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CO Word of the Week #6

Last week in my comments on the forum, I tried in my very (and sometimes too) direct way to say that we made different design choices with Cities: Skylines II compared to its predecessor, and we understand that some may prefer one over the other or wish we had gone in a different direction. My poor choice of words did not make it clear that this of course does not apply to any bugs or issues you’re experiencing with the game. Naturally, this led to frustration for a lot of you, and I apologize for this. We know that we still have a lot to do before Cities Skylines II meets the performance standard and polish we are aiming for and that you expect, and you can be sure we are hard at work to reach these goals.

One of the best parts of Cities: Skylines is its active community. As devs we want to be present on the forums, listening to the feedback and answering questions. Our goal is to create the best city builder ever made, and your feedback is extremely important to us in reaching that goal. All of us in the community have different personalities and cultural backgrounds, our preferences and opinions vary and priorities differ. We know as devs we can’t please everyone, but each and every one of you makes our community richer. Cities: Skylines II is about creativity that can spark interesting conversations and new ideas. The community, and modding, are what make a Colossal Order game! And I promise, we’re working as fast as possible to get the modding support into the game.

In the meantime, we released gameplay bug fixes last week. Most notably we touched upon mail service and storage transfer, and fixed bugs related to the pathfinding. You can find the full patch notes with all the fixes here. All the fixes for the simulation may require a bit of time to take effect. However, please report if you still experience the issues and we’ll take a look!

The next patch (the last one this year) is coming out next week before we start our holiday break on the 18th of December. The patch will have the performance improvements I mentioned previously and the gameplay bug fixes we can manage to squeeze in. The focus is on the characters and a dentist has been consulted. There will also be improvements in the level of detail models for selected assets, as well as geometry improvements for better performances and reduced memory usage. Asset-related work will continue next year, but we should already have a good amount of improvements ready before the holidays.

On the gameplay side, we’re looking into the airports having problems with the export and we are working to fix some statistics. We have received reports of more stray dogs, now at the train stations. I can’t believe how terrible the citizens are at taking care of their pets! While I won’t promise we’ll have all of the dog-related issues fixed before the holidays, we are aware of the poor pups being left behind and will make sure their owners learn responsibility eventually. Please keep the feedback and the bug reports coming, we’ll go through all of them!

In the next CO Word of the Week, we’ll go over the final patch of the year and what we plan to work on next year.

Sincerely,
Mariina
 
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Thanks for these updates!
Please don't throw the next update out into the world and go away for the holidays, that's frustrating if it breaks something.

Also, I had to start a new city after the latest update, the one "fixing" mail. Mail situation got even worse and after longer than necesarry i gave up and started over. Though my new city is small, no one is complaining about mail yet. lol
 
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I know many people like dogs and many have them so it makes sense to include them in a game like this for immersion but do they actually have any influence on gameplay at all?

Now I want stray dogs to gather in packs, attack citizens and turn trash cans, requiring the city to build animal shelters and, since you brought the topic, high garbage accumulation could bring rats and bugs requiring pest control services. Now there's some gameplay implications I'd love to see.
 
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Please work with Steam to open up refunds for those of us with over 2
hours.

Until the game meets the standard of what was advertised, I'd like my money back.
 
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Please work with Steam to open up refunds for those of us with over 2
hours.

Until the game meets the standard of what was advertised, I'd like my money back.
I agree - there's enough evidence now that the game was released too early, it can only be a matter of time before @co_martsu has to accede to the inevitable and get a deal done with Steam to let those of us who she's acknowledged have been let down by the state of the game to get our money back.

What do you say @co_martsu - fair's fair?
 
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This game is a mess. A typical example of what happens when good ideas meet bad engineering. And by calling it "engineering", I am being generous as I am not sure if any actual software engineers work at CO.

The lesson to learn here is that if your ideas and aspirations require much more than your technical capacity, don't try to implement them or hire actual experts to do the job.
 
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I'm just confused why there are so many, sometimes severe, bugs. I understand that you can't reach 100% test coverage. But jeeze, were your devs on crack to barely meet the deadline set by your board, managers etc?

"The community, and modding, are what make a Colossal Order game!"
Why did you release the game then without modding support?

Anyway, thanks for the update. Still feel sorry for the devs. Hope they know the frustration is not targeting against them but rather the managers trying to get the Christmas $$$. I always supported Paradox Games but they definitely lost my faith in them. Next time I'll be extra cautious when buying one of their titles.
 
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I agree - there's enough evidence now that the game was released too early, it can only be a matter of time before @co_martsu has to accede to the inevitable and get a deal done with Steam to let those of us who she's acknowledged have been let down by the state of the game to get our money back.

What do you say @co_martsu - fair's fair?
It would be the right move to restore trust, especially in light of the marketing and arguably misleading communications between just before release and the announcement of the delay of mods.

But unfortunately I don't see that happening, PDX likely pulls those strings and if they didn't give a refund for Leviathan, they probably aren't giving one here...

For the record I probably wouldn't take advantage of a refund, the game released in an absolutely unacceptable state but I'm willing to keep my money in if it makes fixes and continued development more likely, but I do think that others who feel differently should be respected, again especially in light of that fact that the VERY material information about mods came AFTER the two week refund window where we were led to believe "days."
 
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Right now bus-only lanes and pedestrian-only streets are completely broken. They appear like suggestions to those in cars. I haven't played since it became unbearable to look at.
How so? I haven't seen evidence of this personally. Cars are allowed to use bus lanes to turn, as they should. The only vehicles I've seen on pedestrian roads are the ones that are supposed to be there.
 
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This is not a high priority ticket at the moment I'm afraid.
Well that kind of sucks. I don't know if you realise, but it really affects gameplay and it's clearly a bug caused by whatever you guys fixed with the latest patch. I've got a level 8 city, which would realistically be level 2, which is anoying because they're asking for stuff they normally wouldn't get at a city this size. I'm forced to plan for highschools, high density housing, all sepeciallized industries, etc, and I'm not even at 2k population. I like working from progression level to progression level, trying to balance my budget, while offering my citizens what they need. Being successful in this gives me a sense of accomplishment, which is what the game was designed around. Now there's nothing to play for as far as I'm concerned because everything is for free. If I wanted that, I would play with everything unlocked.

Btw, a bunch of guys in the bug section trying to troubleshoot it for you too. Would be nice to drop a comment there.
 
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I love this idea and agree that the game needs churches as any city has it. BUT the game should match people from any cultural background. Christmas is a very specific Christian thing. Maybe there could be a in game religion with it's own kind of temples and such a festival? Something like a Chirper Cult. Could be a good DLC. Temples of the holly chirper could bring indoor recreation and have limited capacity, so you need enough of those and on festival nobody goes to work.
Glad u like my idea.

However I have a bunch of friends from different cultural background and they all celebrate 'winterfest'. They all have lamps decorated, eat food and come together and have schnapps and gluhwein at the winter market with me. There is Lunar New Year thats a bit later though but they also use lights. They could be an option toggle though.

A lot of games do this the past years. Assassins Creed Valhalla had mini games and decorations in their camp, in Sea Of Thieves outposts are decorated with pumpkins and lights and even Call Of Duty has a decorated Shipment map etc.

The only 'problem' I see is that the ingame season mechanic clashes with this.

Having curches or any form of religion in this kind of games is tricky. A lot of building games just omit it or find clever abstracted ways to avoid real world implementation because of obvious reasons.
 
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Which one is "the"? The first one, the last one or also those in between? :D I've multiple cargo train stations and I'm still trying to figure out how it should work... If I remember the number correctly, the station has a capacity of 15.5k, but the inventory shows way above 100k for some goods. On the other side, the capacity bar shows 0/15500, so I wonder what each of them is meaning.
1.0.15 did fix the mail bug, but there's a second separate bug that's behind the issue you're seeing. Post Sorting facilities don't use their own trucks to transfer mail if you have a cargo station built, instead they rely only on the cargo station's trucks to transfer sorted and unsorted mail (with the cargo hub acting as the central warehouse managing it all). Mail is also a lower priority good than most of the other goods at the station. This means your bottleneck is your cargo hub's 16 trucks who have to drive around and deal with everyone else's requested imports before they can get around to sorting out your mail, and if you have a medium or large city from pre-patch, the simulation changed significantly enough that it takes hours to for them to get through the new inventory backlog.

The quickest workaround is to delete and rebuild your cargo hubs to reset their storage. This will free the trucks so they can immediately deal with mail while they wait on trains and boats to import new good requests and for local industry to bring their exports over.

If you have multiple hubs, you can try just deleting one to see if that has an immediate impact. I don't know if it'll be sufficient or not because maybe stored mail in the other hubs will still interfere with the simulation.
Thanks,
btw, who cares about dogs when all of the post is still stuck in the cargo train stations?
If dogs are being detached from the simulation and standing around unattended, every agent on-screen has a cpu, ram, and gpu cost, so letting large piles of dogs accumulate would negatively impact your performance. There's a reason not every cim leaves their house every day.
 
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In my opinion, government subsidies are a very interesting feature. They provide a kind of support when the city is somehow financially inefficient. The government aspect and state structures should be deeper. I believe that government subsidies provide such a sense of actual management of the city. Maybe it would be a nice solution if the player had more freedom in deciding whether he wants this subsidy or not. Maybe something based on a directive introduced by the mayor (but not in the form of a loan), but government support from time to time.

The state (government) can, for example, support the financing of a specific investment in the city and contribute to the costs or simply throw money at the player, which the player will have to use at some point, otherwise it will be lost... Hehe, I'm thinking out loud now :)
I am not against subsidies but come one, it makes it impossible to lose, go bankrupt, etc.. plus people is always happy no matter what you do. For me, the game is totally boring. I don’t want just a city painter. I want city management like we are used to with previous city builders games.
 
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Pets don't affect the gameplay, they're just there to keep your citizens company and apparently get abandoned by them. :oops:
Yes they do, public transit will wait for a pet to board, even if the owner left it 10km away.

Ok slight exaggeration on 10km, but they won’t leave until pet and owner are boarded.
 
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We have received reports of more stray dogs, now at the train stations. I can’t believe how terrible the citizens are at taking care of their pets! While I won’t promise we’ll have all of the dog-related issues fixed before the holidays, we are aware of the poor pups being left behind and will make sure their owners learn responsibility eventually. Please keep the feedback and the bug reports coming, we’ll go through all of them!
I see the stray dog issue is mentioned for the train stations but I also see them at the bus station. They seem to be planning on leaving the city but never board a bus. Also I moved my station slightly and some dogs in waiting didn’t move and now float in mid air.
I would like to see some kind of info view that can show high flow between destinations. We obviously can’t do traffic surveys. All the arrows on the roads in the last game wasn’t always the most clear but it did help in some ways. Knowing where citizens travel to and from in high quantities will help with so much development of a city.
Thank u
 
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