Cities Skylines - The Simcity we should've got

[DotCommunist]

do the bus workers unionise

 

[Crispy]

do the bus workers unionise

There are no labour relations or grassroots politics in the game at all AFAIK.
I'm sure there will be a mod for it down the road

 

[Vintage Paw]

I just bought this. I have little experience with city builders past a short horrific experience with a very old Sim City game. I expect to do terribly, but it looks very cool

 

[mauvais]

I'm quite enjoying this, with a few caveats - not necessarily the game's fault.

One is it's a bit slow to get moving - e.g. you have to build a load of landfills to deal with the trash, because the game keeps you from accessing incinerators until a later stage, despite having loads of money. So then you have to spend a while getting rid of the landfills again, which requires extra capacity.

Tunnels as well as bridges would make my life much easier. Apparently they'll be added.

So would a universal grid as I end up with an almost grid like system that after a while ends up on the piss.

I'm struggling to know what to do with the enormous highway that runs through the territory and will ultimately run through the middle of my city. It might need some regional level rerouting.

Building highway junctions is an enormous pain, if a kind of guilty pleasure as well.

 

[Citizen66]

On the video in the op it says things can go wrong very quickly. If someone dies and a hearse isn't available to collect the body, their home becomes derelict. This happens whether the home is a bungalow or a high rise. Then the home attracts criminals and can catch fire. The fire engine and cops have to fight with the hearses to get there quick enough. Apparently there is no way of knowing which houses have become derelict in the UI so either you have to spot it, which might prove tricky in a sprawling metropolis, or the first time you know there was a problem is when half a neighbourhood is on fire.

So don't cheap out on the road building and make sure there's plenty of cemeteries. Looking forward to buying this next week.

 

[mauvais]

I don't know about that, it seems like you can be fairly neglectful in one respect provided you don't have layers of it - so you can forget to build enough cemeteries as long as you have good fire coverage - but I don't know how it scales up.

 

[Crispy]

Derelict buildings get a little bubble hovering over them, so it's worth scanning over ever now and then and getting rid with the bulldozer.

Last night I obliterated several blocks of downtown in order to put a railway in. Felt good man

EDIT: In a way, this is one of the good things about the unlocking of the various options. If I'd had all the toys from the start, I'd have spent ages laying out everything just so, putting railways and metro and highways etc. in the "right" place. With the steady unlocks, I have to adjust my plans all the time, which makes it feel much more like organic growth.

 

[Citizen66]

That's one of the things that used to irk me about Sim City. Grow the city and get everything balanced nicely then have to start bulldozing because the infrastructure you laid when you were skint is no longer fit for purpose.

Although I guess that's closer to realism.

 

[lazythursday]

Oh I *really* want to play this. Can I possibly justify buying a whole new computer just for one game?

 

[Citizen66]

I believe you can.

 

[Crispy]

Oh I *really* want to play this. Can I possibly justify buying a whole new computer just for one game?

This is the traditional way of buying a new computer.

 

[mauvais]

I planned on upgrading my PC, but I bought more RAM and a GTX970 first, and now everything's so good that I can't justify buying anything more.

There's some good stuff on the CS Reddit, including this: http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkyli..._strange_tale_of_a_cities_skylines_town_with/

 

[lazythursday]

This is the traditional way of buying a new computer.

But it would be an *extra* computer rather than an upgrade as I have an cheap ultrabook for worky stuff... and that takes more complex justification logic. Possibly I should have an extra computer in case of emergencies or leaving laptop drunkenly on train etc.

 

[Crispy]

I planned on upgrading my PC, but I bought more RAM and a GTX970 first, and now everything's so good that I can't justify buying anything more.

There's some good stuff on the CS Reddit, including this: http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkyli..._strange_tale_of_a_cities_skylines_town_with/

And this, which just makes me feel inadequate

 

[Citizen66]

So how does this compare with Sim City 4, superior graphics aside?

 

[Crispy]

So how does this compare with Sim City 4, superior graphics aside?

I never got deep into SC4, but the big differences are:

No Regions - you build one city and that's it. Import/export is abstracted.
Less fine-grained control - in SC4 you could zoom in and set the budget for individual buildings. CS has one budget slider per service.

In general, it's a little simpler, but that's a good thing IMO. SC4 was intimidating in its complexity.

 

[Crispy]

From a simulation POV, they're very different. SimCity games up to SC4 used statistical methods to calculate the population, traffic etc. CS (and SC5) uses agents, so each citizen has a home, a job, a car etc. It makes problems and solutions feel much more real. When the queues at the bus stop are really long, you can actually pause the game, count the people and work out roughly how many extra bus routes you need to lay on.

 

[Citizen66]

I like that you can buy more land and keep building. It's also a third of the price of what I paid for CS5 (Deluxe).

 

[Crispy]

Yeah the buildable area is pretty big. The maximum is 10x10km, of which you can build in 9 2x2km squares of your choosing. But there's already a mod that allows you to unlock all 25 squares. By comparison, the largest single city you could build in SC4 was 4x4km.

 

[Crispy]

Downtown Crispyville, population 15,000

That train line goes to my new commuter town on the coast

 

[mauvais]

SC4 was pretty amazing for its time in terms of modelling, especially once you added all the hideous dependency web of mods like NAM. It was always somehow a bit hard to trust it though, when trying to solve particular problems, especially because of certain things being abstracted or bodged (regional population movement rings a bell I think).

I liked some SC5 things, to be honest. Industrial specialisms were cool - ore mines and chip fabs etc, as was detailed trade. In fact the modular block approach to buildings was good too, if maybe a bit novelty. Unfortunately there were so many other things wrong with it that it never added up - so again in terms of specialist cities, you were forced to do it by the constrained size, but it never meant anything as regional flows were totally fucked.

I hope CS evolves to take a few of those things in, but I'm happy enough as it is - it's its own game, after all.

 

[Vintage Paw]

Not having played city builders before, I ticked the unlimited money mod. My justification: let's start off nice and easy learning how laying water pipes etc works without having to worry about money, and go back and restart normally later.

Probably a good thing, because I really do have no idea what I'm doing. I think I'm ready to try again now though.

I played for a couple of hours last night. I got the first person mod, and a few LUT mods (which are great). I love the Old Time LUT, which makes it feel like I'm presiding over The Truman Show.

I got the dx11 bug where the screen flashes with overlayed info and generally just glitches out to the point of giving you a seizure. So I've had to force dx9, but apparently they're looking into it. But now steam overlay won't work. Not sure if that's related. But whatever.

I like it. I'm terrible at it. I like it.

 

[Vintage Paw]

Someone added dynamic resolution scaling so you can downsample (if you have the power) or upsample (if you don't and want to free up more performance) ON THE FLY OMG.

http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylinesModding/comments/2ys1lh/dynamic_resolution_proof_of_concept/

 

[Citizen66]

The main problem with using infinite money cheats, for me at least, is that I become bored with the game a lot quicker because I've already discovered all of the rewards etc without learning the game and aiming for them. It's like the diamond making machines on Minecraft and the lazer guns to take down the terrain. Where do you go from there? You can do everything too easily.

 

[Vintage Paw]

The main problem with using infinite money cheats, for me at least, is that I become bored with the game a lot quicker because I've already discovered all of the rewards etc without learning the game and aiming for them. It's like the diamond making machines on Minecraft and the lazer guns to take down the terrain. Where do you go from there? You can do everything too easily.

I can understand that. In a lot of games I've tended to go through a similar pattern - playing while only cheating a little (more money, or something); then playing again with ALL the cheats; then going back and playing again with no cheats at all and enjoying the process all the more for it. I suppose it lets me learn about the game and experience all it has to offer in terms of the rewards I can aim for, and then going back and enjoying a more 'pure' experience. I can see how it would ruin it for a lot of people though, there is that risk.

 

[Citizen66]

That does make some logical sense actually because people may also drop a game because the learning curve isn't giving them any fun. I'm a fan of Paradox grand strategies but I found Hearts of Iron III impenetrable.

 

[mauvais]

The thing with CS is it's quite easy to make money once the ball is rolling - I've accrued 3 million very easily with not that big a city,
which is enough to build major infrastructure.

If anything, though, that makes the unlimited money/space cheats make even more sense - you get the layout you want from the start rather than having an interim, organic mess that you have to demolish or reshape once you can afford it.

 

[Citizen66]

It's watching a hamlet grow into a metropolis organically vs a city planning simulator. Some want the latter and throttling funds from the outset prevents that.

 

[Citizen66]

But then having too much money shields you from the problems you've dug yourself into.

 

[J Ed]

*adds to list of games to buy when he gets a new computer/laptop...*