Cities: Skylines

Wow, has it been that long? That's great news. This game continues being the best Sim City successor.

And holy shit, that's a gorgeous trailer.

Edited by Redmess on Mar 7th 2023 at 11:51:34 AM

It's practically the only city builder of its type on the market right now, which helps.

Even on the indie scene, those kind of Sim-City-esque macro city builders are extremely rare.

Probably because it's a lot of work to get right, and there isn't a ton of free pre-built engines like with shooters.

It's more because ever since Banished and Rimworld, the colony builder genre has been so incredibly popular that it's overtaken the city management genre.

Traditional city builders are, unfortunately, perceived as passe.

Why was the post with the trailer thumped?

I'll just repost it, then.

TO be clear, this is the announcement trailer for Cities: Skylines 2. It's going to be released somewhere this year.

Edited by Redmess on Mar 8th 2023 at 9:35:53 PM

Because the mods are, quite frankly, unreasonably strict about the context rule.

Anyway. Maybe I should actually pick this up some time. I do have fond memories of the old Sim City games.

Edited by Perseus on Mar 8th 2023 at 9:37:38 PM

Cities: Skylines 2 developer says multiplayer would make the 'core player experience' worse

So no multiplayer. Other news:

• The game will feature rats and hail storms.
• There are 150 buildable tiles.
• The game will NOT be built in Unreal Engine 5, but the same engine as the first game, Unity.
• Mods for the first game won't work for 2, as it will be an entirely new game.

Gameplay trailer

New feature: all roads now automatically carry electricity, water, and sewage lines. No more rote area-covering pipe laying you won't see anyway and wouldn't really make sense in a real city.

See more in this trailer.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 20th 2023 at 7:26:40 PM

From the feature preview I'm probably most interested in the customizable intersections.

My main hope is that you'll be able to prioritize one road over the other, allowing traffic on a busier road to move mostly unimpeded with the slowdown focused on the less busy road where it won't cause as many problems.

New Preview view, this one about traffic AI.

In short the game promises to route traffic more intelligently. Instead of just taking the shortest route from A to B, they'll mostly consider travel time but will also consider other factors (ie they'll tend to avoid traffic jams even if that's still technically the fastest route).

Parking and road maintenance will become more in depth features. Since providing public parking will do things like make nearby businesses more attractive, and maintaining roads properly will reduce the rate of car accidents (which will also be a thing now).

Oh, thank goodness. They're aware of the big issue with traffic pathfinding in previous games of this type, and trying to alleviate it.

The bit about parking is really interesting, too. I remember both SC 4 and the first Skylines had parking mechanics that were super easy to ignore since they didn't really have much of a tangible effect on things.

I do hope the game doesn't become traffic simulator, it was a problem in the first game. Even SC 4 tried to tone it down a bit.

I don't think SimCity 4 is a great counter-example. That game is a masterpiece in a lot of ways, but traffic simulation is actively not one of them, and the traffic simulations in that game were so infamously horrible that it's one of the first games I remember playing where gamers would insist that playing it modded was an essential rather than a bonus for getting the most out of it.

You do need some degree of traffic simulation for a city simulator, though. Sim City 4 was a good demonstration of what happens when that simulation is bad.

Ans as long as the simulation is actually good, and does a good job of showing you where the problems are and how you might solve them, you won't really notice it that much.

Another video, this time on public and cargo transportation:

How different is Cities from Sim City?

It's a bit less beholden to grid building, and with the right mod, you can have an absolutely massive map to play around with. Also, you can get loads and loads of mods. It is very much a successor and improvement on Sim City.

Most of the differences I can remember:

The primary differences I remember are that there's a lot more gating and limits to what you can build and when, as most constructions, utilities, etc are locked behind population limits.

You're supposed to build your city as a small town first, and then as a small city, and so on. It can be a bit jarring coming from Sim City, which gives the player freedom to build straight out the gate, with for the most part limitations coming from available cash and only special buildings being locked at start.

Beyond that, Skylines puts more emphasis on district and neighborhood mechanics, including letting you not just zone what kind of residential/commercial/industrial density you want, but what kind of commercial or industrial business types you want to emphasize. Also, agriculture doesn't suck - though that in particular may require DLC.

More emphasis on transportation, which mostly boils down to being an improvement of SCIV's transportation systems. UI wise, this is probably immediately understood by the player in how you don't zone areas directly: you place roads, and then snap zones onto the roads directly. Admittedly, it can be annoying sometimes figuring out how to get your zones to align correctly, since it's not automatic and if your roads skew slightly they won't snap together. Like before, takes some getting used to.

Much like SC 4, most transportation types aren't super useful and you'll likely spend games not using many of them. Unlike SC 4, the transportation systems you do use are all designed to give you much more out of it the more attention you put into it, which in execution means you're basically using them exactly as you would in SC 4, but there's a lot more Quality of Life improvement and your economy won't tank just because your people refuse to commute adequately.

One last big thing, about budget. You can afford to and should tank your entire budget if you don't need it at the moment. It's not like most utilities SimCity, where 100% budget means "adequately maintenanced" and if you tank it then it becomes subpar. Budget only denotes capacity, so in the early game if you're 100% budgeted it means you're drastically overpaying. (to be fair, SimCity does use this system, but only for certain utilities like schools).

Also if you're coming from SC 4, there's no nation mechanics. Neighbor cities are sorta a thing, but not really, which is kind of a shame.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 4th 2023 at 4:40:03 AM

That last part seems to be changing for the sequel, though.

Also, if you use a mod to unlock the entire map, you can build those neighbouring cities yourself, if you so wish, which adds a whole new level of interesting to the game.

Another new video, this one on zoning:

There are new residential zone types, like rowhouses and mixed use buildings. And of course, special unique buildings to unlock.

Another video, this time on city services.

It's basically the usual, with a new addition being communications, like the internet.

Also, service buildings are now upgradeable.

Something I noticed in the video that wasn't remarked on is that it looks like some buildings variable sizes. So instead of building a garbage dump that's a single structure with a set limit, you'll build a garbage truck depot and zone the dump around it. Thus meaning when you are running out of space but don't actually need more trucks, you can just extend the size of a dump rather then building anything new.

It did mention that the buildings would be upgradeable, so I guess that means the size of dumps as well. Very welcome additions, I might add.