Be Excellent To Each Other

Hey guys!

Remember SimCity? And how after the initial brief spurt of fun-fun Beta enthusiasm from which I persuaded you all to buy, we all found out that the game was cripplingly limited, buggy and devoid of creative opportunity meaning that you'd seen practically everything after a few hours of gaming, and how your precious cities looked like tiny toy-town parodies of the real thing?

Well guess what, a new city builder has come along and - please believe me this time - this looks frickin' sweet as fuck!

Ladies and gents, I introduce you to Cities: Skylines. (Unless, you know, you've actually been following it and stuff, in which case, er, yeah.)





It is definitely far, far superior to SimCity, and also quite possibly the city-builder of our dreams. But for why, Pete, for why?

Well, here's a few simple facts:

Up to 1,000,000 population of living 'cims'. They are born, marry, have children, go to work, die. And unlike SimCity these numbers are not fudged and the game does not cheat. The cims (yes, I'm going to persist in calling them that) move into a house and get a job in town - and once there, that's where they stay. Every day they will commute to the same place. They will have children. They will age. Their children will have children. Eventually they will die, when they'll be carted off to the cemetery or crematorium. Naturally, they get educated too and with greater income upgrade the house.

The cities are big. BIG. Upon loading the game you will see a 2x2km tile to build on. The same size as SimCity. (Though you do seem to be able to pack more into it.) Don't panic! After you reach a population of around a thousand the game unlocks the ability to buy additional adjacent tiles, thus extending your borders. Up to nine tiles are available, and these aren't separate instances like in SimCity, these roll back the borders of your starter tile so that you eventually have one huge 36km2 tile. There is the possibility of modding that to 100km2, but that is very tricky to do, apparently. There will be no support for the mod, and it may fry your computer. But still, 36km2 is pretty damn big!

It has water physics! The water flows in a fixed direction. If you put a sewage outlet above your pumping stations, expect a very sick city. You can see the river flow and the sewage spread. You can also build dams that lower the water level downstream and raise it a little upstream. Beware though, this may flood parts of your city - especially if you demolish it with ensuing wave!

It has buses, trains, subways, airports, harbours, complex interchanges, motorways, left-of-the-road driving options, elevated rail, super-bridges - everything you could want! And the roads are very curvy and easy to lay in any shape you want. Tunnels aren't out yet, but will be in free DLC after release, along with European buildings.

It has incredible modding capability! Steam Workshop is fully integrated and the mod installation screens in game look incredibly easy to use. You can generate new maps, either from height maps or using the in-game editor. You can also create new assets by taking existing components and combing them. For example, say you want to make a custom park - you take a basic template, add trees, maybe a wind turbine, playground, squiggly paths and upload it. Now everyone can share. The same goes for complex interchanges. Craft 'em and share 'em. Hate making interchanges? Download someone else's! Finally using Blender you can make your own buildings and share them. People are already doing so.

The graphics look pretty sweet, check out the videos. But the most impressive thing is how alive and buzzing the cities feel - and with purpose too!

So, the big question is, how does traffic handle? Well, big sighs of relief as the traffic system really does work apparently. A whole bunch of gaming stream types were given a fully unlocked beta-build to go nuts with Let's Plays. Cities of 100k have been achieved already, and they are big. And apparently there's no lag and if you get your road and transport systems down good, the traffic actually works!

You can also create and name districts. You can give these districts separate policies, such as smoking bans, free public transport, tax breaks for certain industries and so on. There seem to be quite a few city ordinances in this game.

There's also three different visual presets to the game, with an overcast 'Northern' theme with firs and pines, a tropical theme with palm trees and such, and a standard colourful vibrant theme. Further themes can be modded, and the colour saturation, tinting etc easily changed.

So, after all that gushing, do I have any qualms from the masses of Let's Play videos that I have watched? Well, I would like a Day/Night cycle, but apparently that's coming later. Also, farms and airports and harbours are too small. But you can create bigger ones to plop down apparently, so that's okay. What else? Oh yeah, I'm hoping for a district policy that'd mean I could control the percentage of buildings of differing heights - there's a few to many hi-rises in the mid-late game, though no where near as bad as SimCity was for that.

Er, I think that's it.

Cities: Skylines is an absurdly cheap £23 and is released on Tuesday. I cannot wait. City Builders are my favorite genre, and there hasn't been a truly great one since SimCity 4. All the advance talk from gamers on SimNation, SimTropolis and other city builder sites who have been given the beta preview code are unanimous that this is the new gold standard. I'm incredibly excited. What this tiny Nordic team of 13 look to have created something truly special over the last 3 years.

So, here's a couple of videos:



Latest Dev-Diary.



(This fan-made trailer is gorgeous, if you only watch one video, this is the one.)

That does look absolutely stunning, but I just know I wouldn't have the time to devote to it

I've just been watching a live modding show-off, involving a lovely looking city on two mountain islands and a coast with a huge waterfall. They created the dodgiest looking park in the world - a park for murders - with a donut billboard, AC unit, smoking garbage can and park bench and plopped it down, watched it being used. It worked. And then they showed a few early fan mod buildings, a couple of cathedrals, a church, a Soviet palace, the Maastricht City Hall - they all looked awesome.

Man, I want this game more than any game I've ever wanted before!

I'm in. Is it on Steam?

I played SimCity yesterday actually. Got annoyed after an hour when it complained that I didn't have enough mass transit for my casino strip, but wouldn't let me build train station as I didn't have a department of transport hub in the region, but it wouldn't let me build one of those either for some reason.

Yup, it's on Steam and is super cheap.

This is a pretty good stream to follow for liveplay's:



He's not an experienced city builder so he makes mistakes, but he's patient and figures things out. The above one is a pretty great example of traffic control measures with industrial connections, passenger stations and the placing of bus and rail.

Happily I have just found out that you CAN ban hi-rise buildings from districts. That makes me absurdly happy.

Oh, and in Cities: Skylines there's no bullshit department unlocks. Once your population hits the required amount, buildings unlock. And the population milestones are pretty easy-going.

I am watching with interest, but after THE GAME THAT WE SHALL NEVER SPEAK OF AGAIN, I'll wait to see how this pans out in reviews and in feedback here and suchlike.

Also it needs to be good enough to compete with Hearthstone for game time, and that's a big ask.

I do love me a good city builder though, and I agree with Pete that Sim City 4 was the last great one. (Although it was Sim City 3000 that I spent a ridiculous amount of time with, like well into the small hours of the morning time and time again sessions.)

As for the most recent Sim City, I shall never speak of it again, apart from just then.

Ooh, SimCity 3000, best music ever. So jaunty.

Wait a week and I'll have a review for you all, with videos of my city, etc. Then I'll let you know if it's great or hilariously and tragically broken in some key respect. But I'm sure it won't be, because the Let's Play streams after many hours still show excellent fun.

Two days to go and lots of cool new things. First of all there's been a whole lot of new buildings appearing. Traffic has been tweaked so that cars change lanes more often, it appears according to the Let's Play streams out there that traffic is pretty darn good now. Also one of the most prominent streamers called Quill18 caused a terrible epidemic in his own city by not paying attention, zoning too much too fast and always playing it on super-fast speed. Turned out he'd built water-towers next to his incinerators. Ground pollution contaminated the water supply that made people sick. The ambulances couldn't get to everyone in time, not exclusively because of his traffic problems but because he'd placed his hospitals on busy main streets disrupting the flow of medical vehicles, and the sheer rate of sickening citizens overwhelmed the system. Eventually people began dying and the hearses couldn't keep up either, which meant that more people got sick and next thing we knew he his population had halved.

This had been a problem building quietly in his city for over half an hour, it just took time for it to reach the tipping point and then.... DOOM.

Fortunately he returned to an earlier save and tried again, addressing the problem early this time, and everything went swimmingly. Phew. But yes, epidemics!

Oh, what else? Somebody has already modded to 100km and it seems to work okay. I think the agent sim limit of 1,000,000 will be the game's cap, not map size. (Electricity, water etc operate SimCity 4 and are not agent based, thank fuck.)

They've now upgraded the water engine so that when you demolish a dam the wave will sweep down the valley and drown your buildings, that become abandoned due to flooding and er, carnage, probably. You can also build massive dam walls to keep out the sea and reclaim land, it seems.

Also a guy took his dog to work in-game. Awesome! And you can see hearses pull up, the guys come out and take away the dead in caskets. Double morbid awesome!

All of these cocks on youtube with their videos. They've been at it for weeks. WHERE'S MY GAME? I want it now

I do really like the look of this but I'm still going to wait for some reportage back from Pete, and see how the reviews pan out.

Then again they're not asking for much money so it can't go too far wrong, unlike those gouging cunts EA who had half a billion pounds off me on pre-order for Sim City DELUXE EDITION which of course turned out to be the most offensive turd in the history of the world.

Shit I mentioned it again.

We all knew how this was going to pan out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments ... ew_thread/

Review scores are meaningless, but this seems to be around 9 meaningless so far.

Played half an hour so far, up to a worthy village in a sleepy northern backwoods. It's gorgeous.

I await detailed feedback with interest!

That's an hour now. I'm at a population of 1.800 and have a small town police station, fire station, elementary school and clinic. My finances nearly sunk me, but a loan has kept me afloat. My little town is one of small winding streets and very curvy suburbs. In the dead space between suburban streets I've made pedestrian paths so peeps can take shortcuts. I can imagine this game getting quite tricky the bigger the city, but I'm playing it on the slowest setting, which is rather gentle.

My only graphical quibble is that mirrored glass in the game reflects a built up skyline, which is a bit odd. You only notice if you zoom right in and it only happens with large glass frontages. I suspect this was put in after the community complained that screenshots of glass skyscrapers seemed to show them dull and non-reflective. D'oh!

Otherwise so far so excellent.

Oh my God. This game so far is just bloody brilliant. I'm only on 4.300 people so far in a small town that fills one third of a 2x2km, and that's after four hours of intensive gaming. I've been chatting and sharing screenshots with Pod all the while. He's a smidgeon ahead of me. I've also created a sawmill district in the North, a dedicated industrial zone called 'Packard Mills', which I've modified a cloverleaf intersection to serve. Buses from downtown circle the residential zones and take my workers there and home again after a shift, all thanks to the great multiple bus routes you can build from a depot, colour coded for your convenience.

You can see images of my city here:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/7656 ... crollTop=0

I'll be playing this all tomorrow as I've taken the day off. So far... woah.

Pete is correct.

Also you can rename the people and the places, so you can have Dennis Double-Dick working at The Peeping Palace.

Do I understand correctly that you can plan your own bus routes? If so, I am eager to hear what you can do with trains. Because trains! They might make me buy this.

That might tip me over the edge, one of the best things about Game Dev Story was being able to create games like Furious Fanny Fuckers in the 'Clunge' category, and then watch it sell very well.

For £23, which is an eminently reasonable price, I think it'd be daft not to give this a try.

Is it still £23 now it's been released?

Steam says £22.99.

Yes you can. It's quite easy to do. You build a bus depot and then click on the bus stop icon. When you click where you want your first stop to be you'll find it starts trailing a line along the road. Clicking down subsequent bus-stops shows this line route complete with arrow directions drifting along it, and to complete the route you simply link up to the original stop. When the bus appears, pause and click on the bus and you can change the colour scheme of the bus line, so in infographics you can quickly see say, a red line that runs down to the docks, a green line up to the schools, and so on. You can have five bus routes per depot, and increased transit funding means more buses for the route. Cims love buses. AND THEY USE THEM PROPERLY.

The same deal goes with trains. You can colour code them. You can also click on any vehicle and follow it around, which is quite cinematic at times. I love watching my buses pick up and drop people off. I'm going with seperate lines - a dedicated downtown line that picks up shoppers and takes them home and a line that runs between town and my industrial zones for workers.

You can rename anything in the game, the only catch is that there's no find mode. So you can't go and see what Clarence Bodicker is doing down at the care home. But happily there's a sort of way around this. If you only rename memorable buildings with distinctive surroundings, then you can easily find them again. Then, as cims never swap homes and always live in the same place, and go to work in the same place, you can rename the household and then easily find them, as clicking on a house or workplace reveals the sims inside and around, I believe.

But a find function would have been nice, yes.

You also get subways, and using the stylised colour infographic can see the trains moving underground and picking up people. But I haven't got that far yet.

I managed to get myself into an overly complex sewage and water pipe system, as I didn't realise you couldn't cross them over each other. I should probably start again, as it's only going to get much much worse as I build

I did that the first time, but only because I didn't realise that if you join the sewage system to the water system and you get dual pipes.

Ohhhhh!

I shall do that.

This actually does sound like what Sim City should have been.

Pro-tip, with suburbs draw little pedestrian paths (under the beautification tools) between streets. Not only does it make lots of lovely grassy walks for your residents in the green spaces of your city, but the cims use them a hell of a lot to take shortcuts here and there. They do seem to have a small but welcome effect on traffic. And it looks sweet.

I has bought it, for £23 it can't go too far wrong. Very compact install as well, found room for it on the SSD with no hassle.

I'll have a look later when the evening's 'glass' of wine has taken the edge off my ability to play Hearthstone at maximum efficiency.

Oh God, I'm stepping away from this for a while. It's just too much. It's the most addictive game I've played in a long while. Pop 12,500 now and counting.

Eggleston is progressing nicely thang yew very much. Now a small city of over 13,000. Why not go there on holiday? It's a very nice little city. There's a little brochure on my steam profile page for those who would like to take a look...







Click here for paradise!

I do think the population figures are a little low. (I'd double that total for a city this size. But if that's the price of this agent based glory then so be it.

Really enjoying playing this. What I'm not enjoying is my city traffic starting to grind to a halt along the most used routes to the smog zone. Have had to add EXTRA WIDE streets, but they didn't help with all of the trucks that go to and from the industrial cargo train station. It's gridlock down there



They actually use them too well. I'm trying to make uneducated ghettos here, as I need people in the "uneducated" category to work my farms and oil wells. But these pesky children keep taking 3 bus routes and ending up at the local primary school How dare they try and educate themselves out of squalor.


Q: parking? The 1/2/3 lane roads without trees or grass bits feature "parking", and the game likes to put cars there. But if you upgrade those roads to the grass/tree versions, you increase land value and have fancier looking bus stops.

But does it stop people parking? Where do all the cars go? No one seems to have complained yet...



So far the only "problems" I have with the game are:

• No autosave
• Farms too small, which means you have to cover the fertile land with roads to increase zone size :/
• It's really hard to create small roundabouts that stay circular once you attach roads to them. (And there's also no mini roundabouts)
• Dodgy offramp intersections. They always seem to curve the opposite way from the way they do in real life? this might be a bug in the game, as I'm using left-hand drive
• Building one way roads is a nightmare, especially due to the above problem with offramps. You have to start the road in the "coming from" direction and end it in the "going to" direction. This is often the opposite way that I'd like to build them. Before I realised this a lot of my one way roads were the wrong way round! There should be a button to simply flip a section of road if it's one way. (Also, you can't "upgrade" two-way to one-way and vice versa, even though they're the same size, which is annoying).
• Placing pre-built intersections is a hassle, as you can't place them over existing bits of road. Though now that I think about it you might be able to use the upgrade tool to do it? (Haven't tried)
• You should be able to restrict hospitals/schools/etc/landfills etc to zones. This way I can make true ghettos alongside paradise utopias, brazil style.
• park having to be next to a road. Footpaths don't count :/

But there's very few nitpicks in such an enjoyable game. What's weird is Cities in motion 1/2 handled the road building and one way stuff very well?

There's a bunch of screenshots here, but I haven't bothered to be artist like Pete or even give them captions. (well, only a tiny bit on the artistry front)




ps: On taking these images I noticed that my coal plant, after being moved from one side of the industrial zone to the other, is running out of coal. And that I have a 3 way deadlock with trains.

I built separate little towns to feed my industry with the uneducated. A friend suggests I should call it Tardville. These towns are far away from my main city (about a tile away) and though they have bus routes to the industrial centres (which are about half a tile from the main city) where they could theoretically hop on another bus or the subway into the big city, they seem to prefer commuting home after work. Consequently their children are educated only to an elementary school level. This seems to do well for me.

Perhaps there'll be an Aldous Huxley mod where we can inject alcohol into the young to damage brain cells. Brr.

I've heard there's a patch to be released about the over-frequency of trains. Fingers crossed eh? Also, you can fake good looking farms with one of Skyestorm's mods. There's a video on youtube. I've also spotted some arable field buildings to fake bigger farms.

ps; The strange tale of a Cities: Skylines town with only one house

For anybody who wants to wander my city, I've uploaded it here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =406663441

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/sho ... ces!/page9

Read all posts by Co_Karoliina in this thread and ignore all of the other idiots. She explains the mechanics of how the simulation works.

Well, I'm still horribly addicted to this game, despite the commercial bug which makes the mid-game a bit annoying for the likes of me, wot like to build commercial hubs AND parks. Hopefully that'll get fixed soon.

So, I started on a second city. I'm seeing how creative I can get with a highly mountainous region. Let me introduce you to...



Hidden Pines!

Nestled deep in the mountains, Hidden Pines is a small community built around a thriving sawmill industry. Upon entering Hidden Pines, you will find The Packard Mill District. This modest little hub of industry exports high quality lumber, sourced from the verdant pines and firs of this beautiful valley. It's a sustainable industry, and great care is taken to maintain the bio-diversity of the forest.



Follow the bend of the road at the end of the street and you'll quickly find yourself climbing up a winding mountain road, upon which the bulk of Hidden Pine's residential housing is found. Two cul-de-sacs branch off midway, and you can follow the narrow road all the way up past the water tower and wind turbine, and up to a small community that boasts a scenic overlook, giving breathtaking views out across the region towards the fjords. This residential district is named Truman Heights, after the local sheriff. Another road weaves up to the Cookie Residence, which also proudly displays a magnificent view.





After a rocky start, in which Hidden Pines barely scraped a profit and had to take out a near-crippling the loan, the large village now happily finds itself making a modest income from its lumber exports. This money has been used to build public parks, such as a carousel and basketball court. The village also houses an elementary school, fire and police service, and rural clinic.





Hidden Pines may have a small population of just over 1,000 souls, but that doens't mean that the sleepy village doesn't dream big. With expansion mooted to follow the valley floor to the east, Hidden Pines looks to have a great future. Let us hope it does not lose any of its charmingly quaint character in the coming years.





Also, cheap whiskey.

Bootiful!

ps: I'm not sure I'd consider the park thing too much of a bug. Your residents only have so much free time. They can either shop or go play football! Though I guess it needs to be tweaked, as parks etc are a primary way to raise land value, so people will place lots of them.

In other news: adding cargo freight stations basically killed traffic in my city, as now there's a million trucks lining up to get into each station, one by one! There appears to be 4 open bays on the cargo train station, but trucks only use one, and happily queue up for it?? I consider THAT a bug! (It's similar to how one lane on a road often stacks up, even though all 3 lanes go the same direction).

That's a mighty good looking town there Pete I do love the graphical style of the game.

I've put a smallish amount of time into the game up to now but haven't even got as far as saving a city yet, just starting from scratch each time. (And getting better with the mechanics each time.)

Mechanically it all seems really good, and I love the way everything works down to an individual level.

It seems very generous with cash and very forgiving of general fuck-uppery, at least in the early stages of the game.

Fundamentally though it's not winning the battle for my time with Hearthstone, no reflection on Cities Skylines.

My only criticism would be there's no v-sync option and no frame rate limiter, which causes my graphics card to get a bit noisy as it cheerfully renders the game at 150FPS or more.....

No V-Sync mod yet, but there's a frame rate limiter out which caps it at 45fps. You can find it here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... earchtext=

For screenshots this camera mod is pretty handy:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... earchtext=

And finally if you want better AA in game this dynamic adjuster is awesome. 150% seems to be a quality and performance sweet spot for me.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... earchtext=

Ta, man!

Will this run OK on works my Macbook pro (with retina, the 13" i5 with 8gig ram)? I was thinking the other day of getting Sim City 4 as I saw it on the app store, but this looks a bit newer and shinier. How do they compare? Last Sim City I played was the ipad version, and before that SC3000 on PC.

I've had a hankering for some city building for a while and now I've got my own office some time, I'm really quite tempted by this.

I reckon so. You're plonked somewhere between the min and rec specs:

Thanks, was a little unsure about the GFX though, as it's an Intel iris rather than a truly separate card.

Was wondering if SC4, which should run pretty well on a modern machine, was going to be a better experience than Skylines running (potentially) a little bit roughly. Not that it seems like a game that requires mad FPS.

Oh, you don't have a separate Nvidia one inside? My 15" has the GTX 650M. It won't work with an Intel integrated card, as stated.

http://www.game-debate.com/hardware/?gi ... 0%20Mobile

This website reckons you'll be ok in lower resolutions (720p)

Bums

That would look a bit pants on high-resolution displays wouldn't it?

It's last-gen console resolutions, so yeah, wouldn't look amazing on the 1600p screen you have.

If you can hit an exactly divisible resolution, which conveniently would be 1280x800, it can look ok.

It's like they almost designed it that way. Mine is 1800p, which divides to 1440 x 900.

First expansion is coming.



More info: https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines-after-dark

The important bit (my bolding):

That's very nice of them.

I must confess I never really got into this game, not because there was anything wrong with it but because it suffers the same fate that basically all games suffer when it comes to me these days - they're competing with Hearthstone for my game time and that's a battle that any game, no matter how good, generally loses.

I should give it a proper go at some point really, and there is also a fine choice of fantastic mods now as well. RPS has done a couple of good write-ups on them.