YMMV / Cities: Skylines

• Broken Base: The Sunset Harbor DLC brought much debate when it was leaked and later announced. While the free update providing overground metro to unmodded users (the metro transit system was often criticized as a poorly-developed mechanic, and the otherwise decent Mass Transit DLC was also criticized for not focusing on improving the fairly barren metro transit system at the time) was met with almost universal praise, the downloadable content is the subject of debate, with some players feeling that essential updates or much wanted expansions to mechanics such as crime or airports would be more deserved than a DLC revolving around fishing and coaches. The less coherent theme of the DLC also bring back memories of the After Dark expansion, often viewed as an example of Early-Installment Weirdness in terms of DLCs, with many users demanding a more straightforward DLC like the other expansions.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The game has extensive Steam Workshop support, allowing players to upload custom assets, maps, and even entire mods. Combine this with a common perception of the game's default assets and other features being bland and/or incomplete, and it's rather uncommon to see dedicated players playing the game fully vanilla.
• Fridge Brilliance: Chirper is much maligned for providing little useful information while constantly throwing idle nonsense and repeating complaints at the player... which is not that different from how people actually tend to use Twitter / X in Real Life.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Pedestrian walkways. If given a choice, Cims will prefer to walk to where they need to be rather than drive. As such, creating elevated pedestrian walkways between your residential zones and where your Cims need to be can seriously cut down on traffic, leaving roads open for service vehicles.
  • Update 1.1.0 adds tunnels for both roads and rails. Before, building rails and highways took up a significant amount of space forcing the player have to plan the routes carefully. Now it's possible to build either partially or completely underground, both freeing up space and not requiring the player to have to demolish significant chunks of their city.
  • The Monuments are designed to be game breakers, although, without using mods, you have to have reach all the population milestones in order to unlock them, making them arguable Bragging Rights Rewards. Some remove the need for city services like healthcare or education, others provide massive power production or a tourism boost. The Eden Project can break the game in a bad way if placed carelessly: it massively increases land value throughout the city, causing all the homes and businesses to upgrade to max level at once. This can almost double the population, causing high unemployment and a subsequent economic depression.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the criticisms of SimCity (2013) was how EA was planning to put out oh so many expansion packs for the game. That did not really come to pass as EA pretty much abandoned the game when they took Maxis out to the back and shot it, leaving the game with only around a dozen or so DLCs. However, Cities Skylines, as of 2022, has no less than 38 DLCs, creating a Crack is Cheaper scenario for those who're just getting into the game.
  • The name of the ChirpX rocket launch site, originally added to the game in 2018, is especially funny following SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter^note which the in-game "Chirper" is modeled after in 2022, and even more so following Twitter's rebranding to "X" in 2023.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Most of the various public transit options in the game have various pros and cons, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who seriously uses the trolleybuses from Sunset Harbor, which combine all the disadvantages of buses—slow, low carrying capacity, and able to congest traffic—with all the disadvantages of trams, including the need for specialized and expensive road infrastructure. Unlike trams, trolleybuses can't bypass traffic by running on specialized lines, nor can they operate on six-lane avenues or highways like a bus. Parks & Promenades makes them even more useless, as the patch introduces a number of high-speed bus-only expressways that they can't use. In real life, trolleybuses do have many advantages over both ^note They are lightweight and don't need to refuel/recharge, therefore having cheaper long-term fuel costs. The lack of a combustion engine or battery pack results in cheaper maintenance costs, a significantly reduced risk of mechanical failure, and more interior space dedicated to passenger capacity. The rubber tyres combined with the lack of an easily stressed internal power generator also means they can handle inclines and slippery conditions very well; Switzerland is a nation that largely kept its legacy trolleybus networks for precisely that reason. Many new trolleybuses also contain a small battery pack that can be charged during operation, alleviating some of the downsides of their fixed infrastructure by allowing the buses to drive short distance off the wires without the downsides that the charging times and excess weight of dedicated battery electric vehicles bring but the game doesn't model these considerations.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The brief *DING!* that heralds a building upgrading. Especially when it happens multiple times in rapid succession. *DINGDINGDING DINGDING DING DINGDINGDINGDINGDING!*
• Nightmare Fuel: "Lehto Electronics" a creepy atmospheric track which wouldn't sound out of place in a Silent Hill game, plays when there is nothing built or a city full of abandoned buildings.
• Porting Disaster: When the Nintendo Switch version was announced in 2018, fans were very suspicious of whether the game could even run on such weak hardware. Despite gameplay footage from Tantalus (who made both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports) appearing to show good performance in large cities, many who wanted a Cities: Skylines experience on the go were left with a seemingly unoptimized and unfinished port when it released in October 2018. Many were angered at Paradox and Tantalus for selling a sloppy and unoptimized game, so much so that even Colossal Order declared it a lost cause and discontinued the port, thereby leaving it without any expansions aside from After Dark and Snowfall.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Chirper, an in-game Twitter / X-like news feed, informs the player of various happenings in the city. It is often disabled by players not long after the game starts due to its overly frequent updates and the fact that the updates try a little too hard to emulate Twitter. Any information from it can be gotten from the traditional graphs and map views anyway.
    • To the point that there are mods that will "kill Chirper" for you.
  • In earlier versions, the landscape could not be altered once a map is generated and there were no disasters (at least, besides dam-related ones). However, given the mod-heavy nature of the game and Paradox asking what players would like to see, any unfeasible mechanics can be averted, and indeed, mods have since been made to add terraforming functions among others in-game to make up for what the stock game lacks.
    • Landscaping tools were ultimately added to the game along with a new DLC. The Disasters DLC also adds disaster support to the game.
  • The requirements for some landmarks can range from baffling (fill up a certain amount of cemeteries) to frustrating (have a high crime rate for a long time, have a low tax rate for a long time, or have 1000 abandoned buildings). The good news is that unlocking a landmark in one map unlocks it for any subsequent playthrough.
  • The 'Deathwave'. Since all your initial residents move into the city at about the same age, after a few years there will be a deathwave when people are dying rapidly and your population plummets. Suddenly, a lot of hearses are spawning all at once, clogging up the roads. Dead bodies devalue houses and nearby houses, which will then become abandoned, which causes crime, which requires cops, but the cops can't get to the crime because of all the hearses backed up around the block... then ambulances can't get around, so sick people die... The deathwave can destroy a wealthy, well-functioning city in less than a year. There are mods that help alleviate the deathwave effect by slowing down the aging process of the citizens in order to balance the gameplay and provide a sense of realism. Cities: Skylines II got rid of the deathwave altogether by having citizens move in at many different ages, producing a slow churn of older cims passing away instead of large waves of many of them dying at once.
  • There is an actual limit to how many infrastructural buildings and transportation links you put in your city. The biggest problem here is that it is hidden and you have no way of finding out until you get the "cannot build any more buildings of this type" error message. There is a mod that shows you the limit of the number of buildings and links you can construct before you have reached your maximum and you can no longer go further. Unfortunately, this limit seems to be hard-coded into the game's engine and there is no way to get around it with mods. The announcement that Cities: Skylines II will no longer have the infrastructure/citizen limit and will allow players to build anything in their personal cities as much as they want until their computers break was met with much optimistic enthusiasm.
  • Once your city's population reaches past 500,000, the game begins to break as vehicles no longer spawn, causing major problems to your services. Keep ballooning the population further and you can expect to lose your constructed buildings. This problem is apparently related to the infrastructural limit and is a major source of complaints among players.
  • The Snowfall DLC is considered this, being one of the most underused map types, mostly owing to the pure white maps being underwhelming to build on. Many feel that the content in Snowfall could have been better used as a weather mechanic rather than its own map subtype, which is indeed what Cities: Skylines II did.
  • Tsunamis from the Natural Disasters DLC. Unlike most other major disasters, which often focus on only one part of the map, tsunamis affect the entire water level of the map, taking the form of a usually massive wave that sweeps away everything along the shores and can travel surprisingly far over flat lands. As a result, even small waves can sweep over and destroy entire cities and decimate the population. What's more, the building used to detect tsunamis is almost useless due to the fact that, by the time it warns you about the incoming wave, it's already in your city limits and it's likely a lot of people will be washed away even if you activate the shelters immediately upon being given warning. Your only real hope of defense is to be lucky enough to see the wave coming from the side of the map before it reaches your city limits and pre-emptively hit the evacuation alarm in time, and even then, it's likely you won't get everyone into a shelter before the wave hits.
  • The introduction of the Paradox Launcher and subsequent integration of the game to the launcher, Good grief. The launcher is a real piece of work that needs administrative rights to install and run, and will not work otherwise. Cue the game becoming broken on systems owned by security-conscious gamers. It's no secret that the launcher is extremely reviled, half of the posts on Paradox's forums are questions about bypassing the launcher completely. And yet Paradox is adamant about not removing it.
• Spiritual Successor: To both the aforementioned SimCity and to Cities In Motion by the same company, especially as designing efficient transportation is a major focus in this game. Ocean Quigley, a veteran of SimCity dev Maxis and lead developer of the 2013 iteration of the game, said in an interview that he was thrilled Skylines picked up the mantle after SimCity 2013's poor performance lead to EA closing up Maxis in 2015, the same year Skylines was released.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Released in 2015, the game's mascot, Chirpy, is obviously inspired by Twitter's bird logo. Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and rebranded the website as "X" in 2023, the Twitter bird has been retired, though Cities: Skylines II, despite being released a few months after Twitter's rebranding as X, still retains the Chirpy mascot for use for its in-game Twitter/X-like feeds.

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