I started this city in the early beta of CitiesXL. Some of the old veterans maybe know my work cause MonteCristo, the former developer, honored Coast City and me by putting a screenshot of my City on a poster that were attached to the limited edition of CitiesXL. But it was a long way until then.
Everything starts in 2009 when Simtropolis had a beta key give away event for Cities XL. I was constantly refreshing my browser and searching through simtropolis to acquire a beta key for CitiesXL during this event. Finally I was a lucky beta player of the game I was so much excited about. 🙂
It took some time until the server was stable and the planet mode works good enough to start playing. First I started browsing through all the different map types and finally I found one that looks pretty nice and interesting to me: The small Peninsula. This map has a large area with flat land but also some water, mountains and a nice shaped shore line. So I decided to settle down and to start with a nice little town. Coast City was born, a small town with 90.000 inhabitants. The City shape was very European, curved roads with block structures gave it a “natural growing” look. The town hall was located in the centre of the city with an nearby park. A large avenue connected the town hall to the coast, in the south of the city. Where another avenue folowed the shore line. This is the mainstreet. The town hall was surrounded by an office and commercial district, with some residential buildings between. The medium density block structure of the city centre slowly changed over to suburban areas and agricultural areas. A large industrial area with a harbour was located in the east. From there mainly agricultural products were exported into the entire World.
But there was much more space on this map available and after I had trained my citybuilding skills at this first part, I tried to create a large masterplaned city on the rest of the map with a clear structure. At this time many beta players just have designed chess board cities, but my intention was to set myself free myself from this SC4 style and to build a circular shaped city instead. The circular shape I used for Coast City was inspired by masterplaned real life Cities like Canberra or Lingang and by the Garden City concept. At first I “sketched” my later road gird with some small and farming roads on the map. These roads were just placeholders. In the centre of each circle I planed a huge park and public buildings. At the larger circle I tried to create a clean structure, high density office buildings in the first/ second ring, express ways, parks, some commercial in the third ring, a mixed medium density zone in the small fourth ring, than another express way and park ring and at least the residential rings started with high density and going down to low density. Some industry were placed between these two rings.
I started the construction of the small circle at first, during this time I tryed around with the freeway tool, I liked to integrate it into my city as central traffic axis but at first I was not very satisfied with the possibilities to cross them with bridges or tunnels, all took to much space. Until I figured out a way to build a sunken freeway.
The city grows constantly and after some time the small circle was finished and the work on the large one started. But a unforeseen event throw Coast City back and brought it dangerous close to bankrup: deployment of build 201. This patch completely reworked the balance of needed and produced tokens and implemented a extreme negative effect of air polution as well. That finally caused a massive negative cash flow in Coast City. My only chance to survive this was to bulldoze through the city until I got to a point were things were stable again. Finally I can say I have, like any other player who got his city through this massacre, deserved this shirt 🙂
I started to rebuild my city slowly and I returned to business as usual, crating roads, parks and placing buildings and so on. Some days later the large circle were close to completion and the blueprints were introduced. I placed the Empire State Building, the highest building in CitiesXL, in the centre of the large circle. Also I started to work on a third circle, not intended at the beginning of my project but now necessary, between those two others, this circle was dedicated to hotels, tourism and elite population, because I needed these tokens.
After countless hours of work Coast City were finally completed and appeared in its final beauty. As you can see, the unity of a stringent circular city shape with the natural landscape is verry characteristic for Coast City. The completion of my project came just in time, shortly before a new patch deployment with a server reset, that had erased all cities.
I celebrated this event with my version of the end of the world. A huge space ship appered in the skies above Coast City and made his way directly towards the center of the large circle. And in the end This beautiful place were turned into fire and dust. RIP
But my work was not completely lost, Montecristo took care of Coast City, puted a screenshot of it on this awesome poster. This will always remind me on the best beta I have ever played. I want to thank Montecristo/Focus for this honor and I also like to say thank you to the whole CitiesXL community for the inspiration and interest I got from you for my work.
regards
Auriga
