urbanMSP

Skylines is out now. I'll see you all when I return from my game-cave.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/citie ... =userscore

It looks so amazing. I've been watching game play of it since my computer is not good enough for it

... Well, I won't be sleeping tonight.

Anyone on steam, my ID is walkingsnake if you'd like a friend.

I'll likely be playing around with modding the game and putting up Workshop files at some point. I was way too huge into this stuff during the SC4 days, I can see myself doing it all over again.

"Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on Steam! That's a good sign.

The most beautiful day of the year, and I'm in my apartment faffing about with road layouts. Love it.

Never has a city game emphasized traffic this much. And I love it.

FYI for other players - pathfinding still needs some improvements and the devs are already promising patches soon. They've been very transparent and open so far, small team, no big publisher overlords.

I wish I had a good computer

Having mods activated disables Steam Achievements, which is perfectly understandable. That being said, the conflict of my desire to get achievements and my desire to kill Chirpy is causing a bit of distress.

There's a mod that's supposed to reenable achievements while running mods. I'm at work so I don't have the link handy but it's in the workshop.

Also I'm loving the game so far. It needs more building variety and I'm a bit disappointed at how it goes from low density houses straight to Minneapolis high rises (because twenty stories is apparently a high rise here), but I feel like both of those issues will be resolved by the pent up creative willpower of the sc4 modding community. I can't wait for the skylines version of NAM.

I really wish you could rezone without unzoning first. And buildings don't get reused they just get torn down.

Maybe I'm not creative enough but I just keep drawing grids and I'm like "ok this is boring." Once unlock all the buildings I might just say I'm done with it.

That zoning thing really is a problem. I can't upzone an area without tearing everything on it down? How does that make sense?

I must admit I'm a little disappointed in the game. I'm one of those people who still plays Simcity 4 regularly, so in theory I ought to be the perfect man for this game, but I keep running into problems:

- The angled streets are nice, but the way they implemented it means a ton of space in any given block is left underutilized. That's actually true even with perfectly rectangular blocks; it's very easy to end up with a no-man's-land in the middle.
- A lot of the new mechanics are more irritating than exciting. I have to pay attention to whether my power plants are getting enough petroleum? I have to empty my landfills? Don't even get me started about abandoned buildings.
- They don't really give you a detailed-enough view of the way things work to make everything go smoothly. Dams are a big example of this: if you build one, are you going to change the currents and flood your town? Who knows? The little arrows in the water certainly aren't enough to help you decide.
- I appreciate the complexity of the public transit system (which might be the coolest thing in the game), but it's buggy as hell.

This game is trying to be way too many things, and it doesn't do any of them well enough to justify the annoyances of the rest. If it isn't a great city builder, if it isn't an enjoyable game, if it isn't an effective mass transit modeler... what is it?

You can't up/downzone? That's a problem. Worst part about Cities XL.

That zoning thing really is a problem. I can't upzone an area without tearing everything on it down? How does that make sense?

I must admit I'm a little disappointed in the game. I'm one of those people who still plays Simcity 4 regularly, so in theory I ought to be the perfect man for this game, but I keep running into problems:

- The angled streets are nice, but the way they implemented it means a ton of space in any given block is left underutilized. That's actually true even with perfectly rectangular blocks; it's very easy to end up with a no-man's-land in the middle.
- A lot of the new mechanics are more irritating than exciting. I have to pay attention to whether my power plants are getting enough petroleum? I have to empty my landfills? Don't even get me started about abandoned buildings.
- They don't really give you a detailed-enough view of the way things work to make everything go smoothly. Dams are a big example of this: if you build one, are you going to change the currents and flood your town? Who knows? The little arrows in the water certainly aren't enough to help you decide.
- I appreciate the complexity of the public transit system (which might be the coolest thing in the game), but it's buggy as hell.

This game is trying to be way too many things, and it doesn't do any of them well enough to justify the annoyances of the rest. If it isn't a great city builder, if it isn't an enjoyable game, if it isn't an effective mass transit modeler... what is it?

There are mods for deleting buildings and auto-emptying landfills, so that takes care of some of the annoyances right there.

And if anyone does design some buildings on the workshop, post some links here so we can track them down.

I'm about 10 hours into Cities: Skylines, and...I dunno. The traffic and transit stuff is very fun to play around with, but is this better than SimCity 4, a 12 (!!!!!) year old game? Why am I spending ten minutes trying to figure out how to get dead bodies to a crematorium? I'm not against detail, but that's such an oddly specific thing to include. The utilities stuff is pretty clunky, and parts of it are very clearly yoinked right from SimCity 5. The scale of the city to population doesn't really match up either--my town of 30,000 looks far larger, and the buildings grow much more SimCity 3000-ishly than SimCity 4-ishly, and it looks a little weird.

That said, haven't tried any mods, and I guess it was just $30. Make sure you keep in mind that a lake will form behind your $400,000 dam before you plop it...

I pretty much felt the same way a couple days into it. Then, I got super busy at work, and I haven't really played since then. I'm hoping that, when I have time to get back into it, there will be mods to fix most of my biggest concerns.

The scale of the city to population doesn't really match up either--my town of 30,000 looks far larger

IIRC, SC4 fudged the population numbers to fix that issue. (Like, you'd have a city of 100,000, and it would look about the same size as Rochester or whatever, but if you looked at each individual residential building and summed up all of their residents, you'd get 20,000 or so.) C:S doesn't do that to my knowledge, which leads you to your town of 5,000 having three fire stations and two high schools and traffic jams at the freeway entrances and such. Seems like that would be an easy thing to mod, though, (not that I know anything about creating mods).

Huh, never quite noticed that with SimCity 4 but could be.

If I were going to sum Cities: Skylines up in a sentence, it'd be that it's basically Cities XL with better English and a few gameplay elements taken from SimCity 5. Which isn't to say it's a horrible game, but...were all the glowing reviews just to spite EA?

I like the mods, but I still prefer SimCity 4 a bit more than Cities: Skylines to be honest. SC4 looks more realistic to me, as something about the 3D graphics of the 2013 SimCity and C:S just seem odd to me for some reason. Plus the various demands for stuff like crematoriums gets annoying. I still play it once or twice a week for a short while, but I am hoping more mods come out to fix some the issues like many of the mods did for SC4.

The most fun I've had with Cities: Skylines was in making the least realistic and walkable city possible; giant industrial parks, ringed by stroads and only accessible by massive highways. Then you get to design the highway interchanges, which are surprisingly difficult to get right (particularly if you have more than two or three highways converging together).

But it doesn't make very good cities, no.