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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

I also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse.

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.

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If they don't give us mixed-use zoning I'm going to tableflip, so here's hoping. I dislike how Western-centric the concept of zoning is - in most of the world having a grocery store at the bottom of a building is normal!

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!

> Western-centric

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.

I think they meant vaguely North American. That kind of awful zoning is quite prevalent in Mexico and Canada as well.

It's very common for Dutch shops to have apartments above them. Sometimes it's where the shop owner lives, sometimes not. Many modern shopping malls include a lot of residential space of some sort. Many neighbourhoods have corner shops.

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.

There are a couple of mods that let you change what buildings are used for, or rebalance how dense they are. Ploppable RICO, Realistic Population, etc. You can even go so far as to use Procedural Objects with Service Cubes. Use PO to create a completely unique building, then hide a Service Cube inside it that provides housing for 100 families, another that provides some commercial, and another that provides a city service like a school or a morgue. There, instant mixed–use building. Overlap it with a subway station for extra realism.

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!

I'm curious how much they'll pull over from the existing DLCs, the Plazas and Promenades pack does allow for pedestrian cities. But not in a European sense despite the dev being in Europe.

We could even begin with a concept of mixed zoning that's so standard in many world cities. The usual "stores on the street, apartments above" design.

(I was really surprised that actual USA is building cities the same way SimCity modeled - with complete separation between commercial and residental areas).

but that's the issue. most sims are designed after american cities

Not only many world cities, but also at least some parts of iconic USA cities like New York City Manhattan, downtown Chicago, etc.

essentially pre-automotive cities vs. post-automotive cities.

This was standard in US cities in the early 20th century (prior to 1920) before the value of the real estate (and taxes) and automobiles changed the model. Mixed use may be coming back-California recently passed a state law allowing for it, I believe . Here is one article on the topic of mixed-use:

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.

The limits of every simulation game come into play where they start to "cartoon" how the world actually works, which has always been the case with city builders in the Simcity mold. The approaches to traffic, crime, pollution etc all act in a way to give an impression of the real world while not really going deep into the subject and making the solutions be a bit lock-and-key, fitting our existing norms rather than presenting an emergent problem: a lot of times it comes down to building "expensive structure X" to solve your city's issues. The original Simcity is ultimately broken, speedrunner style, by reaching into the guts of the sim to realize that every zone just needs a token road or rail by it, not a connection, and therefore can be approached with a nonsensical pattern of disconnected structures.

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.

Well, I personally think that these sandbox games need a bit of suspension of disbelief and roleplay to be truly fun.

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.

> The original Simcity is ultimately broken

Magnasanti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

One rather big cartooning, which the old Sim Cities did better, has to do with development over time. In the first Sim City you started in 1900. And although the implementation of any kind of historical progress was extremely limited (it took a while to get access to nuclear plants as I recall), my imagination did a lot of the work. (Listening to Dire Straits "Telegraph Road" helped too). And SC2000, the last I played, had a lot of progress elements and even the memorable "arcology" futuristic buildings.

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")

> I also hope that they'll let us build more "european" cities that aren't so horribly car centric and are more diverse.

Yeah, I wanted to start Skylines but found that it all begins with a highway...

It’s true that every building needs to be on a street but it is nevertheless possible to build substantial pedestrian architecture. I’ve spent many happy hours building pedestrian infrastructure and encouraging my peeps to walk and catch the subway.

And if you don't want your cities to die from traffic congestion you need to make it all walkable with good public transportation.

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:

https://www.youtube.com/@CityPlannerPlays

CPP is really great. Recently discovered, and I'm binge-watching through all his content. I love the stories he's telling, plus the insides he gives as being an actual city planner.

It would be so cool to only have a rail station to begin with.

The game desperately needs a 'campaign', similar to (but hopefully richer than) what the Roller Coaster Tycoon series had, just to give some structure to repeated gameplay.

There are scenarios[1] in the game, from my experience that is very similar to what RCT used to have. You're given a map and a point in time where the map has certain issues, and you have to solve them. The issue is that they are gated by DLC, so not all players can experience it. Also they aren't really deep and don't have too much re-playability.

[1] : https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Scenarios

Oh yeah, I've played the game and some of dlc and didn't even know about them.

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