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I would unironically love building Cities with my wife. Sadly there's really nothing like that, while Anno 1800 does scratch some of the itch.
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Apr 7, 2023 22:25
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Vahakyla posted:Colossal says pretty much "no" to multiplayer, and says that mods will not be able to be ported over. No multiplayer is a good sign. And I think we all knew the mod thing, the game will be different and they wouldn't work.
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Apr 8, 2023 04:36
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It would be nice if they made a converter for simple building assets, though.
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Apr 8, 2023 05:40
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MikeJF posted:It would be nice if they made a converter for simple building assets, though. Someone will probably mod it in 
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Apr 8, 2023 05:44
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What does multiplayer even look like in a city builder (geniune question)? My partner and I differ enough in playstyle/goals (especially Crusader Kings...) that playing games with her watching adds another layer of gameplay, where I'm often negotiating IRL. With CS we'd normally kind of alternate in building projects/priorities.
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Apr 8, 2023 09:51
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Ethics_Gradient posted:What does multiplayer even look like in a city builder (geniune question)? SC13 was online only with forced multiplayer. What it boiled down to was
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Apr 8, 2023 09:58
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It's also likely it was because their lovely agent system could barely handle that tiny size. SimCity 2000 had a network edition you could play multiplayer. I tried to do that with a friend but the fastest game speed was syrup so we were quickly fed up and bored.
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Apr 8, 2023 10:02
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I never played SimCity 2000 Network Edition myself, but it was seemingly based around the idea of owning plots of land on the same map. When you wanted to take a plot of land (and you had to, because everyone starts out owning nothing) it sets off an auction. I'm not sure if there was anything like deals for sharing power and water between your cities (part of the city).
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Apr 8, 2023 10:27
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My first exposure to 2000 was NE. So, for the longest time, I thought that you were just supposed to buy squares before you could build on them in SimCity. Like, individual tiles on the game screen. Network Edition was not very good.
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Apr 8, 2023 10:33
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nielsm posted:I never played SimCity 2000 Network Edition myself, but it was seemingly based around the idea of owning plots of land on the same map. When you wanted to take a plot of land (and you had to, because everyone starts out owning nothing) it sets off an auction. I'm not sure if there was anything like deals for sharing power and water between your cities (part of the city).
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Apr 8, 2023 10:33
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I think a multiplayer city builder could be great, but I think it would need some constraints. A game where you play as the mayor of a borough of a larger city, for example. You can control your own territory, and see other territories. You need to cooperate to some extent with other mayors so roads line up, for example. But maybe you're also competing for funding money from the central government. Or a larger scale version, where you're a mayor of a city in a larger region, but ditto with the cooperative/competitive nature of resources. The sandbox nature of these games makes them at their base not very suitable to this sort of game as it could easily get frustrating or complicated to work with other people. If the pace of building was slowed, if say demolitions were not so cheap and easy, if you started not from a blank slate but from an existing city, then it could be made viable. Would still only be appealing for certain people, but then the idea of gamifying city council does appeal to me.
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Apr 8, 2023 16:26
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Ethics_Gradient posted:What does multiplayer even look like in a city builder (geniune question)? In Anno 1800 one can play separate nations, or they can play coop where you inhabit the exact same entity. I can place a building, you can delete it. I can edit the trade route's name while you assign stops to it. It is true shared gameplay in that we have no restrictions in a coop up to 4 people. Obviously not doable with pubbies, much like for example Hearts of Iron that works in the same manner. You just simply share literally everything with no restrictions. The best way to play these types of shared coops is to just say "I do trade routes, you set up new world islands while third friend handles these two islands" or something. House rules and personal negotiation. In HOI, it was often the case that my son handles the eastern front while I handle western front and my wife deals with industry. In Cities, it could be that. We share everything and just zen build together. Or we assign boroughs or districts that are controlled by a set player.
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Apr 8, 2023 16:58
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Vahakyla posted:Colossal says pretty much "no" to multiplayer, and says that mods will not be able to be ported over. Fully expected no mods to be able to be ported over. Current Skylines can't even get updates without breaking most mods.
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Apr 8, 2023 17:48
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MikeJF posted:It would be nice if they made a converter for simple building assets, though. It probably will be doable somehow. I am not a modder but ultimately the most time consuming part of making a building is the model, and I don't see why you couldn't just reuse the model in whatever format CS2 will have. It's still Unity even. And a lot of the community buildings are already very high quality so I suspect they wouldn't look out of place in CS2.
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Apr 9, 2023 02:18
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I played Skylines near enough to launch, within that first 18 months. Could never get my head around traffic. With the announcment of Skylines 2 I loaded it up again (and bought Park Life.) I still can't get my head around traffic. I've been watching the City Planner guy and I think I've done better than before, but I just hit 18k-ish people and my one big road off the highway is killing me, and it doesn't help that I have two industrial zones loading right into where the highway comes off. I think I need to buy more land and get the rail and another highway connection.
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Apr 9, 2023 07:02
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Mrenda posted:I played Skylines near enough to launch, within that first 18 months. Could never get my head around traffic. With the announcment of Skylines 2 I loaded it up again (and bought Park Life.) I still can't get my head around traffic. I've been watching the City Planner guy and I think I've done better than before, but I just hit 18k-ish people and my one big road off the highway is killing me, and it doesn't help that I have two industrial zones loading right into where the highway comes off. I think I need to buy more land and get the rail and another highway connection. If it's an industry-heavy area, you ideally want to have an exit straight to the highway. Just an on-ramp. Fiddle around with the number of lanes on the highway, too, if you want the traffic smoother (if the highway is 3 lanes before the on-ramp, increase it to 4 lanes where they meet). You can have off-ramps from the highway to the industry, too, if you're either importing a lot or you have lots of trucks travelling large distances in your city. Roundabouts are good, but if you've got a lot of traffic going a particular way (you can use the in-game tools to check), slip-roads or even fly-overs can help avoid queues. Then there's mods. That one mod that lets you edit traffic lights, auto-build roundabouts and all that jazz is really helpful for stuff like changing speed limits on roads and making roads exclusive to different types of vehicles.
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Apr 9, 2023 11:27
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Grand Fromage posted:It probably will be doable somehow. I am not a modder but ultimately the most time consuming part of making a building is the model, and I don't see why you couldn't just reuse the model in whatever format CS2 will have. It's still Unity even. And a lot of the community buildings are already very high quality so I suspect they wouldn't look out of place in CS2. Porting buildings may be a bit trickier than that because of the prop system and the weird scale that structures had in CS1 have.
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Apr 9, 2023 14:06
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kingturnip posted:If it's an industry-heavy area, you ideally want to have an exit straight to the highway. Just an on-ramp. Fiddle around with the number of lanes on the highway, too, if you want the traffic smoother (if the highway is 3 lanes before the on-ramp, increase it to 4 lanes where they meet). You can have off-ramps from the highway to the industry, too, if you're either importing a lot or you have lots of trucks travelling large distances in your city. I've been playing with roundabouts for a few hours in my save. They'd work, for a while, then suddenly they'd break. I sat and watched one for an age while fiddling with every little thing. I finally saw in a video someone turned off all the "Stop" signs on the entrances on the roundabouts. Now, that kind of makes sense because there's no "Yield" instruction and stop means you have to stop even if there's nothing coming, while yield just means anyone on the roundabout has right of way. I tried giving the cars on the roundabout right of way by giving the roundabout road priority, but it's a pain in the butt to keep the same road going all the way around the roundabout. I'm not sure it mattered though. I just took off the stop signs and used some slip roads for cars turning to the next exit on the roundabout so they don't have to go onto it and it sorted. So yay! Then while I was doing all this and figuring it out traffic went to shite elsewhere. So not so yay... The other thing annoying me at the moment is water pumping. It seems distance from the pump is factored into some stuff. I had more than enough capacity for my entire city, but places far away from where the intakes were were getting the "no water" notification. I had to put water towers near them as no matter how many pumps I put down and no matter how much capacity I had it didn't fix. This makes real world sense, but from what I can see in game the water appears to be on/off or enough/not enough, even if the underlying mechanics don't support the way it's presented. So now I have buttloads of capacity but still don't know if an area will suddenly be without water because the game decides it's too far away.
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Apr 9, 2023 14:23
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One thing worth keeping in mind with regard to traffic is how the game defines right of way in intersections Basically, right of way only works the way you would think it would work at 180 degree angles. A T shaped intersection will have two right of ways, while a Y shaped intersection is going to have three right of ways. An X shaped intersection and a + shaped intersection, on the other hand, will both only have two right of ways. It also doesn't matter what roads do immediately outside of an intersection. they can curve or turn in whatever direction you want so long as the road bits connected to the intersection are at 180 degrees. This is worth keeping in mind with roundabouts, as it's pretty easy for them to work worse if you're just eyeballing the angles or attaching roads to them at the wrong nodes.
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Apr 9, 2023 15:22
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Just disabling every stop sign and traffic light in your city is how you cheat at Cities: Skylines.
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Apr 9, 2023 15:46
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Yeah, placing traffic signals is the exception rather than the rule. The situations in which you want to place them are few and far between and only really show up if you have a major load entering a primary road and there's no room to insert a roundabout. And even then, you want to go into the TMPE settings and tell the signal to prioritize through traffic and only allow the light to change when there's cars waiting. The traffic must flow!
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Apr 9, 2023 16:13
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Mrenda posted:I've been playing with roundabouts for a few hours in my save. They'd work, for a while, then suddenly they'd break. I sat and watched one for an age while fiddling with every little thing. I finally saw in a video someone turned off all the "Stop" signs on the entrances on the roundabouts. Now, that kind of makes sense because there's no "Yield" instruction and stop means you have to stop even if there's nothing coming, while yield just means anyone on the roundabout has right of way. I tried giving the cars on the roundabout right of way by giving the roundabout road priority, but it's a pain in the butt to keep the same road going all the way around the roundabout. I'm not sure it mattered though. I just took off the stop signs and used some slip roads for cars turning to the next exit on the roundabout so they don't have to go onto it and it sorted. So yay! You need Traffic Manager to make roundabouts work properly. It's not just the yield, but you also need the cars in the circle to have priority over cars entering the circle, and they also don't need to hold short of the intersections. Luckily TMPE has an easy button that you will set all the roundabout options for you.
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Apr 9, 2023 18:50
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Mrenda posted:The other thing annoying me at the moment is water pumping. It seems distance from the pump is factored into some stuff. I had more than enough capacity for my entire city, but places far away from where the intakes were were getting the "no water" notification. I had to put water towers near them as no matter how many pumps I put down and no matter how much capacity I had it didn't fix. This makes real world sense, but from what I can see in game the water appears to be on/off or enough/not enough, even if the underlying mechanics don't support the way it's presented. So now I have buttloads of capacity but still don't know if an area will suddenly be without water because the game decides it's too far away. This is wrong, unless you're using some weird mod that changes the default water behavior. Distance from the pump does not matter at all, and you can extend your pipe network as far from the water source as you want with no issues. If you're having not-enough-water issues despite having enough pumps, then you should check to make sure that the pipes are all connected and that you didn't miss a spot, and then you should look closely at your water source to make sure your pumps are actually adequately supplied. Pumps will actually consume on-map water, and if they're taking in water faster than your on-map water source replenishes, they will actually reduce the water level and eventually lower it enough that the water doesn't reach all your pumps anymore. It's easy to miss if you're drawing from a river, since the water will keep flowing, and at a glance you might not notice that a couple of your pumps aren't quite at the water's edge anymore.
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Apr 9, 2023 19:44
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Mrenda posted:I played Skylines near enough to launch, within that first 18 months. Could never get my head around traffic. With the announcment of Skylines 2 I loaded it up again (and bought Park Life.) I still can't get my head around traffic. I've been watching the City Planner guy and I think I've done better than before, but I just hit 18k-ish people and my one big road off the highway is killing me, and it doesn't help that I have two industrial zones loading right into where the highway comes off. I think I need to buy more land and get the rail and another highway connection. in unmodded SC you basically have to give any sizable industrial area its own dedicated highway connection because of how much cargo truck traffic it generates. If your industrial traffic is getting routed through the main throughfares your residents use, it will choke everything, especially if it has to go through multiple controlled intersections to get to the highway.
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Apr 9, 2023 22:34
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In unmodded CS you don't actually have to build any industry at all once you've unlocked offices, and indeed should demolish all your industry as soon as you do.
Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Apr 10, 2023 |
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Apr 9, 2023 22:39
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Thatcher simulator 2023 
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Apr 10, 2023 00:11
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Eric the Mauve posted:In unmodded CS you don't actually have to build any industry at all once you've unlocked offices, and indeed should demolish all your industry as soon as you do. I always refuse to do this and it always makes everything harder.
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Apr 10, 2023 15:33
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Love to drown in a sea of trucks
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Apr 10, 2023 16:59
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I'd still kill for a good city building game that also had sc4 style regions and allowed for asynchronous multiplayer. Get like 5 friends together, everyone plays whenever they want, and you see the region grow over the weeks. A much more realistically scale economy where you'll actually need lots of little farm towns and things to build up a regional economy before it can support proper commercial cities. Have the development of the region really tell a story over its history and make sense.
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Apr 10, 2023 19:34
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Baronjutter posted:I'd still kill for a good city building game that also had sc4 style regions and allowed for asynchronous multiplayer. Get like 5 friends together, everyone plays whenever they want, and you see the region grow over the weeks. A much more realistically scale economy where you'll actually need lots of little farm towns and things to build up a regional economy before it can support proper commercial cities. Have the development of the region really tell a story over its history and make sense. Could live without the MP part but yeah this was one of my favorite SC4 mechanics. Was always fun linking small towns together and playing off the RCI demands of each, then eventually you get to a point where you can support large downtown regions with towering buildings. It always felt kind of cheap that I could skip all those steps in C:S and go straight for it.
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Apr 10, 2023 19:55
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buglord posted:Could live without the MP part but yeah this was one of my favorite SC4 mechanics. Was always fun linking small towns together and playing off the RCI demands of each, then eventually you get to a point where you can support large downtown regions with towering buildings. Yeah I kinda hate that you can just slap down skyscraper zoning anywhere you want and get them. I miss the feeling of having to really work for your growth. My ideal city builder really leans into the region play. You can't just start a blank map, zone a ton of land and bam, a city grows. In real life, that's how you get California City. I want something where you HAVE to build up a region. Where that modest sized main regional city with some actual office buildings and a nice museum only exist because of the many smaller villages and towns you built up in the area. Get some farming and resource towns going first, simple working class jobs and an economy built around exporting those raw materials to the wider world. But all those farmers and miners need a small amount of shops and services of course, so eventually each of those towns would end up with a little main street. But then how do you grow beyond that? There's just no demand for a big tech company skyscraper in your podunk region of 20,000 people spread among 5 towns. You just have to slowly build up. You manage to attract a big food processing industry that can take advantage of all the agriculture you've built up. A cement works located by your gravel quarry. Those generate more jobs, which generate more demand for local services and so on. Eventually there's actually demand for some office space for all these industries management class so you manage to attract some in your biggest most central town. A regional center is actually forming! It's still a podunk town but there's some insurance office and other such businesses that serve the region's population and businesses. You eventually build a small community college there too, a big deal! You're of course also expanding your other small towns and building new ones during all this time. Eventually after a lot of hard work your main regional town becomes a small city. There's some actual 4 story apartments, a 10 story "skyscraper" office block. The local population is more educated and has a critical mass of educated workers to actually start to attract some office space needs that don't just serve the direct local economy, but actually do business stuff for the bigger world. More industry adding value to your raw material economy, you're exporting machine parts and chemicals and processed food instead of the raw materials. Finally one day you actually get to a point where your region has a million people between 20 distinct settlements, with a whopping 500k in your main city. You feel like you really earned it by building up the entire region map, and you're excited to keep going.
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Apr 10, 2023 21:23
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Entropic posted:in unmodded SC you basically have to give any sizable industrial area its own dedicated highway connection because of how much cargo truck traffic it generates. If your industrial traffic is getting routed through the main throughfares your residents use, it will choke everything, especially if it has to go through multiple controlled intersections to get to the highway. i just have all of my highway connections transition into six lane roads and treat them like arterial roads with occasional intersections and nothing zoned alongside them, but still connected to the rest of the city's grid. it saves a ton of space that would otherwise be taken up by on/off ramps and the occasional intersection doesn't really slow anything down too much.
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Apr 10, 2023 22:23
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Entropic posted:in unmodded SC you basically have to give any sizable industrial area its own dedicated highway connection because of how much cargo truck traffic it generates. If your industrial traffic is getting routed through the main throughfares your residents use, it will choke everything, especially if it has to go through multiple controlled intersections to get to the highway. I've tried a few strategies to mitigate this and it still seems to end up messy - lately my starts have been taking a highway interchange (usually one from a pack of interchanges I downloaded that turns the on-ramps into basically a big roundabout) and making one side of it Industry and the other side Not Industry, and things still end up somewhat clogged. should my industrial zone maybe just be like, further down the highway, far enough to need its own exits?
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Apr 10, 2023 22:51
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You're always going to have some industry near your residential to start with, but as the city expands, you'll want to move it further away and then give it some public transport to try to reduce commuter traffic. Industry just creates lots of trucks. If you're importing/exporting, you want to get those trucks onto a highway as soon as possible so they don't clog up your city's streets; and if they're going elsewhere in your city, you want them to get there as simply as possible (which probably means having good highway access to wherever they're going). Or, if you've unlocked it and you've got obvious hubs for freight, use the cargo train station to move freight around.
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Apr 10, 2023 23:51
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I'm just blown away by how much of the city I have to demolish to institute almost any public transportation, and how ridiculously expensive it is
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Apr 11, 2023 01:26
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Inspector Hound posted:I'm just blown away by how much of the city I have to demolish to institute almost any public transportation, and how ridiculously expensive it is
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Apr 11, 2023 16:41
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah I kinda hate that you can just slap down skyscraper zoning anywhere you want and get them. I miss the feeling of having to really work for your growth. My ideal city builder really leans into the region play. You can't just start a blank map, zone a ton of land and bam, a city grows. In real life, that's how you get California City. I want something where you HAVE to build up a region. Where that modest sized main regional city with some actual office buildings and a nice museum only exist because of the many smaller villages and towns you built up in the area. Get some farming and resource towns going first, simple working class jobs and an economy built around exporting those raw materials to the wider world. But all those farmers and miners need a small amount of shops and services of course, so eventually each of those towns would end up with a little main street. But then how do you grow beyond that? There's just no demand for a big tech company skyscraper in your podunk region of 20,000 people spread among 5 towns. You just have to slowly build up. You manage to attract a big food processing industry that can take advantage of all the agriculture you've built up. A cement works located by your gravel quarry. Those generate more jobs, which generate more demand for local services and so on. Eventually there's actually demand for some office space for all these industries management class so you manage to attract some in your biggest most central town. A regional center is actually forming! It's still a podunk town but there's some insurance office and other such businesses that serve the region's population and businesses. You eventually build a small community college there too, a big deal! You're of course also expanding your other small towns and building new ones during all this time. this as hard as possible. an updated SC4 where this is the whole thing is my absolute dream game Zoobtro fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Apr 11, 2023 19:18
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Inspector Hound posted:I'm just blown away by how much of the city I have to demolish to institute almost any public transportation, and how ridiculously expensive it is The campus stuff isn't scaled at all to the city blocks with skyscrapers. Especially the sports arenas are ridiculously huge, that track & field arena can easily house several apartment blocks on its infield. Also, if you didn't plan ahead you have to bulldoze entire city blocks for a law school or police academy.
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Apr 11, 2023 19:27
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Albino Squirrel posted:Are you my IRL city council? Putting in a bus system was a whole investment, and trying to do a little metro has been a very harsh learning experience Der Kyhe posted:The campus stuff isn't scaled at all to the city blocks with skyscrapers. Especially the sports arenas are ridiculously huge, that track & field arena can easily house several apartment blocks on its infield. I laughed when I saw the roundabout, which should basically be the size of a normal intersection unless it's four lanes and there's a medieval fountain on the middle.
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Apr 12, 2023 12:37
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How should I be responding to demand for residential/commercial/industrial zoning? I started a new save, trying to slow things down, but again I'm falling into the trap of feeling like I have to keep expanding, and quickly. I'm up to close to 5,000 people with my first session. I made the mistake of going with windpower, so I feel like I'm constantly behind on costs. I tried stopping to let my cash build up to make improvements/improve land value but my population dropped when I wasn't responding to the zoning demands. Is there a point where you need to race to and then you can let things even out and slow down?
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Apr 12, 2023 14:40
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