Anyone else playing this new citybuilder?
Developed by Colossal Order (same people behind Cities in Motion), Cities: Skylines is a pretty comprehensive city-builder in the same line of the SimCity series. It takes several hints from SimCity 2013 (on the surface they actually look very similar), while avoiding pretty much all the things it did wrong (in particular: No online requeriments, huge city sizes, functional simulation, and lots of modding tools).
Graphically it looks great, though I admit the style is a bit bland. But with thousands upon thousands of custom buildings, parks, intersections, and landmarks already available from the modding community, it's quickly being fixed.
Maps are huge; you start with a 2x2 km area, which you can expand by purchasing additional 2x2 km lots, up to 9 in total (with mods you can purchase up to 25, for a massive size of 100sq kms).
Difficulty is pretty low, particularly if you compare it with SimCity 4. Though there are ways in which the game can throw a wrench at your carefully built utopia, save for the very early stages you will never really encounter money issues.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game is the traffic simulation. The engine can hold up to 1,000,000 individual agents, each with their own homes, works, and needs, which scurry about your roads and walkways in a very realistic manner. And with the extremelly flexible road tools, you will soon find yourself experimenting with 4-level fractal highway junctions and spiral bridges.
It also deals very well with gridless city shapes, as lots are subdivided into tiny tiles that orient themselves to the street rather than the ground, allowing you to have very natural curves and corners.
All in all, a fantastic citybuilder. A bit easy, yes, but it more than makes up for it with its depth and replayability. The absolutely ludicrous amount of mods also give it a constant stream of free content, and the devs are very committed towards quality DLCs, both free and paid (the publisher's Paradox, and they've announced a release system like that of EU4 and CK2, in which even paid expansions provide free content for everyone).
Truly, Cities: Skylines is the first citybuilder since SimCity 4 that has managed to enchant me.
Also: The game includes poop dynamics. Sewage drains actually add volume to waterways and, if you build a dam to close them, you can drown your city in literal, volumetric crap. Sewer surfin'!
Wow! That is what I was really what I have been waiting for.
I have played a lot of simcity 4 but when I switched computers it started crashing a lot. I could tolerate all the little problems with graphics, interface, and game play, but combined with instability, it was just too much. Also, I did get sick of grid cities full of Cox Family Courts and such.
I played cities XL, but it has some sort of memory leak type bug that makes the clumsy interface BRUTAL to deal with. That game is broken, and should never been released, much less by at least two gaming companies. Also, almost no trains beyond nebulous subway lines.
How are the mass transit options for Skylines?
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Mass transit is pretty expansive. You have bus, trains, trams, metros, and ferries, with route customization and overlays showing the types of passengers.
That way, instead if just plopping, say, bus stops all over town, you build a bus station that services vehicles and then draw different lines, determining where the stops will be. Then the station starts pumping out buses to meet the line's requeriments (basen on how long it is). This way, you can have multiple lines serving different areas or purposes, such as one meant to drive tourist across landmark sites, students to school, or workers to the mines. These vehicles still have to move, so a gridlock will affect buses just as much, while trains require careful planning to avoid collapses.
Coupled with all the road/track building freedom, it's the deepest mass transit system of any citybuilder. Which makes sense, considering the game was built on Cities in Motion 2's engine (a transit simulator).
Aye, it's easy to lock yourself into a dysfunctional traffic network early in the game. But then again, dealing with those issues is one of the most entertaining aspects of the game!