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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

You should check it out more! I love it. There are some similarities to the way your project is put together.

I like it as well a lot, but after several hours of playing with it I started focusing too much on some things that I consider core flaws of the game and now I'm not motivated very much anymore to keep playing... .

Examples:

- utility services: I keep having problems with e.g. ambulances or trash collectors that are spawned very very far from the area where they're actually needed, even if a hospital or incinerator is just around the corner.

- size of buildings: I don't like the approach of having tall buildings / high-rise in developed high-value zones by default. In my opinion the size of a building should mirror only the density of the population living in that particular area, so it should be possible to have as well tall buildings in low-value zones. As well the amount of people living in tall buildings is for my taste not a lot different from the one of med/low-buildings, taking into consideration the height of the building... => how tall is a building should be a function of the people inhabiting it and not related to the value of the zone.

- deaths/births waves: once my cities got big, I kept getting each time waves of people dying and later a lot of births. There is a plugin that fixes this, but this should really be part of the basic game.

- traffic: this is actually already working veeeery well on multiple levels (e.g. very nice/interesting to observe how queues generate - I can observe that for hours hehe) but I do miss a logic that says e.g. "if this section of street has during a certain timespan ~95% of space occupied by vehicles then assume that there is a queue => mark that section of street temporarily non-existing for non-involved vehicles so that other cars would start looking for alternative paths" or something similar.

All in all, even if Cities Skylines was already a giant leap compared to the classical Simcity-games (excluding the last one which was just horrible), I'd definitely like more "action=>reaction"/"cause=>effect" in a potential future "Cities Skylines 2" or in this case in "CityBound".

Cheers

EDIT: for more details search in this page for the post containing "Unfortunately, traffic management is the only part of the game that really holds up as a simulator" by "amyjess" - I just read it now and I think that I agree as well with all what's mentioned there about CS (but I honestly don't rememember anymore how Simcity4 worked...).

Kind of the same. Loved Cities: Skylines to death but the traffic AI killed it for me. It gets to the point where you're stuck building unrealistic designs to workaround the flawed AI pathfinding. It's true you can mod it but it requires a ton of extra manual work to reassign lane routing in each and every city intersection, on top of killing performance.

I'm just waiting for the sequel to the game where they may open up the traffic AI to modders more, or fix some of the stuff broken with the existing engine. That said, it's become kind of the gold standard for city sims so OP should definitely check it out.

The current iteration of the goto traffic manager mod is the presidential edition, https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=58342.... It has some features like the dynamic lane selection and an alternative AI model (I think) that help even without manual work. But yes, assigning lanes at intersections, planning the number of lanes accordingly to have onboard lanes and in general avoiding that traffic collides takes some manual work. It can be fun though. I did not notice the performance going down too much.

I play City Skylines only to tune my roads with that mod. It's awesome, but in general I think the game has some annoying flaws, like that bringing dead people to graveyard is like a logistical problem, the blocky zoning makes neighborhoods boring, buildings are never that big, etc.

In CS the only way I found to have even moderately decent traffic flow was to make absolutely every street a one-way street. I don't claim to understand why that helps, but it seems to.

The downside is you have to be very careful where you place your emergency services as you can easily get zones which are too far for firefighters to reach.

This is exactly why I quit playing as well.

So, one thing that's broken about traffic is the distribution of population in low-density vs. high-density areas.

The short version is that low-density areas are denser than they look, and high-density areas aren't dense enough. For example, if you click on a single-family home and look at the population, there will be over a dozen people living there (TBH, I forgot the exact numbers, but it's way more than a single family's worth of people)! But if you click on a giant skyscraper, there's nothing even close to what would fit in that building if it existed in real life.

This has two unfortunate effects:

* The suburbs need more public transit than you think they'll need. Once you hit 50k people or so, you'll be hurting for transit badly. "But I'm building low-density housing with a street hierarchy, it works fine in real life, so why are my roads clogged in the game?" Yeah but in real life you're not cramming a dozen people into every single-family home.

* On the other hand, you can get away with building dense downtown areas with much less transit than would be required in real life.

And yes, there are mods to realistically balance population. If you run these mods, you'll have something much more realistic: the suburbs don't really need transit, but if you build any high-density at all, you'll need to get a good transit network up and running ASAP.

I agree and I'd like to add that (not related to traffic nor density but just pure spread of population density), from what I saw, there doesn't seem to be in CS (Cities Skylines) any relation between low-density & high-density areas, meaning that I can start right away building high-density areas with no in/direct realtime/historical impact of any kind.

We can (proably should?) debate about how these mechanics should work, but I think that it must be true that any city needs in some percentage both areas (e.g. as well the extreme being built now "on demand" for the World Cup in Qatar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusail ) must need both, or maybe not if they modeled the city based on CS haha.

I think that I could have similar points as well for the "education" in CS - I never (still don't know) if the elementary schools that I place are a foundation for people that will then go later to College and/or University - I still place them because I personally believe in the scala Elementary=>maybe_College=>maybe_University, but who knows... . (ok, this boils down mainly to a lack of transparency/informations for the user, independently if what CS does is good or wrong from the point of view of the user)

So, according to the Cities: Skylines wiki [0], cims who move into high-density residential areas are younger and less likely to procreate than cims who move into low-density residential.

That's an interesting way to differentiate them, but it's also something that's very specific to present-day America. And middle-class America, at that.

Kind of odd that Skylines is developed by a Finnish company and published by a Swedish one, given how US-centric that model is.

I've also written elsewhere in this thread about how Skylines doesn't have a concept of class stratification, either, and that's a problem: the only way to create neighborhoods with distinct class implications (e.g. the ghetto) is to use the RICO mod and plop buildings directly.

There's no real concept of medium-density, either: the closest it comes is to zone high-density and put it in a district with the High Rise Ban ordinance. Or, again, use RICO. Oh, and growables are limited to no more than 4x4 tiles... if you want bigger buildings (e.g. a sprawling suburban apartment complex), your only option is RICO.

[0] https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Zoning

> Kind of odd that Skylines is developed by a Finnish company and published by a Swedish one, given how US-centric that model is.

I totally agree, and maybe there has been some discussions about this in the past (I forgot about those early webcasts) - but for a company to align to the US market (probably the largest & most uniform around) is usually probably the safest bet - I still admit of being a little bit sad :|

> There's no real concept of medium-density, either

Now that you say it, I think that (a realistic - see previous posts) medium-density would be absolutely important to model european cities.

> limited to no more than 4x4 tiles

You're right but personally I don't really care about this for the time being (meaning that the other problems have for me absolute priority compared to this) - maybe they just randomly put a safe limit for their first release to avoid indirect potential complications... - I would have most probably done the same, so I won't dig into this hehe.

> I've also written elsewhere in this thread about how Skylines doesn't have a concept of class stratification

I agree.

Summarizing after all these posts & remarks, I feel sad that the studio so far developed only add-ons that do not improve the core of the simulation but only add more distractions and/or superficial complexity around it :P

(E.g. I did buy "Mass Transit" but it didn't give me the feeling that it improved the game but just gave me a few more alternatives - and actually "mass transit" is in my opinion associated to trains & metro, therefore absolutely not fitting cablecars/blimps/ferry/etc...)

But maybe.... they be working on aggregating key-improvements for their next CS2? Who knows... :)

I agree about the expansions, they have been a disappointment in general. Mass Transit was the highlight, but didn't go nearly far enough and still concentrated on the eye candy. I do understand that they try to appeal to the larger market -- people running the game as a simulation is surely a minority.

That said, it's still currently the best city sim by far. Hoping that Citybound will change that at some point :)

> * The suburbs need more public transit than you think they'll need. Once you hit 50k people or so, you'll be hurting for transit badly. "But I'm building low-density housing with a street hierarchy, it works fine in real life, so why are my roads clogged in the game?" Yeah but in real life you're not cramming a dozen people into every single-family home.

One could argue some cities have low-density housing next to transit though (like Berlin, or Paris). It does have the disadvantage of making metros too easy though, so commuter rail is almost never done because it is too hard to integrate to a city.

My experience with C:S heavy rail transit is that it doesn't work well with the current simulation: it seems that the cims take the shortest route even if the slightly longer train would be much faster due to fewer stops abd less congestion.

These are all very valid points. Cities: Skylines ends up being kind of a "traffic sim" game once you get down to the nuts and bolts of it. Even though they have some very intelligent citizens, it's still not quite up to par for pathing.

I still think it's the best City Sim game made yet. The author here should really invest some time to learn about Skyline's failings so they can avoid those problems in their own sim.

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