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Comment by toasteros | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time with freeform city builders like Skylines or SimCity. The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing. I have the same issue with The Sims or something like Planet Zoo.

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.

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> The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing.

After a while, grownups lose what to do with a plastic bucket and shovel at the beach.

And then when they have kids, they remember how much fun it is. Kids give me the excuse not to be embarrassed, but I'm not really building the sandcastles just for them!

Thinking about schools, the workplace, the economic systems we live under, and how many things constantly require action from our brains (vs. free space to imagine), the former three all frequently punishing significant deviation from a given norm, this isn't entirely surprising. Unfortunately I've found it impacts me, too.

Ironically, my absolute favourite beach activity is road building. I head off to the edges where the rocks, sand, and shore meet where the sand is damp. I then compact damp sand onto the rocks to make little roads and try to build a network of roads that keeps road gradient below a certain threshold. It’s a fun problem solving exercise and almost on a par with Cities Skylines!

I like making dams.

That's why I love my job as a software engineer: I never unlearned to create something out of nothing.

Never heard that

Good reminder

I similarly get bored of Skylines as soon as the game starts handing you near-infinite money. Making something aesthetically pleasing is only so interesting to me - I want the challenge of constraints.

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.

Almost all simulation games suffer this problem of, well, winning. You'll see complaints that the late game of Civilization 6 is boring, as a sufficient advantage means a winner has been effectively determined.

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.

I haven't really spent much time on simulation games past SimCity 2000, but I find this odd. Even the most winsome cities and countries in the world are struggling.

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.

> Design success as the enemy of success, and you never run out of issues to solve.

And a game almost everyone will hate, as it slaps you in the face and spits on you for succeeding.

I'm sure you could design it in a way that people wouldn't mind. Most games get harder as you succeed at them. Rimworld is a builder game that does it. And not just through increased complexity, but by making the environment more hostile.

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.

Same decay happened in Civilization. Civ4 was a great challenge in terms of making choices and fighting off a somewhat competent (at least enough to make you take it into account) AI. Civ6 seems to be more of a design game after you get past the initial hump a getting some early infrastructure together without going bankrupt or conquered.

You could use a game trainer to limit how much money you receive. I usually do the opposite since I hate grinding in a game for virtual money or points, feels like a waste of time for me as compared to working on something cool in the real world.

Cities: Skylines has that built in, actually. The more money you have saved up the lower your revenue from taxes is.

Exactly. It's essentially a sandbox city builder with some highway optimisation thrown in. SimCities 4 was more fun because it was more challenging and felt more like a game, rather than a sandbox.

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 two separate subgenres, and that's fine. Because its just a different game in general despite both being simulators.

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.

Two Point Hospital is really a fantastic game. I'm curious how Two Point Campus is, I am not sure if I'm as interested in that one.

The 'pointlessness' is what attracts me. I dislike playing according to other peoples goals, achievements, rules. I'll make up my own, thank you very much. And I will change my mind whenever I feel like it.

How does one plan a city indeed! Why would you want the answer?

Do you know that Cities Skylines introduces the services after you reach certain population milestones? It starts with just Power and Water. https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Milestones

I think it correlates to how much uninterrupted blocks of free time you have. My almost middle school son loves it, but he has much more free time than I do (maybe because he hasn't discovered HN yet!). In my free time, I want to have a specific end goal or victory condition.

Nah, there are countless roads to different game style preferences. Sandbox games without constraints can be a nice escape from a life that feels especially regimented, even if you only get to play in them here and there; or they can just be a fun game style that you ran into at the right and that stays interesting through nostalgia and accessible through familiarity; etc.

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).

The trick is to start small, like a country town with farms and a small downtown. Build from there.

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.

For me, a lot of game choice comes down to: I build/plan/learn things all day. Sometimes I want to do that in a game, but often I'm looking for something that doesn't feel like that -- either because its a game style that taps into a very different kind of experience or because its one that I internalized so long ago that engagement feels pretty chill.

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.

> That and Skylines giving me a blank canvas paralyses me. How does one plan a city? Where do the roads go?

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.

I think a lot of people compare playing the game to the hobby of model trains / town building.

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.

City builders experience leans too much towards god mode that closely resembles creators vision rather than the compromised mess that actual urban planning is. A proper city building experience would lead to a haphazard landscape where you hate 50% of what exists but just relieved it even got built in the first place.

I was fixing some traffic issues in a Cities: Skylines game and had to bulldoze some of the first housing I had laid down. I thought for a moment about the families who had lived there for years, and where they would move to, as I put in wider roads.

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.

This is what attracted me to the Surviving Mars series. It does a good job of constraining resources and giving you a general goal to build towards when building your settlement in a specific drop zone. You do reach a point where you feel like everything is on cruise control and there's nothing more you can really achieve, but its fun to pick up once a year at this point.

This is the sentiment that caused Sid Meyer to create Civilization.

That game is Simcity with objectives.

> The amount of unrestrained freedom makes me question why I'm even playing.

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.

yes, but then why not just do life instead?

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