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Poizen Jam posted:Tiny farms, tiny airports, big gently caress off subway. In the case of SC 4 I don't think the developers had time to implement a realistic airport that existed on a regional level. Also a realistically sized airport would probably be off putting for a lot of people. It likely would have taken up an entire medium sized city tile in SC 4 to approach being realistic on any level, and if you had to place all the set pieces manually like you do in the mods people would only get frustrated by it. With the newer city sims you don't have the full region experience like you had in SC 4. So airports are even more constrained in size so that they can fit on the same map as the players city.
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Nov 5, 2014 15:13
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If only there were some sort of happy medium of placing ploppable airports that took up large tracts of land in a single city-section but provided a boost to every other city in the region...
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Nov 5, 2014 19:42
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Space isn't really a limitation in these games, airports and buildings can be as big as they need to be. A map tile nearly filled with an airport only has the airport to process vs that same tile being full of dense city. It's not the size of the maps, it's what's in it that counts. The map tile limits are just there as a worst case scenario for low end systems, but it's a really bad measure for performance. A 9 tile city that's mostly sparse suburbia and nature areas will end up running smoother than a 4 tile city that's fully built up. I think though they've said the tile limit will be moddable. So if your system or city design can run smooth on 12 tiles go for it. The 4x4 buildings and tiny airports are just them being lazy and trying to be "safe". When every building is the same size it's much easier to estimate performance needs and map size limits. With more reasonable sized buildings and farms it would mean a much bigger variety in "performance density". They feel they need to limit the map based on the absolute worst case scenario of someone filling up the map with skyscrapers, which means if farms and airports are bigger this will be a harder balancing act for them. If they make farms and airports big but balance map size assuming wall to wall skyscrapers people will complain the maps are too small. If they balance the map size assuming people will build a lot of farmland around their city people will complain the game runs too slow once they hit 50 million people. Personally I'd rather leave performance up to the user and just scale things a little more realistically, or at least believably. Sure give us a little selective compression with some of the huge items, but not to the point where it looks absolutely ridiculous like the airports or inexcusably ugly like the farms.
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Nov 5, 2014 21:20
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New developer diary: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?817606-Cities-Skylines-Dev-Diary-5-Outside-Connections Here are the images with absolutely no context at all:       Looks to me like they reacted to everyone being very vocal about the bright and saturated colors from last time. Looks better now. Though I really hate the terrain and am hoping this is one of the things we can mod in the game once it's released, similar to creating a gradient ramp like SC4 had. The new user interface looks fantastic, as well. Really solid improvement. Feeling better the less I hear about specializations and resources. Still cautious, however. Edit: The trees all seem too big.
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Nov 19, 2014 22:46
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I didn't mind the bright colors because it is very easy to fall into "drab" and "dull" and "muddy" when it comes to these kinds of zoomed out games.
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Nov 19, 2014 23:37
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The terrain looks really bad and I don't like the silly reward system, but it's no worse than sc4's.
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Nov 19, 2014 23:42
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There's a new dev video, so far they've only uploaded the highlights reel but the full thing will probably get posted over the next few days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrvybCBTQFE Turns out the game will have proper fluid dynamics, so hydroelectric dams make physical sense and presumably there's a compelling flood mechanic. They cut the highlight clip before a building got flooded though. Seems you can really interrogate your individual workplaces and find out how many workers of each level of education are needed (and if they're under- or over-educated), pie charts and all. No word yet on whether the nuclear power plant will explode after being filled with Homers, though. At four minutes they show off their revolutionary pig-naming mechanic, while a seven-storey scaffold is slowly erected and then dismantled in the background to reveal a patch of dry grass. Apart from fluid dynamics I'm not really seeing anything that makes this stand out as the next level in city-simulation, instead it just strikes me as a more refined and less restrictive Simcity 2013. Which is fine, that's something I want, but I just can't get as excited because I spent all that excitement on Simcity.
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Nov 28, 2014 16:16
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Maybe it is overly nerdy of me but it would be cool to see someone make like an actual city planning game instead of just remaking SimCity 2000 over and over again. It would be neat to see how construction delays affect how to plan what you want to do. Or have a city council that grows/shrinks your budget depending on the mood of the electorate. Stuff like that. Not that I don't like playing SimCity, it has been really fun until recently. But I agree with the post above that so far this just looks like another more refined iteration of the same forumla.
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Nov 28, 2014 16:27
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I don't know if I'll ever finish it but I've been sort of working on a stupid city building game. Imagine playing simcity4 but never leaving the region view...
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Nov 28, 2014 17:24
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The full stream is available now on Twitch, here: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/profile/past_broadcasts . I've been following closely and am actually pretty excited for this. In a lot of ways, it seems like they've re-built Sim City 4 with modern graphics, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. And, because of their small team, have kept the game relatively simple. If they are half as mod-friendly as they claim to be and can get the game out the door without crippling bugs, there's a ton of potential here. I have no idea how they are able to allegedly simulate up to 1M residents, which is the stated goal (which may have been achieved), if Sim City 2013 had such issues with their much smaller system. Minor issues could be lack of larger buildings in industrial areas, including farms, scaleable airports and ports, and tunnels, but those can be overlooked with a good base game and could presumably be modded or added with an update down the road. gman14msu fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Nov 28, 2014 |
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Nov 28, 2014 18:55
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Baronjutter posted:I don't know if I'll ever finish it but I've been sort of working on a stupid city building game. Imagine playing simcity4 but never leaving the region view... I actually want to hear more about this, if you don't mind.  You can post it at SH/SC > project.log, so you get a place that's all about your project.
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Nov 28, 2014 19:00
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gman14msu posted:The full stream is available now on Twitch, here: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/profile/past_broadcasts . Same but watching the video makes me hope they really fix one small thing before release: how buildings seem to level the ground a few feet around their base. Minor terrain alteration when things pop up or are plopped down is fine, but the grid of dirt looks terrible to me.
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Nov 29, 2014 02:26
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gman14msu posted:Minor issues could be lack of larger buildings in industrial areas, including farms, scaleable airports and ports, and tunnels, but those can be overlooked with a good base game and could presumably be modded or added with an update down the road. The farms look like utter poo poo so I certainly hope that larger buildings can be easily modded in. But I notice the engine only supports 4 tiles out from roads so I guess it depends on whether that can be changed.
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Nov 30, 2014 13:05
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How odd. Taxes are split by density, not wealth. So unlike Simcity 4, you can't tax the rich more and give the poor a break. Instead you can only choose whether it's the high-rises or the suburbs that gets taxed the most, regardless of how wealthy they are. (edit: actually you can set different taxes for different neighbourhoods, so I suppose you could target a wealthy surburb that way) But I really like how highways and intersections can be built out of free-form one-way roads (and it being a design feature that the pathing can deal with, not some sort of workaround that is hit-and-miss with the pathing algorithms). I look forward to seeing what people do with that. And apparently, intersection designs can be saved and shared as ploppables. This is shaping up to be a really good city sim and I'm surprised this thread isn't getting more traffic, given the simcity thread was pretty much non-stop during development. Maybe it's the power of brand or maybe too many people just got burned. Microplastics fucked around with this message at 22:33 on Dec 2, 2014 |
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Dec 2, 2014 22:28
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KKKlean Energy posted:How odd. Taxes are split by density, not wealth. So unlike simcity 4, you can't tax the rich more and give the poor a break. Instead you can only choose whether it's the high-rises or the suburbs that gets taxed the most, regardless of how wealthy they are. That's really bizarre. Little things like that just keep boggling my mind. They seem to be on the right track and making a solid game in most areas, but then they make these insanely bone headed design choices like tiny maximum zoned building sizes, a tiny amount of zones/densities, and then a kludged neighbourhood specialty system, and a stupid tax system now. The zoning system is really dumb. They wanted to "keep it simple" with the number of zones/densities, but instead of having a simple "Farm Zone" you zone industrial, create a region, then set that region's specialty to agriculture??? That feels kludged as hell, why not just have an agricultural zone that has its own rules on lot sizes? Why does it have to follow the same maximum 4x4 building size like other zones? Mines are a zone? Why not just make them big huge special buildings, mines are huge affairs, not something you zone inside a tight grid of city blocks and watch dozens of little independant house-sized mines pop up. Make a huge nasty thing you plop down and can expand. I know it's late in development now, but some of these things seem so dumb and bad they're worth spending the time to change, or just scrap. I'd honestly just ditch farming altogether if they can't do it right. Scrap it and then implement it properly in an expansion. So much of the game seems solid but small dumb design choices or badly implemented features can ruin things.
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Dec 2, 2014 22:40
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Is anyone less and less excited about this game the more it's updated? I'm with Baron on this one. The design decisions just seem abysmal, and it's sad because the potential is right there. Right there! On the cusp of greatness but... 
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Dec 2, 2014 22:42
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Baronjutter posted:The zoning system is really dumb. They wanted to "keep it simple" with the number of zones/densities, but instead of having a simple "Farm Zone" you zone industrial, create a region, then set that region's specialty to agriculture??? That feels kludged as hell, why not just have an agricultural zone that has its own rules on lot sizes? Why does it have to follow the same maximum 4x4 building size like other zones? Mines are a zone? Why not just make them big huge special buildings, mines are huge affairs, not something you zone inside a tight grid of city blocks and watch dozens of little independant house-sized mines pop up. Make a huge nasty thing you plop down and can expand. I think a lot of the issues come from the "keeping it simple" problem. At this point they have a system for the player to determine what type of industry goes in a zone, and have wedged all types of industry into that system. This doesn't really work for agriculture. And for whatever reason, for now they only have 4x4 buildings. Hopefully they will hear the feedback that those are way too small, particularly when we have such a huge map, and will give us some larger options at launch. They're still probably at the point where they're just trying to get everything to work together so I'm not that concerned about some of the issues, it seems like they could be fixed. And I'm actually more exited as the game is updated. I think there are some great features, ability to actually simulate 1M residents, actual movements of goods and resources, great road drawing tools, and dynamic water flows, and most importantly, encouraging verbal support for mods.
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Dec 2, 2014 23:39
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How the hell is zoning for one type and then having to change it into a sub type simpler than just zoning what you want in the first place? Also, those tiny farms look like poo poo.Poizen Jam posted:Is anyone less and less excited about this game the more it's updated? I'm with Baron on this one. The design decisions just seem abysmal, and it's sad because the potential is right there. Right there! On the cusp of greatness but...
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Dec 3, 2014 00:09
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e: wrong thread!
Pentecoastal Elites fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 02:24
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Poil posted:Yeah... I'm equally filling up with excitement and dread. Kinda like how things went with a certain other city builder, except with more excitement and not as much dread. I describe this feeling as apprehension. This game fills me with it.
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Dec 3, 2014 02:33
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gman14msu posted:Hopefully they will hear the feedback that those are way too small, particularly when we have such a huge map,.. That and the scaling you see in the videos makes me think size-wise, this is going to be way closer to SC5's SimVillage than SC4's SimMetropolis. In feel, at least.
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Dec 3, 2014 02:35
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:Am I alone in feeling that, after watching the videos, the map is actually pretty small (assuming 9 blocks)? The maps do feel pretty small, even when you can grow how you want. I really wish they'd "knock out" the edges so that my immersion  wasn't affected and I could just pretend it was part of a larger metro area. This fully-3D poo poo is ruining city simulators.
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Dec 3, 2014 02:47
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I'm pretty sure they said at some time that the 9 tile limit is just the default limit for babby computers and so idiots don't complain about performance but the maximum number of tiles will be changeable in a config file somewhere so you can mod it out.
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Dec 3, 2014 02:55
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KKKlean Energy posted:How odd. Taxes are split by density, not wealth. So unlike Simcity 4, you can't tax the rich more and give the poor a break. Instead you can only choose whether it's the high-rises or the suburbs that gets taxed the most, regardless of how wealthy they are. (edit: actually you can set different taxes for different neighbourhoods, so I suppose you could target a wealthy surburb that way) E; Quoted wrong poster NatasDog fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 16:39
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Perhaps if we could set property tax AND income tax we'd have really neat emergent gameplay mechanics. I know income tax isn't specifically the purview of city management, but city sims have always blended city management with state/provincial/federal level management (eg. hospitals, schools, police, and fire departments), so an income tax is internally consistent with the logic of the game. Imagine if you had the above system but also could set zones for the taxation. You'd have a lot of control over whether your town/city develops into a posh, metropolitan megacity (low taxes on mid/upper class, low property tax on high density), or some backwater hick farmville (high property tax for higher density, and high taxation on middle/upper incomes), a slum-hell (low property tax for density, low tax on lower income), or so on.
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Dec 3, 2014 16:53
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There does seem to be a very robust education mechanic in the game. Kids go to elementary school and become "Educated", then when they become teens they go to high school and become "Well educated", then when they become young adults they go to university and become "Highly educated". Then they become adults and join the workforce, and then they eventually become seniors (and presumably leave the workforce as retirees). I can't see how they could improve on that, if I'm honest. Presumably, citizens join the workforce if there's no spare education slots available for their age group (but I'm unsure, and it might be that teens just hang out at the mall). Sadly, the average education level across the city is tied to unlocking ploppables. I'm not really fond of that, but meh. Social mobility seems to be a tiny bit abstracted; the "level" of a residence (there are five levels, which is nice, instead of Simcity 4's three) depends at least partially on the education of the occupants, regardless of whether they actually have decent jobs or not, as far as I can tell. There's going to be a strong correlation between education and income of course, so it's not a terrible abstraction, but it would be slightly more realistic (and very relevant to today's UK, at least) if you could land a scenario where shitloads of university-educated citizens are living in shoeboxes because you didn't expand the high tech job base enough so they're all baristas instead of doctors. Would be odd to have baristas living in mansions just because they have a degree. I can't tell yet what else contributes to a residence's wealth level, but presumably it's going to be various services besides education, not unlike Simcity 4 (I'm using SC4 as my comparison game, gently caress everything else). I really like that it's not abstracted though - a house isn't considered educated because it's merely near a school and has been so for a while, but because its occupants physically went to the appropriate school for their age group. No terraforming, but there is a map editor. The pre-set highways that criss-cross the region can be destroyed and rebuilt as wanted, so long as you buy the land in which they lie (and all land is buyable to a limit that can probably be changed, as discussed above). A welcome relief for those who found that part of Simcity2013 to be a pile of wank. Noise pollution is a thing. You can build a bypass for industry traffic so the noise of trucks doesn't upset your delicate middle classes. The traffic simulation is looking really solid. If on-street parking fills up, people have to park further away and walk (though I'm not sure what the consequences of that are, simulation wise)
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Dec 3, 2014 22:47
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KKKlean Energy posted:I can't tell yet what else contributes to a residence's wealth level, but presumably it's going to be various services besides education, not unlike Simcity 4 (I'm using SC4 as my comparison game, gently caress everything else).
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Dec 4, 2014 01:23
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Yeah I hope it's not going to try to say that so long as you give everyone great education and services everyone's rich and happy and there's just no need for working class people.
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Dec 4, 2014 01:37
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As someone who wants a fun game in the vein of the older Simcity games and NOT a ~ultra hardcore~ Urban Planning Simulation, I'm actually cautiously excited about this game. It looks potentially quite fun. 
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Dec 4, 2014 02:55
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Fintilgin posted:As someone who wants a fun game in the vein of the older Simcity games and NOT a ~ultra hardcore~ Urban Planning Simulation, I'm actually cautiously excited about this game. Come to think of it, is there any game at all that delivers this kind of experience? I think I could go for an ultra hardcore urban planning simulation!
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Dec 4, 2014 03:21
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DrSunshine posted:I think I could go for an ultra hardcore urban planning simulation! I would love something like this, especially if the focus was on the Simulation part. Plop down some roads, some mass transit options, and some zoning and watch things happen.
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Dec 4, 2014 04:47
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah I hope it's not going to try to say that so long as you give everyone great education and services everyone's rich and happy and there's just no need for working class people. From what I can tell, even high-tech industry needs some uneducated and minimally educated workers, and the place of work reports how many workers are over-educated. So the basis for maintaining a class balance is there, but I don't know what the programmed consequences of over-educated workers are. I'm guessing it causes unhappiness, but do they leave the city and caused a labour shortage? If providing everyone with university is horribly expensive and can near-bankrupt the city (especially when they don't use that education in the city economy and just swan off for greener pastures), then there'd be an incentive not to over-educate everyone. Poil posted:I just hope that providing rare luxuries such as power and water along with a small park won't instantly turn a neighborhood into mansions. Especially if they all then become scribes and drop out of the labour pool, causing the entire pottery industry to crash. Lesson learned: don't let that loving bazaar stock up on jewellery
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Dec 4, 2014 06:02
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Pretty informative "constant" AMA over on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/2o1g64/cities_skylines_constant_ama/ A few takeaways: • Definitely won't be getting bigger farms at launch. • They wont be adding too many more buildings before launch; the variety of buildings seen in the dev diaries is probably close to what we'll have at release. That's not that much. • They seem very committed to a Q1 2015 release. • Water can flow basically anywhere. • Heightmaps can be imported for map generation. • Each citizen has a home, workplace, education, hobbies, wants, and needs. • If your computer can handle it, you can go up to 10km x 10km map size. Although seems like their recommended max is 6km x 6km and 1M citizens. • Still seem very committed to modders. They are already discussing the file types for buildings that can be imported. Overall looks like strong bones for a game, but missing some meat that can hopefully come from modders. Sounds like if someone puts together a pack of 50-100 "American" buildings or something and we eventually get some kind of modular expandable airports and seaports I'll be very happy with the game.
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Dec 4, 2014 16:42
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yeah, I hope via modding people implement not just more building variety but shape variety. I've seen a few houses that don't quite seem 4x4 but it looks like 4x4 is the dominant lot size, specially for anything moderately dense. Would love to see all densities and wealths represented at all sizes to help fill in all those gaps. So like 1x4 buildings and such. I don't think modders can do things to make larger buildings though, but I could see someone doing a "total conversion" sort of mod that replaces a lot of industry with ploppable rewards while removing mines and refineries as zoned tiny buildings. Could have huge factories, mines, refineries placed more like power plants. I don't see any solution to farming looking awful though. Farms just don't fit in the 4x4 urban lot system. It's a bit spergy but I also really hope the art of the building matches its stats. In city games it always drives me nuts when two buildings of vastly different sizes have the same stats. Cities XL was horrible for this where an 8 story building and a 50 story building would have the exact same stats simply because they were both the same level of building. Simcity 4's numbers were mostly way too high, but at least the numbers matched relative to each other. I want to be able to look at a building and it be fairly intuitive how many people live/work there.
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Dec 4, 2014 16:49
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There's a new dev diary about the map editor, looks like you'll be able to import 16bit hightmaps into the game and play on them.
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Dec 9, 2014 18:11
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This new dev diary was the best one they've done so far. I was real wary of the resources thing and the tiny farms and the weird specialized industries and the airports, but this one they showed that you can get a pretty decent playing area with a real-world map and I'm totally back on board. I cannot wait to recreate my hometown in the game.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:51
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For the life of me I couldn't find the new dev diary because they haven't yet indexed it in their various lists, so I looked into the forum and for the benefit of others here is a direct link: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?822199-Cities-Skylines-%96-Dev-Diary-6-Map-Editor&s=9d4d0b48463aeb74eb5990ebcc550274 That map editor looks pretty drat good. I can't wait to abuse the gently caress out of dynamic water. I take back what I said about unique selling points, this dynamic water thing could be amazing. The inability to create above-sea-level lakes in Simcity 4 was a thorn in the side of my ~pretty landscape~ efforts.
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Dec 9, 2014 22:41
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New Trailer today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hsp5JjdSaA Something about saving Japanese gardens, but it shows some interesting shots of the game.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:49
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Game is pretty, scales are weird, but I'll overlook it if the final product is fun. Certainly not enough there for me to risk a preorder though. Once bitten twice shy. 
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Dec 10, 2014 21:52
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Yeah when I bought CIM2 I assumed because it was Paradox (published) it would follow the same development pattern. Ok to not so great game on release that gets patches and expansions that make it amazing. Colossal order don't really do that, reading the forums it seems a lot of people got pretty pissed (angry betrayed people on paradox forums!?) at the lack of patches/development of CIM2, even things they promised to fix/implement. Paradox seems a lot more involved in this one though, so hopefully they rub off on these Fins more. If Paradox was directly making this I'd be a lot more optimistic that we'd see years of patches and DLC that make the game into something amazing, but with Colossal Order I'm not holding my breath and will assume the quality of the game at release is going to be more or less how it will stay. I do really wish they just hadn't bothered with the whole forestry/farming/mining poo poo at all and just focused on getting everything else right, then come out with some FORESTRY DLC that implements it in a cool way, or a FARMING DLC that implements really nice farms. They'd make more money and we'd get a better game in the end.
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Dec 11, 2014 02:46
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