We can (proably should?) debate about how these mechanics should work, but I think that it must be true that any city needs in some percentage both areas (e.g. as well the extreme being built now "on demand" for the World Cup in Qatar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusail ) must need both, or maybe not if they modeled the city based on CS haha.
I think that I could have similar points as well for the "education" in CS - I never (still don't know) if the elementary schools that I place are a foundation for people that will then go later to College and/or University - I still place them because I personally believe in the scala Elementary=>maybe_College=>maybe_University, but who knows... . (ok, this boils down mainly to a lack of transparency/informations for the user, independently if what CS does is good or wrong from the point of view of the user)
That's an interesting way to differentiate them, but it's also something that's very specific to present-day America. And middle-class America, at that.
Kind of odd that Skylines is developed by a Finnish company and published by a Swedish one, given how US-centric that model is.
I've also written elsewhere in this thread about how Skylines doesn't have a concept of class stratification, either, and that's a problem: the only way to create neighborhoods with distinct class implications (e.g. the ghetto) is to use the RICO mod and plop buildings directly.
There's no real concept of medium-density, either: the closest it comes is to zone high-density and put it in a district with the High Rise Ban ordinance. Or, again, use RICO. Oh, and growables are limited to no more than 4x4 tiles... if you want bigger buildings (e.g. a sprawling suburban apartment complex), your only option is RICO.
I totally agree, and maybe there has been some discussions about this in the past (I forgot about those early webcasts) - but for a company to align to the US market (probably the largest & most uniform around) is usually probably the safest bet - I still admit of being a little bit sad :|
> There's no real concept of medium-density, either
Now that you say it, I think that (a realistic - see previous posts) medium-density would be absolutely important to model european cities.
> limited to no more than 4x4 tiles
You're right but personally I don't really care about this for the time being (meaning that the other problems have for me absolute priority compared to this) - maybe they just randomly put a safe limit for their first release to avoid indirect potential complications... - I would have most probably done the same, so I won't dig into this hehe.
> I've also written elsewhere in this thread about how Skylines doesn't have a concept of class stratification
I agree.
Summarizing after all these posts & remarks, I feel sad that the studio so far developed only add-ons that do not improve the core of the simulation but only add more distractions and/or superficial complexity around it :P
(E.g. I did buy "Mass Transit" but it didn't give me the feeling that it improved the game but just gave me a few more alternatives - and actually "mass transit" is in my opinion associated to trains & metro, therefore absolutely not fitting cablecars/blimps/ferry/etc...)
But maybe.... they be working on aggregating key-improvements for their next CS2? Who knows... :)
That said, it's still currently the best city sim by far. Hoping that Citybound will change that at some point :)
One could argue some cities have low-density housing next to transit though (like Berlin, or Paris). It does have the disadvantage of making metros too easy though, so commuter rail is almost never done because it is too hard to integrate to a city.
The short version is that low-density areas are denser than they look, and high-density areas aren't dense enough. For example, if you click on a single-family home and look at the population, there will be over a dozen people living there (TBH, I forgot the exact numbers, but it's way more than a single family's worth of people)! But if you click on a giant skyscraper, there's nothing even close to what would fit in that building if it existed in real life.
This has two unfortunate effects:
* The suburbs need more public transit than you think they'll need. Once you hit 50k people or so, you'll be hurting for transit badly. "But I'm building low-density housing with a street hierarchy, it works fine in real life, so why are my roads clogged in the game?" Yeah but in real life you're not cramming a dozen people into every single-family home.
* On the other hand, you can get away with building dense downtown areas with much less transit than would be required in real life.
And yes, there are mods to realistically balance population. If you run these mods, you'll have something much more realistic: the suburbs don't really need transit, but if you build any high-density at all, you'll need to get a good transit network up and running ASAP.