I’m a hardcore fan of Cities Skylines 1 and have been playing it for several years now. One issue I have though is how I go about making a highway system. It seems so complex, I don’t understand how I can connect place to place in a reasonable way and I feel like the only proper way to do it is to ravage through regions of my city to make massive interchanges and efficient routes. My strategy as a result is just using 6 lane roads as my “highways” and kinda just avoiding the idea of highways altogether. I’m so bad at it that my idea of creating an on/offramp is retrofitting roundabouts. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this and also how to get my mind thinking of the right ways to make good highways.
Something else I can say is scale. If you’re building a realistic scale city, you don’t have a vast highway system. Highways in real life connect between cities. And good urban design should see highways outside of city centers and away from neighbourhoods for the noise. So in CS, a highway basically can just run past your city and connect your city to a fictional place outside the map. I think it can be interesting to think about what you want the history of your city to be. If it is a point that has always been between other big places, it might be near a big highway crossing where two highways meet, if it’s more of a coastal city or an “end point”, there only needs to be a highway leading to the city.
Some cities don’t have a highway at all and you need to drive quite far to get to the highway outside of town.