Cities: Skylines II
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This reminds me of the same thing that happened with Stardew Valley, the creator missed the old Harvest Moon games, didn't find a suitable substitute, and just build the entirety of the game from scratch, teaching himself art and music composition too. He's made over $300 million in revenue so far and might be the first solo game dev (or even regular software dev) to hit $1 billion in the course of the game's existence.
It just goes to show that the dominant players are not always dominant forever, and that common YC startup advice of understanding what exactly users want (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers)) and serving them well is still correct.
Generally, for big profit, you need to build something good, but the reverse is not true. And you can still make small profit with crap.
I know "boycotts" don't work in the gaming industry but i can honestly say i haven't bought an EA product since.
That has been slightly easier by them only churning out yearly sporting games filled with micro transactions mind.
Isn't it great when founders get a pay day but does that kind of thing really benefit everybody else? Just in general it doesn't seem that allowing most mergers is a particularly good thing for the American public, benefiting mostly just very large corporations who get to offload risk on to startups and their investors and reward only a lucky few (though skill is important, who succeeds and gets a good exit has a lot to do with luck)
unlikely stuff does happen but not as much as likely stuff. Generalising from anecdotes and cherry picking data remains ill advised.
While EA was busy destroying the SimCity brand with unadulterated capitalist greed, Cities: Skylines was created with public funding from the Finnish government.
No VCs wanted to invest in such a niche company. They were only able to get off the ground thanks to money from Finland’s public startup funding and arts grants.
Capitalism on its own isn’t always enough to ensure that successful products get built. Sometimes it takes public funding to salvage a good idea that capitalism managed to burn down.
Government bureaucracy and inefficient spending never burned down good ideas? Never wasted untold billions on failed projects? When it comes to innovative ideas and forward thinking, people turn to short sighted bureaucracy and public funding.
> the entire industry up until this point has been going about it wrong?
but it sometimes goes about it wrong.
> Capitalism on its own isn’t __always enough__ to ensure that successful products get built.
You are building up a strawman and attacking it with very hostile language. I would also disagree with your assumption that governments are inefficient, as there are good examples of efficient governments. Governments can get it right too, and the parent comment certainly isn't suggesting that governments are always right.
Every criticism you have levied: "burn[ing] down good ideas", "wasted untold billions on failed projects", "short sighted"-ness also have examples in the private sector and even with public companies.
EA is not an isolated company afflicted with capitalism. When you say a companies failures are due to capitalist greed, that means something. You are blaming the fundamental economic principles that the majority of publishers (and western businesses) operate on. Words like greed imply there is an inherent evil or 'sin' in capitalism that corrupts, and EA has somehow become its victim. In steps our hero the government with its keen eye for missed opportunities to save the day.
There is absolutely no assumption's about the inefficiency of bureaucracy and government.
EA destroyed a valuable brand by managerial greed. That’s a fact. Another company got funded by public means when capitalist institutions didn’t want to give them the time of day, and is now a successful business. That’s another fact.
I didn’t say anything about an inherent evil or sin. If you believe capitalism always executes perfectly and is beyond criticism, that’s your ideological position. You may be projecting this expectation of ideology onto others.
You mention capitalisms failures and destruction of ideas while public funding saved the day. Pointing out that a single government grant does not make a game industry or save ideas destroyed by capitalism is not projecting ideology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202
It seems pretty clear that this game was destroyed by EA management's poor decisions. They forced the game to require an active online connection primarily as an anti-piracy move, but then underfunded the development of the server-side functionality, so the servers were down for most buyers. For strategic reasons, they wanted to tie SimCity into EA's Origin game distribution platform, but this was just a hindrance to players.
Why did management make these decisions? To maximize shareholder value and increase their quarterly profits. EA as a company is a good example of the kind of short-term thinking that capitalism can encourage.
It's good to have a counterbalance. It can come in many forms. Tax-funded public instruments are one, but another important source of funding that's not distributed by capitalist principles are the various private foundations. And most of those were of course founded on wealth created by capitalism. So I'm not at all opposed to private wealth and market-driven resource allocation — I just don't think it should be the only way, or some kind of received truth that's above criticism.
PC gamers want to run games on a platform open to piracy, and call it greed when companies try to stop the theft of their own work.
...And where is the government in all this by the way? Anti-piracy laws seem to be grossly ineffective as it is so widespread. Companies have to protect their own work as government sits by idle.
CiM 2 is a really good game, and very beautiful (which I guess is how they got the idea to build C:S). The focus is on transportation, and it does a much better job of simulating it than C:S (no despawning for starts). It has a few bugs and performance issues which I guess will never be fixed now, but worth playing if you like games that are a bit more constrained.
I would argue it’s actually unusual on HN to hear such an origin story for a successful business. Everybody has heard a hundred versions of the VC-funded twenty-something boy genius and also the bootstrapped hustler… But the story where your seed funding comes from government grants in a small European country doesn’t align with that kind of hero founder narratives.
Personally I got started in the software business with a Finnish government loan too, and I’m grateful for it. So I wanted to highlight that this actually happens and leads to products that people want.
I think they're not enamored of their reputation for crap shoveling and are making a concerted effort to deliver more value with their overhauls and that's why I've never really viewed them the same as skin-pushers like Roblox, CS:GO, The Sims or Fortnite.
If we’re talking about games developed by Parodox itself I really can’t imagine something like this. Core mechanics in most grand strategy games have usually been changed to a significant degree and while they are technically playable without DLCs the changes were most often made to better integrate the new content. Which overall left the base game in a largely crippled state.
Skylines is a lot better in this regard than something like Stellaris though.
I found https://store.steampowered.com/app/1538960/Crusader_Kings_II... to be an extremely good deal especially because I never tend to play these games continuously for significant periods of time. Obviously they are not offering this for newer games since it would usually lead to people spending 10s of dollars instead of 100s for the same amount of content .
And I don't mean in the way No Man's Sky did!
Another one is called Paralives: https://www.polygon.com/23433566/sims-5-project-rene-paraliv...
They pull in >$40k/mo in Patreon funding, and have a team of >10.
Website: https://www.paralives.com/ Their Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/alexmasse
Unaffiliated, just a massive Sims fan :)
That would be Notch, who made Minecraft
So you use revenue as a measuremeant of success, which is very reasonable.
> (hint: they don't want always-online DRM-filled games that nickle and dime you with microtransactions (well, most people anyway, there are always gacha/gambling-type whale gamers))
Then you said this. You know in terms of revenue, microtransaction is the most successful model, right? Mobile gaming is now bigger than PC gaming + console gaming. And they're basically all microtransactions. $300 million sounds a lot but it's just 2~3 months of Genshin. If revenue is a sign of what players "want", then the only logical conclusion is a lot people "want" microtransactions, they just don't admit it like people want BigMac but say they want to eat healthy.
I think it's a strong no-true-scotsman fallacy right here. You believe players don't want microtransactions, because you don't think those casual players who play Candy Crush, Clash of Clans or Genshin are "true players".
My issue with your comment that I have attempted to frame in that pithy one-liner is that microtransactions are often sold through a manipulative sales window, in some cases games are designed around them to make the micro-transactions more appealing (e.g. games that throttle your progress unless you spend).
In addition, using revenue as a measure of popularity with micro-transactions is problematic because they are designed to effectively segment the market. This means they're not necessarily a solid indicator of what an average/median user might want because sometimes much of that revenue is a product of relatively few users (aka "whales").
Making something unique can make more revenue than replicating other successful model with hight competition.
Hopefully we also get a bit more diversity of gameplay - Skylines got pretty repetitive quickly with only challenge being traffic optimization. The new DLCs didn't really add that much to gameplay except different things to paint between roads. I hope things like universities, industry, agriculture, airports, etc. become a an actual challenge to build, fund and retain - maybe pull in some things from the Anno series to make it happen.
(I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation between commercial and residental areas).
https://www.secfin.com/private-money-blog/2021/12/15/the-ris...
And if you haven’t read anything by Jane Jacobs, it’s worthwhile checking out her books written (1950-1960) about the importance of city neighborhoods from the perspective of NYC urban dwellers.
I think Skylines did a good job of modelling complex traffic, but when I came back to it a month or two ago, I was disappointed by how much it felt like I was steered towards creating a "city of the past" and not engaging with any new technological or economic developments. Like, you can build an Amsterdam-like bike city in Skylines, with the appropriate DLC, but it's not modelled in a fine-grained way and just feels like you have magicked away commuter traffic by dumping bike lanes everywhere.
In the end, if I want to plan a city of the future, I should probably go back to drawing on graph paper like when I was 8 years old.
If you optimize the fun of the game by breaking it (and that's usually rather easy), you'll just... not have fun with it. This is why I personally prefer to avoid using broken strategies and set my own fun challenges to build themed cities.
Which is why I kinda wish there was more variety in Skylines - besides Vancouver, I also want to make messy cities like Shenzen or Bangkok, or London and maybe deal with local limits and idiosyncrasies.
Magnasanti
In Cities: Skylines, you start in 2010 as I recall. Not only is it rather more implausible to start a city in the wilderness then than in 1900, but you have idiots tweeting at you - forever.
I'd love to see a city builder where the challenge wasn't about urban planning, but in adapting to a changing world. ("Then came the trains, then came the ore, then there was the hard times, then there was a war")
Yeah, I wanted to start Skylines but found that it all begins with a highway...
I can get much further through the middle game by focusing from the start on not building all kinds of roads. I used to run a big highway down the middle of my city thinking that was the right way to do it, but you're vastly better off not doing that, because if you build that road, they'll overuse it.
The sims will walk a pretty unreasonably long way as well, I've built ped overpasses that were packed, while having nice and quiet roads.
CityPlannerPlays is a good youtuber to learn how to build cities that aren't terrible, and aren't overly cheesing the game mechanics:
Likewise I wish they would model the amenity effect of businesses. Commercial zones in C:S are only about employment, but IMO having good amenities near residences is a huge influencer of QoL and should be modeled.
In fact I would love to see zoning become a more full-fledged game mechanic - balancing the amenity effects of mixing business with residential with the nuisance drawbacks.
Likewise the idea that you had to start every city with a huge freeway is a bit of a turnoff. Give me a start with a train station! I want to make a beach town that's primarily accessed by train!
Don't you mean US-centric? I don't recall a UK city where there wasn't a grocery store within a 10 minute walk of everywhere and I don't recall visiting a city in Europe that wasn't pretty much the same.
Another interesting thing that these games don't support is reusing existing buildings for a different purpose. Former industrial or dock areas are always popular places to turn into expensive housing or shopping areas.
One of my favorite Youtube series is Cities Skylines: MARS <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDX8YQ_aGnY>. The author goes hog–wild and builds a complete city into a dome on Mars using custom assets he created himself (the game comes with asset editors), Procedural Objects, Service Cubes, and liberal use of the Move–It mod. It really is an astounding work of art, but you can also see why Colossal Order didn’t make a game with that level of freedom built–in; it almost becomes more of a 3D modelling program than a game. There’s a fine line between competing with SimCity and competing with Maya or Blender!
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them -- so, if you have a little grocery store, we'll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they'll have what seem like really big lots -- but they're nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
Agree on everything you say, but I do wonder to what extent the bad traffic and all those limitations are an inherent statement that these games carry by design. A statement on how we think urban design should work blah blah.
SimCity 2000 certainly had a sharper, more pointed set of things to say that presumably originated with Will Wright. Skylines obviously can’t be too political about it, they just have to keep it mild to sell.
I do remember this guy making a great series of videos explaining a lot about how cities were/are made while playing through a modded copy of Skylines. Highly recommend here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwkSQD3vqK1S1NiHIxxF2g_Uy...
I can imagine what you’re wanting for will probably be delivered with a variety of mods and community content. Or as DLC?
Since you asked, "Conspiracy Theorists Think Walkable Cities Are Really Open-Air Prison Dystopias Now":
* https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g898/walkable-15-minute-ci...
"Conspiracy Theorists Are Coming for the 15-Minute City"
* https://www.wired.co.uk/article/15-minute-cities-conspiracy-...
Not everything has to be political, but if you start digging, everything is.
That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go?
It's the sort of game I want to love, but I just get so overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and I'm not sure what to do.
On the other hand, games like Tropico (at least the later titles - 3, 4, 5, 6) having a "story" to play through help a bit because there is direction in what to build and where. Conversely, though, cities I build in Tropico end up being haphazard patch jobs where I find an empty space and put a dozen wind turbines in it because that's what the mission calls for, and so I miss out on some of the potential satisfaction.
If you like Tropico, then you probably should give TwoPoint Hospital a try, as well as Ceasar 3, Cleopatra, and a few other games of the more "agent simulation" nature... with actual goals and challenges to defeat and win.
Sim City / Cities Skylines is less about gaming and more about play. There is no winning or losing in these games... I mean nominally, if you run out of money I guess you lose. But the games are setup so that you don't really run out of money under typical circumstances.
Conversely, goal-oriented games can just feel like "work" to someone who feels like their life involves a countless measurements and expectations, or just like intellectual labor to someone who is learning all the time; etc
As they say, it's really very hard to account for taste. It's usually not worth trying to analyze it for anyone but yourself (and only then if it helps you to do so).
I actually have a similar problem with the Tropico remakes. Tropico 1 was hard. You could not survive a mission without dipping into the dictator toolsets. So striking a constant balance between economics and human rights was an interesting challenge. (It also made for a much more biting satire). The games since 3 are still pleasant city-builders in their own rights, but make it a bit too easy to win on the straight and narrow.
The only fix I can see is to have much better scenarios, or AI opponents, which I tend to think only the external communities around these games can produce. They generally don't allow that level of access for mods though.
Instead of scenarios or AI, why wouldn't it be the case that success invites more problems? You've got issues with immigration happening too rapidly for the population's taste, inflation devalues your accumulated resources at a more rapid pace, essential workers' pay isn't keeping up with FAANG, inequality is rampant, lots of homeless druggies appreciating your shelter & food bank infrastructure but locals are fed up, and also the next level up in government works against you out of envy or simple lack of appreciation for you contribution to the public purse. Power structures crumble because citizens get lazy and entitled, not knowing how good they have it, populism and self-interest rule the day.
Design success as the enemy of success, and you never run out of issues to solve. That said, it would be nice to see the winning endgame in real life for a change.
And a game almost everyone will hate, as it slaps you in the face and spits on you for succeeding.
Having a dynamic environment is one of the things that I've long wanted city sims to have. SimCity always had disasters, which is in the same vein, but they always felt like an afterthought (or a joke, in the case of alien or monster attacks). City simulations pretend to be serious flaw toys, so let me deal with a recession (or even a boom), or a dioxine contamination, or civil unrest. Not with a minigame, but let me deal with the city management aspects of those events.
There are so many interesting gameplay things Skylines could do to be more fun for me like:
1. Subway optimization, e.g faster train cost more but people get to their destination faster, slower trains allow for shorter distances between stations.
2. Parking optimization, e.g. building with parking costs more (because more land has to be bought), but allows people to travel to the place in
3. Low vs high taxes, nanny state or pure capitalism? How would that affect the economy and people's satisfaction?
There's also the flip side which is just sandbox building a city to your specifications and ignoring the city building aspects of it. Almost like building a model of a city.
There really isn’t an end goal for me, I’m not trying to make my city a certain size. I’m trying to make something beautiful, that is fun to imagine living in.
I also think mods are essential if this is the way you want to play, as it’s much easier to get nit-picky and detail oriented with the correct tools.
Learning a new sandbox's toolbox of system parts and laying out clever designs while I stare at a screen can read a lot like what I do with most of my weekdays, but without the return in pay or reputation.
How does one plan a city indeed! Why would you want the answer?
That game is Simcity with objectives.
After a while, grownups lose what to do with a plastic bucket and shovel at the beach.
Good reminder
The base game isn't quite this much of a blank canvas. You have a budget, and you have city needs. You try to fit the needs within your budget, while trying to expand and grow with what the immediate geography allows you to do.
You almost never (unless you're an advanced player who knows how to scam a bunch of money) have money to waste to treat central planning as a blank canvas.
Well I hope you don't have the same feeling about life. Because we are all free to choose our own adventure (with some choices obviously better than others), and there are no clear objectives or goals besides what you set for yourself.
These games all represent resident happiness as some function of traffic, crime, garbage, pollution, but I don't think any of them have made an effort to zoom in on particular actions and how they effect the population. Or to represent long-term fulfillment. It would be a very different kind of game to highlight what actions an urban planner takes that have the biggest impact on residents.
Maybe the old newspaper function in Simcity games tried to capture this - or the outraged advisors a bit too, but it's never felt narratively driven to me.
It would be incredible to have a globe viewer/DEM download tool built in to the game, but the bandwith required for hosting the project might turn into an issue (I'm reminded of the situation with high res imagery for Command: Modern Operations/TacView, where users are strongly encouraged to download only what they need due to server constraints).
Use this instead: https://heightmap.skydark.pl/#
However, the cities themselves don't have much of a personality. It's barely a simulation. I'd like to see certain areas becoming rough sort of ghettos. People in the city having different backgrounds. Just creating a school in those places would not necessarily improve things.
I'd like to see economic effects happening and causing disruption in the city. Big companies coming and going and affecting daily life.
I'd also like to see rich regions forming. Cool places that everyone wants to go.
Essentially, I'd like to have less control and see things not working out exactly like I planned. Everything always goes exactly to plan.
I've been developing a city builder myself over the last year (Metropolis 1998). I wanted to do a 3D version sometime in the future, but alas. Maybe people will be tired of purchasing $15 DLCs on top of a shallow base game (probably not).
Time to get to work
Looking at Metropolis 1998 my feedback would be I'm excited for the concept of a modern take on retro builders but I'm worried the gameplay will end up more "2D grid traffic simulator" than city builder. "Traffic simulator" can be a key layer for city builder die-hards but I'm hesitant that a 2D grid approach would be more interesting than base CS1, particularly with a free mod that simulates traffic more realistically (albeit not as performant what you can do with the traffic and road designs in 3D freeform is also much more interesting). I'll keep an eye on it though, it may be something I pick up in the future as it materializes :).
So expect cars and sidewalks. Pedestrian-only walk ways should be possible in the first release.
found it on Steam. added to my wishlist. will also check out early access...
Btw I'm also working on my own indie game, it's quite challenging but I'm happy with progress I'm making by being consistent on it.
The graphics remind me a little bit of the ones in OpenTTD (an open source transportation tycoon game), the top down view also looks interesting, since most games just stick to one perspective. Oh, maybe the style is a little bit like the Simutans game (another transportation tycoon), but that depends on the graphics package.
I don't think that anyone has quite done city builders where you can look inside of buildings, so that sounds pretty unique - good luck with your project. I'm pretty sure that the genre is big enough for Cities: Skylines II, niche games like Urbek City Builder (voxel based city builder where building placement matters, almost like a puzzle) and plenty of other games out there, so don't feel too discouraged.
I'm curious about some of the tech behind this if you don't mind me asking:
1. Is the top down view just rendering the same isometric assets from a different viewpoint, are they pre-baked sprites, or are they completely different and hand-tuned?
2. How are you doing the changing wall height for seeing inside buildings? Do you just have 4 pre-set wall heights that you're animating between globally, or is it dynamic?
Not with the Traffic President mod which allows you to disable cars despawning and adds to the challenge of building a good transit system.
- Agent-based simulation instead of model-based (the latter is what the Maxis games used). Agent-based simulation is performance-intensive, and in practice it led to all sorts of gamebreaking bugs. Last I checked, the game still caused traffic jams because every car would enter the turning lane immediately. It also causes the infamous death waves. Some of these are hard to fix without changing the core simulation model. Some of these would be trivial to patch, and it's kind of embarrassing that they haven't.
- The DLC is essentially mandatory, in that they release updates to the free game alongside every DLC, and the free updates introduce some of the features but not all, and they end up breaking the balance of the game unless you purchase the full DLC.
- The game is far too easy, unrealistically so. Even on the harder difficulty setting, it's just way too easy to create a cash cow and create the optimal city without any real challenge.
Cities:Skylines is good in sandbox mode, if you want to create beautiful-looking models of cities. Which is a valid use case and there's definitely a market for that. But for people who like the original SimCity games and enjoy simulations, it's... just not that. There's a reason that professional city planners used the original SimCity games as tools for study and development, and that's what made (for example) SimCity 4 Rush Hour so much fun to play.
Whenever I want to play a citybuilder, I end up going for Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, or Rimworld. None of those are citybuilders, but they're the closest thing I've found to substitute for what made SimCity games enjoyable that Cities:Skylines lacks.
You know, I never thought about the factory automation/colony simulator genres as being similar to the city builder genre, but... now that you brought it up, I think I see how said genres would appeal.
First of all, you get to collaborate and build things faster. You could have a voting mechanic where the citizens (AI) resolves conflicts. You could assign roles to subordinate players to manage things like traffic, services, new developments, etc. You could implement trade across city lines, and have acquisitions. It could easily turn into a MMO of epic proportions; with whole worlds built out.
So. Many. Things!
IIRC, SimCity 4 didn't have this issue but it sort of cheats by chopping the map up into multiple tiles in a region and only simulating a subset of your population. Which honestly seems acceptable to me.
If you have a spare desktop lying around, it really helps to do the simulation "in the cloud."
You run it on the desktop and remote play it using remote desktop or steam’s equivalent on your laptop?
I used to do that with my powerful desktop, leave it in my home office and remote play CS from the living room. Lag was good enough to play.
Some people have also said they switched to Unreal Engine 5 but I have a hard time finding definitive source of that. It would be a major change since the original was made in Unity.
I'm sure the game will be great. But I would have loved something more revolutionary.
For a Finnish studio, I would have hoped Colossal Order focused a bit less on American cities, American urbanism.
I found that once you reach a certain city size this game is just car traffic management.
Everything else is taken care of by designating a faster arterial road at certain intervals(so that the driving AI's preferences are more predictable) and then designing a one-way flow in and out of areas with a lot of conflict points. It is not exactly how I want to envision my city, but it's also not extremely complicated to work out.
The game really limits traffic reduction mostly through the city services, which all have to drive down the roads to provide services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041202
In that context it’s notable that the company behind Cities: Skylines, the most prominent SimCity replacement, was originally funded by the Finnish government as explained on their Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Order_(company)
VCs wouldn’t invest any money to build such a niche game, but Finnish national funding instruments for startups and arts were more willing to take risks.
A small story to keep in mind next time someone claims everything successful can be created through capitalism alone. It also happens that successful things are destroyed by capitalism and salvaged by public means.
For all the higher-level systems thinking happening in city builders, we never go into the more subtle signals that can make a city feel great or terrible to its people.
Would be cool if we could zoom-in to a specific person in the game, and ask them how they actually feel living here, what they like or dislike about it. Including useless things that we can't possibly fix as a mayor. But that would give us cues to let us figure out what we could improve.
Then once we interview a few of them in a neighborhood, we'd get a picture of what to change to make them happy. We could also have different types of populations and neighborhood for different types of people.
Something more complex and organic than "people in this neighborhood don't feel safe, so you need to add a police station". This would add a layer of discovery and aliveness to the game.
Let people playing game dev tycoon represent how successful a local business is. Let someone playing a GTA-like game be part of a police chase. Allow truck simulator players to be part of freeway traffic.
Obviously this would be extraordinarily difficult to pull off well, but I can dream.
You can click any visitor, and see all the stats for that individual visitor, including how happy, sick, bored, etc. they are. You can even see them saying things like “I reall like Rocket Coaster!” or “The line for Very Merry-Go-Round is too long.”
Then you can aggregate how many visitors are saying each thing about the various attractions or the park in general.
And then it allows exactly what you said: make tweaks based on the aggregate feedback and see the positive (or negative) effect your tweaks have.
The main issue is that the way zoning is done is really damn bad. Like not even American cities are that bad, zoning at its very very worst. There is no reason why it should be possible to have a much more flexible and powerful zoning code. Having mix use zoning, exclusion zones and so on. Why can offices and high density building not be in the same place?
I also dislike the roads, the basic building block is the road, but it should be the lane. You should be able to easily put together a few lanes, into a new road and then be able to use that. Currently you have to basically load 500 DLC road types just to cover all the basic things and even then it isn't great.
Parking, parking is the biggest problem with car based cities. And the game just ignores that issue, and that results in the problem with cars just being about optimization of intersections.
I also found the creation bus routes and other public traffic routes to difficult. It gets complex pretty quickly and once you have lots of them it just becomes almost unmanageable.
I wish they will introduce mixed zoning but you have to bear in mind that these games are also meant to work on consoles, with limited UI complexity. So that could be a challenge to implement (or maybe it’s not).
Parking works. I haven’t played in a while, but I think the Traffic Manager mod is the one that allows you to see areas of the city where parking is needed (building appear red in the traffic view).
Bus routes can be complex, but real world ones are also complex. I’m not sure how this could be better handled. There are mods that give you more stats to help you make better decisions, like also show you where people are coming from and where they want to go, but it’s always going be a challenge.
> Parking works.
Parking aren't even in the base game, and yeah you can add lots of mods I think overall the dynamics about parking, induced demand and traffic isn't that great.
> Bus routes can be complex, but real world ones are also complex. I’m not sure how this could be better handled.
Yeah I don't want my game to be as hard to manage as the real world.
It could be significantly easier to draw routes, modify them after you created it. The UI around that stuff I found really hard to work with.
It just feels like much more thought was put into car traffic then any of the others. The game could suggest service patterns to make it easier to get started. Give you good visualizations of where the routes are, make it easy to modify them.
I just found the whole experience of trying to make public transit work frustrating and to time consuming.
Does anyone have any interesting links, papers, references, etc. for implementing a city simulation? I really like the idea of agent-based models and actor systems, and I think it would be a lot of fun of learning about the science and engineering of the models behind these types of games.
Perhaps the DLCs have improved the situation, but I lost interest by then. Hope CS2 will be better!
All joking a salad, probably all the very common constraints should be addressed, but I'd be stoked on an online component like SimCity 2000 Network edition. I'm not so into the idea of a pure sandbox anymore. They've had one of the longest beta testing cycles ever with that first version though, I'm hopeful.
One thing I was never fully able to explore, was the idea of taking a kind of broken city, and exploring ways to improve it given real constraints. I think a lot of people hate their hometowns, and would love to just start with that somehow.
Fwiw I do know about importing terrain maps and so on, which is cool, but it's still a sandbox. I like the idea of starting like 100 years into a city that's just been broke and struggling, with terrible infrastructure and lott of complaints.
Trailer disappointed me. Pass from me.
I prefer games like factorio or microtown for example, where every object exist in the game, and is not just a statistic.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/jw3e1c/game_benc...
I hope somebody makes a Streets of SimCity-style exploration/battle game from this.
That game was so much fun!
CS is basically a mediocre traffic manager and production chain management game with a city builder attached.
I have no confidence in the sequel.
And then they'll want £400 from you for DLCs while still not adding to any of the core mechanics