Recently got Skylines and g*med hard on it today, but, as someone who sunk hundreds of hours into SimCity 4, I'm not getting the appeal. SimCity 4 is just so much comfier?
Is Skylines really just a traffic simulator? I watched a video by a self-proclaimed city planner all about how to make efficient transitions from the highway to your town, and it seemed like the road building / traffic control is the whole point.
What am I missing?
the Mods ...
seriously , you need the Mods , they are basicly part of the Game by now.. "move it" / Road anarchy / etc...
and also , it is way more a "builder" then a game imo..... , nobody is playing it as intended wheree ou are limited by money and having to unlock buildings by growing to a certain size etc..
I do the building unlocks because I'm trying to learn it and tend to get choice paralysis otherwise. And I try to keep the city finances in the green over time, but yeah, I always use the infinite money toggle in the options. Definitely more of a creative game than a 'best the game' game for me though, so even in my case you're totally right about that.
I am guessing you are referring to City Planner Plays, who is very vocal about how you build and evolve your city toward more robust public transit in a way that is inspired from his being an American city planner and having to work within the confines of the interests of capital and other vaguely materialist factors.
If you want to see his mask slip a little watch the videos where he talks about parking requirements and building a Walmart/shopping center, I am 99% certain he is an anti-capitalist of some sort.
Also CS 2 will be incorporating some of the most essential DLC and mods into the base game.
Also also, this comparison shot is very disingenuous as that is the exact wrong way to build a city in CS and the game will punish you for that much sprawl.
Oh that's cool to hear about that tuber. The comparison shot was just a random google image search, but uhhhh, my current CS city is sprawling pretty damned hard lol
It's pretty... Empty without mods check out the workshop and make sure to install creamapi for free dlcs. Vanilla without dlcs is pretty lackluster.
Its not just about roads doe once you hit 4k people you can build a pretty pog bus system and bike network.
And rail, and subways, and trams, and pedestrianized districts where you can literally ban cars.
Yeah, I just picked it up again recently, with all 🏴☠️ dlc, as I have a week off and am trying to learn them to create much less car brained cities. So far I've mostly just discovered that cycle paths are really good.
If you're on Linux there's a thing called Stellarkey you can use for DLC in place of CreamAPI
Far less comfy but far more rewarding when it works, human-centric in that it doesn't let you demolish homes until you've found a new place for the current residents to live.
It's a socialist society after all. The game impresses me by how little liberalism there is in it (It's not completely devoid of it, but still) while being from a eastern European developer (from Kosice, Slovakia)
That game would be amazing even if it wasn't Socialist-themed. By far the most in-depth city builder I've seen.
Having played both, my key takeaway is:
- In Sim City it's hard to build a city wrong as long as you follow some basic rules.
- In Cities Skylines, building a city wrong is almost guaranteed for your first few cities.
That isn't a value judgment. They're both fine games, but are going to appeal to different audiences because they have different design goals.
I'm just getting into it too and traffic management is definitely a big part of it, but it's the detailing I really like. Trying unusual road layouts or following the topography of the less flat maps and then creating green spaces and stuff in between.
I'm trying to learn some of the new stuff in the dlcs too to create pedestrian neighbourhoods and cool public transport like trams and monorails. It seems like some of the others have more complexity too, like industries where you have to build up and efficiently organise different aspects of supply chains etc.
Simcity (5) is garbaggio - SimCity 4 is one of those games that I can just turn my brain on autopilot and listen to podcasts while playing, very chill and comfy.
love me some skylines, but it often feels like it's missing the heart that SimCity had, y'know? Like, none of the CS attempts at comedy land for me, and there's a lack of gamefeel - thinking about how each of the SimCity power plants had their own lil audio clips that played when you opened the infobox & did the coil whine "bweeooooo" when you first plopped em, the set of composers they bought in for the ost, that kinda thing. Maybe CS2 being bigger budget will help, I definitely prefer the art direction at least
Just a traffic simulator? No, it's a fully featured city builder. With all dlc's, at least. Community talks a lot about traffic stuff because that's the hardest part of the game. It may be a little too realistic for some people. I mean literally, every citizen will actually get in a car and drive to work, to shops, etc. Every shop need to be restocked by a perfectly real truck that actually drives around. Every factory has trucks to get materials in and goods out. Police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, garbage trucks, coffin trucks, postal vans, taxis, buses… Each needs to actually get from A to B to work, rather than just be in a range. It's much less abstract, and the scale of it all is much higher than than in SimCity. Honestly, i don't remember ever losing a game in SimCity. But here? It took months real time of trial and error to actually build a properly functioning high density city. And i'm not even the dumbest Skylines player. I guess it might be the definition of "uncomfy" for some people, but for me, that was the whole fun of it, actually.
It may be a little too realistic for some people. I mean literally, every citizen will actually get in a car and drive to work, to shops, et
It's too unrealistic, people drive their cars, then the cars vanish, which encourages people to build cities as dense as NYC, with literally no public transit.
Also coffin trucks are way outside the scope of the game, really weird to add that and not pizza delivery or any of a million more common sources of traffic.
Cars vanishing is a bug tho.
But
burgerbrained players and modders are something else.I mean when they get to their destinations. Dense cities aren't forced to choose between building mass transit and dedicating 30% of their land to parking.
Not exactly, cars are actually parked when here is space. You can install some parking mods and see for yourself. Yes, here is no in-game penalty for not having It, but you can play it fair. Also, you see, while the scale of the game is higher than SimCity, it is still lower than in reality. That's why you don't need the murrica-sized parking hell.
If the game forced you to build america sized parking hell to have an america style city, it would be amazing propaganda.
Skylines is not fun imo. I will keep playing workers and resources and keep praying for a faster speed option. I think most people use skylines as a modding platform at this point, as base game is genuinely not fun/engaging.
Hey comrade if your PC is decent enough, you can open CheatEngine while playing and select the "Enable Speedhack" box and set your speed multiplier in that menu. It can increase the speed faster than the in-game options allow but the downside is it's limited to how fast your computer can run the game
https://www.cheatengine.org/downloads.php
One of the things I liked about the SimCity games (though I'm basing it on SimCity 3000 which is the last one I religiously played) is that if you did something like cut the garbage collection funding, or fail to increase it to meet demand, garbage starts piling up in front of buildings and on the streets. That fun little detail is missing from Skylines, where it's just a red garbage can icon floating above the building, but the building itself still looks clean as a whistle.
Skylines is really a traffic simulator, yes. Any game that requires like 3 different mods to add in things so you can actually have a 'SimCity' experience is BAD in my book.
