Any interest in Cities Skylines?

dothog

dothog

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/

https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines

It's coming out next week. $29.99.

I'm surprised there's no topic for it. There's a SimCity 2013 thread somewhere in here, chock full of accounts of Maxis fail and the dangers of pre-ordering. Maybe some of those folks have an interest in CS.

Even though the developer has a good relationship with the commnunity, and they're supporting a lot of requests, it's Paradox and there will likely be a lot of DLC. I prefer to wait until I can get everything in a tidy bundle.

Besides, there's a small chance it'll take a huge shit the way SC2013 did. The limited LPs that are out there suggest that won't be the case, but we'll see.

I hope any CAG who gets it on release will share their impressions. I could be talked into getting it near full price -- $29.99 ain't bad, as new release pricing goes for a title with a great deal of potential depth.

Here's the most recent LP of a pre-release copy if you're interested...

http://youtu.be/83VFQmGh1J0

EDIT: I lied. I may cave on this closer to release than normal. I won't pay $30, but $20? Seems like a good deal. Again,  though, I don't trust Paradox and their DLC. Eager to hear what others think.

 
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Pre-ordered on Greenmangaming VIP for $21.89.  There's also Nuuvem.  

And yes, it's a Paradox game, and yes, it will have tons of DLC.  Spent most of yesterday watching livestreams, and that's all I needed to get me to purchase.  Sure, they're making TONS of promises right now, but the underlying simulation looks good enough.  Fans of citybuilders are absolutely starved for a solid game, and while I haven't seen any of the hardcore SC4 modders commit, there certainly is a rapidly growing interest in C:S.  

Offering early access to streamers/tubers was a genius bit of marketing. We'll see if the devs crumble once the initial wave of criticism hits post-launch.

 
Thanks indef for the note on the GMG deal. I nearly bit. But I'm going to wait, it's bound to get down near $20 soon enough, and by then, as Aiat mentions, we'll have reviews to fall back on...plus, an idea how the DLC shakes out.

There's LPs all over the place on this, though. It reminds me of the weeks before the Banished release, which had an admittedly smaller scale but still had a sudden surge of popularity just ahead of launch due to well-placed pre-release copies with youtubers.

 
So, in Skylines you can import height maps into the game. Someone created a useful tool that allows you to create height maps from real satellite images specifically for this game:

http://terrain.party/

Also reviews are coming out and they're all really positive.

 
How the hell can you manipulate roads easier? At the start, there are like on/off ramps looping over the highway and whatnot, but for the life of me I cant figure out how to actually set something like that up myself. I spent like an hour earlier strictly playing with the road tool, messing with straight, curved, and free-form roads and nothing did the trick. I feel like I'm missing something really simple.

 
SEH said:
How the hell can you manipulate roads easier? At the start, there are like on/off ramps looping over the highway and whatnot, but for the life of me I cant figure out how to actually set something like that up myself. I spent like an hour earlier strictly playing with the road tool, messing with straight, curved, and free-form roads and nothing did the trick. I feel like I'm missing something really simple.
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PageUp and PageDown control the height of elevated roads. It helps if you try to build them in areas that are vacant, otherwise you'll have a hard time getting them to plop.

Got about an hour invested so far, having lots of fun. Hope the mod community takes off, because the vanilla buildings are a bit boring.

 
$29.99 is too expensive for a paradox game for me.

They are often bundled or steam sale. I do want it though since I do love me some Sim City and was horribly dissappointed by the new Sim City and that other knockoff Cities game.

 
Bumping this up to make people think this thread is active. Let's discuss our cities!

What's going on in yours? What are you confused about? Why does the fuck ing Ice Cube factory keep starting on fire?

Post screenshots, cool mods, neat maps, anything! Just post, dangnabbit.
 
Here's my (poorly) planned community, Zephyr Fields.  Right click and view image to make it readable.

 
qYrMitN.jpg

Traffic is getting to be a killer due to fairly narrow roads throughout and poorly planned intersections.  One-way streets helped some of it but really the town just needs a major road makeover and expansion which means destroying a LOT of property.  I may just start over with the lessons learned than go through changing the town that drastically.

The upper right hand corner has my late-addition of some agriculture and forestry.  But it's been hard to get it started since everyone just says "nope" to fruit picking and log cutting and works in town.  I think the fix to that is to just take it very slowly -- zoning a bunch of farms just means you have ten failing farms with zero to one worker each.  If I only had one farm, I could wait for it to be secure then zone for the next, etc.  I need to resist the temptation here to just paint a region and expect it to pop up like daisies.

 
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Unfortunately I haven't really devoted any time to this yet really. I have a city around 30k people or so that's basic and only put in a couple hours. Waiting to get through a few other games before I put much time into this. So it'll probably be a week or two. Then I'll continue with my boring looking city until I get enough cash to build a decent section in another block and make it look less boring.

I do recommend however getting the auto-save mod because there are always times you're engrossed and forget to save. Then probably the achievement unblocker mod as well so you still get achievements. Potentially some other mods as well that up the quality of life, such as placing more than one tree like you can in the editor using a brush tool.

 
Here's my current...thing

image.link 

I'm not very good at the ramps.  Last night I was adding in that new highway on the left side.  Spent about 2 hours trying to get that highway-to-highway interchange connected.  Then I realized I placed the main roadways backwards, meaning it's left-hand drive.  Trying to decide if I should re-do it or just pretend that part of the city is in England.

Population just hit the 5500 level and opened up high density and now everything is falling apart.  Again.  Might do my next one in sandbox mode and skip the progression, but first i'll have to see how much of the current one I can flood.

Also, if you want some interesting screenshots, check out the first person camera mod.

edit: wtf, we can't inline steamcloud pictures?  

 
Here are some C:S resources.

The Official Cities: Skylines subforum @ paradoxplaza.  Lots of complaints, shouting, and pitchforks that come with any "official" forum.  Devs respond occasionally, but they clearly aren't prepared for the flood of queries.  Don't think they expected to sell half a million copies already.  If you want to get some actual hard numbers on how the simulation works, scour this place for a while.

The Simtropolis folks (STEX for SC4 nerds) have a dedicated branch of forums, including a sub filled with modding info and releases.  Some interesting buildings already popping up in there.  Good to see this game being picked up by the people who kept SimCity 4 running for over a decade.  Also check out their Journals sub if you enjoy emergent gameplay stories.

SC4Devotion (LEX) is showing some signs of life after being stagnant for a long while.  Just one thread, but it's something to keep an eye on.

Reddit has a sub dedicated to modding with some decent creators, including Gula, a former Maxis employee.

Like anything that gets moderately popular on reddit, the main C:S sub is a cesspool of screenshots while actual game discussion gets shoved aside.  They did have an excellent community Question & Answer thread yesterday.  It's worth checking out, lots of good hints and tips for beginners, and even some advanced strategies for later-game situations.

 
Draekon said:
I do recommend however getting the auto-save mod because there are always times you're engrossed and forget to save. Then probably the achievement unblocker mod as well so you still get achievements. Potentially some other mods as well that up the quality of life, such as placing more than one tree like you can in the editor using a brush tool.
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Could depend though. Personally I avoid the autosave mod for what I hit a few days ago. City was going awesome, tons of money rolling in, spread across 5 regions. Start trying to rework some roads and put down some new stuff and out of nowhere half the city leaves, they all got upset for some reason from something I did but I dont know what. Luckily I did not save so I can just go back to my good point, if I had autosave on Id be screwed.

So situations like that Im grateful theres no autosave

 
ezelkow1 said:
Could depend though. Personally I avoid the autosave mod for what I hit a few days ago. City was going awesome, tons of money rolling in, spread across 5 regions. Start trying to rework some roads and put down some new stuff and out of nowhere half the city leaves, they all got upset for some reason from something I did but I dont know what. Luckily I did not save so I can just go back to my good point, if I had autosave on Id be screwed.

So situations like that Im grateful theres no autosave
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Same thing happened to that city I posted yesterday. Lost half my population when I decided to plop a bunch of incinerators and empty out my landfills. Garbage truckpocalypse. Might be faulty AI pathing, but if you ever get stuck behind a garbage truck on a narrow residential street, you can understand why things would grind to a halt.

 
Hmmm, maybe thats what I was working on as well. For me the one main issue I always seem to hit is dealing with garbage. Its probably just due to improper coverage setup and having to do the whole manual emptying of landfills in to incinerators, etc.  Thats one thing I hope they change in a patch is maybe have garbage truck down time start emptying landfills into incinerators automatically

 
ezelkow1 said:
Could depend though. Personally I avoid the autosave mod for what I hit a few days ago. City was going awesome, tons of money rolling in, spread across 5 regions. Start trying to rework some roads and put down some new stuff and out of nowhere half the city leaves, they all got upset for some reason from something I did but I dont know what. Luckily I did not save so I can just go back to my good point, if I had autosave on Id be screwed.

So situations like that Im grateful theres no autosave
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I never said to only use the auto-save, that would be stupid. It should compliment your normal saving methods to prevent any sudden loss of power or crashes.

 
Last night I took a good look at Zephyr Fields and realized that there was no way to fix its core traffic issues short of leveling half the town.  Rather than do that, I started a new community: the riverside logging community of Naiad.  Let me first say that it's kind of silly that you can't start an agricultural town but have to district into it after your population grows.  Because, in the course of human history, man has been unable to plant wheat or cut down trees until you have enough freight yards and ice cube factories.

Anyway, the city government of Naiad may have over-applied the lessons of Zephyr Fields.  The densest trees were at the far edge of the starting plot and beyond, so after getting a starting area established near the highway, we laid a long stretch of 6-lane road out to the hinterlands to act as a spine for the area and start building out there.  The idea was to get my logging industry up and running before hitting the uneducated worker drought later on.  Likewise, laying pipe and wires to my "inner" town took a lot of reaching across the landscape.  As a result, I think my infrastructure costs are sapping my revenue and I've only managed to place town services because of the cash boosts you get when you "level up" your city size.  That plus a 20k loan.  I think I can push through it but it's some hard going with a treasury of around $2,000 most of the time and buildings catching on fire.

 
A screenshot of Naiad.  The eastern part of town will eventually need some reworking but the rest of it is coming along much more well planned.  Still struggling here and there but doing much better cash-wise than before.

 
7Y5yx78.jpg

 
It stayed at $22 at GMG post-launch. So I wound up buying it. Never hurts to wait, even though it was clear just before launch that a SC2013-level meltdown wasn't going to occur. (And it was all the more satisfying as a purchase due to my staying out of the SC2013 cess pool.)

I enjoy it. I feel like for as much attention as the traffic gets from the community, the game doesn't punish you for ignoring traffic. I'm glad for that, because fuck yo roadways, citizens. I've got monuments and needless parks to build.

 
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It still amazes me some of the mods that have come out in a short time:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=416064574&searchtext=

Import height maps for accurate cities from images.  Also lets you export as open street map files so you can import your cities in to numerous other applications (Ive mentioned to the fiance she can now import my cities into her GIS applications :) )

And that the traffic simulation is actually fairly accurate, someone recreated most of san francisco and it actually gets traffic jams at the exact same locations as the real world version:

http://www.pcgamer.com/this-cities-skylines-recreation-of-san-francisco-is-amazing/

I think most of the traffic complaints are from people who just had poor layouts. They complained 'why are they all using one lane' when its really obvious, because those cims all need to go the same direction and you have a poor layout for them to go that way.

Just seeing if you guys found any new neat stuff out there, still waiting on the devs to fix the no-asset image for alot of workshop items, once that gets fixed its gonna be a road free for all

 
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