Cities Skylines II

[Fedora Master]

People are complaining that the city is "too noisy" when noise is at

 

[Alienman]

Sensitive guy.

 

[Caim]

A modder confirms that the "Cims" have 46k fucking polys. Disabling them gives a 20 FPS boost. Who needs LOD's anyway.
If they fuck up basic shit like this, I wonder what else is broken.

Starfield has a similar problem, but I reckon there's far more people on a map in this game than there are in space Skyrim.

 

[Perkel]

A lot of those "it has too many polygons" stuff is due to dudes not having skill loading stuff wrong in blender. Most of game assets are not available in form where you can just load it into blender (they are usually packed and encrypted) and you need to do some fuckery to load them. Usually that fuckery for unskilled leads to issues with assets like wrongly loading assets and blending subdividing stuff increasing amount of polys. Or loading only LOD0 etc.

The issue with City and Starfield is not due to polys (which are actually fairly cheap these days to render) but due to their handling of CPU work usually leading to batching issues. Which is why both CS and Starfield are super CPU sensitive.

CS at least has excuse of simulation thing going on though.

 

[Fedora Master]

CS at least has excuse of simulation thing going on though.

Not if it is indeed all just black box fake simulation.

 

[Perkel]

CS at least has excuse of simulation thing going on though.

Not if it is indeed all just black box fake simulation.

I mean just to simulate trafic you need to simulate something.

 

[Black]

 

[Fedora Master]

>Slavoid accent
>Close video
>Don't show this again

 

[Axioms]

>Slavoid accent
>Close video
>Don't show this again

I have nothing against Slavic peoples aside from how their video game youtube videos are basically reverse ASMR. Their accent just grates so hard on my innocent midwestern ears.

 

[Fedora Master]

>Slavoid accent
>Close video
>Don't show this again

I have nothing against Slavic peoples aside from how their video game youtube videos are basically reverse ASMR. Their accent just grates so hard on my innocent midwestern ears.

Who asked

 

[axx]

 

[Fedora Master]

"I get between 35 and 60 FPS"
lol

 

[Fedora Master]

Electricity/Water network is a fucking mess. I just spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why my sewage lines wouldn't connect.
What a joke of a game, honestly. Can't even say "MODS WILL FIX IT" because there is no Workshop.

Who is this game supposed to appeal to? It's not advanced or difficult enough to satisfy the autists but it also isn't good at letting you pretty up your city so the casuals won't get much from it either.

 

[Alienman]

Colossal Order also used the hotfix to remove the ‘Spasm Electronics’ advertisement from the in-game radio stations, after members of the community took issue with the sound effects used therein, which they argue mimic the sound a person makes when experiencing a seizure.

From here.

 

[Stokowski]

"I get between 35 and 60 FPS"
lol

"... but mostly around 50-ish", he said. Which, considering his CERN level computer specs, is pretty sad.

 

[axx]

Folks just love train stations.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Folks just love train stations.

Average walkable Eurohive.

 

[Joggerino]

Really good idea to add modules for buildings, a great feature. Guessing this will be a better game than the first one once they eventually fix it.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Silly to buy this now instead of waiting to get it on sale once the DLC comes out.

 

[Caim]

Silly to buy this

 

[JarlFrank]

Looked at the top negative review on Steam and holy shit lmao

I tried to like CS2, I really did. I can ignore the performance issues and bugs, as these are things I see being fixed over the short term with some patches in optimisation. However, there are much bigger issues that you need to be aware of. The numerous simulations in the game have such foundational flaws in them, that I believe this game is the most fake city builder of them all.

This game is marketed as "the most realistic city builder ever", with multiple levels of simulation in the city, sims, economy, services, and traffic. Unfortunately, there are huge flaws in each are of the simulation.

After 20+ hours playing, aside from the known performance problems (which I've mitigated by running the game at lower gfx than I should be), these are the biggest issues I see:

- The economy is broken. Goods in your city aren't actually traded. Import/export don't actually do anything, so trucks deliver goods to your stores and train stations, ports, and airports, but the transportation networks never pick it up to deliver off map. Industry, commercial and residential don't use your produced goods. There is no cargo traffic in your city, because there is no simulation of producing goods, transporting them to your shops, and then sims buying those goods. It's all completely fake. Colossal Order have confirmed this on Paradox forums.

- The progression system is broken, just place a tourist trap and bulldoze it, repeat over and over. Level 20 without doing anything. Progression is not linked to population, just "XP" gained from placing stuff. Thing is, it doesn't remove the XP if you bulldoze straight away. As a result you can have a "Flourishing Metropolis" with 50 people. Each main step should have a population limit. IE: town 10k, city 50k, metropolis 100k or something.

- Most people don't actually go to work, kids don't go to school, people don't shop. You can track individual sims. When you follow them, they actually don't go to work. They will get in their cars, or walk to the tram or whatever, jump on, and then do a circuit back home. Or they'll arrive at work and get straight back onto transport again to come home. Kids do not leave the house. They will stay in their homes, not going to school. The whole rush hour thing is a joke. Basically, the sims simulation is..... fake. And this is the big ticket item that this game is sold on. A simulation of each individual sim, going about their world, doing what the do. Living, growing, prospering, dieing. All faked.

- The city only ever demands low density housing, never anything else. City of 50k, with very little office demand. Always, low density residential will be 100% demand. You can even buy 20 tiles, do a massive grid of low density residential, it'll all pop into existence and demand will still be 100%.

- You don't need to build any city services, it all comes in really cheaply from off map. It's cheaper to import all services, than to build the services yourself and pay for maintenance. The only exception seems to be power and water. You can export power and water for enormous profits.

- Maintenance and expansion is not balanced at all. For some buildings it's cheaper per unit to build a new one, and some are cheaper to just expand. For instance water pump: $10,000 to build 100,000 unit pump, and $7,000 to expand one an extra 50,000 units. Cheaper to make a new one there.

- The traffic AI is just absolutely stupid and retarded. I couldn't think the traffic AI could be worse than CS1, but they actually managed to do it. Cars will do u-turns in the middle of a highway. Cars will stop in the middle of the road, jump across 3 lanes causing a big traffic jam, just to reach a left-hand turn they go straight through instead. Opposing carriage turns (ie: right from left side drive, left from right side drive) will not wait till the approaching through traffic is clear. They will turn like it's the middle of Delhi and cause a huge accident or traffic jam.

- The economy is extremely frustrating. There are no small-town service buildings, so to cater for your citizen demands you need to build service buildings priced for cities much larger than what you have. This results in grinding your city's economy into the ground. The only way around this is to largely ignore city services until at least 25k population when your tax revenue is starting to be enough to pay for these demanded services. All the while the annoying bird, building icons, and radio announcements will continue harping on about all these citizen demands. On the flip side, electricity and water exports are priced so out of balance, that building a few extra coal power plants and water pumps, and exporting every single piece of it, will have you swimming in money.

- The whole off map servicing of your citizens is quite simply extremely flawed at it's foundations. When you utilise off map services, the price of those services do not adjust to cater for the simple economic principle of supply and demand. You can pump as much electricity to the off map as you can, and the game will continue to give you the same high price for each MWh. Same with importing off map services. Using off map fire services will remain the extremely cheap price no matter how many fires they have to come and put out.

- The garbage system is totally cactus. Your incinerators will go get garbage from off map to burn, rather than burning your own. Your landfill fills up, your buildings fill up, and stupidly off map garbage trucks come and get your rubbish. The only way to get around this is to build huge landfills, and once they are full just bulldoze it. Poof, all garbage gone. Since incinerators don't collect your garbage from landfills, as it's cheaper for them to drive off map and get it there, it's the only way to process landfill.

TL:DR - Optimisation issues aside, there are MAJOR flaws in each of the game's simulations. The entire game presents a facade, layered on top of fancy marketing speak. I think in reality, this game is the most fake city builder out of any of the top-tier city builders in the 30+ years I've been playing city builders. Ultimately, I do not see how Colossal Order/Paradox proceed from here.

>make game, claim everything is simulated
>economy simulation doesn't work
>devs confirmed it's not actually simulated
>NPC schedules aren't actually simulated
>the things that are simulted don't work

What a shitshow

 

[anvi]

I deserve a good building game All these shitty devs are disgusting let downs.

I played SimCity in 198something and imagined a future with huge worlds that you could build multiple cities with countryside in between. And with depth and interactivity, simulating economies and social things, political things. I loved Transport Tycoon which I wanted to see merged with SimCity by someone. I liked building the trains between two places and watching the profit flow in. But there is no resistance. A coal factory produces tons of coal. You build a train taking it to power plant and the money rolls in. If only life was that easy. Competitor companies are the only resistance and mostly the risk is just them taking some of the limited resources first. You can do a little bit of manipulation, like paying to boost a small city. You can try to beat the competitors by driving them out of business. But it's very limited... I used to like cheating and parking a train in front of a competitor's depot so they couldn't do anything. Mwahaha. But really I crave a bigger and more advanced game, even as a child I wanted that.

SimCity same story. You can stagnate a bit sometimes if you screw up. But mostly it's about three lines, R, C, and I. Build whatever the line tells you to build. And you win. Pretty soon you filled the map with stuff. Again I always enjoyed this as a kid, but I always craved more. I hated filling the map. All that effort and it goes nowhere... There is no ending. You just use up all the space the game could offer. Nothing happens when it's full either, the city still functions fine, but you just can't play anymore... They added disasters but it was such a shit idea. It just destroys a small part of the town and you rebuild it a few minutes later. SC 4 was exciting to see multiple cities. Now when you finished the city you can start again and build another one. And they let you join them together with a road. But that was a total undeveloped afterthought. There is no real interaction. It's just SimCity 2000 but you get multiple boxes to build in. Barely an improvement.

I also hated how they added things like the Army Base. They were just teasing me. I wanted enemy battleships to come in and start shelling my city and then I wanted to build units to go fight back. Why can't I have Supreme Commander or Command & Conquer gameplay mixed in with my SimCity? Because they can barely make just one of those games these days, let alone combining them. Tropico series had better management. Anno series added bigger scope and some basic combat. There are lots of games that have pushed things forward slightly. But it's miles away from where I expected it to be by now. I am happy to just play RTS for combat. They have good building too sometimes, but the focus is on the battles which are fun. I don't need combat in a building game, but there does need to be something to struggle against. I would be happy even if that was just the economy, but that doesn't even happen. Best of all would be something like riots. Run the city well or the public block the streets and harm the economy, burn parts of the city down, etc. It takes someone with the mind of a game designer to make a good game like this, and I'm not sure anyone like that even exists anymore. SimCity 2k had lots of cool stuff like City Ordinances which all had minor impacts on the gameplay. eg: Legal gambling. Brings in tourists but raises crime. If there is to be no combat, then I at least want to get absorbed in the economics of the city. And having social and political issues would really make the building a lot less mindless.

I expect something with an infinite world. Games like Minecraft and Factorio have broken that little gaming paradigm. Working within space between a mountain and river or something is cool. But being limited by invisible walls, or end of the map... is just sad. Any game that does that today just seems severely compromised.

Also when I played SimCity in 1989, it was a primitive time. I didn't complain when a Fire Station cost $25 or whatever. I cared that building things required some thought, and it sort of did. But today I am not forgiving. I am tired of seeing building games where the economy is just a token. The player just progresses automatically. If building things is not a delicate financial balance then they should just not have any costs. Just make it a 'creative' mode game for children to build big stupid virtual cities for no reason. Where nothing is actually simulated.

 

[Fedora Master]

Releasing games that look like complex simulations but actually aren't is what PDX just does now.
No idea how they could fix this either if the systems they advertised simply don't exist.

 

[Fedora Master]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...tion-given-in-ui.1606488/page-2#post-29234528

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...tion-given-in-ui.1606488/page-2#post-29235254

Basically you can't fail, even if you have no outside connection or people or resources in your city. Working as designed.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

anvi
videogames stopped daring two decades ago, when "sky is the limit" became "consoles hardware is the limit". i can recall just two who declared they'd do more, no man's sky and starfield, and they turned out to be absolute scams.