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I'm not terribly familiar with Paradox - what's their reputation for delivering good games? I really like what I see so far and I know they tend to make more spergy games than the usual games company (which is good news for me), so I'm hoping it follows through.
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Sep 30, 2014 20:36
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I am excited to hear more about the public transit. I remember in the early days of SimCity 2013 development, when buses were confirmed, I smartly deduced that since it was an agent-based system, there must be a whole interface of setting up bus lines and stops etc. I mean, what's the alternative, let the buses roam around the city randomly like a herd of confused zebras? (it was exactly that) It'll be interesting to see how it's treated in this game.
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Sep 30, 2014 21:32
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Interesting that they're using a separate 'office' zone. I'm guessing the commercial zone is all retail?
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Oct 1, 2014 17:02
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Baronjutter posted:It's still a bit depressing that in 2014 all city builders are still using 100% use segregated zoning. I know the excuses of "gameplay" and "simplicity" but if you can't figure out how to do basic urban zones and make your gameplay work I don't know what to say. "mixed use" isn't some weird new concept, hell it's the norm in 99% of cities outside of a post-war american suburb. Shops on the bottom, office or residential above. Also a bit surprising given that they're going specifically for a north European focus. I can see from the videos that each residential plot can hold a number of unique households, so I wouldn't have thought it particularly difficult for a plot to hold units of different types. Perhaps when they started coding it they backed themselves into a corner on that one though, and implementing it now would mean re-writing a whole lot.
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Oct 1, 2014 17:31
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Parts 3 and 4 of their gameplay video are out. Part 3 seems to have already been mostly covered by their highlights video, but part 4 is more interesting and it covers the Q&A at the end of the session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzHdq88g7uE * no mixed use (because gameplay reasons, but there'll be a visual representation, also maybe they'll let you mod it) * no weather (not at launch anyway, but maybe later, and they want it to have gameplay implications, not just a visual effect) * currently just one building tileset (but players can create and import their own architectural styles) * you can build a hydroelectric dam (no visuals yet) and if you're not careful about it you can flood your city
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Oct 3, 2014 21:46
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My guess is that it's a static waterfall with a 'spring' for a source (i.e. magic water appearance point), and they just stuck a couple of sewage outlet pipes at the source to colour it brown/grey. I don't think much can be read into it - it strikes me more as a trailer joke than a feature plug for fluid dynamics  I am very interested in finding out how the flooding works though.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:05
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I don't know about Europe but here in London most intersections have lights on both the near and far side - but some have lights only on the near side so it's by no means a rule. It's only cosmetic though. I'm hoping the traffic simulation will be decent. Will I be able to create a gridlocked hell? I have a niggling suspicion that rush hour isn't simulated. I seem to recall from my limited experience with CiM that there was no daily cycle - people just up and went to work at random times throughout the day, so there was no meaningful rush hour.
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Oct 6, 2014 10:07
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I decided to google street view some European capitals but I couldn't find any beam or hung traffic lights, and then after a couple of minutes I realised I didn't give a poo poo, because, well, really? We're only page 2 and we're angry about cities already?xzzy posted:I think elections could be a cool feedback system for measuring how well you're doing, but I wouldn't want it to be tied to a "game over" screen if an election is lost. I like this. City-builders are open-ended so you could have election victories feed into a score. Maybe the score keeps track of campaign promises kept and broken, too (so if you gently caress up and lose an election, oops! Now you have to keep the promises your opponent made lest you lose the next one too) But I'd also like to see an election mechanic tie in with a lobbying system. So perhaps to get a winning vote share you need to spend campaign funds (unless you've managed the city spectacularly well), and these funds come from various lobbying groups you have to keep happy. They make requests from time to time and you have to pick and choose which ones to accept, weighing their campaign donations (and thus vote-boosting potential) against the negative effects of whatever poo poo ideas they spat in your in-tray. Simcity 3K had lobbying groups but it was mostly just for direct city cash infusions if I remember correctly. Tropico had some nice ideas in the election/lobbying department but obviously it fits a certain theme that doesn't translate well to a regular city builder.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:34
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ToastyPotato posted:I am tired of games having to be modded in order to fix built in issues. I think it's a bit unfair to describe the lack of mixed use zoning as an "issue" awaiting a "fix". It's just an unwanted simplification of the simulation, rather than a bug. There's nothing wrong with hoping that modding will help to enhance the simulation.
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Oct 8, 2014 08:23
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They've also posted parts one and two of a three(?)-part livestream covering services and policies. I haven't made a post because really there's nothing I've seen to write home about. Power, water and garbage seem to work mostly the same way as in Simcity 4. The only differences I've seen so far is: * the oil power plant tool-tip said there was "9 weeks of oil left" - so some sort of resource chain seems to be involved there, which makes sense since the devblog you posted explicitly says so. * there's a hydroelectric dam, but how it works in terms of modelling water flow is not yet known. * if the construction menu is complete, then there are no water towers - but there is a sewage outlet pipe and the river-adjacent water pumps are sensitive to polluted water (which affects health across the city). I recall Simcity 4 had water treatment plants, but not an outlet pipe as such. * the garbage collection is agent based - trucks leave the landfill and collect garbage from homes (and businesses?) * health is agent based too - ambulances leave the clinic/hospital, visit a home with low health, and this 'resets' the healthiness meter of the home, which reminds me a lot of the system in Caesar III and Pharaoh (only not with random motion of the agents) * you can designate city districts and apply policies to them individually * the policies aren't very interesting... usually a trade-off of good thing/bad thing (the bad thing usually being a monetary cost) As for that devblog... hah. Those fields are hilariously small. But at least they're going with the "you zone it and the resource-specific buildings pop up dynamically" method rather than the "state-owned oil well ploppable". Only problem is you have to designate a resource district, which is almost as bad. I guess it depends how the specifics of the economy work.
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Oct 25, 2014 12:12
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I actually like the idea of resources to some extent, because I'd like to be able to simulate a mining town or a fishing village, etc. Especially one that can hit economic trouble and simulate a recession if the resource dries up. But it's never, ever done well. And the particular way that they're doing it in this game really does suggest they're just trying to clone Simcity 2013. Disappointing.
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Oct 25, 2014 16:51
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Part 3 of their livestream recording is up, and this one covers mass transit among other things. The menu shows they have buses, subways, railways, airports, and habours (passenger and freight). No details about most of those, but in the video they build a bus line and it's as simple as placing stops in a loop and a bus depot to spit an indeterminate number of buses out onto the loop. The nitty-gritty of how this interacts with the commute mechanic remains to be seen. I think I mentioned this in an earlier post but I'm not seeing any sign of a meaningful day/night cycle so I don't think rush hour is simulated, which is a big shame. I hope the traffic is heavy enough for me to create gridlocked nightmares. All the roads seem pretty wide though (is there any road without on-street parking?). At the end of the video is a QA session, from which I gleaned the following info: * There are five demographics; child, teen, young adult, adult, senior. Whether there's any kind of family reproduction mechanic (as opposed to randomly spawning people in vacant homes) remains to be seen. * There are four levels of education, presumably based on how many of the education buildings (elementary school / high school / university) a citizen hits on the way through the demographic groups. Education affects the type of commercial/industrial buildings in the city, as expected. * They intend to be able to simulate a million inhabitants (that's their target, no mention yet of their progress), and all indications are that they're tracking each individual citizen so they're not abstracting for that. * Pedestrianisation is a "good idea" they "want to have" as a policy
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Oct 25, 2014 22:02
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Yeah, I think there is a clear line between the type of simulation that simcity does and the type of simulation that something like Anno, Caesar III, Banished or Tropico does. In Simcity you influence where and what buildings appear, in other games you more or less control it absolutely. But then again, the other games have resource and production chains and Simcity (up to 4) does not. What I'd like to see is a Simcity with production chains which grow by themselves, instead of being plopped and micro-managed. So zone industry over an iron ore seem and iron ore mines appear, which creates demands for smelters, steelworks, and everything that follows. If the ore dries up so does everything else in turn. Taxes, subsidies and regulations can have an impact. Let's say if the ore is becoming more difficult to extract and companies are packing up for lack of profit, you can subsidise them just to avoid an unemployment problem. Or you can be Thatcher and close all the pits. pwnyXpress posted:I think having resources is cool, since most real cities develop around those kinds of things. I don't think they should run out at any point, though. For gameplay reasons maybe, but real cities fail around resources running out too Mining towns are ten a penny around the world. I think a fun challenge would be a scenario (remember those?  ) along the lines of "This mining town is running out of coal, transition to a different economy before it's too late"
Microplastics fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Oct 25, 2014 |
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Oct 25, 2014 22:12
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They seem to want to jam agriculture into their resource mechanic, hence the specialisation districting. It's drat weird though. The farms look like utter poo poo. They really need to look at SC4 farms for inspiration. Lol @ the pet thing. I think that came about because one of the devs hates animals (monster) and wanted to ban pets in her dream city, so it's kind of in as a joke thing.
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Oct 25, 2014 23:36
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Yeah, that tends to be the way it goes. I think it stems from starting the map with perfect information - you know where all the deposits are and how big they are. Would be more interesting if some were hidden and discovered later, and the yield was some random number you don't learn until it starts running out.
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Oct 26, 2014 16:06
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I see that the subway entrance takes up a big plot of land, rather than fitting it on an existing sidewalk. A shame. The transport is otherwise promising but I want to see how it interacts with commuter behaviour.
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Nov 4, 2014 16:23
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WithoutTheFezOn posted:Nice runway length. 1000' should be plenty for a jet to land on. What looks like an airbus A380 no less.
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Nov 4, 2014 16:48
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Fintilgin posted:I'm more concerned about the number of identical 'clone' buildings showing up in some of the screenies. It wouldn't be a city simulator without a grave case of repetitive building syndrome. I do notice they use random colours (albeit three of them) on some building designs. Did SC2013 do that? I also got an impression somewhere that apartment blocks have random numbers of floors, though I might have imagined that. Simcity 4 did it well, even without colour variation the sheer amount of variety in yard and roof objects (sheds, swimming pools, aircon units etc) and lot sizes really gave an impression of building variety. Until you got skyscapers.
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Nov 4, 2014 18:49
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Heh, so much for their "we're aiming to simulate a million citizens" ambition. I wonder what number they've whittled it down to.
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Jan 7, 2015 19:04
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nielsm posted:RCT agents also tend to spend most of their time doing a random walk or standing in line, as far as I remember it was pretty rare they were actively pathing to a specific attraction. So again a simplified model. It's worth noting though that agents in a city simulation will spend most of their time in a building and not pathing anywhere too. A city simulation of comparable sophistication to RCT (is there one? I know Caesar III had agents but didn't truly track all residents) would probably handle the same number of agents I reckon. E: I suppose it's also worth noting that whereas RCT agents are constantly changing destinations ion tyre whim of decisions, a simulated citizen will spend most of its time doing the same journeys, so depending on how well the simulation is coded there would be fewer calculations. And rather than being on the fly, the morning commute could be calculated while the city is asleep, rather than at the moment that everyone leaves their driveway. But then, that would blatantly be more sophisticated than RCT so the comparison would probably be lost by that point. Vvvvv a very good point. RCT never really had to deal with "traffic". Microplastics fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 19:44
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DrSunshine posted:"The day when Paradox announced that I would not be able to simulate the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area in Cities: Skylines..." Shities: Crylines
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Jan 21, 2015 22:54
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MonoAus posted:Is this really most people's experience with sc4? There was a slider on the budget screen that adjusted all schools evenly. There was, but demand on individual schools didn't change evenly, so even using that slider just meant over-funding some schools and underfunding others. If you wanted to avoid waste or strikes, you still had to check them individually. I like my micromanagement but that's just bonkers game design, because there's exactly one correct choice and the game has no way for the player to make that choice in an easy manner (or just delegate it to the AI). quote:Have to say I'm kind of surprised most people are poo-pooing cities: skylines though. I thought it looked pretty good. Sort of like a sc5 that isn't terrible. There have been some very odd choices announced in the past month or so, which has upset some people (including myself) expecting something more akin to a simulation than a game. But I still think it looks pretty solid.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:38
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These days it's usually a tiny discount. e: removed my personal view on pre-ordering because let's please not have another discussion about the merits of pre-ordering.
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Feb 4, 2015 14:39
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:If mod support allows for editing/creating mechanics and not just making new meshes/cosmetic things we might have something fantastic on our hands. Like Banished's mod support. Yeah I certainly hope the mechanics are up for modding, mostly to get rid of the stupid content in, say, district policies and replace it with decent stuff. I know I keep banging on about this but I really hope someone can somehow work in a 24-hour cycle with actual rush-hours. Fairly sure the base game won't have it.
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Feb 11, 2015 12:03
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The parallels to SimCity are uncanny, but I welcome that, because what I want is SimCity2013 minus the boneheaded limitations, broken mechanics, bugs galore, total lack of mod support, money-grubbing DLC shitwankery and the condescending developer/publisher PR, all of which we all came to know and hate with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. This game looks like that. I'm glad it is like that and not a wildly different city simulator done in a totally different style. If they're literally thinking "Let's emulate Simcity2013 but do it right" then I am both disappointed at their lack of creativity and incredibly smug that they've decided to gently caress EA right in the rear end so brazenly. Microplastics fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 16:31
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WMain00 posted:I believe so yes since the expanded zone he opens up includes the highway, so I would imagine it allows some sort of editing to go on for that highway. Unlike SimCity, it's not some sort of external static piece that can't be touched. Yeah, a dev video explained that you can indeed do whatever you want with the pre-built highways once you claim the land they're built in. Demolish them, replace them, like any other road.
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Feb 11, 2015 18:56
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Yeah it's probably more appropriate to think of it as building Milton Keynes next to the M1, rather than starting out with Tipplebottom Hamletsquire on the brook crossing a 2 day horse ride out from Pootingham.
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Feb 11, 2015 19:16
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Stop talking about the merits of pre-orders for fucks sake  For content (and deliberately hunted down so we can get off this utterly poo poo derail which I despise so very much), it appears there was a dev diary last week which never got posted in the thread (although some data views did feature breifly in the trailer, prompting comparison to Simcity). Here is the thread for a better look: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?833752-Cities-Skylines-%96-Dev-Diary-9-Info-Views&p=18811903#post18811903 The style is so similar to Simcity it basically looks like a tweak. A couple of things stand out though - no bar charts (a good thing if you ask me, heatmaps are more intuitive, though C:S seems to be missing a few obvious places for heatmaps, like population density), traffic congestion (did Simcity even have that? I don't recall it managing to pick congestion out of its agent clusterfuckery) and noise pollution - which I think is the first time a city simulator has ever done a noise pollution mechanic, though I haven't played every one. Apparently you can block noise with trees, though I can't find where I heard that. v stoppit Microplastics fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Feb 12, 2015 |
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Feb 12, 2015 10:20
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Darkrenown posted:I don't think there's another Cities steam, but there's various other Paradox games being streamed today and tomorrow (It's PDXcon2015 here at the moment). The streams should also be up on youtube/twitch archives later for people who missed them. Don't they hit the twitch archive as soon as the stream ends? I found it here: http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/b/623748169 Cities stuff begins at 1:06:16
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Feb 12, 2015 17:11
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The Duggler posted:They should have just called it Simulation City and gone full CiMCity The ultimate troll
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Feb 12, 2015 19:09
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A musician friend of mine once told me that this track relates to the number 5 rather than the usual 4 (sorry I don't know the musical terms because I'm an uncultured dumbass) and that this makes it rather impressive as a piece of musical work. It's certainly one of favourites anyway.
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Feb 13, 2015 21:06
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