Cities : Skylines

[Turjan]

Here's a video that shows pretty much everything the Parklife DLC contains:



The unique buildings are somewhat meh (but who cares, given we have thousands from mods). However, the rides for the amusement park look awesome, and the zoo also looks nice enough. Animations is still something that's hard to do for modders.

Release is in three days from now.

 

[thesheeep]

Most important feature is probably that parks can now be put in the "malformed" areas in-between houses instead of just being rectangles of varying sizes.
Finally!

Makes for far more organic looking cities. When I look around in the city I live in (which just happens to be where the devs are, too), there is basically not a single park that is rectangular.
That always bothered me a bit (the rectangular parks in the game, not the organic ones in the city).

Of course, I always fail at playing the game since I can never figure out the traffic once the city becomes truly big. That is one puzzle that is just beyond me.
One-way roads, replacing crossings with roundabouts, disabling traffic lights where they aren't needed... nothing really helps. At some point I just give up and live with it

 

[Turjan]

Yeah, it's the little things that are quite enjoyable. I have a vanilla city, in the sense that you can load it without any mods without losing anything (I still use some utility mods for building), and some of the stuff in this update is generally usable, for example the paths (this is the "nature reserve" set):

The four available new paths are all terraforming, unlike the base game pedestrian paths, and they look quite distinct and can give some character to your game, even in the vanilla state. They come in a naked and "dressed" form, where the latter means they have lots of props already assigned, like benches, little rocks, leaf litter, those poles with a power line you see in the pic, etc. Equally useful are the new fences (there's one type of those in the last pic). You can use them everywhere, they snap and bend (they are networks) and unlike the old prop-based fences, they don't get lost when the mod fails or when you put them on a lot or in difficult edge situations. The stretch up to my main railway terminus now got finally properly fenced in:

The vanilla catenaries should still get some touch-up though.

Also new are not only a few tree models, but patches of underbrush. They even added deco rocks which already come with that underbrush deco "out of the box". They also touched up the existing rock models. On this pic you can see an example:

The fence here is the zoo model.

All in all, I'm quite happy so far with how this turned out. Much of it can be had from mods of course, but it's nevertheless nice to see that the devs do at least something to make the game more convenient.

 

[Dreed]

 

[Jacob]

I just realised the ferries can climb waterfall, awesome.

 

[ortucis]

I must say, I am addicted to Cities: Skylines. Already 30 hours in it, still fun. What is crazy is that I am still on my first map. 10-15 hrs ago, I was going bankrupt, most industries were abandoned and I almost started a new map. Then I learned about how I can basically setup different types of zones and ended up setting up farming, IT sector, sawmills and all. Now launched a rocket before I hit 70,000 peeps to unlock the plane (already placed the airport).



There was no planning since I started the game to learn the basics and was gonna start from scratch. Traffic was piling up in every corner and only recently, I started managing it by creating flyovers and setting up STOP signals. Traffic has started going smoother in many areas of the city compared to what it was like before. Still need to work on traffic more, but have basically managed to make it flow without massive jams on every intersection.


Also, this house burned down while the Fire Station was right across the street.





EDIT: Created thumbnails to avoid slowing page loading.

 

[Drax]

I like your no-nonsense naming of districts.

 

[Alienman]

I sure the people living in "Peasant uneducated" love their district name

 

[TripJack]

I sure the people living in "Peasant uneducated" love their district name

thankfully they cannot read what it is

 

[ortucis]

I sure the people living in "Peasant uneducated" love their district name

thankfully they cannot read what it is

Yeah, the only thing I provide them with is smoke detectors, they seem to be happy with that.


I reached 85,000 pop in 2 hrs, some shots from my adventures:

Farming is very profitable and that small IT cluster I setup before brings in nice cash. When I start a new map, I will focus on IT cluster and farming first. Seems to be pollution free money.




Shots of my farms. Rain (third shot) makes everything shiny, I like it though the game could've used more weather effects.






Nice top down view at night:




When you zoom in, you can tell what's REALLY happening in my city:

 

[deltamind]

Here's a video that shows pretty much everything the Parklife DLC contains:



The unique buildings are somewhat meh (but who cares, given we have thousands from mods). However, the rides for the amusement park look awesome, and the zoo also looks nice enough. Animations is still something that's hard to do for modders.

Release is in three days from now.

To be honest that looks pretty dope!

 

[ortucis]

Gentlemen, I found oil.



It was tucked away in the corner of the map. Up until now, I thought this map had no oil, but after unlocking a new tile I noticed something black when viewing resources on map for farming. I assumed it was water but nope, black gold. Out of nowhere, a small, well educated town popped up on the location. I was shocked. SHOCKED!

Behold, town Jackpot:



A town with top universities and best amenities, needs to pay bills. I am overcharging for tickets at the airport along with bus and metro tickets nearby:



Some hi-res shots featuring my old harbor in the background, bringing in goods:







If this venture fails or when the oil runs out, all these educated people will be working in farms and the logging industry nearby.

 

[Turjan]

Gentlemen, I found oil.

If this venture fails or when the oil runs out, all these educated people will be working in farms and the logging industry nearby.

Heh. Oil runs out very quickly in this game, if you don't use the vanilla mod to keep it eternal. As soon as that happens, the oil pumps will change to oil-processing plants, which will import tons of oil, which isn't a good thing. The easiest way to deal with that situation is to just use the zone tool to change the industry to "generic". You can use a "rolling" oil zone for quite a while (I mean moving the specialized zone across the oil field with time), but it needs lots of busy work.

Oil industry employs people on the education level of level 2 generic industry, similar to ore industry. Forestry and agriculture never run out of raw material, but are level 1 employers. To keep agriculture and forestry going in a well educated city, you usually have to make sure you have something of at least 6% unemployment.

By the way, you see the raw materials on every tile you buy on the graph that comes up when you click on the tile.

To get rid of the hud on a screenshot, click on the camera icon in the very lower right corner.

 

[Drax]

In the last update they added the option to display the resources layer while you're checking the tiles.

 

[ortucis]

Gentlemen, I found oil.

If this venture fails or when the oil runs out, all these educated people will be working in farms and the logging industry nearby.

Heh. Oil runs out very quickly in this game, if you don't use the vanilla mod to keep it eternal. As soon as that happens, the oil pumps will change to oil-processing plants, which will import tons of oil, which isn't a good thing. The easiest way to deal with that situation is to just use the zone tool to change the industry to "generic". You can use a "rolling" oil zone for quite a while (I mean moving the specialized zone across the oil field with time), but it needs lots of busy work.

Oil industry employs people on the education level of level 2 generic industry, similar to ore industry. Forestry and agriculture never run out of raw material, but are level 1 employers. To keep agriculture and forestry going in a well educated city, you usually have to make sure you have something of at least 6% unemployment.

By the way, you see the raw materials on every tile you buy on the graph that comes up when you click on the tile.

To get rid of the hud on a screenshot, click on the camera icon in the very lower right corner.

Yeah oil has been a disappointment so far. I was expecting to make shitton of money and see large oil rigs spawn up. But luckily, there is whole green farming and forestry tiles nearby I can move the population to.

But now, suddenly there's random flooding in areas for no reason. Setup some canals and raised terrain at the water edges, but got bored while doing it.

Anyway, after 33 hrs of playtime (over 100,000 citizens), I think I've had enough of the game for now. I'll come back to it later when I get that park life DLC.. on a discount. I bought the game on 4 DLC's on Steam Sale but that Park one wasn't on sale.

So yeah, gonna wait for that and start a new map, maybe the winter map next time. That should be fun. For now, gonna switch to Kingdoms and Castles.

 

[Alienman]

I have a bit of a weird problem. This is part of my city:

And I can't determine if these buildings are part of a DLC, mod or normal in-game houses? I have looked through my assets but can't seem to find them, and I don't have the European build-set on. Kinda want some new building types popping up, since every new building area turns into these buildings. They are HIGH DENS. I do use a mod that change how long people live and one that increases the amount of workers in buildings but I don't see how that would affect anything. Does it have to do with population in the city? Only got 14k, so not really expecting skyscrapers but when the game was new it was easy as hell to get those.

Don't wanna turn off all the assets in case that messes something up??

 

[Perkel]

That i think is part of Free DLC. European style sities theme.

 

[Alienman]

Can't find a free DLC on Steam. The only one I see is European Suburbia but I don't own that one. I do have all the other major DLCs though.

Edit:

Btw. Have they changed how Skyscrapers are formed? Will these buildings eventually turn into bigger buildings?

 

[Perkel]

I mean as part of paid DLC. Each expansion has paid part and free update. And european theme i think is in one of those as free part. But i might be wrong though because i didn't play CS is about 1,5 year.

 

[Mazisky]

I am still waiting for a city builder with the charming art of Simcity 2013.

 

[Perkel]

I am waiting for citybuilder that will actually put game into genre again.

While cities skylines is terrific sandbox game and looks really well and has interesting aspect of it (transport management) i doesn't provide you game. You almost can't lose, nothing never goes south, there is very little accountability for mistakes and your careful planning doesn't matter.

And it is problem not exclusive to CS, Simcity2013, SimCity4/3 also had this problem but to lesser extend.

I think what i look from games is context. By doing essentially creative mode you don't have that context and you essentially paint instead of playing a game where you struggle.

Happiness and fulfillment from game at least for me in this genre comes from struggle of solving problems in order to grow such city/village. If city building was such easy task like in games will all would live in cities with perfect roads, canalization, all green no industrial cities which is obviously not the case.

I hate for example that dirty industries almost always are seen as starting industries. There is a level to degree of complexity of dirty business. I might agree that some sweatshirt manufacture could be reasonable starting business but something like chain of petrochemical plants are something whole cities are build around instead of them being build around cities.

I am yet to see such game in genre. There is banished which tries to some degree tackle that problem but at much smaller scenario and Dwarf Fortress but aside from that there isn't really anything.

 

[Stokowski]

I am still waiting for a city builder with the charming art of Simcity 2013.

 

[Mazisky]

I am still waiting for a city builder with the charming art of Simcity 2013.

Still 10 times better than CS and his cold finnish barracks looking towns.

 

[Thane Solus]

I am waiting for citybuilder that will actually put game into genre again.

While cities skylines is terrific sandbox game and looks really well and has interesting aspect of it (transport management) i doesn't provide you game. You almost can't lose, nothing never goes south, there is very little accountability for mistakes and your careful planning doesn't matter.

And it is problem not exclusive to CS, Simcity2013, SimCity4/3 also had this problem but to lesser extend.

I think what i look from games is context. By doing essentially creative mode you don't have that context and you essentially paint instead of playing a game where you struggle.

Happiness and fulfillment from game at least for me in this genre comes from struggle of solving problems in order to grow such city/village. If city building was such easy task like in games will all would live in cities with perfect roads, canalization, all green no industrial cities which is obviously not the case.

I hate for example that dirty industries almost always are seen as starting industries. There is a level to degree of complexity of dirty business. I might agree that some sweatshirt manufacture could be reasonable starting business but something like chain of petrochemical plants are something whole cities are build around instead of them being build around cities.

I am yet to see such game in genre. There is banished which tries to some degree tackle that problem but at much smaller scenario and Dwarf Fortress but aside from that there isn't really anything.

Sweden Socialism cant loose, so its translated in their games.... (well publisher games, Battletech will fit right in)

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I am waiting for citybuilder that will actually put game into genre again.

While cities skylines is terrific sandbox game and looks really well and has interesting aspect of it (transport management) i doesn't provide you game. You almost can't lose, nothing never goes south, there is very little accountability for mistakes and your careful planning doesn't matter.

And it is problem not exclusive to CS, Simcity2013, SimCity4/3 also had this problem but to lesser extend.

I think what i look from games is context. By doing essentially creative mode you don't have that context and you essentially paint instead of playing a game where you struggle.

Happiness and fulfillment from game at least for me in this genre comes from struggle of solving problems in order to grow such city/village. If city building was such easy task like in games will all would live in cities with perfect roads, canalization, all green no industrial cities which is obviously not the case.

I hate for example that dirty industries almost always are seen as starting industries. There is a level to degree of complexity of dirty business. I might agree that some sweatshirt manufacture could be reasonable starting business but something like chain of petrochemical plants are something whole cities are build around instead of them being build around cities.

I am yet to see such game in genre. There is banished which tries to some degree tackle that problem but at much smaller scenario and Dwarf Fortress but aside from that there isn't really anything.

as far as i know, sim earth and sim life were the last and best of this kind.
damn, what i'd give for a remaster...