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CS2 would need to have 2 modes to please for everyone. One where budgets, demographics, traffic and policies are meaningful and challenging. The other would need to be a sandbox make-pretty-city- simulator. It would be cool to get something like SC4's regional system, whether through the literal separate adjoining maps or just massive maps.
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Dec 22, 2021 14:22
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Real thing SC2 would need is to be able to make European style city centers, instead of this binary zoning.
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Dec 22, 2021 15:03
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MikeJF posted:They could maybe not use agents for seagulls, though. And honestly they could fake some of the population numbers. spincube posted:It'd just be good to mix up things a little, imo. So your cities don't have to start with the exact same 'here is a highway junction; now place some green, blue and yellow areas and build a road that links them; now build a power station and place power lines; now build water pumps and place water pipes; fast-forward until you unlock the actual fun stuff that's nice to look at so you can demolish everything you started with anyway' process.
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Dec 22, 2021 15:55
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Buller posted:Real thing SC2 would need is to be able to make European style city centers, instead of this binary zoning. Mixed-use zones and decouple wealth from density.
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Dec 22, 2021 16:26
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nielsm posted:decouple wealth from density. This is by far the biggest thing that SC2 needs to do: everything else is 'very nice to have to advance the game' but this is critical.
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Dec 22, 2021 16:30
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Buller posted:Real thing SC2 would need is to be able to make European style city centers, instead of this binary zoning. Or really any kind of "non-American" style city centers. Even for e.g. a Japanese-styled city, you have promenades and shopping arcades that line pedestrian-only streets and it's not really possible to recreate this easily in SC
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Dec 22, 2021 16:44
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I like how we've all relapsed into saying SC instead of CS
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Dec 22, 2021 17:42
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Eric the Mauve posted:I like how we've all relapsed into saying SC instead of CS I like how we're all making arguments that should be the standard IRL. No cars! Walkable cities! Density options! "making space for all the parking wasn't fun or attractive so we handwaved it, but you still have to have roads and cars as standard because, uhhh" 
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Dec 22, 2021 17:58
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so I could say that I finally figured out what this god damned cube is doing. Get well Lowtax.
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The problem with all city building games is that they've never been made by people with an actual interest or passion in urban planning. Will Wright was just some nerd who read a horribly discredited economic book about urban economies and decided to make a little game out of it. Every city builder since has basically taken those core mechanics and assumptions as a foundation and only built on top of it. Skylines team also had zero urban planning backgrounds or knowledge, they just wanted to make a traffic sim about maximizing your income. No one has ever actually tried to make a city building game that even remotely tries to model the most important factors, even in an abstract way, related to how cities are shaped and grow.
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Dec 22, 2021 18:06
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I just want a prettier SC2k with workshop support that works on modern systems, is that too much to ask
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Dec 22, 2021 18:09
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What I really want is street level commerce and with residential on top.
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Dec 22, 2021 18:10
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Deltasquid posted:Or really any kind of "non-American" style city centers. Even for e.g. a Japanese-styled city, you have promenades and shopping arcades that line pedestrian-only streets and it's not really possible to recreate this easily in SC So it can look like every loving pedestrian-only street in Europe, you see.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:53
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Eric the Mauve posted:I like how we've all relapsed into saying SC instead of CS Sities: Ckylines
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Dec 23, 2021 07:36
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Grand Fromage posted:The agents are unnecessary and hold the game back, yeah. I can't see them getting rid of entirely, the detailed loving around with traffic/setting transit lines/etc is pretty major to the Skylines style and I'm fine with that, but more abstraction so we can have big cities would be nice. MikeJF posted:The agent modelling for cims and traffic is the fundamental way that the game operates, it's not really something you can abstract away without basically starting over from scratch. - Divide all the roads into different categories, depending on what kind of traffic they're supposed to carry - from the largest scale movement down to the scale of "you're seriously not just walking??" - Make the game automatically split the map up into tiered zones based on the above, with the smallest zones coming together to form the next tier of zone, which themselves are the constituent blocks of the next one up, all the way to city level - The game calculates the average speed of traffic through any given zone, for all tiers of road types, which can be used for both land value/traffic safety calculations and to calculate the average travel time through it Now, if an agent wants to get from one zone to another, they can find a route based on the much less complex zone network, drastically simplifying the calculation. If something seems wonky to the player, they can be allowed to manually adjust zone boundaries, letting the player take over strategically in places where the computer (for once) has a hard time keeping up with the human brain. The exact same system can be applied too to public transit options and bicycle networks, and where allowed by policy/public transit option, allowing what is essentially higher tier roads for bicycles in the form of buses and metros with bicycle racks. Hell, with some willingness to let the traffic have some inertia, the agents could be used more to slowly tune the traffic to whatever changes you make, while the majority of traffic is actually just reusing old routes taken. Obviously old routes would be pruned if the road stopped existing, but otherwise there's no real issue with just letting the sims continuing to use their previous routes. Give the routes some base percentage level decay, so if agents stop continuously creating new routes of that type due to a better option now existing, the old routes will be replaced eventually until the reduced level of traffic results in a new equilibrium where the old route is competitive with the new. In short, give the player a bit of top-level control over how traffic flows, and make a system that's fine with "good enough" so you can simplify the whole thing enormously.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:43
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This is also something that is solvable with region play. SC4 cities can be of completely arbitrary size because only one section is actively loaded and playing at a time. Figure out how big of a city makes your computer catch on fire and make that the size of the individual plots, then have your region which can be any size you want since it's not a live simulation. With a modern 3D engine you could probably make it so the neighboring city tiles are visible as static backgrounds while playing and you could just click over to load the other city, make it a lot more seamless than 4.
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Dec 23, 2021 08:56
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Grand Fromage posted:This is also something that is solvable with region play. SC4 cities can be of completely arbitrary size because only one section is actively loaded and playing at a time. Figure out how big of a city makes your computer catch on fire and make that the size of the individual plots, then have your region which can be any size you want since it's not a live simulation. With a modern 3D engine you could probably make it so the neighboring city tiles are visible as static backgrounds while playing and you could just click over to load the other city, make it a lot more seamless than 4. If you wanted to get a bit more advanced, I think you could actually program the system to dynamically change how many calculations it makes for an area. Basically, the backlog of previously calculated routes are paired with a base input. The greater the divergence between previous and current input, or previous and current output, the more calculations are made. This would result in an area the player has "finished" eventually just gearing down to almost no calculations, just enough to notice a divergence so it can gear up again, while areas under development take up most of the processing power.
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Dec 23, 2021 13:04
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I've picked S:C up after a long hiatus (and only getting to around 40k before). Right now finding myself in a loop where I keep having to build a new wind turbine to deal with my increasing population, which zeroes the money I was building up, rinse repeat. Have them in the windiest part of the map, population around 2.5k. Am I doing it wrong? Or so I just need to wait until I get better power gen options?
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Dec 23, 2021 13:13
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Ethics_Gradient posted:I've picked S:C up after a long hiatus (and only getting to around 40k before). Right now finding myself in a loop where I keep having to build a new wind turbine to deal with my increasing population, which zeroes the money I was building up, rinse repeat. Have them in the windiest part of the map, population around 2.5k. However, you usually need to cut down on a number of services as a small city, because keeping schools and hospitals and emergency services fully funded is ridiculously expensive and you don't need that until they're serving a much larger community.
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Dec 23, 2021 16:42
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Eric the Mauve posted:This is the part where I admit on a Skylines thread that I'm not really into individual agents and really just want 3D SimCity 4 + NAM with a modern UI that doesn't hurt to use. Yeah this is me. The agents were a cool idea but since I'm not that into managing traffic it doesn't seem to improve my game experience, while it imposes other restrictions. Decoupling density and wealth is priority #1 I agree. If CS2 doesn't do these things, are there any other contenders? Did the Sim City franchise just die after their last release?
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Dec 23, 2021 17:18
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SimCity has been dead and buried since 5 was such a piece of poo poo. No indication they're thinking about trying again. Cities XL always sucked and also appears to be gone. There are a couple indie projects around, NewCity is the only one I've paid any attention to. Some interesting stuff there but it still doesn't really work and is fugly as poo poo. So yeah. The city builder was never a packed genre but other than a theoretical Skylines 2 there's nothing out there I'm aware of.
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Dec 23, 2021 17:23
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I would've said the SimCity franchise was dead after the failure of 5 but Skylines proving that the genre wasn't dead, they just made a lovely game actually might cause them to have another go eventually. Otherwise they would've just written it off as 'nobody wants a city sim'. Instead Skylines is over there proving that it can be done just fine and you can sell suckers 20 DLC packs to follow up. But there's no rumours or anything I know of that anything's currently in the pipeline.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:04
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Maybe but it'd just be reusing the name. Everyone at Maxis is gone, it's just a brand name used to print money with Sims expansions now. There's no reason to think they'd actually do anything better or interesting.
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Dec 23, 2021 18:12
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I liked a lot of elements of SimCity 5, not gonna lie. I like the look of it way better than CS, for sure.
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Dec 23, 2021 20:05
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mutata posted:I liked a lot of elements of SimCity 5, not gonna lie. I like the look of it way better than CS, for sure. Agree with this but that's the entire list of SimShitty superiorities
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Dec 23, 2021 20:10
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I honestly remember nothing about it except the maximum city size was about three blocks and the water in pipes was agent simulated for some incomprehensible reason.
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Dec 23, 2021 20:16
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Also there were no density controls in the zoning, it was entirely tied to road width. So if you wanted tall buildings you had to build a big ugly suburban stroad.
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Dec 23, 2021 21:03
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Grand Fromage posted:I honestly remember nothing about it except the maximum city size was about three blocks and the water in pipes was agent simulated for some incomprehensible reason. The sewage agents are just a thing that kind of breaks something in my brain. Hello gamers we saw you liked SimCity 4, well you're gonna LOVE the Turd Modelling we've implemeneted.
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Dec 23, 2021 22:16
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SC2013 was super disappointing. I played it a few months before release in their closed alpha and submitted a BUNCH of feedback. Nothing changed.
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Dec 23, 2021 22:21
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I really liked the addon system. It gave a bit of customization and also let you scale capacity (and cost) in a cooler and more intuitive way than fiddling with a budget slider.
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Dec 24, 2021 06:29
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Ethics_Gradient posted:I've picked S:C up after a long hiatus (and only getting to around 40k before). Right now finding myself in a loop where I keep having to build a new wind turbine to deal with my increasing population, which zeroes the money I was building up, rinse repeat. Have them in the windiest part of the map, population around 2.5k. I think the 'proper' way to manage this is to fiddle with your budget. So when you first slap down any service (including turbines) go into the budget panel and move the slider down until you get to the point where you think you're providing enough. Then as the city grows, you move the slider up every so often to keep up with demand. Eventually, you reach the point where you're at the maximum on the slider, and that's the point where you slap down more [insert service here]. And immediately move the slider back down again. This is a somewhat tedious way of doing it, but it will give you more money over time if you're consistent at doing it.
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Dec 24, 2021 12:06
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Also remember that the coverage ring shown when you place down a service is the area where the service provides happiness, but every service generally covers the entire city. (Cims will travel across the entire map for school, if there's an open seat there, for example.)
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Dec 24, 2021 13:16
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AttitudeAdjuster posted:CS2 would need to have 2 modes to please for everyone. One where budgets, demographics, traffic and policies are meaningful and challenging. The other would need to be a sandbox make-pretty-city- simulator. We're now in the age of accessible games. Being able to create your own difficulty by tuning items up and down is the way to go. Even if it's a series of "How important is managing this to you?" radio buttons that are set on a scale of off to 200% of developer intentions. Being able to roughly dial in how much you want to mess around managing aspects of your city would allow for players to simply disable aspects they find annoying in game without mods/addons Example: water, power and sewer management. Turn them completely off, the game ignores any need for any need for building any related buildings. Next pip up requires managing them to the extent of building associated buildings, but not having to drag out power lines and water pipes. Next pip requires piping and such (basically normal mode as we know it), and then a pip above that level that increases the challenge, allowing infrastructure age to force the player to consistently increase maintenance costs or rebuild/improve pipes and such to keep them meaningful during the management portion of the game. Traffic, population, health and death care, education, land value, pollution... basically every metric that's measured should be modifiable to customize the player's experience instead of just a binary normal mode vs sandbox. Don't want to manage employment, but still want to match demands? Turn it down a notch instead of all the way off. Really love the traffic management aspect and road building, but don't really care about the rest? Turn off what you don't want to be bothered with and crank up the traffic realism. There's really so much more that the game could offer by allowing players the choice to play with less instead of just sandbox/normal modes
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Dec 24, 2021 15:19
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Roads should convey power and water, it's always been dumb that they don't. I'm not really into the idea of a genre shift from "city builder" to "local politics simulator" but it would at least be cool to have an option where bulldozing a functioning building is extremely expensive, takes a year to happen after you condemn it, and tanks happiness in the surrounding area for a while.
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Dec 24, 2021 15:34
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Workers and resources soviet republic but with CS road building tools and modular LPS housing design.
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Dec 24, 2021 15:56
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kingturnip posted:I think the 'proper' way to manage this is to fiddle with your budget. So when you first slap down any service (including turbines) go into the budget panel and move the slider down until you get to the point where you think you're providing enough. 
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Dec 24, 2021 17:06
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pointlessone posted:Example: water, power and sewer management. Turn them completely off, the game ignores any need for any need for building any related buildings. Next pip up requires managing them to the extent of building associated buildings, but not having to drag out power lines and water pipes. Next pip requires piping and such (basically normal mode as we know it), and then a pip above that level that increases the challenge, allowing infrastructure age to force the player to consistently increase maintenance costs or rebuild/improve pipes and such to keep them meaningful during the management portion of the game. The maintenance cost of infrastructure rising over time, whether roads or pipes, would be a good addition though for the simulationist side of things. It'd very much put the player under similar pressures as a real city, where things like modern suburbia promise quick returns but eventually end up being a net-negative, requiring ever expanding suburbia to pay for the old stuff - the developmental Ponzi scheme it truly is. Eric the Mauve posted:Roads should convey power and water, it's always been dumb that they don't. Water management could be a thing in the game, but the kind of stuff the player is tasked with doing in CS is almost at the level of asking the player to prepare foundations for the buildings that spring up. What water management should be in the game is the big picture stuff; sourcing water, dealing with flooding, and dealing with waste water. That's far more interesting stuff, which aside from the gameplay challenges would also encourage realism in terms of city layout/services that would help players build more well-rounded cities. It'd also make the difference between different climates more meaningful. Plus, if they did the whole region play thing, it could result in some interesting dynamic between the player's cities, if one city grows so large as to impact others through its consumption - such as draining a river of reducing an aquifer so much that another city can't draw from it anymore.
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Dec 24, 2021 17:48
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Poil posted:That's one of the main reasons why I could never stand Sim City 4. You don't have to do it at all though. SC4 sims will live in a squalid wasteland as long as there's water and power, you don't need to provide them a single service until you can afford it. Skylines sims are a little more insistent but you can still delay services until you can afford it, I don't think I've ever futzed with the funding sliders at all.
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Dec 24, 2021 19:43
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Grand Fromage posted:You don't have to do it at all though. SC4 sims will live in a squalid wasteland as long as there's water and power, you don't need to provide them a single service until you can afford it. Skylines sims are a little more insistent but you can still delay services until you can afford it, I don't think I've ever futzed with the funding sliders at all. in SC4 they dont even need water!  i think the game justifies it as them digging wells or something
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Dec 25, 2021 01:36
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VostokProgram posted:in SC4 they dont even need water! Yeah that's true, some of the lowest level zoning doesn't. You're still better off providing it though, it doesn't cost all that much and the growth benefits are worthwhile. You can put off schools/healthcare/etc for a much longer time than you can water. I've never tried but I suspect you could get to a pop over 100k with zero city services except power and water, possibly garbage. NAM version 43 came out today, by the way.
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Dec 25, 2021 01:46
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Not sure what purpose piping even serves, at least not on the level where you're just putting it under every zone anyway. At the very least, it should function like power, and just extend through development automatically. Some of this sounds really interesting but things like future-planning tradeoffs with suburbia or maintenance increases really isn’t what I want to be worrying about. That’s like how in SC4 power plants would blow up if they got too old so you had to check on them intermittently; imo it was just a bit of a pain in the rear end. Like someone said upthread, I think ideas like that are really more of a different game. I don’t want a game that’s just a sandbox of me plopping buildings where I like; the management side adds stakes and keeps me more invested. But there’s an obvious limit, and once you get to actual granular real world stuff you’re talking about it’s just gonna mean every single city needs me to sit there for 10 hours planning and only gets built over the course of a literal year of playtime if it isn’t going to turn into a huge mess. That kinda urban planning/local politics stuff could make for a fun game but I feel like it’d have to be so massively abstracted (to avoid being horrifically micro intensive) that it just wouldn’t remotely resemble SimCity anymore. Although honestly the road planning in Skylines already kinda brushes against that threshold for me; I find myself going back to SC4 more often these days.
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Dec 25, 2021 01:59
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