Dominion Strategy Forum

Miscellaneous => General Discussion => Topic started by: theory on March 10, 2015, 10:34:44 am

Title: Cities: Skylines
Post by: theory on March 10, 2015, 10:34:44 am: (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/Cities_Skylines_cover_art.jpg)

Who's super excited for this game? The Simcity series is one of my favorite games of all time, and this looks like it'll be the best city-builder game since Simcity 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gI2N10QyRA

Early reviews appear very enthusiastic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/cities-skylines
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Ozle on March 10, 2015, 04:37:13 pm: hmm, looks nice and clean, hated all the more recent Sim Cities with being too much.

I'll definately give it a look
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Ichimaru Gin on March 10, 2015, 04:46:58 pm: This does look good. The last Simcity game I played was 3000 which I got when I was like 9. Had loads of fun with it though. From what I gather, some of its sequels weren't as well-liked.

Edit: realized it was actually 3000 that I played.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: theory on March 10, 2015, 04:48:49 pm: Simcity 3000 and 4 were superb. The 2013 Simcity was plagued with technical problems but had some decent innovations underneath. This looks like the real deal, though!
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 10, 2015, 05:29:31 pm: This looks interesting -- I think I'm going to wait another week or so to see some more reviews but I'm thinking I'll buy it if it has a positive reception!
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Kirian on March 10, 2015, 06:31:22 pm: This looks pretty slick. SC4 was the pinnacle of the genre; if this can unseat it, I'll be impressed.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 15, 2015, 09:07:18 pm: Did any of you get this? What do you think of it?
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Ichimaru Gin on March 16, 2015, 01:44:07 am: I'm teetering on the edge of getting it. I'll report back when/if I do. I watched some gameplay on Youtube, and it looked pretty fantastic. I normally wait for games to go on sale though...
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Ichimaru Gin on March 17, 2015, 11:20:28 pm: And...I finally broke down and got it. It's downloading right now. I'm excited!
I'll probably have more to say tomorrow after playing it all night.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 10:03:14 am: Relevant? http://imgur.com/gallery/WdJim
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: pacovf on March 18, 2015, 10:34:54 am: I remember playing Cities XL and having my computer spontaneously combust from trying to calculate traffic.

Quote from: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 10:03:14 am
Relevant? http://imgur.com/gallery/WdJim

I was not expecting the Space Elevator.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 10:42:41 am: Quote
Roundabouts are indeed pretty sweet. To be honest, you can ignore almost everything you just read and plop roundabouts everywhere. As an added bonus, they look nice and are a central tool for ton of the amazing cities I see on this subreddit. The only downsides are that they take a little longer to build, and they take a lot more space.

If this is indeed the case in this game, then it does not do a very good job of modelling real life traffic, because in real life, roundabouts are terrible :( Anyone ever driven in New Jersey?
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: theory on March 18, 2015, 11:44:12 am: Perhaps you are thinking of something else? It is widely accepted in the urban planning literature that roundabouts are superior to intersections in terms of traffic, safety, and fuel consumption:

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roundabouts/topicoverview

Carmel, Indiana has replaced its intersections with roundabouts and reduced the number of accidents by 40% (and injury accidents by 80%): http://www.carmel.in.gov/index.aspx?page=123

As someone who grew up in NJ, NJ has very few roundabouts. Maybe you are thinking of jughandles.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 11:58:14 am: Quote from: theory on March 18, 2015, 11:44:12 am
Perhaps you are thinking of something else? It is widely accepted in the urban planning literature that roundabouts are superior to intersections in terms of traffic, safety, and fuel consumption:

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roundabouts/topicoverview

Carmel, Indiana has replaced its intersections with roundabouts and reduced the number of accidents by 40% (and injury accidents by 80%): http://www.carmel.in.gov/index.aspx?page=123

As someone who grew up in NJ, NJ has very few roundabouts. Maybe you are thinking of jughandles.

I'm talking about the big traffic circles that you see throughout central Jersey, especially around the shore.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 18, 2015, 12:40:02 pm: Quote from: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 11:58:14 am
Quote from: theory on March 18, 2015, 11:44:12 am
Perhaps you are thinking of something else? It is widely accepted in the urban planning literature that roundabouts are superior to intersections in terms of traffic, safety, and fuel consumption:

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/roundabouts/topicoverview

Carmel, Indiana has replaced its intersections with roundabouts and reduced the number of accidents by 40% (and injury accidents by 80%): http://www.carmel.in.gov/index.aspx?page=123

As someone who grew up in NJ, NJ has very few roundabouts. Maybe you are thinking of jughandles.

I'm talking about the big traffic circles that you see throughout central Jersey, especially around the shore.

There's a decent amount in central/southern NJ. I think they're better for people who are used to them, but worse for newcomers. There's a lot in DC and they definitely help with traffic.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 12:45:56 pm: My main problem was the two-lane ones.. the circle was two lanes wide, but you have to exit from the right one.. and in some cases part of the lane would be, like, exit only.. lots of congestion getting on, changing lanes, getting off. There is one on the drive to the shore, not far from Point Pleasant. The roads would get really backed up.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: pacovf on March 18, 2015, 12:55:34 pm: You are supposed to get in as much as possible, then move one lane outwards per exit until you are in the outmost lane right before your exit.

It is quite an exercise in faith, because it relies on everybody doing the same, and some people get into the outer lane before their exit because they are afraid they will miss it, and it messes everything up.

At least that's how I've been taught about them, and how I feel about them. Small roundabouts are the Wild West though.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 12:57:22 pm: Quote from: pacovf on March 18, 2015, 12:55:34 pm
You are supposed to get in as much as possible, then move one lane outwards per exit until you are in the outmost lane right before your exit.

It is quite an exercise in faith, because it relies on everybody doing the same, and some people get into the outer lane before their exit because they are afraid they will miss it, and it messes everything up.

At least that's how I've been taught about them, and how I feel about them. Small roundabouts are the Wild West though.

I don't get it :( You get in on the outermost lane, and then people need to exit on that lane..
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: pacovf on March 18, 2015, 01:03:04 pm: Let's say we have a N lane roundabout. You want to get out at the n-th exit. Then you enter the roundabout at the n-th lane (counting from outside). Everytime there's an exit, you move one lane outwards. If everybody does so, you shouldn't have a problem doing it. By the time you reach your exit, you should be at the outmost lane. Nobody can block you from going out.

If there are more exits than lanes, you get in the innermost lane, and don't move outwards until the number of remaining exits until yours is the number of lanes of the roundabout.

That's the theory, at least.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 01:09:45 pm: Okay, but these traffic circles are small and congested. You enter in the outermost lane and if you want to exit at the next exit or the one after (which are immediate), you have to stay there. If you get out at the one after the next one, then people are getting in in your lane, and basically crossing you as you have to exit.

It's just really messy. It works fine if there are no other cars. Then again, so would going straight.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Kirian on March 18, 2015, 06:20:22 pm: Quote from: Witherweaver on March 18, 2015, 10:03:14 am
Relevant? http://imgur.com/gallery/WdJim

OK, that looks fucking gorgeous.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 27, 2015, 01:41:22 am: Bought the game. I'm loving it so far -- highly recommend it to anyone who is interested.

Do you guys have any tips on making highway interchanges? I just spent forever building one, it's very hard to do well.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Voltaire on March 27, 2015, 11:19:39 am: Quote from: Twistedarcher on March 27, 2015, 01:41:22 am
Bought the game. I'm loving it so far -- highly recommend it to anyone who is interested.

A friend told me to wait for patches, something about "undo" when building being impossible? Is this incorrect? I'm inclined to waste all weekend playing this.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 27, 2015, 11:23:09 am: Quote from: Voltaire on March 27, 2015, 11:19:39 am
Quote from: Twistedarcher on March 27, 2015, 01:41:22 am
Bought the game. I'm loving it so far -- highly recommend it to anyone who is interested.

A friend told me to wait for patches, something about "undo" when building being impossible? Is this incorrect? I'm inclined to waste all weekend playing this.

An undo button would be great -- but the lack of one hasn't overly frustrated me right now. As of now, if you want to delete something you just built, you have to actually bulldoze it. A bit annoying but it hasn't really affected me at all.

A lot of stuff is getting modded that's helpful -- you can pull intersections, buildings, new features, etc. As an example, in the base game you can only purchase 9 of the 25 plots of land, but you can easily get a mod to allow you to use all 25 plots of land. There's mods that let you change whether or not an intersection has a traffic light, traffic patterns of certain lanes, etc. More and more is getting modded.

I'm having a blast with it -- I definitely view it as more of a sandbox-type game than anything else. It's not like it's a exercise in maximizing efficiency or anything like that. You just build stuff that you think looks cool without bringing your city to its knees -- I've had no problem progressing after getting the very basics out of the way.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Voltaire on March 27, 2015, 11:26:52 am: Hmm, I may go for it then.

My friend's horror story involved building out his entire street grid, then discovering he'd accidentally done it all using one-way streets that didn't flow together.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 27, 2015, 12:03:56 pm: You can upgrade roads from one type to another and build over them -- it doesn't necessarily need to be an upgrade, either. So if you have a one way road, and then decide you want a two-way road, it's easy enough to make that change. It will automatically rezone residential, industrial, or commercial zones to fit the new road. The only difficulty is if you have a service that can't be removed (school, firehouse, etc.), then you'll need to move it temporarily away and you can move it back after you upgrade the road.

But yeah, basically, if you build an entire city section, and discover you've built it wrong, you might have a slightly difficult time -- but that's what save is for!
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: eHalcyon on March 27, 2015, 01:40:05 pm: Is there a lose condition? Like, can you screw up so bad that the citizens all riot?
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Ichimaru Gin on March 27, 2015, 02:42:51 pm: I'm very impressed with the patches the devs have released so far. Too often, I feel like game designers rely on the ingenuity of the community to fix problems. The first patch made the majority of the mods I had installed obsolete. They fixed parks driving commerical demand down to nothing, and added the ability to upgrade one way roads to two way and vice-versa.

@eHalcyon, as far as I can tell there is no official "game over" or whatever. I can see a scenario with negative cash and being maxed out on loans that would basically equal a position you couldn't recover from though.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on March 27, 2015, 04:30:10 pm: Quote from: eHalcyon on March 27, 2015, 01:40:05 pm
Is there a lose condition? Like, can you screw up so bad that the citizens all riot?

My first two cities, I overbuilt early on (not realizing power would transmit between buildings, I built a LOT of power lines) and had to immediately restart. You can screw up badly enough to make everyone leave, I'm sure, but it would be pretty hard (at least to the point where I'm at -- my first city is still only at ~20k).
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on April 01, 2015, 05:39:03 pm: What's the largest city anyone here's gotten? I just got my first city to 80k, unlocking everything. It took me about 30 hours, but I'm pretty obsessive about making sure traffic works well (no problems at all!) and I don't fast forward. How large have you all managed to make your cities?
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: theory on April 01, 2015, 07:02:00 pm: I'm at 75k. I have several seemingly insoluble traffic issues and it might be unsolvable barring massive a redesign, sadly ....
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: jonts26 on April 01, 2015, 07:33:35 pm: Just purchased. This looks like a great city sim. I look forward to blowing this weekend on it.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: theory on April 10, 2015, 01:10:52 pm: Here's my current city. I'm obsessed with creating terminating vistas:
(http://i.imgur.com/pakkRlkh.jpg) (http://imgur.com/pakkRlk)
(http://i.imgur.com/yZp6LaUh.jpg) (http://imgur.com/yZp6LaU)
(http://i.imgur.com/R893QG7h.jpg) (http://imgur.com/R893QG7)
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Witherweaver on April 13, 2015, 02:13:05 pm: http://imgur.com/gallery/QeEtD6f
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Kirian on April 13, 2015, 02:58:10 pm: Quote from: Witherweaver on April 13, 2015, 02:13:05 pm
http://imgur.com/gallery/QeEtD6f

Best comment on that: "The Dread Sigil Odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu!"
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Twistedarcher on May 11, 2015, 06:25:12 pm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOuOEHbWKuw
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: LostPhoenix on August 20, 2018, 07:27:37 pm: Getting a new laptop soon. Looking forward to finally playing this game.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Chris is me on August 20, 2018, 08:26:58 pm: It’s super dope, I’ve put in a few hundred hours this year. I love it.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Trogdor the Burninator on August 21, 2018, 06:33:03 pm: Cities Skylines is probably my favorite City sim I've played. Does anyone else use the free-build mode? I find that to be pretty nice. I don't like having to wait to unlock a bunch of extra stuff.
Title: Re: Cities: Skylines
Post by: Chris is me on August 21, 2018, 09:48:21 pm: Quote from: Trogdor the Burninator on August 21, 2018, 06:33:03 pm
Cities Skylines is probably my favorite City sim I've played. Does anyone else use the free-build mode? I find that to be pretty nice. I don't like having to wait to unlock a bunch of extra stuff.

I have been playing unlimited money (because it’s basically unlimited after the first bit any), and with the first couple of milestones unlocked so I have all the roads but still earning everything else. Will probably just do unlock all later on, but this helps me retain a sense of progression without repeating the dull part of the game and making advance road planning impossible.