I’ve managed to put 50 minutes in on this so far, and in that time the program has crashed while launching it twice, and hard locked my system and forced a push of the reset button once. Pretty poor first impression.
Edit: Ran fine for my last little chunk of play, but then I saw some irritating things like a lot of buildings gated behind city sizes, seemingly no way to exploit all the trees around me (Game was happy to tell me there were huge quantities of trees waiting to be turned in to dollars, but since everything was normal RCI plotting I didn’t see a way to lean on my abundance of trees), and a lot of mysterious things like “Statue of death, prerequisites: 3 full graveyards, required for: fusion power plant”.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Cities Skylines is set in some nightmare dimension where things are even harsher than in Tropico. Everyone is assigned cellphones and speaks in hashtags, the mayor of the city can outright ban pets and smoking, the people eat seaweed patties, and the electricity is supplied by burning the dead. I should probably bulldoze the city and end their torment.
Edit 2: Played 3 hours. Figured out forestry zoning with districts. Expanded city to 8,000+. Thinking I’ll skip buying it and call it quits now.
This game, outside of traffic, falls pretty firmly into a “city painter” rather than a SimCity 4 “city builder”. If you can accept it for what it is, and like playing with mods/assets, it is great. If you actually want a deeper simulation, digging out/GOG’ing your copy of SC4 Deluxe + NAM is probably a better choice. I get a kick out of just seeing the city grow, so my $20 investment for C:S+AD and modding it to wazoo is well worth it.
Approaching the main island from the neighborhood of East Beach. The highway heads up to the center left, while the neighborhoods visible to the right of the main island are Mountainside and Arrowhead Heights.
Turning onto the main highway from the East Beach spur. The neighborhood dead ahead is Central Bay, with Port Town at the middle of the bay. Th eDocklands and Morningside are visible center left in the background, while the twin towers of Commerce Park and the apartment buildings of West Haven can be seen on the distant island center-right.
Building highways on the ridges and mountainsides has saved me quite a bit of flat land for buildings, but has forced me to build some interchanges my friends have described as ‘Cthulhuesque’.
Very nice, though I’m not sure how much snow I actually see in those images. Still neat-looking, though.
I never made it far in this game: I had trouble making money and staying afloat. I was making just enough to expand in small increments, and I got tired of the slow pace. I know the game is supposed to be on the easy side, so I must be dumb. Any general thoughts on how to build in a profitable way?
I’ve found myself getting bored again after about 4 land tiles getting filled. It seems to happen every time, so I start another new city. I really wish they would work on making the simulation harder. Have crime matter, have healthcare matter. Let fires spread, I mean fires don’t spread! WTF!
Its the little things that need work, and while yeah snow is nice, its not what I think they should have focused on.
Traffic is simulated? I vaguely remember reading when the game released that it was one of the few systems that was somewhat abstracted.
But yeah, I have the same issue with sim games - it’s too easy to fall into the same predictable patterns which makes repeated play sessions a little boring. It’s much more fun when you’re dealing with unpredictable factors.
Just started playing again with the expansions. Does night mode actually do anything? Crime goes up supposedly, but everything is still operating like normal, the day/night budget sliders seem kind of pointless.
Do they, though? I mean, it’s not 1906 anymore. I can’t remember the last time I ever heard of a fire taking down more than one building (and maybe a neighboring building) in a modern city.
Later this month, Cities: Skylines will receive a free content update which will add new features and options for ambitious player-mayors. Players should be formally informed that they can perform mild terraforming on their cities’ formations, to reform former landforms into malformed formats. Canals and quays will also be available for construction, so that Paradox can officially say they have handed over the quays to the city.
At 16:00 in this video the guy seems to play with speed limits and then alter the lanes. Is this built into the game or is it a mod?
edit: Later I see a “Traffic President” window, which looks cool and is definitely something I’ll use if I play the game again. Whilst you can change lane markings with it, it doesn’t seem to have that line drawing method.
