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

[Just Some Other Guy]

Cities Skylines is a colorful sandbox. That is it. It's a pretty bad city management sim. I miss being able to make giant slum apartments in SC4 teeming with tens of thousands of the low class. That's some real shit right there.

I've played CS for probably 10 hours and just don't get it. I can tell why reddit worships it. Its euro-utopia sandbox.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

Pretty sure subways was in the base game from the very beginning. Like all things traffic the way it works is wack as fuck

Metro has been in from the beginning, and the free update that came with the Sunset Harbor DLC added elevated/at-grade metro stations, so you can transfer between underground to on grade to elevated.

They're not compatible with the train tracks. There are tons of "combined stations" available in various DLC and mods.

I've played CS for probably 10 hours and just don't get it. I can tell why reddit worships it. Its euro-utopia sandbox.

It's exactly why it's worshipped; but it IS fun as a colorful sandbox.

But honestly except for the graphics and some of the road capabilities I always thought the "city painting" features of SC4 with all the mods was better. CS lets you get a bit more "active" stuff somewhat.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Modded SC4 pretty much solves almost any question as to what a city building sim should have. But Paradox and co just couldn't learn from that. No. Too American-esque I'm guessing. Wouldn't pull in the Redditor community like "ohmuhgawd look guys, roundabouts and legalized pot!"

Oh, and trains. The ever autistic obsession with trains.

 

[Win98SE]

Played so much SC3K growing up. I remember spending way too long building and not realizing I needed to lay down water pipes!

I've returned to it in recent years and find it a bit easy, but I enjoy the much more relaxed nature of it compared to SC4. SC4 is technically impressive, but I never found myself enjoying it like I did 3K. I'd like to return to it at some point with a tutorial for proper transportation infrastructure in hand.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Did anyone play the spinoff SimCity games, in SimTown and SimCity Societies? In both of those games, you plop down buildings one by one, instead of placing zones. To think that SCS even had slum apartments and commieblock tenements as housing, while Cities Skylines doesn't have that, I think, says something alright.

I also remembered that game footage from SimCity Societies was used in one of the TV channels in The Sims 3.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I'm not a train autist, just a train appreciator, but Transport Fever 2 actually looks pretty good.
I joked about Tropico, but there is a big difference between its style of city-builder and SimCity/Cities in that the former has individual building placement and the latter have zones that fill in. And the latter is more realistic, sure, but with city-building I do not find that more fun.

But if you're going to play a game that's glorified traffic, well, I see the appeal of just chucking rocks and storms at a city, or sculpting a city for fun, but it seems like just going with a dedicate logistics game makes sense. Transport Fever has historical missions, which I love, and can ride the vehicles. Wonder if anyone's made one where you can build the city and drive the train/fly the plane around, Anno has that in a setting of just road vehicles. It is a shame there's too little time to play so much good stuff.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Wonder if anyone's made one where you can build the city and drive the train/fly the plane around

Sim City 4 let's you drive vehicles such as planes and trains. Not to the extent of autistic sim mode, but you get some basic control of them.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Sim City 4 let's you drive vehicles such as planes and trains. Not to the extent of autistic sim mode, but you get some basic control of them.

But not in the first person, cockpit perspective?

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

But not in the first person, cockpit perspective?

Nope. Just 3rd person basics with a few actions. Again, it's nowhere near sim mode and just more of a fun little tack on. I very much doubt a fully fledged city builder will ever have sim train/ plane controls.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Nope. Just 3rd person basics with a few actions. Again, it's nowhere near sim mode and just more of a fun little tack on. I very much doubt a fully fledged city builder will ever have sim train/ plane controls.

Doesn't have to have sim controls. I just like that in Anno 1800 you can explore the city on foot and commandeer any vehicle (wagons, motorcars, bicycles) you see going by. It looks like shit since the graphics are like crappy old RTS game levels when close up, but it's incredible just to get a first-person, ground-level perspective and see all the details (like posters on walls, or specific items in storefronts) you never get from a birds eye.

(Could be a way to do it better would be if these games could have an exploration mode where you just load in one island with high-quality textures up close, but a lot of work for a feature most people wouldn't pay much attention to.)

 

[Kane Lives]

Doesn't have to have sim controls. I just like that in Anno 1800 you can explore the city on foot and commandeer any vehicle (wagons, motorcars, bicycles) you see going by. It looks like shit since the graphics are like crappy old RTS game levels when close up, but it's incredible just to get a first-person, ground-level perspective and see all the details (like posters on walls, or specific items in storefronts) you never get from a birds eye.

(Could be a way to do it better would be if these games could have an exploration mode where you just load in one island with high-quality textures up close, but a lot of work for a feature most people wouldn't pay much attention to.)

Funny tangent but, Maxis actually tried doing that in spirit with both SimCity 2000 and SimCopter (back when Maxis was focused on making sim games for edutainment). So SimCity 2000 was basically a isometric version of the OG SimCity with water included, while SimCopter had you basically driving a helicopter doing missions Crazy Taxi-style. The twist? You can actually import cities which you made in SimCity 2000 directly into SimCopter to explore and play around with. As far as I can tell, it was a one-to-one import of what you made in SC2000, right into SimCopter, with the same buildings being rendered in primitive 3D. Of course, they never tried that since then as SimCopter was actually not very fun to play (and sold like shit for most part), but the idea was there.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Wonder if anyone's made one where you can build the city and drive the train/fly the plane around,

Funny tangent but, Maxis actually tried doing that in spirit with both SimCity 2000 and SimCopter (back when Maxis was focused on making sim games for edutainment). So SimCity 2000 was basically a isometric version of the OG SimCity with water included, while SimCopter had you basically driving a helicopter doing missions Crazy Taxi-style. The twist? You can actually import cities which you made in SimCity 2000 directly into SimCopter to explore and play around with. As far as I can tell, it was a one-to-one import of what you made in SC2000, right into SimCopter, with the same buildings being rendered in primitive 3D. Of course, they never tried that since then as SimCopter was actually not very fun to play (and sold like shit for most part), but the idea was there.

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

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

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

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

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

 

[CuzinEd]

I remember playing the original Sim City on one of my early PC's back in the early 2000's. A friend of mines dad had a whole bunch of old games. I think it was around 2000 so it was the old 486 with the Pentium overdrive. I had lots of fun building cities and running them into the ground. Which what usually happened. I had Sim City 2000 on the PS1 as well. I got in Toys R US for $20 on sale. I would build cities and run them into the ground with bad decisions. In the late 2000's I played Sim City 3000. I would have to say that's the best Sim City. It had a good sound track and good art style. It struck the right balance between the cities looking good enough graphically and showing you what your city looked like.

It was still a 2D isometric look but worked well. As with the other Sim City games I would build a city and it would turn into a shithole from my bad decisions. I would basically end up with a ghetto like you would see in a blue state. I tried Sim City 4 it was ok but I never got into it the way I did the others. Though it's basically like the other Sim City games. It just didn't have the same charm IMO. It's ok though. It will run on a modern OS and will work with HD screen resolutions up to 1080p. Anything higher than that and it won't work. I never bothered with Sim City 2013 mostly because I had no way to play it and from what I heard it wasn't very good.

I bought Cities Skylines in 2015 when I got a PC capable of playing games. Well sort of capable. I played it for a while. It's ok but it seems to be lacking of some the depth and management of the Sim City games. This is how I think of the two games. Sim City is for people who want to manage a city and I mean every aspect of it you can imagine. Cities Skylines is for people who want to build a nice looking city. It's more like a city builder than a management sim. Kind of the way Planet Coaster is like a park builder and not an in depth management sim. I still play Cities Skylines once in a while. But I bought Sim City 4 a few years ago on Steam and if I want city management I play that.

I also have all the Tropico games on Steam. I picked them during Steam sales. I believe I got Tropico 3 and all the extra stuff with it from Humble Bundle for like less than $5. They are like city builders. If you ever wanted to play as a dictator Tropico is a good game. In Tropico 3 and 4 you can upload pictures of whoever you want. If you want to rule an island as Hitler you can do it. If Hitler was a Communist. You are basically playing as some Latin American tin pot dictator. I think in 3 you can use Pinochet as an avatar.

Another city builder I have played is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. You can build and run your own Communist country. I didn't play much of it. But I do remember it being an interesting concept at least. It's a different spin on a city builder. It's one of those games sitting in my list of installed games on Steam I want to get back to playing. You can pick it up during a sale and try it.

It's not so much a city builder as a colony sim. But Dawn of Man is still an interesting game. I played a little of this as well. You can get it on Steam on sale for $12.49. You can take early human village all the way to a fort with people using swords and shields. You start off in the Pleistocene with Mammoths and things like that roaming around. I didn't see any in what little I played. I saw some bears and wild boars. You can send out hunting parties. You have to build your ice age village up.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

I just really want to know how skylines has worse traffic than sim city. That's a real achievement.

Skylines just pisses me off. It just had to be Sim City gameplay with modern features. But they watered it down so much. It could have been so much more.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I just really want to know how skylines has worse traffic than sim city. That's a real achievement.

Skylines just pisses me off. It just had to be Sim City gameplay with modern features. But they watered it down so much. It could have been so much more.

It has worse traffic because it tries to simulate it more “accurately” - you can read some of the TMPE autists but the short of it is that SC4 simulates “buildings” and CS tried to simulate individuals and ran into performance issues around release time and did some hacks to make it work. Much of TPME is removing those hacks.

The poorly implemented “day/night” cycle makes it worse.

 

[UtadaWasabi2]

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

 

[jje100010001]

I just really want to know how skylines has worse traffic than sim city. That's a real achievement.

Skylines just pisses me off. It just had to be Sim City gameplay with modern features. But they watered it down so much. It could have been so much more.

I think ultimately Cities Skylines was a hastily-rushed asset flip of Cities in Motion 2 (done in months once the Simcity franchise collapsed), and I doubt they were expecting an operational lifespan this long.

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

Simcity 4 is fun as an early-00s American urbanist dream encapsulation that needs a couple of community patches to fix some of its issues, Simcity 3000 is more timeless but less detailed.

 

[Stephanie Bustcakes]

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.

 

[Kane Lives]

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.

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