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So they're finally adding some challenge to the game? Hmm, this could be good.
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Aug 18, 2016 13:03
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Ahundredbux posted:So they're finally adding some challenge to the game? My first impression was actually that it sounded like busy work. Without a decent economic challenge to start, it seems like disasters would just be, "Hey rebuild this thing you already did." Disappointed for now but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
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Aug 18, 2016 13:55
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Disasters and scenarios are neat nostalgia tickling features for someone who loved SC2k, and the preemptive planning part with radios could be a neat new thing. But I guess I'll be the first negative Nancy to say it's probably the last topic I would want an expansion to address when there's enough stuff missing or needing tweaked to be more engaging in the minute to minute if you're done making Zen gardens in infinite cash mode. I should probably wait to hear the split of expansion vs patch features before bitching too loud.
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Aug 18, 2016 13:56
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Bold Robot posted:I don't give a gently caress about disasters but the rest of it sounds cool. Hope to wake up to good news. 
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Aug 18, 2016 14:11
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I hear you friend. I always turned disasters off in SimCity. No interest at all in what's on offer here. God I hope they decide to spend some time on a big quality-of-life update that just rolls in some of the best mods, improves the UI, improves stability, and optimizes performance.
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Aug 18, 2016 14:18
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gman14msu posted:My first impression was actually that it sounded like busy work. Without a decent economic challenge to start, it seems like disasters would just be, "Hey rebuild this thing you already did." Disappointed for now but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I would assume that the disasters would provide the economic challenge, but yeah, it doesn't sound terribly interesting. The scenarios system seems to be where the new challenges would be. There's more information on the streams on Twitch: - emergency services now have helicopters, which do not need road connections to provide services. This helps provide firefighting/medical assistance in the face of a disaster. - there's a new emergency service that's specifically for rescuing people in the event of a disaster. - you can create scenarios in previously existing cities/savegames, you don't have to build one from scratch. - meteorites will destroy the pipes beneath the ground where they hit. - they are working with modders for "something in the future", but they can't say what. - the expansion will not be focused on transportation, but that is "high on the wishlist", whatever that means. - aiming for a winter release.
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Aug 18, 2016 14:22
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Red Bones posted:- meteorites will destroy the pipes beneath the ground where they hit.
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Aug 18, 2016 14:46
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Red Bones posted:- there's a new emergency service that's specifically for rescuing people in the event of a disaster. 
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Aug 18, 2016 14:58
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Given how easy it is to mod vehicles, I give it about three hours before there's a full set replacing the helicopters with MikeJF fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 15:00
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I hope one of the disasters is a volcano like in SC4. I loved how a lot of them permanently altered the terrain.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:26
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Wow, I 'm even less excited about this than Snowfall. At least that gave us trams  Having to rebuild crap is the worst part of disasters. Will there be anything beyond meteors? They didn't show or say anything so probably not? Hopefully there will at least not be a group of tornadoes spawning in in the middle of the city and moving between random buildings making a highly probably dice roll whether they get demolished or not.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:35
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Diasters sound like fun. It'll be interesting as hell to have different ways to prepare for them. If there's a comet coming and your roads are poo poo evacuation will take time. And pre-planning for earthquakes and tornados because they're unpredictable.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:42
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The problem is that once you get a good city going the money doesn't matter. Comet wipe out half my city? No matter it only takes me a few minutes to rebuild with the millions I have stocked away. The game is still just a zen garden. This just lets you kick the sand around every once and a while.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:42
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Yeah, exactly. Unless the game was on a bit more of a timeline, there were more political/social forces at work in the city, and money wasn't essentially unlimited once you get past the first couple years, disasters is just more busywork that in the end don't produce better cities or deeper gameplay. It's just "surprise, you have to re-draw all the roads and pipes in this area. Nah It won't cost you much, only your time" I ended up caving and getting the snowfall one (still never once loaded up a snow map) just for the trams. I wonder what single minor feature they'll roll into this one to make the actual city builders buy it. It sounds like, with snowfall, all they know how to do is add more service vehicles you need to over-build because they have terrible pathfinding and priority AI. Oh there's been a disaster? Hope you have enough RESCUE CENTRES that send out RESCUE VEHICLES. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 15:48
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If the disasters were implemented well and a map was built around them, you could have some interesting stuff like high fertility floodplains, or having to manage your waterfront developments in regards to balancing proximity to ports vs flooding risk, or if they can make a volcano that alters the ground around it (I really doubt they'll manage it, but hey) it'd make for an interesting map because then it wouldn't be so much a randomly occurring one-off disaster, but a repeating issue of eruptions and lava floes and the changing landmass that you would have to manage. But yeah, it sounds kind of dumb, mostly because repairing after a disaster seems like it'd be really trivial. In real life, a huge disaster hitting a city is often a point where a lot of change happens regarding what areas are redeveloped and what areas are left alone, what specialist infrastructure and systems should be put in place, and how it would impact things like immigration and emigration, and the standing of that city within the wider regional economy. C:S doesn't really have the systems to simulate outcomes like that, so I'm finding it hard to imagine disasters being that difficult to recover from unless you're playing a scenario built specifically around, say, a big city needing to be repaired after a huge earthquake and running a massive budget deficit, with a rule like "city population cannot drop below X". repairing a bunch of poo poo isn't going to be difficult because the challenge in C:S isn't building, it's traffic management. Maybe evacuating will be the challenging part.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:49
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The PDX employee made it sound like the expansion pack was going to be more about events than disasters. I always turned disasters off in SC games so my hype is at negative levels.
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Aug 18, 2016 15:50
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Fish Fry Andy posted:The PDX employee made it sound like the expansion pack was going to be more about events than disasters. I always turned disasters off in SC games so my hype is at negative levels. It was kinda fun to play with them off and then intentionally trigger one every now and again - but then immediately savescum to before the disaster because rebuilding isn't actually very fun. Disasters were okay for a few laughs in SC2k but what a bummer as the focus of an expansion. In light of the twitch summary that was posted, it sounds like absolute best case scenario maybe we get some transportation stuff in the spring?
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Aug 18, 2016 16:06
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Essentially this new expansion simulates my LMB sticking at an awkward moment when I have the demolition icon selected. 
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Aug 18, 2016 16:12
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I remember in The Deadly Hume's SimCity 3000 Let's Play, he actually turned rebuilding after an earthquake wrecked a sizable portion of his city into a compelling challenge. Of course the fact he was broke since money is continually a problem until the endgame in SC3K played a big role in it. Oh and I guess I'm the only one here who would probably quit playing the game if Rush Hour were mandatory. I like city sims more as a relaxing time killer than for traffic engineering minmaxing 
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Aug 18, 2016 16:27
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Eric the Mauve posted:Oh and I guess I'm the only one here who would probably quit playing the game if Rush Hour were mandatory. I like city sims more as a relaxing time killer than for traffic engineering minmaxing When I first read the press release I wasn't sure what additional transport tools they were thinking of but the mention of rush hours got me concerned they planned on bringing more 'time of day' stuff back. As it is in the game now its not that bad with the day/night cycle and traffic flow but I do remember quite clealy how things often turned out in CiM2 where cities often all ended up in the same 24 hour gridlocked mess. Thats not something they need to revisit here. I was hoping that the expansion would be something that expanded the game more, adding more depth and variety to the things we can build, and that it would draw me back to the game but after seeing the trailer I'm pretty much in the same camp as everyone else who said they aren't interested - it really doesn't add anything to the city building elements of the game except the chance you may now have to do things twice. I got the first expansion because it looked interesting, even though the additions didn't turn out to add much. I skipped on the second after learning snow was its own map type and the streetcars alone weren't enough to sway me. And it looks like I may also be giving this a pass... I really do hope CO's next idea helps breathe some life into things.
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Aug 18, 2016 17:17
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This...this isn't what I wanted at all! 
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Aug 18, 2016 17:58
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I'd like to see how some scenarios work. It seemed from the Twitch stream that the idea was that by putting out a really robust, easy-to-use Scenario editor, it'd be a thing for people to do in the game. So depending on how interesting those look to play, maybe the game will be good? It feels like a step in a wrong direction, though, because the sandbox has always been the core of the game. But if a scenario can be loaded into your game and they work kind of like quests, maybe that'll be interesting? Like, "okay host the olympics please, build a bunch of these stadiums and for one game week you will have 6 million tourists to deal with, go wild".
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Aug 18, 2016 19:10
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There's just way too little gameplay in the base game to do much with disaster or scenarios. It's a traffic flow painting game. Money is meaningless, there's no internal politics, no approval rating. Every building is either 100% happy or else the building will abandon. There's no mid-points, everything in the game is binary. It's either working correctly or not working, you're either drowning in money or financially hosed. Your traffic is either flowing smoothly or it's gridlocked. Your stupid loving industries can get raw materials or they some how can't. There's no degrees. They need to add and improve to the game's core mechanics before things like disasters become meaningful. Have poorly managed disasters hurt the city's reputation and thus lower investments and growth (but then you need an actual economic system). Eliminate the micro-management by having areas destroyed by disaster retain a ghost-image of how things were so you can one-click rebuild, but that's only meaningful if money was ever an actual constraint in the game. Real cities are never rolling in cash let alone have massive stockpiles, they tend to spend every penny (and more) than they bring in each year. Finances should always be tight, there should always be choices that need to be made. I'd love to see a sort of "reputation" system added to the game that tracks how cims and groups feel about various aspects of your city. Your transit system could have a reputation based on wait times and speed to destination that would entice or dissuade cims from using it, the same with your road system. Constant gridlock all over the city would earn driving a bad reputation and push people more towards alternatives, if they exist. But if a cim's preferred transport method has a very bad reputation, it's going to make that cim overall less satisfied with life in the city. A city with excellent freight systems, local resources, and "business friendly" laws and taxes could build up a good reputation with industry and so on. Have all these groups have various overall needs as well as specific demands. Have neighbourhoods have reputations too based on a variety of factors, not just a poorly implemented land value system. Basically give the cims more personality, more needs and wants that aren't just satisfied by plopping down 2 more police stations. Gut the zoning/growth system. Separate wealth from density. Have the city's actual economy provide cims with their incomes, which alter their class, which alter their demands and expectations. And have demand, economics and scarcity of land determine density. A city based on heavy industry is going to want a large working class workforce and only see a small class of managers. Have the neighbourhood reputation system organically determine where the rich part of town is vs the poor part of town. Make improving the wealth and class of your city actually difficult but rewarding, not just plop down schools and wait. Highly educated cims with no local job prospects should move away, a brain drain, a real problem for smaller towns that lack higher paying employment. Have a variety of ways a mayor can attract or create a higher wealth economy that actually feel like you're accomplishing something, not just plopping down a couple extra fire stations near your industry so they level up. A rapidly gentrifying town though may leave people behind, and as housing costs go up homelessness and the increases in crime that go along with a larger rich/poor divide should become another problem that needs to be faced. Small towns generally are built around a single majory industry. Maybe it's farming, maybe it's a big factory, maybe it's a local mine. I'd love to see this represented, large anchor-industries. Start your town because there's a rich iron deposit so you plop down this huge 20x20 mine building that provides your initial employment and thus residential demand. Those workers need services, and that demand grows a smaller secondary economy of shops and smaller industries that service the population and the mine. Keep the mine happy and it will upgrade, demanding more educated workers, more utilities, a direct rail link for hauling ore. make the environment impact of huge industries actually an issue. That mine is going to produce tons of waste and pollution, it's going to need a big old tailings pond and other nasty things no one wants near them and will poison the land for generations. How long do you bend over for the mine in the name of economic growth before you try to diversify? How to you make your town an attractive place for companies to set up offices or high tech manufacturing when it's got a reputation for being a polluted rough blue collar town? What happens if the mine shuts down? What if that huge tailings pond you allowed the mine build with minimal safety concerns breaks and floods the town?
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Aug 18, 2016 19:40
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That all sounds pretty spergy and I really like and enjoy how this game is quite simple and I can just sit back and watch my pretty cities.
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Aug 18, 2016 19:42
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CLAM DOWN posted:That all sounds pretty spergy and I really like and enjoy how this game is quite simple and I can just sit back and watch my pretty cities.
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Aug 18, 2016 19:59
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They just feel so meaningless within the game. A cim is a cim, they have no class, they belong to no group, they all have the exact same needs and any deviation will send them to the hospital or an early grave. There is one correct way to run your economy and the only choices are meaningless aesthetic choices that have no in-game effect and how you design your transport system, which has big effects so ends up being 90% of the focus of the game. How do disasters even make sense in a game where mostly all you're doing is building roads? A fire burned down some buildings, are my roads ok? yep, ok, the simulation will re-build all the buildings, no action needed. Did the disaster hurt my roads? Uhg, gotta re-build them, traffic will be fine and any effected buildings will re-grow. Sure hope I didn't put any time detailing this area. Actually with disasters on I'm not going to ever detail or put much work into anything since it all might get destroyed. Actually after seeing all the disasters once I'm just going to turn them off now I guess?
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Aug 18, 2016 20:00
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It would be cool to have a scenario with a pre-built city with hosed traffic that you need to fix by bulldozing neighborhoods to build new expressways and train lines. Maybe even based on real cities. But that's about the most you can do as the game is now.
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Aug 18, 2016 20:15
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Baronjutter posted:RESCUE CENTRES that send out RESCUE VEHICLES. A rescue vehicle hasn't passed my house for over an hour now, and as a result I have died in a volcano
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Aug 18, 2016 20:23
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Baronjutter, have you ever considered making your own city builder game? Semi-serious question, not sarcastic.
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Aug 18, 2016 20:26
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Eric the Mauve posted:Baronjutter, have you ever considered making your own city builder game? Semi-serious question, not sarcastic. I'm pretty sure scale model trains is pretty much the IRL equivalent.
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Aug 18, 2016 20:57
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Eric the Mauve posted:Baronjutter, have you ever considered making your own city builder game? Semi-serious question, not sarcastic. Yeah, I had a friend actually try to teach me some java to do like a real simple tile-graphics thing where it was less building a city road by road and instead you plopped down neighbourhoods/districts which would then fill in with more abstracted buildings represented just as stats. Depending on the initial plan/type of neighbourhood it could easily upgrade to other more advanced types, or be a massive expensive political impossibility, and the more built-up a neighbourhood the more expensive it was to change/upgrade its infrastructure. So you could initially build a classic grid plan neighbourhood which would be very easy to upgrade and adapt to new uses and infrastructure, building a curvilinear suburbia neighborhood would be nearly impossible to adapt to anything else. So why not just build the "best" types of infrastructure and districts? Because it was also a bit of a "card" game that would send you through the history of your city and you could only build the types of districts that were in-demand and en vogue at the time. You had political capital which let you go against the grain, but it was expensive. So maybe it's the late 70's and all anyone wants to build is massive sprawl with curvy dead-end streets and a strict hierarchy of roads, but you know in the long term those will create a ton of traffic and be nearly impossible to ever adapt to transit and pay poo poo property taxes and don't want to build them. But you can't just not let our city expand if there's pressures, that's going to raise housing prices and get angry at you, so you can spend some political capital to build another type of district instead. But your political capital is limited, so you have to choose which battles to fight and when to just give in and let some sprawl happen. Traffic was to be fairly abstracted, each citizen had a random job slightly weighted to distance and people would path through the quickest route from district to district. Depending on the district type and its infrastructure each district could handle a certain amount of local and through traffic. Too much through traffic could create jams, requiring more and more expensive highways, and highways full of heavy traffic would have a very negative effect on how pleasant and attractive the district was. How "walkable" an area was would also be important, but like most of the game is abstracted within the neighbourhood level. People are willing to walk much farther if their environment feels safe and pleasant and there's safety in numbers, while an area filled with heavy traffic where few people walk will be very hard to build up a "walking culture". Same with bike use, or transit use. If only poor people use the bus, it will have bad reputation and so on. Your city also develops a sort of culture over time. A city that's historically seen most of its population own detached housing is going to push for more of that as the city grows and will be much less happy to adapt to renting in a high density urban environment. People used to driving everywhere will balk at measures they see as "anti-car". As mayor you often have to play the long game and get your people used to ideas gradually rather than revolutionary change, which would be very expensive politically. Massively investing in bike infrastructure in a city where a large cross section of the city already bikes could gain you political capital, but trying to get biking infrastructure off the ground in an historically car-centric city could be a very expensive proposition. Basically going with the flow and doing what your city thinks it wants gains you political capital, while going against the grain costs it. You may have to enshrine a rich suburb's low-density zoning to earn the political capital you need to start your LRT system. You may have to pay for the ridiculous expensive freeway upgrade your industrial sector wants in order to gain the political capital you need for your affordable housing program, and so on. I wanted the game to be slightly educational, showing the long term effects of sprawl on a region, but also how regions are often essentially forced into it for political and economic reasons and it actually takes a lot of hard choices and compromises to end up with a good city. You'll never have enough money and political capital to create your perfect bonsai city, sometimes you just have a cringe and plop down that massive golf course and gated community project.
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Aug 18, 2016 21:04
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CLAM DOWN posted:That all sounds pretty spergy and I really like and enjoy how this game is quite simple and I can just sit back and watch my pretty cities. That would be what a casual, unlimited money mode would be for. The base game probably shouldn't be like that, especially when they are adding disasters that are part of paid DLC, which in the current system, will do nothing but basically randomly make part of the city not be the way you want it to be until you take a few minutes to fix it back to the way it was. I like CityPaint as much as anyone else, but it is frustrating that they are neither adding significant amounts of things for me to paint with (buildings and other assets) nor or they adding the gameplay that I want. A few expansions in and this still feels bare bones without mods, which I shouldn't need to get value out of a game when they are still actively working on it.
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Aug 18, 2016 21:07
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You know what would be neat? Toll roads.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:08
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I really like the game play of cities skylines, but there is definitely empty void waiting to be filled with a real city management game and not a road traffic sandbox
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Aug 18, 2016 22:10
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ToastyPotato posted:That would be what a casual, unlimited money mode would be for. The base game probably shouldn't be like that, especially when they are adding disasters that are part of paid DLC, which in the current system, will do nothing but basically randomly make part of the city not be the way you want it to be until you take a few minutes to fix it back to the way it was. I like CityPaint as much as anyone else, but it is frustrating that they are neither adding significant amounts of things for me to paint with (buildings and other assets) nor or they adding the gameplay that I want. A few expansions in and this still feels bare bones without mods, which I shouldn't need to get value out of a game when they are still actively working on it. That would be really cool, I just don't see that happening with most dev studios  Having an equally awesome and well-developed casual mode and spergin' mode.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:59
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They already included unlimited money mode in the game, as well as unlock all buildings (I think that came with the game), so they already recognized that a lot of people just want to build cities without the hassle of sim features slowing things down. But they just keep half assing everything instead of committing. If they want to make an ultra casual game, then stop adding half baked features and just give me more stuff to build with. I'll gladly pay for massive building and map packs. If they want to make an actual city sim, then make one that actually simulates something beyond this "baby's first city building game" system they have going currently. It's crazy that city sims from 20 years ago have more depth.
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Aug 18, 2016 23:48
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Separating wealth from density would be such an extensive retrofit and leave them with no idea what to do with existing buildings that I can't see it being at all possible before Skylines 2. Probably the most practical game they'd be able to do would be tweaking the economy so you don't have basically infinite money. Unfortunately, a major issue is that with their policy of keeping the systematic patches free so everyone is on the same engine and we don't end up in version hell for mods, there's no incentive for people to buy the expansion that does this, since that stuff would be free. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Aug 19, 2016 |
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Aug 19, 2016 00:03
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Baronjutter posted:New Urbanism: the Videogame
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Aug 19, 2016 00:54
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These models would still not be economically impacting enough if we won't get construction times and efficiency. There'd have to be trucks and other units that build every single road and building and overpass, with time and effort. Of course a shadow mode for planning out your interchange would be needed. But I feel likenp decision or cost will ever be actual decision as long as you can just fix a gridlock with pause button and money.
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Aug 19, 2016 01:32
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Super lame. This is not worth breaking all my mods.
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Aug 19, 2016 01:43
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