Have CO lost touch with what players want?

[TekindusT 3,809]

16 minutes ago, Darf said:

I want a citysim, where if I don't educate a neighbourhood and there's no police there it becomes a gangland. If I have made that mistake it will cost a bit more effort than to plop a few schools and policebureaus.

I want a citysim where, if a specific neighborhood becomes a gangland, bad publicity will damage tourism; and with less tourism, less retail revenue. Tax cuts in order to attract new retail are successful and that nice commercial street gets clogged by traffic, making difficult the access to the industrial area... and so on.

In essence, a city simulator where simulation is, like real life is, a constant butterfly effect. Where the effects of a "good" policy of yours can lead to rather bad consequences, as it happens in real life.

[MatlockMan 370]

On ‎24‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 6:46 PM, Darf said:

Simulation wise C:S is very very shallow. You basically can't fail at the game. Which is what many players want.

Exactly. 

Going back to SC4, the game punishes you for poor decisions harder and harder the longer you continue. Poor education is acceptable if your city is small and underdeveloped, but if you're zoning high-density and you have no high schools, colleges, universities, or libraries, your city will be full of box-shaped brown megatowers, and your city will never develop a nice skyline or shimmering high-tech industry. If you run pipes through your dirty industry, you kill your water supply and poison your Sims. C:S has plenty of those same challenges; for instance, you cannot place a waterpump downstream from a sewage pipe or you'll monumentally rubbish your city's health. The problem is that such a crisis is easily avoided, and after the first time you make that mistake you'll never do it again, rendering the 'challenge' useless. Same with deathwaves. There needs to be a late-game challenge added to ensure that players feel rewarded.

SC4 had an interesting choice in the lategame - continue with dirty industry with negative consequences, or risk upgrading to high-tech.

In comparison, C:S essentially abandons industry after the first hour of a city's life. Unless you intentionally cripple your city's health, education and overall advancement, those outlying industrial suburbs will wither and die or otherwise sit there collecting dust. There's no expansion on industry either - you can't enact policies to ensure the survival of industry or turn your city into a manufacturing centre. The only option is to move into office and commercial, which themselves provide little variety. There is also little downside to Office and commercial zoning - they're both extremely lucrative.

A solution to this problem would perhaps be to create a second density of industry to the game - high density industrial -  which would be megafactories. It wouldn't be as polluting as initial industry, but it would still be undesirable to the environment and to Cims' health. The benefit to such an industry would be a) massive numbers of high paying and advanced jobs, b) huge tax revenue for the government, and c) a massive boost to commercial demand. In tandem with this, I would nerf the tax revenue received from Office zones and the demand for Office and Commercial zones (in the lategame). I would also heighten the prerequisite education and health standards necessary for the continued development of office. Make office an extremely challenging yet rewarding aspect of the game. Office would also be highly reliant on supply chains -  to have successful Office zones, mayors need either exceptional international transport links such as well-funded freight-train, seaports and airports, or have plenty of industrial production within the same city, in order to support it.

Mayors (players) therefore would have the choice in the lategame.  Heavy industry is polluting, unhealthy and strains on export freight routes, but with the benefit of strong citywide commercial demand, strong jobs sector, high tax revenue and low barriers-to-entry for Cims (meaning low education and health). Office on the otherhand would be far more challenging. For Office, a mayor would need a decently planned city, very high levels of education and healthcare, and some remaining supportive industry/strong interconnections with the outside world. The upside of Office would be no pollution and some lucrative unlocks. 

Thoughts?

[charlesnew 262]

These are some really good suggestions. As you said @tmorgan96, adding more late-game challenges would really enhance the game. Don't make them the same challenges too, different cities with different types of industries or economies would be facing different problems. I think something really good would be a dynamic economy. That means your city can't rely on one industry. Or even taking contracts with companies and setting up factories and a headquarters for them.

I like making pretty cities, but I would love it even more if I could make functional and pretty cities.

I personally don't think CO has "lost touch" with what players want, they just didn't know. CO saw a starving genre, and took the opportunity by creating this game. I just don't think they realised how popular it would become and I don't think they really knew what people wanted since the last good game came out 10 yrs ago at the time. As far as I know, Colossal have been trying to increase the game's difficulty recently with natural disasters. It's a start, but to really change it up, they might as well make a new game.

I really hope CO has learned from this game and if a new city builder is made some years down the line, I hope they can make an even better game than this already is. Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying this game for (probably) many years to come.

[Czardus 211]

The latest DLC is a bit disappointing if you ask me.  It feels much more like a mini-game that's being added.  

[LivingInThePast 364]

On 8/7/2017 at 5:06 AM, charlesnew said:

These are some really good suggestions. As you said @tmorgan96, adding more late-game challenges would really enhance the game. Don't make them the same challenges too, different cities with different types of industries or economies would be facing different problems. I think something really good would be a dynamic economy. That means your city can't rely on one industry. Or even taking contracts with companies and setting up factories and a headquarters for them.

I like making pretty cities, but I would love it even more if I could make functional and pretty cities.

I personally don't think CO has "lost touch" with what players want, they just didn't know. CO saw a starving genre, and took the opportunity by creating this game. I just don't think they realised how popular it would become and I don't think they really knew what people wanted since the last good game came out 10 yrs ago at the time. As far as I know, Colossal have been trying to increase the game's difficulty recently with natural disasters. It's a start, but to really change it up, they might as well make a new game.

I really hope CO has learned from this game and if a new city builder is made some years down the line, I hope they can make an even better game than this already is. Meanwhile, I'll be enjoying this game for (probably) many years to come.

I don't think CO really knows what players wanted to begin with. Everyone wants SimCity 5, but CO is still thinking Cities in Motion 3 with some more SimCity elements. That's why you can do some nifty stuff like designate turn lanes to go which way but can't really do anything with them. There's no real challenge to the game and the creators decided to basically outsource modding which leads to major performance issues. The three fundamental problems of why I lost interest in C:S are such.

1. The game punishes you for using mods. So if you want to get rid of Chirper or change any of the building styles to something less hideous, then no achievements for you. The basic coal power plant, for instance, is extraordinarily underpowered. The SimCity series had the coal power plant which was a big polluter but was cheap and was able to power up to a medium-sized city before it started failing (and by that point, you should be considering something more powerful/cleaner). Mods can fix that, but you can't do that either. To say nothing of the performance issue.

2. The scale issue. This affects Workshop items (even the nice looking ones) so a McDonald's can take up the same block as a big skyscraper, and houses look like houses for hobbits. When you take into account the actual scale that the buildings work with you get the equivalent of a 2x2 SimCity 4 block, or 1024 meters squared. That's the size of a lot of a convenience store with about 8 or so pumps. You CAN get buildings to scale but they're just for show.

3. There's no strategy. Obviously there's the opportunity to use it as a city painter but I want to have functional cities. With SC4, you were allowed to fail and had to know what you're doing. You couldn't expand too fast and had to balance out income. I always felt SC4 had the better learning curve than its predecessors (for instance, SC2K was extraordinarily difficult at first, you had to gain a positive net income before 50 years when the power plant blows and issuing a bond was basically financial suicide, but at a certain point money keeps flowing in and you can do whatever you want with it). The cemetery mechanic is the "replacement" in C:S, which is disappointing since it's a bad mechanic and a shame since CIM focused on keeping everyone and everything moving. The SimCity 4 Prima guide kind of touched on this, with cities growing to "Phase 9" (yeah, I know growth stages only go up to 8, I think this was more arbitrary), where the land maxes out and you end up with skyscrapers. But not everyone wants skyscrapers. Sure, I guess you could have a "Phase 9" city, something like Los Angeles, Houston, or NYC--a cultural powerhouse with wealth and some terrific-looking buildings as you, the player, deals with traffic and aging infrastructure, as well as keeping the crime in check, and you can have a very different challenge if you wanted to build a "Phase 6" city, perhaps a small college town or a tourist-oriented city (or both!) as you attempt to maintain an affordable quality of life. I shouldn't be too hard on C:S on this aspect, pretty much every 3D simulation discards strategy in favor of eye candy.

At this rate, I'd rather see an open source re-implementation of SC4 that reuses the copyrighted SC4 assets (sorta like OpenRCT2 in that you need the original to play) than see another company take a stab at replacing it, since it's been more than a decade and no one has done it right.

[Turjan 1,048]

7 hours ago, LivingInThePast said:

The three fundamental problems of why I lost interest in C:S are such...

Hmm, well, I'm not sure whether I would identify the same issues here.

1. The vanilla game itself is scaled to play short sessions with small towns. Everything is scaled to that goal. Of course, there's a mod that lets you earn achievements with activated mods, and that one is pretty much as old as the game itself, so this is a non-issue. Replacing utilities with larger buildings is surprisingly tricky. Most released assets by modders follow the original mechanics. You basically have to adapt these assets to your needs yourself, which is what I did. I took some models I liked and gave them the numbers I wanted. Of course, these assets are always available, which touches on one of your other points.

2. The scale issue is a tricky one. The problem is not so much underscaled buildings - most assets on the workshop are actually okay in this regard, but overscaled people, cars and streets. As CiMs are more than 3 meters tall and cars are so big, you have to overscale the first floor of your building to make it look not too silly. It's, by the way, also a technique that is used in SC4 modding. As for lot sizes, people from different areas of the world have different expectations. I remember A Nonny Moose complaining how SC4 lots for single family homes were much too large, as lots in his neck of the woods were tiny. For C:S, this leaves lots for American-style skyscrapers, industry and farms which are noticeably off. RICO is a way around this, but it's not really well integrated into the core game mechanics. Nevertheless, it's a huge improvement to lots without function.

3. Yeah, there's no challenge in the C:S base game (except traffic), and certainly no proper economic simulation. Then again, the challenge was gone in SC4 after a few weeks, too. I could build those cities while half asleep. C:S tries to rectify this with its scenarios now. Those can actually be very challenging. However, I noticed that I don't really like those. The cities you have to build in these scenarios are very utilitarian out of sheer necessity. As a consequence, most of the time, they look like crap when I do those. Of course, some of the scenarios let you build cities which you would never try to build without those scenario goals, which may be interesting in and itself, like when they force you to use methods of transportation you would never use otherwise.

Anyway, over the years, I have learned to understand at least some of the design decisions the devs made, as I see how taxing the game is for your computer hardware. However, my acceptance of some of the mechanics that simply don't work is less pronounced. For example, I have the feeling that they made some of the traffic mechanics even worse in one of the last patches, as one of my cities that ran fine before now shows even more asinine traffic behavior on the motorways. As traffic is actually the main challenge this game provides, it's really disappointing how utterly insane the vanilla simulation is. I now finally had to succumb to using TM:PE, single digit fps be damned.

[LivingInThePast 364]

6 hours ago, Turjan said:

Hmm, well, I'm not sure whether I would identify the same issues here.

1. The vanilla game itself is scaled to play short sessions with small towns. Everything is scaled to that goal. Of course, there's a mod that lets you earn achievements with activated mods, and that one is pretty much as old as the game itself, so this is a non-issue. Replacing utilities with larger buildings is surprisingly tricky. Most released assets by modders follow the original mechanics. You basically have to adapt these assets to your needs yourself, which is what I did. I took some models I liked and gave them the numbers I wanted. Of course, these assets are always available, which touches on one of your other points.

2. The scale issue is a tricky one. The problem is not so much underscaled buildings - most assets on the workshop are actually okay in this regard, but overscaled people, cars and streets. As CiMs are more than 3 meters tall and cars are so big, you have to overscale the first floor of your building to make it look not too silly. It's, by the way, also a technique that is used in SC4 modding. As for lot sizes, people from different areas of the world have different expectations. I remember A Nonny Moose complaining how SC4 lots for single family homes were much too large, as lots in his neck of the woods were tiny. For C:S, this leaves lots for American-style skyscrapers, industry and farms which are noticeably off. RICO is a way around this, but it's not really well integrated into the core game mechanics. Nevertheless, it's a huge improvement to lots without function.

3. Yeah, there's no challenge in the C:S base game (except traffic), and certainly no proper economic simulation. Then again, the challenge was gone in SC4 after a few weeks, too. I could build those cities while half asleep. C:S tries to rectify this with its scenarios now. Those can actually be very challenging. However, I noticed that I don't really like those. The cities you have to build in these scenarios are very utilitarian out of sheer necessity. As a consequence, most of the time, they look like crap when I do those. Of course, some of the scenarios let you build cities which you would never try to build without those scenario goals, which may be interesting in and itself, like when they force you to use methods of transportation you would never use otherwise.

Anyway, over the years, I have learned to understand at least some of the design decisions the devs made, as I see how taxing the game is for your computer hardware. However, my acceptance of some of the mechanics that simply don't work is less pronounced. For example, I have the feeling that they made some of the traffic mechanics even worse in one of the last patches, as one of my cities that ran fine before now shows even more asinine traffic behavior on the motorways. As traffic is actually the main challenge this game provides, it's really disappointing how utterly insane the vanilla simulation is. I now finally had to succumb to using TM:PE, single digit fps be damned.

OK, so #1 is a non-issue essentially but #2 can't be shrugged off. The scale issue in SC4 dealt with the extra height for aesthetic reasons because the view was fixed, but the X and Y scales were essentially perfect. Granted, there weren't a lot of curves and the 16m*16m tile size left a lot to be desired if you were trying to build anything more dense than suburban California. But while in SC4 you could try lots with multiple buildings on it, there's not really an option for C:S, nor does SC4's scaling issues change the situation at C:S. With the X and Y scale already strongly warped, the Z scale warping makes everything look even worse. And no, you can't pass off the "scales of the world" issue unless you live in Hong Kong or something, and even then it would be just as limiting to scale to SC4 is (besides, C:S is clearly designed with Western gaming in mind). I spent a bit of time looking at European cities and their suburban areas to see if this actually makes sense. It doesn't.

The traffic issue in C:S is hampered by that silly hospital/cemetery mechanic and not just people trying to get to work on time. More thought in that area would've been great, if you could adjust stoplights (without making it too, and I hate to use this word, "autistic") and you could deal with the cost/benefits of making underpasses and overpasses. My computer is actually fine, thank you, and trying to pass off "your hardware just sucks" when the devs have clearly made a terribly optimized game is insulting. It's one thing to like and appreciate a game but it's another to stick up for developer under any circumstance (if you are being paid to say that or if you actually were a developer that just shows how awful CO is, but I'll assume good faith).

I think someone on this thread said it best that the developers may have a lot of interesting ideas but there's no one in place with a clear vision for the game and making sure those interesting ideas are properly implemented and work well, and with the developers refusing or incapable to fix that makes a C:S a game not worth it in the long run.

[Turjan 1,048]

1 hour ago, LivingInThePast said:

My computer is actually fine, thank you, and trying to pass off "your hardware just sucks" when the devs have clearly made a terribly optimized game is insulting. It's one thing to like and appreciate a game but it's another to stick up for developer under any circumstance (if you are being paid to say that or if you actually were a developer that just shows how awful CO is, but I'll assume good faith).

Huh? Where did I say anything about your hardware?  I was talking about my computer. With the mods and assets I use, the game uses something like 26 GB of RAM. That's still not exactly the standard in computers nowadays (maybe very new ones), and this includes the more intelligent RAM usage provided by the Loading Screen Mod. If you use lots of different assets in view, your graphics card gets taxed, especially at night with hundreds of light sources. The simulation is what finally brings the fps down to a crawl if you don't have a top-of-the-line CPU. While the game phases the simulation slowly out with the growth of your city, it gets taxing in the 200k inhabitant range and above. And TM:PE with its (optional) better traffic simulation brings my fps down even more.

The game is built with a laptop with a dedicated graphics card and 4GB of RAM in mind. The devs didn't put much thought into the situation when you exceed these limits.

[LivingInThePast 364]

3 hours ago, Turjan said:

Huh? Where did I say anything about your hardware?  I was talking about my computer.

So, "as I see how taxing the game is for your computer hardware" was actually a typo? If true, I'm sorry I took offense.

Maybe I'll load up C:S again and see if anything has been fixed, but first impressions count and I didn't enjoy it as much as I wished I did.

[Turjan 1,048]

Oops, sorry, I didn't even notice that. I certainly didn't mean to address you personally (I have no idea what kind of computer you have), I meant it in a general sense. I don't think I heard from anyone that they have a computer that runs a larger city in a heavily modded game at a great framerate. All I hear is different degrees of complaints about the slog.

I don't think that the general issues you have with the game got changed in the meanwhile. Emergency vehicles behave a bit more sanely (to a degree), but that's mostly about it. I think some scenarios are vanilla. I would be hard-pressed to run an unmodded game though. I use roughly 100 mods, not to mention the assets.

[MatlockMan 370]

The latest expansion is an okay step. I'm very happy (happier than most, at least) that CO is still putting out new expansions. Both SC4 and SC2013 only received one expansion pack each, and that really was a missed opportunity for those games which had a lot of potential and a lot of improvements needed. 

The challenge of this game needs work. A city painter is fine if you want a nice public transport network or road map, but the one thing I love about SC4 is that even if you were making lots of money and building beautiful networks, there would be unforeseen consequences which would require serious attention. Building a new train station on an existing network could cause a bottleneck. Extending your highway could overload an offramp and create a backlog of cars. This was especially difficult because often these problems would require the demolition of major beautiful shiny city skyscrapers to fix. 

In SC4, demolishing a skyscraper is a real big deal. It takes a lot of effort to get organic growth of a downtown business district without using ploppables. The same can't be said about C:SL, which is why I guess there is something "missing" from the game. Big achievements were possible in SC4 and when you got them you felt real proud, because it took a lot of effort, tinkering and foresight to get there. In C:SL, these big achievements are either not really that special or easily attained. The natural progression of the game pushes you toward the same goal. Start with industry and then move to high density and commercial/office. Bleh.

 

 

[MatlockMan 370]

On ‎24‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 3:37 PM, punkologist4 said:

I don't really understand all the hate.

It's not really that bad. There is a lot which we should be thankful for - large city sizes, extremely easy and open modding, multiple expansions and continued support, and the fact that SimCity 2013 wasn't enough to scare studios from making more city-builders.

I do feel that a lot of the frustration ultimately comes down to the simulation of individual citizens, which means that city populations never really grow much greater than 100k in most cases. Nothing has been done either to the 4x4 lot sizes and the wealth levels. I think a lot of us criticise the game because the small imperfections are noticeable. 

 

[boformer 3,169]

 

On 28.8.2017 at 2:03 AM, LivingInThePast said:

I don't think CO really knows what players wanted to begin with. Everyone wants SimCity 5, but CO is still thinking Cities in Motion 3 with some more SimCity elements. That's why you can do some nifty stuff like designate turn lanes to go which way but can't really do anything with them. There's no real challenge to the game and the creators decided to basically outsource modding which leads to major performance issues. The three fundamental problems of why I lost interest in C:S are such.

Outsource modding? I've never seen a game that can be modded like C:SL. There are almost no limits.

Quote

1. The game punishes you for using mods. So if you want to get rid of Chirper or change any of the building styles to something less hideous, then no achievements for you. The basic coal power plant, for instance, is extraordinarily underpowered. The SimCity series had the coal power plant which was a big polluter but was cheap and was able to power up to a medium-sized city before it started failing (and by that point, you should be considering something more powerful/cleaner). Mods can fix that, but you can't do that either. To say nothing of the performance issue.

Do you really care about achievements? It's kind of understandable, isn't it? Some mods are like cheats.

Quote

2. The scale issue. This affects Workshop items (even the nice looking ones) so a McDonald's can take up the same block as a big skyscraper, and houses look like houses for hobbits. When you take into account the actual scale that the buildings work with you get the equivalent of a 2x2 SimCity 4 block, or 1024 meters squared. That's the size of a lot of a convenience store with about 8 or so pumps. You CAN get buildings to scale but they're just for show.

That's a serious issue, although a mod could remove it.

Quote

3. There's no strategy. Obviously there's the opportunity to use it as a city painter but I want to have functional cities. With SC4, you were allowed to fail and had to know what you're doing. You couldn't expand too fast and had to balance out income. I always felt SC4 had the better learning curve than its predecessors (for instance, SC2K was extraordinarily difficult at first, you had to gain a positive net income before 50 years when the power plant blows and issuing a bond was basically financial suicide, but at a certain point money keeps flowing in and you can do whatever you want with it). The cemetery mechanic is the "replacement" in C:S, which is disappointing since it's a bad mechanic and a shame since CIM focused on keeping everyone and everything moving. The SimCity 4 Prima guide kind of touched on this, with cities growing to "Phase 9" (yeah, I know growth stages only go up to 8, I think this was more arbitrary), where the land maxes out and you end up with skyscrapers. But not everyone wants skyscrapers. Sure, I guess you could have a "Phase 9" city, something like Los Angeles, Houston, or NYC--a cultural powerhouse with wealth and some terrific-looking buildings as you, the player, deals with traffic and aging infrastructure, as well as keeping the crime in check, and you can have a very different challenge if you wanted to build a "Phase 6" city, perhaps a small college town or a tourist-oriented city (or both!) as you attempt to maintain an affordable quality of life. I shouldn't be too hard on C:S on this aspect, pretty much every 3D simulation discards strategy in favor of eye candy.

I would call it "gameplay" instead of "strategy", and the gameplay is not challenging in C:SL. No depth. Even with the "hardcore" mod, it is still too easy.

On the other hand, SC4 lacked an ingame help. I played it for years without knowing that there is a strategy guide. Getting high tech industry and skyscrapers was always a mystery to me.

Quote

At this rate, I'd rather see an open source re-implementation of SC4 that reuses the copyrighted SC4 assets (sorta like OpenRCT2 in that you need the original to play) than see another company take a stab at replacing it, since it's been more than a decade and no one has done it right.

I think C:SL is a good base. With modding, we can introduce challenging gameplay and stunning visuals. Basically we could reimplement everything described in the Prima Strategy Guide!

 

One thing that really bothers me is the visual style of the game. Many assets look like a 5-year old child coloured them. SC4 looked great, even without mods.

[Boss Tradamus 1]

On 6.9.2017 at 5:13 PM, boformer said:

That's a serious issue, although a mod could remove it.

Hello,

i can't find this mod in the workshop. can you provide the link.

Have been looking for "Growable Overhaul Mod"...

BR

[Roadman20 601]

7 hours ago, Boss Tradamus said:

Hello,

i can't find this mod in the workshop. can you provide the link.

Have been looking for "Growable Overhaul Mod"...

BR

You can't find it because it doesn't exist for public use.  It never left beyond the "it is somewhat workable proof of concept" stage because there were other parts of the mod that needed to be done to make it useable for public use.  There is a development thread here on the forums detailing how far the development got before it stopped.

[Darf 1,439]

On 6-9-2017 at 5:13 PM, boformer said:

One thing that really bothers me is the visual style of the game. Many assets look like a 5-year old child coloured them. SC4 looked great, even without mods.

It took some great buildings and executed them well.

[LivingInThePast 364]

On 9/6/2017 at 10:13 AM, boformer said:

Outsource modding? I've never seen a game that can be modded like C:SL. There are almost no limits.

The Sims games, Fallout 4, and many others have mods that change all sorts of behaviors. And there are limits, as we have discussed.

Do you really care about achievements? It's kind of understandable, isn't it? Some mods are like cheats.

They're not a necessity, but I disagree with the "some mods are like cheats". That's like saying NAM is a "cheat" for SimCity 4's broken traffic simulation.

That's a serious issue, although a mod could remove it.

A mod that never got out of development, see above about the "no limits except there are".

On the other hand, SC4 lacked an ingame help. I played it for years without knowing that there is a strategy guide. Getting high tech industry and skyscrapers was always a mystery to me.

No one's saying SimCity 4 couldn't have been improved on.

I think C:SL is a good base. With modding, we can introduce challenging gameplay and stunning visuals. Basically we could reimplement everything described in the Prima Strategy Guide!

Except modding doesn't go that far, and modding won't last term for a base game that's not solid. Would you use a table where the legs are made of wood glue?

In actuality, I don't think anymore big mods are coming. I glanced through the forums here and Steam Workshop. There was an interesting "rush hour" mod in beta, which was cool but something SC4 did first, and appalling that CO wasted time with gimmick DLCs without addressing it, the traffic manager, Precision Engineering, Network Extensions, RICO, and a mess of buildings, but no one -as far as I know- has attempted or released anything that does anything like fix the underlying texture quirks like being able to make an alley without a pedestrian crossing/intersection being generated across the main road, or animated railroad crossings, nor do I see them appearing anytime soon.

Replies are in italics.

[Avanya 2,605]

@LivingInThePast How can you say "Unlimited money", "Unlock All", "Unlimited resources" and "Pollution, Death, Garbage and Crime Remover Mod" aren't cheats? Sure, not all mods are cheats, but some are, which is why achievements are disabled. There's a lot of those achievements, which are only a challenge because you have to manage income and services. It makes sense to have mods disable achievements, especially looking at the ones the game shipped with. Plus if you really want achievements, there's a mod to enable them while you're running mods.

[boformer 3,169]

@LivingInThePast Your user name somehow matches with the attitude in your comment

14 hours ago, LivingInThePast said:

Except modding doesn't go that far, and modding won't last term for a base game that's not solid. Would you use a table where the legs are made of wood glue?

I know the game internals and I can tell you that there is a solid technical base. One that can be modified/replaced in many ways. It's just that many of the default assets and some of the city services are bad.

Talking about limits: Actually manpower is the real limit we are facing. That's reason why I never published the larger zones mod.

14 hours ago, LivingInThePast said:

In actuality, I don't think anymore big mods are coming. I glanced through the forums here and Steam Workshop. There was an interesting "rush hour" mod in beta, which was cool but something SC4 did first, and appalling that CO wasted time with gimmick DLCs without addressing it, the traffic manager, Precision Engineering, Network Extensions, RICO, and a mess of buildings

CO integrated a lot of mods into the base game. Just think about road naming, priority roads, sub buildings, building styles, better measurement/snapping, multi-track stations, new road options and the upcoming road modding tool that was announced a while ago.

14 hours ago, LivingInThePast said:

but no one -as far as I know- has attempted or released anything that does anything like fix the underlying texture quirks like being able to make an alley without a pedestrian crossing/intersection being generated across the main road, or animated railroad crossings, nor do I see them appearing anytime soon.

Both technically possible. And while these were not made yet, we got many other things to play with.

Why so pessimistic?

[csSniper 1]

On 10/21/2016 at 5:19 PM, calpolyfan said:

Yeah, this game is not very good. It really never has been either.

CO do not understand what a city builder actually is, and it is showing.

I really do not like anything about this game, except the roads/rail and ability to place them creatively.  Other than that, I am not impressed with anything.

This game just has a "hollow" feel to it, where you don't feel like there is much behind the actual city simulation at all.

The game interface is poor, the graphics are poor, and sometimes hard to look at, especially when zoomed out further.

There really isn't any "skyline" simulation at all..  Buildings grow too tall too early, and are all 4x4? Are you kidding me? This is a joke.

 

Like I have said before, SimCity type games are more like Gardening than they are anything else-  You want to WORK to get that taller building... You don't want a flat-top sea of skyscrapers showing up, with no clear focus.

 

Cities seem to lack personality, vanilla architecture is awful.

No interconnections with other cities in the map, no larger city regions.

Areas which could have really become fun gameplay aspects: Ferry lines, Interface with real freight transfer between ships, trains, trucks, airports etc.. were somehow left out of the game..  Ships just drive over land if the land gets changed STILL.. is this a joke?

But mostly, the scale is just way off..  No larger plot sizes is just a joke more than a year later..  What is the point of this game exactly? Plopping everything?

 

They didn't even include a good building creation tool.. I mean, that's a basic thing and as far as I can tell it takes a college degree to import buildings and custom content into this game.

Having constant "Steam Updates" and needing essentially to be online, and having all your subscribed assets makes for a very clunky user experience, that isn't truely "offline".. and game load times are ridiculous.

Just an overall terrible city builder that looked very promising in the beginning, but was ultimately a let down.  Was it worth the 20 bucks or whatever? Probably, but it's not even as good as SimCity 4 really as far as re-play ability goes.

 

Very old post I know, but the thought seems to still apply.

Regardless who you intrust with creative credit Paradox, CO, Valve, Steam, CS all suck primarily on the sam tit. They all use each other as chess pawns and no one accepts responsibility for anything. As everyone knows there is no such thing as Customer Service to be found anywhere in the pile of BS that is associated in any way with Colossal Order.

[bitters 1]

On 2/23/2023 at 8:54 AM, csSniper said:

Very old post I know, but the thought seems to still apply.

Regardless who you intrust with creative credit Paradox, CO, Valve, Steam, CS all suck primarily on the sam tit. They all use each other as chess pawns and no one accepts responsibility for anything. As everyone knows there is no such thing as Customer Service to be found anywhere in the pile of BS that is associated in any way with Colossal Order.

The biggest disappointment for me is the Narrow close minded way the Cities Skylines Discussions are maintained.