Oddly enough I never played SimCity. Closest from those times for me were Ceasar III and Pharaoh (which I'm playing again now: there's a very good remake).
Cows don't roam free in Sri Lankan cities, either. You are aware that South Asia is a subcontinent and a whole set of islands, and not one singular city,right?
I have heard many Hindus consider the cow a holy animal and let them roam where they please. And there are many Hindus in Sri Lanka (though there are more buddhists who don't consider cows holy but are vegetarians).
And yes I know the region pretty well. I've lived more than half my life outside my home country (in 3 different ones). Though never been to Sri Lanka no.
Never seen a single cow on the road in Sri Lanka. Though I only visited the western half of the country from about the Colombo to Kandy line down to the very southernmost tip.
However, the other settings seem about right to conservative vs. reality. I literally just got out of the airport in a taxi and thought I was gonna die, so fast and close to an oncoming car was the taxi going. Probably about two atoms worth of "air" between their side mirror and the taxi's.
Traffic lights might as well not exist. Everyone was just going through the intersection at the same time. No elephants on the raods either but an army of Tuk Tuks. Actually preferable to car taxis. Never took one again. Bus travel was interesting as well.
Most Buddhists are not vegetarians. There's a huge gap between Wikipedia stats and real life, as it is the case everywhere.
Using "Knowing the region pretty well" to be confident about a country you've never set foot in is like me assuming alligators are roaming free in corn fields in Iowa because I've been to a few states in US and have seen Florida through youtube.
So because the number of active vehicles is much lower than reality, the road network is actually a lot more efficient: it’s a nearly 1:1 scale city with less than a fifth of the real vehicles that would take up the streets.
Mostly because of this, public transport in game is a lot better than our particular reality. In fact, the trains are completely underutilized - we can tweak transport modal share (and should) to get the numbers to balance better.
Yup. The 3D assets are from Steam workshop and impact visuals and population calculations (since pop calc is based on square footage). Otherwise, with Skylines' defaults, this would all look like the Netherlands.
They're funding us to do this and a few other things:
2) Create and publish maps of Sri Lanka, especially for journalists to use for environment and land use reporting, for 2017-2024, using Sentinel-2 data
3) Build and publish our wiki of 70+ crops that can be grown in Sri Lankan backyards
4) Build and publish our open-source DIY agricultural sensor kit
5) Design and publish our journalism and media literacy course for young journalists and the general public
In general, these folks (https://www.giz.de) are one of main european branches of NGO funding in the Global South. This is a very small project in their overall scheme of things - your tax money goes to a lot of places in the world.
