Cities : Skylines

[SwiftCrack]

You mean Sim City 1.

 

[Makabb]

GTA 1: Skyline edition

 

[Keshik]

Am "working" from home today, so hooray for me.

 

[bonescraper]

From what I saw, there's no Entertainment need, so no building theaters, cinemas and such, which is sad. You can build a stadium, but it's more of an unique building that gives some bonuses.

Massive

 

[cw8]

Playing the game at the moment, a little disappointed by the lack of night cycles. Simcity 4's nighttime looks fantastic. For those starting the game, download the get rid of film grain mod. And then if you really hate depth of field and in-game blur, put the slider for "Tilt Shift" in options to minimum, presto the game looks a lot sharper.

First thing I played about with is the Asset Editor and true to their words, it's able to import custom 3D models for custom assets. I'm trying to bring the buildings I made for Simcity 4 into this game. Am currently working on this one atm. This local skyscraper I made for Simcity 4 in 2004 which is still on Simtropolis: http://community.simtropolis.com/files/file/3484-uob-plaza/

Of course since SC4 is a 2D game and it renders off the 3D model into 4 perspective bitmaps, we never had to worry about polygon count and texture size. We could stuff all manner of detail on buildings. I had to remodel everything for Cities Skylines to suit the low poly shit. Still working on it hence it looks like shit, I just took a simple texture and UV mapped. Will work on it in the coming days. Hopefully the textures work fine with the lighting. But at least I know custom assets are working fine.

I hope the Simcity 4 BAT community works on this game as well. We'll have tonnes of custom buildings in no time.

 

[Alienman]

So some issues after a all nighter... damn I'm tired now.

The simulation seems a bit off. I have around 12k citizens now and I already have high-rises. I thought I had to reach at least 100k pop for that... So yeah, downtown of a 12k city has high-rises. The traffic is still bugging me. There is so much traffic and I really don't understand where it all comes from. It seems most of the people travel by public means but still there it is. 12k city with New York City gridlocks. Most disappointing of all this is for me that the game cheats. When workers get stuck in traffic too long, they just simple warp / teleport. What in the shit? I rather just watch my city die from congestion than that the game saves me and fakes it.

Some other issues. I see dead people. People die in droves for some reason, I have around 4 graveyards, and two of the is filled up to the brink with corpses. I keep getting warned about smelly corpses in the high-rises and I can't really do anything about it. I'm expecting my own zombie-apocalypse soon enough.

Still fun though and better than Sim City.

 

[fanta]

I googled their DLC plans before buying because Paradox. The dev says:

All depends on how well the game goes, but we do plan on having pretty extensive post-release support. See CK2/EU4 as a reference

Extensive post-release support is one way to call what CK2 is doing. I'll postpone buying Cities for some time then.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

For those starting the game, download the get rid of film grain mod.

Yeha, film-grain looks so retarded, I have no idea why they implemented it (especially since you cannot turn it off without a mod).

 

[cw8]

For those starting the game, download the get rid of film grain mod.

Yeha, film-grain looks so retarded, I have no idea why they implemented it (especially since you cannot turn it off without a mod).

For those who care about achievements though, I personally don't, if you use the mod, it seems that achievements are disabled.

 

[Angthoron]

So, thanks to having a day off after a trip, I've been giving this an extensive try today, 6 hours already played, got an 18K city going.

Assorted thoughts so far, will probably write more on the topic later and possibly more comprehensibly, but so far:

* Pretty well made overall, the team understood what it was that made SimCity games fun to play
* Easy. You'll probably have money troubles for like the first 3 minutes of game time, after that, not so much, it'll mostly be about (gently) balancing various services (which is also pretty easy) and figuring out traffic rules
* Speaking of traffic, I think I'm getting the hang of it. The game really doesn't like lots of intersections close to one another. Like really doesn't like those. To be fair, that's realistic, I've been to cities that do that, and holy shit do you get gridlocks. So yeah, long streets, 2-3 lanes being best of course.
* Nice Street Upgrade system, though obviously you won't be upgrading from 1 lane to 3 with a mouseclick. Unless you're okay with the upgrade potentially demolishing buildings along the road.
* Power plants actually get physical fuel off the national grid. Had a fun moment when my gridlocked highway exit was so congested that I couldn't get oil delivered to the plant. Actually gave me a reason to look into road improvements.
* Metro is a cash machine. Drop a few stations and watch land value take a nice sharp rise and your income promptly double. Went from 6k/day to 12k/day in 5 minutes. Sound pollution seems negligible.
* Rather like the different way of having "needs" - if your areas aren't covered by healthcare, you'll see a lot more dead people, if dead people aren't being picked up, more disease will happen... It's all a neat vicious circle.
* Fortunately the game doesn't force a green mentality, which was something I was sorta worried about.
* AI is occasionally funny - if you destroy a road and place another nearby, the cars from the destroyed road actually drive onto the new road and continue.
* Some bugs seem to be present, I'm guessing some of them with income calculations; some bugs with road creation (minor but annoying), and possibly a bug with pop calculation, but it might actually be my own mess-up somewhere, so that's too early to speak of.
* Very smooth, I can't believe this is a Unity game, it runs a very stable FPS count and loads very quickly.
* Land region is fucking HUGE. You start out on a small plot, but almost immediately can buy more areas. And it makes it pretty fucking HUGE.
* Fuck unlock system, fortunately, it's one-shot and there's a mod to disable it.
* Farms look way better in Cities XL series
* Would like to see more graphs, statistics, feedbacks and alerts like "Your power plant capacity limit has been reached" rather than looking at the city and wondering if the water pump stopped because reasons or because I'm having a brown-out.

Overall, I'm enjoying it quite a lot. It's not flawless, and it's a bit on the easy side so far, but as a SimCity-like goes, this is certainly very good.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[SwiftCrack]

So is there anything known about the possible release of entertainment buildings or something like that in the future?

 

[Whiran]

So is there anything known about the possible release of entertainment buildings or something like that in the future?

There are entertainment buildings but all they do is bring in tourists.

Entertainment as a need doesn't exist at the moment but there seems to be an underlying framework in place to make it more prominent.

I wouldn't be surprised if a future expansion / DLC was about entertainment / leisure.

Overall, I'm enjoying the game. It was definitely worth the price.

 

[SwiftCrack]

Guess I'll wait a few weeks/months then. I've got a zillion games to go through anyway.

 

[Perkel]

Ok few thoughts after few hours:

Pros:
- UI is excellent
- graphic is nice (though i prefer SC4 graphic)
- awesome transporation tools
- awesome road tools
- seems to be huge

Cons:
- highway retardation on every map. I mean highways are suppose to connect cities. On almost every map there is ton of highways that don't make any sense. Starting town looks dumb as fuck because of it.

Overall. They delivered good SC4 spiritual sequel.

Gotta try to fiddle with terrain editor and make new map without highways retardation.

 

[oscar]

How the heck do buses work? I set up connecting loops but they never seem to get sent out.

 

[Turjan]

So is there anything known about the possible release of entertainment buildings or something like that in the future?

In principle, you would just have to port the buildings from CiM2. CiM2 erred in the other direction, as it built pretty much nothing but entertainment buildings in your zones.

 

[Turjan]

How the heck do buses work? I set up connecting loops but they never seem to get sent out.

You just plop down stops and make sure you have a loop that ends at the first one you plopped. If you have a depot somewhere nearby, buses will just start running. It's pretty neat actually. You can add, remove or move stops to a different location anytime you want. When I built a railway station, I just moved an existing stop from a parallel road to the station, and voilà, instant integration.

 

[Turjan]

So some issues after a all nighter... damn I'm tired now.

The simulation seems a bit off. I have around 12k citizens now and I already have high-rises. I thought I had to reach at least 100k pop for that... So yeah, downtown of a 12k city has high-rises. The traffic is still bugging me. There is so much traffic and I really don't understand where it all comes from. It seems most of the people travel by public means but still there it is. 12k city with New York City gridlocks.

I guess the "problem" is that the game doesn't fudge the numbers. You have this vastly accelerated time, and everyone is more or less traveling most of the time. It's a constant strain on the simulation.
I have a "city" of 25,000 inhabitants with one train line with five stops, one being just the connection to the "mainline" (I don't want to have that one in my city) and thus with little traffic. The line isn't even particlularly well built, as I more or less just built where I had space, so it bypasses "downtown". Train capacity is 240. Trains run non-stop, so when one leaves a station, the next one pulls in. It doesn't manage to deal with the amount of passengers.

Some random other stuff: I thought I would hate farms. Then again, they have their charm:

I had a double one-way road here (6 lanes in every direction), and it turned out to kill all traffic in the city center. I replaced those with two two-way roads, one of the elevated. Even if the elevated part is hardly used, this setup works much better.

This won't happen if your traffic becomes gridlocked:

 

[baturinsky]

I doubt people really need dedicated buildings to get entertainment now.
Or maybe entertainment function is spread between "commerce" and "leisure" category.

 

[Perkel]

2 hours later now i have my own fucking map without retarded highways:

 

[Makabb]

So should i play this or simcity 4 ?

 

[Perkel]

Play this. IT is worth it.
Either way you will have two amazing games to play B2B.
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Holy fuck. I just realized that game comes with mods already made by developers.

- Unlock all progression
- Infinite money
- Hard mode

Infinite money is shit but hard mode and unlock all progression seems awesome for people who like to play something more like SC4 though SC4 was easy as hell on hard.
I added to that unlock all 25 tiles and looks like i will be spending whole weekend doing stuff.

Also i think 1 000 000 limit is easily modable considering how 25 tiles were easy to pull off.

 

[Perkel]

Also i think when modders will get into that edit tool we will likely to see huuuge areas + even morethan 25 tiles.

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ok i fucking nailed it now :
My hand hurts from all that carving

 

[Dead Guy]

I think that traffic and city composition not resembling what you'd expect in real life for corresponding number of residents might annoy me a lot. Towns with 25000 inhabitants might have a few ~10 storey apartment buildings, but they sure as shit don't have congested roads and they'd be lucky to have commuter trains at all, much less having a train come in to the platform as soon as one's left, not even cities with a million people have that (though they do have congestion, obviously).

Sounds like they really need to reduce the fraction of residents that actually go to work, or adjust things better with regards to how long it takes for them to get to work in game versus how long it 'should' take in real life. It's great that it's a true simulation, but whether or not it reasonably matches what you'd expect in reality is a pretty big deal for me.