Cities: Skylines

[Dewar]

As far as I'm aware every intersection is a light. There isn't even road priority like Sim City has where traffic on the smaller road has to stop for traffic on the larger one who gets right-of-way.

[Bjorn]

  On 4/1/2015 at 11:56 PM, Gormongous said:

Trying to unlock some of these buildings, I turned off all my police stations and closed all my medical facilities. The crime rate is 21% and average health is 63%. Both have been stable at that for nearly a year. The game is screaming at me to fix the "problems" of having no police stations or hospitals, but my population's at 105,000 and rising, my weekly income's $20,500 and rising, and happiness has stabilized in the low 80s. This is a little disappointing, to be honest. How can a city function for a year without any policing or healthcare?

 

It would be incredible if a sim modeled emergent community protection groups, which could then spiral into other unintended consequences. 

[Spenny]

Yeah it seems more and more to me that this game is a road drawing sandbox, which is pleasing in its own right, but most of my cities problems are coming from my negligence more so than poor decision making. 

[YoThatLimp]

All hail dancing alien roundabout.

 

It actually is working pretty splendidly (yes, I know I am terrible with roads)

 

[Cordeos]

And SimCopter is coming:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04/07/citycopter-mod-aims-to-be-simcopter-for-cities-skylines/

 

Is Streets of SimCity next?

[Coods]

[DocRandal]

 

Cities Skylines: After Dark

Night time is fun time! After Dark is the first expansion to the hugely popular classic city simulation Cities: Skylines. The game expands on the repertoire of features and customizations designed to enhance the thrill as well as maintain the challenge of the city building experience. (Requires Cities: Skylines.)

Developed by Colossal Order and published Paradox Interactive, the central feature of the latest expansion is the day and night cycle, which alters the approach to managing your city. Will you construct a bustling city that lives and breathes at night or will your city succumb to the perils and misadventures of night life? You’re only limited by your imagination, so take control. The sky is the limit! Find out what life is like in the city when the sun goes down!

Main features:

• Day and night changes in the city and affects citizen schedules. Traffic is visibly slower at night and some zoned areas do not work with full efficiency, further easing the traffic. Service vehicles move around as usual. A free update for all users.
• Commercial areas can specialize in leisure activities. Leisure areas are especially active during the night, but work like regular commercial areas during the day. 
• Commercial areas such as beach bars and restaurants, small marina and fishing tours on the shoreline can specialize in beach activities.
• Criminals will now be taken to Prison from Police buildings. Taxi service will help citizens and tourists travel around the city. Cargo hubs are harbors that accept cargo trains straight to the terminal. International airport is a huge airport, allowing much more traffic than the previous airport. It has a metro station attached to it. Bus terminal allows citizens to transfer to other bus lines in the terminal building. 
• Bikes and dedicated bike lanes and bike ways let citizens opt for a faster alternative to walking. Bus lanes can be used to help the public transportation run smoother.

[Cordeos]

  On 8/6/2015 at 8:02 PM, DocRandal said:

 

Cities Skylines: After Dark

Night time is fun time! After Dark is the first expansion to the hugely popular classic city simulation Cities: Skylines. The game expands on the repertoire of features and customizations designed to enhance the thrill as well as maintain the challenge of the city building experience. (Requires Cities: Skylines.)

Developed by Colossal Order and published Paradox Interactive, the central feature of the latest expansion is the day and night cycle, which alters the approach to managing your city. Will you construct a bustling city that lives and breathes at night or will your city succumb to the perils and misadventures of night life? You’re only limited by your imagination, so take control. The sky is the limit! Find out what life is like in the city when the sun goes down!

Main features:

• Day and night changes in the city and affects citizen schedules. Traffic is visibly slower at night and some zoned areas do not work with full efficiency, further easing the traffic. Service vehicles move around as usual. A free update for all users.
• Commercial areas can specialize in leisure activities. Leisure areas are especially active during the night, but work like regular commercial areas during the day. 
• Commercial areas such as beach bars and restaurants, small marina and fishing tours on the shoreline can specialize in beach activities.
• Criminals will now be taken to Prison from Police buildings. Taxi service will help citizens and tourists travel around the city. Cargo hubs are harbors that accept cargo trains straight to the terminal. International airport is a huge airport, allowing much more traffic than the previous airport. It has a metro station attached to it. Bus terminal allows citizens to transfer to other bus lines in the terminal building. 
• Bikes and dedicated bike lanes and bike ways let citizens opt for a faster alternative to walking. Bus lanes can be used to help the public transportation run smoother.

 

I want a mod where my city is in night mode the whole time an economy entirely based on partying!

[Badfinger]

That trailer had a much different tenor than I expected from the thumbnail and title!

[ihavefivehat]

  On 8/7/2015 at 1:34 PM, Badfinger said:

That trailer had a much different tenor than I expected from the thumbnail and title!

 

I know! There were absolutely no flying toasters at all!

[BigJKO]

  On 8/7/2015 at 3:19 PM, ihavefivehat said:

I know! There were absolutely no flying toasters at all!

[Altea]

While waiting for dark after-party, I continue to watch more Cities Skylines on YouTube <3

 

[Dewar]

Nice, I'm looking forward to that.

[Cordeos]

Free weekend on Steam if anyone wants to try it out: http://www.destructoid.com/you-can-play-cities-skylines-for-free-until-sunday-342438.phtml

[Nappi]

Those puns...

 

http://store.steampowered.com/app/420610/

[brkl]

Those are pretty strong puns for a Finnish company writing in English.

[prawks]

Tried this last night for the free weekend. I'm not much of a city-building guy but I can imagine getting into them for sure.

My first attempt I created my roads, zoned them, got electricity running no problem. Reading the tutorial for water lines, it said "you do not need to loop them". I took this to mean, well I lay one down from the pump out across town, and one from the drain all across town, and I'm up and running. My town is then hemmorhaging money, citizens are complaining that they don't have running water, and I don't have enough money to fix it, so my town just keeps... growing?! I let myself get pretty far into the negative before restarting after I figured out the lines need to connect the pump and drain. I think I need some YouTube tutorials before I get much further. With so many features in the game I was expecting a more thorough in-game tutorial.

[clyde]

So you just make a big 'U' with the water pump at one end and the drain at the other?

[Jutranjo]

You just need a network of pipes that have at least 1 source and 1 drain on it. Odds are the source wasn't big enough, you might need more water pumps. There's 2 separate demand bars that tell you which you're lacking, also an overlay of what your pipes cover. You also click the thought bubbles of "I don't have water, this city sucks" to get the camera snapped to the location of that house/building.

[clyde]

So I don't have much time to play this during the free-weekend, but I enjoyed making a main-street and installing the first-person mod.

I'm curious about how complex the system and aesthetics of disrepair go. Does Cities: Skylines evoke narratives of gentrification, patinas, and other aspects of hyper-local histories?

[Gormongous]

  On 2/19/2016 at 7:32 PM, clyde said:

I'm curious about how complex the system and aesthetics of disrepair go. Does Cities: Skylines evoke narratives of gentrification, patinas, and other aspects of hyper-local histories?

Not even accidentally. Urban decay is a blight to be bulldozed, full stop. The closest that you get is, in an old-growth city where expansion has stopped or shifted, the interplay between user-created neighborhoods and actual patterns of commerce can be unexpected and interesting.

[Valorian Endymion]

Played a bit of the new expansion yesterday - the map I choose didn´t snowed, but the rain looks really gorgeous. I think that finnaly they add a auto bulldoze for abandoned buildings (or the mod I was using was still running, or not, I disabled everything to test but I might forget something).

[Nappi]

I played the game for the first time since the release, and started a new city with both expansions and the winter theme. The increased demand for electricity at low temperatures almost got me, as I had used up all my money and loans, realized too late that I could not provide electricity for a large part of my city during -20C weather, and started losing people and money quick. I managed to deal with the situation by temporarily raising taxes to avoid bankruptcy until I was able to get a new loan and build a new coal plant. The heating pipes vs electricity mechanic seems quite cool.

 

Otherwise the experience was quite similar to my previous city. In the three hours or so I played, I had some terrible traffic problems and was close to a total disaster a few times. Then I suddenly got my shit together and by the time I quit I had 30 thousand inhabitants, about 1 million moneys and was earning 20k a month (a week, a day?) Still, have to figure out the traffic, though. There seems to be cool new options for public transport now.

 

I'm a bit disappointed that there are no seasons, just maps with permanent winter. It would have been interesting to see snowplow services shut down and ice skate rinks turn into football fields come spring. I wonder if there is any chance of that functionality being added later.

 

Also, yay, saunas.

[toblix]

Oh, so I have a question for anyone who's been keeping up with this game. A couple of months after release I sort of gave up on the game because of how unintuitively the traffic behaved, and how you had to follow special rules, hot tips and specific templates («all of my city is a giant one-way off-ramp!») to get traffic to work. There was a lot of rumbling about this on forums («why do all the cars line up in a single lane, while all the others are empty?!»), and some minor improvements, but it very much looked like they wouldn't be able to do much with how traffic behaved (apparently this was to do with some core characteristics of the traffic system, and performance stuff)

 

So, is traffic still as weird and nonsensical as it was at release?

[Nappi]

I don't know if the traffic is still nonsensical (or if it was really nonsensical before), but I think I will find out soon. It seems, I learned very little from my earlier mistakes, as I did not pay enough attention to the traffic when I started building my city and am now facing severe congestion problems again. Quick Googling revealed a bunch of guides on handling traffic (for example, this one), and I'm planning on re-arranging my traffic using these guidelines. Most of the stuff, like paying attention to a well-defined road hierarchy and avoiding frequent intersections on multi-lane roads, make a lot of sense and you can see their effects in-game quite easily. At the moment, I'm quite optimistic that I can save my city by throwing bunch of money and bulldozers at the problem. I'm actually looking forward to making some drastic changes to my city layout. Also trams will probably be cool...

 

Of course, it might be that after spending two hours building new roads, the traffic is more of a mess than it was before. In which case, fuck this game.