Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend. But it's not without faults. For me one of the telling things will be how they handle a very similar problem that EA had with the latest Sim City. Traffic. Once your city becomes a certain size the game goes from City Builder to Traffic Management Simulator. Which itself wouldn't be a problem if not for issues with the simulation.
For example if you have a 6-lane, one-way, road with intersections cars will get into the right/left lanes as soon as they get on the road, even if that's on the other side of the map from where they're turning. Causing the middle lanes to become useless and the others to be backed up (admittedly this isn't totally unrealistic though). I remember Sim City had similar problems and I'm sure it's a tough one to solve. Especially on a big game world with hundreds, or thousands, of intersections and tens of thousands of cars being simulated at once. Even if they don't solve it I'll still be burning my weekends on this game for a long time.
The current proposed hack to encourage them to use all the lanes is this: https://i.imgur.com/F8eKjp5.jpg -- periodic narrowing of the lanes so those that don't need to turn stay in the middle.
Interestingly enough, while it looks bizarre in a video game, this is functionally how left/right turn bays work in some large urban one-way streets in real-life. See, for example, this NYC intersection: https://goo.gl/maps/SCFrQ . The left turn lane is a parking lane until one is within half a block of the intersection in question. While it isn't as extreme as 2 lanes to 6, it's very similar. So... is it a hack for the game, or is it a hack for real-life, or neither?
I walk through that intersection most days. What they've done in NYC is interesting. That part of First Avenue used to be, like most in mid and upper Manhattan, six (or sometimes more) undifferentiated lanes.
The first change was the addition of dedicated bus lanes (right-most lane, painted reddish), complete with violation cameras and automated ticketing. This reduced competition among buses and cars -- in favor of buses, leading to somewhat better bus throughput. Cars now had five lanes -- although with parking in at least the left-most lane, and delivery trucks double-parked adjacent to the cars, more like three.
Then came the big bike lane initiative. In the book Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt, some of the takeaways are that parked cars can form a buffer between flowing traffic and bike lanes, and that narrowing roads at intersections through the addition of islands with trees on them increases pedestrian safety (in no small part by reducing the speed of turning cars at intersections). To varying degrees they've applied these ideas -- the left-most lane is now entirely a bike lane (painted green, complete with its own traffic signals). Next to that is a dedicated parking lane -- yes, in lane two -- often buffered by concrete islands at intersections, with a tree or two. You can see this here [1]
Cars now have three or perhaps four lanes for general travel. For left turns, the bike and parking lanes are cut by a dedicated left-turn waiting lane [2] (usually with its own left turn signal, so left turners are not fighting pedestrians in the crosswalk).
On some avenues they then added "Select Buses", which work on a "trust-but-verify" honor system so riders can enter and exit quickly through any of three wide doors without queueing to dip a Metrocard.
Finally, they cut the city-wide speed limit to 25 miles per hour, adjusting the timing of avenue traffic signals accordingly.
The result of all this has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but as a whole it's made the city substantially better for bikers and pedestrians, and in many cases left turns are much easier for drivers.
Stuff like that is pretty common in suburban Northern Virginia (for example). There are lots of busy roads with two lanes in each direction which expand to three, four, five, or even six lanes at intersections with dedicated turn lanes. I think the only reason that "proposed hack" screenshot looks so weird is because the distance between intersections is much, much shorter than it would be in real life, relative to the width of the road. For example, you can see it in action in various amounts for all four directions of this intersection:
It sounds like the game is inaccurate in how it models traffic, because in real life people do move out to make use of empty inner lanes (outer lanes? I can never remember). NB: I've not played the game so I'm not 100% on what the traffic problem is, exactly.
The problem stems from the car AI being crazy aggressive in it's lane switching. They will switch to the lane for their exit the instant they can, even if they still have to travel around the entire city to get to it. Leading to middle lanes not getting as much use (At least without careful planning to ensure there is something they can exit the road from the middle lanes with) and potentially large backups of a single line of cars waiting to turn right (Even when the lane right next to it is also a right turn lane). They also cannot merge properly so I end up placing exits on both side of my highways (For both incoming and outgoing traffic) with one side coming up and over the road to join into the other sides exit to limit congestion.
Not that any of these things are completely unrealistic but it is occasionally annoying when your traffic is backed up solely because they're ignoring the adjacent lane.
I absolutely love the citybound dev blog, it's such a great exploration of problems that i would never think about otherwise.
However, I have no faith that the game itself will ever be finished. It's the epitome of "perfect is the enemy of good", they spend so much time getting little things absolutely perfect. At least it makes for an interesting blog.
I gotta say, that sim of three lanes of cars all merging into one lane to turn right really was painful to look at. Darn near had flashbacks to my morning commute. Really nice work.
True on the traffic. Sure, the game isn't perfect. However, one of the successes of Skylines has been the honest tone and communication with the developers. There's a sense of confidence that the game will be supported and improved over time. This didn't exist with Sim City 5, what with the always-online drama, the inability to play the game well for several months after release, and the early focus on producing large amounts of paid [overpriced?] DLC.
I think a lot of the demerits in Skylines exist within the core game of Sim City 5. The problem is, as I see it, that the obvious marketing (buy more things, here, get this Nissan leaf station for your town for free!!!), and the lies (it has to be online, simcity wouldn't work any other way), made players unwilling and unable to forgive simcity's foibles in the game. It was obvious people were being treated like a resource to be extracted, not a demographic of people who want to have a need fulfilled.
All games have failings, how many failings, and the degree people are willing to forgive them is the thing that changes.
I think after the anger of simcity 5, people are willing to forgive a lot of foibles, and despite that, Skylines doesn't seem to have many, it's pretty solid.
Maybe this is encouragement from the game to build alternative transport options like light rail, trams, move jobs closer to residential districts or establish suburbs to lower city population, tax cars more, build bike lanes, build more sidewalks, etc. In real life, there's not usually a solution for traffic. If you build out more streets, people are incentivized to drive more. I'd love this game to be this realistic. Its shouldn't reward this kind of simplistic gamer "solve the puzzle" mentality if the puzzle should rightfully be unsolvable.
Im hesitant to say that's the intended result but it is what happens. I found myself planning new districts entirely around this problem with bus, metro, and pedestrian walkways (maybe its just me but right now commuter rail seems to be basically unused and doesn't seem to do anything). So it definitely does force you to think about how you're laying out your city and plan things out beyond then just tossing down a grid and calling it a day.
It's a hard problem to solve, and it might be a good crowd-sourcing opportunity. They need to expose some API for managing traffic, so that the community can experiment with new routing and scheduling strategies.
In real life you tend to have the exact opposite problem. People changing lanes the second the lane they are in starts slowing down without any forward planning about where they might have to go next.
In real life, I observe both, often simultaneously. The far left or right lane can back up a very long way as everybody tries for the same turn. Oblivious or selfish people bypass it all and try to change lanes at the last second, often with sudden braking and occasional bent metal because the target lane is full and stopped.
It's not selfish to use the road to its full potential. We should all be merging at the last moment, and using zipper merging to allow smooth traffic flow.
Zipper merging is good when a lane ends, but that's not what I'm talking about. Attempting a zipper merge into a turn lane at the last moment is a really bad idea, because by attempting to do so you will block a travel lane that other people will want to use for going straight. This slows them down at best, and causes crashes if you're unlucky.
Merge at the last moment when your lane ends. Do not merge at the last moment when you need to get into a turn lane. These are different scenarios.
I expect that the naive traffic sim implementation is to simulate everyone following their GPS perfectly. Real humans seem to have a bit more randomness and a mix of different driving patterns.
I wonder how regular GPS use has changed real-world traffic patterns?
I lived near Austin my whole life and just assumed traffic was that bad everywhere...after I relocated to Portland, I realized how truly miserable driving anywhere in Austin actually is.
I wonder if their earlier transit-oriented title Cities In Motion could be used to design & simulate a mass-transit network for Austin. To be later presented to the city urban transportation council.
(Spring break week traffic has been awesome. Next week: Back to 40 minute commutes.)
The problem with Simcity is that 'traffic' would basically take absolutely any turn that would get them to where they wanted to go. This meant that if you had a gridded layout of large, wide avenues, four-lane primary streets, and two-lane side streets, your traffic will gladly back up for miles outside of town because everyone entering your city is trying to take a two-lane side street to get to their destination, even if it's on an avenue, just because turning onto that side street is the first available option.
They later updated the algorithm, apparently, to do path cost routing, making it far more preferable to take avenues over dirt roads, but until then the only way your city could work at all was to create it entirely out of cul-de-sacs.
There was also an issue with the train service, where, when a commuter train came to an intersection, it would randomly choose which direction to take. This meant that if you had a grid of avenues, some of your sims would be waiting for hours for a train, because the train is bouncing randomly around your downtown instead of dropping anyone off.
Moving to a system where there were literally no intersections at all for your trains was the only way to make your mass transit system a benefit and not a liability.
This behavior applied to train stations too: When a train entered the station in SimCity 2013, it would randomly decide to either continue forward or go backwards (it was strange to look at it -- it would "skip" the tracks and face itself in the opposite direction).
So even if you had a single long train track with no intersections, but multiple train stations, some train stations would receive more traffic than others.
Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend.
I agree! I found this game on Steam last weekend and spent 5-6 hours building a city. It really is the next SimCity city building fans have been waiting for.
One of the developer's previous games was Cities in Motion, which was all about transport, so I guess a transport focus is to be expected in Skylines. It has sure made me think what a headache it must be to design roads in the real world!
I think we are all playing into EA's strategy by calling it Maxis instead of just EA.
Simcity 2013 was a failure of EA, but by mentioning Maxis 11 times and EA only once (and in passing), it's as they give EA a carte blanche to fail without the lowered reputation for future games (which means many people will preorder, and so on)
Honestly I think Maxis deserves a ton of blame as well. They operate semi-autonomously for how long and they routinely churned out terrible games. On reddit, I see far more people blame EA than I do Maxis. And while I'm all for EA getting a ton of bad press, I think it's bs that nobody points a finger at Maxis because they're just as guilty, imo. Nostalgia for 90s and early 00s Maxis is blinding people from the reality that Maxis turned into a shit dev
Yes, but there is a pattern of EA ruining previously good development houses. It's like expression, "The common element of all your failed relationships is you."
I think it's a result in AAA development in general being in a slump.
If anything, I'd say Ubisoft (outside of one or two lone bright spots like Rayman) has been worse than EA the last few years, with the rotten cherry of Uplay on top.
Have a look at Activision/Blizzard. They built essentially the same thing (Origin/Uplay) but being very customer friendly about it and have had crazy success with Battle.net.
You've never played their recent games then. Battle.net 2.0 is routinely called 0.2 and considered a step back in every single way, aside from FB integration I guess. It didn't even have chat channels until recently or clan support. Promises made for starcraft 2 5 years ago have yet to be delivered on. Diablo 3 was a terrible cash grab and mostly abandoned by players.
After Activision purchased blizzard it has not been the same company.
You're conflating the battle.net platform that they have built, which is the launcher, the updater, etc. with concerns that people had over matchmaking and chat support.
Uplay is a horrendous piece of junk that feels like a horrendous piece of junk that's horrible DRM. Nobody talks about chat channels and clan support in Uplay, because the only function Uplay has is to sell you games and stop you from pirating games.
Battle.net serves the same purpose, but it serves it much more gracefully. Apart from some complaints about no offline only mode for Diablo and Starcraft, it's been a pretty quiet system. Even with the new launcher it's pretty respectful to players.
I think it's pretty telling that you talk about specific functions like clan support and how Diablo 3 was a cash grab. It means you're talking about gameplay features, and not about the Battle.net platform at all.
The fact is, Battle.net is pretty quiet from a DRM perspective. You don't feel violated by installing the launcher like I did when I loaded Uplay. It feels like a tool for interoperability across Blizzard instead of an attempt to outsteam steam while screwing you over trying to lock down your games.
Battle.net's launcher got me playing hearthstone, it got me playing HOTS, it let me reconnect with people that I forgot I had on my friends list from when I played WoW. It was a useful tool. This is regardless of how long it took them to get clan support in SC2 or global chat channels or matchmaking concerns or whatever else your pet issue might be. Whatever the case, I didn't feel cheated just by installing it. Whether the games are good or not are different question.
Blizzard has a huge fan base and have had much success with recent games like Hearthstone and the build up to Heroes of the Storm is also looking very promising. SC2 has stagnated and Diablo had missteps but they've made bold steps in trying to fix those problems. I don't think Activision's stewardship of Blizzard and EA are even in the same league. Blizzard has maintained a very unique and powerful brand with almost Nintendo level IP. There are a lot of characters from Blizzard games that are well known.
Also Blizzard's' international presence is very large.
This is the classic symptom of changing oneself to fit the mainstream once one hits the mainstream. Whether it's EA's fault of Maxis's fault is just fruitless finger pointing (it's EA's, these guys are literally the cancer that's killing the video game industry), but the real mistake is updating your game to fit "mainstream standards" of connectivity, social, high quality 3d graphics, etc. Some management official or engineer probably sold these ideas as completely required innovations if Simcity wanted to stay competitive with things like facebook or MMOs (i.e. other time-consumers), and everyone just jumped on board.
And it's that very idea of "we need to stay competitive" that really killed Simcity. Here in capitalist societies, we're sold on the idea competition is great, but it's not, it assumes the fact the rules stay the same and focuses attention on what our "enemies" are doing. We become obsessed with not doing what we do best, but with doing what we think will beat the others. In Simcity's case, it was adopting online connectivity and social interaction despite the fact Simcity is inherently a creative game and not a social one (in fact, unless you're a trash-tier mayor, you've spent time researching city layouts, reading through strategies, and possibly even simulating various algorithms and geometries in matlab or whatnot... whereas in a social game, you'd be spending your time name-calling the other players). Strategies and ideas that emerge from competition focus on trying to capture customers from an adversary, and completely ignores the fact people are complicated, don't like change, and that a company can capture them by just being incrementally "better" in some engineering metric.
Today, it's too late for simcity, but to a new rising city game like skylines, I hope they ignore what "the competition" are doing and just focus on making their fun city building game more fun (e.g. instead of worrying about online, social, or the 2018 version of online-social which will probably be 3d holograms or something, spend time introducing new mechanics like strategic resources, "work from home" algorithms, flying cars, racism / gentrification, etc.)
I think Simcity came around in the same era where everything EA did was online, for no reason. It's like the execs said 'online social games are killing us, we need all of our games to be online and social' and wouldn't sign off on a project without those two check boxes.
Need for Speed: Rivals was similar. It was a neat concept, but it revolved entirely around online play that was generally just completely terrible. You get dumped in a map with 1-7 other people, and then you drive around aimlessly hoping that you eventually run into them, which you don't. In the meantime, you're listening to every idiot with a Playstation Camera screaming at their moms for another PB&J, or some jackass swearing the entire time because he thinks he's alone in his room, because there's no way to turn off voice chat in the game whatsoever.
Congratulations, your game is both online (but you can't really tell) and social (but it's actually antisocial).
Simcity is the same way. What if you could play online against other people? I mean… with other people. You could build neighbouring towns. Except you're actually building neighbourhoods because realistically sized cities would take too much server resources. And then you can interact with other cities! By buying or selling resources like garbage pickup, recycling, and power.
Except that the servers didn't work, so online only meant offline always. And the social idea was cool, until some jackass dropped into your region and built a zone that was entirely coal power plants and industrial zones, and polluted the whole region. Or built a city with nothing but power plants, provided power to everyone else in the region, then one day bulldozed everything, pulling the rug out from under everyone else and sending their cities into chaos.
I really hope that Cities: Skylines is successful. It already seems like a far more interesting game than any previous Simcity was, and it has a lot more potential as well. I love the idea of being able to ease congestion by 'work from home' incentives, and it would be cool if they (or modders) could implement that.
The racism / gentrification thing might actually be extremely interesting for its effect on land-value. Like, each sim-citizen would be assigned arbitrary a race; to not conflict with real world race, we can call it race alpha, beta, eta, and omega. On a regional (or global) level, each race would have an affinity value for the other races that is periodically calculated based upon the aggregate contribution to city land value from that race...
Or, in colloquial terms, I like you if you like me or if you bring up the land value of my house. And the land value of my house is equal to however they used to calculate land value, and how much I like the race of my neighbors.
It would be amazing (and probably instructive) to see how much gentrification, segregation, and whatnot evolves out of this. Would we see all the races converge to harmony as race becomes a non-factor in calculating land value (because the affinities converge to 1 number)? Or will we see cycles of alpha race at times increasing land value, and at times decreasing it? Or will we see high rates of crime due to increasing population in sectors of eta race? Or will we see long-term oppression where omega race always increases land-value and beta race always decreases land value?
I think you definitely hit the spot on what killed SimCity, but a 3D holographic city builder would probably be one of the best things ever. Combined with the street level view you can get in City: Skylines it'd actually be really really cool to see.
Most of the people from 'Maxis' left Maxis a long time ago. The current 'Maxis' is just the brand that EA is slapping on stuff from that studio, but it bears almost no relation whatsoever to the Maxis that we all grew up loving.
What it seemed like happened was the Maxis developed a great (or at least good) game, and EA came in and stuck their own requirements in where they didn't belong, which then caused all the issues.
And honestly their strong suit was never the software itself so much as the awesome ideas that came from the Will Wright, Jeff Braun, and their team. For instance, The Sims. Not a great game technically, not much innovation there are far as game play. In fact it's quite generic. But the idea of creating an AI-driven character that has it's own emotions, it's own life? That's legendary stuff. But they've always seemed to try to appeal to the masses, watering down their games to the point that they become boring over the years. Their games went from interesting complex simulations to disney-like worlds where everything is nicely polished, but not very intriguing.
And this doesn't even factor in all the mistakes that EA has made.
Speaking of that, is there an indie competitor to the Sims out there? My biggest gripe with that series is the $30 game + $6000000 of expansions model, which could be pretty easily replaced with community-made mods to build on a simpler base game.
To me they're a mixed bag. I've enjoyed many titles from them (Dragon Age, Titanfall, Dead Space, NFS: HP, Mass Effect, Bulletstorm, BF: BC2, and countless other titles from older gen consoles and even older PC games like Archon and Kings of the Beach).
I think that when expectations are set high (most any recent BF release), disappointment is sure to follow.
Even the Dragon Age games had issues. The first one had "HAY BUY THE DRM" plugs in incredibly irritating spots. The second one had like three maps, which made playing a lot less fun than it should have been.
It's not that expectations are high. It's that the games would be outstanding if EA hadn't crappified them. Many of these games have very player-hostile elements designed purely to suck more money out of people.
Maybe it's just me, but for all people like to point out how expansion packs back in the day used to be bad, I don't remember ANYTHING on the level we're seeing with how aggressively they try to milk their customers at the expensive of the experience.
I liked proper expansions where you got a good proportion of a whole game's extra content. I hate DLC where you are encouraged to buy large numbers of small items, because it's a 'death by a thousand cuts' model of sucking way more money out of the player with far less dev effort.
I never buy DLC for any game, on principle. If a game has a lot, I'll reconsider buying the game at all.
It's likely just as unfair to tarnish the Maxis name for the game design failures of the EA SimCity era. Would a pure Maxis game have been as badly received? I guess we can't know for sure.
The Colossal Order team, in my opinion was very lucky! There were three games -
1. SimCity 4 with the statistical simulation model, big maps (region-wise) and plenty of features.
2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. And,
3. Cities XL having a HUGE map, few unique features like bus routing, etc and amazing graphics!
All these games had flaws in their respective models but worked well nonetheless. SimCity 5 is a success IMO; for venturing into a much realistic simulation that you could connect with. Though we all love to complain about the map size.
Cities: Skylines had the advantage of picking up the good pieces of each of these games! On the other hand, the last good game was SimCity 4 in 2003, more than a decade! We badly needed Cities: Skylines.
It's also very elating to see the support the team is giving to us! The Map Editor, the Asset Editor, the water dynamics, a mixture of agent and other simulation models (as they call it - "complex"). Though this game has its own share of flaws, they're quite tiny; except for the traffic (which is being fixed)!
> 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre.
It irks me how SimCity 5 is praised for that. The Caesar series had pure agent-based simulations in the 1990s, and somehow had none of the agent routing bugs SimCity 5 had. How can being worse than your competition 20 years ago be considered an accomplishment?
I think you guys make it sound a whole lot more glamorous than it really is. I played those city-building games back then (Caesar, Pharaoh and later Zeus). And do note, I absolutely loved them.
Caesar 3 basically had delivery "serfs" that would move stuff from one place to another. Each building had it's own unit to get supplies (materials to do it's thing), and it would simply retrieve it from the relevant store, so it had to path-find across a very simple road network to get to the destination, then back.
As for the other "agents", they were simply "roamers" that would randomly walk out of their "base" building, and go straight until they hit an intersection, and pick one at random.
There were no "dwellers" that would go to work. You simply had population, and buildings got magically filled with workers if they head dwellings nearby.
#Edit. Forgot to mention, you could have as many "agents" on the same road tile as needed. There were no collision checks, nor were sections of the road uni-directional.
Technically, there was a walker that went from the place of employment searching for an occupied dwelling to source employees from. But you are correct that there weren't agents that tracked where each individual citizen was at any given moment.
Tropico, on the other hand, does have every employee individually modeled.
And I believe Children of the Nile, which is something of a spiritual sequel to Pharaoh, also tracked individual citizens as agents.
I'm surprised the Tropico series isn't getting much love here, I discovered it on personal recommendation after the disappointment of SimCity 5 and it's really a fantastic substitute.
I found the games to be not challenging enough, and they seem to crank out sequels far too quickly with too little changes to justify the price tag. This just rubs me off wrong, with sim titles like that I expect to sink several years into them.
Funny you mention "serfs"... wondering if you were referring to Serf City[1], which predated Caesar 3 by five years but had the same agent system of serfs carrying goods between waypoints. I'd completely forgotten about the game until you mentioned "serfs", but I spent a good chunk of 1995-96 playing it on a (barely capable) Tandy 1000 RL in my basement.
I could see the contrusction workers actually working, moving vans with families, kids boarding coming out of the house, boarding the school bus (actually walking/climbing), going to the school, playing on the swings, the sand, the slides, people actually walking in the park, a car actually owned by a sim being parked at work, etc. SC5 is praised for this level of detail in its model.
Except that workers did not go to the same job every day, nor did they return to the same house when they were done. No sim has a history; every move was to the first available location that an invisible "seeker" agent found. So, by not having history, more agents had to be used in order to find available locations. Not to mention that water and electricity were basically implemented as "wandering" agents that just randomly walked the grid and "deposited" at every location they passed until depleted. Which, in turn, meant even more agents, because they had to be populous enough that the random walking would ensure visiting the entire grid.
TL;DR: There were a lot of decisions SimCity made that directly increased the number of agents required. This in turn directly impacted the #1 issue about the game: City size.
Take a look at Caesar 3. It's "only" hand-drawn, high-resolution 2D, but the amount of detail is impressive. People enter the map carrying their belongings on hand-drawn carts, erect tents, go to work, walk around on the streets, the building slowly grow all the way up to small palaces… or a mob with torches and pitchforks assembles and razes everything, only to be mauled by the local amphitheatre's lions (or wild wolves). Kids run through the streets, food is carried from the farms to the silos, to markets, to homes, …
It's similar for other games of the time, like Settlers II. Only in the 2000s the detail level was massively cut down.
Games like Pharoah (a direct descendant of the Caesar series) also had agent modeling in the late 90's where you could see what the agents were doing. That said, the computing power and storage capacities of the time limited the set of possible animations. The LOD and graphics are incremental improvements on a feature that has existed for decades (not to say they aren't welcome improvements).
The art department just makes things pretty. They don't have much to do with the simulations folks, aside from being asked for assets for specific actions (car driving, person walking, etc).
SC5 might have been really pretty, but the agent simulation was entry level CS at best. As others have noted, sims woke up and drove to the closest available job regardless of past behavior for example.
I'm surprised Tropico doesn't come up in these discussions about simulated-agent city builders more often. Maybe it didn't feel Sim City-ish enough because you have to place all the buildings yourself, or because of the comparatively low population limit.
Did it actually have much of a "realistic simulation" though? One of the main reasons I didn't buy the game is because people tore it to shreds for utilizing the same exact algorithm for determining traffic as they did water and other utilities. Also people pointed out that like people themselves weren't actually simulated in anyway they just woke up in the morning found the first open commercial job to work at and at night left and found the first house to live in.
It was a realistic simulation of a dystopian society in which people had no long term jobs or housing but were simply assigned to one each day based on proximity.
Well, maybe not "real" as in the "real world", but "real" enough to have fun. SimCity 5 faced an ordeal in trying to be too real; they traded off other vital entities (map size, gameplay features) for getting this simulation right!
It's also been stated that this game has, by default, a very "easy" gameplay which may have contributed to siding to being a bit less realistic but sufficiently real for playing and having fun.
The traffic is a mess, true. They'll patch it up with a better algorithm hopefully. It's still fun though. I recently had a couple of industrial buildings burn to ashes because the firetrucks were caught up in a jam! Now that's quite possible!
But I'm curious what actual 'realism' did it have?
Like the above poster said, the agent model may have been intended to be more realistic, but in practice you couldn't follow a single sim and see a facsimile of reality: they would go to the nearest workplaces and return to the nearest house even if it wasn't 'theirs'.
So where did Sim City 5 succeed that no others have?
I'm probably in the minority here, but for me the biggest appeal of the SimCity series was the aesthetic and music. The music in particular.
I absolutely love what I have seen of Skylines so far, but it seems to be missing the SimCity charm — that urban soundtrack, the way the buildings light up at night, the unique architecture and art style. I'm hoping mods will fill in all these areas.
This.
Sim City 4 is maybe the only 3D management/strategy game I have loved. Unlike most 3D sequels of 2D games (like Rollercoaster Tycoon III, much more profound than the II, but vulgar, unattractive, charmless), Sim City kept all its charm typical of the 2D era. The modern games have lost the cuteness so present in the old strategy/management games like Transport Tycoon, Theme Hospital, etc. This cuteness was important to me because it allowed to play in a satirical way, or in a non-realistic way.
To be honest, I don't know if I would have loved this new game when I was a child, I remember being first attracted by the colorful graphics and the funny councilmen. My cities were like a full world, closed and unique, not like Paris or London but like Springfield or Duckburg. Sim City (or Caesar III, Pharaoh) allowed me to learn how to manage a city, but also to imagine stories.
I put on the SimCity 4/5 soundtrack in the background after I got tired of the C:S music, which happened pretty quickly. Those two soundtracks are on Spotify, if you can believe it. SC2k also had a fantastic soundtrack (midi, as far as I can recall), I'm sure it's somewhere on the net.
The graphical art style in C:S is pretty neat, overall. There's a mod in progress that'll bring night views. But I also noticed a lack of charm -- I can't quite grasp why that is. It's still a worthy successor to SC4, at last.
Same here, I love how relaxing and charming SimCity is. I think Simcity 2013 really nailed the charm (if nothing else). I don't know what the general opinion is on the cartoonish graphics and filters, but I really like them. I would often let the game run for hours just to watch, like a fish tank or something, because I think visually it is gorgeous and it looks so alive (and maybe because I felt I needed to get my money's worth somehow).
I'm very excited to play Skylines, the gameplay seems a million times better in every way. But the screenshots just aren't as satisfying to look at, and as silly as that may be, that's a big part of SimCity to me.
SimCity 3000 actually had a native Linux port by the (now defunct) Loki Games, that can still be gotten on Amazon and some other resellers and can be run with the help of some compatibility dependencies, although it's been some time since I tried.
The Cities in Motion series (same developer) runs on Linux too, but those are more transit modeling than city building (but if you build roads, buildings will follow).
I brought Skylines a few days ago and I absolutely love it. Its got amazing detail and it's pretty much everything I hoped a modern sim city would be. I never thought I would find building a traffic system so fun, and the twitter feed it uses to show you your citizens opinions is a fantastic idea as well.
The one downside is it gets a bit boring after you have made your city. On Sim City you could at least trigger some disasters to destroy your city in interesting ways, I find myself missing that feature sometimes.
I feel just the opposite. I think they pace the game really well. You are constrained at first, but the early game is pretty easy. Once you get a bit larger traffic becomes a problem and you need to make adjustments quickly.
When you get further along you can create districts and set policies that affect the evolution of your city. I think the late game is way more interesting as there's an endless amount of things you can tweak.
I'm really looking forward to seeing more mods that affect how districts work, I'd love to create a china town or little italy with specialized assets. I think these things are all possible and will make fully realized cities much more fun to tinker with.
Cities: Skyline is a great game. It really fills in the gaps that I had from Sim City 5, but it's iterative; it's definitely "picking up the pieces"...
I am hoping that with some future updates this game gets to the point that it replaces the Sim City franchise completely for me, but it's off to a great start.
As someone who hasn't played any SimCity game in years (not since SimCity 4 came out), I really enjoy Cities: Skyline.
I particularly love that I can have curved streets and named districts, and that I can rename individual shops, people, and even cars. Makes the city seem more like a character than a simulation.
Paradox Interactive also published Crusader Kings 2, which came out in 2012, and its latest free update was Feb. 16. They support their games for a long time.
Wikipedia says it's Paradox Development Studio, which is the design studio, where Paradox Interactive is the publisher, and both are under the same parent company. As far as I am aware, the 'clausewitz engine' used by these games isn't available to other developers.
Who are you seeing as the 'not-Paradox' developer for CK2?
EU4 and CK2 are made by PDS, part of Paradox Interactive, a Swedish company.
The confusion was because the thread is actually about Cities: Skylines. That's the game that's only distributed by Paradox, not also made by them, and the one I was confused about.
Just saying that I think that Cities: Skyline is a great next step in city builders, but is not ground-breakingly different from the last Sim City. I am hoping that there's some ground-breaking changes soon enough. This is a great start!
It's amazing what a small team with a great vision can do. They had the expertise and delivered what customers wanted.
It's also sad how a large company can lose track of what made its previous products so great. EA tried to "innovate" SimCity 5, except they were "innovating" the game for themselves (e.g. get users online to make it easier to buy upgrades), not the end-user. Gamers did not want a multiplayer-based city simulation with limited scale and broken mechanics.
I don't know if it is just my incompetence, but I wanted to mention is that it can be unclear what the citizens want unless you cycle through all the available overlays and check things out.
I feel like they could definitely summarize important counters for you so you don't always have to click 10 times to get all the information on your city. This is especially true early game when your city is expanding by leaps and bounds and you keep hitting electricity/water supply issues.
That would be great. It is a little annoying having to click around to make changes and click back to check it again after say adjusting your power budget. If it was semi transparent when not in focus and solid when in focus that could be a good way to make non intrusive. anyways I will keep an eye out for it.
That's a great idea on the transparency, I'll be sure to have that implemented.
The hardest part of modding Skylines right now is using its non-documented UI system; styling the panel is all I have left and it's taken days. Watch /r/CitiesSkylinesModding or /r/CitiesSkylines, that's where I'll be posting upon release.
Yeah, I know that is what it is supposed to be for, it just seems to do the job a lot worse than in sim city.
Many times I will notice my pop +/- flip from a large + population to a large minus, which is the only indicator I get from the game that I am screwing up.
This looks awesome! Does anyone know if it plays acceptably on a new Macbook Pro 13"? The spec sheets for the game say it doesn't support Intel integrated graphics, but maybe that means it just can't run full resolution?
I've put about 12 hours in on my late 2013 13" mbp. For a decently sized-city (10k+), there aren't noticeable performance issues at full-screen and mostly 'medium' display options. Your fans will get a workout and you get about 30 minutes of battery life off the charger, though.
I'm wondering the same thing - does the spec saying that it doesn't support Intel graphics just mean that I'd have to dial down the resolution, or is it a hard stop?
I have a ThinkPad 440s, which is a beefy machine in other respects, but has integrated graphics. I can't currently play the game due to rendering glitches :/
I made a rule to never pre-order after SimCity 5. I broke that rule when I saw the price of skylines, the small dev team that was producing it, and the support they wanted to put in for modders.
I'd say it's a bit on the cheap side when you are talking full retail pricing. It executes well on its premise, has good polish and has no major issues that I've run into at release. That's better than most games asking for $50+ these days. And yet, it's priced at a discount.
I think skylines mods are non-sandboxed (meaning you can do what you want code-wise, note the mod that adds reddit posts to your game internal chirper) that would concern me from a malware perspective
it is nice to see that they post hash values of what was audited, but how do I prevent the steam client from automatically updating the mods I have to a newer non-audited version? how can you compute a checksum of the module before downloading it? it seems the steam client only allows you to 'subscribe' to a mod, not to download/check/install it
assume I have a "good" mod, lots of people download it, which as far as I understand is a "subscription" in steam workshop terms, somebody breaks into my account and uploads a malicious update, now everybody will download the malicious update instead: unless there was a way to tie a code audit to a specific module that you download it seems like this would still be risky
That's a risk you take running any program that isn't sandboxed. I don't see how mods through Steam are any different. Until any popular mod is found to be malicious I don't think it's worth getting paranoid about.
mods that cannot initiate network connections or the local filesystem are not that much of a concern, but running an arbitrary C# program as your local user to me is a significantly different use-case, I think the steam workshop should integrate a checksum approval process where a user can decide for each individual update if they want to install or not.
I personally have bought skylines and find it great, but I am really wary about downloading mods for it as things stand now unfortunately.
Opensource OpenTTD [1] (based on Transportation Tycoon Deluxe) is still around and in active development it seems. It was a great Simcity replacement in the past for me. Obviously graphics are dated, but gameplay was great.
I adore Cities: Skyline, and I haven't even looked at the mod scene at all yet. I was always a fan of SimCity but it's been literally years since I've even played a computer game. Skyline brought me back. :)
The mod scene is great so far. Auto-bulldoze and changing the direction of one-way roads are fantastic things to have that I really hope they bring into the game as actual features. From what I've heard they haven't opened up too much of the API to modders yet though but do seem to be receptive to feedback and working with the community.
It's awesome, in just a week you already have multiple very interesting mods ( 2 ways to 1 way roads and a query path tool to see the path of a car to his destination ), plus all the models etc.
Interesting: My startup (which did something totally unrelated) was called Skylines, and I have been wondering what to do with the Skylines.io domain.. :)
I absolutely love this game, been playing this for a week now and cannot get enough of this game. My city is now really big (population of 175k).I have not played the latest city sim games, but have played the old games back in the day (like pharoah , pharoah2 ,sim city4 etc). Its amazing that this runs on Unity, supported to run on Windows, Mac OS AND Linux !
Not to mention its very reasonably priced at $30. Having the ability to start of with unlimted money (one of the mods available at release) makes this game really have a very low barrier to entry. You still have to unlock the unique buildings and monuments however. Speaking of unique buildings, to unlock some of them , you need to intentionally cause damage to your city (like cause 50% unemployment or have avg garbage pile up increase). I found myself trying to have throwaway districts intentionally built to be discarded once the unique building is unlocked. unlimited money after all :)
all in all, great game, absolutely recommend this, however be prepared to lose a lot of productivity for a while ! you are warned.
1. I bet hobbyists could come up with some garden city plans that would be genuinely pleasant places for real people to live, and perhaps city planners might take inspiration from them.
2. I wonder whether a game like this could produce a file format that could be used as input for a racing game or a game like Grand Theft Auto.
Skylines looks promising, but I'm still reserving judgement. It's a shame that EA completely botched the new Sim City.
I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.
"I feel so bad about Maxis closing down," Hallikainen said. "The older SimCitys were really the inspiration for us to even consider making a city builder."
That is a brave statement these days. No doubt they have to tread carefully lest someone accuse them of infringing the SimCity IP.
By default, 36 km^2 in 9 interconnected 2x2km squares, so you don't have to make a 6x6km city if you don't want. With modding you can build up 100 km^2 (25 2x2km squares).
The population in skylines actually represents the agents. In sim city it wasn't a representation of the agents it was inflated. Sim City's numbers seem more accurate to city size. For example I have a city that would probably be 300-400k people in SimCity/Real life but the reported population is 75k in C:S.
By default you can only unlock 9 of the 25 tiles. Largely for performance reasons I think but there is a mod that will enable you to buy all 25 (2km x 2km) squares, giving you a 100 sq km area to build your city.
For example if you have a 6-lane, one-way, road with intersections cars will get into the right/left lanes as soon as they get on the road, even if that's on the other side of the map from where they're turning. Causing the middle lanes to become useless and the others to be backed up (admittedly this isn't totally unrealistic though). I remember Sim City had similar problems and I'm sure it's a tough one to solve. Especially on a big game world with hundreds, or thousands, of intersections and tens of thousands of cars being simulated at once. Even if they don't solve it I'll still be burning my weekends on this game for a long time.