Did 'Cities Skylines' Kind of Kill The City Builder Genre For a While?

calpolyfan · December 20, 2017

Hi There, Long time member on the forum, haven't commented in a while after the hype of Skylines wore off.

I am watching the city-building genre kind of go stale.

The last really good city building game was SimCity 4.. as Skylines is riddle with issues that make it (at least for me) annoying to play at best, but almost nonfunctional.

Often, (when a smaller scale especially) visually cities can look pretty good from some angles, but the game isn't fun, and I think I have slowly put my finger on why that is.

Cities Skylines was released at the perfect time to become hugely successful; a long drought in the City-Building Genre, combined with spectacular crash-and-burn always online annoyance of SimCity with tiny maps really alienating their fanbase, as well as the non-success of games such as Cities XL, and XXL.

The media Hype was huge around Skylines, and enough people believed it appeared that the game would be the perfect replacement for SimCity 4 that sales took off.

Right out the gate though, on the first day of gameplay I started to notice a number of things that didn't feel good about the game:

1. Bad City Graphics

(Usually I'm not a graphics stickler, but in a city building game the graphics are very important. The graphic style almost looked like a Mars Colony more than any city on Earth. The super vibrant pastel blues, greens, yellows, and pinks complimented soil that turns purple when it got polluted.. (interesting design choice).

At many levels of zoom, obvious graphical switches between large and small model files loading really grabbed the eye, and sharp looks to many of the buildings (for some reason the graphics, even when on higher setting are headache inducing.

To this day, the base graphics appear mostly the same as they were at launch, instead of say replacing them with better looking "Brooklyn/NY" designed sets for example, having paid the model designers a bit to use their sets commercially. Any mods added to the games already long load-times, which makes them not as fun as they could have been. Which leads to..

2. Game Load Times Ridiculous

It's hard to have fun playing this game, when even with the mod that speeds stuff up, game takes many minutes to load.. and what's even worse, when exiting the wait is excrutiatingly long. It's hard to have fun playing a game when load times are this poor and you're afraid to exit a city or do other things out of fear of waiting so long.

3. Game is Clunky - Over Ambitious / Under Optimized

The Traffic in this game is both a high point and a low point - It's a high point in so much that laying roads is flexible and rather easy to do and cars are individually simulated. There are also individual sims being generated and followed around everywhere. Every agent you see is simulated, not procedural generated.

Well, this is great in theory, but as the city grows, you can tell the computer isn't haven't too much fun playing 'simulate every little thing' on this scale. Usually around 100K population the simulation slows down, and thinks start getting clunkier. Around 250K things are pretty much unplayable (I bought a new computer for this game, apparently not the right one) to the point of generally being annoying in a 3D environment. This makes this game not so fun for building large cities - Not to mention a mod is needed to open up all the tiles on a map (come on guys).

Simulating Flowing Water was ambitious, but it might be the straw that broke the camel's back computer performance wise, and is it needed really?

Also, the joy of vehicles etc. quickly moving around your city is lost, as things run slower and slower due to so many agents being simulated.

This is the trade-off on simulating everything down to the single agent. Which I think was a big mistake. Had they procedural generated some aspects such as general traffic maps and just populated areas with vehicles where the player is focused and just generally simulated traffic elsewhere I don't think this game would have been such a CPU hog and building truly large cities would have been more possible.

For other areas, agents should have been simulated: Trains, Boats and Airplanes etc- these are large-scale infrastructure that people would pay more attention to on a larger map. Every single car on the other hand, let's just make this game playable and proceedurally create cars on the road when necessary to allow larger cities.

4. Very Large Cities Hard to Build Due to CPU Constraints.

Kind of mentioned this above, but very large cities are hard to build due to CPU constraints. The cities in Skylines, while bigger than SimCity 2013 are actually smaller than a SC4 region for example. In this aspect, we took a step backward in the city-building genre, and arguably one of the main reasons people play city simuators is to make massive cities. Unless you're running this thing on a supercomputer, that's just not possible.

5. Zoning / Zone Depth / Lack of Skyline Simulation

For a game called "Cities Skylines" there really isn't much skyline developing in any city you build, unless you plop buildings. There is a sea of "mid rise" skyscrapers topped out all about the same height- What a letdown! I was hoping to see a gentle arch toward the most expensive land values in town, and a corresponding skyline, but nope, there apparently is little, if any actual city simulation taking place regarding land values and other factors contributing to tall buildings.

Zoning is more limited than previous city buildings, and zones are 4 (very small) boxes deep. Zoning left many players very discouraged, with hopes that the zoning issues could be fixed via modding, but apparently they can not.

Both of these things are very bad for Colossal Order, as long before the game was launched people were pointing out the "painty" look to road placement, ergo "4 deep zones".. It just doesn't look right and creates for a repetitive/painted look to city growth. Even SimCity 4 would build in some generic blocks which is a much better method to placing zones and streets.

6. Really Bad Sound Effects

I don't usually complain about sound effects in a game, but these are the worst sound effects I have heard in a game in recent memory.

From the terrible bulldoze sound that is way too loud, repetitive, and just frankly annoying, to the sirens blaring way too loud and constant it's hard to be more annoying. Really nothing positive to say. How could it be this bad, and not fixed with an update? Yikes.

7. Stubbornness on the Side of the Developers

Want 3 Zoning densities? Too bad. Want Zones deeper than 4 tiles? Too bad. Want realistic looking buildings? Too bad. Don't like the Chirper? Too bad. Don't want Pastel Colored Goofy buildings and vehicles? Too bad. Want the entire map playable? Too bad.

There was a lot of almost cockiness/stubbornness with how the developers have interacted (or not) with the city-building fanbase. I think this team did an acceptable job making a city builder in 3d, but not an exceptional job in any way shape or form, and they have shown they really don't care what the majority of fans want or ask for, they're going to do it their way anyway.

8. Limited Transportation/ Lack of Sim.

Ships at ports will drive over land if land is terraformed, limited shipping aspects, trains run way too frequently it's almost a joke, and don't really serve much of a purpose. Airports are a joke, super tiny. No ferry options. No zoning of Aiports/ Seaports. Trams etc. are an extra money-grab. etc..

Especially the trains aspect was seriously botched in this game, and generally any type of transportation that isn't a road seems pretty flimsy/not simulated or thought about very well by the developers.

9. No Large groweable buildings

Since zone sizes are 4x4 and there appears to be no real building simulation running in this game (whereby downtown areas would get taller buildings than other areas) the only way to make a "skyline" pop is to add plopabble buildings. This is a huge letdown for most city building fans, as growing taller buildings is pretty much the entire purpose of a city building game.

I've said it before, but city building is more like gardening than anything else.. You create the conditions necessary for development, but have to wait for it to grow to its potential. Just selecting a building and plopping it completely misses the boat on what the purpose of a city building game is.

The anticipation of seeing what a new large skyscraper will be, as it grows from foundation up is a huge aspect of city building games which is generally overlooked.

Not to mention, the lack of building height variety, and this game is a complete let down, with repetitive looking cities with buildings all on pretty much the same lot size and no focus to the skylines and urban development. Really, really bad.

Yes, CO was able to sell many copies of its game, but after playing for a while, I think most city builder fans clearly understand this game is not "the one" by any stretch.

Because Skylines was marketed so well, came into the market at the right time, etc. it gobbled up a majority of the city building fanbase.. Who were "happy enough" with it to not ask for a different game.. The irony is, Skylines might kill the city building genre for a while. Had this game not come out, I wonder if we all might be playing a much more fun, actual city simulator game that for all intents and purposes could be a better City Builder right now.

I personally think this game is not fun, has a number of serious issues, and is actually fundamentally irritating at times, unlike anything I experienced with any SimCity game.

I think the City-Building genre has shown a very rabid fanbase that will spend money on a good city building game. Let's hope we get that game.

Or Maybe, the fact that Cities Skylines sold so well, and really wasn't a finished city-building game and could have been a lot better will interest some other game designers to try their own attempt at a city-building game?

Hard to tell whether Skylines will dominate the city-building genre for a while longer, or whether another developer thinks they can do better and the market is still viable.

If Skylines has shown one thing, it's that City-builder games can and will sell, and make plenty of money. The super-shooter/racing etc. gamer needs are met, but city-builder fans have been under appealed to, making the opportunity still there for a very profitable city builder if done correctly.

Turjan · December 20, 2017

I think the main issue here is, for a city builder to really look good and sell outside of the hardcore fan base, you need quite a lot of money. To earn that money back, you need to sell lots of copies. In order to sell lots of copies, you need the game to be rather accessible for casual players and, on the technical side, limit the scope to have a broader base of possible machines it can run on. All of this explains why C:S basically is the game it is. It wasn't even expected to sell as much as it did, otherwise there would have probably been put more work into engine development. We will see what their approach will be the next time.

I'm afraid that nobody sees the hardcore city builder audience as large enough to merit spending on AAA production values married to hardcore management mechanics. I love SC4, but I also see that it wasn't really beloved when it was released. Too complicated. For developers that means: too risky.

I wonder when they will start on the next game or whether they already did. If the achievements are anything to go by, we can see that the core player audience from the start was about 10% of all buyers. These are the players that built at least a 9-tile city, 9% managed to unlock monuments, less than 5% ever reached more than 100,000 inhabitants (although these are longtime players where a fraction may use mods and doesn't care for achievements). Snowfall managed to still mostly reach the latter group, as 3.8% built a sauna in their cities and 3.1% experienced snowfall. Natural disaster managed to reach about 1.8% or about half of the Snowfall audience. The highest Mass Transit achievements clock in at 0.6%. Green Cities comes in at 0.2% if you look at the relevant achievements. The "Green Energy" achievement is a good way to see the amount of players that still play the game at all, as it came with "Green Cities", was added to the base game, and is unlocked when you start a new city with a wind turbine, and this comes in at 8.2% percent. Steamspy puts the current player base also at about 9.5%. I wonder whether this means that the base game still sells decently, but the audience for expansions dried up, or whether it's all old players who just didn't like the new expansions. Probably a mix.

calpolyfan · December 21, 2017

I think it's time that CO move on to the next game.

They need a better engine or better way to reduce polygons or not actually to simulate every sim. in order to make this a fun game, where you can have very large cities.

I would recommend making the scale of the next game 10KM by 10KM, so building regions and countries in a regional mesh would be easier accomplished.

Also, a "sim" of rail routes and airplane routes/ ferry routes and shipping would be generated using these 10 by 10 squares as a distance for costs and travel times between distant cities on a much larger scale map.

This way, you could have the actual use for an interesting airport. and shipyard.

On a large-scale multi player map, trade deals would be made, as only the players who were online would be adding on during any given time.. and property could be bought/sold and deals made with utilities, airline routes, shipping deals etc. between cities on an enormous map, which was only updated when/if players were online..

When you think about it - "City Builder" Games really are the perfect thing for a multi-player game, but it has never been done.

Lost Gecko · December 22, 2017

Cities: Skylines was my first city building game so I don't have the experience as far as comparisons go, but while I overall agree with what is being said here, there are a couple of points I'd like to make.

I originally bought the game for what it looked like "vanilla" because I love city planning and simulation wit all the creativity that goes with it. While I had fun for a little while, I soon wanted to create my own assets to be able to make exactly what I want in the game, and that's how I became a "city painter".

This wasn't because I was disappointed in the simulation aspect and looked for something else, but as time went by I indeed came to the conclusion that some fundamental aspects of the game were pretty lackluster, especially on the simulation side. I do love creating beautiful cities and only worry about the looks but I do wish I was able to actually simulate the city at the same time. I think that vision of the game has been increasingly developing among many people, certainly "city painters".

That being said, my main point is that Colossal Order was (and still is) a tiny company with very limited resources when they made the game. As much a many people (me included sometimes) want to complain about their design and development choices, most of the existing issues stem from the game being build by a small team who couldn't possibly dream of the success their game would have. So yes, there are tons of fundamental weaknesses, design flaws and overall I would argue almost a certain feel of amateurism (non-exhaustive list of examples of small yet frustrating details in the spoiler), but unfortunately it all comes down to a lack of resources, and they can't really be blamed for that.

Spoiler

Sun rising in the West - inverted red channel in normal maps - normal map strength weakening on UV rotation - washed out yellowish tint after After Dark - broken animated UV shader after the Mas Transit update (fixed) - ship shader used for monorails - unplanned decreased tree LOD render distance - broken asset format for updated pre-Mass Transit assets (fixed) - different lighting settings in asset editor and in game - ...

All these things are pretty minor details but there is a consistent list of inconsistencies plaguing every aspect of the game design that give the feel of an overall lack of quality and professionalism... Not that relevant to the conversion though, hence the spoiler. I only made that list to illustrate my point for those who are interested.

As for the stubbornness of the developers, I would have to disagree. As much as I would want to see the aspects you listed improved, it's not possible to do so on the go once the game is released. Most of these things need a complete rework of how the whole game works, which is impossible to achieve in a game update for tons of reasons. They tried to implement what they could from what the community has been asking: the DLC contents are pretty much all adressing the wishes of the community, albeit not always in the way we would have hoped.

I'm uncertain about agent-based vs procedural simulation. Both have their merits and downsides, and I think it's more a matter of preference than one being obviously better. There is undeniably a certain appeal to being able to follow every individual process of city life, from people visiting their favourite park to studying the goods supply chain of the city. And with all the problems traffic has, the agent-based simulation really allows you to design your infrastructure in a meaningful way, because everything you do will have a direct impact on individual citizens. Similarly, water physics add a lot of depth to the simulation and visuals, and I don't think it's that much of a strain on resources, so I'm all for it.

So overall, I agree with most of your criticism but for me it all originates in the core of the game being made with limited resources, which given the context can be excused and cannot be changed now that the game is released. Which brings us to a potential future city-building game hopefully adressing these issues.

Coming back to your orginal statement, I'm convinced CS didn't kill the city-building genre but rather revived it. CO proved that demand is there and they have managed to make a successful game with what they had, which regardless of its actual quality is a superb achievement. I hope they will work on a CS2 and take advantage of their success, experience and money to make it more polished and with an actual in-depth simulation, but I realise that everyone wishes something different and there will also be great aspects of the original game that won't go into the second one.

All of this was pretty critical of the game so here is also a list of things that the game got right and should totally expand upon (as stated earlier some of those are more down to preference than being objectively better than something else):

large maps (I wouldn't enjoy 10x10km maps which would be 3x smaller) - water physics - terraforming freedom - road layout freedom - modding support (gives so much more depth and replayability) - agent-based simulation - recently added road editor ...

Not a huge list but these are much more fundamental aspects than my previous list...

Overall I really love and enjoy the game, aknowledging its merits while at the same time wishing for a new one that would go that much needed step further... But once again I think CS was very beneficial to the city-building game industry than the opposite, we'll see how it goes...

Thank you for your time reading this awful long comment...

For further reading thee is https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/71734-have-co-lost-touch-with-what-players-want/ with people expressing similar opinions to mine way better than I do and of course very interesting various points of view...

T Wrecks · December 22, 2017

As for your overall question, I agree with most of what @Turjan stated: it is a niche, and it is complicated. You cannot simply license a nice pre-made engine, slap your own textures and models on it, design a UI, think of a story / scenario and call it a day. Many of your points of criticism relate to performance, so a highly performing engine would be a necessity. In a 3D shooter, you can find workarounds by limiting the environment (e.g. inside dungeon, narrow areas instead of open outside), but for a city simulator there isn't really a way around showing a large area with a high amount of details, or you run into either of the following situations (one of which you criticised):

city big, graphics poor
graphics good, city small

There is also not much development and no real competition to speak of, which hampers progress.

To address some of your individual points from the point of view of someone who doesn't play C:SL, but has lots of experience with SimCity 1-4:

On 20.12.2017 at 6:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

1. Bad City Graphics
See above - and IMO, full 3D is not practical yet for city simulators. You either go detailed, high-performing pre-rendered 2D and lose some "free form" abilities, or you go cloudy, low-poly, low-resolution 3D and gain these abilities at the cost of detail level and visual beauty. All detailed and fully 3D would be ideal, of course - but the genre as a whole is underdeveloped, I think. We are in a stage of transition.

A few examples: Yes, freely draggable roads are wonderful, that's 2015. But we are still stuck with static, rectangular lots, and that's 1985. IIRC, Cities XL required fields with roads all around, and all fields had one texture in the same orientation, totally disregarding the overall orientation of field and terrain. Some games are developed with almost scientific precision and accuracy these days (and it's been a long way that still goes on), city simulators don't even get many basics right yet. Due to the lack of player base and hence, competition, they will always lag far behind, I fear.

2. Game Load Times Ridiculous
To be fair, SC4 isn't a fast-loading game, either - imagine that on the computer you'd have had in 2003, when SC4 came out!

3. Game is Clunky - Over Ambitious / Under Optimized
Transitional period / lack of development again IMO. Either we need more potent computers and optimized engines for agent-based simulation, or we need more game concept development for developers to know whether all that resource-gobbling agent-based simulation adds to the actual gameplay or can be replaced by smarter systems. To cite an example from a different genre, in your typical hack-and-slay action RPG (think Diablo et al.), you'd buy healing potions, find healing potions, sell healing potions, refill healing potions... and yes, you could probably design intricate interfaces for all of this. In a more recent game, they took the whole cycle of:
"use healing potion => slay monster => find a dropped healing potion => pick up healing potion => place healing potion where you want it => run back into town and buy new ones when you run out"
and switched to permanently useable flasks that re-fill gradually as you kill monsters, or re-fill completely once you enter a town. And it works! The result is pretty much the same, but they did away with all the clutter. Smart solutions like these may still come for city simulators - think of traffic representations that are merely visual and hardly cost resources, but turn into agents as the camera is on them (why follow a car that the player doesn't follow? That would be the same as rendering the back side of a wall that the player only ever sees from its front side - obvious nonsense, as 3D shooter developers would tell you. City simulators aren't that far yet). Something like that.

4. Very Large Cities Hard to Build Due to CPU Constraints.
This, too, is a problem with SimCity 4 as well (again: think 2003 computer!). City simulators may be the genre with the highest total amount and density of items that need to simulated concurrently at relatively high detail, and including complex interactions with one another.

5. Zoning / Zone Depth / Lack of Skyline Simulation
I've heard similar questions for SimCity4, too: new users would ask "where are the skysrcapers", and after showing some screenshots, people would tell them: "dude - you already got them. They don't get much bigger". I guess this was due to rendering constraints back in 2003. For Colossal Order, it may have been a question of poylgon count / texture size in game.

6. Really Bad Sound Effects
OK, I cannot comment on that, never having played C:SL. But the bulldozing sounds & effects in SC4, that little street building routine and the police helicopter endlessly hovering over that one spot are not too pleasant, either.

7. Stubbornness on the Side of the Developers
TBH, I had the impression this was worse both with SC:S and with SC5. Escpecially before the SC:S release, they came here and pretended to listen and gather input, when they already had the 3/4 finished game under the desk. It was pure marketing, and a poor attempt at that.

8. Limited Transportation/ Lack of Sim.
To be fair, SC4 has a half-implemented region concept where traffic will be simulated within each tile on its own, but that's it. The transit switching logic isn't flawless, either - think of Sims driving to the station on their way to work and riding the bus home... airports are plopped in one piece and are super tiny as well. But yes, you'd guess there had been more progress meanwhile.

9. No Large groweable buildings
SC4 is lacking in this aspect, too, only more in the footprint aspect - the lot sizes of warehouses, malls, factories etc. are ridiculous, for example.

Mind you, I'm not quoting and commenting all these points to incite a "which game is better" debate! What I'm trying to point out is that many of your points of criticism (which, to me at least, sound justified to a large degree) are points that apply to this game genre as a whole and are not exclusive to C:SL.

The good aspect about this? There's massive potential still in this genre!
The bad aspect? I predict once again that development will be slow and sometimes clumsy because there hardly ever are more than two relevant games on the market at any given time. Lessons will therefore be learnt and implemented slowly.

Turjan · December 22, 2017

For what it's worth, my criticisms of this game became much more mellow when I hit its technical limits (I'm not referring to the building limits, which is kind of artificial and made me furious, but they increased that one). When discussing some computer issues after a Windows update on a different forum recently, I mentioned that I sometimes run out of memory in my 32 GB RAM system. The obvious follow-up question to me was what the heck I was playing that would exhaust 32 GB of RAM. It's a luxury problem.

Fantozzi · December 22, 2017

58 minutes ago, T Wrecks said:

There is also not much development and no real competition to speak of, which hampers progress.

This might be a crucial point often overseen in critics. Market on media is special and different from f.e. market on cars. On cars it's possible to produce 'luxury products' with maybe 500 or 1000 exemplars to sell but at very high price - so those manufacturers, even development costs are a heavy factor on production costs, they can make it.

On media this never worked. There were several approaches to make high quality products for smaller audiences but this didn't work econommically. In media - no matter if it's books, movies, computer games, music . all what counts is the amount of copies you can sell. While on cars it's possible to make up a brand like lamborghini with a few luxury models - on media this doesn't work. 'Luxury media' doesn't exist in this sense - there is no audience for prestige products, it's a classical mass product - therefor called massmedia.

But you can change a common volkswagen into an individual, exclusive product, by 'modding' it. The same happens on games. Basically modding is to turn the mass product into individual products, like a pimped car.

But basically - if you wait for big companies to make individualized products for a small audience you may wait forever. They tend to maximize the selling of copies at reasonable prices, trying to limit risks. It's a much lesser risk to make things again that already have been successfull. Making another star wars remake instead inventing something new. Etc.

I'm afraid, city builders aren't mainstream products - or if they are done too sophisticated, too complex so it's only for adults with certain logic abilities, not for little children, not for the player searching some quick action - they become some kind of luxury products for a small elaborated audience. And therefore is of no interest for companies bound to sell as many copies as possible.

It's like art - on a certain level, poems, sculptures, opera - it's for a few experts they are able to enjoy because they have a corresponding education - it becomes elitist, intellectual. Making elitist stuff - works on cars and watches but not on computer games. Like Lego. Lego is regarded a childs game. So are city builders. There are adults enjoying to make great stuff with Lego. But they don't make up a relevant market.

matias93 · December 22, 2017

Dunno, from the standpoint of an SC4 player, CSL looks like having some desirable niceties: I'm particularly envious of the possibility of creating bus routes and to see the city from an immersive perspective.

But yes, several other things are outrightly impossible to implement with today's technology, and trying to do it tends to end in disaster. The agent approach should be the biggest example of it, but up to what I understand, it is a combinatory problem: for example, all the Tropico series has been based on agents (otherwise you wouldn't be able to persecute political opponents, a big part of the game), but on the first release the graphic demands weren't as remotely big as the newer ones, and the game was very fluid even on simple hardware. And on the other hand, many games are very efficient with their graphics and work great with high configurations. The problem is to make both things at the same time.

Avanya · December 22, 2017

I completely disagree with your overall statement. If anything Cities: Skylines has shown there's still interest in the genre after the failure of SimCity 2013 and the re-release of Cities XL as Cities XXL. Is Cities: Skylines perfect? Nope, not at all. But that doesn't mean it can't be a good game. It isn't all black and white, where it's either perfect or absolute crap. As others have pointed out there isn't a ton of competition in this genre - and had SC 2013 not messed up its launch we might not even have CS. While it was CO's eventual goal to make a city builder, Paradox wasn't ready to take the chance while the SimCity franchise was dominating the genre.

1. Bad City Graphics

The sad thing here is most of the default buildings are actually pretty decent! The game is just very oversaturated and too bright washing out a lot of the nice details. On top of that many buildings have some weird color options and would look so much better with less crazy colors. I wonder what the purple pollution looks like with some of all those graphical mods and LUTs that make the game properly balanced. It might even be a lot less weird, though agree purple is a weird color and a more yellow-brown would probably have done a better job.

More levels of detail would make for smoother transitions when zooming in, but considering the workshop aspect of the game and how many creators do not even add the one low detail model I'm not sure more levels would look great for anything but the vanilla game.

As for buying models of workshop creators it's not as simple as that. If I remember correctly Feindbild used images from Google Streetview for at least part of the textures on the Brooklyn/NY assets, which is copyrighted images. For anything paid for and added to the game you can't have copyrighted material or grey areas. And if the models were made in 3D Max student version, then the creator would need to buy a license for the full version to sell his/her models.

2. Game Load Times Ridiculous

Now I'm not sure what "many minutes" is to you, but I honestly don't think the loading times are that bad - at least not as long as you don't exceed what your system can handle. Ofc 20-30 min is crazy and we used to have that, but one of the recent patches actually changed that. My loading times are about the same with or without the Loading Screen Mod - and around 5 min while almost maxing out what my system can handle. I haven't played much SimCity in the later years, but I remember about the same or longer loading times for The Sims games and MMOs are about that too. I don't think <10 min is unreasonable, especially for a modded game.

3. Game is Clunky - Over Ambitious / Under Optimized / 4. Very Large Cities Hard to Build Due to CPU Constraints.

Honestly it's been so long since I played unmodded I don't remember how well the game performs. And when we're talking about performance, we have to look at the game without mods. The devs can never be responsable for what mods do to the game. Looking at a 9 tile city I don't think it's too bad with the agent based simulation and you're very unlikely to hit any of the limits in the game. Sure, your options to speed up the game don't do terribly much and I'm not sure how well the game runs at the minimum specs, but what really makes it slow is the mods. 25 tiles is a whole different beast than 9 with a much larger population.

I disagree that the agent based simulation was the wrong choice. It's something I find really cool and makes me care more about my city. I like the fact that it's "real people" living and working in my city and not just pretend traffic. I like that I can follow a person around, see where they work, see where they relax and so on. But like T Wrecks pointed out it doesn't need to be 100% simulated all the time. I think a lot of the points about limited competition in the genre and no great commercial engines are the root of this really. I wonder what it could have been like with a custom built engine designed specifically for the needs of the game. CO built their own engine for CIM and CIM2, so perhaps on the success of CS a sequel might get just that.

5. Zoning / Zone Depth / Lack of Skyline Simulation

I'm pretty sure the limits we see in zone types (and medium density missing) and size are a result of the small team. You'd need at least double the amount of buildings for a max lot size of 8x8 and I just don't think they had enough artists to do that. Ofc maybe not all zones need all sizes, but we'd still need more buildings than now and as you mention yourself there's already a lot of repetition.

As for the mod for larger zones that's doable and AJ3D even showed of a working version of the mod. But it's a lot of work and as far as I can tell it's been only/mostly boformer and AJ3D doing the work, so it just isn't ready yet.

6. Really Bad Sound Effects

I disagree the sound effects are bad. Ideally we could tweek them more, but at least turning ambient sounds down will go a long way. As for sirens, they're annoying in the real world too.

7. Stubbornness on the Side of the Developers

I gotta say, at this point you're being really unfair and either don't realise or just decided to ignore what they have actually implemented due to feedback. Yeah, they haven't added medium density or made zones larger, but that's a large undertaking, which most likely isn't worth the work. Unlike mods they need to provide ALL the buildings and can't just wait for creators to add them over time. And that's not even getting into any performance issues that might come with such things. Mods don't have to care about Bob with the potato laptop, they can go way beyond what he can handle and just say "too bad" - anything official has to work within the minimum requirements and with the current DLCs I think we've actually gone past the minimum amount of RAM.

The day/night cycle was added after the initial feedback from players. Disasters was a requested feature that was added. Ferries (and most of Mass Transit) came about from player feedback. Ofc the problem is everyone doesn't want the same, so they can't please everyone. They've also changed their patch cycles to be more gentle with mods and started the modding beta to let mod creators test their mods before a patch hits. They've added a network editor so we can make our own networks without knowing how to mod. Ofc there's a lot of stuff they haven't added and everything hasn't been exactly how people wanted it (like Snowfall not bringing seasons), but to say they don't listen and don't care what fans want simply isn't true. They add requested stuff where it makes sense and follows their vision for the game.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everything they've added was exactly how I wanted it, but I understand that they have their own ideas for what the game should be and that those might not be the same as mine. However much I'd like them to make the game exactly how I want it, I'd much rather have them follow a their vision than make left and right turns at the whim of fans. I'd rather have a game that isn't entirely how I wanted it than some weird mix of fan-of-the-day's ideas that don't even fit together.

8. Limited Transportation/ Lack of Sim.

I find public transportation and import of goods via trains and ships is a big part of running a good city. A lot of the game is about traffic management and non-car transport plays a large part in that. As for small airports I think you forget the game was designed with a 9 tile max. Realisticly sized airports take up too much space, so we got smaller versions.

9. No Large groweable buildings

This has mostly been covered already, but I agree that it's too easy to reach the higher levels.

I personally think this game is a lot of fun. There's room for improvement, sure, and I have higher expectations for Cities: Skylines 2. I think CO are on the right track and have learned a lot of valuable lessons with their first large title. But I completely disagree with the notion that Cities: Skylines has killed the genre - if anything I think it's showed there's still a lot of interest in it.

matias93 · December 23, 2017

I was up to say something about the themes mentioned but was on the phone and without much battery, so now.

1. Bad graphics: yup, for what I've seen, some textures aren't the best they can have done, mainly because of the colour choices. You really don't need super HD textures to have a good looking game, regular textures can do wonders if well designed and adequately balanced in colours. For example, @rivit, GM Leguim and @Finnbhennach have put a lot of effort on making texturing a precise and standardised procedure, almost scientifical on its approach for SC4, also building on the legacy of Simfox. It's certainly a doable thing, on which one would expect the game creators have the main responsibility, but the modders can also help. I'm also with T Wrecks on this: real 3D is beautiful and all, but not really the way to go when you want big cities being simulated as a whole.

2. Load times: I'm not sure of what is considered a normal and a realistically desirable loading time for CSL, but on SC4 load times almost grow exponentially with the addition of custom content. My experience as a crazy hoarder of plugins (about 8 Gb loaded on each game session and counting) is that, even with all the available optimisation measures (datpacking, strategic ordering, cleaning and defragmenting), my loading times are around the mark of 30 minutes between loading the game itself and a city. Even changing from subway or zones view to the normal mode can take one or two minutes, and there's not much to do about it. These ones are simply the most detailed and variated kind of games in existence, and unless talking about loading times, we users actively value and prefer a diversity of content.

3. Clunky and overambitious game: yup, but that's not surprising at all: city simulation games are, almost by definition, overstretched on their features, and flawed on their execution. As I said before: agent simulation is not a bad idea by itself but combined with crisp 3D graphics and HD textures, is a recipe for disaster. Maybe the suggestion for future developers of the genre would be to tandem on both methods. Again as T Wrecks, I think you can safely suspend the agent simulation for most of the sims or cims, and only use it when querying a selected few for feedback purposes; you can even use an algorithm to determine which agents will find each other and only simulate them (I think a Monte Carlo method can be used for this). A similar approach would be useful for the 3D view: just as Google Earth does, the game could only load in full detail and texture resolution the buildings inside a determined area around the current view, keeping the overall city as a barebones model; yes, this makes sudden movement through the city more clunky, but reduces drastically the RAM usage and makes the game itself more accessible to a wider gamer base (which we want as it makes the chances of competition grow). For the traffic simulation, while I would initially fear that ditching the agent simulation could cause some neat features to be lost (as the aforementioned bus routes), on a second thought, they can be adequately simulated without agents, by simply increasing the categories of traffic and making special classes for each bus or train line, restricting them the movement to a single route instead of letting them to devise their optimal route.

4. City sizes: dunno, but I think that a really huge city is not only unmanageable for your CPU and your RAM, but also for you as a city player and planner. A better implementation of regional playing and connections would be much more fruitful that insisting on big city tiles that are clunky to use, hard to understand as a whole and too much strain on your hardware. On this, there are also cultural preferences. Me, as a latin american, make very compact and dense cities, so a 16 km² square appears like a lot of city, on which many things fit (but, of course, not an entire metropolis). Maybe for anglosaxon players things are much different, as your cities in real life are a handful of blocks of skyscrapers and hundreds of km² of suburbs with little or no diversity of zoning: of course that you don't want to see your cims or sims having no place to buy food or go to work, and that's much more probable on an equal area of suburbs than a dense and mixed city.If you want, this is even a political bias on the way the game is designed and played (sorry, I had to do that).

5. Zoning and skyscrapers: on zoning you have the entire point. Definitely restricting that is dumb and unnecessary (even if, I assume, there could be some rationale on doing so when your game allows free dragging of roads, which can cause strangely shaped lots that would be difficult to process and orient otherwise). Diverging from Avanya, I think you don't need to impose a hard limit on zone sizes because of a lack of different lots for it: you can always keep the larger zones as a dormant feature, ready to be exploited by custom content creators, just as everything bigger than 6x6 in SC4. Also, there is the traditional grievance of the mixed zones, which are abundant in real life but sadly absent from city simulators. On skyscrapers, I tend to feel that is somewhat right to restrict the height of normal growing buildings, for the sake of realism: in real life, most humongously huge project will always be controversial and require a lot of government involvement, even to the point of giving tax breaks and stimuli to get them to be built on a determined city, so is very realistic that you have to deliberately plop the bigger towers instead of simply waiting for them to develop spontaneously. Maybe SC4 reward lots would be an adequate model for this: you are offered a big project which demands resources and free space, and promises certain effects on your city, but you are the one deciding if the project goes or not.

6. Bad sounds: well, no idea about CSL, and yes, SC4 has some quirky sounds (even if the music is simply gorgeous, as said by someone that has literally loaded the songs on his phone). But that sounds like something very much moddable too, and you can always silence the game and put music from another source instead (I do that for stability purposes, indeed, on SC4).

7. Stubborn devs: I'm not adequately informed of this, but for all I know, the people at CO are still actively developing their game, and indeed asked the city simulator community for feedback when designing CSL and its DLCs. We cannot say the same of Maxis Emeryville after what EA did with it. If something, Paul Pedriana has been kind and considerate enough to point @simmaster07 to some useful resources for DLL modding the game and fixing long-accepted bugs that were easily fixable with access to the code. In more general lines, what you still have in both cases is a game that you buy, but that is the code of someone else, and that's a hard limit on what you can make the developers do: their own will. Until one of this heavily modded games gets their source code opened to the public domain, we will be stuck with the problem of stubborn devs, and even after that, you still will need to make a fork of the code and be proficient enough on programming to change things against the will of the main developers.

8. Limited transportation: mainly what we all said on point 3. It is desirable to have traffic simulated at all levels? YES! What we would be open to sacrifice in terms of simulation to get a better transit simulation? I would say that private transportation, but that's debatable. I tend to feel that to make good public transportation simulations, you need control about time tables and routes, which means a lot of micromanaging that makes playing much more difficult. Maybe the solution here could be to use an AI to auto-generate time tables and routes, while keeping them customisable by the user., but that's extra strain on your CPU. If you ask me, I prefer that to full 3D, but again, debatable.

9. No large growing buildings: see point 5.2. Bigger buildings: bigger political problems: as a mayor, you should be involved on that, not passively see them grow.

In resume: almost everything is moddable and what not, we can only hope will be added on a future game or a open source version of the ones we learnt to play and love.

Jasoncw · December 23, 2017

I think after seeing how much attention SC2013 got, a small team thought they could do a better job and make some money. They did do a better job and they did make some money.

A lot of times, game makers are genuine fans of the types of games that they make. Like if you looked at the staff working on a FPS, I'd bet you that a lot of them made Half Life 2 mods when they were younger. The people in charge of designing RPGs were probably designing RPGs in their notebooks in middle school. The people who made CS have played SimCity games and have enjoyed them, but they haven't been in the SimCity community. They tried to get an idea of what people wanted and they got a lot of things right, but they missed out on a lot of things too.

The zoning and building growth are two easy examples. The 32m max zone size is unacceptably small, and whatever they thought they were doing that forced that limit, they needed to restart the design process to solve that problem. It's as simple as that. For building growth, that is also a very basic element of a city sim game. For starting out the design process and thinking about the basic things which are needed in order for a city sim to work well, the building growth is an important part of it. And when they were doing their research (or through being genuine fans of the genre) they should have learned about SC4's growth stage system. Even SC2k and SC3k tried to deal with it by making the center of the map have higher land values so there'd be more skyscrapers there, making the assumption that people would put their downtowns in the middle. Those are two examples, but I feel like there are other times when they missed out on core functionalities of city simulators.

It *is* true that city simulators are complex games. That makes them harder to develop. But I also think that city simulators also have very enthusiastic modding communities that will generate massive amounts of game content for basically forever.

I think most of us here understand that the true task of developing a city simulation game is solving all the core game mechanics and creating a solid foundation for modders to create content.

But anyway back to the main question, I think that the the attention that SC2013 got, and the success that SC has had, and the longevity of SC4, have all proven city sims to be a reliable niche genre. I don't think that another studio will want to try to compete against Cities Skylines until they feel they can beat it, because I don't think there's much pie to go around. As computers get better and development tools get better, it will be easier to make a city sim game capable of outdoing the previous one. Cities Skylines was not released that long ago and is still actively getting DLC.

Fantozzi · December 23, 2017

6 hours ago, Jasoncw said:

I think most of us here understand that the true task of developing a city simulation game is solving all the core game mechanics and creating a solid foundation for modders to create content.

Exactly. A good mechanics (a nice looking environment and elaborated network) and a easy to use tool to create content (buildings and elements). I always thought the trick to advance the genre to a new level would be to create the game itself only as a quite empty framework (the logic structure, the algorithms), selling it for $10. Instead promoting the creation software and selling it for $100. making it a hybrid between a game and a user programm. Dividing the software world into these separated parts - serious software and funny games - this classic culutural making distances (like serious music and popular music, belles-lettres and high-literature) - I personlly think the genre is entrapped in the same silly classification. As a good simulation only partially is a game. And the desires to develop is a creative desire only covered by user programs. Modern games will be more a playground you want to put your own creations in.

City builders don't work best as brief entertainment but more as a creative tool, a simulation framework. Like a garden, an allotment. A quite empty space you cultivate and design it by your own hands work. At the end - what we really want - tools to be more creative, not always repeating the same moves with the same objects.

I don't think we need perfect games. But games more flexible to tweak them towards our sense of perfection. That's what the NAM does - with its dozends of install options - f.e. on SC4. That's all the modding is about. One has to see modding as a great part of the fun for many users One has to think thart the most creative game would be a game where modding is the central part of gaming. One could even imagine gaming and modding not being different things but melting into one. Yes, I think, that's the future.

ghosty20 · December 25, 2017

On 12/22/2017 at 10:16 AM, calpolyfan said:

I think it's time that CO move on to the next game.

They need a better engine or better way to reduce polygons or not actually to simulate every sim. in order to make this a fun game, where you can have very large cities.

I would recommend making the scale of the next game 10KM by 10KM, so building regions and countries in a regional mesh would be easier accomplished.

Also, a "sim" of rail routes and airplane routes/ ferry routes and shipping would be generated using these 10 by 10 squares as a distance for costs and travel times between distant cities on a much larger scale map.

This way, you could have the actual use for an interesting airport. and shipyard.

On a large-scale multi player map, trade deals would be made, as only the players who were online would be adding on during any given time.. and property could be bought/sold and deals made with utilities, airline routes, shipping deals etc. between cities on an enormous map, which was only updated when/if players were online..

When you think about it - "City Builder" Games really are the perfect thing for a multi-player game, but it has never been done.

Cities XL and SimCity 2013 tried the online routine and well we saw how that turned out.. Cities XL developer patched out the online requirement and shut the servers down, and folks lamb roasted EA/Maxis for the always online bit and they eventually patched out the need to be online to play..

OT: I would say that EA/Maxis damaged the city builder genre with SimCity 2013, with its tiny maps and many bugs.. I would say that Cities Skylines has revived the genre a bit and brought it into the light.. I like CSL a lot due to what it can do, and with mods I can have the whole map to play around in, and on that part the quality of the mods coming out for the game are getting much better..

Also you have to remember this is CO's first foray into the City Building genre and maybe with what they have learnt, if they ever make CSL2 then they may put what they have learned into practice..

calpolyfan · December 25, 2017

2 hours ago, ghosty20 said:

Cities XL and SimCity 2013 tried the online routine and well we saw how that turned out.. Cities XL developer patched out the online requirement and shut the servers down, and folks lamb roasted EA/Maxis for the always online bit and they eventually patched out the need to be online to play..

OT: I would say that EA/Maxis damaged the city builder genre with SimCity 2013, with its tiny maps and many bugs.. I would say that Cities Skylines has revived the genre a bit and brought it into the light.. I like CSL a lot due to what it can do, and with mods I can have the whole map to play around in, and on that part the quality of the mods coming out for the game are getting much better..

Also you have to remember this is CO's first foray into the City Building genre and maybe with what they have learnt, if they ever make CSL2 then they may put what they have learned into practice..

I am not saying I want an online-always game. Quite the contrary actually, I despise online always games, and I agree, that's definitely a major reason SimCity2013 failed (and the small maps).

I generally avoid buying "online always" games, and that's why I was excited about Skylines, even though I was skeptical about it being on Steam - but then, after I got it on Steam I realized it wasn't really "offline always" as there were constant updates etc and login requirements on Steam that basically made it "technically offline" but essentially you needed to keep re-logging online to get it to work. That sucked.

This was a pretty big let-down for me, as I like the simplicity of games like SC-4 where there isn't nonsense about updates etc, and the game just loads. You download mods and buildings when you want to be logged in and just do it manually, worked just fine.

What I was saying is that I would love to see a large-scale multiplayer aspect incorporated into the city building genre. Imagine A big map of Europe, divided into 10KM squares. Each player chooses a start location , and is able to purchase squares directly adjacent, not unlike maps in Skylines, only on a much larger scale.

Distances between cities on the map would be generated for trade deals, but the squares in between these distant cities would just be generated data - with the exception of shipping routes, and maybe train routes which would use pathfinding around the larger map.

Players could play when they wanted to, and not play when they had things to do, only have the game update after they hit the "update" button which would require being online.

When they logged back in, they would see the map update where other players cities had grown etc (maybe an infographic would be nice) and present the player with any trade deals (Shipping, Airport Slots/routes, outside rail or highway connection request, trash/power deals etc.) other players had proposed and they could either agree, or refuse said agreements with other players.

Imagine you have an airport you built - There could be an aerobiz kind of slot selling component - and you could make deals with other players regarding setting up airline routes - trade deals regarding shipping, airports, and long-distance trains even, where other players trains/airplanes/ships from great distances pull into your seaport - Wouldn't that be cool?, where your painted ships/planes stand in stark contrast.

Seeing your airport get demand based on the cities population and economy- and you would physically have to increase the airport size by adding gates - but there could also be an airline/company aspect to the game where you buy particular kinds of airplanes and assign them to routes to distant cities that either you build or make deals with other players on the map. The planes that pulled in and out of the airport gates would actually be run by you (and other players) and painted in your city/company colors.. Players with more influence would be known map-wide by their planes making more frequent showings at your airports.. same with ships, and trains.

That would be a lot of fun for me.. and that's kind of what I've always hoped would happen with city builders.

ghosty20 · December 26, 2017

These two images are why I find CSL really cool just the view alone is nice this map I play pretty much exclusively because it looks so cool.. Either way it is a good step in the right direction, if CO do, do CSL2 can only know I should be better..

I do have Sc2013, SC4, Cities XL Platinum and have not played any of them in a long long time.. SC2013 I hate the how restricted and buggy it is, SC4 not played for a very long time as does not really excite me anymore and Cities XL well it looks nice but that is it.. I was just so happy to have a new city builder to play with and to me anyway CSL is my go to game when I need my city building fix..

And maybe if we do see CSL 2 they may add in region play ala SC4 and to a lesser extent SC2013, of which I think that is pretty much all SC2013 had going for it was its city trading and seeing sims from one city go to another and so on.. Will just have to wait and see what CO do and well the one big tick that CSL does have is that at least it is still getting content added to it by the developers, unlike SC4 and SC2013..

I use the 81 tile mod to open up the whole map allows for a lot of freedom, the map is creativeDEX's Cleyra map..

UrbanLegend · February 2, 2018

"Kill the city builder"? No. If anything Cities Skyline did the opposite IMHO. It demonstrated what is possible and reinvigorated the genre after the lackluster SimCity 2013 and several dull Cities XL entries. I mean don't forget SimCity 4 is like 15 years old.

Which is not to say the OP dosen't have a point. CS is sometimes clunky. It often feels like an unpolished "early access" game. It's more of a city "painter" than a sim.

Ultimately the problem is that the technology isn't quite there yet to have a city simulator that lets you model an actual city in 3D. New York City is over 300 sq miles and several times larger if you include the greater metro area. But do you really want to be plopping down streets and zones from New Jersey to Connecticut?

MatlockMan · February 2, 2018

I feel like the three biggest things which let the game down are a) the low populations, b) the zoning system and c) the education paradox. Give us mega-skylines and big populations thanks.

Populations with the agent system are problematic. To solve this, the two options are to either dump the agent-based system in favour of the SC4 approach, or to split cities up into smaller allotments (like the region system in SC4 and SC2013), allowing your systems to sprawl further while only focussing on one small area of the city at once to keep performance under control. I feel that the latter - an agent-based system with a "region", would be beneficial and could be implemented well into the existing game. I loved how SC4 could allow you to build cities right up next to one another and thus it was possible to hide the boundaries slightly. SC2013's region system was worse but still good. I want a dense city centre with a large amount of commuting suburbs, all of which are dealt with by rapid transit and commuter rail systems. Other players might differ in their approach, but the fundamental problem remains that the population limit this game is afforded is too low and needs to be looked at.

Zoning obviously needs to be overhauled and building variety increased so players can create extremely impressive skylines without a problem. The issue as I see it is that once you get to a certain stage, a player can just zone high-density and basically Manhattanise everywhere with impunity. That's fine - we've seen cities in SC4 with very similar layouts - but many of the sky-scrapers in C:SL are too small or seem not to 'stand out' from one another. Compare this to SC4 where zoning was much more interesting - you could manage the height and wealth of buildings extremely well through zoning, education and land value, ensuring that only the areas you wanted to densify and gentify would. There also seemed to be a greater height and architectural variance in the buildings of SC4, allowing the skyline to be much more dynamic and "organic". I say organic because skylines around the real world developed over centuries - in SC4 we had four eras of architecture which could be enabled or disabled, allowing things to look very varied as if the city had grown over the course of a hundred years. CSL has this to an extent, but it feels like many of the buildings are similar and all seem to hit a height ceiling. It's a bit drab and boring.

Education annoys me because it makes industry impossible to specialise in. Sure, there's offices, but that's basically a glorified commercial zone and is boring to play around. Industry in SC4 was at least enjoyable, since you could either skill-up your workforce and get high-tech, or allow your industry zones to become hell-holes. These blights were there and sometimes very hard to get rid of, but they were always staffed and very lucrative. In SC2013 we saw this expanded to have production lines and processes which could make your city very rich. Both games treated industry as something worthwhile. Nevertheless, CSL seems to kill industry in the midgame. Basically once you hit high density residential, your industrial workers flee for some reason, leaving abandoned factories. To keep these districts alive you literally need to stupify your population. I would much rather.

If the devs could look into these issues, that would help the game immensely. I'm not sure if the changes I've suggested are possible for a simple update or whether it would require a new game to be accomplished, but either would be welcome over the current trajectory of doing nothing. Looking at another Paradox title - Stellaris - it's obvious that Paradox are not afraid to radically overhaul a game if the fundamental mechanics behind the game aren't working. I think CSL should receive the same overhaul to fix these issues.

I will say that, for any city builder I've played, CSL has the most fantastic options for transport that I've come across. SC4 with NAM probably surpasses it, however the ability to set and adjust lines, coupled with the variety of modes of transportation, mean that CSL as an un-modded game is pretty great. Any significant overhaul of the game or sequel would have to retain the transport element.

calpolyfan · March 2, 2018

On 2/2/2018 at 2:53 PM, tmorgan96 said:

...Populations with the agent system are problematic. To solve this, the two options are to either dump the agent-based system in favour of the SC4 approach, or to split cities up into smaller allotments (like the region system in SC4 and SC2013), allowing your systems to sprawl further while only focussing on one small area of the city at once to keep performance under control. I feel that the latter - an agent-based system with a "region", would be beneficial and could be implemented well into the existing game. I loved how SC4 could allow you to build cities right up next to one another and thus it was possible to hide the boundaries slightly. SC2013's region system was worse but still good. I want a dense city centre with a large amount of commuting suburbs, all of which are dealt with by rapid transit and commuter rail systems. Other players might differ in their approach, but the fundamental problem remains that the population limit this game is afforded is too low and needs to be looked at.

Zoning obviously needs to be overhauled and building variety increased so players can create extremely impressive skylines without a problem. The issue as I see it is that once you get to a certain stage, a player can just zone high-density and basically Manhattanise everywhere with impunity. That's fine - we've seen cities in SC4 with very similar layouts - but many of the sky-scrapers in C:SL are too small or seem not to 'stand out' from one another. Compare this to SC4 where zoning was much more interesting - you could manage the height and wealth of buildings extremely well through zoning, education and land value, ensuring that only the areas you wanted to densify and gentify would. There also seemed to be a greater height and architectural variance in the buildings of SC4, allowing the skyline to be much more dynamic and "organic". I say organic because skylines around the real world developed over centuries - in SC4 we had four eras of architecture which could be enabled or disabled, allowing things to look very varied as if the city had grown over the course of a hundred years. CSL has this to an extent, but it feels like many of the buildings are similar and all seem to hit a height ceiling. It's a bit drab and boring.

I agree, they kind of blew it when they went for agent based, instead of just simulating/fudging population numbers based on a given structure.

Because of the size and complexity of a city, it was quite silly for Colossal Order to try and simulate agents. Not sure what they were thinking, as that was the kiss of death for this game having larger cities and not getting too laggy.

Which reminds me of another thing that is super annoying about this game - the "Reward" buildings such as the CO Office building are much too large and out of scale, as is pretty much everything in this game. The sense of scale was completely off, with huge roads compared to lots and tiny skyscraper lots etc. I agree with you that there wasn't much "simulation" behind the office buildings, and the education system was flawed.

The "spaghetti" looking aspect that four deep zones are placed when roads are built also leads to rather fake looking cities, and zoning definitely could have been handled much better. It was kind of silly, when the fanbase kept asking for medium density during the development process, and CO kind of told everybody go get lost (kind of like the Chirp bird come to think of it)..

Also, overall, I have to say, the base game graphics for this game are absolutely terrible, especially when zoomed out at a medium level. It really looks like the Easter Bunny took a dump all over the map with the pastel pinks and blues, edges to buildings and general graphical appearance of base game is just awful, headache inducing.

By contrast, the night views can be rather stunning, and the different colors for different sized boulevards should be applauded. It's kind of a tale of Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde on this game, or the Seinfeld episode "Two Face" regarding day/night graphics.

The transportation options, while varied, are extremely shallow simulation wise as well, with crazy busy bus stops, not much useable data, and not a very deep traffic simulation going on for anything except roads.

Airplanes/ships use their pre-determined routes that are vectors, and clip through land if it is built, airports are one-dimensional, no correlation between air traffic and city size etc.

----

Which brings me to my final gripe: The base game isn't quite where it ever needed to be/didn't get tested enough to make this game "playable" without mods on release. That, combined with the Steam system, which constantly demands updates etc. and it doesn't feel like the "offline always" game we were all promised. The terrible interface with Steam Workshop, where unsubscribing to things takes forever and is organized terribly is cumbersome and annoying. The old SC4 Model - you know, where you actually own your game, there is a CD, and you can create a folder for plugins, and the game doesn't take three months to load was a lot more fun.

I always find myself watching videos of people making amazing stuff in Cities Skylines, but when I try and get all the mods needed, sometimes I can't even start the game, so it's a bit "false advertising" if you will to many people watching these professional designers with super rigs online making cities that look great: Because 95% of the people playing this game will never have that experience.

Anyway, this game while revolutionary in some aspects really is a shallow city simulation game, built by people who I don't think understand what a city building game is actually supposed to be about (no offense). I know this game sold very well, but it could have been a lot better. I hope the next people to try and do city building do it right, and take more commentary from their fanbase, instead of trudging ahead, not listening to the fanbase.

Linoa06 · March 19, 2018

Killed the city building genre? Nah, if anything it proves there's a market for it. Game's got its flaws, but it's manage to reignite a certain want for city builders. CO had limited resources, and given how many indie games with similar ambitions and resources crash and burn they did pretty well.

Steam Workshop is also a much better way to do mods than the old SC4 way IMO, it's just less of a pain, though quality controls are also low - but that's less of a problem in the long run as big time modders have by now established themselves and their products. Yeah it's not "always offline" but it wards off piracy, if you pirate the game you get a subpar experience with no workshop, also the DLCs ensure there's a trickle of money back in the dev's account - basically almost a DRM method that's both effective and fair to the people who play the game legitimately (and none of that SC13 crap, ya?). Also as someone who's been through 4 copies of SC4 because of heavy CD use (and perhaps improper care ^^) I don't see the problem with Steam, it's all of the convenience with none of the crap and Steam accounts are fairly well protected.

Also what's the deal against modding? Fan beloved "best city building" SC4 outright sucks without mods. People do need to take their rose tinted glasses off and look at SC4 without the NAM and such. It sucks. I couldn't play SC4 without the NAM, and I don't think I would like it much without other mods, either. People who make CJs or Youtube channels about CSL also aren't trying to "trick" you into buying a far less good looking game, they've just modded it and they use it as a user program more than a game. I fail to see how that's false advertising, *especially* since you can get those mods for yourself and build neat stuff, too. They do also take the game beyond what it's intended to do - so it's not the dev's fault if you hyped yourself for a game based on what people are doing to it outside of the game's parameters.

I'll agree that the design choices aren't great - I hate default graphics and I hate the sound ambiance in this game, compared to SC4 or even SC5 it's pretty subpar, even if it's mostly design choices and it also comes down to the lack of resources - but they're by no means making the game unplayable. And yeah the game is poorly optimized, but did you play SC4 at launch? My PC couldn't cope with it, I had to upgrade before I started modding.

But at least on a technical point of view, Cities Skylines is barebones on purpose - it relies on modding, at least from what I can see. And that's not a bad thing, SC4 relies on the NAM just as much! But if you want CSL to look and feel better, well, you're gonna have to pitch the idea to someone with far more resources and it's unlikely they'll agree, especially with all the bs around "live services" and phasing out the very notion of a "game" (there's a reason CSL is one of my last game purchases I've ever done, and why I'm not upgrading my consoles or anything)

I'd point out my PC poorly copes with CSL these days, but it's a limitation I adapt around and I feel like I have a lot more fun around that than if I could just cover the entire 84 tiles in streets and buildings. But I agree 100% with everyone who complains at the small size of cities - SC4 allowed to build far more sprawling metropolis, but CSL doesn't, and that's also good for modding, since with less space to build stuff you can instead focus on detailing your city more closely, and make it yours.

Now I get where you're coming from on the city building perspective, airports don't realistically grow, it all feels a bit fake and the agent simulation is pretty shallow, well...it's true, and perhaps a hybrid system would work better, but I can't help but feel like you're asking excessively much from CSL or hell any city building game. No game, especially a game without a AAA budget, is going to try and simulate that much. Even SC4 didn't simulate that much, even if it did simulate things better in some respects by having a statistical model. And many games that do try to add all these extra features end up bogged down by them - anyone can probably recall a game with a thousand options and a thousand variables, except in the end it becomes quickly apparent that only a few really matter and the rest is just completely subpar.

So while I get where you're coming from, I feel like it's all a little unfair - and a little beyond the scope of CSL along. It also sounds like you don't really have much experience with city builders yourself - you talk about the spaghetti 4-deep roads, and I know what you mean it's a pain, but it also sounds to me like you randomly place roads and expect the game to look good around that. You could also make ugly cities in SC4.

I hope they make a sequel, absolutely, and I hope they learn from what they've done and improve - but I also feel like you expect too much on the mechanics point of view, and you have a problem with the notion of modding entirely, and that while it all sounds neat on paper to have an unmodded experience that's very deep in everything it does while looking and playing great - it's nearly impossible to balance a game around some of the things you propose, and it's certainly hopeless with the kind of budget CO can actually spend.

tl;dr the game has issues, but perhaps you also have too big an expectation for this genre in the current economy

Rob86 · March 21, 2018

it is strange for so many people (not on this forum but elsewhere where the conversation is more raucous, to put it midly) to defend CO's deficiencies and relying on the defense that their team is small whenever questions on code fixes, and natural upgrades only do-able on sequels comes up AND yet Paradox has been earning dozens of millions of USD in after-tax profit annually. Too many buyers are just content, sometimes even reverential to CO, that there is a successor to SimCity 2013.

having Paradox is a publisher is a double-edged sword. They did pick up an once forgotten genre after all, but it is Paradox with their half decade long sequel development targets, which by then all the talent would had left . And of course , Paradox being Paradox, is much more interested in milking the franchise for all the DLCs it can squeeze.

even till now, SimCity 4 with cc looks and simulate better than C:S.

Darf · April 7, 2018

To answer your question: yes, C:S has killed the citysim genre. The typical Citysim genre that is defined by SC4.

A lot of people from the SC4 crowd here I see, that look at C:S from a limited point of view. I played SC4 quite a bit 500+/- hours and yes it´s a better game. It's a lot more challenging and a lot more fun! It is however not a game so easily modernized. I think C:S does a good job with the limited scope and the limited resources (in personell) they had.

Graphics and sound

Yeah, the out of the box gfx from C:S are quite bad, a lot worse than SC4 in that regard for the basegame. 3d or not, the game could look a lot better than it does now. From the yellow tints to the weird Japanase themed buildings. Modded though C:S looks a lot better than SC4. The engine can be stretched a lot more than SC4 ever can. Soundeffects are annoying in both games and yes the sound design is a bit better in SC4. SC4 music is classic and it's hard to top such a great soundtrack. Saying that, music in C:S ain't bad at all/

Game load times and moddability

Generally I think this comes down to your personal experience. Modded SC4 load times are actually worse nowadays. Basegame loadtimes are generally ok for both games. If you know both games technically you know C:S is a lot more moddable in every way. NAM is really clunky if you look at some of what is possible with C:S mods. Graphically a lot is possible, gameplay wise is a lot harder to do. This is where the game shines, but also where it lacks, it lacks gameplay systems to tweak.

Mapsize and gameplay

I don't think limits are that big of a problem nowadays with modern CPUs, you can easily have a 300k city, big enough for most midsize american cities, but I do agree that the SC4 style of saving/loading cities is a lot better incorporated than the C:S big map tile. Simply because you might need a change of pace and might alternate between cities. SC4 does that a lot better. My maingripe with C:S is that there is no challenge to it, you can hardly fail. There is no concept of wealth or how well a city is doing. There's hardly any visible difference from a good city than a bad city. You can also hardly call it a sim, because frankly there doesn't seem to be any goals to simulate anything. That said, when you start your eight SC4 game you know the deal as well.

Than why play and mod for it? Well C:S is nowadays more played as a cintypainter. And it's a great citypainter. There's still a much larger community for the paintaspect than for the actual sim. Lot's of active and well watched youtube series for C:S, while for SC4 there is none. So... I think it's hard to built a citysim atm, because it needs a good simulation, which is hard to do in a 3d environment and needs lot's of tweaking. You need workshop and mod support, because otherwise it will die down pretty fast. And generally it's hard where to focus the game on, because the amount of simulation fans is quite low compared to the casual crowd, the citypainter crowd and the I might play it once and not install it again crowd.

Can C:S be a lot better? Yes. Does that matter at this point? I dont think so, it won't make the devs more money. They either need to come up with a full fletched sequel with a better gameplay design (which frankly I'm not sure they are capable of) or use the resources for something else. C:S does it's thing atm. Not what I had hoped for, but it's where it evolved to.

Cool_Z · April 9, 2018

Wow wow wow... I agree and disagree with this topic at the same time.

I don't think C:SL killed anything. It certainly did not kill the genre, SC2013 almost did.

But... I agree with you on many many points.
(all I'll say will refer to vanilla CSL)

- Graphics:

CSL does not look completely bad. It looks "meh".
The engine does what it can, cities look a bit bland, buildings look okay-ish apart from some completely stupid looking ones. The main problem is the useless anti-aliasing.
The secondary main problem is the awful way some lods look.
There's a third very bad point but I will cover it later.
SC4, despite still being 2,5D looks sweeter. Cities XL looks great. SC2013 looks sweet. CSL fails here.

- Game load times are not that bad

- "Game is Clunky - Over Ambitious / Under Optimized"

Oh god yes it is !!
Full agent simulation. WHY??? City builders do NOT need that, it just helps making the cities smaller and the games run slower.
SC2013 tried to use it as a selling point. We all know how they lied and how it turned to be a catastrophe.
A statistical simulation is what a citybuilder needs.
It was sold as a plus because the game is actually a transport network simulator with parts of a citybuilder painted on it.
Well, the network simulator is crap (lane usage... laughable, service AI.. laughable...) and the citybuilderpart is crap (levels ????? no wealth/density separation ? WHAT ??)

The result is a huuuuge "citybuilder" with huuuuuge maps that you actually can't use because the engine will not cope with it. FAIL.

- Zoning

The zoning system is nice. The growable zoning size is ridiculous. 4x4 is the same as 2x2 in SC4. LOL.

- Sound

I never turned the sound off faster than with Skylines. Terrible!

- "Stubbornness on the Side of the Developers"... I would add "very VERY bad choices, what do they smoke?"

They had the recipe, they had a community willign to say what they wanted... and they did stupid stuff.
Small lot sizes... limited densities... tiny farms... we told them. Naaaah.

---------------

That was the part where I followed the original post... here's where I really add stuff...

---------------

****** Promises turned into lies.

The game was launched like they would truly listen to players. At first it all seemed nice, a few contests, a small but fast to answer team... great. But the games disappeared very fast and the responses from the devs did the same.
I reported bugs. First one was the fact that only a few custom buildings could grow. It was fixed but they didn't seem to truly care about it (hey, the game was selling, not a major problem).
Second one was the color variations system being broken. They did not even answer me, it took an intervention from modders to make them acknowledge it and fix it. Took weeks.
Third one (buildings grow a different color than the end one)... it is there since the game was released, I repeateadly reported it and they just don't give a f*ck.
Yep, they don't care about players, they just won't fix anything that's not game-breaking unless there's great pressure.

From a building maker's side... they said the building import tools we were given at launch were just a start and we would get better things later... we never got anythinG. The tools are crap, they still are. Thanks for nothing, thanks for the lies.

*********** What the f*** are you doing ?

Crazy ideas, useless stuff, almost game-breaking decisions!
Why can't they fix the death waves ???? Is it that hard to randomize the age cims move in the city and the age they die? How STUPID is that ???
Moving utility buildings... ok it's nice. But its completely NOT realistic. Same idea as getting the money back when you bulldoze streets or civic. WHYYYYYY
Water simulation. WHY ??? What is the use of that ? Oh yeah, water pumps and sewage... but again WHYYYYY ??? God, a 50000 people city can reverse the flow of a wide river ? AAAARGH please that's stupid !!
The $%&^! gulls !!

And now the "it was nice before let's break it and never fix it"
The way the game looks since After Dark. It now looks like we peed on it. Piss color everywhere. Never fixed, "f*ck you all, we don't care."... and it's not the only thing. Snowfall... rain... the streets after rain look like a mirror, it looks awfull from the sky. how did they fix it ? Turning down speculars (reflections) for the WHOLE game. Result? All the buildings using reflections look different (just look at Dubaiskyscraper's buildings).

The list goes on and on and on. Since the game started selling the devs seemed to not care anymore what whe wanted, what they promised or what the game looked like.

PS:

I almost forgot a few things...
The engine kills textures. The game would look tons better if the lights were turned half down.
The night looks like crap. Most vanilla buildings look like oversized lightbulbs. The choice made for the nightlights system is terrible (and I went very vocal about it the second I learned about it), where in the world did you see buildings gradually turn on or off????
Some stuff that was promised to be moddable isn't (cims ? No LOD ?).
Trains and boats... the way they behave is ridiculous. Busses are a bit better but just a bit.

People might say "hey, this isn't a "AAA" game". I'm sorry but add just one of the dlcs and we paid as much as a AAA game.

Lost Gecko · April 10, 2018

@Cool_Z I agree with a lot of what you said, sometimes to a lesser extend, and sometimes I don't quite agree. First, thank you for what you brought to the game. I wasn't around when you were active but you sure were a pioneer in the early days.

About the agent simulation, I think it has pros and cons and I can't quite make up my mind on whether there's a better one, though I must say given that the simulation is so weak it only really just brings the pleasure of of stalking your cims which is... something I guess. An agent-based simulation would really be a huge plus if the simulation mechanics were actually deep though. I find the water simulation to be a really nice thing to have which allows for a lot of creativity. Just wish it was less clunky.

I wouldn't go as far as saying they are lying. I think they are full of good will and are ready to listen to the playerbase, but I must say everything they come up with seems pretty underwhelming and often kinda amateurish. It fits in the "small team and limited resources" narrative which gave us the base game, but with the millions they are making you'd expect the game development to become a bit more professional (as you said for specularity and post-AD for example, but also for things like using the ship shader for monorails, etc.

They do try and improve the game here and there, also on the content creation side: the content editor is way more stable than it used to be, they implemented network and citizen modding, random props/trees, sub-building support,... Here too the result is sometimes often half-baked (no LOD for citizens, etc) and I really wish it was overall way more friendly and efficient to use, but they are trying...

Overall I wish the game was more solid all across the board and there are a ton of frustratingly absurd limitations and design choices, but I feel like the developers are at least trying and do care for their game. It is still a very enjoyable modding platform (never played SC4 or any other city-building game but from what I gather it's quite messy to create content for) and CO certainly managed to prove that the potential is there for great city-building games.

Rob86 · April 14, 2018

to put it in perspective, Cities Skyline has sold more than 5 million copies (not including console). It is not a hardcore niche title, even though at times we label ourselves as elitist gamers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games

now, if only one of the few gaming powerhouses would pick up this genre.

as for CO, it feels as if they had ran off with the unexpected deluge of money

Edited April 14, 2018 by Rob86

TheBigCon4800 · April 15, 2018

Quote

(Usually I'm not a graphics stickler, but in a city building game the graphics are very important. The graphic style almost looked like a Mars Colony more than any city on Earth. The super vibrant pastel blues, greens, yellows, and pinks complimented soil that turns purple when it got polluted.. (interesting design choice).

Artstyles are a thing, and mods for buildings are amazingly common.

Quote

To this day, the base graphics appear mostly the same as they were at launch, instead of say replacing them with better looking "Brooklyn/NY" designed sets for example, having paid the model designers a bit to use their sets commercially. Any mods added to the games already long load-times, which makes them not as fun as they could have been. Which leads to..

I mean;

a. I'm pretty sure replacing released content that most people are either fine with or can mod out isn't a good look

and

b. Didn't they do exactly that with the Content Creator Packs?

Quote

It's hard to have fun playing this game, when even with the mod that speeds stuff up, game takes many minutes to load.. and what's even worse, when exiting the wait is excrutiatingly long. It's hard to have fun playing a game when load times are this poor and you're afraid to exit a city or do other things out of fear of waiting so long.

You are going to find that problem with almost every 3d game that you can mod.

Quote

Well, this is great in theory, but as the city grows, you can tell the computer isn't haven't too much fun playing 'simulate every little thing' on this scale. Usually around 100K population the simulation slows down, and thinks start getting clunkier. Around 250K things are pretty much unplayable (I bought a new computer for this game, apparently not the right one) to the point of generally being annoying in a 3D environment. This makes this game not so fun for building large cities - Not to mention a mod is needed to open up all the tiles on a map (come on guys).

I mean, CO's had experience with agents; CiM 1 and 2 both were agent based, with CiM 2 having a similar system to C:S. In addition, you're trying to release a game that can work on the lowest listed specs; do you A. Isolate those with potatoes and make everything load with 81 tiles or B. make it easily moddable so that if you want 81 tiles, you can get them.

Quote

Kind of mentioned this above, but very large cities are hard to build due to CPU constraints. The cities in Skylines, while bigger than SimCity 2013 are actually smaller than a SC4 region for example. In this aspect, we took a step backward in the city-building genre, and arguably one of the main reasons people play city simuators is to make massive cities. Unless you're running this thing on a supercomputer, that's just not possible.

You can bang out a decently sized city on 81 Sq KM, dude.

Quote

For a game called "Cities Skylines" there really isn't much skyline developing in any city you build, unless you plop buildings. There is a sea of "mid rise" skyscrapers topped out all about the same height- What a letdown! I was hoping to see a gentle arch toward the most expensive land values in town, and a corresponding skyline, but nope, there apparently is little, if any actual city simulation taking place regarding land values and other factors contributing to tall buildings.

Dude, you can literally install mods for that. This just seems like that comic with the bike and the stick.

Quote

From the terrible bulldoze sound that is way too loud, repetitive, and just frankly annoying, to the sirens blaring way too loud and constant it's hard to be more annoying. Really nothing positive to say. How could it be this bad, and not fixed with an update? Yikes.

As opposed to stock sounds whenever you clicked on a service building.

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

Want 3 Zoning densities? Too bad. Want Zones deeper than 4 tiles? Too bad. Want realistic looking buildings? Too bad. Don't like the Chirper? Too bad. Don't want Pastel Colored Goofy buildings and vehicles? Too bad. Want the entire map playable? Too bad.

That's why they made the game modder-friendly; you can mod that stuff out.

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

There was a lot of almost cockiness/stubbornness with how the developers have interacted (or not) with the city-building fanbase. I think this team did an acceptable job making a city builder in 3d, but not an exceptional job in any way shape or form, and they have shown they really don't care what the majority of fans want or ask for, they're going to do it their way anyway.

What "Majority of fans" do you speak of? Most of the C:S communities i frequent love the game, and they gave you mods so you can disable most of the stuff you complain about.

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

Ships at ports will drive over land if land is terraformed, limited shipping aspects, trains run way too frequently it's almost a joke, and don't really serve much of a purpose. Airports are a joke, super tiny. No ferry options. No zoning of Aiports/ Seaports. Trams etc. are an extra money-grab. etc..

Especially the trains aspect was seriously botched in this game, and generally any type of transportation that isn't a road seems pretty flimsy/not simulated or thought about very well by the developers.

1. Bug was fixed

2. Easily fixable with mods

3. Easily fixable with mods

4. As of Mass Transit, ferries are available. And mods can replicate the function.

5. There wasn't any in SC4 too, hon.

6. Trams weren't even in SC4 before Rush Hour.

In addition, non-road transit in this is actually much better than any other city builder i've played. Setting up lines is much better than just plopping stops without any rhyme or reason.

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

Since zone sizes are 4x4 and there appears to be no real building simulation running in this game (whereby downtown areas would get taller buildings than other areas) the only way to make a "skyline" pop is to add plopabble buildings. This is a huge letdown for most city building fans, as growing taller buildings is pretty much the entire purpose of a city building game.

Who are most? I've heard that complaint from a total of 10 people. Out of 5 million.

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

Not to mention, the lack of building height variety, and this game is a complete let down, with repetitive looking cities with buildings all on pretty much the same lot size and no focus to the skylines and urban development. Really, really bad.

...you said this already, and the problem can easily be modded out.

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

Yes, CO was able to sell many copies of its game, but after playing for a while, I think most city builder fans clearly understand this game is not "the one" by any stretch.

Because Skylines was marketed so well, came into the market at the right time, etc. it gobbled up a majority of the city building fanbase.. Who were "happy enough" with it to not ask for a different game.. The irony is, Skylines might kill the city building genre for a while. Had this game not come out, I wonder if we all might be playing a much more fun, actual city simulator game that for all intents and purposes could be a better City Builder right now.

Who are "City Builder Fans"? You sound just as annoyingly smug saying this as the subsections of the Star Wars fandom who bitch about fake fans. C:S revived the genre, in all honesty. Without it we'd be lining up for SimCity 5: Now With Buyable Buildings!

On 12/20/2017 at 12:12 PM, calpolyfan said:

Or Maybe, the fact that Cities Skylines sold so well, and really wasn't a finished city-building game and could have been a lot better will interest some other game designers to try their own attempt at a city-building game?

I mean, it's perfectly finished. A decent-sized amount of base content with the option to add more via mods. I'd say it's done right, TBH.

OP, this has just been a long, pedantic rant about why C:S didn't personally go the exact way you wanted.

Cool_Z · April 15, 2018

That last reply was full of "not knowing what you're talking about" and excuses for the flaws the game has. Nice.

If there is fanboyism somewhere, here's a good example.

ghosty20 · April 16, 2018

13 hours ago, Cool_Z said:

That last reply was full of "not knowing what you're talking about" and excuses for the flaws the game has. Nice.

If there is fanboyism somewhere, here's a good example.

Yes isn't it terrible that someone enjoys the game, and their "opinion" even if it is right or wrong they are entitled to it.. So in the end if being a fanboy is so terrible then count me one as well..

And even though Cities Skylines may have its flaws, at least it is a hell of a lot better than that travesty that was SimCity 2013 and to a lesser extent the Cities XL series..

Darf · April 16, 2018

1 hour ago, ghosty20 said:

Yes isn't it terrible that someone enjoys the game, and their "opinion" even if it is right or wrong they are entitled to it.. So in the end if being a fanboy is so terrible then count me one as well..

And even though Cities Skylines may have its flaws, at least it is a hell of a lot better than that travesty that was SimCity 2013 and to a lesser extent the Cities XL series..

SimCity 5 would've been a fine game, if they handled some things better:

Bigger plots, much bigger plots. This is the mainaspect that C:S handled right. They got some nice renderingtricks in the engine that allow for the much bigger plots.
Some aspects we're not properly balanced (tourism for example), wealth and traffic.
The multiplayer aspect was a good idea, but Mods are much more important for citybuilding genre. If they could combine the multiplayer aspect with mods (buildings at first, but later also gameplay mods) it would've been great.

It was much more enjoyable to actually built a city and specialize one. The gameplay aspect they got right. Visually it was also more appealing than C:S vanilla. It was just hard to fail a city in that game also. The coregame died, because there wasn't really anything to do after an hour of 15. The game was kind of too easy balanced or badly balanced in some other regards. Not enough room and no custom mods to built beautiful cities and the aspect of multiplayer wasn't necessary and didn't really stimulate people to play together. Community died fast and than sales we're thrown into the abyss, so combined with the bad publicity EA killed it.

ghosty20 · April 16, 2018

3 hours ago, Darf said:

SimCity 5 would've been a fine game, if they handled some things better:

Bigger plots, much bigger plots. This is the mainaspect that C:S handled right. They got some nice renderingtricks in the engine that allow for the much bigger plots.

Some aspects we're not properly balanced (tourism for example), wealth and traffic.

The multiplayer aspect was a good idea, but Mods are much more important for citybuilding genre. If they could combine the multiplayer aspect with mods (buildings at first, but later also gameplay mods) it would've been great.

It was much more enjoyable to actually built a city and specialize one. The gameplay aspect they got right. Visually it was also more appealing than C:S vanilla. It was just hard to fail a city in that game also. The coregame died, because there wasn't really anything to do after an hour of 15. The game was kind of too easy balanced or badly balanced in some other regards. Not enough room and no custom mods to built beautiful cities and the aspect of multiplayer wasn't necessary and didn't really stimulate people to play together. Community died fast and than sales we're thrown into the abyss, so combined with the bad publicity EA killed it.

This is the thing SC5 was pretty to say the least, but was hampered by many things, and one nasty thing I seemed to encounter quite often was mass homelessness.. There would be plenty of jobs and plenty of housing but all of a sudden bang there would be a huge wave of homeless people.. In the end I gave up on SC5 and have not played it since, and yes I can agree to a point that Skylines vanilla is lacking graphically after modding it looks so much better..

One last thing that I have to say against SC4 and SC5 is how they both got one expansion and then completely abandoned by the developer/publisher, at least C:SL is it is still getting developer/publisher loving..

Darf · April 16, 2018

9 minutes ago, ghosty20 said:

This is the thing SC5 was pretty to say the least, but was hampered by many things, and one nasty thing I seemed to encounter quite often was mass homelessness.. There would be plenty of jobs and plenty of housing but all of a sudden bang there would be a huge wave of homeless people.. In the end I gave up on SC5 and have not played it since, and yes I can agree to a point that Skylines vanilla is lacking graphically after modding it looks so much better..

One last thing that I have to say against SC4 and SC5 is how they both got one expansion and then completely abandoned by the developer/publisher, at least C:SL is it is still getting developer/publisher loving..

Well sort of, I think most of the expansions for C:S are made by a maximum of 3 people. The mainteam at CO are working at something else. So that's why the expansions are pretty limited in scope and not many communityrequests are fullfilled. It's also the reason why a total overhaul of the game mechanics is not possible.

Did 'Cities Skylines' Kind of Kill The City Builder Genre For a While?

47 posts in this topic Last Reply January 10, 2023

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