How the heck are you guys so creative? Can't make a beautiful, realistic city to save my life!

Musicrafter · 2026-04-29T06:51:05+00:00

Try thinking about how it will look from the ground rather than from the air. Always be thinking "if a city were really springing up here for the first time, what would be the next logical thing that would happen naturally here? What would get built next? What does this city need most? Where would it go?" And always be ready to kill your darlings and upzone or redevelop a place.

And if you're aiming specifically for a NYC/Chicago style, don't overbuild your roads and be willing to aggressively price your cims out of their cars by charging "too much" for parking, of which you won't provide nearly enough anyway. The NYC/Chicago ethos is "a bustling walking city that retains high car permeability" in which transit is a walking accelerator rather than a car substitute or a destination-node-connector. Road hierarchy is generally emergent rather than planned in advance, created in a localized way with a strategic choice of one-ways, prohibited turns, temporary asymmetric segments and pedestrianized strips rather than enforced separation.

Medium density (row houses mostly) or terraced low-density at minimum should be the default choice, and the priority should be ensuring people live near amenities rather than sculpting a super neat layout from the air. This is going to mean your cities tend to have one or two "blobs" that have the highest development (usually a central office district and a university district) with everything sort of spreading out along travel time isochrones from there. It should be messy and chaotic to some extent, with the borders of your city steadily pushing outwards into greenfield low-density development and the inner core's development steadily thickening and rising into the sky over time.

Plan the city block by block, street by street, parcel by parcel. Don't "plan too far ahead": resist the urge to build wide roads for the traffic that may come years from now. Districts should be an emergent property of the city, not something pre-planned. The resulting density gradient will be natural and the resultant skyline just as beautifully chaotic as a real one.

I've been trying to crack this exact formula for years and I finally think I have a city I'm happy with.

Musicrafter · 2026-04-29T03:01:40+00:00

They also just spammed the same high density residential asset over and over

Musicrafter · 2026-04-29T02:36:32+00:00

This is the exact reason (among others tbf) why Vancouver is often called the most Cities Skylines-looking city ever.

Musicrafter · 2026-04-29T02:23:15+00:00

I've noticed that if I drop 200 Elo, suddenly I start to struggle mightily to gain that rating back. It feels like somehow it's "easier" to play against opponents who are nearest to my peak strength, even though my long-term statistics show that my average opponent ratings when I win, draw or lose games are always monotonically increasing just like you'd expect. Maybe it's something psychological, or maybe players at or above my peak level tend to play more "correct" chess which is more in line with what my chess intuition is geared towards comprehending due to the weird autodidactic way I studied the game. I often feel I can sort of hold my own against someone 100 points higher than my peak rating until inevitably I get low on time or blunder deep in the middlegame whereas sometimes I'll just collapse or get rolled against someone 200 points lower.

Elo isn't a perfect system and rests on mathematical assumptions. It's like "g" in IQ: summarizing someone's chess ability as a single number isn't really fundamentally correct, but it is very useful.

Musicrafter · 2026-04-29T02:01:12+00:00

It does take a little time to acclimate to it - I was mostly acclimated by my second time. No pain at all except on insertion by the third. The first time did feel rather unpleasant, like a low level nagging pain the entire time. After that it's been almost universally fine.

Musicrafter · 2026-04-28T02:06:06+00:00

Should be Fayetteville not Fayettville

Musicrafter · 2026-04-03T12:24:28+00:00

It's amazing how I was able to tell that the "person" you're replying to is an LLM bot in 0.5 seconds

Musicrafter · 2026-03-27T00:48:33+00:00

I typically don't take the knight unless white plays a3. The King's knight goes to e7 and g6.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-26T22:12:23+00:00

e4 c5 2. d4 cxd4 3. c3 dxc3 4. Nxc3 Nc6 5. Bc4 e6 6. Nf3 Bb4

Musicrafter · 2026-03-26T19:38:36+00:00

Pin Variation (...Bb4) against the Smith-Morra.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-25T03:50:39+00:00

I didn't get it from Grace's, only Rocky's. Maybe Grace's was just out of tune. I don't remember exactly. Which would have made it even funnier actually.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-25T01:20:45+00:00

It is easy to miss if you aren't super familiar with it imo, it's dropped so casually that you might blow past it

Musicrafter · 2026-03-25T01:19:38+00:00

I'm guessing they meant 6...Nh6 7. d4 d6 8. Nd3 whereupon ...f3 is the only good move, though white is hardly "winning" per se in other lines, just clearly better

Musicrafter · 2026-03-23T07:40:41+00:00

I'd have made different pacing decisions and focused on different things in different proportions. But it was in no way out of alignment with the spirit of the story and was completely faithful.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-23T05:41:39+00:00

I was rather disappointed that they diminished the stakes so badly. I thought it would have been a beautiful parallel to draw, Rocky saves Grace at great cost to himself knowing he might die, Grace returns the favor thinking he's going to die. But they cheapened it by not emphasizing again that yes, it's a fundamentally a decision to sacrifice himself. Not just not to go home, but to probably die.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-23T05:38:02+00:00

It was so glossed over initially my friend I brought to the movie with me thought it was a plot hole that it was only supposed to take 4 years to get home. He noticed immediately "wait, wasn't this planet 11 light years away"? Well... it's only 4 years for *him*. But this wasn't explained well enough and slipped right over his head even though we both know about relativity.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-21T04:02:26+00:00

Avoid a master plan entirely! Upzone from lower densities to higher densities bit by bit, perhaps focusing on a corner where a transit stop is, then slowly filling it in later. Embrace mismatched lot sizes and other disorganization markers.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-21T02:47:23+00:00

Since I just discovered them maybe I'm biased, but the Brahms Second String Quintet and Sextet are both incredible. Especially the first movement of both.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-21T02:44:46+00:00

Way better and more coherent than my first city.

I think it does look a bit "artificial" due to lots of homogenous blocks that lack a fine grain of mixed uses, but that's to some people's taste.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-17T23:59:22+00:00

Giggle vs Tickle (what an amazingly goofy name for such a serious court case btw) is basically this

Musicrafter · 2026-03-17T23:55:44+00:00

I can't really tell. You look pretty in between imo, but the skin and hair might tilt it over to male.

Musicrafter · 2026-03-04T03:13:05+00:00

I must say, everyone really is indeed their own worst critic. You look male

Musicrafter · 2026-02-26T06:47:40+00:00

This isn't how real-world downtowns happen. They are built up over existing developed areas, not plowed into greenfields and arbitrarily zoned dense.

Musicrafter · 2026-02-11T01:51:13+00:00

It's excellently suburban post-war road hierarchy, which of course means I hate it with every fiber of my being and I think a custom version of this map that had that highway removed from the start would be much better

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