We Built This City--And It's a Hot Mess

After a bout of serious indecision, I gave up on Borderlands 2 and decided to try my hand at some Cities:  Skylines.  I love Cities: Skylines and think it's a great modern city-builder.  I've played it off and on since I originally bought it in a sale a few years ago.  I'm going to admit that my adventures in city building tend to end in frustration or disaster (not because of actual disasters or anything, but due to my poor planning).  Please, continue reading to learn about my failure at city building.  (Read my review here)

In general, I've found that my cities move along at a good clip until the population gets to about 50k people.  Then, one of two things usually happens:

1.) Traffic is a clusterf(*k

Traffic jam!

There's always this point where I look up and realize that the traffic in my city is a dumpster fire.  This is usually due to complete failure to plan adequate routes for traffic coming into my city.  I learned a few things from my early ventures into Cities, but I still manage to mess it up.  I've been trying to read some guides and remedy my horrid traffic problems--my solution has been a bit inelegant; eliminate as many intersections on my major artery as I can to keep traffic flowing.  I think I've managed to alleviate some of the traffic pain, but I know it's undoubtedly a ticking bomb that is going to come back and bite me as time goes on and my city grows.

2.) I see dead people.

Santa Vegas has some problems.

 For some reason it always seems like no matter how many cemeteries and crematoria that I build, there's never enough to keep up with the demand (and yes, this is probably partially due to my horrible traffic flow problems).  I've also read that there can be a tendency for large numbers of deaths to occur at certain points due to an aging population in your city.  My city has periodically been plagued by a tide of uncollected corpses.  The end result is usually a glut of abandoned buildings that need to be bulldozed and re-levelled up.

Even though I hit my same wall of frustration, which in the past has seen me just giving up, I decided to soldier on and attempt to solve my problems.  I have spent several hours trying to work out solutions to traffic--bulldozing large portions on the map and trying to build roundabouts or a more complex highway system.  Usually I end up re-loading a previous save and trying from there.

Some of my efforts have paid off and Santa Vegas has become one of the largest cities that I've built.  My goal is to make it to 100,000 but I have a feeling that unless I figure out a way to solve my major problems, I won't even get remotely close to that number.  I really enjoy the challenge of Cities:  Skylines and the fact that it does require management and problem solving skills.