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

[Xarpho's Return]

I've had the idea before of a city-builder game that has the gimmick of having urban politics and being based around revitalizing/gentrifying cities. So you start with a horrific shithole, like a vast abandoned Detroit or a bloodbath Memphis or a socially explosive San Francisco, and you have to resolve it. Historic preservation was my specific interest there, as I'd been reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Tradeoffs of whether or not to protect specific buildings and districts, or how you can integrate them into a new tourism-based economy, that building something like a Charleston would be a win state. But preservation could be just one part of it among a lot of other issue, gentrification one of them.

Could even have some sort of very light RTS mechanics with handling riots.

The key to such a game would be that the player would have to have severe limitations on what they can do. City council as actual characters, factions, mayoral elections, that sort of thing. Like Tropico meets Sim City.

The problem I see is that at least for neighborhood gentrification, the end result is usually trading out shit for different type of shit. Sure, it has a shiny new coat of paint and your chance of getting randomly stabbed/mugged/shot plummets, but they vote the same way (perpetuating the cycle that got it into the mess into the beginning), it gets more expensive to live in, and a hellscape of townhomes and midrises is just as boring.

 

[Kane Lives]

The real poison right now is wasting time is a focus on resources and materials, which are the some of the worst things that have been integrated into city sims. (Minecraft may be to blame). There's so many things that I'd like to see--and at least one stillborn city sim did try it, that I'd like to see integrated into city simulations but none of them really do. Worst, half of them are from other games that essentially do the same thing but much better.

Colour me curious. What would be in your ideal city sim?

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Colour me curious. What would be in your ideal city sim?

I've had a number of ideas on and off, but mostly what it revolves around is being able to take SimCity 4 and infuse it with all the choice bits of other games I've played over the years (one idea I had was that you could add billboards around town for extra money, taken from Yoot Tower) and a more expansive map, like being able to build a fully to-scale city with realistic population numbers (so 100k people would not be skyscrapers).

The main "radical" ideas I've had is either ditching or a massive re-do of the health model (SimCity 2000's health model really was just a way to determine lifespan which ultimately led to more or less schools) and hooking electrical into "the grid" without all the neighbor deal stuff.

I bring up the health model because even SimCity 4 basically treated health workers like government employees, and being nearer to a hospital or clinic doesn't make one "healthier"...otherwise half of Houston would be the healthiest people on the planet because of all the concentration of hospitals south of downtown.

As for the "stillborn city sim" that was NewCity and its full apartment complexes (similar to what you'd see in most of America, very common post-WWII), rather than just random apartment buildings.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

I think a solid city game would just embrace the city painter type of gameplay, minimize stupid shit, have a good traffic algorithm (run detailed pathing, don’t recalculate every time, etc), and just let you fuck around and see what works.

And be graphically less intensive so you can have fucking humongous cities.

 

[3-2-1836]

Each citizen is 19k triangles (which is too much for how bad they look, even in stills), and everything is all modeled and textured, even down to underwear. This is why some of the NPCs wear bras and panties on the outside of their clothes...but even so, what's the point? If an NPC spawns wearing clothes, there's no need to model underwear underneath, unless there's some sort of clothing damage mechanic (which there isn't).

I'm assuming there's going to be some integration with Life by You like there was between the Sims and Simcity way back in the day hence integrating clothes

I'd be interested to see if they reused the same models.

 

[LegoTugboat]

Edit: If it wasn't clear, I mean you inherit a fully-fledged city with natural city-like features (growth that reflects age, instead of being some artificial planned thing), are given a somewhat realistic timescale for what can be accomplished, and you can't just casually make a volcano of poo like that Isorrowproductions faggot that does all the unfunny Paradox videos on YouTube. Making even slight changes to the city layout should be a grueling slog. Imagine having to deal with bullshit like eminent domain and environmentalist injunctions. There would be a market for such a game.

If you win, you get elected mayor of San Francisco and get to enact your reforms in real life!

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I'm assuming there's going to be some integration with Life by You like there was between the Sims and Simcity way back in the day hence integrating clothes

I'd be interested to see if they reused the same models.

Sadly no one does cross-game integration anymore, not even common developers (no Planet Zoo/Planet Coaster hybrid parks for instance), let alone two studios (CS2 is Colossal Order, LbY is Paradox Tectonic).

LbY's people look far better than the randomly generated blobs of CS2.

 

[Classical Lord Dessler]

Colossal Order put out a Word of the Week Monday, half of which talks on toxicity in the community and how they're concerned of how it will drive people away. They go on to basically ask if the playerbase wants more or less moderation over their spaces (I'm assuming PX forum and the CS2 Steam discussions). There are definitely outliers taking things too far but I sense a lot of the alleged "toxicity" is people going on about the mountain of bugs, dlc for the premium edition that's getting pushed further and further out, console edition release and first party mod support that's also pushing out and out (as of Monday the modding tool's BETA TEST is expected in a "few weeks").

They know why the community is getting more and more irate, they don't want to admit that we're approaching 3 months from release and the game is now just about playable. At least I assume it is, glaring bugs have mostly been patched in my instance and performance is about what I was expecting to get day 1, though I'm on an OP system so other people with reasonable PCs that are lower spec might still be having problems.

They've set themselves up to lose, lose, and lose again (but win financially, of course). Employees at CO better gear up for 2 quarters of hell, either to catch up to the community's expectations or to weather the ensuing storm from failing to meet them.

Link to WOTW: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/co-word-of-the-week-8.1621364/

 

[ye's Official KF Burner]

Colossal Order put out a Word of the Week Monday, half of which talks on toxicity in the community and how they're concerned of how it will drive people away. They go on to basically ask if the playerbase wants more or less moderation over their spaces (I'm assuming PX forum and the CS2 Steam discussions). There are definitely outliers taking things too far but I sense a lot of the alleged "toxicity" is people going on about the mountain of bugs, dlc for the premium edition that's getting pushed further and further out, console edition release and first party mod support that's also pushing out and out (as of Monday the modding tool's BETA TEST is expected in a "few weeks").

They know why the community is getting more and more irate, they don't want to admit that we're approaching 3 months from release and the game is now just about playable. At least I assume it is, glaring bugs have mostly been patched in my instance and performance is about what I was expecting to get day 1, though I'm on an OP system so other people with reasonable PCs that are lower spec might still be having problems.

They've set themselves up to lose, lose, and lose again (but win financially, of course). Employees at CO better gear up for 2 quarters of hell, either to catch up to the community's expectations or to weather the ensuing storm from failing to meet them.

Link to WOTW: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/co-word-of-the-week-8.1621364/

They, like many other companies, need to stop treating valid criticisms as toxicity. If they didn't want people to be upset, they shouldn't have released a broken, buggy, and unfinished product.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The mask slipped off—they coasted off goodwill and relied more on dedicated modders than releasing a good product, and now that they finally have some resistance to a lousy product they get pissed. I can't wait until they start to block mods out of spite and destroy the product for good.

They're fucked and they know it. All that's needed is some surprise dark horse candidate and it's over (now unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a new candidate).

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Tired of devs acting like such shits when they have the recipe for success right in their lap and still manage to fuck it up.

 

[The Ghost of Kviv]

They, like many other companies, need to stop treating valid criticisms as toxicity start enforcing positive feedback through corporate control mechanisms. If they didn't want people to be upset, they shouldn't have released a broken, buggy, and unfinished product should've brought in KPMG before launch to prep them on how to use modern communication methods to punch down fight back against negative toxic feedback. For example: "Sexism against fat women who work at PDX and CO is a prevalent pattern found in negative user feedback".

FTFY

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Tired of devs acting like such shits when they have the recipe for success right in their lap and still manage to fuck it up.

Well, there's always been the fact that the devs didn't know what they were doing. C:S1's DLC not only wasn't good it seemed to lack of consistent vision and what would be actually good and useful additions. What people really liked was the mods like Traffic Manager.

The generated people is one example. Removing them pre-release and making a statement like "One thing we wanted in C:S2 was a living breathing city with people; unfortunately, the results weren't what we wanted and brought down performance", and then not only would they be forgiven, but when it gets inevitably found and re-enabled through a patch people would be like "Holy shit, this is awful" and not give them any problems.

 

[jje100010001]

Colossal Order really needs an actual art director and art team.

CS1 was understandable as an asset flip from Cities in Motion, but CS2 is still sort of plain-looking once you look past the shiny shader bits (and see right into the overscaled bland walls/paving and marketplace prop assets).

You can compare this to Anno 1800 which looks gorgeous and stylistically consistent out of the gate, up to its final DLCs last year.

 

[3-2-1836]

Can someone tell me what was their motivation in removing steam workshop support?

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

Can someone tell me what was their motivation in removing steam workshop support?

Paradox are a bunch of faggots.

In more depth, I think it's part of their continued attempt to be a big-boy publisher, with their own launcher and mod ecosystem and all that shit. You can see on their "Coming Soon" page they mention the modding library being available on both PC and Console, so I'm assuming that plays a part of it: they want the console market sales, know mods are a big part of why people liked CS1, and decided to come up with this "solution." That's my best guess, anyway.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Paradox are a bunch of faggots.

In more depth, I think it's part of their continued attempt to be a big-boy publisher, with their own launcher and mod ecosystem and all that shit. You can see on their "Coming Soon" page they mention the modding library being available on both PC and Console, so I'm assuming that plays a part of it: they want the console market sales, know mods are a big part of why people liked CS1, and decided to come up with this "solution." That's my best guess, anyway.

They had to pull support for Nintendo Switch early and the other console versions don't support mods.

The problem is that I suspect that Paradox won't be nearly as forgiving and open when it to comes to mods in CS2. We've already seen them bitch about "toxic" players, wait until some popular mod has to be banned because it can't play on console correctly...or some other mods getting banned because of Current Year bullshit.

 

[Classical Lord Dessler]

Can someone tell me what was their motivation in removing steam workshop support?

Their reasoning was to integrate console versions better by maintaining a unified platform. They had the ability to delete mods from the workshop in CS 1 so I do believe them when they say they want a unified mod space. The problem rises when you ask the follow up question, "why not have both?" which I haven't seem them answer. Everyone knows the answer, the steam workshop would monopolize everything and then they have to deal with console babies complaining about the lack of mods again.

Like Xarpho said, appeasing the console players will help sales numbers but it's retardedly kneecapping modding overall for the game.

Day 1 the workshop was open for CS 1 and we had mods fixing all kinds of issues. It was an easy 1 click solution and the centrality of the workshop has allowed 400k+ assets to accumulate in these 9 years. Compare this to CS 2, no workshop and a hideously (sometimes literally) buggy game. There were some performance enhancements people were making but they were scattered on 3rd party mod sites some of which I never even heard of. Would optimization mods save the release build of the game? No, but if there was an easy to install mod from the workshop to help hold people over, the blowback would be dampened by the community.

But no. Just wait a week month quarter little later guys and we'll get you mod support! There will even be a beta for it! Well, there will be if you're a popular creator from the last game.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Day 1 the workshop was open for CS 1 and we had mods fixing all kinds of issues. It was an easy 1 click solution and the centrality of the workshop has allowed 400k+ assets to accumulate in these 9 years. Compare this to CS 2, no workshop and a hideously (sometimes literally) buggy game. There were some performance enhancements people were making but they were scattered on 3rd party mod sites some of which I never even heard of. Would optimization mods save the release build of the game? No, but if there was an easy to install mod from the workshop to help hold people over, the blowback would be dampened by the community.

But no. Just wait a week month quarter little later guys and we'll get you mod support! There will even be a beta for it! Well, there will be if you're a popular creator from the last game.

They basically declared war on their own fanbase. The second a viable competitor comes out the game is toast.

 

[Classical Lord Dessler]

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/co-word-of-the-week-9.1622032/

Well we have the update, Paradox Mods/modding interface entering public beta late March and progressing to a hopefully "finished" state by the Fall.

To summarize on the priorities of the modding support:

1. Public Beta version of code modding and Paradox Mods will be available in the live build by the end of March
2. Public Beta version of Map editing available in the live build together with code modding or soon after
3. Public Beta version of Asset editing to be announced, only after the technical issues are sorted can we roll out the tool
4. Continue to work on the modding support and get out of the Beta stage during the Finnish fall.

I have to wonder what in the fuck are they doing with the map maker that it's going to be released late March or later. More importantly that means 2 more months with CO's base game maps which is going to torture some people