Kyriakos playing a Paradox game as Greece? I don't believe it!
Pretty sure Greece doesn't have claims on Italy in the base game though? That must be part of the mod?
Not time anymore to play games in any consistent way. :-(
I vaguely remember how to play SimCity anyway.
Bummer! For what it's worth, I hadn't played SC4 since that succession game 10 years ago, and hadn't played SC3K since prior to that. Which might be part of why I wound up taking out so many loans to provide so few services...
American Truck Simulator: Pulling two trailers with 58,000 lbs / 26,000 kg of crushed cars is like driving a train.
Man, it looks like they've really upped the game graphically since I was cruisin' around California, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. I had the Oregon and Washington packs too, and I remember Portland, Oregon, being way more impressive than places like San Francisco that are considerably bigger cities in life, but seemed like small villages in-game. So I knew they were getting better as they went along, but it seems they really have kicked it up a level since then.
What do you use to play it? I was using a Steam Controller which seemed pretty all right (and is the only controller I have that's easy to use on modern Windows; my XBox 1 "Duke" and "Akebono" controllers take quite some configuration to get working).
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I've now also started a Cities: Skylines city. With the city simulator bug, I spent time getting all three simulators ready to go, and SC3K was the easiest, SC4 was moderate, and CS took the longest. Why? Largely because of all the mods needed to mold it into what I'm looking for. I found my old saves and found I'd tried it three times, not getting that far in any of those attempts. Played 3 years (game time) in 2016, three years in 2019, and seven years in 2021. Now I have more mods than I've had for any game:
- Hard Mode. This ships with the game so it's really more like an option. But it increases build and maintenance costs by 25%. Which is good as I'd always felt CS was too easy - and playing Sim City 3000 today confirmed that.
- No Money From Milestones. The free money from milestones (city sizes being reached) always felt gamey, and exacerbated the "too easy" problem. It basically gave you enough money to build every new building, but where's the challenge in that? Sim City had the right approach; you have to pay for the new buildings!
- Achieve It! Allow achievements with mods. I still have 0 achievements in all my other Paradox games because I'm not going to play in Ironman mode just to have achievements.
- Realistic Population. One of the things that always bugged me in CS was having two people per floor in residential high-rises, or a couple dozen working in a skyscraper. It felt wildly unrealistic. And meanwhile, you'd have 10 people in a suburban midsize house. Realistic Population fixes problems like this. I've also set it so Sims age one year per year.
- Lifecycle Balance Revisited. Fixes things like the Death Wave of all your immigrants from the same time dying at the same time, and Sims going to school from birth.
- Stats. Adds a sidebar with overviews of stats like happiness and crime rates. TBD how necessary it is.
- Snooper. Lets you see where vehicles/Sims are traveling from, as well as to. In theory will result in better insights into traffic.
- Chirpy Exterminator. Admittedly, it would have been nice to be chirped at when a fire broke out in my city that lacked a fire station, but it's worth it to not have all those annoying chirps about finding someone to water the plants while a Sim is on vacation (this is also why my plant of choice in real life is the cactus, followed by the artificial Christmas tree. They're both quite hardy).
- Speed Slider. I need to remember that I have this, it lets the game speed be adjusted incrementally.
- More City Stats. Adds way more statistics. Even more than Sim City has.
- Date Changer. Lets me start the game in 1900 instead of 2024. Still leaves things like nuclear plants unlocked, but the "always playing in the future" thing bothered me since I'd rather play in the past like in SC3K, or at least have a "ab urbe condita" date like in SC4.
- CSL Music Mods. Lets you add custom radio stations, which I proceeded to spend an hour doing.
Yeah... that's a lot of mods. I tend to prefer games that have good defaults or in-game options for good defaults to ones that have a million mod possibilities but you have to track down the mods that make it play the way you like. SC3K definitely wins in that regard. But maybe CS will scratch the itch with all these tweaks.
So... I have founded a new city, named Cloverleaf. It has about 1500 people, near the end of 1901. With a central commercial zone along the main street, and residential areas around it, plus a new residential area to the west, also with a small commercial zone in the center. And with Stonehenge in an undeveloped are of that district, for an unknown reason, but it's cool to have Stonehenge in the city. I recently bought a second plot of land where I plan to build farms, and almost went bankrupt right away as rather than built an ahistorical 1900 wind plant (the cheap and sensible option in CS), I built a coal plant. Which is now being properly utilized. Our roads are all gravel roads to be historically accurate, and surprisingly, that isn't causing any problems.
The only real problem is that it's almost impossible to see anything at night time, and it looks like I need another mod to adjust the gamma settings. Apparently C:S is optimized for TN (Twisted Nemantic) monitors, and my IPS (In-Plane Switching) monitor with more accurate colors consequently has too dark of nights for the game. It is surprising how much of a difference a monitor can make; I still remember the stark difference in Civ3 terrain colors when I switched from a CRT to a laptop with a TN cold-cathode fluorescent display.
Sigh... maybe I'm just one of the minority of people who would've preferred Sim City 5 if it hadn't been exclusively online for so long.
Edit: There are some nice features though. Like that I was able to name the local convenience store Kim's Convenience. And I expect I'll like the districts feature once I have a few more of them.