Recommendation

[Whichone? 1]

Evening,

 

I'm not new to this site but haven't been on here for years and for some reason, the forgotten password doesn't accept my email address.

Anyway, i used to come on here for SimCity 4 mods and stuff, SC4 is a brilliant game and I loved the fact i could make it realistic, with 3 bed semidetached houses, proper bus stops etc.. and create English cities.

I bought a new laptop last year and couldn't be bothered to transfer all my dependencies onto it, so thought i would give Sim City 2013 a try, as I had owned every sim city from the start, all bar one and they'd progressively got better, up to the brilliant game that is SC4.

Anyway as we all know Sim City 2013 isn't the best, so my question is, whch of the Cities games should i buy?

From very quick research, Cities:Skylines looks like the best one and closest to the SC4 experience, so i have a few questions if that is OK?

What are the mods like?  I have seen there are English 3bed semi's and Tesco shops etc... so does it work the same as SC4 with just downloading BATs/mods ploppable/growing mods?

Are the mods free like SC4?

Are there as many transport/change to the correct side of the road mods?

Street furniture mods?

Will it get as big as SC4 with modding, are there lots of dependencies?

and last but not least, is it as good as SC4?

Thanks in advance.

[the builder 0]

Mods are free. its a 3d game, not 2d simetric camera. Prepare your video graphics board, the game is processor and graphics intensive. keep an eye in forums to get more information about, mods updates and crashes. This game has a mod community with awesome contributors, but lot of trash and outdated assets. Steam workshop for C:S  is completely big, but there too many good things there. Unity engine is used then, take your own conclusions. BTW the game is cool, but without mods, is nothing.

[Whichone? 1]

Thanks.

What should I do to prepare my graphics board?

I know SC4 was processor heavy, especially with mods/dependencies and massive 1+ million population cities.

[Turjan 1,048]

This game is also processor heavy, like all simulations. It needs a 64-bit OS as minimum requirement. As for memory, it says 4GB RAM minimum, but the game alone uses about 3.6-3.8 GB without mods. With mods, this quickly goes up. Intel integrated graphics don't work, so try to find out whether your laptop will be able to run the game at all or whether it will look bad, if that concerns you.

[Whichone? 1]

Cheers,

Its 64bit, with an i3-4005u, will 0.25 ghz make much of a difference, coz it's got 8gb RAM?

I used to run SC4 modded to f#ck, with nearly 1.5 million regions on a crappy Celeron, with 4gb RAm, it would crash alot.

Then bought a better AMD processor, however it would crash still occasionally on the million+ tile when zooming in.

Worth purchsing an i7 then?

[Turjan 1,048]

I have to admit I don't really know. Maybe, you can look at this thread and see whether anyone has your configuration:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/post-your-computer-specs-here-and-we-will-tell-you-if-it-meets-the-required-specs.835357/page-62

[BlakeMW 84]

37 minutes ago, Turjan said:

Intel integrated graphics don't work, so try to find out whether your laptop will be able to run the game at all or whether it will look bad, if that concerns you.

Intel graphics do work in practice as long as they have enough processing grunt. Older Intel graphics are basically a total no-go, but the versions from the last few years or so, including the HD4400 (which I happen to have in my laptop), do work (for instance the HD4400 is about half as powerful as the minimum requirements GPU, and it plays the game about as well as you'd expect from that - you might get about 15fps on a standard laptop resolution, or a bit more on lower resolution, dropping to about 10fps for a large city). So it runs. But it's not officially supported, and it's about half as powerful as minimum specs so you can't expect much.

8 minutes ago, Whichone? said:

Cheers,

Its 64bit, with an i3-4005u, will 0.25 ghz make much of a difference, coz it's got 8gb RAM?

Unfortunately that CPU is like really wimpy. It's a dual core with a low clock speed, and is a low-power usage version, so it doesn't handle demanding CPU tasks very well. The combination of an under-par GPU and a weak CPU is not pretty. The game will slow down a lot as the city gets larger, and soon cims and vehicles will be moving around in slow motion.  (my laptop has a more powerful i7, tho still only dual core and it's pretty crap)

You'd definitely want a better CPU, definitely a true quad-core (i.e. not dual core with hyper threading). Both i5 and i7 can work well, usually i5 has better performance to dollar ratio than i7, I think the most important thing is probably that it's quad core as Skylines makes reasonably good use of 4 cores, and also not something power-saving as skylines needs to run all the cores full-tilt.

[Whichone? 1]

23 hours ago, BlakeMW said:

Intel graphics do work in practice as long as they have enough processing grunt. Older Intel graphics are basically a total no-go, but the versions from the last few years or so, including the HD4400 (which I happen to have in my laptop), do work (for instance the HD4400 is about half as powerful as the minimum requirements GPU, and it plays the game about as well as you'd expect from that - you might get about 15fps on a standard laptop resolution, or a bit more on lower resolution, dropping to about 10fps for a large city). So it runs. But it's not officially supported, and it's about half as powerful as minimum specs so you can't expect much.

Unfortunately that CPU is like really wimpy. It's a dual core with a low clock speed, and is a low-power usage version, so it doesn't handle demanding CPU tasks very well. The combination of an under-par GPU and a weak CPU is not pretty. The game will slow down a lot as the city gets larger, and soon cims and vehicles will be moving around in slow motion.  (my laptop has a more powerful i7, tho still only dual core and it's pretty crap)

You'd definitely want a better CPU, definitely a true quad-core (i.e. not dual core with hyper threading). Both i5 and i7 can work well, usually i5 has better performance to dollar ratio than i7, I think the most important thing is probably that it's quad core as Skylines makes reasonably good use of 4 cores, and also not something power-saving as skylines needs to run all the cores full-tilt.

Thanks for all your advice.

Got Christmas, then a car to service in the new year, so no dough to upgrade to a faster processor.

Will just have to transfer all my dependencies for SC4 onto the the laptop, if it really won't perform well.

What if I took the cheapest option and doubled the Ram to 16gb, do you still reckon I'd experience issues with Cities:skylines?

 

[Turjan 1,048]

Whether you have 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM is only important with regard to how much custom content you can load. If your processor is borderline suitable, you probably won't have much fun with the simulation speed. You may get single digit fps already with a very low number of citizens.

[rmjohnson144 39]

On 12/15/2015 at 1:42 PM, Whichone? said:

Cheers,

Its 64bit, with an i3-4005u, will 0.25 ghz make much of a difference, coz it's got 8gb RAM?

I used to run SC4 modded to f#ck, with nearly 1.5 million regions on a crappy Celeron, with 4gb RAm, it would crash alot.

Then bought a better AMD processor, however it would crash still occasionally on the million+ tile when zooming in.

Worth purchsing an i7 then?

The i3-4005U is only 1.7GHz and is more of a tablet processor.  With that said, you can still play the game fine, you'll just be limited to a few tiles with no mods or assets.  

Expect slow downs as your city grows and traffic becomes out of balance and slow.  Just balance it out and you'll be able to continue a little more.  I don't see you filling all 9-tiles, but you should be able to unlock everything, but be stuck with low-density buildings if going past one tile.  Maybe a few high density sections here and there.

It'll be a challenge to say the least, but can still be just as fun.

Lower screen resolution and graphics settings should let you get a little further still.

[Azurespecter 506]

Hey there!

Hope you are able to try it out. To add to what others have said, your i3 is going to be the biggest hold up. i7's work fantastic, I'd say an i5 is good too, but at the rate technology comes out and prices drop, I don't think it would be a smart buy, rather just save up a little longer and get an i7.

8GB RAM does it for most people. 12 would be amazing. The nice thing about RAM is that it's usually easy to upgrade and add more, so I'd start with 8GB until you find out if you really enjoy the game to start packing on thousands of new assets and stuff.

Cities: Skylines is much more simulation heavy than SimCity 4, which was isometric and basically just numbers. This is both good and bad. It means Cities: Skylines feels more alive, because everything is simulated, and you can see it all in 3D from any direction! But it also means that you can't achieve the same texture quality or sizes of cities or number of people.

There is one golden star of Cities: Skylines that (in my opinion) matches SimCity 4 - the amazing community of modders and asset creators.

The Workshop is full and alive, members working together all over the world to reach new heights and push limits. Thank to a robust engine, there's actually a lot more that can be modded, and easier/faster, than for SimCity 4.

Hope that helps! Again, I would get an i7 because it's a great investment no matter what you play, and they aren't likely to go out of style soon. I would hold off on other upgrades until you play Cities: Skylines and see how you feel about it.

Oh, and I'm Jonathan, Community Assistant for Cities: Skylines. So I guess take what I say with normal "I work for them" bias  haha

On 12/15/2015 at 0:48 PM, Whichone? said:

Are the mods free like SC4?

Are there as many transport/change to the correct side of the road mods?

Street furniture mods?

Will it get as big as SC4 with modding, are there lots of dependencies?

1. Yes

2. The game has a built in "left side" road for all you British/Japanese/Australian peeps. Modders are working on a fantastic project called TAM that is somewhat similar to the original NAM in scope, adding lots of new road types and transportation AI logic and other cool stuff

3. There are ploppables. I use a mod that makes it so you can place assets wherever you want. Works cool!

4. Steam makes dependencies much less of a concern. Creators have the option to link any dependences right there on the download page, so it makes it very easy.

[dedgren 830]

I'm using an AMD FX 4300 Quad Core processor running at 3.8 GHz and 16 GB of RAM with an AMD Radeon R7 200 graphics card and the game just screams along, usually at 60 FPS.

Even with 800,000 trees on a 25 city tile region.

 

  I built the machine last year just before the game was released for graphics processing in my photo art business, so had no idea what C:S would run like on it.

 

David

[BlakeMW 84]

14 hours ago, Whichone? said:

Thanks for all your advice.

Got Christmas, then a car to service in the new year, so no dough to upgrade to a faster processor.

For what it's worth, merely upgrading the CPU in a laptop isn't a very cost-effective solution (if it's even possible) since laptop/ultrabook CPUs are like super expensive for the performance you get and all the other components in a laptop/ultrabook are lower performance too. You get far better bang for buck out of a budget gaming build, with a cheap quad-core CPU and a cheap GPU. There are some very nice guides to budget gaming builds < $400 on YouTube. The most pertinent example is:

Can a $350 PC Play Cities: Skylines?

 

Quote

What if I took the cheapest option and doubled the Ram to 16gb, do you still reckon I'd experience issues with Cities:skylines?

Unfortunately having more than 4GB does absolutely nothing to help make up for limitations in GPU or CPU. The *only* thing having more ram allows, is it allows you to install more custom assets. 8GB is already way more than Skylines needs, with plenty of room for all the assets you'd want to install on a weak system. For a more capable system, if you're really into custom assets, you might want 16GB.

[Vals Loeder 27]

I am running a 7 year old PC ... and only 2 GB of RAM!! So far the game works okay ... but my largest city  only has 35,000 inhabitants. Fortunately for me I like starting over building new cities again and again, so my cities never grow very large, otherwise my PC would burn to a cinder I am afraid.