Didn't we just have another Cities Skylines expansion this spring or summer? Yep, we sure did. Mass Transit released only five months earlier (May 18th)! Heck, there was also another, tiny DLC pack released later in the summer as well. I didn't pick up the Concerts DLC. At $7 (more than half the price of a full DLC), I just didn't feel like it was a very good value if all it does is add the ability to make an outdoor concert venue. If the Concerts DLC had been a full-fledged expansion that focused on planning and managing city events, that might actually have been pretty cool. I actually would have been totally on board with a full expansion focused around building arenas, stadiums, convention centers, festival spaces, and so forth; then managing the traffic going into and out of them; and inviting concerts, sporting events, music festivals, trade shows, and maybe even political rallies or the Olympic games to your city. Unfortunately, the scope of Concerts is about the same as the Match Day DLC, which Colossal Order were kind enough to give away for free. Maybe I'll pick up Concerts if it goes on sale for $3 or $4.

Mass Transit, on the other hand, was a full expansion, and might very well have been the best expansion for Skylines to date. While the previous expansions were focused on adding additional flavor and customization to your city, Mass Transit actually took a stab at providing more utilitarian solutions to one of the most endemic problems that your burgeoning cities will inevitably face: traffic congestion. It was pretty successful at that mission.

Green Cities aims to solve any pollution problems your larger cities may be suffering from.

Green Cities tries to follow suit. Except instead of helping to solve your traffic woes, it offers new tools for addressing the second most significant and intractable problem your cities will ever have: pollution.

I never really had a problem with pollution to begin with

I'll admit that I never really had much of a problem with pollution in my Cities: Skylines cities to begin with. Thus, I haven't really found Green Cities to be as useful as it seems to think it should be. I usually only had a few blocks of default industry in my cities. I usually focus on lumber and farming once they become unlocked, and then go strictly with offices once those are unlocked. And even then, I rarely play a single city long enough to get it up into the millions of population. Maybe at that point, pollution is a critical issue, but for me air pollution has rarely been a problem.

Smaller cities can see some benefit from the inclusion of things like the recycling center, which is available as early as the first milestone. It can apparently replace landfills in very small cities and seems to have less of a ground pollution footprint. I'm a bit annoyed that it doesn't seem to have any visual indicator of how full the building is. It would have been nice to have animations of the building filling up with junk and processing it, but whatever. The "Recycling" policy is still its own thing (and is unlocked a couple milestones later), and I'll admit I'm not sure how (or if) the recycling center building and the recycling policy interact with one another. I guess the recycling center actually acts as garbage storage and converts some trash into consumable goods, whereas the policy only reduces the amount of garbage that the city generates. There's also an "Plastic Recycling" policy that simply improves the efficiency of the recycling center.

Recycling centers are available very early as a substitute for landfills.

Water pollution, on the other hand, is always a pretty big deal. Maps that have flowing water such as rivers are usually not a problem, but anytime I have to dump sewage into a lake (or even the ocean), it quickly becomes a cesspool. Up until now, there was virtually nothing that you could do about that...

Continuing my series of Civilization V strategies, the third installation will cover Gajah Mada and his Indonesian "spice islands".

Indonesia is an Oceanic island nation between the Indian and Pacific oceans, north of Australia. Archaeological evidence shows that the region was inhabited by Homo Erectus, and that its primitive human occupants developed relatively advanced maritime technology, allowing them to sail across the ocean between the various islands of the Australian region as early as 42,000 years ago. Its early inhabitants took advantage of the tropical conditions to create flourishing agricultural communities and became masters of wet-field rice cultivation, as well as becoming traders and fishermen.

Much of the history of Indonesia has been shaped by maritime trade. Hinduism and Buddhism arrived in Indonesia around the seventh century through trade with India, and the Indonesian people welcomed these faiths with open arms and dedicated numerous temples (called "Candi") to the gods these religions brought with them. Islamic influences began around the thirteenth century in trade missions from the Middle East, and large portions of regional populations converted to this new religion. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese explorers brought Christianity to the islands. For the most part, the various religions in Indonesia intermixed and co-existed in relative peace and harmony. Portuguese traders quickly monopolized the trade of Indonesia's native nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper. The Dutch arrived soon after and established their East India Company in the region and held tenuous control over the region until the Japanese occupation leading up to World War II. Following the war, bloody struggles for control of the nation resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, but democracy began to supersede authoritarian rule in the early 2000's. The Republic of Indonesia is currently the world's fourth most populous country, is the 16th largest economy in the world by GDP, and currently has dominion over 17,508 islands of the Indonesian archipelago.

Gajah Mada (the "Elephant General") was a mahapatih (or "prime minister") of the Majapahit Empire during the early fourteenth century who, according to myth, made a vow not to eat any spices until he had conquered all of the southeastern Asian archipelago and united it under the empire. Little is known of his early life, but he lead the empire to the height of its power during this time and presided over the arrival of the first Muslim traders. His legacy has made him a symbol of Indonesian national pride to this day.

Success as the Indonesian Empire in Civilization V is partially determined by the player's ability to develop an intercontinental "island" empire, which grants access to the valuable nutmeg, clove, and pepper spices that dominated trade with Colonial European powers. Indonesia is also uniquely positioned in Civilization V to benefit greatly from possessing followers of multiple religions in its cities.