It’s not exactly controversial to suggest that Cities: Skylines has proven itself to be the more flexible and interesting replacement to SimCity in the city builder genre. While I haven’t played the game myself it’s been interesting watching it’s growth in popularity, especially in contrast to the dire fall from grace that is SimCity BuildIt. Testament to it’s flexibility and toolkit, then, is this amazing map shared by redditor sevtraz in which he has created a near perfect recreation of my home city Southampton.
Using a base map created earlier this year by Steam user Graham Simmons, a bunch of free downloadable items from the Steam workshop and I can only assume a boatload of satellite imagery (thanks Google) sevtraz has managed to make a near 1:1 replica of the town and the surrounding areas. While the game doesn’t really have the fidelity to mimic specific locales up close, I think we can all agree that the aerial shots of the city match up fantastically and sevtraz has done an amazing job at recreating the road map and structure of the city in general. The map itself can be downloaded and explored in game using the Steam workshop functionality, so if you have Cities: Skylines you can check it out for yourself with this link here. Yes, finally you can fulfill your dream of drowning it beneath the ocean. Here are some of the awesome shots sevtraz shared:
Here are some comparison sliders with Google Earth, which really show how accurate the map is. I think I can even pinpoint my flat on this one.
And the detail put into the pathways in the common is great:
A few more images can be found on the original post here, on the r/southampton subreddit. If you are from Southampton and a redditor yourself, you may even like to subscribe to it for more interesting posts about our city (and shitposting about the Daily Echo). Thanks again to sevtraz for doing such an awesome job and allowing me to share it here, and to Graham Simmons for creating such a detailed base map to build upon. Truly amazing work, guys.
Update: Apologies for anyone sent to the original map by the bad link. It’s now been changed!