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The playable area was tiny and the game was weird in the way it cycled boom and bust development seemingly at random. And then despite the game selling incredib

The playable area was tiny and the game was weird in the way it cycled boom and bust development seemingly at random. And then despite the game selling incredibly well they abandoned it after launch and never really improved the game much. The marketing hype leading up to it featured lot of outright lies in terms of how the game works. Compute was not offloaded to the cloud, but bigger than that there was the lie that every sim had a daily routine that was simulated and when a factory had an output it was an input somewhere else and that was all simulated like Factorio. It wasn't. It was all faked and not even convincingly well. I have been hoping for a new city builder for awhile. Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. I think I want the original promise of SimCity (2013) with the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines. Solving transportation issues and bottlenecks to make sure your city is operating efficiently sounds incredibly rewarding.

pdntspa 4y ago
You might enjoy Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It's really rough right now, and frustratingly manual in places, but it does a good job of simulating resources at least. If you play in Realism Mode then vehicles and resources are dispatched and consumed realistically. (People too, but they teleport home at the end of their job and they don't appear to take transfers for public transit)
- homarp 4y ago
  Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...
dragontamer 4y ago
OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe being the original), is my preferred traffic simulation game. Once you can control all routes and trains, you can never go back! You get used to the control, the timetables, the organization that's possible.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  OpenTTD sadly does not simulate passengers as unique agents. Transportation demand can be very unidirectional and not make logical sense.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    Have you not tried the CargoDist button? It was added maybe 5 years ago, but as an Open source project, advertising for this feature is pretty bad. It turns passengers/mail into agents who will perform 2 or 3 or more hops to reach their destination.
    - zaphoyd 4y ago
      Seconding this, if you dropped OpenTTD because of the simplistic passenger/cargo routing (i.e. take any cargo to any place and pay is only based on how far you took it) then definitely give the CargoDist option a try. Every passenger (or mail or manufactured good) has a unique destination in your system that you need to get it to. They are roughly balanced based on demand (two stations in large cities will generate a lot of traffic between them, but a small town will only generate a small amount of traffic to and from a large city). It makes the transport routing game way more interesting and more like the routing of passengers in more traditional Sim City type games.
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        Beyond just that, the ability for passengers to "route" themselves (Take airplane from CityA -> CityB, then rail from CityB -> CityC, then bus from CityC to CityD... and back) is the bigger, more important effect of the CargoDist feature. That means you can form "Hub and Spokes" for passenger traffic, and the individual passengers are smart enough to figure out how to route themselves to their ultimate destinations. ------------ Its the most "realistic feeling" traffic mod I've found of any of these games, honestly. Even Cities Skylines seems rather basic in comparison. ----------- I play on Passengers/Mail as CargoDist, and then all other traffic (Coal, Wood, Cargo, Oil, etc. etc.) as default / original rules. I also set the "symmetry" of CargoDist to 80%. That is, 20% of traffic is one-way, which seems to be correct in my opinion? I think it defaults to 100%, but it doesn't make sense for _ALL_ traffic to be bidirectional (ie: for all agents to make a return trip each time). EDIT: I do think that a "big mod" to OpenTTD under a new name would be beneficial to the project. Something that redefines OpenTTD's sizes (each square is supposed to be a square km, but it doesn't "feel" like it. Roads aren't a square km wide after all...). I think that if each square were 10m x 10m nominal, and then for all other parts of the game to be redesigned off of that (scaling up docks, rail depos, cities, etc. etc. as appropriate to this new size), would be really all that OpenTTD needs. Plus CargoDist Passengers/Mail by default.
waboremo 4y ago
It's funny you mention wanting to solve transportation issues, because that's exactly the reason why I bounced so hard off Cities Skylines. At a certain point, it just turns into a "play with the roads" game. No matter how many forms of transportation you utilized, it just turned into bottleneck fix after bottleneck fix. When you tried to implement serious logical solutions (ie dedicated bus lines), you were met with more chaos. But add several roundabouts in succession and suddenly traffic fixed. I do agree with the depth, something Cities Skylines was really lacking. Most of the logic of the game was quite shallow, and the people really don't live anywhere near as "deep" lives as in SimCity (2013). I'm hoping this is something they address in the sequel, but seeing as the community has rallied so strongly around the idea of creative designing vs functional planning, I'm not holding my breath.
- potatolicious 4y ago
  I really agree with this. I've gotten into Cities: Skylines numerous times over the years and have bounced off of it each time because it was so hard to scale a city past a certain point due to transport. I'm up for a challenge and I think transport is actually a fantastic gameplay element for the player to scale, but as it is the only way to "solve" transport feels like cheesing whatever algorithm is under the hood, rather than designing a transport system that makes any real kind of sense. I have some beef with agent-based simulations in this regard. They're fascinating in the abstract, but IMO too many game devs are obsessed with it to their own detriment. Heavily agent-based sims tend to scale really poorly (an issue I suspect is true with SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines) and imperfections in modeling the agents causes extreme divergences at-scale that break the illusion of realism badly. At this point I'd honestly much rather - especially with large-scale sims where you build cities of millions rather than a town of dozens - have non-agent-based statistical simulations. I want to build cities that I can imagine seeing IRL, not some metagame-game-mechanioc-defeating monstrosity that's optimized against the game's pathfinding.
- dwringer 4y ago
  I've played with Cities: Skylines off and on many times over the years and often do give up in frustration with endless traffic problems, but I think it's down to two main things: one, traffic management is very much "endgame" type content, as you can build a nice self-sufficient little zen garden community without really worrying about it much. But to get big cities it must be dealt with. And two, once you've already built a city, it's way harder to implement good traffic flow. This is painfully evident all the time in the real world. Now I use a mod to unlock all the map tiles (actually, the entire map) at game start, and I build specifically around my envisioned future transportation needs. It's still a challenge, and I highly recommend the traffic management mod mentioned elsewhere in these threads, but it is not an insurmountable one.
orangepurple 4y ago
SC4 + NAM is what you are looking for https://www.sc4nam.com/ https://www.sc4nam.com/ It has been in development for 20 years.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
> the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines It's worth mentioning that Colossal Order (the studio behind C:S) cut their teeth on transit simulators, namely the Cities in Motion series.
genocidicbunny 4y ago
> Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. Incidentally, Cities Skylines 2 was announced just earlier today. There aren't many details yet, but perhaps that will scratch your itch.
- etempleton 4y ago
  That is exciting. Weird that the trailer is so light on detail or gameplay, but it says coming this year, so more details will come soon I imagine.
humaniania 4y ago
Did you play Sim City 3000?
- Zardoz84 4y ago
  Did you play Sim City 2000?

pdntspa 4y ago

You might enjoy Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. It's really rough right now, and frustratingly manual in places, but it does a good job of simulating resources at least. If you play in Realism Mode then vehicles and resources are dispatched and consumed realistically. (People too, but they teleport home at the end of their job and they don't appear to take transfers for public transit)

homarp 4y ago
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources_Soviet_Republic/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/784150/Workers__Resources...

dragontamer 4y ago

OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe being the original), is my preferred traffic simulation game. Once you can control all routes and trains, you can never go back! You get used to the control, the timetables, the organization that's possible.

orangepurple 4y ago
OpenTTD sadly does not simulate passengers as unique agents. Transportation demand can be very unidirectional and not make logical sense.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  Have you not tried the CargoDist button? It was added maybe 5 years ago, but as an Open source project, advertising for this feature is pretty bad. It turns passengers/mail into agents who will perform 2 or 3 or more hops to reach their destination.
  - zaphoyd 4y ago
    Seconding this, if you dropped OpenTTD because of the simplistic passenger/cargo routing (i.e. take any cargo to any place and pay is only based on how far you took it) then definitely give the CargoDist option a try. Every passenger (or mail or manufactured good) has a unique destination in your system that you need to get it to. They are roughly balanced based on demand (two stations in large cities will generate a lot of traffic between them, but a small town will only generate a small amount of traffic to and from a large city). It makes the transport routing game way more interesting and more like the routing of passengers in more traditional Sim City type games.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Beyond just that, the ability for passengers to "route" themselves (Take airplane from CityA -> CityB, then rail from CityB -> CityC, then bus from CityC to CityD... and back) is the bigger, more important effect of the CargoDist feature. That means you can form "Hub and Spokes" for passenger traffic, and the individual passengers are smart enough to figure out how to route themselves to their ultimate destinations. ------------ Its the most "realistic feeling" traffic mod I've found of any of these games, honestly. Even Cities Skylines seems rather basic in comparison. ----------- I play on Passengers/Mail as CargoDist, and then all other traffic (Coal, Wood, Cargo, Oil, etc. etc.) as default / original rules. I also set the "symmetry" of CargoDist to 80%. That is, 20% of traffic is one-way, which seems to be correct in my opinion? I think it defaults to 100%, but it doesn't make sense for _ALL_ traffic to be bidirectional (ie: for all agents to make a return trip each time). EDIT: I do think that a "big mod" to OpenTTD under a new name would be beneficial to the project. Something that redefines OpenTTD's sizes (each square is supposed to be a square km, but it doesn't "feel" like it. Roads aren't a square km wide after all...). I think that if each square were 10m x 10m nominal, and then for all other parts of the game to be redesigned off of that (scaling up docks, rail depos, cities, etc. etc. as appropriate to this new size), would be really all that OpenTTD needs. Plus CargoDist Passengers/Mail by default.

waboremo 4y ago

It's funny you mention wanting to solve transportation issues, because that's exactly the reason why I bounced so hard off Cities Skylines. At a certain point, it just turns into a "play with the roads" game. No matter how many forms of transportation you utilized, it just turned into bottleneck fix after bottleneck fix. When you tried to implement serious logical solutions (ie dedicated bus lines), you were met with more chaos. But add several roundabouts in succession and suddenly traffic fixed. I do agree with the depth, something Cities Skylines was really lacking. Most of the logic of the game was quite shallow, and the people really don't live anywhere near as "deep" lives as in SimCity (2013). I'm hoping this is something they address in the sequel, but seeing as the community has rallied so strongly around the idea of creative designing vs functional planning, I'm not holding my breath.

potatolicious 4y ago
I really agree with this. I've gotten into Cities: Skylines numerous times over the years and have bounced off of it each time because it was so hard to scale a city past a certain point due to transport. I'm up for a challenge and I think transport is actually a fantastic gameplay element for the player to scale, but as it is the only way to "solve" transport feels like cheesing whatever algorithm is under the hood, rather than designing a transport system that makes any real kind of sense. I have some beef with agent-based simulations in this regard. They're fascinating in the abstract, but IMO too many game devs are obsessed with it to their own detriment. Heavily agent-based sims tend to scale really poorly (an issue I suspect is true with SimCity 2013 and Cities: Skylines) and imperfections in modeling the agents causes extreme divergences at-scale that break the illusion of realism badly. At this point I'd honestly much rather - especially with large-scale sims where you build cities of millions rather than a town of dozens - have non-agent-based statistical simulations. I want to build cities that I can imagine seeing IRL, not some metagame-game-mechanioc-defeating monstrosity that's optimized against the game's pathfinding.
dwringer 4y ago
I've played with Cities: Skylines off and on many times over the years and often do give up in frustration with endless traffic problems, but I think it's down to two main things: one, traffic management is very much "endgame" type content, as you can build a nice self-sufficient little zen garden community without really worrying about it much. But to get big cities it must be dealt with. And two, once you've already built a city, it's way harder to implement good traffic flow. This is painfully evident all the time in the real world. Now I use a mod to unlock all the map tiles (actually, the entire map) at game start, and I build specifically around my envisioned future transportation needs. It's still a challenge, and I highly recommend the traffic management mod mentioned elsewhere in these threads, but it is not an insurmountable one.

orangepurple 4y ago

SC4 + NAM is what you are looking for https://www.sc4nam.com/ https://www.sc4nam.com/ It has been in development for 20 years.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago

> the transportation flexibility of Cities Skylines It's worth mentioning that Colossal Order (the studio behind C:S) cut their teeth on transit simulators, namely the Cities in Motion series.

genocidicbunny 4y ago

> Cities Skylines was great, but I am looking for something a bit more in depth. Incidentally, Cities Skylines 2 was announced just earlier today. There aren't many details yet, but perhaps that will scratch your itch.

etempleton 4y ago
That is exciting. Weird that the trailer is so light on detail or gameplay, but it says coming this year, so more details will come soon I imagine.

humaniania 4y ago

Did you play Sim City 3000?

Zardoz84 4y ago
Did you play Sim City 2000?