Mystrelia

Indeed I'm wanting to play Cities: Skylines but I have an aging system that might not quite meet Recommended Requirements so I'm looking for feedback on what kind of performance others are getting on their specs. I don't want to spend the money on the game right now if it means I'll need a spiffier computer to play it reasonably. Oh, and by reasonably I don't mean with the 25-tile mod, just be able to build some cities that probably won't even necessarily be huge but at the very least spread out on the default nine tiles. I bought this PC about four-and-a-half years ago but I have too many other financial obligations at the moment to justify the expense of a better machine. Of course I have Windows 7 64-bit. My processor is an AMD Phenom II quad-core, 3.4Ghz 8 gigs of RAM Graphics card is AMD Radeon 6450 with its own 4 gigs of RAM Thanks for answering!

I've been too side-tracked the last little while to play Skylines and haven't kept on top of the latest news. So, I knew tunnels were in development but am I seeing right that full-fledged surface to underground can be accomplished? I was SO hoping that would be a thing!

It doesn't seem to, or there may be a separate cap for buildings/parks with trees on; I can still plop parks with trees even when I could no longer actually plant trees (got bulldozer happy to remove some excess in the end). Oh, sorry, that's not what I was talking about. The trees on the map when a building is placed remain there so if you bulldoze or move a building the original trees are still there. It's those I'm wondering about counting toward the the limit. If those do count I'd imagine it would be a lot easier to come up against the limit than if the trees were destroyed before a building was placed or built on zoning.

Yes, yes, there's a tree limit. I've been wondering if said limit takes into account the number of trees under buildings or if while the buildings are on the trees if they don't count. I remember seeing a mod that destroys trees when buildings grow on a piece of land and thinking perhaps that is why that mod was created.

I'm horrible at building roads and this mod looks extremely helpful!

I understand that and I agree, but you don't necessairly have to level up your industry, do you? It could work like the generic industry, which can employ different kind of workers as they level up Specialized industries don't level up. Timber and farming require only uneducated workforce with ores and oil requiring a mix of education levels. I'm not sure if you're saying they should or not. I sometimes do wish they could.

Speaking of which, I'd like to see educated and highly educated workers working on farms, as well. Farming is not only for farmboys, you know: stuff like GMOs, technologically advanced crops and livestock, food research insitutes, veterinary research labs, they employ a lot of researchers and are great in farm districts. I've thought about this and overall agree but I think that the reason farms and timber don't use educated labor is that so the player is able to place some specialized industry at the start of their game and not have to import everything before Cims can get educated. Otherwise yes, some farmers do have degrees. Indeed they do, more like the manufacturing plants for farm products. I finally realized that I could somewhat control what my farming area looked like by putting some of the zoning for the district outside the yellow resource overlay. Currently most of the processing plants are now very near the cargo terminal and only animals, crops and a few sheds are away from there. It looks much more like real farmland now. Also, bear in mind I live in the U.S. in a huge agriculture area where farming is done mostly on flats in large blocks of land, sometimes 80 acres or more broken up into only a few fields. Then there are the orchards and vineyards that are planted mainly on the hillier areas. While some of the farm buildings in the game are a little more space-age looking than what I see in my area, the orchards do all have packing sheds and what-not and all the farms have their corresponding buildings as well. We also have agricultural research facilities here as well but those mostly look like sheds sitting out near fields. I wouldn't be surprised if one day they look more like what's in Cities: Skylines. One thing I just thought about was that here it's not uncommon to find a small farm-type area where the property owner also runs a small greenhouse project. Most of them raise bedding plants, others do seed research. It's pretty varied. Of course the seed research centers also usually come with plenty of acreage attached.

There's a reason Cities: Skylines isn't an MMO and that reason is because that aspect of SC2013 was received so poorly. Based on input I saw when that game released the vast majority of city builders just want to do their own thing.

Like rsc204, the stuff we made in the past for our games (this was mostly Sims games) we made because we'd be playing along and either dressing a Sim or building a house and go, "Oh! I really would like...." then set about making it. Since we'd already gone to the trouble it seemed like the next logical step was to share it with anyone else who would like to use it because spending umpteen hours on one project just for one of our games seemed like such a waste of time, but not nearly so if a few dozen or hundred other people would also like it for theirs. I never released anything I made for my SimCity games because most of those projects were just little things I wanted that I'd spend fifteen or so minutes putting together and while they worked for me weren't exactly up to snuff for public consumption. I know for certain that mods for SimCity 4 was one of the things that helped it to remain popular. It didn't matter at what point a person bought it they could find all kinds of great content to add to it and the longer it went on the better that content got. I never played it frequently but I still put plenty of time into it and knowing I could count on some new shinies when I did pick up playing again meant I could freshen it up. That's interesting. Here's a thought that's bouncing around in my head. The only experience I've had over the years with paid user-made content for video games has been with the various The Sims games. Frankly, charging for what we commonly refer to as CC (custom content) for any other game simply was not done. However, since Sims games tended to draw in different players it became completely acceptable and not only did some modders sell content and others maintained websites through donations and advertisements, some of them have made a pretty good living at it over the years. One of the most popular formerly pay sites ran on a monthly subscription model. They no longer charge subscriptions but finance the entire site by ads with subs being optional. Another large site I know of has always been free funded by ads and voluntary donations and has done quite well over the years. My own experience with running our rinky-dink website that didn't have anywhere near the kind of traffic those big ones did was what I considered fairly decent. We didn't do a lot of promoting and weren't exactly mainstream and had very low visitor numbers but we usually made around $30 a month off of the ads we ran, more or less just depending on how active we were in updating. Of course we weren't in it to make a living, just pay the hosting and buy new expansion packs when they came out so we got all that covered and a little more. Even if we had been properly motivated to try to make a living of it I don't think we could have, although I'm sure we could've supplemented nicely. Here's the thing I think about when it comes to mods and charging money. Players already pay for a game and most games are pretty expensive anyway. On top of that they also often buy various add-ons created by the developers. It is the capitalist in me that understands how this works and is willing to support it. However, there's also a socialist in me that simply loves to see things like mods shared freely for everyone to enjoy. And of course there's the totally practical side of me that knows full well many people can't afford to pay hundreds of dollars just to play a single video game and when mods go pay it seriously limits the number of people who can enjoy them. It's not that I don't sympathize with modders who would like to make money on their work. Shoot, I know all too well what it's like not to have enough money to go around. I think also modders might see more in the way of donations if so many people weren't flat broke. To my mind if they want to make more money they should look at how some other modding communities have done it. Minecraft modders, for example, jumped on adf.ly like, well, flies drawn to stink. Sure, it's a little bit of a pain having to go through an ad to download something but well worth it for the privilege of having free access to any mod you want to use in your game. I've read of others using patron systems. I realize a patron system is the very essence of socialism but it's also something that can work out quite well because while some of us barely have two spare dimes to rub together but it gives those who have the resources to support such things a great outlet and their money is being given to something worthwhile. Then those of us who don't have money to spend can be involved in other aspects of a gaming community if we want to be helpful. This reminds me of all of the world building that has gone on for The Sims 3 over the years. A few extremely talented people built very beautiful worlds for players but without other players willing to test those worlds and give feedback they'd have been released with all manner of game breaking problems. In some cases without people willing to help build lots for said worlds, the worlds never would've been finished. In my experience modding communities have always been greater than the sum of their parts because so many people are willing to help non gratis. I have also been witness to the effect this kind of thing will have on a gaming community during The Great Paysite Debate of The Sims 2 that was going on somewhere around the year 2007. There was so much fall-out from that battle I could write a fairly lengthy book on it. When everything broke loose last weekend I thought, "Yep, been there done that, don't want to relive that drama." I'm sure that's more than enough from me on the subject and if I got too rambly I apologize.

That little section of road under Chirpy, it doesn't happen to be a one-way, does it? If so that could sure cause that. In my experience vehicles don't come into your city unless they have a destination.

There are a lot of things that influence residential capacity but the first obvious one is going to be education. Once they start getting educated then they'll want parks and services which increase land value and land value is a huge trigger for leveling. I usually keep a few slummy areas in my city and when I want some extra work force but don't want to be bothered to zone more residential I'll add a park and see what happens. If that gives me enough I let it go for a while. If not I'll add other services. They get all excited over everything from cemeteries to bus stops. I go with parks first since the service buildings require more employees and I'm always trying to keep education capacity below the number of citizens that can get educated. And not all citizens that move in are dummies. I see a lot of Cims move into my city with education levels from bottom to top. Just level up some apartments to third, fourth or fifth tier and watch as they fill up and you'll see what I mean.

Yep. A lot of people are glad to see this back-tracking. After seeing an article or two today I can fully understand the thought behind it. Unfortunately not nearly enough though went into it.

I know nothing about Steam other than the occasional comment here and there so could you help me understand your response? You say one can run Steam in offline mode but required to be running in order to play the game. Will Steam "run" without an internet connection? Can I play without an internet connection once installed and validated? Also, how much CPU useage and RAM does Steam require? Sorry, but I'm old school. Give me a DVD a password and perhaps require a phone call or something if you must, (all of us do not have unlimited download data allowance). Patches have never been a problem since they started to be posted online. Players simply download read instructions and install. Simple. To say Steam is needed for updates and patches is simply an excuse and I doubt I would like the reasons by Paradox or any other company for being connected. I have quite a game collection (I paid for them all) but have stopped buying games for about two years now because of how they are delivered. I did purchase Banished but don't have to have Steam or anything else. I will always support such developers. It's okay, I'm old school too and I'd much rather just have the game on a disc and be done with it. Yeah, it's a pain sometimes having to switch out discs but not a huge deal. After all, I always end up restarting my computer anyway between games (which is why I usually play one game for several days at a time). Anyway, what you need Steam for with Cities: Skyline is to download the Steam client and to either download the game or activate it if you buy it on physical format. Granted, I don't know where a person could get a physical disc of this game but I've heard it's available. At any rate, I did download it (took quite a few hours). I agree, there's no reason to require Steam, patches and such can be downloaded and applied manually. Goodness knows we did it for years on end. Shoot, when it came to Sims 3 I could never get that launcher thing to install the patches right so I always had to download and install manually anyway. I do have to say with Steam it has worked both times and I have to admit I do like the Workshop and being able to just click the subscribe button and have it automatically download to my game. However, the automation also has a down side when it comes to updates and such. I think automatic updates can be turned off but I'm not sure how to do it.

The first time I discovered all the custom farms for SC4 I went nuts. Man I love those things! I have downloaded a bunch of park lots to add to my farming district in Skylines and it helps but I'll be darned, way too many of them weren't properly edited when created not to send out a park notice so there ends up being way too much traffic out there. I need to find out if I can successfully edit someone else's lots because it's quite a nuisance. As I learned how the resources work I now also zone some farming industrial near where the cargo depot is, which is off the fertile ground, so this is where the factory-type buildings build and the fertile ground is being developed with mostly fields which is also making it look much more realistic.

Well by the looks of it, it is the games developer/publisher that decides whether or not to go down this road.. As at the moment it is only Bethesda and their game Skyrim that has gone this way so far.. All I can say from this is that Bethesda's name is now mud.. And well can't really blame Valve / Steam as they are really only distributors nothing more in this case as before it seems it was the developer that wanted to go this route.. Yes, and if they do and I think many are forgetting it's still up to individual modders to decide whether or not to charge for their content, even if it is on the Workshop, so if you have stuff there already I don't really see a point in pulling it because believe me when I say there are going to be a ton of people who bypass mods that cost for the free stuff. And of course at this point we don't know what, if anything, Paradox will do. Oh, I don't remember whether I posted this here or not but if I did I'll post it again because someone may've missed it. Steam originally had a limit of 100MB on file sizes for mods. They recently lifted that limit for Skyrim. This mod pay thing has come on the heels of that.

Please pardon my naivete.... Who gets paid... the fans or Colossal Order... Yeah, some people have a very, um, awkward? definition of the word fan. Now, directly back at Xenocity, do you really expect people to continue playing TS4 for the next twenty or so years? Dude! That game is old! It doesn't mean we don't like it, it just means we also like doing other things too. Imagine if you will, having two favorite foods. Imagine having three or four favorite actors, two or three favorite singers, etc. It's entirely possible to be a fan of more than one thing of the same type at a time.

Well, except for as it turns out Valve isn't taking 75%. Valve is taking its standard 30% cut, 25% goes to the modders and the remaining 45% goes to Bethesda, and it was Bethesda who set that percentage, not Valve. I think either way it's stinky and sets a new precedent in gaming that like cromabianca says could end up turning into something like the whole freemium business model, which is another thing I hate. In years past most of the mods I downloaded were for Sims games and anyone who's ever played a Sims game knows there's both pay and free content just depending on which sites a person goes to. Some years back there was a whole pay-site vs. free-site debacle that ended up with a group of people taking it on to themselves to buy all the content offered on all the pay sites then upload it to a different website for anyone who wanted it to download. They did this for absolutely years. Thankfully when it came to Sims games some of the best content creators and modders out there wouldn't have put their files on a pay site if their lives depended on it, and I'm not referring to penny ante things like tuning mods but the mods made by people like Pescado and Twallan who basically re-wrote Sims 3 and turned it into a playable game. I've no idea how much of his life over the years Twallan devoted to keeping that game running for players for nothing more than the kudos he got from so many of us who couldn't play without his mods. In a nutshell, he was a hero to thousands of players. Years back many of us wondered over why The Sims games were the only ones that had mods for money and wondered if it would ever happen with other games. We figured since Sims players tend to be their very own category of people who often don't play much in the way of other games they just didn't know any better. I'm just truly hoping that Colossal Order doesn't embrace this. At least if they do I'm pretty sure a lot of modders will keep their stuff free both in the Workshop and other websites.

I do find it worrisome on the same levels as many of you have outlined. Right now my Cities: Skylines game has around 30 mods that affect the game and probably a hundred or more various assets and a custom map. Now imagine if all these mods cost even fifty cents each, that's something like $65 worth of mods, over twice what the game cost. I've used mods for games for a lot of years, some to make a game function the way it should've to begin with and sometimes tunings to fit my play style better and others simply for the sake of having added content. When modders I like had donation pages set up and I had some extra money I donated to them. Over the years I've helped support mod makers through adf.ly and other ad programs. However, if it comes to a choice between having to spend money to buy mods or using that money to buy groceries or help out one of my disabled relatives it probably doesn't take a genius to figure out where it's going to go. The thread about this on Paradox's forum is still growing as people are trying to make sense of this. Here's a link to the legal agreement on Steam that explains some things which have me scratching my head even more.

Also, I didn't say earlier this looks to be a thing where a publisher would need to opt in. There's an article on Ars Technica that also talks about this being introduced for Skyrim not too long after the 100-meg file size limit was lifted. The way it currently stands the modder gets 25% of the sale price with the other 75% apparently being split between Valve, the producer and there was some indication toward contributions to various projects like Blender. It's my understanding that there will also be a "pay what you want" option if a creator wanted to do that. Like I said, I'm not keen on this kind of thing but I don't think we have enough info to say one way or another how this might affect Cities: Skylines or any other games for that matter.

Simply put, we need more information before we start predicting doom and gloom. I will say I don't like it and I won't be buying games where this is a thing. I ran a successful site with my kids with mods for years on end and never felt the need to charge for them. We did eventually monetize the site with AdSense and that paid for our hosting and usually new games and expansion packs and we felt like that was plenty enough.

After we got DSL I found it all too easy to forget that many people out there are still on dial-up connection and ended up swinging myself back around to keep that in mind when we had our websites going, always making sure they would load quickly no matter what kind of speed a person had. I'm sure if I ever had a 100mb (or some such) connection I'd again find it easy to forget those out there who struggle with not only their internet speed but possible transfer limits. As it is on a good day our speed is 3-5mb, so slow it no longer qualifies as "high-speed". Turjan, that is an interesting thought because yes, there really is nothing to prove an account belongs to you. I do think, though, that having a PayPal receipt for a game could suffice. I always keep my PayPal receipts.

Thanks for your reply, Turjan! I'll hold out as long as I can before I put a cargo depot there and maybe something will show up in the meantime, or if I get ambitious enough I'll try to make one. I'm still working on my original city and had the thought in mind today that I'd work more on the farming district. I did a little of that then the first thing I knew I had about 10% unemployment rate (not sure where that came from, possibly the backlash over revamping the university system so it can't take all the potential students), so since I had a bit of old farm ground left in an area I got the bright idea to change the zoning and let them all convert to generic industry to absorb some of the labor pool. Well, the first thing I know people are sick and dying EVERYWHERE in my city! I had recently added a new sewage treatment plant so checked that and it wasn't the problem. Finally I reloaded to my last save just before everything went sour and found it was the water tower I'd put near the farms. The generic industries were polluting it and giving my Cims the plague! I know a lot of people will read that and go "been there, done that" but this is definitely something a person doesn't have to deal with like that in any SimCity game. One thing I do know is that even if nothing was ever added to it aside from player-created mods this game is well worth the price I paid for it, although I do look forward to what CO has up their sleeves in the future.

Cops in hot pursuit of...you guessed it, the donut van!

I had a park placed away from a road with pedestrian paths to it. Apparently it was farther than three tiles because the garbage trucks never picked up the trash it generated. In all the time it was there not a single Cim visited it.

These are some of the reasons I like taking a slow exploring process toward just about any video game I play. I don't play it every day and last week allowed myself to be enveloped by Minecraft so there is still a lot for me to do and learn in Cities: Skylines. I recall over the years scores of players who get a game and have to do everything there is to do with it in the first week, then they're tired of it. I'm still learning how to balance things and how to best manipulate traffic. I probably won't even have my entire city built by the time tunnels come out. I think one of the best things I did was stop comparing this game to SC4 shortly after I started playing it. As much as I've enjoyed the SimCity games over the years I'd hate to have Skylines be just another SimCity game. And writing of things like railroads and such, has anyone run across a cargo depot that's perhaps a bit smaller than the in-game version and would look a bit better located near a bustling commercial district? I've looked and not seen one. I thought about making one but I couldn't figure out how to do that in the Asset Editor because all I saw was an option for making passenger stations. It would no doubt help if I spent more time in the editor but I've currently been more interested in playing than making things.