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New Butt Order posted:Do the specialized ones not? I've never had a problem with commercial buildings getting goods and I'm the worst traffic manager you ever did see. I've had bad traffic and pathfinding experiences with the specialized industries. Commercial needs generic goods, which are either imported off the map and need to path all the way to the shop, or are created locally and then mostly exported off the map even with commercial wants goods so they import them off the map anyways?? Generic industry though needs seemingly random resources, food, wood, oil, or ore. The problem is the above pathfinding/demand system kicks in for each of these too. Specialized industry comes in 2 hidden flavours (but you can usually guess by how they look) raw materials and processing. So a farm field or pasture will create raw food, and a bakery or juice company or what ever will turn that (secretly raw, not actually listed as such) FOOD into FOOD, which can then be shipped to a generic industry that demands it. But it often doesn't work that way. Instead your farm field will export raw food off the map, your juice company will import raw food off the map, then export it, then a random commercial building will import food so it can produce goods to get shipped off the map while a bunch of your commercial buildings yell that they don't have enough goods. So in the end instead of helping "produce locally" I find specialized industry just adds more traffic and more weird "is this working right???" pathfinding issues. You'll open your import/export tab and find you're exporting 1,200 units of stuff and importing 1,300 units of stuff. You'll see your top export is wood, but your top import is... wood as well?? I've certainly seen farm trucks actually drive to my generic industry, I've seen goods vans go from a factory to a shop, but it's random. It seems like the industry needs to have spit out a product at the exact same moment a demanding building runs out, otherwise they import off map, except off-map imports have odd limits and if you run up against them you get situations where you have a mixed industry/commercial area where random buildings are all crying about missing goods while trucks full of them drive past to export off the map.
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Aug 9, 2017 16:32
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Turdsdown Tom posted:it's me, i am the vanilla player who doesn't care about detailing. i have literally never used stuff like Move It or Prop Anarchy. the furthest i've gone with modding is stuff like Traffic Manager and 25 tiles just because i'm more interested in the transportation simulation than the actual building of the city. i have no idea what kind of player is more common I have traffic manager, 25 tiles, lots of car parks (seriously, why are there no base game car parks?) and a series of vehicles to make the roads look samey.
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Aug 9, 2017 16:42
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Baronjutter posted:I've had bad traffic and pathfinding experiences with the specialized industries. Luckily, like most gameplay elements, all of this stuff can be safely ignored with no real downside. The supply chain stuff might be even worse than the water physics in terms of being very complex and finnicky while at the same time adding very little to the game.
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Aug 9, 2017 17:46
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I loving love production chains and poo poo like that, just make them actually work and be meaningful. That's a big problem with this game, they added a lot of really cool moving parts but most of them just aren't meaningful. Cims don't really need to get to their jobs and so long as a traffic jam doesn't block a fire truck or something they don't really have any effects, smooth traffic or a super efficient transit system doesn't make your cims more happy or your economy more efficient, it just sort of feels good. Money is absolutely trivial to the point that playing with it off doesn't make any practical difference beyond the first few years so there's no real reward to using all the specialty industries to try to get the most income out of everything. The specialty resource system feels tacked on and is really opaque and has serious pathing issues. Buildings have a ton of things they want, but it all ends up feeling binary, either they have 100% of the services they need or they don't and complain bitterly or abandon so nothing is really dynamic, things never feel like they're growing organically, you just set things and forget them and they quickly reach their maximum. Imagine if generic growable industry just represented small operations like autobody shops and cabinetry workshops and poo poo but there was a whole array of huge ploppable and upgradable industries, some needing to be placed on special terrain to extract resources. You could build a big mine which would produce raw ore, which could be exported or sent to a steel mill, and you could actually set up a little ore train between the two points and it would be correctly used. Some of your little industries might want steel and trucks would drive out and deliver, but maybe you've built a huge car factory or goods factory or something and once again you got a train line going between the two linking them and avoiding a flood of trucks. You've got some oil wells, maybe you've got oil trucks, or a train, or a pipeline feeding a big refinery that's making various fuels or feeding a chemical plant making plastics which are then sent off to industries that consume them. There's good automatically zipping all over, but there's enough concentrated areas of demand that you could set up specialized freight trains. Get some light Transport Fever / Tycoon / Anno stuff going on. Setting up transit system is fun, you get to define specific lines, but the freight train system being auto-generated leads to poo poo like your system being spammed with 2% full trains. Let me define the size of the train and the route. Let me see little ore cars or chemical cars zipping around going to their logical destinations. And let's have a proper pollution system where you can't just place that massive smelter 20m away from an apartment building and it's 100% fine. Simcity 2013 did air pollution pretty good actually, with wind and poo poo.
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Aug 9, 2017 18:03
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Turdsdown Tom posted:it's me, i am the vanilla player who doesn't care about detailing. i have literally never used stuff like Move It or Prop Anarchy. the furthest i've gone with modding is stuff like Traffic Manager and 25 tiles just because i'm more interested in the transportation simulation than the actual building of the city. i have no idea what kind of player is more common Most of the random folks, and "non-gamers" that I've recommended the game to get into the traffic solving side. The RCI stuff is easy enough to keep happy, but there's something I think about the traffic stuff that is very easy to understand the problem (lots of cars gridlocked) and a solution (new roads, less cars). That's just my experience though.
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Aug 9, 2017 23:12
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Yeah count me in as someone who enjoys the traffic solving stuff. That's why I liked the big soccer stadium thing. It throws a huge wrench into your traffic/transportation systems you need to rejigger everything around now.
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Aug 9, 2017 23:16
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I miss solving traffic, I don't know what combo of mods are doing it for me but no one drives in my cities. Trams and metro is flooded, bike lanes and paths super busy, but no personal motoring. It's an urban planning paradise but I don't feel like I earned it you know? I love the bonsai city stuff but I actually would prefer a mechanical challenge (that I can still make pretty)
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Aug 9, 2017 23:20
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I like traffic but I find myself most frustrated by junctions because that's easily 90% of the the actual difficulty and you can't get enough tools to really do finely detailed lane work so you have to demolish big chunks of city to put massive extra roads in instead. Also the grid doesn't work super great, it'd be nice if the buildings used the same technology as the road sidings and could blend to shapes or fill in the ground.
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Aug 9, 2017 23:34
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OwlFancier posted:I like traffic but I find myself most frustrated by junctions because that's easily 90% of the the actual difficulty and you can't get enough tools to really do finely detailed lane work so you have to demolish big chunks of city to put massive extra roads in instead. Yep, it's shallow, but it's very understandable and pleasing to solve it for those who are new and are not going to sink in hundreds of hours into it. Which is why I thought that the first expansion should have been a "traffic infrastructure pack". The systems would have been free in the update (fixing lane issues, one way system, height adjustment, tunnels etc. road naming, etc). and the new purchasable content would have been new roads, roundabouts, cul-de-sacs, some transport types, larger/smaller stations, conversions/hubs, road accidents and traffic events. But you know, you can have a mishmash of stuff in a barely focused "night life" expansion.Which really highlights my own issues with the expansions - They never feel focused; so there's not really a target audience. Fishbus fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Aug 9, 2017 |
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Aug 9, 2017 23:43
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OwlFancier posted:you have to demolish big chunks of city to put massive extra roads in instead. To be fair this is also how they often did freeways irl
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Aug 10, 2017 00:29
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Here's a takeaway from a lot of casual players that really discourages them: "How come my poo poo doesn't look like other people's poo poo, it's like we're playing different games" The default vanilla game should look much better and allow for better looking results naturally. You shouldn't need a bunch of mods and hand-placed decals to make a loving highway onramp that looks how people expect it to look. You should drag a ramp to your highway and have it automatically snap to a tight realistic angle and some nice looking lane markings and signs and such appear as people would expect. The little library of pre-made interchanges are ok, but they can be fiddly to place. For a game that so revolves around building roads and especially highways there really should have been more user friendly and nice looking options to deal with on/off ramps and interchanges. Cross 2 highways? A little prompt comes up asking to autobuild an interchange along with some style options, then it's done and looks great. Want a quick off-ramp? Hit the ramp tool, click on the highway, maybe select an option or two, and done, a nice looking exit. You shouldn't need to use move-it and control building level up and a million other things to have neighbourhoods that look natural, the zoning and growth system should produce them out of the box.
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Aug 10, 2017 00:52
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Baronjutter posted:Here's a takeaway from a lot of casual players that really discourages them: "How come my poo poo doesn't look like other people's poo poo, it's like we're playing different games" It's also completely insane that there is no easy way to make parallel highways. How can it be that 2.5 years on, this hasn't been added (unless it was in Mass Transit and I missed it)?
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Aug 10, 2017 01:12
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Bold Robot posted:To be fair this is also how they often did freeways irl Well yeah but I don't want to build a freeway I want to put a filter lane in to bypass the traffic lights by just cutting into the setback a bit like we do in real life where I live. Except Skylines doesn't have setbacks and can't handle roads close together and leave big gaping holes in the city if you don't use a grid. The shallowness I don't particularly mind, it's more the fragility of the system doesn't really afford you a great deal of creative freedom without hand adding a lot of visual grout yourself to make it look passable.
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Aug 10, 2017 01:16
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Bold Robot posted:It's also completely insane that there is no easy way to make parallel highways. How can it be that 2.5 years on, this hasn't been added (unless it was in Mass Transit and I missed it)? I would love it if someone made a mod that allowed highways in each direction to be laid at once. I'd be happier paying money for something like that, rather than a bunch of festival assets or whatever that new package is.
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Aug 10, 2017 01:45
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Parallel highways are easy, as long as they're completely straight.
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Aug 10, 2017 02:03
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Away all Goats posted:Parallel highways are easy, as long as they're completely straight. To be honest the default traffic behaviour bugged me a lot, but easily fixable with mods.
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Aug 10, 2017 09:11
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So I bought the game last night and am going to try it soon. Are any of the DLCs must-haves or should I start small?
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Aug 13, 2017 04:07
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None of the DLC are really must-have. Although you do get things like Trams, Bikes, Monorails, Ferries, cable-cars etc scattered throughout them none of them are must have unless you want that particular type of transport for your city. For now there's no harm just playing around with the vanilla game for a bit, and then start to check out the steam workshop. I think most people here would consider tools like "Move It" to be far more must have than any one DLC.
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Aug 13, 2017 05:41
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Winter is pretty great because the snow-on-the-ground aesthetic is nice and the new things you deal with is low maintenance enough it doesn't really detract from the experience. Then again I really, really felt like I needed to make Ice Town happen.
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Aug 13, 2017 05:59
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I think I'll mark Mass Transit for the next sale then. Winter effects are something I'll have to think about after I've actually played the game.
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Aug 13, 2017 06:32
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Will the free 'dlc' auto-download, or do you have to manually click it?
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Aug 13, 2017 06:45
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Kavak posted:I think I'll mark Mass Transit for the next sale then. Winter effects are something I'll have to think about after I've actually played the game. Although remember it's not winter effects, it's winter maps. So you can either have it be winter all the time, or winter none of the time, seasons were totally beyond CO's abilities.
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Aug 13, 2017 07:11
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I grabbed all the expansions a while ago, and I'm returning after a pretty long hiatus. Does anyone have some up to date mod recommendations? I'm after two types of mods: 1) Quality of Life - anything that is Vanilla+ in terms of interface improvements or similar. 2) Growables - any growables that are Vanilla+? Preferably a one click subscribe collection on Steam. When I last played, it was during the Nightfall expansion and some of the growables didn't support lights, which looked v. bad, and I'd like to avoid that this time around.
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Aug 13, 2017 13:00
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Honestly After Dark and Nightfall make the game so extremly pretty and charming. Have a nice little neighborhood in the middle of a snowstorm during the night is stunning.
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Aug 13, 2017 13:18
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Day/Night cycle is free. After Dark just brings tourism and some extra transport options.
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Aug 13, 2017 13:59
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The only thing of value in After Dark is bikes. I think bikes was After Dark, wasn't it?
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Aug 13, 2017 15:22
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hailthefish posted:The only thing of value in After Dark is bikes. I think bikes was After Dark, wasn't it? It was in the free update portion that coincided with After Dark, iirc. As for the DLC itself, some of the marina stuff and the transport hubs were pretty useful for making everyone happy.
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Aug 13, 2017 16:54
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Just a shame they're kinda ugly when it's always so many stories down to the water for them, because the water physics are so wonky and crappy and every coast/riverbed is a very steep cliff or it would flood the entire land. I really wish we could build flat canals, which would simply carve down deeper if the land elevation changed. 
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Aug 13, 2017 17:00
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Poil posted:Just a shame they're kinda ugly when it's always so many stories down to the water for them, because the water physics are so wonky and crappy and every coast/riverbed is a very steep cliff or it would flood the entire land. I really wish we could build flat canals, which would simply carve down deeper if the land elevation changed. I'd love if it modeled tidal zones, swamps and mangroves. More nature! MORE ECOLOGY. Also, make a "Park" zoning tool that spawns appropriate park buildings and maybe animals. Birds? I did a lot of hand smoothing on my custom map of costal and intracostal North Florida to get some kind of gentle gradient on my rivers and Estuaries. It's not impossible to make look good, but not with the kind of time I felt like spending on it.
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Aug 13, 2017 17:08
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Poil posted:Just a shame they're kinda ugly when it's always so many stories down to the water for them, because the water physics are so wonky and crappy and every coast/riverbed is a very steep cliff or it would flood the entire land. I really wish we could build flat canals, which would simply carve down deeper if the land elevation changed. Actually you can get some nice and shallow rivers if you use erosion modeling programs on your map's grayscale heightmap to simulate actual water flow. Truly a wonderful system.
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Aug 13, 2017 20:17
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yeah it can be a bit fussy but you can make some really nice coasts and rivers and even wetlands. It's just once again a system where they put in 99% of the resources needed but fell short of the 1% more that would make it so much better. You've got all these water physics baked into the game, so why not have tides? You've got polluted/nonpolluted water so why not have salt/fresh?
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Aug 13, 2017 20:34
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turn off the TV posted:Actually you can get some nice and shallow rivers if you use erosion modeling programs on your map's grayscale heightmap to simulate actual water flow. Truly a wonderful system.  Does it properly work with the flow? For example when the rivers go weird and cause those long and random waves.
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Aug 13, 2017 20:43
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Poil posted:Um, that sounds a bit complicated. It's a little janky and requires some user input, but if you have the patience you won't have any waves.
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Aug 13, 2017 21:47
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I spent 2 hours last night trying to make a simple coastal map with a river. I've never had so much trouble with the water physics. Random mega-waves coming down the river, huge rapids all over the ocean, and sea level going down a good 10m or so at the mouth of the river exposing the ground. There's just this huge dip at the mouth of the river that sea water is rapidly flowing towards along with the river. It's like the river water is pushing the sea water down and out. I even tried to make a little swampy wetland area. It was once again raging rapids sucking water in that went nowhere, just into water physics bugs. Tried to blanket the swamp with low-flow water emitters but there's no way to fine-tune the water height, no numeric input like you can do with everything else in the editor, so you have to eyeball it, but that isn't good enough so all your water sources are slightly different and that results in flow and chaos. They really need some sort of "water plane" object that you can scale up big or small that sort of acts like a big huge water source/drain and keeps all the water at an exact set height. So your entire ocean area could be set to 60 and the object would force exactly 60 height water throughout. Are there any "water mods" that make dealing with water less fucky?
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Aug 15, 2017 18:39
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Baronjutter posted:They really need some sort of "water plane" object that you can scale up big or small that sort of acts like a big huge water source/drain and keeps all the water at an exact set height. So your entire ocean area could be set to 60 and the object would force exactly 60 height water throughout. Are there any "water mods" that make dealing with water less fucky? There is a sea level slider in the map editor for oceanic areas, but it wouldn't help for, say, wetlands.
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Aug 15, 2017 18:58
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Baronjutter posted:They really need some sort of "water plane" object that you can scale up big or small that sort of acts like a big huge water source/drain and keeps all the water at an exact set height. So your entire ocean area could be set to 60 and the object would force exactly 60 height water throughout. Are there any "water mods" that make dealing with water less fucky? This is exactly what the ocean is. Your best bet for messing with water is to grab one of the faster max speed mods and run at 8x in the map editor. Every time you make an edit to a water source you need to let it max its flow out before making any other major changes. Similarly, you want to place as many water sources as you can flowing into a single river. Alternatively just make rivers by placing multiple sources along its path, although this fucks with dams.
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Aug 15, 2017 19:03
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turn off the TV posted:This is exactly what the ocean is. It's not though, it only creates a water source at the edge of the map set to that level. Then the water simulation kicks in and you have have +/- 10m pockets all over the place. Even with absolutely no rivers or water sources on the map if I set sea level to say 60m I'll get a nice flat sheet of water that lasts for a few minutes and then the flows start. The shallow wetlands suddenly drain, huge currents and rapids form all over the map, the water rushing out of areas pushes other areas up. The ocean tries to establish equilibrium by sending in more water from the edges but physics errors near the middle of the map are too far away for them to help. What I'd love is a brush that works like the level tool. You type in a water level, say 60, and paint it on the map. It creates water at that exact height that stays at that height. Higher water flowing onto it is quickly absorbed, and lower areas next to it are filled. Basically a paintable water source. Bonus points if the water physics simulation just turn off within X meters of the edge of the zone to save processing power. Double extra points if you could set this painted are specifically as an "ocean" or "lake" or what ever and have the game understand salt/fresh water and apply map-set tides to the ocean. So the lake you painted will stay at exactly 80m forever and ever while the ocean you painted at 60m will go up and down 4m based on a simple tide cycle. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 19:27
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Baronjutter posted:It's not though, it only creates a water source at the edge of the map set to that level. Then the water simulation kicks in and you have have +/- 10m pockets all over the place. Even with absolutely no rivers or water sources on the map if I set sea level to say 60m I'll get a nice flat sheet of water that lasts for a few minutes and then the flows start. The shallow wetlands suddenly drain, huge currents and rapids form all over the map, the water rushing out of areas pushes other areas up. The ocean tries to establish equilibrium by sending in more water from the edges but physics errors near the middle of the map are too far away for them to help. This only happens because the ocean is functionally a giant water source. Raise the ocean level while paused, unpause and hit reset water to sea level a few times until it levels out. turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 20:16
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turn off the TV posted:Raise the ocean level while paused, unpause and hit reset water to sea level a few times. Oh I know all the sea level tricks. Set it to 0 to get rid of all water too so you have a blank waterless slate and no stray waves. It's the physics them selves. I think specially when you try to make "wetlands" the thin thin water "evaporates" so the whole area ends up acting like a drain. I think if we could numerically enter/see water spawner heights it would fix so much. So I can know my sea level is set to 60 then pepper the area with emitters set to 60. Seems like an easy mod for someone to make a little tool tip or something. Actually I wonder, water spawners seem to have a minimum height. If I were to raise the terrain to 60, plop an emitter and drag it down to minimum height if that would be a work-around to get exact heights.
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Aug 15, 2017 20:19
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The ocean also doesn't only produce water at the edges of the map, that's the reason why you need to actually place sources there yourself, or else the entire map is just stagnant and pollution endlessly builds up. E: also, the best way to do wetlands is by making them with river runoffs. I made a map to test it out a few years ago, you can even use dams and permanently drain the water. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=483470938 turn off the TV fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Aug 15, 2017 |
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Aug 15, 2017 20:21
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