A comparison of city building games
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The game rewarded strategies that were not backed up by empirical study, or even common sense: You could lace a city with rail from residential to industrial and commercial zones, and the people would still clamor for more and wider roads; There were no mixed use zoning (You cannot shop in your neighborhood?); Your people would demand more police and if you didn't give it to them, they'd riot!
The game rewarded you if you tried to make a California town. (But not Davis — no bike paths!) The city government could not build public housing … (The majority of housing in Helsinki is publicly owned).
I wanted to be able to twiddle the parameters based on the way real people and cities have been observed to behave. New study comes out that says that people seek out 15 minute walkable neighborhood? Go to the settings panel adjust the parameters accordingly … The people should riot if you give them too many cops.
When Yannis Varoufakis took a job as house economist at Valve (before he was appointed as Finance Minister of Greece), I thought it might be a good time to pitch the idea to them, but he left soon after.
"And there, the Finnish capital is fortunate. Helsinki owns 60,000 social housing units; one in seven residents live in city-owned housing. It also owns 70% of the land within the city limits, runs its own construction company, and has a current target of building 7,000 more new homes – of all categories – a year"
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
70% of land is not 70% of housing.
Probably because it was developed in Walnut Creek, CA. I used to work nearby. I was always curious why they didn't include the BART train that runs directly next to Cal Plaza (up at like the 5th floor) as the track's curve there makes BART deafeningly loud. The whole Diablo Valley is pretty Levittown-y, possibly causing the lack of zonal diversity in the game.
https://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=California_...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/California+Plaza-Walnut+Cr...
edit: you might also enjoy Sim City 4 with the network addon mod installed. It allows you to customize those exact parameters, and shift the incidence of public transportation usage as well as preference for travel time and other things.
Overall, it's more intended to be a dystopian rather than a utopian city builder, from the brutalist art style to the little game mechanics which imply about city design.
It’s also very common for the player to use place every building manually, contrary to to the author’s table. If you check out /r/CitiesSkylines or YouTube, anything that looks really good is likely done this way.
The game also doesn’t force you to prefer transit vs. cars, it’s very flexible and you can build an Asian, European, or American (NYC or “sprawl”) styles easily. YouTube examples I can think of:
- Nydal - European – Marble Mountain – American (California) – Kobyashi Island – Japanese
More like "The reward comes from playing with your own objectives and succeeding at them" which is one of the hallmarks of sandbox games, not just Cities: Skylines in particular.
I've played Cities: Skylines quite a bit, the genre is my favorite one. While I agree the game doesn't force you into completing arbitrary objectives, I've found it quite challenging myself, but that's also because I setup my own objectives to be challenging.
There's NOTHING wrong with that!! Traffic simulation is incredibly hard, and its very fun to resolve that issue (or "attempt" to resolve the issue). To truly solve traffic problems requires you to understand how and why all the cars are moving the way they do.
The main issue IMO with City Skylines, is that once you "solve" the traffic problem (which is almost always a combination of Highway -> 3-way Artery road with few intersections -> "cul-de-sac" style distribution of cars to their final endpoints + a few mass-transit options), there's nothing else to the game. All problems start, and end, with traffic management.
As such, if you're already a "traffic expert" (due to playing games like Factorio or OpenTTD beforehand), you can quickly build an optimal City Skylines setup and then have not much else to do.
SimCity was truly a game with multiple dimensions. Skylines is mostly a traffic simulatior (a good one, but still... "just" a traffic simulator).
You can definitely get to an optimal state then stop, but you can also keep growing. As the city grows, it requires refactoring roads and public transit to keep things going.
I recently got the Industries add-on, and found that also adds an interesting dimension: as you add factories, they require more of certain types of raw materials and I find myself wishing I had made the farming zone bigger, for example, debating if I should raze this nearby 5-star neighborhood, reroute a well-flowing multi-lane highway, or start a second zone somewhere else.
I kind of like I can get it to an equilibrium and stop, while not feeling like I'm leaving it unfinished. I tend to play for a couple weeks then take a break for a few months.
In real life, could a city do this (outside of forcing people out of their homes with military power)? Are there checks and limits on how much eminent domain can do in terms of claiming already-owned land?
Once the vast majority of your neighborhood signs on, you don't really have much choice. You can hold out for a better offer, but you might also have them literally just build around you [1].
[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/stubborn-home-owners-refuse-to-se...
I keep hearing this, but what other dimensions does it have?
I remember playing SimCity in highschool and can't really remember anything it has that City Skylines does not. That is likely due to multi-decade-old memories and not that it actually lacks those dimensions.
1. SimCity2000 has much higher relative costs for infrastructure. Roads, Police, Firefighters, etc. etc. cost lots of recurring money, to the point where a typical player even on $20,000 "Easy" mode will probably fail the first few times they play. I've never run out of money on City Skylines, literally never. But even with all my experience on SimCity 2000, I can "fail to bootstrap" on medium ($10,000) or hard (Bonds/Debt) mode. (Especially if an unlucky early game fire disaster happens). In contrast, the recurring costs in Skylines is so puny that I forget about that aspect entirely.
2. Disasters in Sim City 2000 force you to rebuild occasionally. Or at least, carefully consider the placement of your items. (Ex: low-lands may flood, getting destroyed. Airplanes may crash, causing fires near airports). Despite being a pain in the ass, the chaos of disasters grossly changes the feel.
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Ultimately, Skylines has more similarities to Rollercoaster Tycoon and/or Tropico than SimCity. Skylines simulates every individual sim (with HEAVY emphasis on traffic). The emergent behavior of each individual sim following simple rules is a particular style of gameplay.
However, SimCity was more of a abstract economic simulator, where larger decisions had more pronounced effects. Opening commercial roads to neighbors would create trade between cities. Airports and/or seaports need to be managed with your neighbors. This style of gameplay: a "big picture" city simulator, ultimately plays extremely differently than City Skylines.
In City Skylines: building an airport or seaport causes a traffic spike that you need to manage. In SimCity, building an airport or seaport causes an increase in commercial demand and/or industrial demand. Its just fundamentally different.
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Really: its just that one thing: Skylines's infrastructure costs are laughably low. There's no worry about ever running out of money... no matter what you build, you're always flush with cash.
In SimCity, you'd worry whether or not you've saved up enough cash to bootstrap a new section of your city. In Skylines, you just build it, and if it doesn't work (unforeseen traffic issues or whatnot), delete it and build it again.
As much as I like Cities Skylines, it kind of assumes that everyone can aspire to live in a nice high rise condo with solar panels on the roof.
bish bash bosh sips tea hugo there, and hugo there
The thread glosses over the "player builds everything" feature, but that's not the half of it: everything in your nation is open for your consideration: the buildings you construct; the food your people eat; the transport vehicles and fuel needed to run them - you can choose to set up supply chains all the way from extraction, to refinement, to manufacturing and export - or import the things (and manpower) you don't care about, at a cost.
Think "Rise of Industry" or OpenTTD meets Tropico, but you also need to source the resources and manpower to build your buildings, roads, and railways.
I also find the mod selection (namely a wide variety of buildings) to be quite an asset to the game
If you mine/process/store all the goods needed to produce a building in your republic warehouses, you can build anything essentially for free. You assign trucks to deliver the goods and use workers to build it.
The only thing missing from that game for me, is a more informative and intuitive UI. It can be hard to understand how all the parts fit together and get a good overview of your republic.
Refining uranium gives some pretty tangible benefits in the real world too. Seems fair.
If EA released the sources to it or created a “Definitive Edition” I could die happy.
EA really, REALLY doesn't want to update SC4, they don't want to fix its easily fixable bugs, and don't want to share the source either, despite the most important parts of it being Open Sourced recently (EASTL is notable)
SC4 to start of, was never finished, while modding the game and then trying to fix its bugs, I found out a ton of features people want, DO exist, but are partially implemented, for example the game even calculate the wind effects on the ground, but does nothing with the result of the calculation.
It also has a advanced modding system using dlls, theoretically you can make dlls using the game APIs and greatly modify its behaviour but the API documentation is heavily secret, asking individual EA (ex)employees about it resulted in them telling me it is secret, and asking EA itself got my questions outright ignored (different from other requests, where they reply declining...)
And it has bugs because the devs went so cutting edge at the time, that they used everything they could of the hardware, that immediately moved from under them:
1. It uses RDTSC for its original documented purpose: count clock cycles. Meanwhile right after launch Intel decided that RDTSC was supposed to count time instead, and changing what it does, breaking some features of the game, and causing crashes, the game still crashes often because of this.
2. The game uses DirectX 7, mixing DirectDraw and Direct3D, it used all the features it could at the time, it was running really poorly in a laptop of mine, so I went to check and found out that nVidia some 2 years after the game launch decided that DX7 is so outdated that they wouldn't bother supporting it at all, and whenever a game asked questions to the videocard using DX7 APIs, it would lie, so SC4 on my nVidia based laptop would get a lot of lies as answers to queries to the video card capabilities, and attempt to do poorly supported things, resulting in severe graphical artifacts and performance issues.
To me the treatment of SC4 by EA just serves to show that EA is a company that doesn't care for quality that much.
This makes me wonder if Wine would run it better. Usually, Wine only "lies" if Windows itself does and if not doing so will cause things to break.
Putting Wine DLLs on SC4 folder make it run better even on Windows. Ditto for a couple other games (for example Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura)
Closest SC4 sucessor for now is the game "New Cities" that is fundamentally different, and proprietary.
Open Source there is an early SimCity clone, but it is not a clone of SC4 specifically, and it is a lot more simple.
There were multiple attempts by multiple people on starting such projects, but all of them failed fairly early, the task is seemly just too daunting, in fact this is part of the reason why the game got released in a unfinished state, in an interview a programmer that worked on SC4 at the time said they "coded themselves into a corner", and were unsure how to fix it, EA then gave them the ultimatum of "release now or never", reimplementing SC4 itself thus seems to be too hard.
OpenTTD was much easier, in part because TTD itself was written in assembly, so when you decompile it, you are seeing the actual source for most part, there are no C++ craziness going on, no virtual tables or crazy jumps.
SC4 was written in C++ with a ton of non-standard stuff, Paul Pedriana is a mad genius, so unless you have supernatural amounts of patience and time, you won't understand a disassembly of SC4, you need the source to do anything substantial.
Just a few things I'd want to add to city games:
- Model water runoff as pollution from agricultural zones.
- Transport-in-road designs -- surface level transport takes up far, far too much land space because the game doesn't support urban infrastructure properly. In SC4, things like subway entrances and bus stops always take up a full tile, when they're typically no more than a portion of the sidewalk or a road sign (and maybe a shelter), respectively.
- Mixed-use zoning. It's probably been the single biggest wish I've had for the SimCity games. It's impossible to build a vertical downtown if you're stuck trying to mix together commercial and residential plots, when many residential buildings along avenues feature ground-level commercial (making them effectively "light" density commercial contained within "dense" residential).
What if as your city evolves it would change from old-town narrow cobbled streets and weirdly shaped buildings to early modern brickwork, then brutalist concrete monsters, and finally modern sky scrapers and suburbs, or whatever, so different neighborhoods end up feeling different based on the era they were built. And if/when you need to remodel/improve the area, you'd have to take the existing stuff more into account and plan for the potentially multi-year construction project with the construction traffic and potential street blockage etc.
The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not.
Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it.
That's there, but it was pretty dumb -- it didn't take terrain topology into account, so you wouldn't have to worry about making sure agricultural zones didn't wash into rivers/lakes/oceans that might otherwise be used for water supply.
> The Network Addon Mod (NAM) addressed most of the transportation issues I have with SC4. I remember having a mod that had road/bus and road/subway combo stations but I'm not sure if it was part of NAM or not.
While I love modding in general, I think something so fundamental as being able to put up a "bus stop here" road sign should be included in the default game. As it exists, a bus stop or subway entrance take up as much space as a small home.
The NAM is a great mod if you're looking to get into SC4 today, but it really should be included in any new release for the knock-on compatibility benefits (you don't have to worry about another mod somehow breaking NAM).
> Mixed use zoning would be amazing, absolutely. Without it, it makes designing Main St and walkable cities nearly impossible. This kind of medium density zoning is something that SimCity has always been bad at. Somehow I think Cities Skylines is even worse at it.
Skylines is definitely worse at it. The base game is a little too bare-bones for me (generally, I like games where the simulation is a state machine where you can tweak inputs vs directly messing with it), and the transportation options are lacking even when compared to SC4. I've tried to get into it a few times, but I keep bouncing off.
Road Top Mass Transit
Though the mixed-use scenario there is a bit iffy (mixed-use is a separate zone that only develops in areas with sufficient density/traffic to warrant it)
The SC4 soundtrack definitely works really well for non-distracting background music while doing work. I recall that one of the Youtube videos having the music had the comment along the lines of "I was looking for a different game [Soul Calibur 4, I think?] and found this instead... HOW IS THE MUSIC THIS GOOD?"
It's definitely all over the place, but it works very well.
I'd rather have something like 2000 instead of 4.
There was a game released in 2015 very similar to these style games called Lethis: Path of Progress. I never got into it, but maybe other fans of Sierra games will
https://store.steampowered.com/app/359230/Lethis__Path_of_Pr...
There are a few touches here and there, particularly the use of steam - you need to build a network of pipes to transfer steam in the places where it's needed (e.g. factories that produce automata that you need to run the service buildings that will attract a bourgeoisie who will pay the most taxes, similar to elite housing in Emperor). But in general it's a game that stays very, very close to the Sierra formula. Even down to walkers starting to get lost as you build more new buildings, leaving swaths of your city without essential services and causing them to cycle between the lowest and highest possible house quality periodically. Exactly like good old Sierra games!
Which is fine by me, I'd probably not like it as much if it was indeed radically new. Weird, huh?
That said, I would sure like to see a genuinely new take on the old formula that didn't also trample all over what made the old formula work.
And as usual you learn a ton about Chinese mythology- because you gotta keep the ancestors happy... or else.
That being said I would not really count Transport Tycoon as a city building game because transport is literally the name of the game.
* Run without wine (Linux)
* Launch with wine
The first one took me to a black screen. The second took me into the game but the colors were entirely wrong -- everything was red and black. So caveat emptor.
I'm working on a city builder as a side project, and it's fascinating how many little choices there are that totally change the space of the game.
I wouldn’t mind paying for a game but not a fan of the time based, gem collecting price models. Would rather pay for the app and just play
While checking out TheoTown on the App Store I found out that there is a paid Tropico version that seems to be a full game.
Almost everything else is a shitware Farmville clone with city building aesthetics.
Hmmm, are they out of stock at Amazon? It does claim to be the everything store...
Edit: found it, it is the built-in unlimited money mod https://steamcommunity.com/app/255710/discussions/0/61170136...
I have 20.04 LTS and it is available as the 'openttd' package.
You're absolutely right. I find it incredibly frustrating that network effects and game theory mean we're stuck with sub-optimal solutions to problems just because "everybody else uses it". Twitter thread long-posts are just one example.
I would love to see some proposals for legislation designed to mitigate user-base monopolies. Products should be competing on features, price, and performance; not on who happened to acquire the most users first.
Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Office, iMessages, etc. are just a few examples of products that are market leaders not because of the quality of their product, but because they happened to capture large enough user bases to spur network-based growth.
I have no idea what this legislation would actually look like (or how disastrous the unintended effects would be), but at first blush I'm imagining something along the lines of compulsory interoperability requirements. The devil is in the details of course...
To defend twitter: each tweet in the thread has to have a point, something compelling about it - and in this case, an image with each. The limitations of twitter force the author to write concisely (as opposed to blogs, where paragraphs can be as rambling and long-winded as the author pleases). The medium also allows persons to reply to any individual tweet - performing a similar role as threaded comments on a site like HN, but more focused. Twitter is an ideal format for short-to-medium length content like this.
> Twitter is an ideal format for short-to-medium length content like this.
So you do enjoy having text broken down in small pieces inside an interface that's obviously made for short messages, with ads on the side, and replies right in the middle of the main body of the text?
All right. I guess we have different standards of readability.
I do enjoy having text broken down into small, coherent pieces - whether it be a tweet or a paragraph. Twitter enforces it, blog platforms do not. While neither twitter nor blog platforms can enforce writing quality, length limits at least prevent the most egregious run-on sentences.
> with ads on the side,
Twitter doesnt have ads for me on any device - app or browser, computer or phone. Blogs generally have ads (that circumvent my blocker) or empty white space (where ads had been) on every device. Twitter has centred text on my laptop (comparable to most blog platforms), or the text fills my full screen width on my phone (better than most blog platforms).
> and replies right in the middle of the main body of the text?
I don't see replies in the main body of the text. I can click on any given tweet to see the various replies, but otherwise the author's tweets remain in an unbroken chain.
Twitter isn't nearly as difficult to use as some people like to make it out to be. My biggest petpeeve on Twitter. Is 30 different replies of "@ThreadReaderApp unroll".
Although reading is more comfortable (for me) in a blog post, posts also tend to have way more junk before it gets to the point. I.e.: recipe posts, entertainment news, etc...
edit: I agree with you though. This should have been a blog post.
Major shade being thrown at the state of CA here.
When I bought my house, the effective property tax on it went from 0.1% to 1%, as the assessed value under Prop 13 was 1/10 of the purchase price.
A few downsides I thought of
1. It makes it easier for rich people to do mean things to poor people (it's not like there aren't already lots of ways, but something to think about)
2. In rapidly changing conditions, people who neglect to file their paperwork will get screwed -- either significantly overpay or get kicked out of their houses for below-market values. The people who are neglectful in paperwork are probably disproportionately those that we typically aim to protect with government interventions
3. Eminent domain changes a bit; people would naturally price their houses for above-market values, because being forced to move unexpectedly is a hassle, so you would assess your value at a premium to avoid that hassle. This means the government would likely have to pay more for property than the "fair market value" that courts require. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, that may be okay.
4. Holdouts[1] tend to be popular. Making it financially untenable to be a holdout thus might be too unpopular a law to pass.
Would be a great way to get back at your enemies when you find out they've been undervaluing their assets though.
Actually, it would be a good deal for landlords. They buy the house then offer to let the people rent it back. No need to deal with flaky tenants, these would be people in their family home. Would be a good place to park money from overseas that you're trying to hide too, solves the problem of the empty downtown condos because people hiding money don't really want to be landlords.
This is one of those systems economists think up that would be perfectly efficient so long as nobody is an asshole or irrational. About as useful as a horse race modeled as a set of identical spheres in perfect harmonic motion.
There is a bit of regressiveness to this though, as it will be worth it for people with a lot of property to pay someone to regularly update their assessed value to keep pace with the market, while those with less property will probably just set a large premium and update infrequently. This is a problem with pretty much any tax though; the more you are being taxed, the more you can afford to pay to figure out how not to be taxed.
I posted potential problems in my sibling comment earlier, but as far as this goes, the ugliest thing would be e.g. an 80 year old who forgot to update their assessed value in a hot market being kicked out by someone who bought their property to flip it for 2x the assessed value.
In theory, they are a tax-cheat who got what they deserved...
I suppose the free-market solution would be services that assess your home for a fee; they could provide insurance against undervaluation as well to incentivize them to do the right thing. This monetarily works out to be roughly equivalent to the government paying private companies to fairly assess people's home-values, but with financial incentives for doing it properly.
This seems a bit unlikely to me since you're directly raising your taxes by doing this. I'd expect the opposite, most people undervaluing their house on the assumption that "it won't happen to me". Also, if I bought for $200k 10 years ago then it can't possibly access for $450k today right? People don't have a good grasp on how fast a market can inflate given the conditions.
I would expect a lot more anti-tax guys who access their property at $1 and if someone comes up to take it they pull out their shotgun.
For this to work at all the government would have to provide a minimum and possibly maximum based on traditional assessments. Basically the system we have now except that you can say that you've done some work to spruce up your house so it's worth more and you like paying more taxes. But it also has the "feature" where you can be evicted by a person with money at any time. Can you imagine this in Silicon Valley? Old people being kicked out of their home by tech-bros would be a daily story.
> This seems a bit unlikely to me since you're directly raising your taxes by doing this. I'd expect the opposite, most people undervaluing their house on the assumption that "it won't happen to me". Also, if I bought for $200k 10 years ago then it can't possibly access for $450k today right? People don't have a good grasp on how fast a market can inflate given the conditions.
1. You're not supposed to set it at a price that the house is worth on the market, you're supposed to set it at the price that would make you willing to move. That requires a premium, because moving is a hassle and isn't free. Because of this a revenue-neutral version is coupled with a commensurate lowering of rates.
2. "it won't happen to me" will go away really quickly if people are undervaluing properties, because it will happen to everybody. Look at the people investing in properties now where they must pay market value; imagine if people can invest in properties for below market value. As with most radical change the period of transition will be terrible
> I would expect a lot more anti-tax guys who access their property at $1 and if someone comes up to take it they pull out their shotgun.
I'm not sure how that's different from them not paying their taxes at all and pulling out their shotgun when the government forecloses on them? It's not like a guy walks up with a $1 bill and says "now leave." Evictions would happen in the same manner they do now, and deed transfers are recorded in a notary's office, not on the property itself.
> For this to work at all the government would have to provide a minimum and possibly maximum based on traditional assessments. Basically the system we have now except that you can say that you've done some work to spruce up your house so it's worth more and you like paying more taxes. But it also has the "feature" where you can be evicted by a person with money at any time.
I see lots of problems with this system, but approximately zero of them are fixed by the government providing a valid range. That defeats the entire purpose of the system to be self-enforcing. One possible fix is rather than an automatic transfer, the owner could agree to a back-reassessment, combined with penalties. The penalties could be split between the government and "purchaser," as payment for their services.
> Can you imagine this in Silicon Valley? Old people being kicked out of their home by tech-bros would be a daily story.
This assumes either:
1. Old people don't follow the news or are too stupid to act on the news (it's a daily story and yet they don't bother to address it themselves?)
2. Old people can't afford the property tax on their house
Maybe you actually think #1. I think it will be much less frequent than daily; there's a certain point at which people are both afraid of something and yet some fraction neglect to take action on it (think deadly crashes from drunk driving or texting), which is probably the equilibrium we will reach. Again, an automated service that keeps your assessment in line with the market is an obvious offering here.
If you think #2, then this is why Proposition 13 was passed over 40 years ago, and that proposition seems to have popular support still. Economists question the need for a retired widow to live by themselves in a $2.5M 4 bedroom in Cupertino, but that of course neglects human factors like "I lived with my husband in this house for 30 years, and raised my kids here, won't you please let me live my last few years here?"
I think the last point is a disconnect between what is politically feasible in a democracy and what economists see as efficient allocation of a scarce resource; kicking an old person out of their house is never going to fly, but economically speaking, kicking an old person out of their house (and paying them well for it) and moving them to a smaller apartment to allow a 40 year-old FAANG engineer with 2 kids to move in is an obvious net win.
What we have now is the exact opposite. If the old person were to move to a smaller residence, they cannot pay less in taxes due to Proposition 13[1], so will be paying the same or higher taxes for a smaller place.
There's tons of issues with this proposal, I don't think it's worth pursuing if for no other reason than it's completely infeasible to pass as a law. It will also effectively be a bit regressive (though only down to middle-class; the very poor are not directly affected by this; if anything the landlord is going to be able to pay slightly less taxes, since they will want to charge a much lower premium on moving than owner-residents). However I think you are mostly barking up the wrong tree with regards to your criticisms of it.
1: Yes there are some limited exceptions, but I don't think it's possible for your taxes to go down unless you move to a place that is worth less than the inflation (max 2%) adjusted value of what you purchased your house for. A retired person who has lived in their house for many years in SV, that translates to "move a long ways away to the middle of nowhere." if you want to pay less.
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
Apparently this is sometimes called a "Harberger tax" after the economist who proposed it in 1965. Maybe that's where Heinlein got it?
I first saw this in a blog post by Robert Hanson, back when I still read him.
As of now there are enough people, corporations, and governments with enough money to buy property for other than its value or use. Petty revenge, fucking with critics, buying the blacks, Jews, hippies, cripples, etc out of your neighborhood. You have COVID, find a new place to live mother fucker.
(sarcasm)