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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'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.
bombcar 4y ago
There's really two types of "City Games" - city painters and traffic simulators, Cities Skylines is basically the second with a bit of the first, whereas SimCity 4 became the first with a bit of the second.
- joveian 4y ago
  There is also the puzzle kind like Urbek, which has a nice SimCity feel but you need to make sure that building type X is (or is not) within Y squares over several levels of development. And more along that line there are a bunch like Farlanders that aren't really builders at all but pure puzzle games that happen to use buildings as graphics. https://www.gog.com/en/game/urbek_city_builder_prologue https://www.gog.com/en/game/urbek_city_builder_prologue https://www.gog.com/en/game/farlanders_prologue https://www.gog.com/en/game/farlanders_prologue
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The Pharaoh/Caesar games also had an interesting take on the city builder but it’s a bit orthogonal.
LegitShady 4y ago
its been years since I played but one of my favorite mods for skylines is "traffic manager: president edition" which let you do fine grained control for lanes and various traffic situations. I know its more 'fiddling' with traffic but it let me solve bottlenecks and issues that just wasn't possible in the base game.

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.

bombcar 4y ago

There's really two types of "City Games" - city painters and traffic simulators, Cities Skylines is basically the second with a bit of the first, whereas SimCity 4 became the first with a bit of the second.

joveian 4y ago
There is also the puzzle kind like Urbek, which has a nice SimCity feel but you need to make sure that building type X is (or is not) within Y squares over several levels of development. And more along that line there are a bunch like Farlanders that aren't really builders at all but pure puzzle games that happen to use buildings as graphics. https://www.gog.com/en/game/urbek_city_builder_prologue https://www.gog.com/en/game/urbek_city_builder_prologue https://www.gog.com/en/game/farlanders_prologue https://www.gog.com/en/game/farlanders_prologue
- bombcar 4y ago
  The Pharaoh/Caesar games also had an interesting take on the city builder but it’s a bit orthogonal.

LegitShady 4y ago

its been years since I played but one of my favorite mods for skylines is "traffic manager: president edition" which let you do fine grained control for lanes and various traffic situations. I know its more 'fiddling' with traffic but it let me solve bottlenecks and issues that just wasn't possible in the base game.