will this new game fill the void for SimCity 4?

[DazzaDazza 29]

it's been some time since I have look at a city building game or posted on this site, I have read some reviews and look into the game some what. but as the biggest city building community what do you guys think good and bad. I will probably buy the game at some point but some "fan boy" feed back to be nice as well

 

- I see it has large maps, as big as and SC4 and CXL or bigger?

- graphics look O.K. but what do people think?

- is the game Stable? while many people complained about CXL being unstable I never really had that problem or with SC4 and the 100 or mods I had installed for that matter.

- from some reports I have seen the game look essay? for me I like to have 10000000 in the bank and be able to create a crate looking city and play around with building, roads, and parks and river banks.

- I know it's early days can I start to crate a grate city that I can speed hours and hours adding new things or if ones the map it filled the mostly game over, one thing I love about SC4 was that the game didn't really start until after to had fill the map.    

            

[Mystrelia 57]

How about some feedback from a fan girl? Or at least very close to being a fan girl.

 

Graphics: They're not horrible, for sure. A lot of people don't like them because the buildings don't have a dirty, gritty city-looking feel to them. I like them because the buildings don't have a dirty, gritty city-looking feel to them. For me the clean look of the game makes a nice environment in which to spend hours.

 

Maps: The way the map works is there are twenty-five tiles and you start with one. You have the option of purchasing up to nine of them without a mod, all twenty-five if you have the mod.

 

Stability: It seems very stable to me. I did have one save that corrupted when I tried to save it but it most likely was caused by a custom building I was using in the game. I've occasionally run into some conflicts and such with them so I'm very careful when I download something to load it up in a test map first.

 

Longevity of play: I have well over a hundred hours so far between experimenting and dumping a few maps then finally settling in for a long-term build. I couldn't say how many hours I have on my current map and am only up to slightly over 20,000 people so far with miles and miles of city-building left to do. Most people build faster than I do, though, and in about the same amount of play time have anywhere from five to ten times as much population as my city does.

 

Ease of play: The largest complaints I've seen about easiness is that before long money starts flowing in fairly rapidly. If they don't like that I don't understand why they don't just turn down taxes since that will fix that little problem. There are different modes you can play on, one starts out with seriously limited cash but as progress is made unlocks various buildings and bonus money along the way. Another mode unlocks everything from the start, including almost 700,000 in monies. Another mode has unlimited money. How you play is your choice. I started my current city with just the unlocks, built out my first infrastructure before I ever started zoning so spent a long time before I started becoming profitable. Now I have over 1,500,000 sitting in the bank.

[BlitzPackage 19]

YES!

[Sabretooth78 808]

First of all it depends on what you consider a void.  SC4 is still around and better than ever.  That said, CSL is a very good game and you'd be foolish to just pass it up.

 

I don't pretend to be an expert at CSL - I have about 70 hours of play according to Steam but a fair amount of that has been fiddling around with settings - but I'll throw in what I know:

 

- I see it has large maps, as big as and SC4 and CXL or bigger?

 

IIRC, the map tiles are 2 km square (so equivalent to 1 medium SC4 tile) and you eventually build up to 9 of those; up to 25 with a mod.  So in SC4 terms, think of that as 2-6 large city tiles.  It's not region play but it's no slouch either.

 

- graphics look O.K. but what do people think?

 

Graphics are a little "fruity" in theme but all in all not bad.  As you can no doubt catch from screenshots, some elements (especially zoom outs) look pretty darned real.

 

- is the game Stable? while many people complained about CXL being unstable I never really had that problem or with SC4 and the 100 or mods I had installed for that matter.

 

Similar to SC4.  You have to be smart about your mods (plugins) but generally speaking it's pretty good.  Right now I have 2400+ SC4 plugins and it's smooth as butter; I run maybe 20-30 in CSL and it's pretty good but I get occasional freezes (beachballing in Mac parlance) at seemingly random times.  Quick to recover though and I haven't lost a save file.  The key is to save early and often just as with anything else.

 

- from some reports I have seen the game look essay? for me I like to have 10000000 in the bank and be able to create a crate looking city and play around with building, roads, and parks and river banks.

 

It's pretty easy to run a positive cash flow early and keep it.  Some items are surprisingly expensive, though.  If it's too easy, there's a hard mode mod that ships with it.  I haven't tried that yet.  It also comes with an unlimited money mod.

 

- I know it's early days can I start to crate a grate city that I can speed hours and hours adding new things or if ones the map it filled the mostly game over, one thing I love about SC4 was that the game didn't really start until after to had fill the map.    

 

Just like SC4; it's done when you're sick of it.  If you want to blow it all up, you can do that (although I don't believe there's an equivalent to SC4's "obliterate city").

[RalphaelNinja 244]

How about some feedback from a fan girl? Or at least very close to being a fan girl.

 

Graphics: They're not horrible, for sure. A lot of people don't like them because the buildings don't have a dirty, gritty city-looking feel to them. I like them because the buildings don't have a dirty, gritty city-looking feel to them. For me the clean look of the game makes a nice environment in which to spend hours.

 

Maps: The way the map works is there are twenty-five tiles and you start with one. You have the option of purchasing up to nine of them without a mod, all twenty-five if you have the mod.

 

Stability: It seems very stable to me. I did have one save that corrupted when I tried to save it but it most likely was caused by a custom building I was using in the game. I've occasionally run into some conflicts and such with them so I'm very careful when I download something to load it up in a test map first.

 

Longevity of play: I have well over a hundred hours so far between experimenting and dumping a few maps then finally settling in for a long-term build. I couldn't say how many hours I have on my current map and am only up to slightly over 20,000 people so far with miles and miles of city-building left to do. Most people build faster than I do, though, and in about the same amount of play time have anywhere from five to ten times as much population as my city does.

 

Ease of play: The largest complaints I've seen about easiness is that before long money starts flowing in fairly rapidly. If they don't like that I don't understand why they don't just turn down taxes since that will fix that little problem. There are different modes you can play on, one starts out with seriously limited cash but as progress is made unlocks various buildings and bonus money along the way. Another mode unlocks everything from the start, including almost 700,000 in monies. Another mode has unlimited money. How you play is your choice. I started my current city with just the unlocks, built out my first infrastructure before I ever started zoning so spent a long time before I started becoming profitable. Now I have over 1,500,000 sitting in the bank.

Good job Fangirl Mystrelia!! I had a feeling you were a fan girl but didn't want to insult you if you were not

 

So that meant you must be hanging around The Sims;

 

Not a lot of guys will admit to playing the Sims (myself included):-P It is like telling everyone that you buy playboy mainly for the articles as I was playing the Sims mostly in Build mode and creating worlds and not for the woo-hoo-ing that occurs within the sim families :-P

 

The unlimited money sandboxing and adding new buildings types is what I'll be looking forward to...

[Mystrelia 57]

Well, I hate to admit to being a fan girl and at my age I really do know better but dog-gone it, it's been SO many years since there was a game released that I actually wanted to spend any time with I got way excited over this one. I tend not to play a ton of games so I'm always looking for something I can get hundreds, if not thousands, of hours from.

 

One of the things that gets me the most is the fact Colossal Order is a group of only thirteen people and they interact with and listen to the players. A good share of them are city sim lovers and they wanted to build a game they would enjoy playing. I think if a developer has a love for the genre it's going to show in what they make and I would say they show their love in Cities: Skylines. It's hard not to be a fan of that kind of thing.

[your_adress_here 11]

IMO it definitely will fill the void for SC4. It's only been about a month now and the modding community has already made the game twice as good as it was on launch day. Remember SC4 vanilla was pretty bare when it came out, compared to these 10+ years later.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Gonna agree with Sabretooth78: fill what void exactly?  SC4 didn't go anywhere; modding community's still active.

 

C:S is an internet smash hit; the thousands of reviews and threads and tutorials and videos here on Simtropolis and everywhere else cover your questions thoroughly.  Not sure why you want someone else's written opinion of the graphics as opposed to screenshots.

 

It could be a worthy successor but SC4 ain't even obsolete yet.  I've personally found it an excellent addition to the genre, very fun to play alongside SC4.  Still needs moar mods.  And there's expansions to come out yet.

[BlakeMW 84]

 

- from some reports I have seen the game look essay? for me I like to have 10000000 in the bank and be able to create a crate looking city and play around with building, roads, and parks and river banks.

 

It's pretty easy to run a positive cash flow early and keep it.  Some items are surprisingly expensive, though.  If it's too easy, there's a hard mode mod that ships with it.  I haven't tried that yet.  It also comes with an unlimited money mod.

 

I've played a pure hard mode city now, and also converted an existing city to the hard mode mod. Like the normal game, it is only hard at the start, once you get to that point in the game when it becomes easy to run a big positive cash flow (usually about 20-30,000 cims) it's also easy to run a big positive cash flow on Hard mode. Maybe you just have 2 million in the bank instead of 4 million.

The essential problem, if you want to call it that, is it's easy to run a city where you grow rapidly but are stingy on services, so you get lots of tax income and don't need to pay out much in expenses. The second problem is that you need to invest in school, highschools and universities, plus a bunch of services, in order to get lvl3 industry and offices, once you have those, you get higher income, but your services expenses are not increased at all. So if you can afford to get to lvl3 industry/office at all, you are guaranteed an excellent permanent profit once you get there.

 

The game design doesn't really support difficult financial management. That would require supply and demand and recessions and stuff. The challenge is in traffic management.

[Marla_Singer 46]

it is only hard at the start, once you get to that point in the game when it becomes easy to run a big positive cash flow.

Well... all business simulation games tend to have this flaw... it's hard at first and after a while money grows on trees. And guess what? That's actually the same in real life.

The whole thing comes from what economists call the economies of scale. The fact that the more your produce, the cheaper it is per unit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

 

The game design doesn't really support difficult financial management. That would require supply and demand and recessions and stuff. The challenge is in traffic management.

Indeed, that's not in money that lies the interest of the game, it's in growing a city and making it work properly. It's the simulation which matters! Of course some can believe that "you can buy all solutions to your traffic issues", as I've been told once, but that's not really the question: you're the dude who need to solve the puzzle, and you're free to do so the way you personally consider the best, according to your own tastes.

 

Personally, I always considered money to be a nice athmospheric feature in that kind of games, but it has never been the core issue. It's too easy to cheat with money when you have the time on your side. Even with the slightest positive budget, how hard is it to simulate 200 years in fast speed and become super rich this way? That's simply not the purpose, to be rich. The purpose is to build a super city, to explore the limits of your own imagination and to see where it guides you.

Now this being said, for those having fun with figures and budget balance, a recession mode could be interesting. And considering how the game is simulated, it may be brought in in various interesting ways: real estate bubble exploding, commodities price falling down if you're an exporter or moving up if you're an importer. Maybe there could be fun things to be added in there.

[Mystrelia 57]

Yeah, this game isn't about the money for me either but about building a functional city and building a functional city in this game can cost a lot. I prefer not playing with unlimited cash because I like to see the in/outflow. Thankfully service buildings (some of those are way expensive) can be moved but I've spent in the neighborhood of 100,000 at a time just rebuilding a road to better handle the traffic it carries. Still the surplus manages to increase quite nicely and if it's coming in faster than I can spend it I lower the taxes. Of course usually shortly after that land value increases and the income goes right back up again then I give another segment a tax break but the land value will eventually top out.