Cities: Skylines - Paradox Interactive Makes A SimCity

Yeah cybrxkhan for an update!

Also I really wanna make a Seattle map with that Northern theme.
 
Yeah cybrxkhan for an update!

Also I really wanna make a Seattle map with that Northern theme.


Apparently you can import greyscale images to make maps, similarly to SimCity 4 in the good old days of yore, so it actually might not be that difficult to do!
 
I saw that and since Cities Skylines supports water at multiple levels, I can now do a proper Greenlake and Lake Washington since they're 160' and 16' above sea level.
 
Today they're releasing a bunch of information about modding. They have modding info up on the official Cities Skylines Wiki (link here), and I have to say it looks like a damn lot of information.

They're also currently doing a reddit AMA at the moment, so hopefully we'll get to squeeze out a bit more information from that.
 
I saw the screenshots on that wiki and the offramps look impressive. I used to play sim city 3000 and it sort of looks like their offramps since sim city 3000 used to have highways but in their most recent release, their highways only allow for internal trolleys..
 
Sips has started doing a full playthrough series of Cities: Skyline. If you liked the taste you got before and (maybe) want to see more/different gameplay, here you go:

NFSW: Language
Spoiler :
 
Apparently, Skylines' pre-order sales are very impressive, I think it went to #2 on steam earlier today. A good chunk of people are waiting until release day/reviews are out, so the actual sales will probably be even higher. I used to think the hype was overexaggerated, but I guess I really underestimated people's dissatisfaction with SimCity 2013. I think even Colossal Order / PI are kinda shocked at the response so far.


In other news, coincidentally, the branch of Maxis that did SimCity 2013 has been shut down.
 
I've been watching Quill18 play the game, looks great although it still just looks completely bizarre and unreal with a complete lack of Urban sprawl and zero farmland whatsoever.

Do you mean something like skyscrapers and office buildings or late game stuff? I dunno if this works but this video shows off a late(r) game city:


Link to video.
 
Yeah it just looks bizarre. A rectanglular city of just tall buildings? It has always just looked bizarre. The only cities I know of that are mostly tall buildings are on small islands or really crammed into a small area (New York, part of Vancouver, etc) or really gigantic cities/metropolis areas (Shanghai, Tokyo).

Most normal cities are surrounded by farmland too, especially since the cities usually grow into and cover the farmland around them as they expand.
 
Yeah it just looks bizarre. A rectanglular city of just tall buildings? It has always just looked bizarre. The only cities I know of that are mostly tall buildings are on small islands or really crammed into a small area (New York, part of Vancouver, etc) or really gigantic cities/metropolis areas (Shanghai, Tokyo).

Most normal cities are surrounded by farmland too, especially since the cities usually grow into and cover the farmland around them as they expand.

Yeah, that does look pretty odd. Should look like this:

Spoiler :


Cities really only grow upward when space is at a premium. If real estate is sufficiently cheap why bother investing in an expensive high rise? Just buy more property. Cities like New York and San Francisco are characterized by lots of high rises because the cities effectively ran out of room to grow 50 years ago and up was the only direction left to turn. In contrast cities like LA and San Jose are characterized by large suburban sprawl because of wholesale annexation of neighboring communities (particularly when the cities were relatively small) and tons of available land to expand into (and the respective counties are very large to boot, unlike, for example, San Francisco County). Gamewise I think you could encourage this by making the threshold to annex neighboring squares much higher. From watching Sips play he barely covered 1/32 of his starting square and he's already allowed to buy another square of equal size. If you never run into space problems then, presumably, you're going to get the situation you get in the video: having a bunch of high rises surrounded by literally nothing, which looks unnatural. Even so the makeup of the city looks off. The listed population in the video is 105k.

This is what a city with around 120k population looks like:
Spoiler :

It's a high rise here or two in the city center, but a lot of 1-3 or 4 storey buildings otherwise. The video has like NY-level density. So the scaling feels really off too.

The most jarring part is that massive block of industrial like right next door. That and the perfect straightness of it all. I don't know if that was just video guy's personal style of play though.
 
I think most of the streamers/youtube people/whatever who are playing with the game currently tend to be min-maxers, so they'll do things they think works for the game, but not necessarily real life (even if it doesn't make as much sense either way). That said I don't feel like this is anything new with city builders, so I'm not as concerned - I think we'd be able to create more realistic looking cities with what we have, they just won't be the most efficient or min-max-worthy.

Also, you can apparently name seagulls!

Spoiler :
 
Yeah they are going for min-maxing, but still it's something that really needs to be added to them or they should change their name to Skyscraper Simulators.

Rofl at naming seaguls, but that screenshot is rather painful on the eyes. The game looks pretty good for the most par in Quill's stream though, although the amount of sewage treatment plants he has seems excessive. The city and surrounding area where I live still dumps it's raw, untreated sewage in the ocean (which is actually surprisingly not that bad, outside of the immediate area where it is dumped), and it only requires two 1 metere in diameter pipes to dump the sewage from over 300,000 people. His city has like ~100,000 give or take and he has like 20 plants surrounding a very brownish lake that has been dubbed "poo Lake". I think he is trying to make it a tourist attraction too :lol:
 
Apparently, Skylines' pre-order sales are very impressive, I think it went to #2 on steam earlier today. A good chunk of people are waiting until release day/reviews are out, so the actual sales will probably be even higher. I used to think the hype was overexaggerated, but I guess I really underestimated people's dissatisfaction with SimCity 2013. I think even Colossal Order / PI are kinda shocked at the response so far.


In other news, coincidentally, the branch of Maxis that did SimCity 2013 has been shut down.

Skylines is now at #1. I believe a good chunk of that is hype at this point, and I'm afraid some people will be left frustrated. Either way, I'm excited. I haven't preordered because I've been burned on preorders than I care to admit, but like Banished, I'll probably get it at release.
 
Yeah they are going for min-maxing, but still it's something that really needs to be added to them or they should change their name to Skyscraper Simulators.

Rofl at naming seaguls, but that screenshot is rather painful on the eyes. The game looks pretty good for the most par in Quill's stream though, although the amount of sewage treatment plants he has seems excessive. The city and surrounding area where I live still dumps it's raw, untreated sewage in the ocean (which is actually surprisingly not that bad, outside of the immediate area where it is dumped), and it only requires two 1 metere in diameter pipes to dump the sewage from over 300,000 people. His city has like ~100,000 give or take and he has like 20 plants surrounding a very brownish lake that has been dubbed "poo Lake". I think he is trying to make it a tourist attraction too :lol:

Apparently there's a huge thread on reddit talking about how Quill's city collapsed into a post-apocalyptic hellhole due to all the health problems and deaths and whatever, did you manage to catch that?


Skylines is now at #1. I believe a good chunk of that is hype at this point, and I'm afraid some people will be left frustrated. Either way, I'm excited. I haven't preordered because I've been burned on preorders than I care to admit, but like Banished, I'll probably get it at release.

Yeah, the hype is real now. Which is good and bad I suppose. I'll have to wait and see myself too - my current PC can't handle the game, which is good at restraining me from pre-ordering. I think a lot of people are expecting a modern SimCity 4, but I've already been seeing hints that despite the superficial similarities there will be differences so there's gonna be unhappy people when they realize they have to play the game differently. Though, for me, as long as the overall difficulty level is around the same as SimCity 4, I'm okay; I don't want it to be the kinda thing where I have to keep starting over and over again to learn what to do and what not to do.
 
I tried to watch quill18 for a bit, doing that sort of min/maxing does not lead to entertaining watching for this sort of game, and the fact that he wouldn't even pause the game to look over the issues his cities had made it even worse with his mass block zoning and ignoring of public transport. Unfortunate that he became the most popular for introducing this game to people, even though I like a lot of the stuff he does. Paradox had a guy streaming who had a lot of play-time and he had a really beautiful looking city and was a lot more entertaining.
 
I tried to watch quill18 for a bit, doing that sort of min/maxing does not lead to entertaining watching for this sort of game, and the fact that he wouldn't even pause the game to look over the issues his cities had made it even worse with his mass block zoning and ignoring of public transport. Unfortunate that he became the most popular for introducing this game to people, even though I like a lot of the stuff he does. Paradox had a guy streaming who had a lot of play-time and he had a really beautiful looking city and was a lot more entertaining.

That's why I've been watching Sips. I go in expecting terrible play, get terrible play and end up thoroughly entertained in the process.
 
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