Cities Skylines

[Uncle Peter]

Aimed squarely at those naffed off with the last Sim City offering, this on the face of it looks like a fancy re-work of Sim City 4. Same concepts and functionality with more modern execution. The graphics don't exactly look fantastic mind but who cares.

http://youtu.be/aqQ0fNy0KZU

There were rumblings of this game's appearance some time ago when Sim City was released and it's finally out on 10th March. Certainly looks interesting and I hope it works.

[Stephen]

SimCity has got a lot better of late.

Do still find myself playing SC4 more though.

That game does look good.

[Uncle Peter]

I've been playing a bit of SC4 now that the NAM plugin has been sorted out for the app store version of the game so never really felt there was any incentive to buy the new Sim City. The map size was the real deal breaker.

Anyway the developers of Cities Skyline seem pretty open and engaged with the community on their forums so certainly bodes very well that they're listening to what the people really want.

[Uncle Peter]

Some very good reviews for this

if you attach any weight to the Metacritic meta score

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/cities-skylines

Plus some other gaming forums heaping a lot of praise so it looks like a deffo buy for me when I have time to play.

[Uncle Peter]

The deed has been done. Bought it last night and played for most of the evening.

All I can say is: What a wonderful game. Just like welcoming back a long, lost friend and finding that they've changed for the better in many ways. The maps are huge: You start off with a relatively small chunk of a much larger map which in itself takes ages to fill even with low density zoning. As you progress and your city grows additional segments of the map become unlocked for purchase for further expansion. Virtually everything in the game is unlocked in stages depending on city growth.

Much of the finicky micro-management of funding from SC4 has gone which is a good thing at this point as I always found it an unwelcome distraction particularly for large cities. Also gone are the range circles for the various services so when you're growing your low density city there's no more requirement to build more than one of each service to mitigate lateral spread. You can also configure districts with a really funky painting tool and assign separate policies and ordinances for each respective district to encourage selective growth, energy saving and even a bit of sneaky social engineering... now that is pretty cool.

The only minor niggle up to now is that the road building can be a bit finicky especially if you're Romano British instincts kick in and you want to build nice, neat grid patterns. Basically it can be a bit too easy to skew roads slightly off centre without immediately noticing. Fortunately the bulldozer tool refunds the building cost of what you remove.

Considering only 9 people worked on the bulk of this game it's a pretty astounding achievement.

[Acathla]

Thoroughly enjoying this game. Although I must admit I have been playing with unlimited money turned on. My plan was 'just to get the hang of it' but I dare not take it off now as my cities will probably be millions in debt :o

[Uncle Peter]

Spending far too much time on this game

Actually it's much easier to make money than SC4 so there's no real need to use the unlimited cash cheat.

The challenge is maintaining enough "uneducated" workers to maintain your base manufacturing and agricultural industries if you have them which means doing a bit of crafty social engineering. The biggest annoyance with the game though is having to constantly manage your landfills. Hopefully there will be a mod or patch to do this automatically for you on building incinerators.

[Ravenheart]

I'm really enjoying this too, a great game that swallows hours at a time

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Uncle Peter

The biggest annoyance with the game though is having to constantly manage your landfills. Hopefully there will be a mod or patch to do this automatically for you on building incinerators.

Personally I just stop using landfills on building incinerators.

[Uncle Peter]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Personally I just stop using landfills on building incinerators.

Might give that a go when I start a new city. I think the current one is a bit too far gone.

Don't tell the greens.

[qasdfdsaq]

I've restarted five or six times now. Hate the map I'm on, but I've grown it too far to just give up and start again. Trying to juggle between cemeteries and activating/deactivating crematoriums to try and lower my healthcare costs, which are astronomical...

[Uncle Peter]

Back into playing this since the last updates. Having some problems with hydroelectric dams though as they seem to have changed the water physics unless I'm imagining things.

Save game before building one!