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Any discussion about city builders without discussing Cities:Skylines is crucially out-of-date. The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each

Any discussion about city builders without discussing Cities:Skylines is crucially out-of-date. The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend. Where the latest Simcity was a low quality sham, Cities:Skylines was a wonderfully put together game that anyone interest in the genre needs to play.

AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
Reminds me of Endless Legend vs Civilization Beyond Earth. When the main series of a genre stagnates, its great to see smaller studios do it different and better.
laumars 11y ago
> Any discussion about city builders without discussing Cities:Skylines is crucially out-of-date Cities:Skylines is discussed in the article though. There's a few paragraphs on it right at the end of the piece.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend. I'm surprised it wasn't done like this before - it's kind of the most obvious and "right" approach to model it. Why is that? Computational reasons?
- roel_v 11y ago
  Computational, and also how much does it add to the 'fun' in the gameplay? City builders aren't about modeling how real cities work, they're about providing a fun gameplay experience. Which is fine, but orthogonal to the question of whether modeling agents in the way mentioned is the 'best' way to model a urban system (to which the answer is a solid 'maybe sometimes', but that's a different discussion...)
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It's my personal opinion, but I find optimizing games for fun directly makes them very shallow. In case of a sim game, I'd much prefer it to be hard due to an accurate simulation, than simplified to improve enjoyment. The former can actually teach you something, and you can also apply real-world knowledge to improve your chances. But then again, I'm a weird player who likes things like Dwarf Fortress and considers Kerbal Space Program to be the best space game ever made.
    - gedrap 11y ago
      I think it's largely a business decision. You need to find a balance between really heard and appealing to more niche audience (resulting in a relatively high game price). Some games like KSP went fairly mainstream, but they did a ton of work to be appealing to a wider audience, not only space enthusiasts. At the other end of the spectrum, you have easy games which appeal to larger, more casual audiences but like you've said are a bit shallow. In this regard, C:S hits a good balance.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I've been hearing nothing but praise about C:S (and I've seen some fun videos of abusing dams and hydroelectric plants to create tsunami waves); I'm definitely going to buy it.
    - roel_v 11y ago
      Of course, 'fun' means whatever stimulates your target audience most and longest. Which is orthogonal to my point that games are or should be about mimicking reality (because let's face it, otherwise nobody would have ever made it through the first room in Doom).
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        The problem of today's games is that the target audience is "everyone who can pay", which naturally leads to very shallow experience, designed for the lowest common denominator.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend. I'm surprised it wasn't done like this before - it's kind of the most obvious and "right" approach to model it. Why is that? Computational reasons?
simoncion 11y ago
> Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend. I thought this, too, initially. Thing is, each denizen moves... either once a month or once every couple of months. This has profound consequences for traffic. Sadly, it means that traffic problems that you thought you had licked come roaring back later in the year because -as it turns out- you didn't solve the problem! The traffic causing the problem just disappeared for an extended period of time. When you combine this with the absolutely essential traffic deletion mechanic, [0] the woefully inadequate freight and train pathing, [2] and non-existent train path control tools, the more I got into the game the less pleased I was with it. Don't get me wrong, I've seen a lot of SimCity 2013. Cities is far, far, far better than that game. I also fire up Cities from time to time and enjoy wasting a few hours on a small-to-medium-sized city. It's just... given the pedigree of the author, I expected a far better traffic simulator than what they delivered. [3] [0] There's a mod out there to disable traffic deletion [1]. I used it in a city that had several cargo train stations. The cargo train stations could not absorb returning delivery trucks fast enough to prevent months-long gridlock. It was a disaster. [1] Traffic deletion is the thing that erases cars, trucks, semis, and trains from the game if they've taken too long to get to their destination. [2] It's trivial to deadlock trains. The author of the traffic deletion disable mod mentioned that he would never turn off deletion for trains because of how essential that feature was. [3] Hell, I was completely unprepared for the train wreck (ha!) that was and remains the train navigation system.

AdeptusAquinas 11y ago

Reminds me of Endless Legend vs Civilization Beyond Earth. When the main series of a genre stagnates, its great to see smaller studios do it different and better.

laumars 11y ago

> Any discussion about city builders without discussing Cities:Skylines is crucially out-of-date Cities:Skylines is discussed in the article though. There's a few paragraphs on it right at the end of the piece.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> The game set a new, extremely high standard for the genre. Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend. I'm surprised it wasn't done like this before - it's kind of the most obvious and "right" approach to model it. Why is that? Computational reasons?

roel_v 11y ago
Computational, and also how much does it add to the 'fun' in the gameplay? City builders aren't about modeling how real cities work, they're about providing a fun gameplay experience. Which is fine, but orthogonal to the question of whether modeling agents in the way mentioned is the 'best' way to model a urban system (to which the answer is a solid 'maybe sometimes', but that's a different discussion...)
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's my personal opinion, but I find optimizing games for fun directly makes them very shallow. In case of a sim game, I'd much prefer it to be hard due to an accurate simulation, than simplified to improve enjoyment. The former can actually teach you something, and you can also apply real-world knowledge to improve your chances. But then again, I'm a weird player who likes things like Dwarf Fortress and considers Kerbal Space Program to be the best space game ever made.
  - gedrap 11y ago
    I think it's largely a business decision. You need to find a balance between really heard and appealing to more niche audience (resulting in a relatively high game price). Some games like KSP went fairly mainstream, but they did a ton of work to be appealing to a wider audience, not only space enthusiasts. At the other end of the spectrum, you have easy games which appeal to larger, more casual audiences but like you've said are a bit shallow. In this regard, C:S hits a good balance.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I've been hearing nothing but praise about C:S (and I've seen some fun videos of abusing dams and hydroelectric plants to create tsunami waves); I'm definitely going to buy it.
  - roel_v 11y ago
    Of course, 'fun' means whatever stimulates your target audience most and longest. Which is orthogonal to my point that games are or should be about mimicking reality (because let's face it, otherwise nobody would have ever made it through the first room in Doom).
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      The problem of today's games is that the target audience is "everyone who can pay", which naturally leads to very shallow experience, designed for the lowest common denominator.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

simoncion 11y ago

> Each denizen has a family, a career and travels around the city as an autonomous entity fulfilling his day to day errands. The consequences, especially on traffic, is a fascinating thing to comprehend. I thought this, too, initially. Thing is, each denizen moves... either once a month or once every couple of months. This has profound consequences for traffic. Sadly, it means that traffic problems that you thought you had licked come roaring back later in the year because -as it turns out- you didn't solve the problem! The traffic causing the problem just disappeared for an extended period of time. When you combine this with the absolutely essential traffic deletion mechanic, [0] the woefully inadequate freight and train pathing, [2] and non-existent train path control tools, the more I got into the game the less pleased I was with it. Don't get me wrong, I've seen a lot of SimCity 2013. Cities is far, far, far better than that game. I also fire up Cities from time to time and enjoy wasting a few hours on a small-to-medium-sized city. It's just... given the pedigree of the author, I expected a far better traffic simulator than what they delivered. [3] [0] There's a mod out there to disable traffic deletion [1]. I used it in a city that had several cargo train stations. The cargo train stations could not absorb returning delivery trucks fast enough to prevent months-long gridlock. It was a disaster. [1] Traffic deletion is the thing that erases cars, trucks, semis, and trains from the game if they've taken too long to get to their destination. [2] It's trivial to deadlock trains. The author of the traffic deletion disable mod mentioned that he would never turn off deletion for trains because of how essential that feature was. [3] Hell, I was completely unprepared for the train wreck (ha!) that was and remains the train navigation system.