Personally, I use traffic lights when I hear a certain audio cue - when cars start beeping at eachother you can check the map for the build-up. One set of traffic lights later, that queue will be dispersed.
I haven't gotten that cue yet, or if I did, I was too busy focusing on something else to notice. Which is weird, because usually with a brain injury, it's hard to block out sounds.
In my experience, traffic lights are good where traffic predominantly flows in one direction, because the lights are smart, and will stay green until there is traffic coming from another direction. This prevents cars moving in the predominant direction from slowing down for the intersection. I think that they also work better than roundabouts when there are too many cars going through.
THIS! Cars slow down at 4 way intersections. Use traffic lights to stop the slowdown at the intersection. Note that they do not slow down at 3 way intersections. Also it is better to have angled merges instead of 90 degree turns.
I have not experienced the lights being smart. Maybe a demo video could exist at some point of them doing this? They seem to be just as stupid as real world traffic lights, always red in the direction of the next approaching car.
@Tyson Jensen Try putting them on a major road with just one house coming in. It will be green most of the time, and only change for the house. One issue they do have is that you can't choose which streets go green at the same time. Sometimes they pick a weird setup. It works best with perpendicular streets.
@@lars8159 Even Egypt has the Nile river. Africa spans an area larger than 3x the US and has all known climates besides tundra. There are plenty of cities with rivers, lakes, and mountains.
Definitely! For the questions what would be different: For examples in the beginning there were no maps including mountains. So there's definitely stuff you can do!
I just played a round of the weekly challenge on AA (don't know if the challenges are the same for diff versions). I only used one traffic light late in the game when I had to cross 2 colours. The challenge only allows for 1 roundabout so it's a better option to force you to use traffic lights, than infinity lights. I think they are only useful when your mingling colours and can't use a roundabout. I have a feeling you need a bit of space leading into the lights otherwise the traffic backs up, especially if you tried to put one right next to a building exit or motorway. The challenge I just played had 9 motorways so my traffic lights were hard to see but I think they worked. At the end of my game I was out of ideas and everything started to fill up but the buildings being fed by the traffic lights lasted better then others with mono coloured traffic. It would be good to figure out some rules for how to use them. If other people have it worked out then it's an extra edge they have to get better scores.
Yeah I felt like i had to use them in this round. In my latest round I didn't use any of them and got to demand-cap again. Maybe traffic lights are just not my style of playing 😅
Traffic light rework: direct cars in the most important areas. For example if a blue mall has 6 pings and a pink mall has 1 then the traffic lights stop the pink cars at the intersection and let the blue cars go.
Its good to see even really good players regularly get shut down around 2k. I've got a few games that went really well past that but typically 1500-2500 is all I can do.
I notice you block out the spaces directly next to the "malls", I was watching a developer presentation about developing this game and at one point they made a comment that sounded like they've changed the way spawning works so that a building will never spawn inside one block of spacing around the entire perimeter. I've been looking out for it now and I do think it's the case. You should test that, it might let you be more efficient with the spaces you chose to block with spare roads
Yeah apparently this is a thing now. That was the worst back then when two malls would spawn right next to each other. Do you know if this also applies to houses?
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS As far as I can tell, Yes. No other mall or house can spawn directly next to a mall. I've been watching out for it and I can't find a single recent example of a house spawning directly next to a mall
Thank you for checking them out. The poor traffic light problem is that it gets too compared 1-1 to roundabouts. Obviously doing that roundabouts win. Instead, they should be looked at as another tool for different layouts.
Traffic lights help where there's an intersection that gets backed up at all in any direction. The flow control will end up finding (more of) a balance (depending on how far the different directions are traveling, etc).
i hava an idea. Can you test the "manual Runabout"?. Manual Runabout is runabout that you make yourself by making a diamond-shaped road. the advantage of this runabout is you can fit 2 lane of car instead of 1 from the original runabout. Thank you. and also, disadvantage of this runabout is it need a big about of road, and sometime a house randomly spawn in the middle of the runabout. to prevent that, you can make 2 wide gap in the middle of the runabout, and put road piece in the middle
I hope they add public holidays or some day that there is no traffic so that you can restructure your whole city. with that in mind the game might get too easy tho
Don't know if that would be the solution. They did a great job improving it tho. In the beginning if you deleted anything chances were high you were done with the game (:
I think the important thing to remember about traffic lights is that cars will always drive at full speed if it's their turn. This makes traffic going in the one direction at an intersection significantly faster, making up for lost time they'd normally have slowing down. It also allows for smaller amounts of traffic to interrupt a more populated road without slowing down the whole thing as the cars respond more quickly when given the green light. Roundabouts are generally more effective, but take up more space and aren't suitable for optimizing small amounts of traffic. I think they're particularly useful for when your neighbourhoods transition to a main road, but I really can't pick these over a Motorway or special roads necessary for the map. They should make traffic lights a minor upgrade or something. Something that can be picked alongside the main ones. There's nothing that'll make them better than all the other choices.
If you look at it logically, at a 4 way intersection and above is when traffic lights will work best, just like a roundabout, but less effective. On a 4 way intersections, _all_ cars will slow down, without exception, and some cars will stop because of a lack of space. With a traffic light, the stopping will still happen, but no car will ever slow down when they are free to go. Also, the reduced time to cross also minimize the time a care on a different lane will have to wait. So you win about 2-3 seconds per car that crosses the traffic light.
"when they are free to go" is the key part here. When there are very few cars going through an intersection, the traffic light saves almost no time, and will probably end up costing you time when stopping cars that didn't need to be full stopped. Obviously the more traffic going through an intersection, the more beneficial the traffic light becomes. But the question is: if you have so much traffic going through an intersection, that a traffic light becomes beneficial, isn't that a sign that its time to refactor something? In other words, in my opinion, if you need a traffic light, you're already in trouble.
Actually I disagree. I think people hate traffic lights because they compare them to scenarios where you would place a roundabout instead. Roundabouts are fenomenal in their job, traffic lights should be used in smaller areas with less intersections to allow free pass of highways.
@@Imbalanxd That's actually not true. Sure, a traffic light has a sweet spot at which it's most effective, but in my example, even only single car will get sped up by about 2 seconds, and saving 2 seconds on every car that passes on every alternation will save a signifficant amount of time and can be the difference between winning and losing. Sure, avoiding intersactions alltogether is almost always better, but sometimes it's unavoidable. And doing a whole restructure to avoid already existing intersection, especialle when the problem is already big, you will probably lose from the restructure, where as placing down a traffic light is a quick and easy improvement to squeeze some more points out fo a run.
@@toastbrot97 Everyone should agree that saving travel time is what makes you more likely to win. The dispute is whether traffic lights actually does that. And in my experience, traffic lights many times stop the cars longer than if it was just an intersection. See 4:09 top right red car as an example. The car fully stops for 3 seconds with no side traffic. And before the 3 seconds, it spent time slowing down, like it would've in a normal 4-way intersection. Granted, since it'd just be a T-intersection without the lights, the car would've just cruised through at full speed without the light.
Having traffic lights for those odd houses that connect to a major road is imo a good idea because then that odd house causes less traffic. Traffic lights become an even better idea if there`s an odd house on both sides forming a crossroads. Also putting a traffic light in suburbs where there are many houses connecting into a single tile might be a good idea.
Addendum to a comment I made on a different video: Try traffic lights at Y intersections (suburb or near mall) _where you are merging or splitting different colors._ I neglected that small but crucial detail. Monochromatic suburbs don't need the flow control, and the signals only introduce delays.
Something I was thinking of: sometimes when establishing a route for the first time, you can get an unsatisfactory initial flow of traffic. For example, if you have a central fork joining 2 groups of houses, that fork can become very congested when the route is first connected. And because of the flow of traffic, that fork will remain congested forever, as the cars always end up there at the same time. If you place a traffic light at that fork, dividing the two groups initially, you should then be able to remove the traffic light as soon as the division is established, as the timing should now be better. So long as the route remains fairly static.
I use traffic light as a jam removal. When I see a line of, car stuck somewhere or don't know who need to move. I just put the traffic light, like a police officer who will say "now, this line move, go go go". After the traffic jam get better, I removed the line for cars to move freely
Your map looked like it had pretty good flow - no traffic congestion - just the purple was too far and too high of demand. Traffic lights help moderate flow of traffic. When I see an area getting congested, I look around the perimeter of the congested area and place traffic lights to help moderate the flow so that cars don't rush the congested area. Stopping cars briefly helps give some breathing room. But warning: Do not put Tlights in the congested area - that just clogs it up further.
Traffic lights meta would be to always have a "strip" coming from each mall for cars to queue to. So id say the first error you made was on initial spawn. Instead of going south, go north, turn right to the houses. Then put an intersection and traffic light right there. And block spawning next to this road. Having a buffer strip between each traffic light IS the meta.
I don't use traffic lights either. If I did use them, I'd built a lot more straight intersections and keep everything cleaner and shorter. The only case for them being useful is when you can cross two roads of different colors and manage the traffic between them. You could have tried using it for the purple. Instead of a long detour, built a very short road with traffic lights to manage it.
At 10:00 I'd delete all the 3-way traffic lights, and the best location I can spot for a traffic light would be under the top teal house near the yellows - so the yellows can go freely most of the time - but I would definitely have redirected the purple tunnel to just above the 4 teal houses.
No. Tried that when roundabouts were not a feature and it doesn't work simply because it'd be using two lane roads. Cars would always go the wrong way because it's shorter 👍🏼
Traffic lights r nice since they take up less space than a roundabout. However, they seem to be able to handle a smaller max capacity of cars compared to roundabouts. Although, late game, even roundabouts can get clogged with too much traffic. Roundabouts seem to be able to handle about one circle business and 1 square business whereas traffic lights do well at maintaining flow to 2 square businesses. One thing to keep in mind, roundabouts r way better if there r more than just a 4 way intersection. Never use traffic lights if there r 5 entry/exit points because then they really suck. I try to keep circle businesses on their own road and try to make sure the houses have the shortest distance to them. They get overwhelmed quickly if the cars have to trace a long way. I find traffic lights r decent early game if u can’t get enough roundabouts or can’t fit a roundabout in. Just make sure that the lights won’t have to direct too much traffic. That’s the summary with them.
Traffic lights are worse than just nothing on the road, cuz they just bring a lot of traffic and make the cars take longer to get to their destination, even worse if you use them far into the game, like 1,000+ pins, they're okay at the beginning but it's basically the same as nothing
My experience with traffic lights is limited but I would say for the most part traffic lights seem to make things go slower unless you absolutely fill very specific requirements such as have a long stretch of road without intersections near the traffic light location, not have more than a 4 way intersection, hopefully having the intersecting road not used to much, among other things. They are not useless, but the opportunity cost is to great to take them when given the other option except maybe late game when spaces are mostly filled and given the choice of a roundabout or traffic light
My problem with this game is that you can't change the mall entrance and invariably I get a mall spawn with the exit RIGHT AT THE EDGE. Then you have to drag a road all the way around the mall and it eats up a ton of space. This kills me on tight maps like Zurich.
honestly if they replaced traffic lights with overpasses it would be a lot better, not stopping one way of traffic, but having it go over one tile instead
Traffic lights seem to be for high density crossings? A roundabout can take at most, one constant line of cars, traffic lights would seem to allow more car throughput overall, albeit slower - so theoretically that would be their use case? When more cars need to come through, rather than faster -> short roads with big loads?
in my opinion sharing the roads isn't an issue, you should try to make the travel distance as short as possible, avoid junctions, bends and give each center the minimum traffic it requires, only adding more houses when the demand grows. The demand of centers isn't constant and as the map grows the overall demand grows that is distributed between the centers, therefore your city is doomed eventually, un-intuitively the more centers you have the higher chance there is to survive.
also hydrophilic when u get an annoying spawn like the yellow you can take a risk and block off all the areas near the newly spawned yellow house and the second or\and the third house will spawn elsewhere
I actually think you used TLs pretty well in this one. However, I think the main argument is that TLs are good, but not as good as RAs. So if you play with only one RA, you're going to have problems. One of the arguments I make is that TLs help regulate your traffic entering into the main arterials. However, in a multifunctional crossing (or an arterial crossing), you will always want a RA over a TL. The problem in this particular context is that you had little to zero arterial roads, and almost all of your neighborhoods were segregated. Not a good setup if you're wanting to maximize your TL's effectiveness. 1. I noticed that in the top-center area you actually had separated the teals from the yellows at one point 9:45, but for some reason decided to connect them 9:53. I think that was not a good decision. 2. I think you should have connected the purple group in the center to the arterial across to the left instead of having it cross up through the mountains into the teal neighborhood. 3. The bottom "white" (lol) neighborhood, you had two TLs, where I think you only needed one if any as this neighborhood was a completely segregated group. 4. I noticed that your pink neighborhood on the left has two separate cul-de-sacs. I think this can just be one and get rid of the TL. Again, if their not feeding into an arterial road, then it's not necessary to have a TL. And perhaps the same for your pink group on the top right. Just connect those houses into one cup-de-sac and it would make your TL a lot more effective there. 5. Your round about in the top right was not necessary. If I were you I would have placed it over on the other side connecting your pink and purple groups and then extending downwards underneath the yellow and teal stores, connecting to your purple store. The reason is that that store ended up being a trouble spot for you in the end. You had nine purple houses in the top right feeding your small store that arguably only needed two or three. Hope this helps! Good luck sir.
The problem with traffic lights are that they are just worse than everything else you can pick at the end/start of a week. Like 10 extra roads or roundabouts are almost always better than 2 traffic lights which make them unviable (basically)
Exactly. Nothing wrong with traffic lights, they're useful when you have a very rarely travelled road leading into a heavily travelled road. This allows the cars in the heavily travelled road to go full speed almost all the time, and stop for maybe 5% of the time. However, they're strictly less useful than more roads, more motorways or more roundabouts (as you said), so the opportunity cost is just awful.
The problem I find with traffic lights is how slow they are to switch colors. They don't detect a car unless it is right next to it. What if they detected cars coming from further away? Maybe just one or two roads away to not make it too OP. Of course it will not switch if a line is already passing.
You seem way more experienced than me, my pb is only about 3.6k. With that said, the cars slow down in intersections (at least 4 roads from one square, they slow down even if there is no crossing cars, so avoiding these makes for less downtime), but dosn't in t-sections, meaning you can make your roads so the cars slow down less of the time. Furthermore, the traffic lights makes the most sense where there is an intersection, not t-section. Your road networks don't seem optimized either, you can shorten a lot of roads, so the cars have less travel time, meaning that they can get around quicker. my 0.02$
Mixed colors and higher volumes (say, roads used for skyscraper destinations) are when to use traffic lights. You’ll never come to that realization when creating a crystallized city. Your separation of colors keeps roads dispersed and out of other color’s way. Where’s the challenge in that? 😋
It's not really an exploit if it's by gamedesign. Without blocking the spawn it would be pure luck and less about considering what would make sense. But that's just my two cents 🤷🏼♂️
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS I prefer letting the map randomly dictate what I have to deal with. Its more fun to go in and see what happens and then deal with the situations as they unfold instead of trying to control the map to do what I want. I think its "game design" because it would be significantly harder to program the buildings to not spawn in a super messed up way on top of existing roads. As it is now its a simple solution so the maps are playable, but allow for a bit of exploiting. It's apart of the game though so I don't mind the players who like to do it. Perhaps changing it to if a road isn't connected to a house anywhere along its connected path a building or business can spawn on top of the road and delete it. You could still exploit a little but not nearly as much. I get better scores and have more fun just playing out the maps normally so that is what I will continue to do.
nit: The roads you place on the corners of new building have no affect. Buildings cannot be placed next to each other, there is always a one tile buffer.
That's false. I had it just yeasterday. A pink mall appeard right next to a blue one with no gab in between. Even worse, the entrance for pink was directed to a corner of the map and I had no chance (not even a motorway) to connect pink to the pink houses because of the blue mall and map restriction. The map expanded way too late and it cost me the challenge with just 82 trips done... :(
Destinations have a 1square perimeter where wont appear any other buildings. So a lot of the "road blocking" you do can be saved. And you will have more roads avaliable :)
![[Weekly] I'll Never Make Fun of Traffic Lights Again - Mini Motorways](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/TRRwm_EuqrY/mqdefault.jpg)
![[UNCUT]"ทนายตั้ม" แฉยับ! ความลับสวรรค์ ใครคือ "บิ๊กเทวดา" ของบอสพอล l คนดังนั่งเคลียร์ l 15 ต.ค. 67](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ru9fpSaUwdA/mqdefault.jpg)
Personally, I use traffic lights when I hear a certain audio cue - when cars start beeping at eachother you can check the map for the build-up. One set of traffic lights later, that queue will be dispersed.
To be honest at some point I start muting the game cause the audio cues get too crazy 😂
I haven't gotten that cue yet, or if I did, I was too busy focusing on something else to notice. Which is weird, because usually with a brain injury, it's hard to block out sounds.
In my experience, traffic lights are good where traffic predominantly flows in one direction, because the lights are smart, and will stay green until there is traffic coming from another direction. This prevents cars moving in the predominant direction from slowing down for the intersection. I think that they also work better than roundabouts when there are too many cars going through.
THIS! Cars slow down at 4 way intersections. Use traffic lights to stop the slowdown at the intersection. Note that they do not slow down at 3 way intersections. Also it is better to have angled merges instead of 90 degree turns.
I have not experienced the lights being smart. Maybe a demo video could exist at some point of them doing this? They seem to be just as stupid as real world traffic lights, always red in the direction of the next approaching car.
@Tyson Jensen Try putting them on a major road with just one house coming in. It will be green most of the time, and only change for the house. One issue they do have is that you can't choose which streets go green at the same time. Sometimes they pick a weird setup. It works best with perpendicular streets.
I hope they add more cities, like. Sydney, Seoul, Paris, Madrid, London. And African cities aswell.
Like Dar-es-salam? 😜
what is the difference berween two cities? other than rivers and lakes
Africa would have no lakes or rivers lol
@@lars8159 Even Egypt has the Nile river. Africa spans an area larger than 3x the US and has all known climates besides tundra. There are plenty of cities with rivers, lakes, and mountains.
Definitely! For the questions what would be different: For examples in the beginning there were no maps including mountains. So there's definitely stuff you can do!
I just played a round of the weekly challenge on AA (don't know if the challenges are the same for diff versions). I only used one traffic light late in the game when I had to cross 2 colours. The challenge only allows for 1 roundabout so it's a better option to force you to use traffic lights, than infinity lights.
I think they are only useful when your mingling colours and can't use a roundabout. I have a feeling you need a bit of space leading into the lights otherwise the traffic backs up, especially if you tried to put one right next to a building exit or motorway. The challenge I just played had 9 motorways so my traffic lights were hard to see but I think they worked. At the end of my game I was out of ideas and everything started to fill up but the buildings being fed by the traffic lights lasted better then others with mono coloured traffic.
It would be good to figure out some rules for how to use them. If other people have it worked out then it's an extra edge they have to get better scores.
Yeah I felt like i had to use them in this round. In my latest round I didn't use any of them and got to demand-cap again. Maybe traffic lights are just not my style of playing 😅
Traffic light rework: direct cars in the most important areas.
For example if a blue mall has 6 pings and a pink mall has 1 then the traffic lights stop the pink cars at the intersection and let the blue cars go.
Always sounds so easy in theory :D
Its good to see even really good players regularly get shut down around 2k. I've got a few games that went really well past that but typically 1500-2500 is all I can do.
I notice you block out the spaces directly next to the "malls", I was watching a developer presentation about developing this game and at one point they made a comment that sounded like they've changed the way spawning works so that a building will never spawn inside one block of spacing around the entire perimeter. I've been looking out for it now and I do think it's the case. You should test that, it might let you be more efficient with the spaces you chose to block with spare roads
Yeah apparently this is a thing now. That was the worst back then when two malls would spawn right next to each other. Do you know if this also applies to houses?
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS As far as I can tell, Yes. No other mall or house can spawn directly next to a mall. I've been watching out for it and I can't find a single recent example of a house spawning directly next to a mall
@@jacobsnedaker8993 Alright, thanks! :)
I didn't know, thanks! This should make my blocking more efficient!
Thank you for checking them out. The poor traffic light problem is that it gets too compared 1-1 to roundabouts. Obviously doing that roundabouts win. Instead, they should be looked at as another tool for different layouts.
Traffic lights help where there's an intersection that gets backed up at all in any direction. The flow control will end up finding (more of) a balance (depending on how far the different directions are traveling, etc).
i hava an idea. Can you test the "manual Runabout"?. Manual Runabout is runabout that you make yourself by making a diamond-shaped road. the advantage of this runabout is you can fit 2 lane of car instead of 1 from the original runabout. Thank you.
and also, disadvantage of this runabout is it need a big about of road, and sometime a house randomly spawn in the middle of the runabout. to prevent that, you can make 2 wide gap in the middle of the runabout, and put road piece in the middle
Roundabout.
Also isn't the main purpose of roundabouts is to avoid left turns across the traffic
Wouldn’t work. Cars take the shortest route. They don’t care where you want them to go or what would make less congestion.
Traffic lights are amazing at 4 ways with massive ques where you can't fit a roundabout. I don't understand why everyone hates on them
I hope they add public holidays or some day that there is no traffic so that you can restructure your whole city.
with that in mind the game might get too easy tho
Don't know if that would be the solution. They did a great job improving it tho. In the beginning if you deleted anything chances were high you were done with the game (:
I think the important thing to remember about traffic lights is that cars will always drive at full speed if it's their turn. This makes traffic going in the one direction at an intersection significantly faster, making up for lost time they'd normally have slowing down. It also allows for smaller amounts of traffic to interrupt a more populated road without slowing down the whole thing as the cars respond more quickly when given the green light.
Roundabouts are generally more effective, but take up more space and aren't suitable for optimizing small amounts of traffic. I think they're particularly useful for when your neighbourhoods transition to a main road, but I really can't pick these over a Motorway or special roads necessary for the map.
They should make traffic lights a minor upgrade or something. Something that can be picked alongside the main ones. There's nothing that'll make them better than all the other choices.
If you look at it logically, at a 4 way intersection and above is when traffic lights will work best, just like a roundabout, but less effective. On a 4 way intersections, _all_ cars will slow down, without exception, and some cars will stop because of a lack of space. With a traffic light, the stopping will still happen, but no car will ever slow down when they are free to go. Also, the reduced time to cross also minimize the time a care on a different lane will have to wait. So you win about 2-3 seconds per car that crosses the traffic light.
"when they are free to go" is the key part here. When there are very few cars going through an intersection, the traffic light saves almost no time, and will probably end up costing you time when stopping cars that didn't need to be full stopped. Obviously the more traffic going through an intersection, the more beneficial the traffic light becomes. But the question is: if you have so much traffic going through an intersection, that a traffic light becomes beneficial, isn't that a sign that its time to refactor something? In other words, in my opinion, if you need a traffic light, you're already in trouble.
Actually I disagree. I think people hate traffic lights because they compare them to scenarios where you would place a roundabout instead. Roundabouts are fenomenal in their job, traffic lights should be used in smaller areas with less intersections to allow free pass of highways.
@@Imbalanxd That's actually not true. Sure, a traffic light has a sweet spot at which it's most effective, but in my example, even only single car will get sped up by about 2 seconds, and saving 2 seconds on every car that passes on every alternation will save a signifficant amount of time and can be the difference between winning and losing. Sure, avoiding intersactions alltogether is almost always better, but sometimes it's unavoidable. And doing a whole restructure to avoid already existing intersection, especialle when the problem is already big, you will probably lose from the restructure, where as placing down a traffic light is a quick and easy improvement to squeeze some more points out fo a run.
@@toastbrot97 Everyone should agree that saving travel time is what makes you more likely to win. The dispute is whether traffic lights actually does that. And in my experience, traffic lights many times stop the cars longer than if it was just an intersection. See 4:09 top right red car as an example. The car fully stops for 3 seconds with no side traffic. And before the 3 seconds, it spent time slowing down, like it would've in a normal 4-way intersection. Granted, since it'd just be a T-intersection without the lights, the car would've just cruised through at full speed without the light.
Having traffic lights for those odd houses that connect to a major road is imo a good idea because then that odd house causes less traffic. Traffic lights become an even better idea if there`s an odd house on both sides forming a crossroads. Also putting a traffic light in suburbs where there are many houses connecting into a single tile might be a good idea.
Addendum to a comment I made on a different video: Try traffic lights at Y intersections (suburb or near mall) _where you are merging or splitting different colors._ I neglected that small but crucial detail. Monochromatic suburbs don't need the flow control, and the signals only introduce delays.
Something I was thinking of: sometimes when establishing a route for the first time, you can get an unsatisfactory initial flow of traffic. For example, if you have a central fork joining 2 groups of houses, that fork can become very congested when the route is first connected. And because of the flow of traffic, that fork will remain congested forever, as the cars always end up there at the same time.
If you place a traffic light at that fork, dividing the two groups initially, you should then be able to remove the traffic light as soon as the division is established, as the timing should now be better. So long as the route remains fairly static.
I use traffic light as a jam removal. When I see a line of, car stuck somewhere or don't know who need to move. I just put the traffic light, like a police officer who will say "now, this line move, go go go". After the traffic jam get better, I removed the line for cars to move freely
In my opinion, traffic lights are used in the crossroads of different colors.
Maybe that's why I'm almost never using them since I try to seperate the colors
Your map looked like it had pretty good flow - no traffic congestion - just the purple was too far and too high of demand. Traffic lights help moderate flow of traffic. When I see an area getting congested, I look around the perimeter of the congested area and place traffic lights to help moderate the flow so that cars don't rush the congested area. Stopping cars briefly helps give some breathing room. But warning: Do not put Tlights in the congested area - that just clogs it up further.
Traffic lights meta would be to always have a "strip" coming from each mall for cars to queue to. So id say the first error you made was on initial spawn. Instead of going south, go north, turn right to the houses. Then put an intersection and traffic light right there. And block spawning next to this road. Having a buffer strip between each traffic light IS the meta.
When i say "right there" is directly north of the first spawned mall.
I don't use traffic lights either. If I did use them, I'd built a lot more straight intersections and keep everything cleaner and shorter.
The only case for them being useful is when you can cross two roads of different colors and manage the traffic between them. You could have tried using it for the purple. Instead of a long detour, built a very short road with traffic lights to manage it.
Yeah that might be why I hardly use them. Normally I avoid different colors on one road
At 10:00 I'd delete all the 3-way traffic lights, and the best location I can spot for a traffic light would be under the top teal house near the yellows - so the yellows can go freely most of the time - but I would definitely have redirected the purple tunnel to just above the 4 teal houses.
could you potentially make a roundabout from roads? like placing roads in a circle to imitate a roundabout
No. Tried that when roundabouts were not a feature and it doesn't work simply because it'd be using two lane roads. Cars would always go the wrong way because it's shorter 👍🏼
Traffic lights r nice since they take up less space than a roundabout. However, they seem to be able to handle a smaller max capacity of cars compared to roundabouts. Although, late game, even roundabouts can get clogged with too much traffic. Roundabouts seem to be able to handle about one circle business and 1 square business whereas traffic lights do well at maintaining flow to 2 square businesses.
One thing to keep in mind, roundabouts r way better if there r more than just a 4 way intersection. Never use traffic lights if there r 5 entry/exit points because then they really suck.
I try to keep circle businesses on their own road and try to make sure the houses have the shortest distance to them. They get overwhelmed quickly if the cars have to trace a long way.
I find traffic lights r decent early game if u can’t get enough roundabouts or can’t fit a roundabout in. Just make sure that the lights won’t have to direct too much traffic. That’s the summary with them.
Traffic lights are worse than just nothing on the road, cuz they just bring a lot of traffic and make the cars take longer to get to their destination, even worse if you use them far into the game, like 1,000+ pins, they're okay at the beginning but it's basically the same as nothing
My experience with traffic lights is limited but I would say for the most part traffic lights seem to make things go slower unless you absolutely fill very specific requirements such as have a long stretch of road without intersections near the traffic light location, not have more than a 4 way intersection, hopefully having the intersecting road not used to much, among other things.
They are not useless, but the opportunity cost is to great to take them when given the other option except maybe late game when spaces are mostly filled and given the choice of a roundabout or traffic light
Got it!
Roundabouts work quite well with three roads imo. Like a triangle.
My problem with this game is that you can't change the mall entrance and invariably I get a mall spawn with the exit RIGHT AT THE EDGE. Then you have to drag a road all the way around the mall and it eats up a ton of space. This kills me on tight maps like Zurich.
Yeah that's pure luck. Might be too easy if you could change it tho, who knows :)
Also: 2k is a solid score!
honestly if they replaced traffic lights with overpasses it would be a lot better, not stopping one way of traffic, but having it go over one tile instead
Or underground tunnels, even if it doesnt have a mountain
Or the ability to connect bridges and motorways
Traffic lights seem to be for high density crossings? A roundabout can take at most, one constant line of cars, traffic lights would seem to allow more car throughput overall, albeit slower - so theoretically that would be their use case? When more cars need to come through, rather than faster -> short roads with big loads?
in my opinion sharing the roads isn't an issue, you should try to make the travel distance as short as possible, avoid junctions, bends and give each center the minimum traffic it requires, only adding more houses when the demand grows.
The demand of centers isn't constant and as the map grows the overall demand grows that is distributed between the centers, therefore your city is doomed eventually, un-intuitively the more centers you have the higher chance there is to survive.
also hydrophilic when u get an annoying spawn like the yellow you can take a risk and block off all the areas near the newly spawned yellow house and the second or\and the third house will spawn elsewhere
I actually think you used TLs pretty well in this one. However, I think the main argument is that TLs are good, but not as good as RAs. So if you play with only one RA, you're going to have problems. One of the arguments I make is that TLs help regulate your traffic entering into the main arterials. However, in a multifunctional crossing (or an arterial crossing), you will always want a RA over a TL. The problem in this particular context is that you had little to zero arterial roads, and almost all of your neighborhoods were segregated. Not a good setup if you're wanting to maximize your TL's effectiveness.
1. I noticed that in the top-center area you actually had separated the teals from the yellows at one point 9:45, but for some reason decided to connect them 9:53. I think that was not a good decision.
2. I think you should have connected the purple group in the center to the arterial across to the left instead of having it cross up through the mountains into the teal neighborhood.
3. The bottom "white" (lol) neighborhood, you had two TLs, where I think you only needed one if any as this neighborhood was a completely segregated group.
4. I noticed that your pink neighborhood on the left has two separate cul-de-sacs. I think this can just be one and get rid of the TL. Again, if their not feeding into an arterial road, then it's not necessary to have a TL. And perhaps the same for your pink group on the top right. Just connect those houses into one cup-de-sac and it would make your TL a lot more effective there.
5. Your round about in the top right was not necessary. If I were you I would have placed it over on the other side connecting your pink and purple groups and then extending downwards underneath the yellow and teal stores, connecting to your purple store. The reason is that that store ended up being a trouble spot for you in the end. You had nine purple houses in the top right feeding your small store that arguably only needed two or three.
Hope this helps! Good luck sir.
Yeah after all I find myself playing better without them actually. Mainly because I could have gotten a different upgrade at the end of the week tho
From my experience TL works best on Intersections of four Streets, were each one has roughly the Same Traffic income
Sounds reasonable since the cars slow down quite a bit at four way intersections.
The problem with traffic lights are that they are just worse than everything else you can pick at the end/start of a week. Like 10 extra roads or roundabouts are almost always better than 2 traffic lights which make them unviable (basically)
Exactly. Nothing wrong with traffic lights, they're useful when you have a very rarely travelled road leading into a heavily travelled road. This allows the cars in the heavily travelled road to go full speed almost all the time, and stop for maybe 5% of the time.
However, they're strictly less useful than more roads, more motorways or more roundabouts (as you said), so the opportunity cost is just awful.
Yeah, maybe they should give you 25 roads with it.
The problem I find with traffic lights is how slow they are to switch colors. They don't detect a car unless it is right next to it. What if they detected cars coming from further away? Maybe just one or two roads away to not make it too OP. Of course it will not switch if a line is already passing.
Yeah I agree. Probably a question of some more balancing.
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS true
Traffic lights are like the valve on the sink it controls how many get thru but it also increases the pressure
I use traffic lights purely where cars are automatically slowing down for empty intersections frequently.
You seem way more experienced than me, my pb is only about 3.6k.
With that said, the cars slow down in intersections (at least 4 roads from one square, they slow down even if there is no crossing cars, so avoiding these makes for less downtime), but dosn't in t-sections, meaning you can make your roads so the cars slow down less of the time. Furthermore, the traffic lights makes the most sense where there is an intersection, not t-section.
Your road networks don't seem optimized either, you can shorten a lot of roads, so the cars have less travel time, meaning that they can get around quicker.
my 0.02$
Your intro music reminds me of Geometry Dash. Is it related? I feel like it could be a track in that game
Not related, I made it using Apple's sound loops. So chances are high you'll find pieces of it somewhere :)
Think traffic lights work best in big neighborhoods. But not on the big long streets where they converge
Please show how you ranked at the end of each level
Mixed colors and higher volumes (say, roads used for skyscraper destinations) are when to use traffic lights. You’ll never come to that realization when creating a crystallized city. Your separation of colors keeps roads dispersed and out of other color’s way. Where’s the challenge in that? 😋
The challenge is to find room for the crazy amount of roads week after week :D
Very very good
They need to fix the "build roads everywhere to stop spawning" exploit!
Absolutely
Shh, no they don't! I need more points!!! :P
actually i'd be happier if they added it to the game in the form of parks
It's not really an exploit if it's by gamedesign. Without blocking the spawn it would be pure luck and less about considering what would make sense. But that's just my two cents 🤷🏼♂️
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS I prefer letting the map randomly dictate what I have to deal with. Its more fun to go in and see what happens and then deal with the situations as they unfold instead of trying to control the map to do what I want.
I think its "game design" because it would be significantly harder to program the buildings to not spawn in a super messed up way on top of existing roads. As it is now its a simple solution so the maps are playable, but allow for a bit of exploiting. It's apart of the game though so I don't mind the players who like to do it.
Perhaps changing it to if a road isn't connected to a house anywhere along its connected path a building or business can spawn on top of the road and delete it. You could still exploit a little but not nearly as much. I get better scores and have more fun just playing out the maps normally so that is what I will continue to do.
Amsterdam, lots of water
play a game with traffic light, then the same without. repeat this 20 times to get a significant result. ;)
Well my day only has 24 hours tho. And a decent round can go for 2+ hours 😅
just choose the hardest map, then the rounds are shorter.
Yeah, This Is Big Brain Time!
nit: The roads you place on the corners of new building have no affect. Buildings cannot be placed next to each other, there is always a one tile buffer.
That's false. I had it just yeasterday. A pink mall appeard right next to a blue one with no gab in between. Even worse, the entrance for pink was directed to a corner of the map and I had no chance (not even a motorway) to connect pink to the pink houses because of the blue mall and map restriction. The map expanded way too late and it cost me the challenge with just 82 trips done... :(
I also do that for the houses so I have still plenty of room to squeeze a road through :)
Destinations have a 1square perimeter where wont appear any other buildings.
So a lot of the "road blocking" you do can be saved. And you will have more roads avaliable :)
It's less for malls and more for houses tho :)
Unless they didn't change anything: I've had houses spawn right next to malls 🤔
@@HYDROPHILPLAYS i'm 99% they don't spawn now. Maybe it has been changed and before they did.
well, you used it in wrong way.
if its only blue lane, why put traffic lights?
Well the idea was to create a nice steady flow of traffic. But I realized I'm playing better without even bothering about them :D
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