Cities Skylines (1&2), SimCity 4, city simulators - sperg about simulations that include or don't include niggers

[Stephanie Bustcakes]

Yeah the fixed age of sims and the resulting deathwave mechanics is fucking stupid because
a) it would periodically overwhelm your cemetaries and crematoriums if you werent prepared
b) easily cripple traffic for a few days while it's being sorted out

That and having half your population suddenly die off isn't great for tax income or businesses that now have no employees or customers.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I haven't played Cities: Skylines in while but I assume they haven't changed any of the things that made me stop. I want to be able to build a small rural town, but the way the game works forces you to go up to a certain size or you'll eventually be doomed. The lower pop garbage and corpse disposal methods of landfills and cemeteries all fill up eventually. You need to hit a pop milestone in order to unlock incinerators and crematoriums, so you must reach those or you'll end up with a city filled up with cemeteries and landfills. Neighborhood deals would be very useful for this. You could pay money to ship garbage or have them deal with your dead. AND SPEAKING OF DEAD It appears to me from experience that every single new immigrant is the exact same age and everyone in the city always dies at the same age (assuming they don't get sick, which is super easy to avoid in this game), which means you get huge waves of people dying all at once. Why not have some variation? Immigrants should be anywhere from young adult to seniors, but weighted towards younger. Same with age, weighted towards dying at old age, but younger people can die, just less likely the younger they are. These things together would make the game both more realistic and should solve the death waves. Hopefully they do this is Cities: Skylines 2. Thank you for reading my Ted Talk.

All of these get fixed with mods but it is insane that the game simulates things you can’t deal with yet (for example, there should just be NO corpses u til you unlock deathcare - assume rural rednecks bury or eat thier own or something). Or making you pay to outsource it until you get your own.

Amusingly the Industries (spellcheck wants to call it I sus tried) DLC helps with rural as you can build farm industry a bit.

For people wanting something non CS I recommend SimCity 3000. It’s probably the best overall and definitely a very good entry. SC4 kind of needs you to know what you’re doing.

 

[Meat Target]

I have one called TheoTown that plays like CS, but the pixel graphics make it easier for my laptop to bear than CS.

 

[ZMOT]

does settlers count as a city builder or would that be more management sim? because the new one is apparently pretty crap.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

For people wanting something non CS I recommend SimCity 3000. It’s probably the best overall and definitely a very good entry. SC4 kind of needs you to know what you’re doing.

It's amazing how SC3000 and SC4 still look better than Skylines. The art direction is just way better. Screenshots from those 2 games still look really nice.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

It's amazing how SC3000 and SC4 still look better than Skylines. The art direction is just way better. Screenshots from those 2 games still look really nice.

SC4's biggest misfortune was coming out right at the start of the Real is Brown era.

 

[CuzinEd]

I forgot about city builder called Citystate. I have had it for a while. It was released in 2018. What made it catch my eye was that it looked kind of like SimCity 3K graphics wise and it was on sale for less than $5. Usually it's $15 but I think I got it for about $4. I haven't played it so I can't say how it is. I actually forgot I had it. I think I bought it back in 2020 or 2021 during a Steam sale and I installed it and just never played it. I have quite a bit of storage in my PC so games can just disappear and get forgotten about if they are small.

There is also a Citystate II but it's a bit more modern looking. I don't have a problem with that. But I never played the first game so I wouldn't buy the second ones right away. It was released in 2021. But I kind of have a thing for the older SC3K graphics. It's on sale now so I might pick it up anyway. Usually it's $25 but its on sale for $11.24 right now during the Steam Spring Sale. That's right, Steam is doing Spring sales now.

You can get Citystate for under $4 on Steam now as well. So if you want to play them both. See which one is better I guess.

I want to play city builder game but I don't want city skyline which game should I pick?

It depends on what you want out of a city builder.

If you want a decent modern city builder where you can build a nice looking city but is light on the management side then Cities Skylines would be a good choice.

But if you want one that lets you build a city and has pretty Indepth management of the city you just built, and you don't care about graphics then SimCity 4 is your only real choice. I don't know of any other game that has a balance of both management and letting you build a nice looking city with modern graphics.

The issue with SimCity 4 is that it doesn't run in widescreen HD resolutions like 1920x1080. You have to make it run in 1920x1080 with a custom resolution. It's not hard to do. You just have to add launch options to the game through Steam.

Right click on the game in your steam library and then click properties. A window will popup and you will see the launch options at the bottom.

Then you just add this into the blank line below.

-CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32

SimCity 4 will now run in 1920x1080x32.

It won't run in any higher resolution than that. Like 1440p and 4K aren't supported. I have heard you can run the game in software mode through the graphics options in game but it makes the games graphics look bad. Maybe you could run it in windowed mode if you want to play at 1440p or 4k. I don't know because I never tried it.

I would suggest SimCity 3000 but I don't think it will run on a modern OS or at higher resolutions at all.

I have one called TheoTown that plays like CS, but the pixel graphics make it easier for my laptop to bear than CS.

CS runs like shit. It must have some pretty poor optimization. It hasn't run all that well since I have had it. It doesn't what matter GPU I use. It would drop below 60 fps with my R9 390 the 1070Ti. I had an i7 6700 with all those GPU's and it still wouldn't maintain a steady frame rate. I have an R7 3700X 2070 Super and 16GB of RAM and if I load up one of the large cities I built the frame rate will dip below 60 fps.

It's a city builder and not a game like Doom or Doom Eternal so having a steady frame rate isn't that important. But it's still annoying that a game that's almost a decade old still causes the framerate to drop below 60.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If only we could combine sim city with GTA...

Id say Skylines, but they'd never let that level of fun touch their game.

That''s actually a really good idea, be fun having car chases and shootouts in a town you built yourself.

 

[Thiletonomics]

The PSX version of SC2000 also let you drive around the cities you built. It was shit, but still:

Those graphics somehow managed to look worse than both SimCopter and Streets of SimCity. And the car's dash looks like it was copy-pasted from SimCopter.

Yeah the fixed age of sims and the resulting deathwave mechanics is fucking stupid because
a) it would periodically overwhelm your cemetaries and crematoriums if you werent prepared
b) easily cripple traffic for a few days while it's being sorted out

I remembered someone making a premature deaths mod, to smoothen the deaths out, but I don't know if it's still updated.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I remembered someone making a premature deaths mod, to smoothen the deaths out, but I don't know if it's still updated.

I linked one earlier - it solves the problem by making sure that immigrants who move in are of random ages instead of all being exactly 20 years old or whatever it is.

 

[ZMOT]

It's a city builder and not a game like Doom or Doom Eternal so having a steady frame rate isn't that important. But it's still annoying that a game that's almost a decade old still causes the framerate to drop below 60.

because a city builder isn't a FPS, GPU means fuck all if a lot of calculations are still done on the CPU.
running on an age old version of unity doesn't help either, we'll see how CS2 goes...

 

[CuzinEd]

because a city builder isn't a FPS, GPU means fuck all if a lot of calculations are still done on the CPU.
running on an age old version of unity doesn't help either, we'll see how CS2 goes...

I noticed when playing that it's CPU heavy. Those kind of games usually are. Like you said there are a lot of calculations going on that are handled by the CPU alone.

Hopefully CS2 runs better. I wonder what engine it will use.

 

[Dammit Mandrake!]

My go-to city simulator nowadays is the A-Train series. It's fucking immaculate and I wrote a detailed post about it last year.

And then you may want to check out the Historical City Builders thread for supplementary information on that specific genre of city builder. I strongly recommend A-Train but it is extremely complex and dense and sometimes that's a bit more than you want. Which is why I keep Sim City 4 Rush Hour and a boat load of mods installed. SC4 with the NAM traffic upgrade is superb. Conversely, Cities Skylines is extremely mediocre and ever since Paradox took over they have also become incredibly sleazy.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

Hopefully CS2 runs better. I wonder what engine it will use.

There was speculation from CPP but Biffa has some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcwyvrHTBc

CS2 will be unity based; the original was Unity 5 and hopefully this one will at least be Unity 2022.

I wish they'd do the simulation entirely separate from the GPU rendering, or even do the simulation on the GPU or something. There's no need for them to be so tightly tied together.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Cities Skylines is extremely mediocre and ever since Paradox took over they have also become incredibly sleazy.

Gee, I wonder what the chances are that CS2 launches with almost none of the content added to CS1 through DLC and will be reintroduced alter with...more DLC.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

What's up with the music in SC2000 (PC/DOS)? It plays for one loop, then goes silent. Sometimes when I click on a button the music randomly starts up again for one loop. Is it supposed to do this?

Say what you like about the console versions, at least the music actually worked properly.

 

[CuzinEd]

There was speculation from CPP but Biffa has some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcwyvrHTBc

CS2 will be unity based; the original was Unity 5 and hopefully this one will at least be Unity 2022.

I wish they'd do the simulation entirely separate from the GPU rendering, or even do the simulation on the GPU or something. There's no need for them to be so tightly tied together.

Thanks for the video.

I wasn't sure what engine they used for the first game. Hopefully it is a newer version of unity. Unity isn't a bad engine. It's usually the people using it that are the problem. It's no UE of course. I saw some people were saying they would use UE5 but that isn't the case. It would have been nice to see someone do something different with UE.

I think some of the stuff the game does needs to be done on the CPU. The GPU probably can't do certain things. It handles the graphics. But everything else gets pushed onto the CPU. It's a city builder it' not a really graphically demanding game. These types of games are usually CPU heavy because of the types of calculations going on. It's kind of been that way for a while.

Gee, I wonder what the chances are that CS2 launches with almost none of the content added to CS1 through DLC and will be reintroduced alter with...more DLC.

There is nearly $250 worth of DLC for CS1 on Steam. CS2 will probably have more. We couldn't put subways in the game guys. We had to do it later as DLC.

What's up with the music in SC2000 (PC/DOS)? It plays for one loop, then goes silent. Sometimes when I click on a button the music randomly starts up again for one loop. Is it supposed to do this?

Say what you like about the console versions, at least the music actually worked properly.

Older games don't play well with newer hardware and operating systems.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

What's up with the music in SC2000 (PC/DOS)? It plays for one loop, then goes silent. Sometimes when I click on a button the music randomly starts up again for one loop. Is it supposed to do this?

Say what you like about the console versions, at least the music actually worked properly.

If in dosbox try playing with settings, it sounds like whatever is supposed to keep the music playing is getting interrupted or stopped,

 

[Xarpho's Return]

What's up with the music in SC2000 (PC/DOS)? It plays for one loop, then goes silent. Sometimes when I click on a button the music randomly starts up again for one loop. Is it supposed to do this?

Say what you like about the console versions, at least the music actually worked properly.

DOS version is garbage and never received any patches. The Windows and Mac versions went up to v1.2, which fixed most of the bugs between two updates.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I haven't played Cities: Skylines in while but I assume they haven't changed any of the things that made me stop. I want to be able to build a small rural town, but the way the game works forces you to go up to a certain size or you'll eventually be doomed. The lower pop garbage and corpse disposal methods of landfills and cemeteries all fill up eventually. You need to hit a pop milestone in order to unlock incinerators and crematoriums, so you must reach those or you'll end up with a city filled up with cemeteries and landfills. Neighborhood deals would be very useful for this. You could pay money to ship garbage or have them deal with your dead. AND SPEAKING OF DEAD It appears to me from experience that every single new immigrant is the exact same age and everyone in the city always dies at the same age (assuming they don't get sick, which is super easy to avoid in this game), which means you get huge waves of people dying all at once. Why not have some variation? Immigrants should be anywhere from young adult to seniors, but weighted towards younger. Same with age, weighted towards dying at old age, but younger people can die, just less likely the younger they are. These things together would make the game both more realistic and should solve the death waves. Hopefully they do this is Cities: Skylines 2. Thank you for reading my Ted Talk.

Maybe there needs to be a SimCounty.