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The Maroon Hawk posted:According to the new Dev Diary, the game will not only model building collapses, it will even mode citizens becoming trapped in the rubble and needing rescue I guess I'm the minority here but that stuff is not at all what I want in a city simulator. 
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Aug 28, 2023 21:47
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Yeah, too immediately visceral to really be fun. I don't want to think about individuals, the agent simulation is cool and all but enabling me to visualize the horrific scenarios I'm creating for my lil guys is the opposite of what I want from wielding my godlike power. I figure avoiding that feeling is how billionaires turn into supervillains.
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Aug 28, 2023 21:54
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CS1 had building collapses and people trapped in rubble too, though? If you had an emergency response team make it to a burned down or collapsed building then it'd respawn with its previous occupants intact. CS2 isn't really any different in that way.
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Aug 28, 2023 21:58
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Eric the Mauve posted:I guess I'm the minority here but that stuff is not at all what I want in a city simulator. Yeah there's a lot of modeling and focus on stuff that I don't want in the game. Fortunately it sounds like you can ignore it. Like the industrial stuff, I enjoy Factorio as much as the next guy but I have zero interest in production chains and poo poo in my city simulator. If it is actually self-balancing as claimed then it's fine I guess, I don't have to care.
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Aug 28, 2023 22:20
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Sure you can ignore it, mostly, but the opportunity cost is huge. Like, this is the stuff they're devoting time and energy to instead of actually simulating a city in the macro, because in their hearts they're not actually that interested in city management. Just transportation management, production chains, and emulating The Sims. Not saying this is in any way a bad move on their part. Obviously the market for what they're doing is big and CS2 is going to puke money everywhere. Just a bit of a bummer to me personally that it's 2023 and I'm still battling it out with Simcity 4's mountains of jank to scratch the city building itch. Eric the Mauve fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 23:56
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Eric the Mauve posted:Sure you can ignore it, mostly, but the opportunity cost is huge. Like, this is the stuff they're devoting time and energy to instead of actually simulating a city in the macro, because in their hearts they're not actually that interested in city management. Just transportation management, production chains, and emulating The Sims. Just curious, I am mainly more in the 'casual city painter' crowd but can you elaborate on what Simcity 4 does better than CS1 / potentially CS2? From a casual's viewpoint (maybe with a bit of haze since I haven't played SC4 in almost a decade), SC4 felt like just making sure traffic didn't go boom and plopping services down to make buildings higher.
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Aug 29, 2023 00:07
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MikeC posted:Just curious, I am mainly more in the 'casual city painter' crowd but can you elaborate on what Simcity 4 does better than CS1 / potentially CS2? From a casual's viewpoint (maybe with a bit of haze since I haven't played SC4 in almost a decade), SC4 felt like just making sure traffic didn't go boom and plopping services down to make buildings higher. on top of letting you design your sims in the sims and then import them into sim city 4 it also let you drive cars around and talk to people with your microphone
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Aug 29, 2023 00:23
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Eric the Mauve posted:Sure you can ignore it, mostly, but the opportunity cost is huge. Like, this is the stuff they're devoting time and energy to instead of actually simulating a city in the macro, because in their hearts they're not actually that interested in city management. Just transportation management, production chains, and emulating The Sims. They're doing bottom-up emergent simulation, the macro simulation can only exist as a summation of improved and more detailed low-level elements combining together in statistically significant amounts.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:39
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MikeJF posted:They're doing bottom-up emergent simulation, the macro simulation can only exist as a summation of improved and more detailed low-level elements combining together in statistically significant amounts. I'm not sure if the phrase "bottom up emergent simulation" ever resulted in actual good game play.
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Aug 29, 2023 01:48
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Dwarf Fortress?
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Aug 29, 2023 01:54
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MikeC posted:Just curious, I am mainly more in the 'casual city painter' crowd but can you elaborate on what Simcity 4 does better than CS1 / potentially CS2? From a casual's viewpoint (maybe with a bit of haze since I haven't played SC4 in almost a decade), SC4 felt like just making sure traffic didn't go boom and plopping services down to make buildings higher. I think the way SC4 keeps the simulation abstracted rather than completely tethered down to the agent/traffic systems allows a lot more focus on the city in a 'macro' sense rather than getting bogs down with the minutiae of particular interchanges and such. In Skylines, the traffic is so central to everything, getting parts of it slightly wrong has cascading effects on every single part of the city -- and in a way most of the game's challenge is then centered around that. In SC4, the traffic is just one of a series of interconnected systems, each one allowed to shine. It's honestly a thing where I think it mostly is from a casual's viewpoint (like me too) that SC4 is much better in this way. I'm sure if you're an expert at traffic management in Skylines and can bend it over your knee, there comes a point where you can just muscle-memory down some basic routes and focus much more on the macro. But SC4 makes that style of play much more accessible. Since I don't need to think if each of the 300 individual exits in my region are actually designed perfectly, I can focus more of my thoughts on my neat new monorail network and so on. Also that's a purely gameplay argument. From an aesthetic/audio standpoint, SC4 is just a different class of game, and that'll probably keep me going back to it forever. AAA studios with worldclass art teams just don't make citybuilders anymore.
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Aug 29, 2023 02:59
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Koramei posted:I think the way SC4 keeps the simulation abstracted rather than completely tethered down to the agent/traffic systems allows a lot more focus on the city in a 'macro' sense rather than getting bogs down with the minutiae of particular interchanges and such. In Skylines, the traffic is so central to everything, getting parts of it slightly wrong has cascading effects on every single part of the city -- and in a way most of the game's challenge is then centered around that. In SC4, the traffic is just one of a series of interconnected systems, each one allowed to shine. cities skylines 1 sucks as a city builder because it barely has any kind of economic or demographic simulation in it. without simulated cars and trains and stuff it just would barely be a game at all. i don't think that it's fair to judge CS2 based on that specific merit since basically all of these dev diaries have been detailing how the sim is significantly more detailed and traffic less finicky
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Aug 29, 2023 03:44
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Vehicles using multiple lanes and emergency vehicles getting priority should hopefully mean non-transportation gameplay elements function largely separately from traffic management. That said, I've been hoping to see a bit more meat on the bones of interesting gameplay and tradeoffs with these other systems, and it hasn't quite gotten there for me. This may be a North American-centric view, but beyond transit, the biggest city challenges would be education and crime. I haven't seen much that would indicate those systems are interesting or challenging to play with. While I've seen that yes, the game has homeless people, I haven't seen anything showing "rough" neighborhoods that would be an interesting challenge to improve, like there were in SC4. I can't say I know exactly what interesting education gameplay might look like. Crime probably has more potential. But both would likely be well served with several available ordinances and I don't think there are too many of those, at least on release.
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Aug 29, 2023 04:47
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While it's not very deep, the well-being and crime systems should be capable of organically creating bad neighborhoods. (Keyword "should")quote:Citizens can become criminals. The probability of this is relatively low but the chance is increased if the citizen’s Well-being is low. When this happens, the citizen will commit a crime to earn income by first selecting the target of their criminal activity. The target is a building where the robbery takes place and it is selected by comparing the buildings in the city and their crime probability values. The final choice is a random pick from the group of buildings with the highest crime probability values. The citizens living in the building targeted by the criminal will suffer a temporary loss of Well-being. Unsurprisingly all that can be solved by improving quality of life but you could just be american and cover the place with cops instead. Crime won't be solved but it'll certainly get caught. Kyte fucked around with this message at 09:18 on Aug 29, 2023 |
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Aug 29, 2023 09:14
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Yeah. Generally these things don't need to be too deep in a simulation set up like this as long as they're detailed enough to create feedback loops with themselves or other simulation elements. Once that's in place (and they've balanced it to make sure it doesn't go runaway too early) then you can start to get complexity developing naturally and creating macroscopic structures.
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Aug 29, 2023 09:20
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Getting incredibly detailed about education seems like it would be a good DLC. I hope we get that rather than something like the universities dlc
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Aug 29, 2023 09:30
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The building expansion system seems like a good way that they can add extra systems and layers to things like education in DLC.
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Aug 29, 2023 09:50
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That workplace availability view looks like it will be helpful. Playing CS1 now I keep wishing I had one of those, to give me a bit more data than just 'C/I/O here = jobs here' or going into each building to see how many jobs it supports.
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Aug 29, 2023 11:50
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I still think sim city 4 is absolutely dire as a game and couldn't be happier that nobody is trying to remake it. As overly simplistic as CS1 was in many respects I still found it infinitely more enjoyable than simcity.
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Aug 29, 2023 12:00
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I can't say looking back that SC4's education and crime systems were especially interesting.
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Aug 29, 2023 12:38
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I think education is pretty well done. It's one of the main systems that reflects change over the much longer term, takes significant capital to invest in and watch flourish, and then has a majorly transformative effect on the entire city. I'm not an expert SC4 player but gradually increasing education level -> quality of jobs is (aside from making a dope-rear end huge airport) basically 'the goal' in SC4 imo. It's kind of a barometer for general quality of your city. Crime though sucks yeah and has taken some admittedly extremely minor heat for being a kind of regressive and lovely way to portray how crime develops -- not through city policy or lack of services or opportunity etc, but just as a natural thing innate to humans that needs to be squelched by putting out sufficient numbers of boots on the ground. The system people were just talking about for Skylines 2 sounds a lot more interesting. I'll always go to bat for SC4 though, I definitely think it's a better made game than Skylines 1. IMO it's one of the best strategy games of all time. The aesthetics and feel, not just in an outward sense of the graphics and sounds etc (but also those), but just in the way your city develops, the pace of the game and the interconnectedness of the region play, strikes imo the perfect balance for a simulationist game. Many of the systems could definitely be improved, but the level to which you're controlling stuff is perfect -- low down enough that you do get to make some fiddly choices if so inclined, but largely high level enough that you can be thinking about bigger things. There's enough control over the minutiae to make things engaging when you're small-scale, but unlike basically every other colony sim / city builder I've played, it never gets overwhelming even when it scales up. Especially when combined with the stellar art/audio, it just helps the cities you make feel so alive.
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Aug 29, 2023 13:58
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I hope they put an orthographic camera mode in SC2.
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Aug 29, 2023 14:35
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I have to say, going complete sicko mode in C:S plopping every building and zooming around at eye level placing individual vending machines and trash cans and poo poo is the most fun I've ever had with the game. Playing it as a high level city simulator along the lines of SC4 was never that satisfying, but as a micro detail experience it's far superior. You just straight up can't do this with SC4's engine.
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Aug 29, 2023 17:26
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Grand Fromage posted:I have to say, going complete sicko mode in C:S plopping every building and zooming around at eye level placing individual vending machines and trash cans and poo poo is the most fun I've ever had with the game. Playing it as a high level city simulator along the lines of SC4 was never that satisfying, but as a micro detail experience it's far superior. You just straight up can't do this with SC4's engine. yup, I've been doing a hybrid of this. Going super detailed and plopping key districts and landmarks while the main fabric and infrastructure of the city is grown from the basic game mechanics. Have the developers said anything more about improved mod support?
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Aug 29, 2023 17:34
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One thought I just had: what happens to cims when you demolish their house? Do they keep existing and need to move into a new place/become homeless? It would be pretty remarkable if demolishing a district to build a new highway actually had consequences like it does in real life.
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Aug 29, 2023 17:57
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I don't think they've detailed that specific situation but from the other stuff they've said I suspect you're right, they have to move or become homeless.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:04
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Grand Fromage posted:I have to say, going complete sicko mode in C:S plopping every building and zooming around at eye level placing individual vending machines and trash cans and poo poo is the most fun I've ever had with the game. Playing it as a high level city simulator along the lines of SC4 was never that satisfying, but as a micro detail experience it's far superior. You just straight up can't do this with SC4's engine. Which dovetails extremely well with the traffic simulation. Sure you can just zone a big pile of stuff but that's very boring and is no more interesting in sim city. The greater attention you pay to the details of how everything works the better the game is.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:20
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I haven't played Sim City 4 in a long rear end while but the thing that tempts me is region mode. Cities don't exist in a vacuum and what your neighbors are doing DOES matter. That said having the tile unlocks be non-contiguous might be enough for me, as I like complexity but there's a limit to what I can manage. I am excited for CS2, though I do feel like it'll be a little rough around the edges at the beginning. The other thing that I don't know if I would actually like in a city builder but would make it more like real life: Construction not being instantaneous. I don't think there's a way to make it fun without designing it around construction being the main focus (like Cities in Motion but more like Cities in Detour) and even then I think that it wouldn't be fun. Would force you to make different decisions about what infra you nuke to put in some shiney turbo interchange.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:41
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It doesn't really make a difference, you're just building the same thing over and over again, or building the same thing but spread over several regions. It doesn't really change the game any except that you get the zoomed out map view to be full eventually. Also if you want construction simulator I would recommend workers and resources soviet republic  Which yes makes you extremely averse to renovating or disrupting existing infrastructure because jesus christ is the disruption it causes a nightmare.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:45
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OwlFancier posted:Also if you want construction simulator I would recommend workers and resources soviet republic I guess that is the kind of game I'm envisioning. On the wish-list but I am also trying not to become the kind of person who "relaxes" from their engineering job to do pretend engineering in a video game.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:49
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I had an inventory management job for a while where I basically owned the entire process, so while the incremental optimization tricks I were doing in Factorio felt nice, it felt *way too similar* to what I did at work so that game was shelved. Is it rose tinted glasses or did low wealth housing in SC4 look actually low wealth instead of just small? I felt that CS1 level 1 housing looked a little too clean, so it was hard to make rough neighborhoods.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:40
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buglord posted:I had an inventory management job for a while where I basically owned the entire process, so while the incremental optimization tricks I were doing in Factorio felt nice, it felt *way too similar* to what I did at work so that game was shelved. It did, and you could have low wealth housing of any density. Also it had a system to apply props and decals to the building so it would literally add some grime texture when the neighborhood was bad
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Aug 29, 2023 19:42
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OwlFancier posted:It doesn't really make a difference, you're just building the same thing over and over again, or building the same thing but spread over several regions. It doesn't really change the game any except that you get the zoomed out map view to be full eventually. SC4's region mode also had neat quirk of not really working well in simulations. The tiles don't actually run when you're not playing in the tile, and when you're playing in a tile, data from the other tiles is just used as a frozen snapshot. To have tiles update you have to go in to each tile and let it run for a few minutes. The region mode doesn't have any smart logic between tiles when you're in the region view, so there's issues you run in to easily like the eternal commuter loop: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/72324-help-removing-a-commuter-loop/ , where your workers commute to the next tile for work since its closest, and then when you play in that tile, they go to the next tile because its the fastest connection, then in that tile they're driving to the next tile because its closer, etc., until your city is filled with commuters who never actually go to work, they just drive around your region forever and ever. Also I don't really like having big cities where the edge of a tile is a hard cutoff to another tile, C:S you're less likely to actually hit the edge of a tile, you're more likely to run in to terrain that contains the spread of the sprawl.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:43
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VostokProgram posted:It did, and you could have low wealth housing of any density. Also it had a system to apply props and decals to the building so it would literally add some grime texture when the neighborhood was bad Hoping CS2 releases an American Malaise DLC shortly after launch.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:49
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piratepilates posted:SC4's region mode also had neat quirk of not really working well in simulations. The tiles don't actually run when you're not playing in the tile, and when you're playing in a tile, data from the other tiles is just used as a frozen snapshot. To have tiles update you have to go in to each tile and let it run for a few minutes. Oh yeah you can set up a city next door to buy shitloads of power or sell you waste and then just do that forever without worrying about that city's budget. Much prefer to have actual shipping of goods around a single map and handling the infrastructure to do that, much more interesting game. Having different resources in different parts of the map and moving them around works much better IMO.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:51
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buglord posted:I had an inventory management job for a while where I basically owned the entire process, so while the incremental optimization tricks I were doing in Factorio felt nice, it felt *way too similar* to what I did at work so that game was shelved.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:52
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Combat Pretzel posted:Production planner playing Satisfactory here. Please kill me. Have you suggested incorporating giant suction tubes to move people around the production floor more efficiently?
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Aug 29, 2023 19:53
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Reading some of the dev diaries it doesn't seem to me that the devs are able to conceptualize of the differences between macro and micro level simulation and how they're pretty different things that don't really interact much in meaningful ways.
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Aug 29, 2023 20:30
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buglord posted:Is it rose tinted glasses or did low wealth housing in SC4 look actually low wealth instead of just small? I felt that CS1 level 1 housing looked a little too clean, so it was hard to make rough neighborhoods. There was a system to add stuff dynamically, so a lovely neighborhood would have trash everywhere and crimes would leave evidence, like chalk outlines on the ground after murders or trees full of toilet paper. I think walls would get tagged too.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:03
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buglord posted:Hoping CS2 releases an American Malaise DLC shortly after launch. I was going to ask earlier, mostly seriously, if the opioid crisis and homelessness would be featured in the game before deciding it was in poor taste. But not all cities are shining. I want bad areas to be possible.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:08
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