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Baronjutter posted: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. The main issue with CiM 2 was that it just wasn't very interesting. No amount of patching was going to save a game with no soul. Hopefully Cities doesn't suffer that issue.
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Dec 11, 2014 16:10
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Baronjutter posted: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. All of this. Why, CO, why? 
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Dec 11, 2014 17:34
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ExtraNoise posted:All of this. Because they're a bunch of hack frauds? After my experience with both CIM and CIM2 it'll be a cold day in hell before I go near their game again unless it gets at least 90% positive reviews.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:26
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Care to explain? I own both and I don't feel cheated at all.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:33
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HappyHelmet posted:The main issue with CiM 2 was that it just wasn't very interesting. No amount of patching was going to save a game with no soul. This is exactly how I feel. With the first CiM game they managed to create a pretty solid tycoon/simmish game which also had a ton of charm, then with the second game they seemed to focus entirely on all the wrong things and made a game about growing vast grey cities with zero personality. It seemed like they were trying to make some kind of hybrid tycoon and city building game and in my opinion they completely failed at both. From what I've seen so far this looks like it has some really nice features and systems in place but may end up completely soulless. Everything being the same lot size or at least squares seems a little troubling in that regard. Clean, neatly spaced completely separate buildings in the center of their perfect little lots look extremely artificial to me. Even in Sim City 4 there's a lot of little details that give it a little bit of personality, like pedestrians actually doing stuff (In incredible 10x10 pixel glory), random lot elements (Crates, trash, signage, trampolines, pools, murals etc.) and even stuff like streets gaining cobble and palm trees or concrete depending on the nearby zoning. Heck Cities XL, though ultimately uninteresting to play, at least had a certain degree of charm to it.
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Dec 11, 2014 19:39
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CiM2 is what happens when you listen 100% to your core most spergy fans and no one else. No time to actually make places or destinations in cities, get rid of train stations, stadiums and just make every building a different size of one of 3 general types repeated in an endless gray carpet. But by god do we have time to implement insanely detailed ticket prices and scheduling. No time to provide good interfaces for any of this, but we've got it. I still enjoy CiM1 because it's the closest I've ever seen to a city game that lets me build charming wall-to-wall buildings. I'd be 100% fine with gridded roads if it meant a building system that actually allowed for realistic tight wall to wall blocks of buildings. Ever since Cities XL we've been stuck trying to fit square buildings on curves and angles and it looks bad unless all the buildings look very suburban. Works for houses and skyscrapers but everything in between looks bad. I'd love a simple transport/city builder that was basically CiM1 with city management aspects and some a few more transport tools. Keep the grid, keep the charm.
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Dec 11, 2014 20:11
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Baronjutter posted:Keep the grid, keep the charm. I also agree that it's frustrating so many developers are trying to ham-fist non-grid systems in when a gridded system works pretty good for a city game. Why was it decided it was bad? Allow for some curve options and call it a day.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:46
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Curves and diagonals give a lot more interesting options for the look of the city. I really want a good city game that has them, but it does seem to be very difficult to figure out how to do them well. If it is as moddable as SC4 though, it should be a problem that can be solved. You could just not zone curves and use all plopped buildings that the mod sperglords have designed to look correct on curved roads. SC4 has those for diagonals.
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Dec 13, 2014 06:52
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Grand Fromage posted:Curves and diagonals give a lot more interesting options for the look of the city. I really want a good city game that has them, but it does seem to be very difficult to figure out how to do them well. I would settle for splitting the grid into 8 possible directions instead of 4. Then just interpolate the roads or whatever to make the curve look smooth. It'd make lot/building placement easier.
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Dec 13, 2014 07:21
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I think a good compromise would be to allow curved roads, but not all building on them. It would allow people to add a little flavor to their roads, and save developers from having to jam square pegs into round holes. Generally in my experience you don't see a lot of buildings built right on the curves of a road anyway. It's more like: curve -> straight portion with row of houses/businesses -> curve...
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Dec 13, 2014 17:38
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We've sunk to the point where we no longer want curved roads? What has become of us!?
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Dec 13, 2014 18:48
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HappyHelmet posted:Generally in my experience you don't see a lot of buildings built right on the curves of a road anyway. It's more like: curve -> straight portion with row of houses/businesses -> curve...  Maybe that happens in a mid-century American suburb or something, but in a city proper?
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Dec 13, 2014 18:50
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First thing is that actual city roads rarely have a regular curve. It's more common to be a series of (almost) straight segments bound together with curvy bends. You mostly see large, smooth curves on thoroughfare roads and expressways, and they most often don't have houses facing them either way. When you do have curves on city streets and houses facing them, the houses will usually still have straight walls. After some looking around, this is one of the most bendy examples I can find, and those are all detached homes. A somewhat less bendy example with multistory homes in wall-to-wall houses. The houses there do follow the road somewhat, but with sharp bends between straight sections, as far as I can tell. I think my conclusion/point must be that in reality, curvy roads don't affect architecture a whole lot, because the curves in the road will either be so wide that the buildings may as well have just straight walls, or the curves are sharp enough that the buildings will have to break up. What's much more important is how the lots are generated. They must fill out every small odd-angled hole, and they should be filled with something that makes sense for the type of lot.
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Dec 13, 2014 19:40
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Yeah. Honestly, I am more interested in trapezoidaly/triangular lots and building for those diagonal intersections. Trapezoidal lots would also solve the curve road problem.
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Dec 13, 2014 20:09
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Right, all that only applied to suburbia though, not urban centers where all the buildings have fire-walls right against the lot lines and no setback from the front lot line. This is what a city should look like. No spaces between buildings.  The look of Simcity 5 or Cities XL or Cities: Skylines is fine for a modern suburb, but not for a city centre. What I posted above is your typical central european city, but the same massing is true around the world. From the cores of north american cities to asian cities to South american, and of course even Helsinki. Have Colossal Order never walked outside their office and seen what a city centre looks like? CiM1 looked good. They gave us a set of fairly generic city buildings that came in all sorts of shapes and sizes and ANGLES so you could make a proper street-wall in just about any shape. Even just doubling the selection and adding a few new shapes and a simple algorithm for getting them to grow when zoned along an 8-direction gridded road system would have been great looking. You could make triangular blocks, square, angled, just about any shape the 8-direction road system could make could be filled with buildings with no terrible looking void spaces. And even if you did have some slight voids, they could all be quite nicely filled with plazas and markets and the exact sort of actively used public spaces you'd expect. 
Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 20:14
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    There are many ways for a city to look beside old timey European style.
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Dec 13, 2014 20:37
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What they all have in common is that the lots are filled right to the edges with relevant stuff, whether it's building, parking space, recreation/park area or just paving. You don't have odd triangles of unkempt grass or dirt all over the place just because the roads bend a little.
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Dec 13, 2014 21:03
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Almost all of those downtowns are full of street-walls of buildings following the angles of the roads??? Also wow Houston is ridiculously nasty with those parking lots everywhere.
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Dec 13, 2014 22:36
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:We've sunk to the point where we no longer want curved roads? What has become of us!? Hah yeah, I was wondering that. Even if buildings are restricted to gridded roads I'd still want an engine that can do curved roads, just so I can build big sweeping highways that look realistic, and twisty mountainside roads. What's needed is a zoning tool that can create any shape of lot in a space, and a lot developer that is very procedural, which doesn't just pick items from a catalogue. Find a polygon that fits the lot (which can be rectangular for lower density and hugging a road or corner, then for higher density it can just aim to fill the entire lot), pick a number of floors, then plaster a texture on the sides and give it a random colour. That would get some nice-looking lots in less dense areas (no stupid unused triangles) and wall-to-wall poo poo in higher densities. And it would be endlessly varied. This is how I imagine it:  (what's funny is that if the engine was good enough to do this, I wouldn't even mind the graphics being as terrible as my lovely ms paint skills)
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Dec 13, 2014 22:44
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I think a hybrid system would be great. Have a library of pre-modeled buildings but with randomized elements for yards and textures and roofs and things to add variety for suburban/detached buildings, and a sort of polygon lot system for when things get denser. Just slap some ugly concrete/brick texture for the fire walls, a nice facade on the front, and a back texture on the back then generate a roof. The technology absolutely exists and in the end it actually saves you time as you don't have to hand model a million buildings. Or you can just ship with a tiny selection of buildings and hope modders add variety. Of course they're a small developer so they can't do everything perfectly. Citybound is doing procedural buildings though, but he's a loooong way off.
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Dec 13, 2014 23:08
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Man, what game is this? Is it a pre-Alpha screenshot or something, because man those are some ugly-rear end/nonexistent textures.
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Dec 14, 2014 05:22
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DrSunshine posted:Man, what game is this? Is it a pre-Alpha screenshot or something, because man those are some ugly-rear end/nonexistent textures. I hate the citybuilder threads because my sarcasm detection is always way the gently caress out of whack.
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Dec 14, 2014 06:23
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A preview of the game came out yesterday on Digital Spy, going over some very basic talking points. http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/ne...~oYPbViA7cytQaM quote:While Cities: Skylines will use Steam Workshop for sharing mods, it is strictly a single-player game with no multiplayer features, which Hallikainen believes doesn't work as well for a game like this. In addition, it seemed to have some new screens:     Looking much better. I'm still anxious to go in there and create a texture mod that dirties it all up a bit (especially those roads, ugh), but otherwise I think the lighting and visual style are all looking pretty good. The mountains in the distance look a little silly though, like there is weird blue fog in the air.
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Dec 18, 2014 20:18
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ExtraNoise posted:In addition, it seemed to have some new screens: Looks straight out of the box cover art from Sim City 2000.
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Dec 18, 2014 20:57
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nielsm posted:Looks straight out of the box cover art from Sim City 2000. Hmm...  The mountains on the horizon look better :P It's no Simcity2013 in the art department. I mean look at this:  They really nailed the art in that game (except for the grass), such a shame the simulation was garbage. But then I'll take simulation over art any day. And if I didn't have Simcity2013 to compare this game to I'd think it looks pretty stunning anyway. I'm pretty stoked for this one.
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Dec 18, 2014 21:18
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Everything still feels so suburban. Big gaps and open space around every building, transport all being big wide roads. Where's the intimate little human-scale pedestrian areas? So far what I've noticed with Skylines is the same problem that cities XL had and Simcity 5 had, it all looks the same. Basically in simcity4 and even 3000/2000 I felt like I was really designing/customizing my city at a very fine grain and the systems of the game worked around and responded to my choices, even at small levels. In Cities XL, Simcity 5, and it looks like Skylines too, the "scale" at which the player makes actions that effect the looks and function of the city is much bigger, which produce much less diverse and interesting results. I'm sure for many people the vast scale of the cities them selves will be enough, but for people who really want to dig-in and make each block, each neighbourhood feel like a place it's not so great. Which really mirrors my opinions of CiM and CiM2. CiM1 had small cities packed with character and detail and there was so much to customize, placing individual litter bins, benches, decorative walls. The scale of player control was extremely fine. Then in CiM2 the scale of the cities was massively increased, but with the focus pulled out that much more there's no time to worry about the exact type of lamps on this street, or if there's enough benches near that popular gathering area. I'm actually fine with smaller maps that you can really pack with detail. I rather have a few dozen city blocks that I feel I've hand-crafted and customized to poo poo than a few hundred city blocks that all look more or less the same. Of course a good city builder would let you do both. Automatically generate generic details where needed, provide enough building style and size variety to fit just about any street layout, but also give you to tools to really zoom into an area and make it your own.
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Dec 18, 2014 21:23
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Baronjutter posted:Everything still feels so suburban. Big gaps and open space around every building, transport all being big wide roads. Where's the intimate little human-scale pedestrian areas? So far what I've noticed with Skylines is the same problem that cities XL had and Simcity 5 had, it all looks the same. I could not agree more. Having tools to customize lengths of streets between intersections would go a long way to micromanage the look and feel of certain neighborhoods. Imagine being able to change a street to having brick roads, streetside parking (giving up a second lane of traffic), sidewalks with a strip of grass and trees. Then being able to save that style, giving it a name like "Old Town Residential" and then being able to plop that style down on streets at-will. Let the game handle the automatic stuff and then allow users to get into the nitty-gritty details to make the cities come alive. The work will be its own reward for players.
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Dec 18, 2014 21:38
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I kinda disagree with the multiplayer part. I'd love to share the city with my wife, like Anno, for example. Like singleplayer, with just shared control. It'd enable is to build it together as our project but sadly there aren't many games like Anno. My wife and I have a thousand hours in Anno for this very reason as a relaxing slow paced shared building game that we can lounge with. I'd love to have that as a game like Cities.
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Dec 18, 2014 22:13
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Yeah, I love to play simulators and such with a friend. I have two computers set up in my bedroom and he two in his basement so we can play together. Adding LAN play to that is the best kind of gaming. 
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Dec 18, 2014 22:17
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Yeah. Then the argument you hear often is that "but what if someone trashes your game or is not willing to sit with the game for a long time"? Motherfucker. Get better friends! I fear they often think of just some random online multiplayer. But some of us, like mentioned, like playing with friends and family inside the same room or maybe over the net or something. Anno 1404 and 2070 are both good, but they are not city builders. Then we got Age of Empires 2. And that's it, I guess. Luckily for us Total Wars allow nowadays coop and sharing of units in battle. But still, games with deep deep strategy coop are still a rarity.
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Dec 18, 2014 22:20
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ExtraNoise posted:In addition, it seemed to have some new screens: Have to hand it to them -- despite being a Finnish team, they absolutely nailed the look of a freeways-and-office-parks generic city in California's Central Valley! 
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Dec 19, 2014 04:47
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Please don't gently caress this up.  I agree the buildings aren't great but honestly SC4's weren't either. I expect to be downloading piles of mods. If it's a solid game and has better mod support than SC4 that will work just fine, those sperglords will do amazing things with it.
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Dec 19, 2014 14:37
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Are there any signs the game understands what is a corner lot and what isn't, or the ability to use style sets like in simcity4? Because with those 2 features and modding we could have just about anything. Want to make a set of Parisian looking buildings? Go nuts! You're stuck with 90 degree corners but at least you'll have nice realistic blocks of wall to wall buildings with nice corners.
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Dec 19, 2014 17:54
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Corners I don't know. The fact that you can use districts to dictate what sort of industry pops up suggests to me that there might be some mechanism there modders could use to set districts with different building sets, if it's not in the game already. Obviously entirely talking out of my rear end but it seems possible. District building sets would be way cool.
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Dec 19, 2014 17:58
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Grand Fromage posted:Corners I don't know. The fact that you can use districts to dictate what sort of industry pops up suggests to me that there might be some mechanism there modders could use to set districts with different building sets, if it's not in the game already. Obviously entirely talking out of my rear end but it seems possible. Yeah, that would be really cool. The whole district thing could be really powerful if there was a big enough selection of buildings and modders actually tagged things correctly. So you could use a district to set height or density limits, or only allow certain styles. \/ Right now they have such a tiny selection of buildings and only 2 official densities I'm not sure there's enough buildings to actually apply any meaningful filters. Maybe we can at least block certain building levels. Like tell an area it can only advance to level X or what ever. I still don't quite get the building leveling up mechanic. Every time a building levels up the wealth and density and everything about it levels up? Or only certain parts? Is it trying to representing increasing density or increasing wealth because those are often two very different things. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Dec 19, 2014 |
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Dec 19, 2014 18:51
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I swear they already mentioned district height/density limits. I might be misremembering.
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Dec 19, 2014 18:53
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Paradox made CO remove all their crazy social policies. CO wanted the mayor to be able to make individual neighbourhoods were gay marriage was legal or not, and a bunch of other weird awkward stuff that really doesn't belong at the civic level let alone neighbourhood. Oh right there was also a pet ownership ban because some CO dev hates animals.
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Dec 19, 2014 20:08
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We don't really know how the density works. SC4 had three, but there were also like a dozen building levels within that. So you could zone high density but until certain conditions were met you wouldn't be able to get a tier 12 building, which is a massive skyscraper.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:07
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Cities Skylines has been making the media circuit lately, but most previews posted so far haven't been anything particularly interesting. Then I started reading this PC World review and was plesantly surprised at how on-point it was: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2860755/cities-skylines-is-more-like-simcity-than-simcity.html#tk.rss_all quote:With EA busy polishing a hot turd instead of rejoicing at a true SimCity successor, I guess it was only a matter of time before someone else decided to take the lead. Last week I got a brief look at Paradox and Colossal Order's upcoming city builder, Cities: Skylines, and it looks at this stage like everything the SimCity sequel was not. quote:Cities: Skylines also claims to simulate every single person, the same as the most recent SimCity. Of course, those claims later turned out to be complete garbage in the case of SimCity, with the game simply fudging the numbers. I'm told that isn't the case this time around, but I have no way of independently verifying that at the moment. quote:It's an ambitious title, for sure. I'd go so far as to say it's the SimCity I thought I was getting from EA. It's not as pretty, but I'll trade a tilt-shift effect for a deeper simulation any day. Emphasis mine.
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Dec 29, 2014 18:55
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That's a fun read. There's a certain enjoyment I'm getting out of this title putting Simcity to shame.
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Dec 29, 2014 19:20
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