8 ms·

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first

Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. Industrial areas lined with low income housing. A whole neighbourhood with schools next to oil refineries, a prison island that receives its drinking water from the sewage run off of the rest of the city, I created roads and bridges everywhere, there's several 'nice' areas along the non polluted areas of water with large mansions, there's a big bustling urban center full of office buildings and highrises not far away from squat, squalid apartments underneath highway overpasses, schools next to landfills, a lack of hospitals and fire departments, many police departments, i've intentionally clearcut as much of the forest surrounding the city as possible, the next step was to create a small gated community out away from the city, for those with money who can't handle the horrid amounts of traffic and infrastructure... I may have also accidently poisoned the whole city briefly when trying to build the prison island and killed 30% of the people there, but things have been looking up, population growth is finally starting to rise again, though the health of the population is questionable.

XaoDaoCaoCao 6y ago
That's a slice of the horror of our civilization lololol
- bluedevil2k 6y ago
  I know it's cool and trendy to trash our current society and treat it like it's the worst time to be alive in human history, but in reality there's never been a better time to be alive in the history of our species. Poverty, infant mortality, childhood mortality, crime...all at all time lows. Literacy, income levels, food quantity, public health...all at all time highs.
  - Kye 6y ago
    Purchased on the credit card of carbon release. We might get lucky and see some technological or social innovation negate or stop the coming disaster, or civilization could snap back to where it was centuries ago.
    - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
      The worst part is not the horror of mass extinctions and runaway greenhouse gasses might eventually resolve itself on geologic timescales, but that the society that rebuilt might find it impossible to get out of the stone age; much less through an industrial revolution: we've pillaged the highest-yield mines, germs have been developed into antibiotic-resistant superbugs, we've extracted the easiest-to-reach stored hydrocarbons, and replaced natural, hardy, diverse crops and the "basic 5" domestication-friendly animals with inbred monocultures.
      - troutwine 6y ago
        I do wonder how much our extractive technological culture would play to the benefit of a child society that intended to learn from us. There'd be an awful lot of material at the surface that could be recycled or repurposed, if we're talking a reboot on the order of centuries. Idle thought.
        eropple 6y ago
        There are, but a lot of them can't be reconstituted without other resources. Take, like, rebar, which is the post-apocalyptic author's favorite source of "chunky metal"--it's low-grade steel that melts north of 1200 deg C. If you don't have access to fossil fuels (or an electric arc furnace, and then how are you going to power it?) you're probably looking at a charcoal forge. Charcoal forges require a ton of airflow (relatively easy, if potentially work-intensive) and a ton of fuel to get hot enough to melt even iron, let alone steel (and remember that modern shitty steel is still pretty good by historical standards!). You can absolutely do it, but you're crawling by your fingernails. And then you have to multiply that by thousands of different factors and different problems. I've thought about this a bunch through the lens of building a game in a world like this and done quite a bit of research, and I tend to think that most of what you might consider "ready resources" in such a world require a pretty significant amount of re-bootstrapping that become really, really hard without easy hydrocarbons. Maybe doable! Probably really really hard.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    It's always the same comment. Yeah most things are strictly better than they have been throughout almost the whole of human existence. Good. Guess what. I'm not content: I want them to be even better. And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocally yes). The typical "it's the best time to be alive in human history so far" sounds almost defeatist, like a license to become lax. Also, nobody claims "this is the worst time to be alive".
    - bluedevil2k 6y ago
      > Some things are worse Such as?
      - brewdad 6y ago
        Speaking as a USAian, we are 20 years further along the Global Warming/Climate Change path with no significant improvements. Wealth inequality is worse than it has ever been since WWII at least. Access to healthcare has improved, IF you can afford it. A significant percentage of our countrymen can't. Oh, and there's a pandemic going on that our nation's leaders would rather sweep under a rug and call fake news or a Democratic hoax. If you live in a country whose population gives a fuck about other people, YMMV.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      > I'm not content: I want them to be even better. Want what you like; but (1) pretty much everyone else wants that so it goes without saying, (2) it is common for people with plans to make things better achieve the opposite because they are lousy planners. The existence of things we don't like doesn't mean we know how to deal with them. People come up with ideas that sound good and don't work.
rightbyte 6y ago
Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city. I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt deep and the isometric view didn't make me sad about not doing angled zones. If Skylines could make roads free of the square course why not the buildings that seem to have to be orthogonal to the tangent of the road.
- AnonsLadder 6y ago
  I never played 3000 but was going to make a comment a lot like yours about Sim City 4
- EricE 6y ago
  You can use zoneable paths to break some of the dependencies on roads. And with MoveIt, Anarchy and other mods you can pretty much bend C:S to whatever you want. Well, with the Steam version anyway. It's the only version that has mods and access to the Steam Workshop with all the community created assets. For example Sunset Harbor added above ground metro's but the modding community provided a solution years before. I sure hope they come out with a follow on version that can scale more than the current version but even as it is I love Cities:Skylines!
- sandworm101 6y ago
  So ready access to roads is preventing the creation of an urban nightmare a la Bladerunner? We better protect our road networks.
- grawprog 6y ago
  Skylines, at least without the mods, feels like an incomplete game in general. It's fun, but it's lacking the depth I expected. Though reading about all the addons and mods, it looks like they add in just about everything I felt was missing, it's just a lot of money to drop on a game I don't really have enough time to get that into.
Natsu 6y ago
> Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. That's NYC, isn't it?
- Natsu 6y ago
  I wasn't trying to take a dig at NYC with this, rather the prison island and geography reminded me of NYC and I should've quoted that part of the grandparent to be more clear.

XaoDaoCaoCao 6y ago

That's a slice of the horror of our civilization lololol

bluedevil2k 6y ago
I know it's cool and trendy to trash our current society and treat it like it's the worst time to be alive in human history, but in reality there's never been a better time to be alive in the history of our species. Poverty, infant mortality, childhood mortality, crime...all at all time lows. Literacy, income levels, food quantity, public health...all at all time highs.
- Kye 6y ago
  Purchased on the credit card of carbon release. We might get lucky and see some technological or social innovation negate or stop the coming disaster, or civilization could snap back to where it was centuries ago.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    The worst part is not the horror of mass extinctions and runaway greenhouse gasses might eventually resolve itself on geologic timescales, but that the society that rebuilt might find it impossible to get out of the stone age; much less through an industrial revolution: we've pillaged the highest-yield mines, germs have been developed into antibiotic-resistant superbugs, we've extracted the easiest-to-reach stored hydrocarbons, and replaced natural, hardy, diverse crops and the "basic 5" domestication-friendly animals with inbred monocultures.
    - troutwine 6y ago
      I do wonder how much our extractive technological culture would play to the benefit of a child society that intended to learn from us. There'd be an awful lot of material at the surface that could be recycled or repurposed, if we're talking a reboot on the order of centuries. Idle thought.
      - eropple 6y ago
        There are, but a lot of them can't be reconstituted without other resources. Take, like, rebar, which is the post-apocalyptic author's favorite source of "chunky metal"--it's low-grade steel that melts north of 1200 deg C. If you don't have access to fossil fuels (or an electric arc furnace, and then how are you going to power it?) you're probably looking at a charcoal forge. Charcoal forges require a ton of airflow (relatively easy, if potentially work-intensive) and a ton of fuel to get hot enough to melt even iron, let alone steel (and remember that modern shitty steel is still pretty good by historical standards!). You can absolutely do it, but you're crawling by your fingernails. And then you have to multiply that by thousands of different factors and different problems. I've thought about this a bunch through the lens of building a game in a world like this and done quite a bit of research, and I tend to think that most of what you might consider "ready resources" in such a world require a pretty significant amount of re-bootstrapping that become really, really hard without easy hydrocarbons. Maybe doable! Probably really really hard.
- andrepd 6y ago
  It's always the same comment. Yeah most things are strictly better than they have been throughout almost the whole of human existence. Good. Guess what. I'm not content: I want them to be even better. And other things aren't that good. Some things are worse, and we should understand why and focus on that. In fact it may not be clear that the world is better today that 20 years ago (again, in some aspects unequivocally yes). The typical "it's the best time to be alive in human history so far" sounds almost defeatist, like a license to become lax. Also, nobody claims "this is the worst time to be alive".
  - bluedevil2k 6y ago
    > Some things are worse Such as?
    - brewdad 6y ago
      Speaking as a USAian, we are 20 years further along the Global Warming/Climate Change path with no significant improvements. Wealth inequality is worse than it has ever been since WWII at least. Access to healthcare has improved, IF you can afford it. A significant percentage of our countrymen can't. Oh, and there's a pandemic going on that our nation's leaders would rather sweep under a rug and call fake news or a Democratic hoax. If you live in a country whose population gives a fuck about other people, YMMV.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    > I'm not content: I want them to be even better. Want what you like; but (1) pretty much everyone else wants that so it goes without saying, (2) it is common for people with plans to make things better achieve the opposite because they are lousy planners. The existence of things we don't like doesn't mean we know how to deal with them. People come up with ideas that sound good and don't work.

rightbyte 6y ago

Sim City 3000 might be the pinnacle of "Sim Cities" when it comes to the feeling of making a big scary city. I would rather play Skylines than 3000 today due to nice feeling and the roads, but the limit that 6 squares depth from the road is as far as housing will "grow" and that you can't make deep neighborhoods or more angled zones, is a sour thumb for what would otherwise be a perfect game. 3000 neighborhoods felt deep and the isometric view didn't make me sad about not doing angled zones. If Skylines could make roads free of the square course why not the buildings that seem to have to be orthogonal to the tangent of the road.

AnonsLadder 6y ago
I never played 3000 but was going to make a comment a lot like yours about Sim City 4
EricE 6y ago
You can use zoneable paths to break some of the dependencies on roads. And with MoveIt, Anarchy and other mods you can pretty much bend C:S to whatever you want. Well, with the Steam version anyway. It's the only version that has mods and access to the Steam Workshop with all the community created assets. For example Sunset Harbor added above ground metro's but the modding community provided a solution years before. I sure hope they come out with a follow on version that can scale more than the current version but even as it is I love Cities:Skylines!
sandworm101 6y ago
So ready access to roads is preventing the creation of an urban nightmare a la Bladerunner? We better protect our road networks.
grawprog 6y ago
Skylines, at least without the mods, feels like an incomplete game in general. It's fun, but it's lacking the depth I expected. Though reading about all the addons and mods, it looks like they add in just about everything I felt was missing, it's just a lot of money to drop on a game I don't really have enough time to get that into.

Natsu 6y ago

> Not to anywhere near the level of this but i've been playing a map on city skylines where i've been trying to make it as dystopian as possible, though at first I was just trying to model my city, the sad thing is, on a superficial level, it still resembles it. That's NYC, isn't it?

Natsu 6y ago
I wasn't trying to take a dig at NYC with this, rather the prison island and geography reminded me of NYC and I should've quoted that part of the grandparent to be more clear.