Badfish301

Hi Everybody, Sorry to have a "downer" thread here, but I think it's important to identify what has gone wrong with Cities Skylines 2, so the same mistakes aren't made 10 years down the road when we get our next new city builder game. I am kind of upset at CO for making this game, as they have again dominated a small niche market, so nobody else is going to try to make a similar game anytime soon in the city builder market. Cities Skylines 2 started off its run a bit more than a year ago with a trailer showing the game. The trailer was a total lie as we know now. Everyone was pretty excited, but people were upset about small detail things like the airplane's reflection in the window not being correct etc (turns out that's not even a thing and there are no reflections in windows etc..). So, CO pulled a huge bait-and-switch, showing us a game created in Unreal Engine 5, when they knew full well the game was going to be built in Unity and look essentially the same as its predecessor. Why did they do that? I mean, isn't that a bit deceptive? The trailer showed puddles in the streets with reflections, beautiful skyscraper designs, great building designs and a nice "city center effect" to the cities. The trailer also showed incremental skyscrapers growing floor by floor to completion with scaffolding and a tower crane.. In fact, the images of the skyscrapers growing incrementally were almost the showcase feature of the trailer, to the point of flying through a skyscraper under construction as it is growing floor by floor. Why feature something in a trailer that literally does not exist in the game? Instead, we get a game built in Unity, where a tower crane shows up, and a building just appears magically. Low effort. Tower cranes are also used to build small houses, instead of a framing animation or something.. come on guys. So, they lied, got everybody excited about a promo shown in Unreal Engine 5, then we got a game made in Unity that looks like trash. That wasn't the end of it. The game is Unity was so poorly created that a year later 1. There is no way to import custom buildings 2. The map editor is basically broken 3. It was so poorly coded it hardly could run on anybody's computer because of things like literal teeth being modeled and grinds to a halt over 100k residents. Maps aren't huge either. There are no regions to create larger maps. Graphically, while attempting to be a bit more realistic than the original, which was horrible as well, the style is quite ugly, and kind of dark/grey feeling, but still graphically not good. At certain zoom levels (zoomed out where the game is usually played) the graphics look kind of jagged/rigid and don't appear clear or smooth. The graphics in SimCity 2013 were better in my opinion. The graphics are D+. The road laying is the best feature of CS2, and mostly good (however the UI is bad and weird it is kind of hard to just make a simple grid even with the grid tool) but they stuck with the very bad "boxes" next to a road mechanic for zoning. I hate the boxes. We all know the next City Building game shouldn't have these small boxes, and should instead use vectors like SimCity 2013 and Manor Lords did. Which brings me on to vectors- Why did they stick with such a rigid zone placement mechanic, when they knew there would be curved roads and other shapes like corner lots and triangular lots where the square zone mechanic simply does not work? Was it too hard to figure out how to implement vector based zones? Manor Lords was able to do it, with a very small team. Instead of zones that were 4 squares deep, we got zones that were now 6 deep, but that really didn't help things much, as a much larger number of building models were then needed to be used in order for things to not look "repetitive" when zoning- forcing players to zone some tiles deeper than other in order to force variety. The city growth mechanic is very poor. There doesn't seem to be a "city center effect" like games even such as "New City" were able to achieve. There doesn't seem to really be a challenge to growing a city, as very tall high-rises just kind of pop up right at the beginning of the game. The buildings that do grow appear to have very strange datasets attached to them, where huge tall residential skyscrapers have very few people in them and industries and office buildings as well. The scale of the game is also bad. There doesn't appear to be any real standard block sizes to build in, as many of the civic buildings and parks are way too huge to fit into a regular sized block (oops). In order to get your city to "level up" signature buildings must be placed, and they are again way too large and out of scale, and when everyone has to place them in every city they build- every city just kind of starts looking like every other city with the same exact tallest skyscrapers (not fun). In SimCity 4, at least there was some excitement about growing your tallest buildings and seeing what they would end up being, but not in CS2 - Instead the tallest buildings that grow are ugly generic buildings with hardly any design time put into them, and the only buildings that are slightly attractive you have to plop. I was complaining about the reliance on this plop mechanic for the tallest skyscrapers before the game was even released and everyone told me to shut up about it, it would be fine, but it isn't fine, it's very annoying, and takes most of the fun out of this game. The tallest buildings should grow, not be placed. There is an obsession with death, deathcare and minutia etc. in CS2- at least they got rid of emptying landfills and cemeteries, but still.. You have to build an enormous cemetery (shouldn't a cemetery be zoned?) that is way of scale with everything else you build and is enormous. This cemetery only gets larger as you add strange wings to it. again, it's way out of scale, and absolutely has to be built or your city just fills up with the dead. You need a huge number of elementary schools and other buildings for a small city to function.. There is an obsession with cremating people in this game as well, which I find bizarre to say the least, as cremation is a private business, is a weird part of deathcare I have no interest in and find depressing which cities' mayors really have nothing to do with. (cemeteries are also private, so wouldn't mind if they would just grow under the right conditions, and would like them to be zoned personally.). More things should be zoned than be plopped: for example, in the original SimCity hospitals would just grow. I think hospitals should grow in a city builder as well, but I get that people want to place them.. Again, hospitals are private, not run by the public- I would personally prefer to zone "healthcare" and hospitals can grow there. This isn't my hill to die on though. I would also like to see Seaport areas grow- like they did in SimCity 2000, and perhaps better division of Industrial zoning into light, heavy, and warehouse. Agricultural zoning should be separate. There is little "shipping" or logistics in this game, and boats are kind of an afterthought and lifeless. There are no ferries. Ships do not have a disturbed water trail following them in the water (anno 1800 was able to do this, and a lot of other games do it, but CO couldn't figure that detail out).. which would have been fun. The water looks bad and waves are too large base game. When a city is small, not all lots should develop until the economic conditions are met and demand is there. A few people have posted images of their cities that look very nice, but it's only because they manually didn't zone some lots, mixed up the density and intentionally zoned at different depths to achieve the look. Realistic city growth patterns shouldn't have to be forced, they should just grow realistically and achieving density should be hard to do, and only under the right conditions- again in a "city center effect." Things like airports could have been handled much better - laying a runway and terminal buildings etc, but instead we have a generic airport. That's not fun. Universities- also not handled well, there should be more flexibility in building placement, smaller buildings, more variety, better building design, and better scale to the buildings. There are no large stadiums - not even one generic baseball, covered arena (which could cover basketball/hockey etc.), or large soccer stadium for your citizens. No arenas/stadiums seems like a pretty huge oversight to me, and appears to just leave room for a paid DLC. Stadiums should have been base game.. (a players should get to chose one type of pro sports stadium to build once a city grows to a certain size, and then get another pro sports team after the city grows more like in the original SimCity, but there are no pro stadiums in CS2 of course) I don't count the chirper football arena as a stadium really, also I find the Chirper in the endzone very annoying personally- CO is like obsessed with themselves and the unoriginal Chirper for whatever reason, and it just isn't that cute. There aren't really very good "government" buildings and there are no options for building say a State Capitol building, or upgrading your government buildings from say a City hall--->State Capital---->National Capital type of things. Government buildings are almost absent from this game, and if they could have been manually added onto with wings and change their colors and add rotunda and stuff, that would have been great, but nope. The building design is horrible to say the least, and in the day of Google Maps and street view, how they couldn't just copy architecture from existing buildings and put it into the game is mind blowing. Instead, really generic looking high-rises and buildings were modeled, many of them using huge amount of Tris in order to create a bland building and the textures are terrible. I cannot understand how they couldn't just look at google Earth and base the models off of that, but they did not. Even basic stuff like the ground textures and water don't look decent in this game unless modded. The park sizes are wonky as well, and don't fit most anything very well. The "Paradox Mods" platform is also horrible, and sometimes just crashes and doesn't work. The load times for the game are poor and general feel of the load screen and user interface are horrible. There should be some procedural generation for buildings going on- not just using vectors for the lots, but also procedural generation for building heights and wealth levels. There aren't any very large yards for very rich people (like we saw in SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4) with large mansions with large yards, pools, and hedgerows. Instead it's just all kind of bland houses, same sized lots mostly no real wealthy areas that take up more space. It just feels lifeless, and the building models are kind of depressing. There doesn't seem to be a purpose to this game. It feels like it was made by very depressed overworked Finnish people or something who just mailed this game in as a cash grab bait-and switch who don't really have a passion for city building games. SimCity 2013's building designs at least had some character to them- the lights would illuminate from inside, the industry felt very dirty, unless it was high-tech etc. The houses had some character, CS2 just feels bland and dull. The sound effects and atmosphere were better also. This game is just so bad on so many levels. I sometimes will look at a city map and get inspired to try and build something similar in CS2 - load it up, start building, placing some roads and then just get bored and it and just a few minutes later just quite because it's just so lifeless and dull. My main complaint is the city simulation though, or lake thereof. There really isn't a city simulation, stuff just kind of grows. There is no real challenge. This is a city painter and city detailer game, and building plopper game, but it just isn't fun and I would give it a D overall (was thinking F, but the road layout saves it from that). I will remember some more stuff I don't like about this game a bit later, but that's a decent start, just need to talk out why I hate this game so much. Thanks for reading, and feel free to disagree of course.

Hi Everybody, Not sure where to post this, and I know everybody hates AI (I generally am not a fan). I have noticed that AI is really good at creating realistic building models though. How hard would it be for AI to create a whole bunch of building models- you could ask it to create a range of New York Style buildings, or Boston style rowhouses etc. It seems like it is really good at understanding architecture styles and creates some very nice looking buildings. I guess you would have to have it create them in a 3d render program somehow. Has anyone been working on this for importing building models into city building games? Seems like a huge time saver, and could create a lot of variety.

Here are a few more models from the AI:

At 3:20 in the above video- You can upload an image and it will create a 3d model from it - Could be huge for building models.

This is from the subreddit AI SimCity: https://www.reddit.com/r/aisimcity/ These building models are just fantastic, the design, scale, feel, adornments etc. Too bad models can't be generated directly like these images- the Holiday Victorian houses are spectacular, and the skyscrapers are so sleek too.. Now that's a game I want to play for the rest of time.. those models are just so good. They could at least be used as inspiration for modelers.

Those are some great building models- They used AI as the inspiration, and then manually built them? Do you have a link to their post on Reddit by any chance? Some of those industrial buildings look fantastic.. and like the gothic skyscraper and other skyscrapers, very nice.

What justifies a new game is that graphics, and road /rail tools have improved dramatically since SimCity 4. As much as I love SC4 I can't go back because of the road building now/lack of true 3d. SimCity 4 was my favorite city builder of all time, but the lack of better road tools is what holds it back now. SimCity 4 definitely had the best "city growth" model out there where you had to work hard to get the very tall buildings and there was a lot of sprawl- across maps even, which was great, because you got a good sense of scale. Cities Skylines never really got the scale right - because they were simulating too much (but not simulating the right things- teeth instead of a city growth model) - and skyscrapers would appear all over the place with hardly any work on the player's part. What is the point? The fact that so many important buildings need to be "Plopped" also ruined the game - the size and scale of most of these buildings was much too large- and placing the most significant skyscrapers kind of defeated the entire purpose of the game. Growing the tallest skyscrapers is what makes a game fun, plopping them defeats the purpose in my opinion. Plopping tall buildings to me is kind of cheating and pointless. A city game is about the challenge of developing services and infrastructure to the point of getting the buildings to grow taller, getting areas to become very wealthy etc.. That's where skylines 1 and 2 missed the plot. Getting a Pedriana Pharamaceuticals to grow or equivalent in just the spot you had planned it was so enjoyable. FYI- There was a good indy city builder game called "New City" that did a pretty good job simulating height and city growth recently, but it stopped getting updated. Its graphics weren't great either, which unfortunately is a bit of a deal breaker in a city game where graphics actually do matter. I just posted another thread about how AI probably could be used to create a huge number of building models fairly quickly- generally AI is good at creating city-specific models too, so that could be a huge time saver. If you could create a procedural generation method like CityState Metropolis is trying to do that would be the best, but having a lot of good building models would be fine to. I just keep hoping some people from the old Maxis Emeryville come back, using the new tools we have and create a SimCity 2030 (SimCity 5). Good luck with your game, if you make it- seems like a lot of work, but can never have too many city builders - especially if they are a builder/simulator and not a building plopper.

So, there's another city building game coming out, this time by the creator of Citystate and Citystate II - I have to be honest, never bought any of the previous games (and likely won't buy this one either). The previous city-state games had a lot of very rich, tropical homes, and super rich looking skyscrapers. Looks like this one is similar, in that there are a lot of very rich people.. maps always look kind of tropical. Some new stuff is shown though- looks like buildings are drawer procedurally (at least some of them) which is very nice. The building growth model also is the first time I have seen a building grow floor by floor, which is nice. Road layout looks pretty good, but again way too many skyscrapers for city size, and some other kind of goofy stuff, doesn't seem like a good simulation really.

I just found the Dev Diary on Citystate Metropolis- not that many entries, but interesting material and it gives some insights on how this game will work: https://www.citystategame.com/post/citystate-metropolis-development-update-and-first-screenshots What is interesting is he isn't going for individuals being simulated at the person level, like was done in Cities Skylines 2, but is focusing on the building/ house level being the simulated part, and agents are just kind of a result of those structures. So basically the level of simulation is a bit more abstracted, but this was in order to have much larger cities. Some people are going to like this, others won't. For me, I think it's a good thing, because the level of simulation was too high in Cities Skylines 1 and 2 that it slowed down the game for larger cities. Another thing that was confirmed is that any odd-shaped lot can be fully filled in, they are vector-based, and residential, commercial and industrial buildings are procedurally generated. I wasn't sure if it was just residential, but it's all buildings. Also, the last dev-blog is from February of this year- but in it he said the game will be released in early access sometimes in September and November of 2025.. So, it could be released in early access this month, or next month (this stuff usually takes longer than people realize with scope creep though) and I have heard Q1 2026 for early access in some videos more recently.

So, borderline "city builder" but growing a city is part of the game, so I posted it here. Game looks very promising, kind of like an advanced Transport Tycoon.. The buildings were pretty good in Transport Fever 2 also. You can build roads that do have buildings grow near them, so there is that. - Custom height maps can be imported to re-create real life areas. - 4 Different biome types can be used and all can be on the same map. - Node based maps create more realistic landscapes. I personally really like the graphics, and seems like the developers have a new game engine also which should improve performance vs. TF2. Looking forward to this one personally.

A new (short) video showing some of the new vehicles in the game. Airplane definitely looks good, some nice high-speed train shots:

City Planner Plays always makes games look better than they are in my opinion, but an interesting video by him regarding this game. The way plots are developed is interesting (and they are vector based plots), the way plots grow appears to be a big upgrade from previous city building games.

Oops, I thought it would start from the beginning, but guess I had a time-stamp in the link, sorry about that. Yeah, the graphics look really good and landscapes seem very realistic. I like the node-based maps. I am not sure how water level works in the game, or if they can get rivers to flow- that's my only big worry.. They say they are trying to make modding very easy., so turning it into more of a city builder seems possible (maybe add parks and stuff). I have a feeling when modders get their hands on it, it can be turned into more of a city-builder by adding some features. As it is, cities do grow due to player decisions, and roads can be laid, but the city builder side is a bit restricted and has to do mostly with what is delivered to cities and how well they are connected to transportation over other factors.

Honestly, there is just no chance this game can be fixed well enough to be good now. This thing is a total write-off. They haven't allowed custom buildings after this long- there's no way they fix the underlying simulation issues and memory hog problems. The game is just an unstable piece of trash. Like you said- it can be made to look ok at certain angles, but generally looks sharp/weird and not right. The city simulation is horrible- super tall skyscrapers for tiny area cities.. they think that's cool and exciting, but it's not. Plopping the largest buildings- I always said this was a bad idea, and it turned out it was. Building growth- again, a crane shows up and a building just appears.. come on. They couldn't care less about how a city actually grows it appears. Super tall buildings just out of nowhere.. no city center effect.. no really good or bad parts to the city from the growth models.. just generic looking garbage buildings and a ton of body incinerators. The zoning mechanic is horrible. The only redeeming qualities are the road and rail layout, and that's literally it. Like you said - the base maps are just horrible- it's as if a small child created them.. and not a smart small child, like one that doesn't give a crap. They had so much time to make this game better than the first one, and besides being slightly graphically better, it is worse in many ways- including the map editor, water, no custom buildings, super huge downloads for the regional packs that seem to break/not download right. We need another company to take over, because CO just tried to mail this one in as a cash-grab after showing everyone a trailer made in Unreal Engine 5. I have no respect for this company, and actually don't like them now, because we get so few City Building game releases and they took the market share, discouraging others from making a good city building game akin to something we actually wanted in the first place.

Looks pretty good. Very impressive you did this all by yourself! I am going to say a few things, and I hope you don't take them the wrong way, I would love to see this game succeed: I am worried about a few things here: 1. We need 30 degree and 45 degree roads (know you said you were working on 45, but really we also need 30 degree roads). Without them I can't get behind it this game. That's what ruined CityState - even though the graphics were good etc. only 90 degree roads is an instant no from me. 2. It doesnt appear as though roads can be elevated, which would be restrictive and really hurt the game. Are there bridges/tunnels planned? 3. On your Steam page it looks like the city is being plopped. I am not really seeing a simulation and buildings are being edited on the fly. I would prefer the building editing tool to be separate from the game, and assets can be selected for play in certain games, but not editing during the game if this makes sense. Buildings should grow, not be plopped/edited by the player in the game. Procedural floor growth would be absolutely fantastic, but should be part of the simulation. 4. Is the map just kind of blank in the beginning and you add onto it? I would prefer maps that are all there in the beginning. 5. Looks like a similar mistake that was made in Cities Skylines- where there are way too many tall buildings for a city that isn't that large. I would be very careful to have enough urban and medium density sprawl before taller skyscrapers start appearing. This of course means maps should be fairly large, or like in SimCity4 where regions can be built from maps. The best thing about your game here though is it seems like you're trying to have the player base build the buildings. Is there a way to share the buildings with other players and allow people to download them? I feel like you should just create the framework and editing tools- the zoning types etc. and the player base can make most of the models for you (even though your building models look very good)- you have some base models, but that should be the game mostly- other people creating and uploading their own attributes. Ideally- building growth is procedural, and by floor- so you could have many different buildings created out of say 3 different floor types... or 1, or more.. you already kind of have that modeled it appears, just not the procedural growth part. Good luck with this, but I think the road angles and flexibility will be your biggest hurdle.

Not only does it crash a lot and take a very long time to download regional packs and then constantly re-download things every time you re-start a game (why do it this way?) The main problems I have with it are the zoning, lack of procedural generation, lack of city simulation, and the graphics are just awful. Its hard to make the cities look nice with the strange eyesore graphics that have jagged angles and just look weird at most of the more zoomed out play distances. I really wish Maxis would come back for another one now that we have better game engines etc. (but they can't try and pull the online-always thing again, which is ironically now another reason CS2 to be a big failure) files need to be downloaded 1 time, stored locally on the hard drive.. no more of this "mods are downloading" thing every time the game loads. Whoever makes the next City Building game also needs to employ a few city planners/ geographers and urbanists who understand how cities grow.. CS2 completely missed the mark.

I was trying to take some screen shots of my cities.. but the game keeps crashing lol.. I will try and upload some as we go along.. Will keep loading the game and take a screenshot or 2 of my cities.. I am not talking out of my rear here.. I have some experience with city building games, and no, I don't zone just 6x6 - the problem I have is the zone depth shouldn't even be created by the mayor, and the concept of boxes and zone depth is destroying this game.. I have a solution to it that involves procedural generation off roads that I can get into some other time. These are some of my cities.. Game cashed 3 times trying to get these images.. and had to uninstall French pack. I love city building games, but this one just has issues. The graphics are poor, the city simulation doesn't exist really, the zoning mechanism is weird, and it crashes a lot. There is a lot not to like.

I have downloaded most of the regional packs (the ones that would actually download). I have to say I am under impressed compared to what I was expecting from them. I guess the first thing that shocked me was how large the downloads were for a modest amount of buildings. The Gigabyte large downloads seemed bigger than what I was expecting (not sure what I was expecting) but I said fine, and started to download the France pack (one of the better packs in retrospect).. It took multiple days to download the France pack (why?) I can generally download 3 or 4 gigabytes in a few minutes for most anything else no problem, but not these regional packs from the Paradox Plaza.. appears the Paradox platform no worky so goood.. The packs then started to create issues with load times and crashes in the game, which made the regional packs very hard to use (at least for me) and I ended up removing a few of them just so the game wouldn't crash.. I can have maybe 2 regional packs installed at a time at most or the game seems to break. The implementation of the regional packs was also strange.. you have to zone them all individually (no option to just kind of paint regions with the style).. and some zoning types simply don't exist for certain packs like office zones etc.. the packs seem incomplete. Was really looking forward to the "Northeast USA" pack, but it turned out to be a complete dud with very poor building designs that was huge again, was very hard to get downloaded and that didn't add much once again and greatly increased crashes and load times with not very inspired building designs. Paradox Mods is horrible, and they won't stop using it because it is a way to control the content I think.. Control-freak Colossal Order likely wanted to be the only ones to upload building models for their future DLC plans - That's the reality. It's greed, not incompetence imo. There is no building upload tool (again a year after released) .. Not because CO can't figure out how to upload custom buildings of course, but because it isn't supposed to work. . That's the reality. They want total control over all in-game content, and that's why instead of a free building upload tool they instead went for the free regional packs to placate the player base and create excitement post launch (hence the staggered release dates), but all the while making sure regular people can't upload free content, only their vetted people to control the flow of building models. "Can't fix the building upload tool.".. sure, whatever you say Colossal Order.. it worked form day 1 in Cities Skylines 1... This Fiasco of a launch for CS2 Reminds me of SimCity 2013 when they completely lied and claimed: "The game can't be played offline" which turned out to be fraudulent when someone created a mod that proved the game could be played offline just fine, only they didn't want you to do it so they could suck every single penny out of everyone thinking it would be pirated.. and likely to sell DLC later and wanted everyone playing online to push things on them. Long story short: Maxis lied to everybody, said they were crazy for thinking the game didn't need to be always online.. they knew they were lying, but they did it anyway, just like CO is doing with the Building Upload Tool that "They can't figure out how to fix." Paradox Mods is used to control user content, not to somehow help us because the Steam Workshop wasn't working just fine.. Paradox mods was just created as a way to potentially suck more money out of the players by not allowing free content. This game is a total disaster.. It could have been good, but unfortunately CO thought they could make more money through controlling all content than they could.. This was pure greed.. and they shouldn't be supported for what they are doing. Showing a trailer made in Unreal engine and then releasing a game in Unity is also a disingenuous greed-based thing to do as they knew the game looked better in Unreal, and they just care about money and fooling people to sell more, not making a quality game like SimCity everything but 2013. They don't realize if they just made a good game they would have done a lot better, and made more money but they instead got greedy and took the short-cut of basically creating Cities Skylines 1.5, which would be fine if we were living in 2019, but more is expected now with Unreal Engine etc. The city simulation just isn't there as I have said before as well. Too many high rise buildings for small towns.

So, the following game, while it isn't the type of game I am looking for in a modern city building game, and the art style is a bit too "Foundation" if you will and a bit too cartoonish looks interesting.. What I love about this game is the zoning mechanic and how it handles oddly shaped areas. I haven't seen this zoning mechanic used before, but I love it.. Watch this video: Zoning is fantastic and handles odd-shaped irregular areas very well, and combines them into larger lots. I am pretty sure it is the road placement, not the topography deciding the shape of the "squares" (for lack of better term as some are triangles I guess polygons?) that combine for the larger lot sizes. Imagine this implemented in a more modern city builder, and we have our square zoning nightmare solved, the roads would create the shapes for the zone vectors. Combine this zoning mechanic with procedural generation of buildings this would solve the corner lot problem.. this would fill all the space in between roads with lots that actually fit. This is kind of the best of both worlds- can deal with triangular spaces, but also could just be a regular square grid for grid areas of the city. Can create original lot sizes that completely fill odd shapes. I really love this mechanic- don't really love this game, but this mechanic combined with "Tiny Glades" building editor type system, and players creating building textures and procedural elements and we suddenly have an amazing city building game that solves a problem we have had with lots that were formerly all squares not filling completely. I also like how the small shapes (sometimes triangular) can combine with neighboring squares and shapes. This mechanic would be so great in a modern city-building game. What is shown in the game is the "vectors" (smaller squares or triangles) are connected, and a larger vector based shape is created, then the player decides if a house, field, or agriculture develops there. This type of zoning could be easily transitioned into a more modern city building game where instead of sheep fields.. low/medium/high density residential is zoned - ports are zoned, cemeteries are zoned etc. etc. heck, keep the sheep fields, and have a large agriculture sub-section with different field types.. this could be huge!

This would also solve the problem we have in city building games now where adjacent lots "snap" together into a larger lot for say a series of rowhouses or areas where you don't want that to happen where the zoning is all the same. In Cities Skylines 2 for example, you need to put a pedestrian pathway or gap something in between lots to keep them from clumping together into a larger lot, but with this mechanic you would be in charge of exactly what the lot sizes are and adjacent similar lot sizes wouldn't combine into a larger lot. You draw the lot size first, then designate what it is zoned inside said area, I like that. That is how it also works in real cities. You could create older parts of town with smaller, narrower lots, create "flatiron building" type large triangular lots, could create square lots of any size, and could control the exact shape of the lots. This would be such a fantastic method for creating zones and is kind of what I have always wanted from a lot zoning mechanic. This lot drawing mechanic, combined with some procedural generated buildings (maybe not all of them would be, but some could be) -and a good building and map editor is exactly what I have always wanted from a city building game.

"After 5 years of passion, late nights, and countless dreams, our small team is proud to release our very first game on Steam – Summer Islands!" Wait, did you guys just rip off the Open TTD code, and add a parrot and tropical music? Am I missing something here where they are stealing the now open source code for Transport Tycoon that everyone contributed to profit off of, by adding literally a pixelated parrot and tropical music? This is really happening right now? These people should be ashamed of themselves.. Don't support this garbage people.

Yeah, that's another issue I have with Urbek... and the ANNO games for that matter. It's now 2025- We need more angles than just 90 degree angles for roads and rail. SimCity 4 had 45 degree roads and that was a while ago now. I just can't play a game anymore that does the 90 degree angles everywhere thing. To me, games that don't have at least a 45 degree angle for roads and rail are just being lazy at this point. It isn't "cute" anymore, it's just lazy. That said- I did not like Cities Skylines 2 very much, even though the roads were amazing, because the city simulation wasn't there, and they didn't understand what City Building fans were mostly looking for in the challenge of getting taller buildings and higher wealth. I would rather play A-train to be honest. New City did a great job with density and city simulation, with ok graphics, but the road layout mechanism was great- it had most of the less than 90 degree angles you would want, and a pre-existing kind of grid layout that helped with laying out larger blocks etc. It also had a great map generator, not to get off topic here. The main issue I had with Urbek though was again that it is more of a puzzle game than a city simulation game, albeit in an urban setting. There wasn't a city-center effect really, as much as requirements in order to get density where you had to kind of "stack" grocery stores etc. to get taller buildings. Also, I'm not from Chile, so the buildings weren't really what I was looking for either. That said, I do try and buy any city building game that doesn't take place on the back of a wandering enormous animal, so I am not trying to talk others out of trying Urbek, and it is inexpensive.

I bought Urbek and found it interesting for a while, but it's almost more of a puzzle game in how the model is applied than a city builder most people might recognize. I found it fun for a bit, but then that pretty quickly wore off when I realized every building is just kind of used to "stack" density, and it fell short for me. You could argue the same is done in SimCity, but it was much more obvious here. Some people like it, but it's not really what I was looking for. I prefer the SimCity 4 type city growth model/city simulation. Also, voxels in the right setting are fine, but I think I am expecting more from graphics with what we have today. Not to be a downer, or take away that you enjoy it, but that was just my experience with it. Also, aren't they trying to sell trains as a DLC?

So, I am watching trailers for this "Tiny Glad" game that is another one of these procedural sandbox games: So, for me- just building a castle or whatever really isn't that much fun if it isn't connected to a larger city building element. Get this idea though: A building editor like the one used for Tiny Glad could be the backbone of the entire city building game. We just need road and rail, and the players design all the buildings using an in-house building editor and then they can upload and populate the game with their custom buildings. There could even be procedural elements built into the buildings- where floors could be added as the land value goes up etc. The entire game should just be the basic road and rail, maybe electric infrastructure, but there is a building and map editor that are the core of the game. The players use an in-house editor to create all the industrial, residential, commercial airport buildings, shipyards etc.. There are textures and stuff they can use, but make it super easy to import custom textures etc.. All the designers supply is the building editor, map builder, and some road and rail stuff. players build the rest, upload their creations *(to be saved locally, not on the cloud) and do it for fun.. This game would go crazy so fast!

This is another great example of how the user takes the simple tools and can create pretty much everything they want. They just need the materials and shapes to get started with.. It's kind of like Minecraft, but way better. It's intuitive, it's pretty, and it solves the problem of how tricky it is to create building models and what program to learn- as it is in house, the building creation and map creation tools are literally the core of the game. How awesome would that be? Check out the video- especially toward the end when the lighting is used- that's exactly the type of look to a building model I personally love. It reminds me of the look of the Glassbox engine - looks like SimCity 2013, with the comforting glowing colors and good graphics, but even better. This game is almost like a proof of concept for a great building editor for the next level of city building game. Colossal Order's biggest mistake was their building models and not having any way to upload custom buildings (probably on purpose) and then they had to have their people design all the in-building games. The game models are bad, and Unity engine does not look good either. The result was poor, and people were upset they couldn't upload their own buildings 13 months on. This solves the problem, and has an in-house building editor, and everyone uploads everything that ends up in the game and it grows exponentially as people add their own models and people can rate them and classify them with tags to be easily searchable. There is also a way to donate to the creator of assets, and the game developer get's 1/10th of the donation amount. The game sells for like 30 bucks- just has map editor, building editor and road and rail tools - and electrical lines and sewer as basic utilities, but it would grow by the day- making it exciting unlike CS2.. It could be bigger than SimCity 4 and they could basically use Tiny Glade to make it happen, just need to scale it up and add a few things, but it's really close to what I've always wanted.