#sunset harbor

Decided to draw Sonic & Mario with my design philosophies

Golden Harbor at Dusk

The sun settles slowly into the horizon, turning the harbor into liquid gold.

Boats drift gently in the evening light, as the day exhales its final warmth.

There is something timeless about this moment — the quiet between departure and return.

Trolleybuses were added in the final Cities Skylines expansion, Sunset Harbor. They've been widely maligned by the community, and accused of being "reskinned trams". Newer players, on the other hand, seem to have more interest in them.

"Reskinned Trams"

I'm going to be honest; I was never that impressed with CSL's implementation of trams in the first place.

The default trams are utterly garbage, looking nothing like a real world tram or streetcar; which baffled me as Collossal Order are European, and thus are way more familiar with trams and LRVs than Americans. But this thing is just a box with a pantograph.

And the fact that the trams were added with the Snowfall expansion, which is by far my least favorite of the game's expansion packs, just compounded my issues with trams as a network.

Because here's the thing? Trams are the only reason anyone has Snowfall installed. It's an expansion that quickly loses its charm due to cities created in it being stuck in an eternal winter.

Its game mechanics and assets are largely gated behind the winter biome; leaving trams as basically the only thing that will be used by 90% of the player base, and that's being generous.

An Actually Useful Expansion

When I got Sunset Harbor, I came to the realization that... I do not need to have Snowfall installed anymore. Trolleybuses do the same thing as trams, and they're attached to an expansion that I actually use quite a lot in normal gameplay.

There isn't an aspect of SH I don't use. I use the fishing industry, I use the Aviation Club, I use intercity buses, and I use waste transfer. And yes, I use trolleybuses. Quite extensively, in fact.

And that's the key thing I realized. Trolleybuses aren't "reskinned' trams, they're a replacement for trams. They were implemented so that people could finally uninstall Snowfall and free up some RAM.

And the implementation is simply gorgeous. The vanilla trolleybuses, far from the fugly vanilla trams, actually look good, and actually feel inspired in their design. Like most SH vehicles they're based on a real world vehicle; the Solaris Trollino 12, a Polish trolleybus.

In terms of game mechanics trolleybus roads are also cheaper to construct and maintain than their tram equivilants.

Cons and Considerations

Are trolleybuses perfect? Well, no. Like Mass Transit's monorail network, there are a number of bizarre issues with CO's game design and implementation that kind of bug me.

In the real world, trolleybuses are cheaper to maintain than diesel buses or trams, actually being one of the most cost-effective public transport methods out there. In game, the buses are absurdly expensive to run, and without mods will never turn a profit.

There's also noise pollution. Trolleybuses put out as much noise as a regular bus, where in the real world the British nicknamed them "Whispering Death" due to being so quiet that they killed pedestrians.

One would think that trolleybuses would be silent like the electric cars added with Green Cities, being electric themselves; but that is simply not the case.

Finally, they have a mere capacity of 30, which is the same as a vanilla bus. It's simply way too low, as anyone who tries to use regular buses will attest.

I also expect that there was going to be more to the trolleybus network that was cut from the final release. The game files call it "trolleybusBRT", which tells me that they had probably intended to make it a higher capacity transit mode with dedicated roads and stuff, similar to a real world bus rapid transit system.

Addressing the Issues With Mods

I personally use Advanced Vehicle Options to change the capacity to something closer to a real world Solaris Trollino 12 (around 75 to 85), and I use Ticket Price Customizer to change the ticket to 120 or thereabouts. By default it's only 80, which is just outrageous.

With these small changes trolleybuses no longer have thousands of passengers waiting at stops, and they can turn a profit.

I also use TM:PE to improve traffic flow, and Extra Roads With Trolleybus #2.3 for the roads seen in my screenshots.

Me: *ends up uninstalling close to 20 assets that Sunset Harbor made obsolete, thus keeping RAM use in check*