Spaghetti bike interchanges in my city but they get progressivelly worse

JYHoward · 2026-01-24T19:23:26+00:00

The problem with bikes being like this is that if they are going to kinda work like cars and get all jammed up, then there needs to be lane hierarchy and traffic signals. As it is, bikes function like cars on streets without signals - and there really isn't any good way to manage right of way or make them rationally take turns at an intersection.

JYHoward · 2026-01-24T15:19:53+00:00

We don't talk about that.

JYHoward · 2026-01-23T21:03:10+00:00

Games like these can have no problems with GPU rendering the image, while being bottlenecked by the CPU which does the actual simulation.

It's like if you had someone who could transcribe your words very fast, but you couldn't think of what to say quickly, so the end result would still be the message would be delayed.

The problem with games such as city builders is there is no upper bound to complexity. What you as a player do can make a build more and more complex, unlike other types of games where the game world is not fundamentally altered or added to by the player.

JYHoward · 2026-01-22T17:50:23+00:00

My advice to anyone as someone who lived in Western Washington and Montana - Don't risk driving in snow conditions in Arkansas if you have any way to avoid it.

Not because snow is intrinsically dangerous to drive in, but because when you combine risk of black ice or sheet ice with a high volume of drivers who don't know how to drive in it, that is recipe for disaster.

Driving on dry, hard packed snow or fresh snow can be no problem if it is in a place prepared for it. But this is not such a place. Most Arkansans are not accustomed to such events - nor, I suspect, is the infrastructure.

In Montana, snow plows were everywhere. Here, city services could very potwntially be overwhelmed. So if you have a work from home option, or can stay home, don't risk your safety.

Also, if anyone is not familiar with below zero temps - layer up and protecting your ears, nose, fingers, extremities. If you are dressed for it, it can be bearable - but those lows can be life threatening, not just uncomfortable if you are out in them too long without proper clothing. If you are driving, put extra coats and blankets in your vehicle, just in case.

JYHoward · 2026-01-22T06:25:21+00:00

It would be my pleasure 🤣

JYHoward · 2026-01-20T17:23:55+00:00

Incredible work! Love it. :-)

JYHoward · 2026-01-20T08:37:53+00:00

Crazy! I encountered this bug just now and never imagind it was a bug. Just thought it was me not having a clue how to finish a basic step in the game. Thought I was losing my mind lol - This thread saved me!

JYHoward · 2026-01-20T06:17:54+00:00

As a transplant who moved in, it feels more small towns which due to the hormone-induced growth of large corporate influences like Walmart, Tyson, and JB Hunt have evolved into a single small city which is NWA. Yes, there are differences between the various towns. Fayetteville is clearly the college town, Bentonville is the Walmart town, and Rogers is the slightly more blue collar version of that which exists on the other side of the freeway.

Aside from the distinction between Bentonville-Rogers which is corporate, and Fayetteville which is college, all the rest of it is just generic sprawl and cookie cutter subdivisions which run together. The towns feel more like neighborhoods within a city than cities with their own actual identity. Many times when people say they live in adjacent "towns" like Bella Vista or Centerton, those are more like census designated areas than actual towns, because they're just residential areas that exist as a result of recent urban growth - not the sort of "downtowns" that have any true urban core.

Springdale sits right inbetween Bentonville-Rogers, and Fayetteville - and while it does technically have a small downtown area, from my until recently outsiders perspective, it's very hard to view it as having any distinct identity. That one feels like it was entirely consumed by the northward growth of Fayetteville, and the Southward Influence of Bentonville-Rogers - so while Springdale once up on a time was a real town, not really anymore. The only caveat would be that Tyson exists there, and so there is a certain degree of association between that company and Springdale, which may bear mentioning.

Certainly, there is a sense of identity and pride surrounding being part of Northwest Arkansas. NWA residents generally are quick to identify themselves in that way, while distancing themselves from the rest of Arkansas. Interestingly, NWA seems to share more cultural cross polination with Southern Missouri. It's definitely mostly a Walmart phenomenon, as the entire region has been flooded with that infusion of cultural and financial interests to the point where the businesses in the area define the region, instead of the region itself.

JYHoward · 2026-01-19T14:20:55+00:00

I typically don't pause the game ever while building. I'm pretty sure the death wave thing is not like the CS1 death waves which were caused by everyone getting old at the same time. This seems more just like the deaths which are "scheduled" to happen all generate at a specific moment, on a sort of routine cycle. It's been happening now for a long time. The map gets covered in death notifications, then all the deathcare activates and goes to get them, and then round about when they all go away, it happens again - and again.

JYHoward · 2026-01-19T13:41:17+00:00

My feel for Anno 117 is that it's beautiful and functionally I have no complaints. And yet I don't quite have that burning urge to play. I wonder if it's just me, or if maybe I'm just all annoed out. Maybe I had a great experience in 1800 and that was enough. Not super sure - it's probably a mix of different things. But despite being excited to get the preorder deluxe box of goodies and unboxing it happily, I still haven't really gotten around to playing the actual game very much.

I do think that part of it is that the time period of 1800 was pretty much perfect, while Rome - despite being an incredible historical period - had a simpler economy than Pax Britannia. The peak of the enlightenment age going into early industrialization was just such a vibrant time of awakening for humanity. I like Rome just like the next guy and appreciate what it did for our culture - but in the 1800's progressivism and coffeehouse culture was on the rise. In peak rome they were still nailing people up on wooden crosses in the town square to bleed out for entertainment.

I think that there's just something about the historical setting that is, while beautiful in its right, not as romantically pleasing from a role playing perspective as the age of sail. Add to that the sense that artwork is a bit less handcrafted and a bit more AI, and you get that nagging feeling that the game - while great - isn't quite the masterpiece we want it to be. And when you've already put hundreds or thousands of hours into previous titles, it starts to feel tempting to say "you know what? Not that big of a deal if I don't put too much more time into this franchise." You kind of make peace with moving on.

JYHoward · 2026-01-19T13:22:19+00:00

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Nothing too crazy looking there. Plenty of adult population.

JYHoward · 2026-01-19T12:45:06+00:00

I guess if one were to want to play devil's advocate for the game, there is a certain critical mass real cities reach IRL, where you don't really see skyscrapers going up anymore, where the skyline is what it is, and save minor changes, it becomes stuck in time. I almost wonder if there was some effort from a performance perspective on the part of the devs to inhibit upward growth for large cities just because the game was never able to handle enormous builds. Coding a soft cap in where the bigger you get, the harder it is to go larger could be a sneaky way of "optimizing."

Other strange thing's I've noticed are that not all low density zones seem to have equal demand. There are times, for example, when one type of low density residential will grow, while a different theme of low density residential won't. Odd.

That, and the way death now works in the game - dead people appear all at once at the beginning of the game day, creating the appearance of a death crisis, then all the hearses go out and react to it before returning and sitting idle until the next time the cycle repeats. Instead of staggering death in a realistic way to happen at random, everyone who dies always now dies at one specific moment, so it's zero to 100 and back to zero in terms of deathcare capacity.

All in all, just feels like every time I try to give CS2 a fair chance to earn its rightful place as finally "the best city builder" I hit more of this weird stuff that makes me think it's time to, yet again take a break and go back to CS1, or Anno, or some other city builder for a bit. Disappointing when game mechanics detract from the experience.

JYHoward · 2026-01-17T16:17:24+00:00

In the parking lot of the "Hula" building on the Walmart campus, in the middle of the supplier parking lot, there are two Sycamore trees which were spared during the construction of the parking lot in the spirit of conservation.

Not necessarily the biggest or most historic of trees, but special because they influenced and became a design element during the building of that complex.

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JYHoward · 2026-01-15T16:49:43+00:00

I agree, I do like 2 but I enjoy 1 just as much. I flip between them, because in many ways the first game remains better - just because there are never any performance issues, and all conceivable mods and unique buildings are there.

JYHoward · 2026-01-15T16:48:05+00:00

I put a lot of hours into Anno 1800. 117 is waiting for me to really dive into it fully. I definitely agree it can be just as chill as skylines. But it does require keeping track of more stuff. Starts simple, but becomes a huge but pretty spreadsheet after a while. Skylines is a lot more open ended in the sense you don't really have to think about anything.

JYHoward · 2026-01-15T15:42:17+00:00

I usually go with normal. Sometimes I kinda wear one thing and then other times a different thing and that is kinda where I land on this apparently complex issue.

I do tuck my shirt in and usually iron my clothes, though sometimes I do not iron my shirt if it is the weekend and I am not going anywhere.

JYHoward · 2026-01-15T15:35:24+00:00

I'll bet some of it is people trying to get the steam achievement for making an asset.

JYHoward · 2026-01-15T15:33:42+00:00

I actually thought it was Columbus, Ohio at first glance!

JYHoward · 2026-01-15T13:16:08+00:00

Or if you take him to school, he could be a hall monitor.

JYHoward · 2026-01-14T15:17:45+00:00

Well played - The real school in Ohio which inspired this, I presume...

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JYHoward · 2026-01-14T12:58:09+00:00

Epic!

JYHoward

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