Engineering the MEGA GRID in Cities Skylines 2!

We're checking out Cities Skylines 2 (City Skyline 2) today, and what better way to do it than to build a city that takes the grid layout to extreme levels!
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#realcivilengineer #CitiesSkylines2

[@RealCivilEngineerGaming]

Me waiting for someone to mention the city name in the comments... 😅

[@datacticalsoldier]

Me:

[@datacticalsoldier]

More grids than a fifa celebration for who won the World Cup??

[@Panzer-Hobbies]

More grids than a Fifa celebr...

[@mr_gutsy5151]

Day 46 of asking Matt to play no man’s sky

[@mr_gutsy5151]

I’m sorry day 47

[@arcticanimator]

CHALLENGE FOR RCE: step one: puase the game. Step two: design an entire city in sandbox and see if it will survive when you press play. Step three:profit

[@Roboninja3327]

the death waves

[@TheLongestPar]

I'd give it about 2 minutes

[@HDTomo]

I 2nd this

[@seablake4116]

Yes!

[@alli_mode]

Wait, to get to "profit" step 2 must be: "???"

[@diegomartin9932]

How does Matt create a new city pretty much every week and always forget basic services? Fascinating honestly

[@Sue_Smabeet]

⚠️ A 4x4 grid containing only 4 squares = Architect mathematics ⚠️

[@y4junzhan56]

comment

[@Panzer-Hobbies]

Be gone from this world demon!!!!!!!!!!

[@y4junzhan56]

@@Panzer-Hobbies hello

[@oOPIIcesOo]

I was searching for this 😁

[@asilbekabdurashidov5195]

Meee toooo

[@iiMoha]

Matt: I can’t believe someone wants to live here! People living in Manhattan: *look nervously*

[@brandonsilva1903]

Avenues are about as wide, streets are not, streets are one lane in most if not all of nyc, the grid is also rectangles. Austin on the other hand...

[@Cappabara]

nah salt lake city we live in one already

[@silentbrad-mmm]

FYI, I found out recently that there’s a parallel roads tool. Two below the replace tool. It also automatically alternates one-ways.

[@WhatsOnTheOtherEnd]

The fact that those services covered such a large area seems to indicate that there’s an exploit here. Maybe the calculation “ignores” intersections as distance?

[@Hr07hgar87]

Its based on pop density i think

[@chnet968]

@@Hr07hgar87 Yup. I think the 2x2 grids do limit the building types that can be spawned, so even for high density building the area won't hold as much people as other cities.

[@theshadowking3198]

Get spiffing Brit here NOW

[@KingHeavyMetal]

Challenge! Most cities have the tall office buildings in the center and the industry on the outside try and make a functional city, but in reverse with all the industry in the center of the city and the office blocks spread around it with the urban area in between

[@dennisdexter5602]

Industries are never in the center. Offices are.

[@KingHeavyMetal]

@@dennisdexter5602 that is the point of the challenge. dummy

[@jotoqi8728]

That’s what he said

[@KingHeavyMetal]

@@jotoqi8728 so is he agreeing with because his comment makes it sound like he does not understand that the point of the challenge is to build a city with the industrial area in its center rather than at the edge.

[@beatrixkaelin5120]

You know, Grids are fine building for cities, if you treat them as Roundabouts. Every street is a One Way Street, One street going on one direction, and the next moving in the opposite direction. So you'll only have left/right hand turns or straight, You never never need a traffic light. One feeder road that's two way, and the rest Oneway gridding is fine.

[@ktvindicare]

Yea this is my usual strategy for controlling traffic on smaller roads in Cities Skylines one. At the start of the game I can't make 4-6 lane roads, but as my population goes up the traffic gets terrible on the starter 2 lane roads, so making them one way does a lot to alleviate traffic issues.

[@Keiidryn]

While this makes sense in theory, I do want to point one issue out. If every road is one way and alternates direction, then every intersection will alternate from only straight/right to only straight/left turns. There would still be a need for traffic lights because traffic would enter from one direction at one intersection then from the opposite side at the next, so every type of turn is still encountered, just not all at the same time. Edit: Actually, with dedicated turn lanes that merge off each time, I suppose it could’ve avoided entirely since there’s never oncoming traffic, only entering traffic. Oversight on my own mental picturing of it.

[@unitrader403]

i think a Hex Grid with one way streets only would be great. for each block the traffic direction around it alternates between clockwise, counter-clockwise and alternating. This would also remove essentially all intersection conflict points, since that is spread out over the Streets via lane changes. You could also view this idea as a gigantic grid of magic roundabouts :D

[@AkariEnderwolf]

it can be annoying to get around, but that is how Detroit is actually set up in some places, some roads are 1 way, while being connected with a couple 2 way larger streets

[@joshthompson8478]

Me: grids aren't bad, you always know where you're going. Rce: so we are making 4x4 grids Me: 😬 ok that sounds like hell. Rce: makes a 2x2 grid Me: he might be an architect with those quick maths

[@unitrader403]

well, technically it is a 4 by 4 cell grid. the road is two cells wide, and the open/buildable space also is two cells wide, which gives the grid pattern an edge length of 4 cells.

[@thisisnotthechannelyourelo407]

@@unitrader403 nobody likes a pedant

[@ewoot8511]

Wonder when he will find out about the parallel route building feature.

[@mgmgeorge3]

You just made my hometown. People adore the road layout because, " you can't get lost", but it also takes 30 minutes to drive across a city of 200k people because you are sitting at traffic lights for 20 minutes.

[@tvdinner1986]

“The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day I got in...” - RCE, probably

[@AbsoIutelyJack]

[12:15] If you don't know what he mean, the building layout spells "HELP". Took me a while to see it.

[@jimmymcgoochie5363]

This is exactly what American urban planning looks like, only with buses and wind turbines and affordable public healthcare…

[@java6791]

America Europe style

[@HDTomo]

nah grids aren't bad, America would be a long line of parallel stroads nearly connected by 4 lane roads but cut off to create thousands of cul de sacs

[@vedants.vispute77]

amm, I mean you need a sunken highways and interstate isnt it?

[@rennoc6478]

@@HDTomothey ain’t but you can still do better

[@TheKrausenKid]

This is just a mega grid thankfully. If it was an American city sim then there would be a lot more abandoned low rent housing lol.

[@CorruptedRipper]

This really inspires me to want to live.. off the grid

[@officialnucky]

Me: **sees 2x2 grid** RCE: The smallest patch we can get is this 4x4 grid Is this the mad descent into Architestism we're seeing?

[@user-qc9fm1hw8w]

It’s a good new year when RCE uploads

[@dangingerich2559]

Grids work wonderfully under two conditions: long streets in one direction to reduce the number of interruptions and encompassed in a square of access roads that then connect to the major roads with a few short access side roads. Those have been the best neighborhoods I have lived in. If the major roads then have their own major grid, with highways in another level of super-grid encompassing the city, it makes traffic pretty tolerable.

[@hardhatlunchpal]

I love these Cities Skylines 2 challenges. It shows me what the extremes of design in this game do. Keep up the good work!

[@abcdefgcdefg5178]

Welcome to the new year fellow engineers! Another year of the war on architecture!

[@Fried_Rice32]

I think a cool feature with the cemetery is if you build it, it should be empty and as your civs die it fills up instead if it being prefilled with tombstones

[@Bluhbear]

unless you build it on top of an old burial ground :P

[@Miss_Trillium]

Matt: *makes a grid city* Also matt: "I'll just spam stuff randomly, rather than make use of the grid"

[@Zergonn]

I wonder if you could use the grid tool to place an initial grid, then again 2 squares appart until filled? If it works, gridding would take only about a fourth of the time.

[@AubreyMK]

Minecraft creative plots be like:

[@Rody_le_Cid]

could you have done grids with alternating one way streets? not sure if it calculates traffic but that might help alleviate cars with alternating one ways

[@darknessblades]

Longer grids works better than individual grids Using alleys allows for more compressed roads, meaning more houses, meaning more peeps moving in

[@Darke_Exelbirth]

wouldn't that effectively be a city of roundabouts, but square?

[@Nick-hi9gx]

@@Darke_Exelbirth Yes; this is how lots and lots of cities in the US that were built between ~1840 and 1920 are built. They had larger roads than the older ones back east, for carriages and wagons, but not wide enough for two-way roads once we switched to cars. You will find entire sections of places like Denver, Albuquerque, cities in Illinois and Iowa and Kansas and the Dakotas, down through West Texas and Arizona that have series of one-way grids. Mostly they have been replaced where they aren't in residential or low-traffic areas, they cause a lot of accidents, but if you look carefully in a lot of those places you can also see how the original grids were built, and had to be expanded through tearing down adjacent buildings. But basically any city built after the steam engine caught on, but before the internal combustion auto was mass-produced, you'll find those grids in the US. Canada to a lesser degree. The problem is corners, and people forgetting which direction the next street is going. Houses and businesses have things that block view, people park too close to the corners, and wrecks happen all the time. When people were only going 10mph drawn by horses, that wasn't an issue. Even when people were only going 15-25 in early cars, not much of an issue.

[@stephenp8232]

Flat open land can have insane wind... ive had to drive alot and there are some areas where its so flat the wind can push your car around.

[@breayonasaurus7236]

I concur. I used to live in Iowa, USA , which is really flat. The wind was awful in central Iowa. My car would shake on the highway from the wind.

[@robjsmiles]

It's like that movie where they get trapped in an endless sprawl of identical houses

[@Secretsofsociety]

I wish the auto gird tool allowed you to pick size because there are gameplay and density reasons that you want 2 or 3 square depth zones to prevent rents being too high and make it look more like a real city. Easy enough to add more alleys after using the grid tool or by using the grid tool again to make a box within the box but it would be nice if there was just an option.

[@moonphase420]

Within the two minutes Matt has already called a 2x2 grid a 4x4 grid

[@screech3859]

The engineer: The smallest I can get is 4x4 Me: that is clearly 2x2. Engineer math must be hard. Lol!

[@Justhatguy1]

Strongest shape bus route! Impressive.. 💪

[@Kalyandra]

"That's the one good thing about the grid. These services, they seem to just affect everyone, like everyone is happy." ;)

[@BrucelLloyd]

could have doubled the density by using the roads without sidewalks

[@hanzzel6086]

Alleys.

[@jc_art_]

​@@hanzzel6086the problem is its not two way, resulting in horrible, no good, bad bad, terrible traffic

[@Astraeus..]

@@jc_art_ Well realistically speaking, on a grid this tight together you'd probably be better off having a lot of one way streets. Say north to south all 2 way, but east to west all 1 way, alternating from all 1 way east then the next all 1 way west, etc.... In that kind of grid you could probably make the 1-ways be continuous, no stops, and have stops only on the 2 way streets that intersect. Would make getting far across the city much quicker.

[@jc_art_]

@@Astraeus.. but what if youre in the middle and need to go the other way, you gotta go all the way to the end to make a turn

[@prod.vikoxz]

A new video on my birthday from my favorite youtuber..thats bang on perfect!

[@RealCivilEngineerGaming]

Happy birthday fellow engineer!

[@azne5298]

Try building a city similar to the grid in center city philadelphia, which is all one-way roads on a tight grid with only a few 2 ways dispersed amongst them. If a block is blocked off for road work (a daily occurrence) you have to play what I call “south Philly pac man” and it takes an extra 15 min to go 2 blocks

[@RB_truckin]

This madness is awesome!!! It always improves the day

[@baneous18]

i am loving this idea. please make it as a series

[@thedmango235]

this is awesome we need to see more of this !!!!!!!

[@themrmatthewalan]

Matt "i hope the sewage doesnt pollute the water" proceeds to build the entire industrial sector directly next to the water pump. Lolol

[@unitrader403]

welll to be fair industry causes more ground and air pollution, not so much water pollution which he was worried about.

[@secondghoul9986]

The new American game, "Make It Grid"

[@jackdesanta69]

Would be nice to be able to copy (or even save) road layouts

[@MihailBFC]

keep going, this was was so much fun!!!

[@jamesletford4266]

I think it would be cool to recreate real cities or towns in this and see how they perform. Could do series making various settlements on the same world eventually building towards a country

[@suri-kun]

Hey Matt. Could I please have all the "Bridge Reviews" from this year in one video?

[@gavinlarson4520]

I always watch the cities skylines videos to fall asleep and then rewatch them sometime later when I’m awake

[@Roach570]

Keep this one going!

[@diegorondelli9379]

Mat not realizing that parallel road would have saved him 50% of time :D

[@NicolianBehn]

Now all you need is a long traffic light at each crossroads that alternates on every adjacent intersection so no matter what, you need to stop every 20 feet

[@mrgamingpanda16]

Hey im the guy who asked about the back of the net a couple days ago and alan partridge is now one of my favorite shows. Thanks man

[@subzeroarctics1299]

Exactly what I wanted today, THANK YOU!

[@SamanthaLaurier]

"I'm going to see if grids are good!" *lays out a huge grid with uselessly tiny squares, making exponentially more work* "Why is this such a pain?"

[@AryaPDipa]

"The map is too flat for wind" Actually that's ideal for wind farm. Just like with any other fluid, obstruction like mountain slows down the speed of air.

[@Dangerwiggles]

Merry Gridmas, everyone.

[@Sirchilla]

laughed so hard when you made the comment about the dotted line thing and then at 17:36 when you see is it cannot be unseen :D:D:D:D

[@roneyeam]

This was awesome

[@Hackatoa]

the street takeovers in this city would be insane

[@flamandbenoit7247]

Challenge for rce : no pollution city ! i really think he can't handle this one ^ ^

[@jdotoz]

I don't think that's possible in the early game.

[@frosbite84]

The amount of stop and go would drive me nuts.

[@boink666]

This video really appeals to my love of Freedom Grids!

[@aehoward91]

This is really cool RCE! Your next city should be the strongest shape!

[@darknesqw]

With this new city, I guess you could say that Matt is hitting the griddy.

[@nealm6944]

Loving the “strong engineering” bus stops!! That was proper hidden!! 🇬🇧

[@DeerLetsplayCrysiser]

PolyBridge and Cities Skylines. That's what I've come for *sips tea*

[@zekeclark2594]

I haven't watched skylines videos for a while and didn't even no skylines 2 was released! I was like, it looks different I wonder if he's playing with a mod. How exciting!

[@elnabasic7115]

Can you make a part of Engitopia the “Engineering” way. (e.g. most traffic efficient, intersections, zoning etc.) ? Would be very interesting. Entertaining and learning in one 👍👍

[@MrGrimm73]

Every time I see how many road names there are, it makes me giggle a lil bit lol 😂

[@loucololosse]

"You never really know what you gonna draw until your finished" 17:30 You silly sausage

[@xVMouseVx]

grids are just square roundabouts

[@Dysonsfear771]

You should do some belgian city, ribbon housing (lint bebouwing). Everyone just lives along a street and only shopping malls are in big cities without too much housing

[@johndutch5809]

Made the perfect city for that tron bike racing competition thing

[@porcorosso4330]

11:16 My guess is the tiny grids can always provide a the shortest distance to a building which kind of increase the range of service...

[@nicholastabar9216]

Now you have to do both... create a grid of the smallest roundabout city you can make. Probably 3x3 or 4x4 to have room for the roundabouts?

[@lorenzounaofb8597]

Cool video!!!!

[@LKLM138]

I knew it. Immediately. This thing works better than most of the serious towns.

[@xternalq1299]

Let's go, the master engineer of 2024 uploaded!

[@wooloo_vt1980]

Matt learning about how wonderful grids are

[@benfordslaw5105]

This is unironically your best layout yet. And I'm not even American.

[@aulvinduergard9952]

Just thought of one good thing about the mega grid: No one has to worry about property lines.

[@scooterD3]

The funny thing about this, is this setup basically gives you a straight shot from any building to any building

[@letstalkstuff3457]

Grids are the roads of freedom! Murica! Them sweet 90 degree angles.

[@CMDRJakob]

The phrase, "Pull up on your block" just got a whole lot more personal.

[@Radulf666]

I felt reminded of Mannheim in Germany, the town-center is in a grid with “Coordinate-like” Naming, so it's not 1st-Str. or like so it's A1 A2 A3 B1 B2 B3 and that's not the streets they're the blocks who have a “name”

[@HampterTheFifth]

good video👍👍

[@fruitfulconnoisseur]

13:45 RCE being an architect... again

[@Switchu1]

Very nice *architecture*! :)

[@jc_art_]

Yeah he literally makes architecture videos lmao

[@Jackthetech]

Summers in that city would be near lethal with all that blacktop. Winter would be nicer, good build tho.

[@jonreich9483]

This reminds me of the neighborhood I lived in Knoxville. God those are some horrifying flashbacks lol.

[@skyshredder_coutries]

You can actually use pathways to block grids to be able to zone 1 tile buildings

[@The01True20Gamer16]

The grid must grow! Continue tell it takes over the whole region. I think we'd all agree the bigger buildings are okay within the grid so long as the grid continues smoothlyish around it. 😂 the grid starves for more!!

[@rubencalvo2001]

17:37 yeah I see what you did there... 😂

[@bonnbybike]

17:36 that reveal was great and unexpected

[@tpgaming8783]

So satisfying

[@JosefdeJoanelli]

One thing I like about this grid is we can do away with house numbers in addresses

[@TankNamedTom]

Next challenge for this map: place trees on every road. 🌳

[@tpepinkdragon5303]

Love the video

[@darioschottlender]

I'd say road maintenance isn't expensive because roads are barely being used, and each time you make the city bigger you just add more roads so it's never clogged and cars barely touch them. I'd assume that's how it works in the game at least

[@laurendavies1915]

The grid looks like a street in Swansea called Dehli Street. Past one junction, you've got another one in front of you!

[@LolaMariek]

Tbh everyone in those homes would most likely be disgusted by the sound of cars might push em back to Matts roundabout world anyway. Job done.

[@liambethell2584]

Noughts and crosses challenge. Grid up each tile like a game grid and each area inside that grid has to either be a nought or a cross. You can fill the noughts in completely to maximise the space within.