Cities: Skylines

I'm playing it every day still, but I'm also playing other things every day.

Played a bit more over the weekend and I'm kind of meh about the game. If tomorrow EA decided to implement some of the things in CS, I'd probably play SC again.

-SC's graphics are just miles better.
-I like SC's presentation over CS, especially the interface.

I find just too much frustration in CS to find it enjoyable. I mean, it's cool for a bit but eventually you run into the issue of not being able to upgrade your boroughs without demolishing the whole thing. You can't auto-widen roads into boulevards the way you could in SC. I mean you can, but you have to demolish the whole strip and possibly the whole block and then widen the entire grid so that you're maximizing zone usage (4x4 mini-squares). The snap tool when starting a town is calibrated to the starting road. That means that you grid your block using that tool, only to discover later on when you widen the grid that you'll be losing 2 mini squares.

Road Grids
Note the grid tool and how it's calibrated to give you efficient city blocks with 4x4 minis squares on each side of the road.


Note what happens after you auto-widen the road, you lose 2 mini squares on each side. Also, unlike SC, CS does not construct buildings on a full floor-print, it only builds them adjacent to the road up to 4x4 mini squares. In other words it won't plop down a 6x6 lot.


This was my planned commercial district. Note how many buildings I'm going to have to destroy if I widen the road. I'm also going to lose zoning area as demonstrated above.


If you have any public buildings in place, those will have to be relocated as well. Also, you can't simply nudge the building, you have to pick up the whole thing and move it complete to another place before readjusting.


Electrical
That being said, once you do level a block, you have to re-establish all electrical connections. This can sometimes result in massive power outages, especially when you use one block to bridge electrical to another. Sorry, but I liked how in SC all utilities were on the fucking road. Also, it seems there's a bug when you level a block that is feeding electrical power to another. It will sometimes not reestablish power to the block even after new residents settle in. In other words you'll end up having to put a bunch of windmills next to your blocks until the entire grid is back fully online (as well as power lines). You can easily end up in a situation where you barely have enough cash for an expansion project, only to end up without the cash to bootstrap the upgraded community. Also keep in mind you lose all those tax paying citizens while the whole borough is demolished.

Highways
Are a bitch right now. Until they fix the idiotic direction, they can be a pain in the ass to set right and mistakes can be very expensive. I'm not sure if the road direction Mod will allow you to fix highways. I spent nearly 50k on a highway upgrade program, only to discover one of the corridors was running the wrong way, had to demolish the whole thing, and reset it down (you don't get back all the original money). Lots of saving and pausing when building/upgrading highways. One thing SC did right was allowing you to upgrade a road into a freeway without much hassle.

Emergency Vehicles
Once again, the dumb fucks that make these games don't know that emergency vehicles have right of way when they have their sirens blaring. Not a big deal, I don't have traffic issues anymore, but can be annoying to see a line of fire trucks stopped behind a bus picking up people. Euro-sirens are annoying, first chance I get to replace them I will.

Overall, it's ok. I'm sure this will eventually get so much better. Definitely one of those games I'll set aside for a year or so when enough patches and mods are out there to get it working much better.

Game is fantastic, I suggest readingHOW TO TRAFFIC, V2 - Album on Imgur.

Guy is a civil engineer in transportation and has great insights into making transit more efficient.

My only gripe with the game at the moment is not being able to set turning lanes when merging a road into another. Cars not using all lanes on the roads is mildly annoying as well.

Cars will only use lanes when there's reasons to use lanes. Just using a lane for the sake of using a lane would create traffic later when having to merge anyway. So efficient road design is all about available output more than actual road throughput. 6-lane 2-ways/1-ways are largely useless for the majority of people because they don't design intersections and output around them so half or more lanes are literally pointless. Some of the lowest traffic city designs never go above 4-lane and 2-lane roads for everything except the central road.

Helldiver - the patch they pushed out a few days ago already lets you change the way of 1-way roads and highways, at no cost, using the upgrade tool. It was in the patch notes it may be in the tooltip now too, I'm not sure. The mod also did let you do that but the mod is actually pointless now since the patch literally added everything the mod did. There's tons of lighting/graphics mods already, I personally prefer CS graphics to SC graphics but that's just personal style so maybe you can find a lighting style you like more.

Amzin_sl said:

Helldiver - the patch.

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Yeah, using a realistic lighting filter right now, haven't found one I really liked yet. Started a new city with everything I know in mind this time and things are turning out a bit better. Having a serious trash issue in this one even though I have an incinerators going. Are you guys putting a landfill at each borough?

I pretty much do yea. Grouping them up just leads to garbage truck traffic overload. Well, I started with dumps and then upgraded to incinerators as money and time allowed.

Amzin_sl said:

Cars will only use lanes when there's reasons to use lanes. Just using a lane for the sake of using a lane would create traffic later when having to merge anyway. So efficient road design is all about available output more than actual road throughput. 6-lane 2-ways/1-ways are largely useless for the majority of people because they don't design intersections and output around them so half or more lanes are literally pointless. Some of the lowest traffic city designs never go above 4-lane and 2-lane roads for everything except the central road.

Helldiver - the patch they pushed out a few days ago already lets you change the way of 1-way roads and highways, at no cost, using the upgrade tool. It was in the patch notes it may be in the tooltip now too, I'm not sure. The mod also did let you do that but the mod is actually pointless now since the patch literally added everything the mod did. There's tons of lighting/graphics mods already, I personally prefer CS graphics to SC graphics but that's just personal style so maybe you can find a lighting style you like more.

Click to expand...

Yeah i have yet to find a good use to 6 lane roads... hell i even switch single roads to highway onramps when i dont need to zone next to them.

My gripe is more along the lines of: i have a highway, theres 2 exits far apart coming up...first one is backed up pretty far...but the cars still line up behind it even tho they are hitting the 2nd exit. idealy, all the cars would go around and try merging after 1st exit..

Barraco Bisi_sl said:

I'm blown away by the designs and scale people pull off for their cities.

Album:SpringValley Pop: 550K - Album on Imgur

Was SimCity 5 really just a sad single square you could use to build? Did Maxis REALLY fuck up that bad?

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They sure did, fuck those guys.

Interesting. I had a blast with the game. Also considering it was what $30, iirc? So I don't see expansion costing too much.

How do you guys look back on this one? I played the shit out of it for a couple dozen hours, but burnt out very, very quickly. It's better than CitiesXL by a mile, for sure. I can't really compare to the new SimCity since I avoided that abortion. But yeah, I got pretty bored of this game pretty quickly.

Eomer_sl said:

How do you guys look back on this one? I played the shit out of it for a couple dozen hours, but burnt out very, very quickly. It's better than CitiesXL by a mile, for sure. I can't really compare to the new SimCity since I avoided that abortion. But yeah, I got pretty bored of this game pretty quickly.

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Pretty much the same here. The game is fantastic for what it does but you can tell it was a small dev team that did it. It was lacking depth and replayability. I shelved it before burning out on it and figured i'd come back once solid mods are expansions would add the missing depth. I have hope it will get there if they keep supporting the community openly.

I'm ashamed to say that I probably put in way more hours into Simcity, yet I feel much better about the skylines purchase. Do wish it had a bit more depth to it though. No doubt I'll pick up the expansion and play it some more again.

I spent more time in Banished than this game, tbh. That was actually a fun sim.

My steam account says I put in 11 hours, 8 of those was fucking with traffic so I stopped playing. Still love the game and will play it again for sure.

I liked it a lot. Put in about 20 hours in the first week that it was out and then never played it again. I'll definitely try out the expansion.