City · Part 2 · About 8 minutes
Reading your city
A city has no accounts to read, so it reports itself differently: how much of your allowance is spent, how completely the place is built, how well it moves, and where the traffic actually goes.
The one-minute explanation
Four instruments answer four different questions, and most confusion comes from asking one of them something it does not measure.
- The HUD
- “What have I got?” — population, land, floor area, allowance used, road length, station count. Always on screen.
- City metrics
- “How complete is this place?” — the capacity bars per category, and the completeness score the nation actually reads.
- Transport demand
- “Where does the movement go?” — flows, mode split, trip times and the busiest origin–destination pairs.
- The city manager
- “Where is that thing, and what is wrong with it?” — every named object, searchable, with the unfinished and problem ones filterable.
None of this is compulsory. A city can be drawn entirely by eye; the instruments exist for when you want to know why the score is what it is.
The capacity bars
Part 1 established that every category has its own allowance. The city metrics page is where you see all of them at once, grouped into four blocks — functional development, public facilities, green space and civic, and transport facilities — each showing developed against cap.
Two details make the bars more useful than a simple progress reading:
- Expand a bar and it breaks into demand subtypes, so a full commercial allowance can be traced to which kind of commerce consumed it.
- Land-accounted categories are marked as such. Parks, plazas and water are measured by ground area rather than floor area, so their bar behaves differently: stacking shapes on top of each other adds nothing.
A bar sitting at zero is not necessarily a failure — it may be a category your city genuinely does not need yet. A bar at 100% is where the refusal message will meet you next.
The completeness score
One number on this page leaves the city. The composite is a weighted pair:
Facilities is the average satisfaction across the capacity categories — how much of the allowance the city has actually taken up. A city with a vast entitlement and three buildings scores badly here no matter how elegant those buildings are.
Transport is itself a product, and the shape of it matters:
Because these multiply, a superb street network laid across an empty city scores near zero — and so does a fully built city nobody can move around. Both halves have to be real.
What service quality measures
Service quality averages two components, and a third once the city is large enough to need it:
| Component | What scores full marks |
|---|---|
| Road access | Building zones with a drivable road within 80 m. Measured around each zone’s edge and weighted by its floor area, so a large tower with one frontage scores worse than a small block with three. |
| Commute time | An average passenger drive of 20 minutes or less scores full; it falls linearly to zero at 60 minutes. This is the channel through which congestion reaches your score. |
| Transit coverage | Residential floor area with a station or bus stop nearby. Only demanded once the metro passes 200,000 people — below that it is not counted at all. |
That population gate is deliberate and worth understanding. A small town is not penalized for having no metro. But the moment the metro crosses 200,000, absent transit coverage becomes a real zero in the average rather than a component that quietly disappears — so a growing city can see its transport score fall without anything having been demolished.
What built-up completion measures
Built-up completion is how much of the city’s core allowance is actually built. It is the half that rewards finishing a district rather than sketching six of them.
Together these two produce the number that, on leaving the city, becomes a small multiplier on its settlements’ development growth — up to +5%, rising to +10% and +15% with the Million City and Metropolis milestones, and decaying as the city outgrows the population it was measured at. That loop is described in Part 1.
Traffic, and how it reaches the score
The traffic overlay is a view toggle rather than a panel: switch it on and your streets recolour by saturation. Behind it, the city assigns four kinds of trip — commuting, business visits between places, trips to hubs, and freight — across the network you drew.
Two behaviours are worth knowing before you read the result:
- Trips shift off the road when transit serves them. A journey with stops at both ends moves onto public transport; one served at a single end shifts partially. Rail takes a trip when both ends sit within 800 m of connected stations.
- The assignment feeds the completeness score. Average trip time, the congested share and the proportion of unreachable pairs all come from this pass — which is why the commute-time component above only has a value once traffic has been computed.
So the overlay is not decoration. It is the mechanism that turns a badly shaped street network into a lower score, and a metro line into a visible drop in road load.
The transport demand board
Where the overlay shows pressure on links, the demand board shows the movement itself: passenger and freight flow, the split between modes, rail's share, the volumes in each trip class, average passenger and freight trip times, the congested share, and the percentage of pairs that cannot be reached at all.
Beneath the cards sits a ranked table of the busiest origin–destination pairs, with each pair's flow, class, vehicles per hour, minutes and distance — and clicking a row takes you to the origin. That table is the fastest route from “my commute time is bad” to “this pair is why”.
The unreachable percentage deserves particular attention: it counts demand with no path at all, which is a connectivity bug in your plan rather than a capacity shortage, and no amount of widening will move it.
The city manager
The manager is the city's index — every road, railway, transit line, bus route and station on one side; every place, entity, building and area on the other. It exists because a city quickly contains more named things than you can find by eye.
The two filters that earn their keep:
- Search across everything named, including groups and corridors, so a district you named six sessions ago is one query away.
- Show only problems and unfinished work. Roads with a broken connection, lines that do not join up, drafts never confirmed — the things that are quietly costing you score.
Selecting a row locates the object and opens it for editing, so the manager doubles as navigation.
The HUD and finding your way
The HUD keeps the totals in view: population and GDP inherited from the nation, developable land (with reclamation counted separately), total floor area, allowance used against cap, building count, green and water area, road length and station count. Expanded, it breaks road length down by class and stations by type.
Search covers every named object in the city, and doubles as a router: pick two points and it will plan on foot, by car, by public transport, or by the fastest mixture, showing each leg with its mode and time. Two failure messages are informative rather than annoying — “no connected path between the two points” means your network is broken there, and “no public transport reaches that way yet” means it is merely absent.
A reading order that works
- Start at the capacity bars. They tell you whether your next move is even permitted, and which development field to raise if it is not.
- Read the completeness split, not the total. Facilities and transport fail for completely different reasons; the composite hides which one is dragging.
- Run the traffic overlay before judging your streets. Until it has run, the commute component has no value and your transport score is incomplete.
- Take a bad commute time to the demand board. The pair table names the corridor; the overlay shows where it chokes.
- Sweep the manager's problem filter before leaving. Broken connections and forgotten drafts are the cheapest score you will ever recover.
Common misconceptions
“A bigger city scores better”
Every component is a ratio against your own allowance. Growth raises the allowance too, so an unfinished metropolis scores below a finished town.
“More roads will raise my transport score”
Road access is only one of two or three components, and it saturates at 80 m from a building. Beyond that, extra tarmac adds nothing while congestion and missing transit keep the other components down.
“My score dropped and I changed nothing”
Check the population. Crossing 200,000 adds transit coverage to the average as a hard zero if you have none — the city grew into a requirement it did not have before.
“The traffic overlay is just a visualisation”
It is the assignment that produces your commute time, congested share and unreachable proportion — three of the numbers behind the score the nation reads.
Continue the collection
Next: the zones themselves — what each kind carries, how footprint and floors become the floor area these bars measure, and who ends up occupying the buildings.