Cities: Skylines - Paradox Interactive Makes A SimCity

SouthernKing said:

Interestingly, aside from Runemaster and HOI4, PDS is actually working on an as-yet-unannounced game known so far only as "Project Augustus." It's not clear what exactly this is, and the responses from PDS devs (expected of) have been vague at best and contradictory at worst. But they do seem to have the resources to pull off Vicky 3, and I really hope that's what they're doing.

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Project Augustus? Like Augustus Caesar? I heard Shams Jorjani of Paradox was seem wearing a Europa Universalis: Rome 2 shirt at their recent conference. No announcements about it, just Half-Life 3 style teasers. So who knows. But "Project Augustus" would seem appropriate for a Roman theme.

Quintillus said:

Project Augustus? Like Augustus Caesar? I heard Shams Jorjani of Paradox was seem wearing a Europa Universalis: Rome 2 shirt at their recent conference. No announcements about it, just Half-Life 3 style teasers. So who knows. But "Project Augustus" would seem appropriate for a Roman theme.

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Indeed Shams was. Though the other Paradox project names (iirc, Eisenhower for EU4, Reagan for the cancelled EvW) had little or nothing to do with their actual titles.

Give me a sandbox mode that doesn't involve the console every 2 seconds and I'll be playing that game forever.

If it doesn't, I'll, well, play it less than forever I guess?

Project Augustus doesn't mean much - Runemaster was Project Nero.

Oda Nobunaga said:

Project Augustus doesn't mean much - Runemaster was Project Nero.

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Eisenhower: EU4
Eisenhower starts with E. Eisenhower was the 34th president. (3*4)+9 [from Isenhower]=21. U is the 21st letter of the alphabet. Hence, EU4.

Reagan: EvW.
Ronald Reagan was the 40th president. Ronald Wilson Reagan=666=6+6+6=18.

40-18=22. V is the 22nd letter of the alphabet.

Eisenhower has 10 letters. 40/10=4, fourth letter of the alphabet is E. Hence, EvW.

Runemaster: Nero
Nero was the 5th Emperor of Rome. 5+4=9. Rune-mas-ter is divisible by three. Fifth letter of Scandinavian runic alphabet is R. Nero mas(s) murdered Christians, which was (ter)rible.

???: Augustus

Augustus was the first emperor of Rome. Augustus divides by three. Au-Gus-Tus.

Au is gold. The atomic number of gold is 79. 7*9=63. 6+3=9+8=17+6=23. But since Augustus was the first emperor, you have to subtract 1 to get 22. V is the 22nd letter of the alphabet. Since GUS-TUS=G-T+AU=(G-T)+AU=(7-20)+7*9=(-13)+63=50-23 Western Emperors=27-12 (1+4+7 emperors before the division)=15-13 (9+4 Eastern Emperors post division)=2+ 1 (Caesar)=3.

Victoria 3 confirmed.

Sim City 5 has had an offline mode for a while now, but it still doesn't fix the fact that the game is brainlessly simple and made for 3 year olds to play.

The most basic thing I think was lacking in SC5 was that sense of acheivement you got in its older iterations when you managed to develop skyscrapers, high wealth, high tech industry industry and the like. The process of doing so was quite obfuscated, but when you got them it really felt like you had tailor made that area and other parts of the city over a long period of time to acheive it.

In SC5, to get high wealth or high density residential you literally just pick the type of park for that class and provide basic necessities and you're set. To get high tech industry you just follow an unlock path that has lots of arbitrary steps like "Your population must be this big" etc. it's a mind-numbingly boring way of doing citybuilding

If you hate simcity5 so much dont play it! Simcity4 is still good enough.

Reagan for the cancelled EvW) had little or nothing to do with their actual titles.

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Reagan was an American president during the Cold War. That's relevant to the title.

Also, if CFC had a like post feature, I would have liked Son's post so hard...

I hope it's somewhere in between simcity 5 and paradox titles then. Most paradox games are too complicated for my tastes, just too big a learning curve to get started.

civvver said:

I hope it's somewhere in between simcity 5 and paradox titles then. Most paradox games are too complicated for my tastes, just too big a learning curve to get started.

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IMO Paradox has improved significantly at this in the past 3-4 years. Hearts of Iron III, from 2009, absolutely it's too big of a learning curve. Even now, there's aspects of the game (namely, combat) that I really don't understand well and tend to let the AI handle. Vicky 2, from 2010, also has a really big learning curve - I still haven't figured out how to really cause much to happen in that game unless I'm reactionary/communist and can choose what to build (and even then, the only strategy I really have is "get radios/cars before anyone else and get rich off them"). Looking further back, EU3 in 2007 is less opaque than HOI3 or Vicky2, but it's still certainly not obvious and not a great UI if you don't already know how it works. The EU3 Wiki is adequate to learn it, but without that, I can definitely see playing it being like being at sea without sails.

But Crusader Kings II (2012) has a significantly more friendly UI, and, while complicated, is easier to get started. And EU4 (2013) is a significant step up in understandability - most of the game explains itself fairly well (with some of the trade aspects being a bit of an exception).

So I think Paradox has realized that they can make the game more accessible while keeping it deep at the same time. I hope Cities: Skylines embodies that - a very deep game, with lots of options as well as large offline cities, but still easy to jump into as Sim City 3 and 4 are today. They also seem to be getting better at giving the player useful feedback recently (which is sorely missing in Vicky2, and nearly completely absent from HOI3 until the last expansion), which would be an automatic improvement over Cities: XL which has the same deficiency.

Quintillus said:

Vicky 2, from 2010, also has a really big learning curve

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75 hours played on Steam. Still have no idea what I'm doing.

I tried CK2 for about an hour and it seemed super confusing like it takes real mental effort to even play it. Contrast that to like civ4 or 5, those games have a ton going on that you don't realize but you can still jump right into them and learn as you go. Moving units around and building buildings is easy, even if you do it sub optimally.

Scarlet_King said:

Eisenhower: EU4
Eisenhower starts with E. Eisenhower was the 34th president. (3*4)+9 [from Isenhower]=21. U is the 21st letter of the alphabet. Hence, EU4.

Reagan: EvW.
Ronald Reagan was the 40th president. Ronald Wilson Reagan=666=6+6+6=18.

40-18=22. V is the 22nd letter of the alphabet.

Eisenhower has 10 letters. 40/10=4, fourth letter of the alphabet is E. Hence, EvW.

Runemaster: Nero
Nero was the 5th Emperor of Rome. 5+4=9. Rune-mas-ter is divisible by three. Fifth letter of Scandinavian runic alphabet is R. Nero mas(s) murdered Christians, which was (ter)rible.

???: Augustus

Augustus was the first emperor of Rome. Augustus divides by three. Au-Gus-Tus.

Au is gold. The atomic number of gold is 79. 7*9=63. 6+3=9+8=17+6=23. But since Augustus was the first emperor, you have to subtract 1 to get 22. V is the 22nd letter of the alphabet. Since GUS-TUS=G-T+AU=(G-T)+AU=(7-20)+7*9=(-13)+63=50-23 Western Emperors=27-12 (1+4+7 emperors before the division)=15-13 (9+4 Eastern Emperors post division)=2+ 1 (Caesar)=3.

Victoria 3 confirmed.

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The logic is ironclad and foolproof.

civvver said:

I tried CK2 for about an hour and it seemed super confusing like it takes real mental effort to even play it. Contrast that to like civ4 or 5, those games have a ton going on that you don't realize but you can still jump right into them and learn as you go. Moving units around and building buildings is easy, even if you do it sub optimally.

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Give it another try, the hardest part about CK2 is just simply learning what everything does but there are lots of guides on Steam, Pdox forums, reddit and other sites. Also that you are controlling a dynasty instead of a nation is a HUGE difference from almost any other strategy game.

Once you get the hang of it though it gets a lot easier. Honestly I feel like there really isn't even nearly enough stuff to do in the game most of the time at this point for me, I'd love to have many more events that I can interact with directly with my character.

gotta say i'm looking forward to this, and will be keeping an eye on the project, hopefully the reviews will be good when this game comes out.

civvver said:

I tried CK2 for about an hour and it seemed super confusing like it takes real mental effort to even play it. Contrast that to like civ4 or 5, those games have a ton going on that you don't realize but you can still jump right into them and learn as you go. Moving units around and building buildings is easy, even if you do it sub optimally.

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For me CKII was actually the easiest PI game to get into. I suppose it's partly because I'm pretty experienced with the Sims, and once I realized it was kinda like the Sims and stopped playing it like a conquer-the-world risk-esque game like EU, it all started to click in.


Anyways, that said, I do hope that this new city builder is similar to the old SimCity games in terms of accessibility and complexity. My younger self may not have really understood much about the complex algorithms and such behind SimCity 4, but he was still able to get into the game and understand the basics.

I'm one of those SimCity players that plays more so I can craft a city to my artistic liking (for instance, building the settings for creative writing), rather than something to do with the simulation; so essentially I come to these games like as if I were a kid playing with Legos, rather than someone who wants a hardcore simulator, and I hope this game will offer something like that for us too.

Is Cities in Motion 2 worth playing? I have it, and I could never get into it. I have always hated the micromanagement of having to place each station correctly and so on. Maybe I've been playing it wrong?

This looks promising, I'll definitely consider buying it when it comes out.

I really like it, but still I only have one city I have been working on from time to time ever since release. Great thing for me about the game is that I can probably return to that one game for years still without running out of things to do.

It definitely is niche and micromanagement heavy though, as are most of this style of transportation game. To me the game really only gets going once you reach the macro-level of managing your network between all the forms of transportation and sorting out bottlenecks by setting up express lines and such, and reaching that point really takes quite a few hours.

One detail about the game I absolutely love is the loan and debt system which makes taking out loans as your credit rate increases and investing it the best choice as long as your expected returns are bigger than the payment costs. It makes managing your finances so much more interesting. For some reason I've never seen any other game than this and Capitalism 2 pull this off in such a satisfying way. To me, anyway, probably not the biggest game mechanic for other players.

I always felt Capitalism 2 was aggravating and unplayable. But I didn't have a manual or good tutorials.