[HN Gopher] Cities: Skylines II
___________________________________________________________________
Cities: Skylines II
Author : TechnicolorByte
Score : 235 points
Date : 2023-03-06 17:41 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (store.steampowered.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (store.steampowered.com)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Hugely excited to see what the game really looks like. If they
| could fix performance and add some new gameplay dynamics it'd be
| great but if they are going to make it something completely
| different I'd be excited to see it as well.
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| Not much info other than the fact that it'll release sometime
| this year on PS5, XSX, and PC. Teaser trailer is just a bunch of
| cinematics.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Yea. It's "cool" in concept but there is nothing information-
| wise about the game. Does it fix the problems of CS1? Does it
| introduce new features? I want to be excited about it, but
| there is nothing to be excited about. Getting excited about a
| single trailer will just lead to disappointment later.
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| It's annoying but it seems to be the way things are marketed
| these days to build up hype so I can't really fault them for
| it. Better to release info piecemeal as opposed to one big
| info dump if you want to build up a following.
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| If foreshadowing is one of their intention with the teaser, I'm
| afraid they'll push raytracing very hard. Their trailer had a
| lot of 'reflect in water', 'reflect in glass panes' moments.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Is the original good? Growing up playing SimCity 2000
| chimeracoder wrote:
| I loved the SimCity series, so you'd think that Cities: Skylines
| would have appealed to me, but it's always felt frustrating,
| which I attribute to a few core issues:
|
| - Agent-based simulation instead of model-based (the latter is
| what the Maxis games used). Agent-based simulation is
| performance-intensive, and in practice it led to all sorts of
| gamebreaking bugs. Last I checked, the game still caused traffic
| jams because every car would enter the turning lane immediately.
| It also causes the infamous death waves. Some of these are hard
| to fix without changing the core simulation model. Some of these
| would be trivial to patch, and it's kind of embarrassing that
| they haven't.
|
| - The DLC is essentially mandatory, in that they release updates
| to the free game alongside every DLC, and the free updates
| introduce _some_ of the features but not all, and they end up
| breaking the balance of the game unless you purchase the full
| DLC.
|
| - The game is far too easy, unrealistically so. Even on the
| harder difficulty setting, it's just way too easy to create a
| cash cow and create the optimal city without any real challenge.
|
| Cities:Skylines is good in sandbox mode, if you want to create
| beautiful-looking models of cities. Which is a valid use case and
| there's definitely a market for that. But for people who like the
| original SimCity games and enjoy simulations, it's... just not
| that. There's a reason that professional city planners used the
| original SimCity games as tools for study and development, and
| that's what made (for example) SimCity 4 Rush Hour so much fun to
| play.
|
| Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for
| Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are
| citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to
| substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that
| Cities:Skylines lacks.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for
| Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are
| citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to
| substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that
| Cities:Skylines lacks.
|
| You know, I never thought about the factory automation/colony
| simulator genres as being similar to the city builder genre,
| but... now that you brought it up, I think I see how said
| genres would appeal.
| richwater wrote:
| They never fixed the terrible traffic AI in the first game.
|
| I have no confidence in the sequel.
| knorker wrote:
| What has made me give up on Cities Skylines is that you can't
| build a liveable city. It forces you to build US-style car-
| centric dystopias.
|
| I found that once you reach a certain city size this game is just
| car traffic management.
| syntheweave wrote:
| You can definitely make the city less traffic-heavy, especially
| after the DLC. But even in vanilla, for the commute traffic
| it's mostly a matter of having enough pedestrian bridges and
| tunnels so that they have uninterrupted journeys, and for the
| trucks the trick is to place rail depots near industrial and
| commercial districts so that they never need to get to the
| highway. Do those two things and you've cleared out most of the
| problem.
|
| Everything else is taken care of by designating a faster
| arterial road at certain intervals(so that the driving AI's
| preferences are more predictable) and then designing a one-way
| flow in and out of areas with a lot of conflict points. It is
| not exactly how I want to envision my city, but it's also not
| extremely complicated to work out.
|
| The game really limits traffic reduction mostly through the
| city services, which all have to drive down the roads to
| provide services.
| brink wrote:
| There's a pedestrian focused expansion pack.
| pavlov wrote:
| Earlier today we had this HN story about how EA's greed
| essentially killed the SimCity franchise for good:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202
|
| In that context it's notable that the company behind Cities:
| Skylines, the most prominent SimCity replacement, was originally
| funded by the Finnish government as explained on their Wikipedia
| page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Order_(company)
|
| VCs wouldn't invest any money to build such a niche game, but
| Finnish national funding instruments for startups and arts were
| more willing to take risks.
|
| A small story to keep in mind next time someone claims everything
| successful can be created through capitalism alone. It also
| happens that successful things are destroyed by capitalism and
| salvaged by public means.
| xenon7 wrote:
| I have a feeling that this isn't going to be available on the
| Series S (or if it is, it'll be like CP2077 on the original
| PS4/XB1). Oh well.
| jeppester wrote:
| I don't think there's been any official communication from MS,
| but it seems well-established at this point that Xbox games are
| required to release both on Series X and S, and with feature
| parity - except for graphics modes.
| jalino23 wrote:
| its specifically said series s|x at the end of hte video
| xenon7 wrote:
| Yes, but I said "(or if it is, it'll be like CP2077 on the
| original PS4/XB1)". I simply can't see the game running very
| well on 10GB of RAM. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but that's
| just what I think.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I find it hilarious that EA had the concept down and just blew
| their opportunity with Simcity 2013 (always online (which by the
| way was actually not true, people cracked the online requirement
| within the first day or so), had to contract with other users for
| basic services like sewage and electricity), paving the way for
| competitors like Cities: Skylines to take the lead instead.
|
| This reminds me of the same thing that happened with Stardew
| Valley, the creator missed the old Harvest Moon games, didn't
| find a suitable substitute, and just build the entirety of the
| game from scratch, teaching himself art and music composition
| too. He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be
| the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1
| billion in the course of the game's existence.
|
| It just goes to show that the dominant players are not always
| dominant forever, and that common YC startup advice of
| understanding what exactly users want (hint: they don't want
| always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with
| microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always
| gacha/gambling-type whale gamers)) and serving them well is still
| correct.
| [deleted]
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Even if you got past the always online aspects, it just felt
| like a huge step down from Sim City 4. Too many opaque things
| going on, too much thrown at you, too high concept, didn't feel
| like building a model train set anymore.
| MikusR wrote:
| The only thing that was bypassed was forced disconnect after
| losing internet. You still could not save or trade between
| regions while offline. Server emulator appeared 4 months after
| release. Official offline mode was released a year after
| release.
| pavlov wrote:
| I posted this earlier [1] but it's an interesting little twist
| to this story...
|
| While EA was busy destroying the SimCity brand with
| unadulterated capitalist greed, Cities: Skylines was created
| with public funding from the Finnish government.
|
| No VCs wanted to invest in such a niche company. They were only
| able to get off the ground thanks to money from Finland's
| public startup funding and arts grants.
|
| Capitalism on its own isn't always enough to ensure that
| successful products get built. Sometimes it takes public
| funding to salvage a good idea that capitalism managed to burn
| down.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047255
| chris_va wrote:
| How are we defining capitalism here? Because, you know,
| people are still getting paid for the work they are doing.
| Laaas wrote:
| Turns out, building good _anything_ is profitable.
| nikanj wrote:
| But building user-hostile crap _anything_ is way more
| profitable
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, no, not really - the example of Simcity 2013 vs
| Cities: Skylines given above is a great example where the
| user-hostile crap was much less profitable than what EA
| could have gotten based on their brand if they would have
| just made a straightforward remake similar to Cities:
| Skylines.
| jahewson wrote:
| It's definitely not! Many good things cost more to build than
| people are willing to pay for them.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yeah, lots of good things aren't profitable (at least to
| the ones making them). Xerox PARC comes to mind, Xerox
| didn't want to capitalize on those good things that were
| made there and thus Gates and Jobs did instead.
| fulltimeloser wrote:
| Xerox wanted to capitalize, but their business model,
| target customer and price point was not as innovative as
| the technology they had to offer.
| dysoco wrote:
| Wonder why a "The Sims" competitor hasn't appeared yet, would
| the lack of branding and general "charm" of The Sims(like
| Simlish) be a dealbreaker?
| MoSattler wrote:
| They actually announced one:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNhV-Gnjdy8
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Life By You seems to be that, which was also announced.
|
| Another one is called Paralives:
| https://www.polygon.com/23433566/sims-5-project-rene-
| paraliv...
| theshrike79 wrote:
| The brand is too strong with The Sims. It has multiple
| generations of fans who started with the original and are
| still playing the latest game.
| _mitterpach wrote:
| That was actually one of the announcements made! Seems to be
| a Sims clone, in the early stages of development. I'm
| honestly looking forwards to it, rather than spending 1,000$
| on Sims 4 on Steam.
| colechristensen wrote:
| "EA" didn't have the concept down, Maxis did. They bought out
| something and ruined it, par for the course for acquisitions.
|
| Isn't it great when founders get a pay day but does that kind
| of thing really benefit everybody else? Just in general it
| doesn't seem that allowing most mergers is a particularly good
| thing for the American public, benefiting mostly just very
| large corporations who get to offload risk on to startups and
| their investors and reward only a lucky few (though skill is
| important, who succeeds and gets a good exit has a lot to do
| with luck)
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > It just goes to show that
|
| unlikely stuff does happen but not as much as likely stuff.
| Generalising from anecdotes and cherry picking data remains ill
| advised.
| swarnie wrote:
| Simcity 2013 was the first time i asked for a game to be
| refunded. After that was rejected it became the first time and
| maybe only time i've used a credit card charge back.
|
| I know "boycotts" don't work in the gaming industry but i can
| honestly say i haven't bought an EA product since.
|
| That has been slightly easier by them only churning out yearly
| sporting games filled with micro transactions mind.
| aflag wrote:
| I feel like most of these city building games is that they feel
| like a doll house. You can create all the nice things you want
| and have a pretty city that you'd like to live in.
|
| However, the cities themselves don't have much of a personality.
| It's barely a simulation. I'd like to see certain areas becoming
| rough sort of ghettos. People in the city having different
| backgrounds. Just creating a school in those places would not
| necessarily improve things.
|
| I'd like to see economic effects happening and causing disruption
| in the city. Big companies coming and going and affecting daily
| life.
|
| I'd also like to see rich regions forming. Cool places that
| everyone wants to go.
|
| Essentially, I'd like to have less control and see things not
| working out exactly like I planned. Everything always goes
| exactly to plan.
| foobarian wrote:
| Imagine the individual people in the simulated cities were run
| on a ChatGPT-like backend, and remembered everything. Held
| grudges for destroying their neighborhood. And therefore self-
| organized into gangs, etc.
| sefrost wrote:
| Have you played Tropico?
| standardUser wrote:
| I completely agree, and it's true more for Skylines than the
| old SimCity games. The "simulation" aspect is lacking in
| respect to developing different kinds of neighborhoods. I spent
| a lot of time in Skylines modding and creating custom
| neighborhood sets that could emulate various levels of density
| or socio-economic status. But that's the doll house approach,
| it doesn't emerge from the simulation. At least in SimCity 4k
| you could create distinctly rich and poor neighborhoods and the
| factors that led to those neighborhood types were reasonably
| well-simulated.
| zokier wrote:
| I think one problem with many city builders is how they don't
| really have proper sense of time. Houses you plop down now are
| exactly the same as you did 50 in-game years ago, and even
| megaprojects usually complete in trivial amounts of in-game
| time. Combine this with the player having near god-like powers
| to build whatever and eventually raze down and reshape any
| parts, and it leaves cities very hollow
| toasteros wrote:
| I have a hard time with freeform city builders like Skylines or
| SimCity. The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why
| I'm even playing. I have the same issue with The Sims or
| something like Planet Zoo.
|
| That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does
| one plan a city? Where do the roads go?
|
| It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so
| overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and I'm not sure what
| to do.
|
| On the other hand, games like Tropico (at least the later titles
| - 3, 4, 5, 6) having a "story" to play through help a bit because
| there is direction in what to build and where. Conversely,
| though, cities I build in Tropico end up being haphazard patch
| jobs where I find an empty space and put a dozen wind turbines in
| it because that's what the mission calls for, and so I miss out
| on some of the potential satisfaction.
| deanCommie wrote:
| > That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How
| does one plan a city? Where do the roads go?
|
| The base game isn't quite this much of a blank canvas. You have
| a budget, and you have city needs. You try to fit the needs
| within your budget, while trying to expand and grow with what
| the immediate geography allows you to do.
|
| You almost never (unless you're an advanced player who knows
| how to scam a bunch of money) have money to waste to treat
| central planning as a blank canvas.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think it correlates to how much uninterrupted blocks of free
| time you have. My almost middle school son loves it, but he has
| much more free time than I do (maybe because he hasn't
| discovered HN yet!). In my free time, I want to have a specific
| end goal or victory condition.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Nah, there are countless roads to different game style
| preferences. Sandbox games without constraints can be a nice
| escape from a life that feels especially regimented, even if
| you only get to play in them here and there; or they can just
| be a fun game style that you ran into at the right and that
| stays interesting through nostalgia and accessible through
| familiarity; etc.
|
| Conversely, goal-oriented games can just feel like "work" to
| someone who feels like their life involves a countless
| measurements and expectations, or just like intellectual
| labor to someone who is learning all the time; etc
|
| As they say, it's really very hard to account for taste. It's
| usually not worth trying to analyze it for anyone but
| yourself (and only then if it helps you to do so).
| legitster wrote:
| I similarly get bored of Skylines as soon as the game starts
| handing you near-infinite money. Making something aesthetically
| pleasing is only so interesting to me - I want the challenge of
| constraints.
|
| I actually have a similar problem with the Tropico remakes.
| Tropico 1 was _hard_. You could not survive a mission without
| dipping into the dictator toolsets. So striking a constant
| balance between economics and human rights was an interesting
| challenge. (It also made for a much more biting satire). The
| games since 3 are still pleasant city-builders in their own
| rights, but make it a bit too easy to win on the straight and
| narrow.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You could use a game trainer to limit how much money you
| receive. I usually do the opposite since I hate grinding in a
| game for virtual money or points, feels like a waste of time
| for me as compared to working on something cool in the real
| world.
| namaria wrote:
| Same decay happened in Civilization. Civ4 was a great
| challenge in terms of making choices and fighting off a
| somewhat competent (at least enough to make you take it into
| account) AI. Civ6 seems to be more of a design game after you
| get past the initial hump a getting some early infrastructure
| together without going bankrupt or conquered.
| schott12521 wrote:
| I think a lot of people compare playing the game to the hobby
| of model trains / town building.
|
| There really isn't an end goal for me, I'm not trying to make
| my city a certain size. I'm trying to make something beautiful,
| that is fun to imagine living in.
|
| I also think mods are essential if this is the way you want to
| play, as it's much easier to get nit-picky and detail oriented
| with the correct tools.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I
| 'm even playing._
|
| After a while, grownups lose what to do with a plastic bucket
| and shovel at the beach.
| Felminor wrote:
| Never heard that
|
| Good reminder
| samtp wrote:
| > The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm
| even playing.
|
| Well I hope you don't have the same feeling about life. Because
| we are all free to choose our own adventure (with some choices
| obviously better than others), and there are no clear
| objectives or goals besides what you set for yourself.
| byteware wrote:
| yes, but then why not just do life instead?
| swatcoder wrote:
| For me, a lot of game choice comes down to: I build/plan/learn
| things all day. Sometimes I want to do that in a game, but
| often I'm looking for something that doesn't feel like that --
| either because its a game style that taps into a very different
| kind of experience or because its one that I internalized so
| long ago that engagement feels pretty chill.
|
| Learning a new sandbox's toolbox of system parts and laying out
| clever designs while I stare at a screen can read _a lot_ like
| what I do with most of my weekdays, but without the return in
| pay or reputation.
| gdprrrr wrote:
| Do you know that Cities Skylines introduces the services after
| you reach certain population milestones? It starts with just
| Power and Water. https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Milestones
| [deleted]
| brnt wrote:
| The 'pointlessness' is what attracts me. I dislike playing
| according to other peoples goals, achievements, rules. I'll
| make up my own, thank you very much. And I will change my mind
| whenever I feel like it.
|
| How does one plan a city indeed! Why would you want the answer?
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| The trick is to start small, like a country town with farms and
| a small downtown. Build from there.
|
| There's also the flip side which is just sandbox building a
| city to your specifications and ignoring the city building
| aspects of it. Almost like building a model of a city.
| guidedlight wrote:
| This is the sentiment that caused Sid Meyer to create
| Civilization.
|
| That game is Simcity with objectives.
| dragontamer wrote:
| There's two separate subgenres, and that's fine. Because its
| just a different game in general despite both being simulators.
|
| If you like Tropico, then you probably should give TwoPoint
| Hospital a try, as well as Ceasar 3, Cleopatra, and a few other
| games of the more "agent simulation" nature... with actual
| goals and challenges to defeat and win.
|
| Sim City / Cities Skylines is less about gaming and more about
| play. There is no winning or losing in these games... I mean
| nominally, if you run out of money I guess you lose. But the
| games are setup so that you don't really run out of money under
| typical circumstances.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Two Point Hospital is really a fantastic game. I'm curious
| how Two Point Campus is, I am not sure if I'm as interested
| in that one.
| daveyjonezz wrote:
| I'm glad to see colossal order and paradox are behind the sequel.
| brianbreslin wrote:
| Would love to play this on my m2 mac, but i'm assuming its
| windows or console only? Or do we think this would be available
| on Apple devices?
| kickout wrote:
| Same, don't know though
| rsynnott wrote:
| The original's available on Mac (and Linux, I think).
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| Was available on Linux, yes. Performed much worse though,
| AFAIK.
| altairprime wrote:
| One random post on the Internet suggests that C:S1 was doing
| 45fps @ 4K on an M1 two years ago, so presumably the C:S2
| sequel will do fine on M2.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jw3e1c/game_benc...
| tarentel wrote:
| The first game you could play on mac. That doesn't mean this
| one will be but who knows.
| trefoiled wrote:
| Most Paradox game are available on Mac, strong possibility CS2
| will be too
| cwkoss wrote:
| Anyone able to read between the lines and see what features will
| be coming?
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| The game will have seasons and probably improved graphics as it
| is based on the Unreal 5 Engine instead of Unity.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Finally, ray-traced cities! I jest, but the Matrix demo on
| UE5 looked amazingly realistic.
| i-am-gizm0 wrote:
| The only thing I got from the trailer would be ray-traced
| graphics and the description suggests that actions have more
| consequences which I read as bulldozing peoples houses makes
| people really mad at you and things like that
| cwkoss wrote:
| Would be super cool if citizens had stories and lives, more
| like dwarf fortress dwarves.
| andrewfong wrote:
| I hope they get perf down. The first game runs great on my M1
| until we get to around 100K residents or so. That's not a huge
| number of people for a real world city, but I guess simulating
| traffic + pathfinding for 100K+ actors is a dicey proposition
| CPU-wise.
|
| IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by
| chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only
| simulating a subset of your population. Which honestly seems
| acceptable to me.
| mlsu wrote:
| Someone came over and asked what I was using the PC in the
| living room for. I told him -- it's the Cities Skylines
| Mainframe!
|
| If you have a spare desktop lying around, it really helps to do
| the simulation "in the cloud."
| brnt wrote:
| SC4 doesn't simulate residents at all, merely statistics. Even
| a single SC4 map is as large as one in CS, regions can be much,
| much bigger.
| quic5 wrote:
| Having spent countless hours in Cities: Skylines I'm a bit
| worried that I haven't spotted a single form of public transport
| nor more bike infrastructure than a painted bike lane. I hope we
| won't have to wait for countless DLCs to add more interesting
| modes of transport that just cars
| haunter wrote:
| One of my favorite mod in Skylines that you can import _real
| world_ terrain maps into the game. Building your own city but
| better is a good fun (and challenge!) https://terrain.party/ Hope
| this will work in the sequel too
| user764743 wrote:
| this doesn't work anymore and is no longer maintained.
|
| Use this instead: https://heightmap.skydark.pl/#
| [deleted]
| yknx4 wrote:
| Thank you. You've just killed my weekly productivity at work
| hahaha
| therein wrote:
| Very nice, I didn't know this existed. Will give it a try.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I spent so many hours hunting for cool bits of real world
| terrain and then massaging them into playable scenarios for
| myself (it's a lot of work to smooth out artifacts in the data
| and then add functioning water, vegetation, initial road
| connections, etc.). I don't know what the licensing concerns
| for the elevation data and maps would be, but I hope they
| consider integrating this functionality directly into the game
| in the future.
| dwringer wrote:
| You can get heightmaps from NASA's SRTM data without any
| licensing concerns at all, and they can be used in Cities
| Skylines (without mods) without any problem (provided you put
| the heightmap into the right file format). This was pretty
| much always possible, it's just been a lot of steps and sort
| of a hassle without projects like that facilitating the
| process for people.
|
| It would be incredible to have a globe viewer/DEM download
| tool built in to the game, but the bandwith required for
| hosting the project might turn into an issue (I'm reminded of
| the situation with high res imagery for Command: Modern
| Operations/TacView, where users are strongly encouraged to
| download only what they need due to server constraints).
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| I hope they don't go again with a car-centric idea of city
| building, but seeing the steam page screenshots I'm preparing for
| disappointment.
| andbberger wrote:
| there are no trains or buses in the trailer
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| You can see a bus at 1:27 and 1:52, but I really hope that
| the public transport system is better than what they showed
| in this first trailer, especially trains.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| I wonder if this will still use Unity
| dphassler wrote:
| City Planner Plays believes it is built on Unreal Engine:
| https://youtu.be/r9XHvsm9OVE
| tomalaci wrote:
| IMPORTANT: the trailer and the screenshots are not actual
| gameplay. There is essentially nothing of the gameplay. At best
| you could say it is concept being shown but... I mean, what more
| of a concept can you do than just making better iteration of the
| first game?
|
| Some people have also said they switched to Unreal Engine 5 but I
| have a hard time finding definitive source of that. It would be a
| major change since the original was made in Unity.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'll be so excited if this allows multiplayer city building.
| Imagine the possibilities...
|
| First of all, you get to collaborate and build things faster. You
| could have a voting mechanic where the citizens (AI) resolves
| conflicts. You could assign roles to subordinate players to
| manage things like traffic, services, new developments, etc. You
| could implement trade across city lines, and have acquisitions.
| It could easily turn into a MMO of epic proportions; with whole
| worlds built out.
|
| So. Many. Things!
| jeffbee wrote:
| And the other players could show up at city council
| subcommittee hearings to denounce your mouse clicks as the
| insidious, carceral hand of Big Developer, sucking the
| character right out of the neighborhood.
| dingusdew wrote:
| [dead]
| myself248 wrote:
| Yeessssss, enabling NIMBY mode would make the game so much
| harder.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| There is a mod for that but it doesn't work terribly well.
| paco3346 wrote:
| I feel like it works well but supports so few mods that it's
| limiting.
| madduci wrote:
| I hope this time the game can really take advantage of multi core
| computing, the first one was bounded to a single core: a long as
| a city has more than 5/10k citizens, it starts lagging
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I hope we can have more European style zoning.
| braingenious wrote:
| Cool!
|
| I hope somebody makes a Streets of SimCity-style
| exploration/battle game from this.
|
| That game was so much fun!
| toshredsyousay wrote:
| One thing that annoys me about the first game is the way the
| commute times are not factored in at all to happiness or
| whatever. People literally go from one side of the map to the
| other for work and you aren't punished for terrible transit
| design (and cars magically disappear). I think the AI is too
| crappy for commute times to be a feature, but I hope they improve
| AI and add it for the sequel because it is just one of the most
| important aspects of city design.
| linkdd wrote:
| > and cars magically disappear
|
| Not with the Traffic President mod which allows you to disable
| cars despawning and adds to the challenge of building a good
| transit system.
| wnevets wrote:
| I'm really hoping they don't botch this release like some of
| their DLC. Most of the DLC released have pretty bad ratings on
| Steam.
| Macha wrote:
| Some of the later DLC have been pretty half hearted yet at the
| same time they've hired modders for some of the more popular
| mods (like traffic manager) who've said they weren't working on
| DLC, so this has been in the works for a while
| dcchambers wrote:
| I have put many hours into Cities Skylines and I am really
| looking forward to this. The obvious thing people will want them
| to fix is traffic and vehicle pathfinding, put personally I hope
| they let us build more pedestrian-focused streets. I so
| desperately want to build walk and bike friendly cities with
| beautiful pedestrian malls and walking-only streets but the game
| kind of forces you to build out extensive car infrastructure. I
| also hope they offer a way to do true mixed-use building instead
| of being forced to choose
| residential/commercial/industrial/office.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I too have put lots of time and energy into this and many other
| city building games.
|
| Agree on everything you say, but I do wonder to what extent the
| bad traffic and all those limitations are an inherent statement
| that these games carry by design. A statement on how we think
| urban design should work blah blah.
|
| SimCity 2000 certainly had a sharper, more pointed set of
| things to say that presumably originated with Will Wright.
| Skylines obviously can't be too political about it, they just
| have to keep it mild to sell.
|
| I do remember this guy making a great series of videos
| explaining a lot about how cities were/are made while playing
| through a modded copy of Skylines. Highly recommend here:
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy...
|
| I can imagine what you're wanting for will probably be
| delivered with a variety of mods and community content. Or as
| DLC?
| samtp wrote:
| How is using your legs in an urban area political?
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| How that urban area came to be is highly political. How it
| evolves is as well.
| izacus wrote:
| I also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities
| that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse.
|
| Hopefully we also get a bit more diversity of gameplay -
| Skylines got pretty repetitive quickly with only challenge
| being traffic optimization. The new DLCs didn't really add that
| much to gameplay except different things to paint between
| roads. I hope things like universities, industry, agriculture,
| airports, etc. become a an actual challenge to build, fund and
| retain - maybe pull in some things from the Anno series to make
| it happen.
| ajkjk wrote:
| The game desperately needs a 'campaign', similar to (but
| hopefully richer than) what the Roller Coaster Tycoon series
| had, just to give some structure to repeated gameplay.
| leeter wrote:
| I'm curious how much they'll pull over from the existing
| DLCs, the Plazas and Promenades pack does allow for
| pedestrian cities. But not in a European sense despite the
| dev being in Europe.
| izacus wrote:
| We could even begin with a concept of mixed zoning that's
| so standard in many world cities. The usual "stores on the
| street, apartments above" design.
|
| (I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities
| the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation
| between commercial and residental areas).
| syntheweave wrote:
| The limits of every simulation game come into play where
| they start to "cartoon" how the world actually works,
| which has always been the case with city builders in the
| Simcity mold. The approaches to traffic, crime, pollution
| etc all act in a way to give an impression of the real
| world while not really going deep into the subject and
| making the solutions be a bit lock-and-key, fitting our
| existing norms rather than presenting an emergent
| problem: a lot of times it comes down to building
| "expensive structure X" to solve your city's issues. The
| original Simcity is ultimately broken, speedrunner style,
| by reaching into the guts of the sim to realize that
| every zone just needs a token road or rail by it, not a
| connection, and therefore can be approached with a
| nonsensical pattern of disconnected structures.
|
| I think Skylines did a good job of modelling complex
| traffic, but when I came back to it a month or two ago, I
| was disappointed by how much it felt like I was steered
| towards creating a "city of the past" and not engaging
| with any new technological or economic developments.
| Like, you can build an Amsterdam-like bike city in
| Skylines, with the appropriate DLC, but it's not modelled
| in a fine-grained way and just feels like you have
| magicked away commuter traffic by dumping bike lanes
| everywhere.
|
| In the end, if I want to plan a city of the future, I
| should probably go back to drawing on graph paper like
| when I was 8 years old.
| izacus wrote:
| Well, I personally think that these sandbox games need a
| bit of suspension of disbelief and roleplay to be truly
| fun.
|
| If you optimize the fun of the game by breaking it (and
| that's usually rather easy), you'll just... not have fun
| with it. This is why I personally prefer to avoid using
| broken strategies and set my own fun challenges to build
| themed cities.
|
| Which is why I kinda wish there was more variety in
| Skylines - besides Vancouver, I also want to make messy
| cities like Shenzen or Bangkok, or London and maybe deal
| with local limits and idiosyncrasies.
| em-bee wrote:
| but that's the issue. most sims are designed after
| american cities
| PeterisP wrote:
| Not only many world cities, but also at least some parts
| of iconic USA cities like New York City Manhattan,
| downtown Chicago, etc.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| This was standard in US cities in the early 20th century
| (prior to 1920) before the value of the real estate (and
| taxes) and automobiles changed the model. Mixed use may
| be coming back-California recently passed a state law
| allowing for it, I believe . Here is one article on the
| topic of mixed-use:
|
| https://www.secfin.com/private-money-blog/2021/12/15/the-
| ris...
|
| And if you haven't read anything by Jane Jacobs, it's
| worthwhile checking out her books written (1950-1960)
| about the importance of city neighborhoods from the
| perspective of NYC urban dwellers.
| acchow wrote:
| > I also hope that they'll let us build more "european"
| cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more
| diverse.
|
| Yeah, I wanted to start Skylines but found that it all begins
| with a highway...
| doctor_eval wrote:
| It's true that every building needs to be on a street but
| it is nevertheless possible to build substantial pedestrian
| architecture. I've spent many happy hours building
| pedestrian infrastructure and encouraging my peeps to walk
| and catch the subway.
| lamontcg wrote:
| And if you don't want your cities to die from traffic
| congestion you need to make it all walkable with good
| public transportation.
|
| I can get much further through the middle game by
| focusing from the start on not building all kinds of
| roads. I used to run a big highway down the middle of my
| city thinking that was the right way to do it, but you're
| vastly better off not doing that, because if you build
| that road, they'll overuse it.
|
| The sims will walk a pretty unreasonably long way as
| well, I've built ped overpasses that were packed, while
| having nice and quiet roads.
|
| CityPlannerPlays is a good youtuber to learn how to build
| cities that aren't terrible, and aren't overly cheesing
| the game mechanics:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@CityPlannerPlays
| iso1631 wrote:
| Be good if the cost of car parking was accounted for. Want to
| have cars? You've got to have large parking lots cluttering
| your space with low appeal, or your buildings cost far more to
| build / lower density etc
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are cars parked on sidewalks at 6 different points in the
| trailer so I assume it still sucks. They should rename it
| "Shitty American Cities, or Maybe Vancouver: Again".
| nzgrover wrote:
| Traffic. Traffic, Traffic, Traffic. Please.
| YesBox wrote:
| Well crap, I'm going to have some serious competition :D
|
| I've been developing a city builder myself over the last year
| (Metropolis 1998). I wanted to do a 3D version sometime in the
| future, but alas. Maybe people will be tired of purchasing $15
| DLCs on top of a shallow base game (probably not).
|
| Time to get to work
| KronisLV wrote:
| Looked it up, here's a clickable Steam link:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
|
| The graphics remind me a little bit of the ones in OpenTTD (an
| open source transportation tycoon game), the top down view also
| looks interesting, since most games just stick to one
| perspective. Oh, maybe the style is a little bit like the
| Simutans game (another transportation tycoon), but that depends
| on the graphics package.
|
| I don't think that anyone has quite done city builders where
| you can look inside of buildings, so that sounds pretty unique
| - good luck with your project. I'm pretty sure that the genre
| is big enough for Cities: Skylines II, niche games like Urbek
| City Builder (voxel based city builder where building placement
| matters, almost like a puzzle) and plenty of other games out
| there, so don't feel _too_ discouraged.
| zamadatix wrote:
| As long as the shallow base game still has more gameplay hours
| than most games I don't think people mind additional (also
| needing to be worthwhile) content costing money. That's
| Paradox's general business model and I think it works great for
| the types of games. I think I have nearly all of the optional
| content for Cities Skylines now but dollars per hour I'm still
| doing better than when it launched and when it launched the
| dollars per hour was still significantly lower than traditional
| games.
|
| Looking at Metropolis 1998 my feedback would be I'm excited for
| the concept of a modern take on retro builders but I'm worried
| the gameplay will end up more "2D grid traffic simulator" than
| city builder. "Traffic simulator" can be a key layer for city
| builder die-hards but I'm hesitant that a 2D grid approach
| would be more interesting than base CS1, particularly with a
| free mod that simulates traffic more realistically (albeit not
| as performant what you can do with the traffic and road designs
| in 3D freeform is also much more interesting). I'll keep an eye
| on it though, it may be something I pick up in the future as it
| materializes :).
| YesBox wrote:
| Thanks! I agree with your feedback. I intend to have
| different options to mitigate the traffic if people don't
| want to manage it. My biggest inspiration for the game is
| actually roller coaster tycoon. I want to offer to the player
| the option to sit back and enjoy what they built (from
| scratch if they want!), and then switch back to managing and
| building their city, much like a theme park.
| em-bee wrote:
| i like that idea. i would enjoy watching what i built.
| taking this as a springboard for a feature discussion: many
| sim games suffer from needing to build american style car
| centric cities. how is your approach here? could we build
| historical european cities? futuristic car-free ones?
| public transport like trams? separate bike paths?
| YesBox wrote:
| I'd love to fulfill all of those options, and I plan to,
| but I dont think I will have them all available in the
| first release build. I'm the only developer working on
| the game, and the only other person I work with is the
| pixel artist.
|
| So expect cars and sidewalks. Pedestrian-only walk ways
| should be possible in the first release.
| em-bee wrote:
| i am obviously not expecting miracles here, more
| wondering in which direction you want to go, and if those
| ideas fit your goals.
|
| found it on Steam. added to my wishlist. will also check
| out early access...
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Also if you're willing to wait about 6 months for any DLC,
| you can pick it up for a couple dollars. I don't think I've
| paid more than $5 for any of Cities Skyline's major DLC.
| morsch wrote:
| I wouldn't be worried, the market for modern city builders is
| large enough to support a few of them, assuming they're
| distinctive enough. I'm kind of shocked nobody made an attempt
| to displace C:S in the last couple of years. Meanwhile we have
| hundreds of variants of The Settlers and Caesar.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| Yes. I'd rather buy an indie game with SOVL and pixel art than
| a big production. Just seeing the photorealistic images on the
| steam page is a turn-off. I'll take a game looking like SimCity
| 2000 or 3000 over that.
|
| Btw I'm also working on my own indie game, it's quite
| challenging but I'm happy with progress I'm making by being
| consistent on it.
| ozarker wrote:
| Your game looks really neat! Wishlisted it. Can I ask what sort
| of tech stack you're building it on?
| YesBox wrote:
| Awesome, thank you! I'm using C++ (custom engine) and SFML
| (graphics framework)
| branko_d wrote:
| Dunno... After spending many hours in Cities in Motion, and even
| more in Cities in Motion 2, Cities: Skylines just didn't click
| for me somehow. It was kind of barren, with awkward road building
| (compared to CIM2), and just kind of restricting in a hard-to-
| define way.
|
| Perhaps the DLCs have improved the situation, but I lost interest
| by then. Hope CS2 will be better!
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| I'm looking forward to another soulless paradox game where the
| core mechanics are really stupid e.g all people who move in are
| born at the same time and will die at the same time so 90% of
| your city will instantly die in a year
|
| And then they'll want PS400 from you for DLCs while still not
| adding to any of the core mechanics
| dzogchen wrote:
| And don't forget you can only build car-dependent cities, not
| the kind of cities you will find in Europe or Japan.
| graypegg wrote:
| You don't have to buy it if you don't want to.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| What a missed opportunity. Nothing futuristic, nothing good. Same
| old, same old. Car-centric cities.
|
| I'm sure the game will be great. But I would have loved something
| more revolutionary.
| geraltofrivia wrote:
| Right? Like mixed-use housing Or even pedestrian only streets !
| Who can imagine!
|
| For a Finnish studio, I would have hoped Colossal Order focused
| a bit less on American cities, American urbanism.
| nrdgrrrl wrote:
| [dead]
| telman17 wrote:
| Truly excited about this one - there are not enough of these
| games in the genre. I wish they had announced a date but even if
| they had who knows how accurate it would actually be?
| pclark wrote:
| Hopefully the AI is a _trillion_ times better.
| malcsm wrote:
| Sadly, sequels never have better AI. All the money gets spent
| on shiny graphics.
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