Cities: Skylines II [video] | Hacker News Reader

Cities: Skylines II [video]

youtube.com

124 pointsthecopy91 comments

My main gripe with the original game was that it wasn't possible to create walkable or cyclable cities. The only way to build anything is to have a road (as in, a road with lots of cars). So mechanically your cities are car centric, which isn't qui the cities I'd like to build.

As far as I can tell, there are no bicycles in that trailer which leaves me little hope.

I'm sure someone will reply about whatever mod that might help, but no I'd like the main game to include the possibility of building other types of cities. Anyhow, I still lost 100s of hours on the original game, it's just lovely.

Pure walkable city is the feature of Plaza and Promenade DLC. It allow you to create a pedestrian-only district.

And dedicated bike lanes came with the first DLC (After Dark), so I wouldn't be shocked if they do the same thing again.

Ah I had no idea about the Promenade DLC, thanks for pointing it out!

There a now a DLC that lets you have pedestrian only zones with no cars beyond some service vehicles.

Bicycles exist in the current game—they were brought in as part of a free update. Roads with dedicated cycle lanes were introduced with an official add-on, but by default pedestrians and bikes will share sidewalks. I imagine the new game will roll a lot of their official add-ons into the base game. I also heard that they hired some of the community mod creators which is exciting news.

There was also no mixed use zoning in the old game. Population sizes and things like bus capacities were generally wrong too but mods at least corrected for that for pc users.

I believe mixed use commercial/residential is pretty much confirmed by this trailer.

What's being zoned at 0:56 is green buildings (residential) with blue bottom floor (commercial). And on 0:19 the corner building next to the intersection appears to be one of those, some type of shop on the bottom floor, apartments above.

Pretty cool. If thats all they offer though, there will at least be mods that will let you dial in usage by the percent one day I bet.

I never even thought about that because I was too busy trying to solve the endless road puzzles for my cities. You can add mass transit and bike lanes but it’s very much car centric as a vital piece to any of its challenges.

A related gap that I felt when playing the base game a few years ago was around ability to reclaim land and evolve a city over time [1]. CS (like SimCity) gave great tools for greenfield development, but I never felt like I could do things like what happens in a real city, where:

- A street is widened to accommodate new transit or bike lanes, but by buying back people's yards rather than by demolishing and rebuilding a whole neighbourhood.

- Zoning changes permit former-bungalows to have second stories built on them, or similar small-scale densifications like encouraging duplexing of existing structures.

- Old factory buildings are converted into trendy lofts.

- A house that burns down is converted into a pocket park.

And I guess worst of all, I never felt rewarded for planning this kind of thing ahead, though maybe I just wasn't doing it right.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_House

You can build very walkable, cyclable and in fact completely car-free cities in C:S; I do only that because cars irk me. This only requires some DLCs and a mod or two. All mods are possible to install with a mere click via Steam Workshop.

DLCs: just get all of them, they are probably on sale, but public transit and likely after dark are a must.

The main mod you need is TM:PE, its key features in this case are allowing to turn on realistic parking (cars do not vanish so you actually feel how horrible they are and need to plan accordingly) and to enable road restrictions (e.g., ban all vehicles except public transport, services and emergency). You may also want to install more road assets with bike lanes.

Note that you can disconnect from the highway and rely just on intercity trains/ships/airplanes (another DLC) to avoid having to accommodate cars incoming via the highway, though this does not spare you from the need to put restrictions on roads because cims can spawn cars while in city.

Warning: you may find and end up installing more mods, the rabbit hole is compelling and time consuming, I have dozens by now. Caution: mods are not thoroughly reviewed and contain arbitrary code. (That said, there are many mods seemingly maintained and contributed to by CO devs.) Beware inter-mod compatibility issues and outdated mods; although the community seems to really have gotten the hang of it recently.

Mature mods is also why I am cautious about the new version. It is reasonably likely that it will miss all these features and there will be no mods to fill the gaps. The community will also become fragmented as a result.

Even beyond the aesthetic problem with the cities being car centric by default is the lack of realistic parking issues. I don't know about mods and DLC but in the original you can get by with designs that would be totally unreasonable in reality because they would require massive underground parking to look how they do.

I played this game extensively, and you can enable "realistic parking" in the traffic manager mod, which assigns parking requirements to buildings (visible with the traffic overlay). You can also disable the auto despawning of cars, which means you have to build parking lots for them (either with mods or the handful of vanilla parking lots).

There's also DLC which provide a lot more walkability options, including bikes (and bike lanes) and the Plazas and Promenades DLC which has pedestrian only versions of the normal roads.

This has been my frustration as well.

I purchased it for Switch. I enjoy the game, but find it very hard to lay out a city since everything needed a street.

>So mechanically your cities are car centric, which isn't qui the cities I'd like to build.

It's a city builder, not a fantasy sandbox.

You are basically complaining that you can't build a machine gun before you build a musket in a gun making game and that you hate the smell of musket powder.

It may shock you to realise just how much infrastructure goes into growing a city. Maybe put your emotion down for a little while...

No I'm complaining that a city builder mainly restricts to one kind of city: the north American city with skyscrapers in the center, a road network (that may or may not look like a grid) and suburbs.

You might respond so vehemently to my comment because you've never experienced anything else than a car centric city? In which case I can only encourage you to visit other places.

What's for sure is we've both moved from constructive criticism to criticising each other, which isn't a good sign. So I'm sorry if I seem to have attacked your personal beliefs, maybe it's worth questioning why these have pushed you to respond with such disdain for something as trivial as an urbanism question and a video game.

>You might respond so vehemently to my comment because you've never experienced anything else than a car centric city?

No, my comment was devoid of emotion. My experiences are not in car centric cities but public transport centric cities. Not that it matters.

>What's for sure is we've both moved from constructive criticism to criticising each other

You have, I have not. You keep going on about personal things for some reason. Like I said, definitely put your emotion down next time...

Whether you like it or not, a city is not born how you think it is born. Feel free to complain about the smell of musket powder ignition, that's not for me to tell you not to. I am just pointing out that it's quite disconnected from reality even if it is a great fuzzy feeling for you.

I bought the first Cities: Skylines because I'm a massive SimCity fan. Ever since SimCity 2000 that I received for my birthday as a child (in a bundle with Theme Hospital). But the text and UI were way too small for me. So I couldn't play the game. I even created my own (very simple) mod [1], but I never got around to playing the game. I hope the developers will address this issue and implement proper UI / text scaling.

1. https://github.com/alex3305/CitiesSkylinesTextScaleMod

There's so much to learn from how CS1 was built and supported mods. But it's hard to tell from the trailer what kind of technical changes have been made.

The rendering looks really nice. Is it URP, HDRP, their own pipeline?

Unity has had an ECS framework under development for almost 5 years now, which could be a great fit for what this game is. Or maybe Colossal Order has engineered something similar, like Photon did.

VR Chat created Udon to better support untrusted scripting. Epic made Verse for Unreal Engine for Fortnite. Ahead of time compiled stuff doesn't vibe with the Unity modding ecosystem.

In my opinion, CS1 from an engineering point of view was a triumph for middlewares.

"Under development" is the operating word here, DOTS is very much still strongly experimental. The development workflow is chaotic and best practices unclear, somehow even more so than the regular workflow. And even more errors now crash the editor.

DOTS is no longer experimental as of 2023; it is now a version 1.0 that can be used in production, though it is still under active development.

Best practices are still being figured out, but since ECS is all about performance, best practices can be measured objectively.

I mean, it is indeed labeled as not experimental, but even the documentation does not show the up-to-date usage of the ECS APIs.

Observations from a long time fan and game developer:

1. Early on in the trailer, it shows a road segment being drawn across an existing road, with the intersection getting automatically added. This is a big step up from the original road system where every intersection must be placed at the end of a road segment. I imagine this will make it easier to create nice geometric patterns.

2. Some cities shown have surface parking taking up a whole plot. I hope this isn't just cosmetic - allowing more/less parking should really influence the economics and transport methods of each citizen.

3. In the data view mode, bright colors bleed onto the white building models. I suspect there's some dynamic ambient light bounce rendering going on here!

4. It looks like the old method of plot zoning is still around, showing as grid squares along the side of the roads. I would have liked to see non-square parcels that fill up the availible space, but I also understand why square plots would make it easier to fill with pre-made assets.

5. Speaking of pre-made assets, those skyscrapers look really similar and boring. Walk around any modern city with glass towers and you'll see a lot more variation and interesting nuances, while still being relatively performant to render in a game like this. I'm worried they will introduce actual variety via drip-fed dlc assets. Yes, mods can fix that, but you can't beat the visual consistency and performance of decent vanilla resources.

6. Looks like the town hall starts off as a huge parking lot with a small office in the middle, and can be expanded into multiple departments. Looks like a handy mechanic, and especially believable for North American development since a lot of government buildings are like 75% pavement.

I just hope they intergrate QOL features so you aren't forced to use a ton of mods to be able to build out cities efficiently.

I'm not sure what more game designers could ask for than a rich modding community for a previous title that gives you the best user research you could ask for. They've already done the hard work discovering what players want. Take the best ideas, refine them, plug them into the next game, give a hat tip to the modders and community.

If I recall correctly, macsergey, the developer behind many of the top traffic-centric mods including Node Controller, Intersection Marking Tool, and a few vehicle spawning and mass transit stop mods, was hired by Colossal Order. The road and traffic management tools seen so far seem vastly improved from this trailer so fingers crossed CO saw the QoL fixes the community needed and tried to include at least some of them.

It's a paradox game, expect it to be missing a ton of content only available post-launch in 20+ expensive DLCs. Get a better business model Paradox, please consider condensing your DLCs into the base game eventually.

* * *

It looks like this is all of CS1 rolled into one base game with an engine upgrade plus QoL improvements, for only $50 I might add. I saw numerous features added by DLC in this trailer. Examples include: day/night cycle (After dark), industrial zoning (Industries), mixed transit hubs (Mass Transit), dynamic seasons (building on Snowfall), college campuses (Campus). I’m sure I missed some other details as well.

I'm a bit underwhelmed. There are tons of QoL changes, but afaict there is little innovation. I would've expected at least a not grid-based zoning so that buildings on curves look more natural. All these empty pieces of land in between buildings look really bad and kind of force us to make grid cities. And that is not even an innovation, it was already present in the SimCity series. But some procedurally generated buildings for smooth corners and connecting buildings would be nice.

Its hard to make assets that would work with every curve. When you see screenshots of nice cities like this, people are using mods to hand place assets with them clipping into each other to make a unified wall of buildings along the curve or corner.

The houses themselves don't have to be curved - but if the zoning around a curve (or non 90 degree angle) could be filled in completely, that'd be nice. Triangular buildings or similar shapes could help. For detached housing, it still might look OK (although a bit weird), but for buildings that are supposed to connect with each other (which is something you see a lot at least in European cities), placing these on a curve and having empty spaces between them just looks bad. The building itself could still have straight walls - with angles other than 90 degrees and then a little bit of auto-filling plaza this could work.

I know it's a hard problem to solve. Personally, this is what makes C:S 1 unable to create natural looking cities. Cities aren't all grids or detached housing.

Agreed. I made this as a personal experiment and it was not all that hard to make form-fitting buildings for straight road networks:

https://andrewq.myportfolio.com/procedural-city-generator

Curved roads are a bit more difficult, but definitely possible.

Jus commenting that this was, by far, my top wish for the sequel. Proper European cities are just not possible with the CS1 zoning squares.

There are triangular buildings in the Steam Workshop that help a little bit, but it's tricky to place them right and they get repetitive quite fast as there aren't that many. Plus that solves just a small part of the problem anyway.

I used to love this genre but the older I get the more it feels like....work. Am I the only one?

Nah, there's probably a dozen or so people like you.

Welcome to old age. Back in the day games that I could sink hundreds of hours into were a steal. Today I won't even touch them, because who the hell has the time?

Same kind of people that pour endless hours to scale models and model trains etc? Hobbies take time, and many people make them a priority in life.

If I were to theorize, it's because you try to min / max it and build the most efficient city. I'm guilty of that too, building everything in neat grids and then I got bored.

But look up some designs; people build chaos, people build things that look good or quirky instead of what works the best. The style you play at determines how much fun you have with it. For some, that's doing it organized and efficient, for others, it's whatever makes them the happiest.

Even if you don't min/max, I can see it feeling too much like work. There's also more overhead to get into the game, a fair amount of information to absorb at the outset to get the most out of it.

After which there's the sandbox potential, but I never understood sandbox games. The closest thing that appeals is the simulated chaos of dwarf fortress.

Yeah city builders are kinda designed to be like work. Same goes for simulators. Some people WANT to do work that’s different from the actual work they do every day.

The older you get the more you… turn them into work. If you approach it like work it’ll feel like work and it’s hard to not have that mindset.

The conceit being that people approach some games "like work", but not others. I don't think that's true. No matter "the mindset" some games will feel more like work than others, in the eye of the beholder.

Funny you mention that. A few years back I tried one of the Far Cry games (no idea which one) on recommendation from an in-law. Almost immediately I was sent on a side quest to gather some items to craft some other item and it was hugely off-putting. Nothing like finishing a days work, sitting in front of a video game to unwind, then being given a honey-do list.

Isolated incident and completely anecdotal, needless to say...

I notices that all the cities were quite small in the trailer. Except that very last one in the last few seconds with the zoom out from car-level which looked very box-arty. I hope the engine scales well.

I wonder if its going to be ram bound like the old game. Every asset had to be loaded into memory with the old game. There were even mods that let you know how much ram the game was consuming on load. On xbox cloud gaming version however the game runs with zero lag, no matter population size, right up to the point you build too many network nodes and the game doesn’t let you build more.

I just hope they don't DLC it to death.

I didn't get into the first one early on, and I would have loved to try it later.. but when you sit there and see like hundreds of dollars of DLC, it makes it not appealing. Sure I could just buy the original, but you just get the feeling you are missing out on so much.

It’s published by Paradox Interactive, of course they are. We’ll be lucky if we even have that day/night cycle on release.

It’s part of the Paradox business model. There will be lots of DLC.

With Paradox games, I recommend starting with just the base game with no DLC. Most of the features in the DLC actually get added to the base game, so it gets better over time even if you don't buy the DLC.

For example, the After Dark DLC for Cities: Skylines added a day/night cycle along with lit-up night time versions of all of the game's assets. Except all of that is actually part of the base game. The only thing that is unique to the DLC are the nightlife and tourist districts, and the new buildings that can grow in them.

It looks nice, but I'll wait for information about system improvements before I get too excited. The original really needs several mods for traffic to work correctly.

I really hope this won't be DLC-ed to hell, the last time I checked it cost about $300 for the first one and all of its DLC.

Random aside... I'd love to see a SimTower remake. I played that game so much as a child.

Project Highrise is very much a spiritual successor to SimTower.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/423580/Project_Highrise/

I had really high hopes for this but IIRC at a certain point all you really wind up doing is juggling/optimizing elevators. Which, ironically, is similar to Skylines 1 where all you wind up doing is juggling/optimizing traffic..

My main gripe with city builders like C:S is that you start off in the modern age.

Bam. Highways, utilities, concrete.

I'd like to go from dirt tracks and outhouses to fully automated luxury gay space communism.

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic has afaik some degree of time progression and development. Overall its a game with surprisingly deep mechanics underlying a zany surface layer.

For anyone who read that last sentence and thought "What?": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxu...

I would loooove for a C:S like city builder where you start in something like a medieval age and then you progress through time. It would be amazing to have nice historical city centers like in Italy or Spain, and this could be heavily changed for different regions (make DLCs for different country styles, like Japan or even USA where you would get to build wild west cities before going into themodern age). Then your city would really feel as if it grew more organically.

One can dream...

You might want to check out the mods that this youtuber uses for his history-of-the-east-coast series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwkSQD3vqK1Q4BP-itzN6...

It starts with the indigenous Americans in wigwams, and goes from there. Pretty cool. (Watch at 1.25x.)

Yeah I know the Franklin series, but that will just turn it into a diorama simulator.

I want the pressure of socioeconomic change to guide me, forcing the city to adapt to previous choices.

SimCity and Railroad Tycoon have technological change over time, but it's just keyed to the date. It sounds like you want a game that nobody has invented yet; perhaps you should be the one who invents it.

Oh, I've definitely toyed with the idea of getting into game dev. After I finish all the other 17 half-baked side projects.

rip franklin

To be fair you cant build a highway until your city is a certain size. You are free to build “rurally” with railroads and dirt roads too.

SimCity Creator DS was this exactly! You’d even progress from pre-historic times to the post-global warming era.

Highly suggest playing the game on an emulator sometime.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=41itb8Sg_IE&pp=ygUSU2luY2l0eSB...

As poorly received as the SimCity remake was—it has really left a lasting mark on the look and feel of city builders (it's nice to see that continue!)

No bicycling lanes? No bus lanes? No pedestrian zones? No electric vehicles? No solar cells on the roofs? No windfarms? No public transport? No subways? And of course no simulation of the traffic noise caused by cars and factories for inhabitants...

It seems like in this game you can only repeat all the city building problems of the past. If you want to build a city of the future, this unfortunately is not your game.

Dystopia building simulator starting with autobahns.

Does it have the concepts slums, shantytowns and such organic urban sprawl or is it all perfectly maintained blocks?

I routinely built slums in CS.

It's mostly decorative, but you can add some functional slum elements like nearby pollution, bad/no schools, etc.

I definitely enjoyed Cities: Skylines when it first released, but seeing it devolve into a stream of half-baked DLC really dampened my enthusiasm for the franchise. Hard to imagine this version isn't just a platform to support going down the same road again.

No Mac version, what a shame.

Will this just include all the dlc from cs1? Aside from the qol mods the community created c:s feels like basically a complete game. I’m interested to know what they’re adding.

This is a paradox published game sooo I’d guess it’ll include some stuff, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before they release a game with everything included

Their brilliant strategy just forces me to wait until dlc is like a buck on sale. Seems like exactly what you don’t want from customer behavior but what do I know.

What you want as a customer is to have a great game, that generates enough money so the studio can continue working on it for years to come.

Yea, I think people forget how much each update to the game has added to the "base" game. Because off the DLC, Cities Skylines has had 17 major updates over the last 10 years. Each of those updates fixed bugs and added new features to the game. They were funded by the DLC, but you don't even have to buy the DLC to benefit!

This is a an unrealistic thing to expect or ask for. The new game uses a different art style, significantly alters the mechanics and uses the latest version of Unity, as opposed to Unity 5 from 2015. If they included every single DLC, they'd have to:

- Recreate or significantly update all of the assets they've created over the past 8 years. This would be a huge amount of work.

- Not alter any game mechanics, because otherwise the content from the DLC wouldn't work. OR alternatively re-design a dozen expansion packs at the same time for the new game. If they couldn't change the game in any way, why would they make a sequel?

They'll certainly include mechanics that they previously added in expansion packs and updates, but expecting them to just bundle all of the stuff from the expansions doesn't make sense from game design or business point of view.

I’m not sure it’s that unrealistic. The trailer shows off a LOT of features carrying over from CS1. Some stuff might be cut, sure, but they aren’t swapping engines so the breaking changes might not be as significant as one might expect.

Asking it to include the most significant changes isn't unrealistic, but to include "all" the DLC is.

It wouldn't even really make sense, for example the Snowfall DLC only had permanently snowy maps, no snow was added to existing maps or maps from other DLC. CS2 will have dynamic seasons and climate. So asking for the Snowfall DLC in CS2 is asking for a feature regression.

When I first got Cities: Skylines, I had expected it to scratch the same SimCity itch. It didn't. I'm still waiting for the true spiritual successor to SimCity.

What do you think is missing?

I love Cities Skylines, but I wish it was a bit less car-centric. It's fun to solve traffic problems, but having micromanage intersections gets old fast.

for clarity, change title to "Cities: Skylines II Gameplay Trailer"

Is this going to be an always-online game?

CS1 was not, and none of the other Paradox games are either, so I guess not.

Shouldn't that game be called How to ruin beautiful landscapes with concrete instead ?

If it's still unity, then fuck them. Not buying.

What's the problem with Unity?

why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com