Correction @1:23 I said "Weast" - not "East"

I'm impressed how you made exactly the same errors that US urban planners have for centuries.

That 6 way intersection kills me. It probably would kill everyone, honestly.

Roundabouts ftw!!

"you have to cross a 6 lane highway every time you leave your house" Ah, good old Houston

The last city you build is the one you make when you remember that public transport is a thing and that there's just no elegant way to retrofit it into your other cities.

"It was almost perfect...save for some traffic problems" - Every Cities Skyline player ever

8:10 The reason roundabouts cause significantly less traffic is because they do not require a traffic light and thus permit the free flow of traffic whilst allowing drivers to change their direction of travel. This effect is pronounced in video games because game AI can drive "perfectly" and has no regard for itself or others.

"6 way intersection" is one of those phrases that fills me with anxiety. Kind of like "air-cooled nuclear reactor" or "this substance is hypergolic with asbestos"

your canter is so mesmerizing. I could listen to you talk all day.

Fractals are the right idea. Each unit of the fractal needs to contain a mini city, connecting to other mini cities predictably, until it is a massive repeating monotonose wasteland.

"Roundabouts, the perfect solution to traffic"... yep, could have seen that coming :-) Great video!

I love how you fully expected the third tsunami but then basically ensured that it would carry feces with it if it made it past the great earthen sea wall.

A roundabout would have solved Triangle Town's traffic problems. You've taught me a powerful lesson: Live in the countryside. It was like War Games with cities. ✌🏻

seems like hybridization of two approaches would be best, like taking the triangle town and turning the six way intersections into roundabouts.

"You have to cross a 6 lane highway every time you leave your house" Maaaaaan that hits home. "Am I clear? Am I clear? Am I clear? YES" *Burns though a set of tires*

This city seems like something the UAE or Dubai's rulers would build just to look pretty on a map. Nobody even lives there, it's just boutiques for tourists and mostly empty buildings(which probably don't have water or electricity, since you need more than untrained slaves for that kinda infrastructure. But at least Dubai has about 3 million of those slaves!)

Nothing could have worked out better for this video than that car futilely performing an infinite-point turn and ultimately going nowhere. It feels like a metaphor, but one I am to short-sighted to understand.

Cities Skylines is a wonderful combination of nostalgic with modern UI. A glorious sandbox indeed. Stay sexy all and look both ways before you cross the road.

the jelly-like consistency of the water in this game always amuses me.

Damn, I've been binge playing this for the last week or so - and now this video has graced us. Incredible. Also, you're 100% correct about having to build two cities. My current city is getting to the point where its dying a slow death due to how awkwardly designed it is - but I'm stockpiling money now, so when the time comes I'm bulldozing half of it and building the city properly. Or I'll build on another tile a reasonable distance away and let the original city be my shanty town for a while and then bulldoze the entire thing and rebuild it properly and join it up. Or I'll restart again and vainly try to build the perfect city the first time - and fail again because I don't have the money or buildings unlocked yet and can't properly flatten terrain because it costs so goddamn much and I can never get rid of all the excess soil...

I can't get over the lil' confused SUV, it reminds me of a startled bug.

Filling the ocean with doo-doo was such a beautiful act of revenge. I cant imagine the horror if a new tsunami breaks through with all the junk floating about though

6:10 and the reason for that is that Hexagon is Bestagon! For we are just the humble bumbles in awe of the incredulity that is, The Hexagon.

The problem I have with Cities... and really any city builder... is that when it finally comes to the point where I realize "Hmm... probably should've saved this space for a highway or something" well past the point of too late, and I feel guilty leveling whole city blocks just to build a road.

The roundabout city was actually beautiful. Damn, that's creativity right there.

This is like watching an architecture lesson about people like Corbusier who had the WHACKIEST ideas of how to design a city.

Honestly you could salvage triangle towns traffic problems by making any intersection bigger than 4 points into a roundabout, combining the strength of a circle city with the power of a hexagon city

Watching this I just realized that Sierpiński triangle has this interesting property that no intersection has more than 4 roads. So you can create a triangular city (with lots of empty spaces... for increasingly larger parks, I guess?) that isn't littered with 6 road intersections.

This sums up exactly how to play this game. My city for some strange reason attracts meteors and has been struck over 8 times now....each time rising from the ashes to refine and rebuild bigger, better, greater than before.

Imagine hitting a 4 way light intersection every 100 feet of road in the square city. To call your daily commute "nightmarish" would be an understatement.

it's actually incredibly refreshing to see a content creator play cities skylines to make a functional city not a wasteland and then (purposely*) destroy it with disasters

I just am watching this because I was in the middle of watching his torsolo series. It’s my favorite

8:00 The perfect recreation of Milton Keynes!

I wanna see a grid city done with herringbone style roads where the roads going out lead to the businesses followed by roads behind them all leading back and then have roundabouts at all the major intersections!

"Smoothed brained civil engineers" I don't laugh out loud often from youtube but he always gets a cackle out of me, I bet he's really funny in person.

I started cities with the humble bundle days ago, I'm having so much fun. Also, I really want to know what you think about "Oxygen not included" Another game that I'm having a blast with it.

Please,I beg you, do long format uploads again. All your content is fantastic and I miss the old days of grabbing my tea and watching a long video of yours.

7:13 "to stay afloat" lmao

As someone who plays this game and has an interest in urban planning studies...from the moment you placed your first road this caused actual pain in my chest. Fantastic work.

It's been long overdue, I've worked my way through the bulk of your back catalogue waiting for more philosophical content. Can't lie though, it was definitely PZ that hooked me. That and you led me to private lime too

Subscribed just for the tangent joke 😂 7:48

I literally returned to your videos after taking a break and binged everything I loved. Now I wake up from Night Shift and see this glorious work of art. Thank You

ambiguousamphibian is truly a cherished amphibian. Every upload is not only a mimetic piece of art, but a genuinely entertaining video that you can relax to. Every video is looked forward to, and each one is enjoyed for every possible second that it has to offer.

2:41 That is actually the optimal density grid square size in City Skylines, and you managed to just select it randomly

Seeing that six way intersection without a roundabout made me audibly gasp in European. I was so relieved when you finally used them, another wayward American has been shown the light.

the best part about Sierpinski-Gasketville is that there's always just a little more space

the humor and storytelling is outstanding, as always. never got tired of AA.

Wish your videos were longer, your voice is really nice to hear on these videos, and the jokes are really funny too!

Gymnopedie. Lol. I think anyone who plays cities skylines has seen Angory Toms series all those years ago. So good. Thanks for warming my mind and heart with another video indistinguishablelizard.

Great experiment. I liked the grid/rotary way of building you did. Looking forward to more Cities Skylines videos in the future.

Doing the scenarios is also a decent way of getting design and layout ideas from the pre-built developer cities. And also the scenarios can add a nice challenge and change of pace from just building endlessly which is what I normally do.

This is amazingly amusing. I have like some 2k hours on Cities Skylines on Steam, love the game, but yeah traffic AI is always a stupid idiot no matter how good you design your city, or how good your transit is lol

Grids makes a lot of sense - though you gotta remember that *road hierarchy*. That and mass transport intergration and mixed residential/commercial (so people don't have to walk far) and also making sure your industry isn't *too* far from houses.

I discovered you by a random recommendation from the Urbs video. A childhood favorite of mine I watched. What transpired over the next week was a pure binge of all your videos, A cornucopia of vast storytelling and fun entertainment enveloped my existence, entranced by the brilliance. As I watched Some of my favorites were of RimWorld and Kenshi. The tales told within were astounding. The trails of Orange, Ezikiel, Tynan, Undugu, Sonny, Max, and Lee in RimWorld will be Enshrined in all their glory. Yeest I also watched the suffering of dear Torsolo in Kenshi, from one small stump to a master of the blades. The fall of Torlusium brought a tear to my eye. Even the humble bonedogs life was witnessed, for it too was entertaining. That one Urb video had brought with a great content creator with a silver tongue. I bought RimWorld and now am lost in its sandbox glory. Thanks so many thanks and keep creating stories anew! :)

Your lexicon and vernacular fill my insatiable literary desires, whilst also supplanting my conscious mind with the supremely addictive internet content I so most crave.

I find this riddle-speaking unlabeled frog quite amusing

The red car at 0:09

the noise you made for the 6 way intersection part touched my soul, i love it.

You should voiceover a documentary and just upload that randomly, your voice has always been so soothing XD

Never realized that the experience for newcomers would be the same across all Paradox Interactive games, as proven by the intro of this video.

The roundabout city looks fantastic, I always start with a big roundabout with two roads coming off it one for industry and one for residential and commercial. It works great early game but by late game the single massive roundabout cannot prevent traffic jams, so I wonder if a roundabout at every intersection will prevent it lmao

I want more of this. This would be a great continuing series

Thanks, I had so much fun smiling and laughing through this video. I definitely will be watching it again to learn along with the humor.

0:47 Cityoleons, obviously.

8:05 basically just Milton Keynes

Thank you for this; now that I have a few ideas of already been tested out, I'm going to try the combination of the Spiral with a bit of a twist and the roundabout setup.

i just watched this vid with no volume at all, i cannot tell if you’re a creative builder or an evil genius - nice vid!

Cities Skylines is just a reminder that city planning is a hard problem and more lanes don't fix traffic.

1:25 east to the south hmmmm

The roundabout section reminds me of Canberra, because there's always a roundabout waiting on the road, no matter where you go! Love listening to your voice, man! Have you ever seriously considered releasing an audiobook or something?

Every time AA uploads, my day gets better

Ah, Wetfield, how much do I love that city. And at least the tsunamis put down the fires in the city.

0:35 Yearo!

Dude, I just bought this game last week and been having a blast trying ( and occasionally failing 😅 ) to make a healthy and functional city. Basically, everyone in my first city is happy and healthy, with some kind of degree from one of my 3 universities. HOWEVER, even with busses, trains, underground metrolines, wider roads, and some strategically placed roundabouts, I can't fix traffic to save my life. Still thanks for the video. You're awesome.

The juicer was right afterall. Roundabouts are the way to perfection.

Did anyone catch the moment when he said “east to south” when it was clearly west to south…

"Grids make the most sense" If you don't overuse them and cause all roads in your city to consist solely of 4 way crossroads permanently stuck in traffic. Unless you have tunnels or overpasses available for traffic to run in parallel, you'd better design a parallel (duh) road that can be entered only at its ends so that only the traffic going into residential grid would get stuck on crossroads and passing one can, well, pass. Weird thing is that out of all games, Tropico was the one that explained it to me. By killing my economy. With traffic. Because first bus drivers got stuck in traffic on the way to work and then free cars completely locked the traffic down for all transport vehicles, be it passengers, cargo or services.

In the best way, everything you say sounds immensely sarcastic and i enjoy it

best design I found Is squares, but encased in tree structure. make roads 60u in length for residential, 3 roads wide, join at the end with 4 lanes, connect to 6 lane or highway. At the connected ends, you add services, you can add bus going around, and metro. Connect to neighbouring ones only with bike/walking paths. Most successful designs are dense, but with sparse ROAD connections, iF you manage to make them walk everywhere, roads will never clog.

“You can’t possibly make a shape with only two sides.” Nobody tell him about semicircles

9:27 Chicago be like

5:27 Nice Ragnarok Online level up soundbit, i love you for this blast of nostalgia ^^/

A recommendation if you play more in the future, try out one way roads. I've found great success with running massive arteries to feed the flow of the city, which then break down into psuedo-roundabout city blocks.

Don't forget branch shaped. Also you missed semicircle adjacent to your highway. Also, you can make your grid more efficient by making them rectangles instead. You need traffic manager for roundabouts to work properly and building on them isn't a good idea. Grids work if you can spread the traffic out across it and you unwittingly did that by having the entrance on one corner and the industry on the opposite, but it does have flaws, such as industry importing a lot of goods. Also, that split is good on sim city, but in cities skylines it is better to disperse your commercial through your residential so they can go to the shops easier and your industrial deliveries are spread through the city. The true intermediate you can use are offices later but only if you really want high density. you can also place all of your utilities in this no go zone. Commercial profit is actually affected quite a bit by land value which is degraded by traffic and pollution but highest near residential. The next factor is public transport, and grids aren't very good for it. The other thing you missed trying is spiderwebs which is quite efficient- not cartoon ones but real ones. They often use two strong branches, a connecting medium at the wide point, rectangles, roundabout in the middle, and reduce the number of connections as they get closer to the centre to make the rectangles roughly equal. it also gives 3 contact points with the highway and you can use the most efficient junctions (J/trumpet) The other thing is you are building on basically flat ground, with terrain it is a whole new story, where you should follow the contours, which is far more realistic.

It must feel like a dystopia living in the center of those square neighborhoods

I usually build separate grid squares connected by highways. To eliminate traffic jams on exit of the grid I connect them right in the middle through underground roundabout.

Im so glad i was there for zig zag town! Thank you for creating it!

9:43 that poor car gives me anxiety

9:03 The Sierpinski would look very cool if the middle was just one huge park.

I think I've binged like every single video you've made in the last two weeks

I finally figured what your bizarrely hypnotic narration sounds like and why it’s so interesting. You sound like a bored god. Surprising handle of the english language and general knowledge, but also alternate between passive, casual use of graduate multi syllable words and kindergarten level vocabulary when making prominent points. You are completely unalarmed by horrendous consequences and supremely interested in the minutiae of a single block’s efficiencies. Your emphasis is never quite where I might expect it to be, your solutions creatively unpredictable. There isn’t just a lack of empathy for these fictional people, it would be a genuine curiosity of you to see how stupid and miserable you could make them. Why not? They exist at your pleasure… yes they’re simulations, but I’m not convinced that given godly powers and awareness you’d treat us any differently. And somehow, I find that inspiring. More please.

I remember when my small town got its first round about, it relieved traffic greatly and generally made the area much better but everyone here hates it and thinks its "eurocentric socialism" in action. they're probably going to get rid of it

This is the type of youtuber that I've been looking for so long

my dude the editing is so good

I built a hexagonal city and it worked amazingly. Sure the six way intersections are complicated but if there's enough of them then there's always alternate ways to flow around, and a little Traffic Manager adjustment of which lanes go where sorts it out. I think I had to build bypasses for the two worst ones (tunnels or bridges so that through-traffic would skip the intersection) but I reached over 200k pops with more than 80% traffic flow, so it worked out

hexagonal (or octagonal, optimally, which is the maximum) are actually super efficient because the game can't simulate them properly. The vehicles _mostly_ just tend to drive through each other. At least that's what it was around launch. I don't know if they changed that or not. I know they added a lot of content to the game, but I think it's exactly that, content. While I'm sure they fixed bugs, I doubt they changed/fixed this. Right around when the game launched I made an entire city that was just 8 roads connected together only by two 8-way intersections. It was hence a "small" city (less than one plot of land), but it could still hold quite a lot of stuff. And traffic was surprisingly decent edit: OH. The thing AA probably missed and which I neglected to mention is that I think *the intersection needs to be made up of all 1-way roads.* THAT is what makes a super-efficient intersection.

This is the hardest and longest i've laughed in many many years. Thank you so much

I've played cities skylines again after my brain mushed for 2 years, incidentally i found a pretty cool idea on how to manipulate grids like using one way roads EVERYWHERE, create a grid city, put two exits or more, make sure the one way roads connects from enter to exit, then do an alternate one way road on each of the intersections so traffic wont jammed, then enjoy as everyone does a long walk without having to swear yourself every 5 meter

Can't tell if Sim City4 or Cities Skylines from all the camera angles. Well done!