Any City Builders Out There? Cities: Skylines is for you

[Camel]

Are you a fan of Sim City 4 and its predecessors? If so, there may be a new game for you that goes by the name of Cities: Skylines.

 

After just a few hours playing the game, I feel that this is what Sim City 2013 should have been. It's just brilliant and it's actually a fully functioning game unlike SC2013 which was a blithering excuse of a game.

 

Cities: Skylines is a modern take on the classic city simulation. The game introduces new game play elements to realize the thrill and hardships of creating and maintaining a real city whilst expanding on some well-established tropes of the city building experience. From the makers of the Cities in Motion franchise, the game boasts a fully realized transport system. It also includes the ability to mod the game to suit your play style as a fine counter balance to the layered and challenging simulation. You’re only limited by your imagination, so take control and reach for the sky!

 

Main features:

 

Multi-tiered and challenging simulation: Constructing your city from the ground up is easy to learn, but hard to master. Playing as the mayor of your city you’ll be faced with balancing essential requirements such as education, water, electricity, police, fire fighting, healthcare and much more along with your citys real economy system. Citizens within your city react fluidly, with gravitas and with an air of authenticity to a multitude of game play scenarios.

 

Extensive local traffic simulation: Colossal Orders extensive experience developing the Cities in Motion series is fully utilized in fully fleshed out and well-crafted transport systems.

 

Districts and Policies: Be more than just an administrator from city hall. Designating parts of your city as a district results in the application of policies which results in you rising to the status of Mayor for your own city.

 

Extensive modding support: Build or improve on existing maps and structures. You can then import them into the game, share them as well as download the creations of other city builders on the Steam workshop.

 

Source

 

Why not give it a go? It's only £23.99/$29.99 on Steam or £14.90(may change) on CDkeys.com. It is well worth the money.

[Ryzza5]

I've got Cities XL 2011/Platinum which is a modern version of Sim City 2000; I just don't have the time and patience for it unfortunately.

 

Maybe if a bunch of us were in one multiplayer area I'd be more interested, but we've kind-of already done a fair chunk of that (twice) in Minecraft, minus the whole economics part.

[CarMadMike]

This sounds like my kind of game but I don't think i'll try it until I get a new laptop :hmmm:

[Guest MrLolololXD]

We need another minecraft server with some sort of economic/trading system, that would be cool

[TIMELESS]

After just a few hours playing the game, I feel that this is what Sim City 2013 should have been. It's just brilliant and it's actually a fully functioning game unlike SC2013 which was a blithering excuse of a game..

 

Well I'm sold. SC was the most ridiculous game release ever.. well almost. I was reading about Cities XXL or w/e it's called, they released Cities XL without... anything new and sold it as a new game :lol: That made me skeptical about this but if it's as good as you say... :hmmm: But yeah Sim City was a joke, lots of the issues have been fixed now apart from the fact that you can never build a city bigger than Ipswich. :fp:

 

And yeah I'm always up for some MP, I could record it and make a "TDUCK plays" series :p

[mau92]

For me the last great SC was 4, and the last I played. I also played Cities XL but I didn't like... It would be nice if Banished gets MP functions like treading or something similar.

[Camel]

I thought I mentioned that Cities: Skylines is nothing to do with the Cities XL series. Maybe I wrote it in my uni work instead. :lol: It's not Minecraft(:lol:) or got multiplayer.

 

It's just Sim City but done right.

[TIMELESS]

I thought I mentioned that Cities: Skylines is nothing to do with the Cities XL series. Maybe I wrote it in my uni work instead. :lol: It's not Minecraft(:lol:) or got multiplayer.

 

It's just Sim City but done right.

 

I know >.<

 

Looks pretty good: Twitch

[Ryzza5]

Looks decent

[CarMadMike]

I think this game and other city builders can be a bit confusing for me and perhaps other europeans, we're from places where nothing has had too much planning put into it as it's something that's been fixed and changed for the past god knows how many centuries, and this is hard to portray in a game. Unlike the grids etc you find in more modern countries. Though having watched that squirrel stream for a bit it does look like a great game.

 

If it's not too resource intensive I might buy it.

[TIMELESS]

I think this game and other city builders can be a bit confusing for me and perhaps other europeans, we're from places where nothing has had too much planning put into it as it's something that's been fixed and changed for the past god knows how many centuries, and this is hard to portray in a game. Unlike the grids etc you find in more modern countries. Though having watched that squirrel stream for a bit it does look like a great game.

 

If it's not too resource intensive I might buy it.

 

Yeah that's one thing that's often missed. European cities have started out small and just been built upon over and over again and updated and changed and improved over time, so we rarely have perfectly square blocks like 'Murica.

[Camel]

There isn't really a grid system in this game. If you get the first road laid down straight then you can make your own grid from that. But the free form road tool is pretty good.

 

You can also flood your cities with the hydro dams if you're not careful. :hmmm:

[TIMELESS]

There isn't really a grid system in this game. If you get the first road laid down straight then you can make your own grid from that. But the free form road tool is pretty good.

 

You can also flood your cities with the hydro dams if you're not careful. :hmmm:

 

:lol:

 

I think I've.. won? Or lost? I'm not really sure. I have a city with a population of about 25k, there's absolutely no problems, I make 20k per week or day or w/e it is and there's no residential, commercial or industrial demand anymore. :hmmm: Not entirely sure where to go from there. Might make a new city.

 

Bloody good game though, I love the fact that you start out with an area about the same as the maximum area in SimCity.. then you can buy like 8 other adjoining areas the same size. :lol:

[Camel]

You can buy all 24 extra tiles if you get a mod off the steam workshop.

 

I got my city to about 40k population before the traffic stopped it from expanding more(some of the services stopped working because they got stuck in traffic) so I knocked it all down and set up an awesomely confusing 1 way system which has solved the traffic problem and now I'm back up to 45k and it's going up fairly quickly now.

 

I still keep finding out new things that I can do like setting up the districts which all have there own policies like banning heavy good vehicles on certain roads. Specialised farming, mining etz zones which make a lot of money.

 

Also try not to budget over 100% for things. If you set the budget for a service to 150% you will only get a 25% boost in output.

[Ozzmcom]

I've been hearing a lot about this game. I'm a huge fan of SC4 that game took a long time to master, I still play it now and then.

I guess I'll just get this game instead of the season pass for the crew :lol:

[TIMELESS]

Cheers for the advice Mells, I've got some districts set up already with their own policies and it seems to be working well. Think I'll continue re-doing my roads. I made some ridiculous motorway type road that's absolutely pointless. And a pointless roundabout at the end of that :hmmm:

[Paladin Skylark]

Aye this game is bloody good indeed.

[Ryzza5]

 

:...:

[Paladin Skylark]

Tbh I was going to make a thread for this game then already saw this, looks like I was a little late to the party. It's the best city simulator since SimCity2000, easily.

[TIMELESS]

http://www.gmtruckclub.com/forum/data/photos/l/20/20951-1370531476-88c7ce21c4539100b150f752c3ad9f0c.jpg

 

:...:

 

[Camel]

My awesome one way system turned out to not be awesome once the population got to 75k. :(

 

We must rebuild!

[Paladin Skylark]

 

[TIMELESS]

New patch!

 

1.0.6 - Patch notes

 

Windows: dependencies to the visual studio runtime have been removed. Addresses the issue where ColossalNative.dll would fail to load for users missing/having wrong msvcrt dlls.

Windows/OSX: fixed an issue where some users would not have permissions to access an user folder

Linux: fixed some cases where the first time launch would show the game half way out of the screen on dual monitors

Linux: various runtime optimizations

Linux: hopefully fixed the performance problems and the log spam, we were unable to reproduce that issue so this is a bit of a blindfolded fix

Linux: added support for $XDG_DATA_HOME. If you are using a custom path for XDG and already played the game on that machine, you will need to manually move the user files from the default folder ~/.local/share/Colossal Order/Cities_Skylines to $XDG_DATA_HOME/Colossal Order/Cities_Skylines

Mac/Linux: fixed a crash when selecting a building in the Asset importer

All platforms: added some debug info which may be useful when trying to help users in trouble

All platforms: added support for -screen-height & -screen-width and lowered severity of argument error unsupported launch options so they would cause the new game button to be greyed

Modding API: fixed OnCalculateResidentialDemand, OnCalculateCommercialDemand and OnCalculateWorkplaceDemand to call their respective counterpart properly. Also fixed for office buildings calling industrial level up.

nerfed parks decreasing commercial demand

road upgrade tool now works between two-way and one-way roads and right mouse-button changes direction of one-way roads

building effect radius is more accurate

added a Film grain slider in the Graphics options, like for the Tilt shift. (Users with the Disable Film Grain mod subscribed from Steam workshop and enabled will be notified with a "Console warning" when the game start and the game will automatically disable the mod and set the film grain amount to 0 so that no action from users is required apart from closing the Console panel).

added a chirper volume slider in the Audio options

intro screen can be skipped with mouse click or key press

fixed a case where an error would occur if the Source folder was not found while sharing a Mod to the workshop

fixed Publish workshop panel caption to not always show Savegame regardless which asset type was selected

killed the clicking sounds that could be heard on a quiet night during full moon and near the end of the loading screen

buildings uploaded to the workshop will now go to their respective tags automatically. (Buildings already on the workshop will not, we are currently investigating how to make it happen without users having to do anything about it)

fixed holding down mouse button and release over ui keeps some tools active

fixed tooltip stays visible when using shortcut to open area view

fixed parking spaces still working for burned down buildings.

fixed mouse raycast use normal mesh for burned down buildings.

removed airplane engine sound from unlockpanel... :p

fixed minor text issues in different languages

fixed wrong tree shadow alpha with pollution or water

fixed bulldozeing ship/airplane paths in map editor even when they are not visible

fixed pedestrian bridge color slightly wrong from far distance

 

Please note: if your specific issue has not been fixed, it's of course still on our to-do list. Do not worry!

 

Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed to bug researching, reporting and helping us :)

 

Regards,

The Cities: Skylines Team

 

 

Also does anyone else find that the AA looks.. awful? Needs more AA? :lol:

[Paladin Skylark]

Here's the deal, the game was made by a fairly small group and it's this good. EA should really, really listen up. They could learn.

[Camel]

Aww, no mention of them working on fixing the traffic just yet. :(

 

But it is good to see how much work they are still putting into the game. Most big developers don't fix that many things in 2 months, let alone under 2 weeks. :)