The Long And Winding Road makes sense too. The main idea is that shorter road sections means cheaper road upgrades and with not so many buildings on any one section, it takes longer for a section to be overloaded. By orienting buildings so that only one side of the road services buildings the load is reduced substantially. But... using only one side of a road means the roads must consume more ground, and space out your buildings so that each Service area doesn't cover as many residences.
Regarding my previous suggestion to have more cross-streets, remember we don't have to connect a street on both ends. You can have a dead-end road, and a short one will at least split the long road into two (shorter & cheaper) sections and allow the residences beside the short block to be turned to face it, reducing the load on the main road.
Regarding the snaking layout, if the game allowed a complete and easy restart (as it should) I would enjoy challenges like making a city with only one intersection. Great idea, artistically. Too bad there's no easy way to share the view.
Can you all provide a pic of your cities? I'm not quite getting this snake road thing. My city is already laid out (380k population) with lots of intersections in a grid pattern.
"Can you all provide a pic of your cities" 😕mileylol:
I don't have the snaking view, but I will offer this little complaint about sharing views.
It is incredibly difficult to generate an image of the city layout. It would require a lot of screenshots in straight-down view at the same scale (later joined in photoshop or whatever) and with the orientation square and unchanging so everything lines up. The smallest variation while rearranging the screen and you'd have to start again.
I doubt that many of us would volunteer the time to do that. The game should provide a way to save a map of the entire layout.
Playing around with taking a series of screenshots (on a Galaxy Note 2, not a tablet) to make a layout map.
A lot of the screen is obscured by control buttons. The usable image area is much smaller than the screen, and every screenshot will have to be cropped on three sides before the resulting set can be joined into the final view. Luckily Photoshop can automate that.
If you haven't tried this yet, moving the view to get the next screenshot is much harder than you'd think. There's no easy way to just move it sideways, or just vertically. Dragging the view means you have to carefully keep the same row or column inside the usable view, so probably it will be easier to just move it small distances and take a lot more screenshots to patch together to provide the entire view with no gaps.
Unfortunately, the traffic will be different in each screenshot, complicating Photoshop's ability to make perfect joins.
This is probably more time than I can afford just now. Maybe later.
{edited to add}
AGHHH. I just realized that the straight-down view is only "straight down" for a small central portion of the screen; most of the screen is still obviously 3D. D'oh. There is a very small area in the center of the view that might be cropped and eventually joined into a larger view, but this requires a lot of screenshots. Probably one for every building-sized portion of the grid, directly over each possible position. Doing that manually is tedious work, especially because every screenshot triggers BuildIt to run the loading screen again.
We need a "Save Map" button.
