended myself, I would have to zone only 4 x 4 unit square block at a time and once a building comes up but has too many jobs available... I stop adding zones until jobs are filled up.
Yeah fine, burn that all down as far as I care...
2022-08-14T15:33:00Z Big City population 16k.
Crematorium, large water tower and advanced inland water treatment plant are now available. Yes, some good stuff, lets put them into good use.
As for lack of educated workers, yeah I need to google forums about that addon if its balanced properly or how are we supposed to play using it as workers are so frigging hard to come by. Maybe its just starting small until more stupid people get educated on high school and then in university.
2022-08-14T15:39:00Z More not enough educated workers icons appear. Looking at one oil industry building, uneducated 4/4, educated 0/7, well educated 4/9 and highly educated 1/2. That is pretty grim setup.
Have to build some generic industry (no farming, forestry, oil or ore) as that industry accepts all kinds of dumb asses to work there hehe.
Hmm would be nice if you could see how much percentage of UNEMPLOYED people for each category you have, like "educated" and "well educated", yes I can see percentage of those people in the whole city, but how many are living their life with a good job and who is sitting home in his underwear eating a bowl of cereal at night time?
The only way I can tell "what the employment situation" is, by creating an well/highly educated zone like specialized industry and check one single building which comes up that how many jobs are there available. Looks like once the jobs available "pie chart" is larger than 50% you start to get the not enough (educated) workers icon and if it keeps up then it leads to abandonment.
2022-08-14T16:15:00Z Grand City population 20k.
Hmm our city needs generic industry to create jobs, these uneducated bums need to get off the sofa and have a job
Well guess they might be in school on various levels of age/education. I mean if you are uneducated adult, you are not exactly going into elementary school, so high school directly I suppose (not sure about american school system, I mean where does college fit in hmm).
Created PMC Ore 1 district which handles ore specialized industry. Now we have all four industry raw material types done.
2022-08-14T17:22:00Z Alarm went of for a lunch break, saved game and let it run 3x time acceleration speed while I'm eating. Lets guess what breaks down while I'm away from keyboard
2022-08-14T17:47:00Z Feeding time is over, back to building a city.
While eating I turned on TMPE feature "disable vehicle de-spawning", well this generated just unbelievable traffic jams heh. Guess I have some traffic fixing to do
Top down screenshots are pretty bad, but this is good way of showing the massive traffic gridlock we got going on here heh.
But in a way I love that vehicles wont magically de-spawn anymore, yes the traffic is atrociously bad when game engine doesn't "help" the vehicles, but this is awesome, if your road network sucks then you will pay for it heh.
2022-08-14T18:10:00Z I had to pause the game and start googling a bit how to use TMPE for traffic lights and also how to handle highway outside connection to your city in BARE BONES BASIC, it is still so difficult for me to do.
Well did not find much of what I was looking for, so back to trying to figure this out by myself...
2022-08-14T19:55:00Z Traffic jams caused fire engines to be stuck, so this devastation happened as only thing reaching the fire was helicopters.
What an terrible location this industrial park, oh man it actually should burn to the ground hehe.
Cant believe traffic got fixed. Over 80% flow now that is pretty nice. There was no skill involved this was pretty much blind luck that I managed to get it sorted heh.
2022-08-14T20:48:00Z Saved game, going to take a quick break while game is running at normal speed.
2022-08-14T21:06:00Z Back to Cities Skylines. We continue.
Created PMC Forestry 2 district by the south end of our city, nicely connected to arterial six lane road, I want to see what kind of effect this location gives on such big road. Also have that 750k capacity warehouse storing "zoned industry - forestry products" for us.
Hilarious to see all those people WALKING to work along this arterial six lane road hehe.
Another expansion to our city, this time to keep on the style its only low density residential.
Yikes we got ourselves a fire here. Always scary when there is a fire on industrial zone.
2022-08-14T22:13:00Z Capital City population 34k.
Cargo harbor is now available.
Another fire. Overall I'm very pleased with our fire department, only thing preventing them doing their job is traffic.
Added few more PMC Ore 1 district buildings, was lucky to have good progress there making some jobs, however traffic is my big fear, its running OK now but if we add more industry which each building generates tons of export/import, well there goes the neighborhood again.
2022-08-14T22:31:00Z Saved game and shutdown Cities Skylines, its already my bed time and still want to watch couple of TMPE and highway connections tutorials. Nites.
2022-08-15T06:06:00Z New Cities Skylines building day has started, woke up and did morning chores but not have eaten days first meal yet, gotta get some city building action going on first heh.
Started the day off by adding bunch of office zone 4 x 4 unit areas by PMC Residential 3 district. So far had good luck with available workers. Demand for industrial / offices (or jobs) is about 80% now.
Uh oh, a bad fire in PMC Ore 1 district! All hands on deck!
But we did suffer one destroyed building even though 6 fire engines (fire trucks) reached the site very fast and helicopters were first on the scene. Hmm maybe we need dedicated fire station building on this oil and ore industrial district. Sometimes these might feel silly overkills, but its an extremely valuable and flammable (heh) area, so why not beef up fire response time.
Traffic jams in PMC Forestry 2 district after I added bunch of new zoning, hmph.
2022-08-15T06:39:00Z Saved game and let it run on normal speed while I eat days first meal, I'm starvin' ...
2022-08-15T07:05:00Z Feeding time is over, back to increase this citys population.
And because of traffic jams in this region, we now have a garbage problem in a wide area. I need to resolve this or else everything goes to hell. So lets try one of those big waste processing complexes with few strategically placed waste transfer facilities.
This should do it, one waste processing complex and four waste transfer facilities nearby the city entrances.
Well there is zero chances of fire trucks getting in there so this one is all on the helicopters which is pretty bad, we are looking for major devastation in this district 
So close...
Five buildings got burnt down
Build new waste transfer facility in somewhat centralized location in the low density residential area.
Traffic gridlock in PMC Forestry 2 is so bad, dunno what there is to do, at least now I can just wait I guess, it would resolve itself eventually I hope, but some change needs to be made to fix this problem.
There must be something wrong I'm doing with my small industrial roads as you have specialized industry buildings both sides of the road so vehicles get spawned on the road in front of other vehicles, I think, not sure. I saw some forum post once where it was explained how to make an efficient industry layout to prevent such traffic issues.
I clearly recognize that my designer fault is to pack everything so tight with the attitude that real estate is expensive and should be utilized 100% to the last square meter. And sure that is true... but when I see many other peoples Cities Skylines work they have everything spread out to nice and relaxed. To me that feels like extreme waste of perfectly good building space. My pet peeve are those roads with huge openings on both sides, cant think of anything else as real estate waste as that. But yeah maybe its just me, I'm a fucking "packer"
Removed all traffic lights from this arterial six lane road, yield signs for the small side roads, lets see if that would clear it up. I want this arterial to be what it is, once a vehicle gets there its petal to the metal all the way.
That fixed it, awesome. So nice to see it all cleared up after spending some time in 3x time acceleration speed
So lesson learned: arterial road NO TRAFFIC LIGHTS, ever.
New residential mega zoning plan to push us over 100k population limit
We have enough industry to generate massive traffic gridlocks, we don't need more. Now its high density residential and offices to generate what we need to finish this savegame.
I'm not sure if there is some technical requirement regarding education with the life cycle addon that you would absolutely have to have grunt uneducated workers doing something, commercial zones need staff to sell goods to the folks.
Speaking of goods, big residential with some commercial areas of course means a lot of truck and van traffic, so need to handle that somehow, no more traffic jams, first come the good roads, only then commercial zones. Oh and metro network needs to be superb to limit personal car use as much as possible.
Arterial and collector roads placed with one highway outside connection.
Going to start with just a slight piece on this residential district, one step at the time.
Water and power connected, first zoning done to get foothold going, lets do it
This is pretty exciting again, to build a new community (district).
2022-08-15T08:59:00Z Colossal City population 46k.
This milestone gives nuclear power plant and cargo hub (ship + train terminal). So nice to be able to sell dirty oil power plants and purchase nuclear one
Once again we have not enough workers problem. Well we don't even have metro connection here yet so in theory it could be traffic transport issue too.
Another fire and by the nuclear plant too. Now I bulldozered all the fucking trees the fuck off from spreading fires. Who needs trees except tree hugging hippie craps
(joking about the need for trees).
Waste transfer facility has pollution value of 10, hmm so I thought it does pollute and we cannot put them in next to residential buildings, however this clearly seems not to be the case. Check out the pollution levels, or lack thereof, in the view with four waste transfer facilities here.
Next I'm going to distribute them into residential areas just fine, well maybe mix them up with commercial of office because they do some noise pollution like commercial.
The beast is growing...
2022-08-15T10:24:00Z Metropolis population 70k.
One more milestone to go and then they are all done.
Its interesting to note that I'm playing "Airports DLC" now but not once have I tested that airport feature yet, usually I hit 100k population long before I feel the need for speed, err I mean, airport.
Dunno man, waste processing complex and waste transfer facility... I am starting to feel like these are bullshit gimmick items just made because colossal order boss told designer team lead that "ok make some shit up so we can sell a new DLC", and this is what they came up with. This fucking transfer facility is always fucking full and complex is sending the pickup garbage trucks to other side of the city.
I might as well just use the standard incineration plant, no fuss, no crap, just pickup the garbage and make it disappear.
Was building the new residential districts when I glanced elsewhere... oh my...
Traffic TERROR! 
2022-08-15T11:18:00Z Megalopolis population 85k.
Last milestone reached, now we get to buy the whole terrain grid tiles
I own you, bitch.
Created cargo train terminal, I'm hoping it would ease off the import/export load from this part of the city, but on the other hand its just "city" not any part of it, this terminal most likely now get even more fucking traffic from the whole city through that highway heh, dunno.
Another cargo train terminal, this one by PMC Forestry 2 district, maybe if I place third one near the generic industry, hell maybe even bring it right next to it, that might take a load off from highway import/export vehicle traffic. Maybe.
First train leaving, choo! choo!
HAHA!
Okay third cargo train terminal is in, now by the heart of the action at PMC Industry 1 district.
Hopefully these trains give our road traffic some relief. I mean isnt that the point of cargo freight trains, to haul big amounts of cargo around fast. If its not, then I've been mislead and... well yeah hehe. Oh well probably just increases truck traffic even more, spawns of SATAN! 
Gates of HELL have opened! Burn motherfucker, BURN!!!
Heh.
2022-08-15T12:05:00Z Saved game, let it run on normal speed while I go eat a lunch.
2022-08-15T12:33:00Z Feeding time is over, back to city building.
Slight garbage problem again, icons on the horizon. Dunno, the more I'm using these waste transfer facilities and waste processing complexes, the more I feel that they are shit. But anyways guess I already mentioned it, so. I am THIS close to going back, once and for all, to incineration plants somewhere on the side, they just simply work.
2022-08-15T13:08:00Z We have reached our goal, 100k population, yeah buddy! 
Saved game and shutdown Cities Skylines, time for a short break.