City Skylines

[Wafflewaffle]

So i watched a few Lets plays, pre-ordered the game and i've been playing it since launch. Noticed two thing about this game.

One, good youtube Lets players can create a sense of urgency where there is none, resulting in a quite different experience between playing it and watching it. City Skylines does have a nice progression to it, unlocking services and buildings according to its population, but it lacks the iminent danger of being left behind and having your city desmantle itself becouse you made a bad decision. I have yet to encounter economy crashes, big brownouts, natural disasters, crime sprees or any other cataclysmic event that i might have to adapt my play to. For a city builder veteran it can be a little too easy, but then again it does scratches a lot of the itches that were not scratched for a long time now.

Two, there is a lot of intermingled systems in the city planning that feel intuitive and that makes optimization a challenge. Things like sound pollution, public transportation, terrain value, and the classic building trinity (fire, crime, education) all mesh very well and making everything work together is easy, but making it work perfectly is not. Im not a guy who goes for optimization for the sake of optimization but im sure there are freaks like that in this forum, so its worth mentioning.

For the price i think its well worth a try. Plus mod support and Paradox DLC policy should extend its playtime for a while. I give it a 6 iron nuggets out of an ingot.

[jorgebonafe]

*Totalbiscuit smites you for using an arbitrary rating for games*

I heard about this before, from the last co-optional podcast. They said it was one of the best city builders in a long time, with systems that actually work, instead of the broken latest Sin City, and the other City XL or XXL or whatever that were pretty shitty. Also apparently it has an exceptionally huge area available to build stuff, like 10 times the Sin City games. I might try it when it gets a discount, its a bit pricey for me atm...

[Katalliaan]

I've been watching EJ_SA play on Twitch (adding up the VOD times, it's showing about 15.25 hours, and I watched the bulk of that, as well as someone else when his internet died). It looks good, but has a pretty serious problem with traffic patterns - on multilane roads, cars will stay in the lane that eventually puts them where they want to be, no matter the distance to that turn or the traffic conditions between their current location and the destination. I've seen a highway stopped up because most of the exits were on the right and nobody wanted to drive around the traffic that was waiting to get off the exit. I've also seen merging of two one-way roads into a 2-way where they alternate between going and stopping because the game sees it as an intersection.

[Taleric]

The more I see this the more I like it :)

I am scared to death after seeing what became of Sim City, that and I can just boot up SC4. Fore sure once it is on sale.

[FaceFoiled]

I've been playing it for a bit as well, and enjoying it so far. I'm not a huge city builder or anything, but since this was only 30 euro.. why not. :) Is a nice change from the "normal" 50/60 euro AAA games these days.

I like how it all works, although I'm struggling with making decent roads. :P I just hit the "traffic" button, that shows how traffic is doing, where it's being congested and such. The ramp from the highway to my city was like a fire hydrant with massive queues. Build another one slightly further down to try and sort this out a bit, but that was quite difficult to do.

I think it's about practice for me though. I'm having fun with it, can't wait to get my next milestone and get a university in place! :D

[Wafflewaffle]

Yeah transit is a bitch but as soon as you get trains for your industry and start to place more entry points into your city things get better. Roundabouts and Three-way intersections are your best friends.

[FaceFoiled]

Yeah figured that as well, but still in the early stages of my city. Need to rework the entry points at some point.

[Taleric]

How is the performance? Watching some streamers it looked good but they usually have super rigs.

[Wafflewaffle]

So far no problem, im at colossal city (30k people?) and my rig is running a GTX560, i7-2600, 8G RAM. Its nothing fancy and it runs smoothly.

[Taleric]

Very reasonable and good to hear ty :)

[akshit1190]

Also apparently it has an exceptionally huge area available to build stuff, like 10 times the Sin City games. I might try it when it gets a discount, its a bit pricey for me atm...

[jorgebonafe]

wtf...

[Sandrew]

wtf...

That is one of the smartest spambots (or maybe not even a bot?) I have ever seen.

[FlowerChild]

Whatever it is...it's been dealt with :)

[Larmantine]

Lol. The only thing that was fishy about that bot was that it was his 1st post. Is that what gave it away?

[abculatter_2]

Lol. The only thing that was fishy about that bot was that it was his 1st post. Is that what gave it away?

That, and it was a direct copy+paste of an earlier post.

[FaceFoiled]

Started reworking the roadworks in and around my city, but it's not an easy feet for an established town. Instead, I am going to start a second city off my main city and basically move things over. That way, I can rework the roadworks in my original city without any significant losses of income over time. Having a lot of fun with it, although the fucking Hydro Dam decided to flood my city. :P

Technically, I suppose it was the river that flooded my city.. I build a Hydro dam a good bit away from my town. Apparently not in a good enough location, or perhaps the water currents in the river were too fast. I dunno, but it flooded big time and took half my city out of work for a while :P.

[Wafflewaffle]

I skipped hidros and went straight for solar. When you design your roads in and out of the city keep in mind that individual roads for material income and outcome of your industrial district and for in and out of tourists of your business district. The less those cross with the in-city transit from and to your residential districts the less overall transit you have.

[Taleric]

As traffic appears to be the lifeblood of this builder do accidents and weather that cause congestion have a place down the road? Or is the scope of time to large/fast for these elements to really make an interesting impact?

[Wafflewaffle]

As traffic appears to be the lifeblood of this builder do accidents and weather that cause congestion have a place down the road? Or is the scope of time to large/fast for these elements to really make an interesting impact?

I dont believe traffic accidents exist and neither does "natural" disasters. Sure you can flood half your city if you are FaceFoiled or poison everybody with a badly placed water tower, but traffic, and the rest of the game for that matter, feels very "constant". There are very little surprises in a maybe too smooth difficulty curve.

There is a "hardmode" mod that comes preloaded with Cities. I've been playing with it, but its actually just a larger numbers mod. You need more residence and less comercial for every industrial area built, therefore more traffic, therefore more garbage, health, police, eletricity and so forth. It is harder but not more challenging if that makes any sense.

[Larmantine]

I tried this game, its great, but lacks depth IMO, and as Wafflewaffle said, challenge. Everything's very straightforward and easy to do. The UI is great, though. Some say the traffic management is a challenge, but it is more of an annoyance for me. Once you expand a an industrial district, it's bound to get clogged with traffic. I try to use as much one-way roads and as few intersections as possible, but still it gets clogged. Also, the fps wasn't that great on my laptop, and basically I think that was the biggest turn off for me. It's an i7-3610QM with a GeForce 610m, on lowest settings it was no more than 20fps.

Gonna give it some more love when I have some more free time.

EDIT: Anyway, if you like any kind of builder games, you'll probably love this one, as it simulates every little detail of every citizen.

[Wafflewaffle]

Also, the fps wasn't that great on my laptop, and basically I think that was the biggest turn off for me. It's an i7-3610QM with a GeForce 610m, on lowest settings it was no more than 20 fps.

Make sure you are running the game through your Nvidia and not your built in Intel GPU. I did a quick search and found a lot of people having this issue on laptops. Just a tip.

[Larmantine]

I already did. Didn't seem to make any difference. But thanks anyway.

[FaceFoiled]

I have been having a lot of fun with this game, although it really did take me a good few cities to get the basics down. Even now, I'm still struggling with the traffic load on certain areas. I think I know how to solve it though, but just have not gotten around to it yet. :D

Quite a lot has changed since I first started the game and attempted my first cities. I got into the Steam Workshop, and that is a magical place. The game is fantastic to start out with, but the tools given to us by the game to create custom content is amazing. You can design and build anything, from amazing maps to buildings and parks. I'll have to dive into that at some point, and see if I can create a nice FaceFoiled HQ building, for now I'm using Gotham Tower as my home. ^_^
Beyond buildings and maps, there are some really cool mods as well. One of my favourite mods will have to be the one that kills the twitter thing. :P At first I thought it was fun to have that level of interaction with the people of my city. After a while, I was tempted to burn down the city to get it too stop. :D

Another mod I really like, is the Terraforming tool. This gives me access to the map editor tools to change the land (raise, lower the land). Not freely mind you, it's very expansive to do so, just like in real life.

Have a look at all the mods and assets I use, here: FaceFoiled's subscribed items on Steam

The map tool is really cool as well. Beyond the basic "build your map", it is actually possible to take real map data and import that. I have not played around with that yet either, and don't really intend to either. Map making.. it's not really my thing, I like to fill out maps.

Currently, I am working on my third real city attempt called "Chilli Cheese Bites". It's based on the Cologne map which can be found here: Cologne v2 map on Steam

A fun way to track my progress, is to go through my screenshots here at: FaceFoiled's Screenshots on Steam

I'll be updating that regularly as well, so that's a fun way to track progress. I'm trying to take it slow though, as I find that going to fast really does not work out well in the long run. It's easy to get carried away and build out too much, without the proper services and roadmap in place.

Actually, that's what I'm facing right now. I had this great idea of separating residential, commercial and industrial in a way that allowed for a really good road network/connection. Unfortunately, I got too excited and build out here and there, and forgot to upgrade roads and sort out those important connections. If you need to go to work by car, I feel sorry for you in this city. The traffic jams are no joke. :P

So that's my next point of business. I need to work on the traffic network and get those important roads in place for good cargo connections. It's fun to work around all that and figure things out, but it will take you a few cities to do this though. You need to understand how things work and what causes issues, and ideally you want to plan your city that way as well.

One last thing to point out, would be CleaveTv! I've been tuning into this Twitch streamer for a while now, and he creates the most amazing cities. Beyond being a great city planner though, he provides a great deal of interaction with the people watching (Chatting) and answers a lot of questions. I've learned quite a lot from him, which really helped me out. Oh, and his YouTube playlist is amazing too, so that helps listening to the stream for long periods of time. :) You can find him here: http://www.twitch.tv/cleavetv

[Stormweaver]

I've been playing this a fair bit too - it's pretty damned good. Only got one mod atm - one that allows you to toggle the existence of traffic lights - and that's just because I have trouble mapping the elegant chaos that is the UK's traffic to the tools given :p

I'm hoping the modding community (I'm sure there's one under the flood of user-generated assets, somewhere) really gets thier claws into this. Half because it's got a lot of potential, half because I'd like to be able to merge and split traffic lanes instead of creating intersections everywhere :/