Update 7 is awesome – a review

Here are the patch notes for this update:

New Feature: Tool to create bridges, overpasses, and tunnels when you draw your roads.
While building your road, pressing the N key or M key will lower or raise the road accordingly creating overpasses, bridges and tunnels. Note: Existing road layouts cannot be raised or lowered

• New: Improvements for traffic behavior to make it smarter. This should reduce the number of lines formed by all available vehicles converging on a single spot. This affects all vehicles including Police, Fire Trucks, Moving Trucks, Garbage Trucks, Recycling Trucks, Resource Trucks, Buses, Ambulances, and Civilian vehicles.
• New: Tree tools – Place individual trees along your city roads. This tool is located at the end of the Nature Parks menu.
• New: Vehicles now accelerate and decelerate faster, allowing them to leave buildings and cross intersections more efficiently.
• Parks: Sports parks are now accepting Sims 24 hours a day.
• Airship: The number of Airship passenger trips should now be correct over multiple days.
• Freight: Freight trucks now only leave factories if they have a valid delivery destination.
• Fix for freight trucks leaving the city instead of going back to the factories in some situations.
• Terrain: Improves some instances where terrain covers sections of roads under certain scenarios while the camera is zoomed out.

Raising and Lowering Roads

The main update in this patch is obviously raising and lowering roads. Being able to make roads that go over or below buildings give you a lot more building terrain and a more efficient road system. People who have been complaining about the cities being too small will really enjoy this update, see how I created more building spaces and still have a direct route because of a tunnel:

Disclaimer: I will never be a good road system builder, but I did notice a huge improvement in this patch, I always end up with very messy road systems:

So what makes this patch so great. Say you have a car enter the city on 1 corner who has to go to the opposite side. He joins the high way and stops at every intersection. With a nice tunnel or bridge it can pass over all the intersections and go straight to the other corner. Same with services, put those on side of your land and let them drive fast to the other without getting stuck in traffic!

Cool right? This is not the coolest part, you can also make tunnels and bridges for railroad. No more crossing streets and making traffic stop.

Trees

Another update worth mentioning in this review is the sidewalk trees, we have these a lot in the Netherlands and I like that I can add them to my game.

Tips&Tricks

1: Connect 4 corners and plan railroad.
I’ve found it useful to have the 4 corners of the map and possibly a middle section connected by the tunnels/bridges so that cars can quickly go from one side of the city to the other, and from there go to their actual destination. This does take early planning of your city.

2: Build services near a tunnel or bridge
As mentioned earlier, it really helps  your services if they can quickly travel to another part of the city and skipping all the intersections that are usually connected to the roads.

3: Railroads
With the addition of railroad overpasses or tunnels you can stop intersecting roads and creating traffic jams, just make nice overpasses.

Build trains early when you can, so that later on you don’t get crazy situations like this:

4: Sometimes you cannot build a tunnel because of the water/land level, then you will have to go for a bridge:

5: Can also make curved bridges and tunnels!

Conclusion

I love this update, I think it adds a lot more depth to the road system. I still get traffic jams but I think that has a lot to do with my road building skills (or lack there of).