CO Word of the Week #6

[YBSerious]

Gameplay idea for next year: automatic chrismas decorations and chrismas lights above the streets in high density quarters when you play between 15/12 and 05/01

Looking forward to the final 2023 patch. I will give the game a spin again during my vacation.

Happy holidays!

Man what a great idea, makes the game so realistic.

 

[co_avanya]

I appreciate the continued announcements and updates on the development process of the game, as well as the clarifications coming from last week's discussions. I could definitely use an insight blog or something that explains why industrial buildings have such high land value compared to low density residential. I can't rezone an area that just had industrial zones built because land value goes up so much that the network suitability is instantly deep red with just five or so industrial buildings (land value takes FOREVER to lower or "reset" in an area, too). Only warehouses will build in those "unsuitable" areas, and yet my demand for low education jobs (mainly filled in industrial plots) keeps going up! The only problem is that once I zone too many industrial plots in "unsuitable" areas, the amount of warehouses present drops industrial demand to zero and STAYS THERE because of "unoccupied buildings" caused by warehouses not employing people. How else am I supposed to deal with industrial demand when warehouses/land value keep messing with my ability to provide jobs??? I would really appreciate something that explains the game logic for why land value for any industrial building is so high and how players can keep it low in the future for more expansion of one's industrial areas. I do NOT want to have to keep moving industrial farther and farther away from my population just because land value is the main (or only) issue.

I heard several times that ground pollution and land value were what made a network unsuitable for industrial (even though ground pollution is something generated by ALL industrial, so that didn't make sense), and yet most of my existing network lacks pollution, so I'm almost certain it's the high land value that makes it so warehouses only spawn in what was supposed to be my main industrial complex. How am I supposed to keep industrial happy by keeping fire chances low, crime low, AND getting workers to their shifts if their target workplace keeps moving farther away every month?

We're looking into the situation with land value, but I'm afraid we don't have anything concrete to share yet.

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

The Traffic Volume shows you which roads get the most traffic. You can find it in the traffic info view and check the box for Traffic Volume to switch from the Traffic Flow view which is enabled by default.

 

[Corran109]

Traffic Volume shows you which roads get the most traffic. You can find it in the traffic info view and check the box for Traffic Volume to switch from the Traffic Flow view which is enabled by default.

But knowing where people are going from a particular road would be very helpful information.

Knowing two roads near each other are busy isn't helpful if the traffic on each are going different places.

But knowing that the traffic going across this bridge is majority going to a certain district would let us know where we can place an alternate route.

I don't need the lines and arrows of CS1, but maybe a great map of destinations for cars currently pathing through a selected road

 

[blahdy]

Thanks,
btw, who cares about dogs when all of the post is still stuck in the cargo train stations?

Destroy and rebuild all your cargo stations, and post sorting will work.

 

[TheMax85]

We're looking into the situation with land value, but I'm afraid we don't have anything concrete to share yet.


The Traffic Volume shows you which roads get the most traffic. You can find it in the traffic info view and check the box for Traffic Volume to switch from the Traffic Flow view which is enabled by default.

Knowing where you have much traffic is not the same as where most people come from or go to. You really need that origin/destination information on large masses of people when planning traffic systems for bypassing some areas or planning where you need public transport routes.

 

[RA1981]

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.

Aaah, okay. Thank you for clarification. So I'll check the hubs if they've tons of mail and if yes, I'll rebuild them. Can you also explain the capacity bar? As I mentioned, the inventory shows several (hundreds of) tons of goods, but the bar itself shows 0/15.500 or (sometimes) another value.

 

[TheMax85]

Knowing where you have much traffic is not the same as where most people come from or go to. You really need that origin/destination information on large masses of people when planning traffic systems for bypassing some areas or planning where you need public transport routes.

Maybe some statistics on a district level would be enough. Like how many travel from which district to which other?

 

[jalapenojon]

Performance patch next week? This is great news and that comes after I have managed to get the graphics up to par with the CS1 Remastered as on my XSX. That is with a RTX 3060 laptop GPU.

Looking forward to those DLCs coming out after almost 150 hours of play.

 

[Shinra375]

To add my 2c I really enjoy this game however the mod support should come through ASAP as well as some basic QOL changes like being able to select what road zoning is on.

Mods will fix most issues and improve community reviews substantially. For example the ‘high rent’ issue is a lot better with the info’ mod that shows more information about the building.

Getting mods out to all platforms (including GFN) should be the number #1 priority

 

[petej728]

I'd personally like to have more control of my pedestrians. The vast majority of my traffic issues are with stalled traffic waiting for pedestrians who cross the road whenever they feel like it.
If I have a large 4-way junction/roundabout and I want to build a pedestrian bridge to stop them crossing directly over the road, I have to use so much space to fit the path and the bridge in that I have to redesign a whole junction to do it. Due to the height the bridge needs to be, the path then has to be around 6 units in length. And then, sometimes, it will not allow me to build the path back down from the bridge to the other side of the crossing, even though it is the same length.
I know I can produce my own pedestrian crossing further down the road, but this still doesn't stop them from crossing at the junction and it only moves the problem further down the road.
Just a timed pedestrian crossing would resolve a lot of these issues.

Secondly, please allow an option to turn off/on vehicle despawning. There is nothing more frustrating than to have spent an extended period of time experimenting with a whole road system (2, 3, 4 lane/asymmetric roads, roundabouts/traffic lights etc) and then just as the flow of traffic appears to be getting better, everything despawns and you don't know if the changes worked or not.

And thirdly, I would like to see a system where we can assign priorities to vehicle groups when there are traffic conflicts e.g.

Priority 1 = Ambulances
Priority 2 = Fire engines
Priority 3 = Police cars
Priority 4 = Buses
Priority 5 = Road maintenance

I see too many occasions where my buses are static while they give priority to every other vehicle at crossroads and roundabouts and my bus queues are in the hundreds of passengers waiting.

I know there will probably be mods coming out for these, but I think they should be part of the base game to start with, not a problem for solving later.

 

[LordJimmehFace]

I am an urban planner in real life here in the UK. Perhaps thats why, given the state of things recently, I expect unpredictability and a lack of tools to address the problems I am responsible for lol. I do think it’s unfortunate there has been so much negativity towards CS2 when, to my eyes, it is in a similar state to how CS1 was at its much more positively received release. Looking through the Steam reviews, it seems many of the people who are most disappointed by CS2 appear to be veteran players of CS1. I suspect it is an issue of these players comparing CS2 unfavourably to the customised highly-modded versions of CS1 they usually play, rather than comparing it to SimCity5 like we all were back in 2015. Certainly, that was my initial reaction as soon as I started missing my favourite public transport tools and stations a few hours in to my first game; it felt like a step backward in that moment. But then I saw mod support is meant to be coming at some point and reflected on the fact that the base game of CS2 actually is quite a lot better than that of CS1; even if there are issues which need work. That said, I want to echo everyone else in that I think it was a mistake not to launch with support for modding. You cannot please everyone Colossal Order, but modding can help people please themselves. I agree getting Mod support out as soon as possible should be top priority, and I do hope it helps to stem the bleeding, so to speak, of players and enthusiasm for the game.

I remember back when I was doing my MA in urban planning, there was a module some of my peers did where they played CS1 (I really enjoyed nerding out talking to them about it, sharing hints/tricks, and showing off our largest most impressive cities). The one thing virtually all of my peers on that module discussed in their assignments was the inherent biases of the game design, specifically, that vanilla CS1 was an unironic mid-20th century North American modernist urban planning simulator. Possibly this type of planning was chosen because it's the closest to trying to apply the logic of a simple machine to urban planning (much to its residents’ collective detriment), but I can see how a system using an overly simplistic logic could be helpful as a starting point when designing a simulation game intended to have broad appeal. This wasn't criticism of the game per se, we had fun, just an observation. An observation resulting from the type of zoning system used yes, but just as impactfully one resulting from the basic shapes of buildings which can be spawned into the game. They are made up of little squares and so, any curves of roads, misalignments of roads, or non-right-angle intersections of roads will result in wasted unused space. This can also make it frustrating to just make things look realistic and avoid wasting space in the most important parts of town, even when you do go for a strict North American downtown block style grid system. Conversely, in non-North American cities, it is those spaces with more complex geometries that typically have the highest densities, as they are often the most historic, organically formed, repeatedly changed, and constantly readapted cores of our settlements. These areas are typically also the most loved and, for better or worse, the most visited parts of our settlements (I live in Oxford so tourists, while very welcome, can get in your hair a little bit), and so, it does feel a shame we cannot craft these types of spaces in Cities Skylines. I'd love to see those fundamental little squares broken up into four even smaller equilateral triangles, so that in addition to the existing assets, we could see some interesting non-right angle shaped buildings which would allow for curving streets and non-right-angle intersections without it looking so haphazard, unnatural, and gapy. I think this would be the single biggest way to break this bias and make it easier to make cities look good, organic, and at a human-scale. I also strongly suspect this would help console players a great deal, who must really struggle with the haphazardness/gapy problem when they don’t have use of a keyboard and mouse to be more precise.

Some ideas which I think could be cool:

• Break up the basic squares in buildable areas into four quarters which are shaped as equilateral triangles allowing for the introduction of non-right-angle shaped buildings which would enable non-gapy curving streets and more beautiful organic street patterns overall.
• A feature to allow us to edit and move where the zoned buildable grid is so we can line them up without having to fiddle with the roads repeatedly even for grids.
• Variably pedestrianised streets: you can select the street and decide when it's closed and to what (buses & deliveries, yes, and private cars, no, on weekends for example).
• Introduce a use-type agglomeration effect. So similar types of uses want to be near each other. Semi-conductor factories are more likely to spawn in an area that has them. High-end shops prefer to spawn in high-land value commercial streets where other high-end shops already exist (and there is a lot of tourism and or high paying jobs).
• More types of mixed-use zones.
• Height and style limitations for districts. This could be pared or part of a Euro-play style mode where you can only control the broad category of zone used, but anything could happen there (possibly this means everything is technically zoned as all the zones in that category simultaneously and what develops will depend on development pressure limited and directed by various district policies rather than zones).

Thank you:

• vanilla based metros are 100% better than in vanilla CS1
• you included the first mixed-use zone
• signature buildings are a fun way to introduce mini goals and mini rewards, love it
• connections to outside areas is so much better than it ever was in CS1
• launching with a fun and detailed industry system is great, much better than the DLC version for CS1, and really adds something fun and impactful

 

[LordJimmehFace]

I'd personally like to have more control of my pedestrians. The vast majority of my traffic issues are with stalled traffic waiting for pedestrians who cross the road whenever they feel like it.
If I have a large 4-way junction/roundabout and I want to build a pedestrian bridge to stop them crossing directly over the road, I have to use so much space to fit the path and the bridge in that I have to redesign a whole junction to do it. Due to the height the bridge needs to be, the path then has to be around 6 units in length. And then, sometimes, it will not allow me to build the path back down from the bridge to the other side of the crossing, even though it is the same length.
I know I can produce my own pedestrian crossing further down the road, but this still doesn't stop them from crossing at the junction and it only moves the problem further down the road.
Just a timed pedestrian crossing would resolve a lot of these issues.

Secondly, please allow an option to turn off/on vehicle despawning. There is nothing more frustrating than to have spent an extended period of time experimenting with a whole road system (2, 3, 4 lane/asymmetric roads, roundabouts/traffic lights etc) and then just as the flow of traffic appears to be getting better, everything despawns and you don't know if the changes worked or not.

And thirdly, I would like to see a system where we can assign priorities to vehicle groups when there are traffic conflicts e.g.

Priority 1 = Ambulances
Priority 2 = Fire engines
Priority 3 = Police cars
Priority 4 = Buses
Priority 5 = Road maintenance

I see too many occasions where my buses are static while they give priority to every other vehicle at crossroads and roundabouts and my bus queues are in the hundreds of passengers waiting.

I know there will probably be mods coming out for these, but I think they should be part of the base game to start with, not a problem for solving later.

I've got to say, your issue with pedestrians as described above sounds essentially identical to real world issues we urban planners have with this sort of situation. I agree with you in terms of getting more detailed controls mind you. I remember in CS1 there were a few mods for managing intersections which frankly I think would sort this issue quickly and elegantly.

Your idea for vehicle priorities is a great idea. It could work well with just allowing you to control use of various priority classes and potentially the time at which it can happen. This way you could pedestrianize streets or make sure bus lanes don't get clogged with empty taxis. Again, I feel like this is a lack of mods issue when compared to CS1.

 

[scottwinch]

I'd personally like to have more control of my pedestrians. The vast majority of my traffic issues are with stalled traffic waiting for pedestrians who cross the road whenever they feel like it.
If I have a large 4-way junction/roundabout and I want to build a pedestrian bridge to stop them crossing directly over the road, I have to use so much space to fit the path and the bridge in that I have to redesign a whole junction to do it. Due to the height the bridge needs to be, the path then has to be around 6 units in length. And then, sometimes, it will not allow me to build the path back down from the bridge to the other side of the crossing, even though it is the same length.
I know I can produce my own pedestrian crossing further down the road, but this still doesn't stop them from crossing at the junction and it only moves the problem further down the road.
Just a timed pedestrian crossing would resolve a lot of these issues.

Secondly, please allow an option to turn off/on vehicle despawning. There is nothing more frustrating than to have spent an extended period of time experimenting with a whole road system (2, 3, 4 lane/asymmetric roads, roundabouts/traffic lights etc) and then just as the flow of traffic appears to be getting better, everything despawns and you don't know if the changes worked or not.

And thirdly, I would like to see a system where we can assign priorities to vehicle groups when there are traffic conflicts e.g.

Priority 1 = Ambulances
Priority 2 = Fire engines
Priority 3 = Police cars
Priority 4 = Buses
Priority 5 = Road maintenance

I see too many occasions where my buses are static while they give priority to every other vehicle at crossroads and roundabouts and my bus queues are in the hundreds of passengers waiting.

I know there will probably be mods coming out for these, but I think they should be part of the base game to start with, not a problem for solving later.

Regarding pedestrians: "in the real world" the ramps, or *gasp* stairs are usually part of the sidewalk and do not take up zoned space next to the road. This, more than anything else, prevents being able to create pedestrian over/under passes in the traffic-heavy regions. Bus stops eat up part of the sidewalk area - pretty sure something similar could be worked out for our beloved Cims to have proper paths.

 

[LordJimmehFace]

Regarding pedestrians: "in the real world" the ramps, or *gasp* stairs are usually part of the sidewalk and do not take up zoned space next to the road. This, more than anything else, prevents being able to create pedestrian over/under passes in the traffic-heavy regions. Bus stops eat up part of the sidewalk area - pretty sure something similar could be worked out for our beloved Cims to have proper paths.

I agree, it sure would be nice if the tunnel/bridge ramps could start on and run under/over those footpaths that are part of the roads so they don't waste so much space. Perhaps it could work similar to how bus lanes work in CS2? Also, if the width of the footpaths on the roads themselves aren't wide enough to accomodate both a footpath and a ramp, then perhaps we could get a feature to increase the width of footpaths on the roads. I could see that working similar to how the number of vehicle lanes on a road can be increased (for example, small to medium size road). The footpaths that come with most roads are often dinky (true IRL too lol).

 

[TyCohen]

... I'd love to see those fundamental little squares broken up into four even smaller equilateral triangles, so that in addition to the existing assets, we could see some interesting non-right angle shaped buildings which would allow for curving streets and non-right-angle intersections without it looking so haphazard, unnatural, and gapy. I think this would be the single biggest way to break this bias and make it easier to make cities look good, organic, and at a human-scale. I also strongly suspect this would help console players a great deal, who must really struggle with the haphazardness/gapy problem when they don’t have use of a keyboard and mouse to be more precise.

Some ideas which I think could be cool:

• Break up the basic squares in buildable areas into four quarters which are shaped as equilateral triangles allowing for the introduction of non-right-angle shaped buildings which would enable non-gapy curving streets and more beautiful organic street patterns overall.
• A feature to allow us to edit and move where the zoned buildable grid is so we can line them up without having to fiddle with the roads repeatedly even for grids.
• ...

I really like this idea. Hexagon is the bestagon! ... Other non-squares are cool too I guess

 

[AAAnubisss]

I am an urban planner in real life here in the UK. Perhaps thats why, given the state of things recently, I expect unpredictability and a lack of tools to address the problems I am responsible for lol. I do think it’s unfortunate there has been so much negativity towards CS2 when, to my eyes, it is in a similar state to how CS1 was at its much more positively received release. Looking through the Steam reviews, it seems many of the people who are most disappointed by CS2 appear to be veteran players of CS1. I suspect it is an issue of these players comparing CS2 unfavourably to the customised highly-modded versions of CS1 they usually play, rather than comparing it to SimCity5 like we all were back in 2015. Certainly, that was my initial reaction as soon as I started missing my favourite public transport tools and stations a few hours in to my first game; it felt like a step backward in that moment. But then I saw mod support is meant to be coming at some point and reflected on the fact that the base game of CS2 actually is quite a lot better than that of CS1; even if there are issues which need work. That said, I want to echo everyone else in that I think it was a mistake not to launch with support for modding. You cannot please everyone Colossal Order, but modding can help people please themselves. I agree getting Mod support out as soon as possible should be top priority, and I do hope it helps to stem the bleeding, so to speak, of players and enthusiasm for the game.

I remember back when I was doing my MA in urban planning, there was a module some of my peers did where they played CS1 (I really enjoyed nerding out talking to them about it, sharing hints/tricks, and showing off our largest most impressive cities). The one thing virtually all of my peers on that module discussed in their assignments was the inherent biases of the game design, specifically, that vanilla CS1 was an unironic mid-20th century North American modernist urban planning simulator. Possibly this type of planning was chosen because it's the closest to trying to apply the logic of a simple machine to urban planning (much to its residents’ collective detriment), but I can see how a system using an overly simplistic logic could be helpful as a starting point when designing a simulation game intended to have broad appeal. This wasn't criticism of the game per se, we had fun, just an observation. An observation resulting from the type of zoning system used yes, but just as impactfully one resulting from the basic shapes of buildings which can be spawned into the game. They are made up of little squares and so, any curves of roads, misalignments of roads, or non-right-angle intersections of roads will result in wasted unused space. This can also make it frustrating to just make things look realistic and avoid wasting space in the most important parts of town, even when you do go for a strict North American downtown block style grid system. Conversely, in non-North American cities, it is those spaces with more complex geometries that typically have the highest densities, as they are often the most historic, organically formed, repeatedly changed, and constantly readapted cores of our settlements. These areas are typically also the most loved and, for better or worse, the most visited parts of our settlements (I live in Oxford so tourists, while very welcome, can get in your hair a little bit), and so, it does feel a shame we cannot craft these types of spaces in Cities Skylines. I'd love to see those fundamental little squares broken up into four even smaller equilateral triangles, so that in addition to the existing assets, we could see some interesting non-right angle shaped buildings which would allow for curving streets and non-right-angle intersections without it looking so haphazard, unnatural, and gapy. I think this would be the single biggest way to break this bias and make it easier to make cities look good, organic, and at a human-scale. I also strongly suspect this would help console players a great deal, who must really struggle with the haphazardness/gapy problem when they don’t have use of a keyboard and mouse to be more precise.

Some ideas which I think could be cool:

• Break up the basic squares in buildable areas into four quarters which are shaped as equilateral triangles allowing for the introduction of non-right-angle shaped buildings which would enable non-gapy curving streets and more beautiful organic street patterns overall.
• A feature to allow us to edit and move where the zoned buildable grid is so we can line them up without having to fiddle with the roads repeatedly even for grids.
• Variably pedestrianised streets: you can select the street and decide when it's closed and to what (buses & deliveries, yes, and private cars, no, on weekends for example).
• Introduce a use-type agglomeration effect. So similar types of uses want to be near each other. Semi-conductor factories are more likely to spawn in an area that has them. High-end shops prefer to spawn in high-land value commercial streets where other high-end shops already exist (and there is a lot of tourism and or high paying jobs).
• More types of mixed-use zones.
• Height and style limitations for districts. This could be pared or part of a Euro-play style mode where you can only control the broad category of zone used, but anything could happen there (possibly this means everything is technically zoned as all the zones in that category simultaneously and what develops will depend on development pressure limited and directed by various district policies rather than zones).

Thank you:

• vanilla based metros are 100% better than in vanilla CS1
• you included the first mixed-use zone
• signature buildings are a fun way to introduce mini goals and mini rewards, love it
• connections to outside areas is so much better than it ever was in CS1
• launching with a fun and detailed industry system is great, much better than the DLC version for CS1, and really adds something fun and impactful

Awesome recommendations, but I have some doubts about whether they have skills required to implement these features

 

[Imp0815]

I'm sitting on my wallet waiting for the big news that the economy simulation is fully functional without any tricks and failsaves and offers a challenging management aspect.

 

[Kars-T]

I am still happy I could cancel my preorder and it makes me sad that I feel that it will take months to make this game enjoyable. I tried CS1 again last week and I have to admit that I encountered so many bugs that it make me uninstall it again after some hours and not want to come back. Maybe wit CS2 it will be better some day. But I will wait for a sale and maybe for 20 USD I would buy it in a year or two. Great ideas but so unstable and bugged till the end. That is my cities skylines experience after years and hundrets of hours. I mostly enjoyed those but in the end the limit are bugs and even loads of mods won't fix them.

 

[benzoll]

I'm sitting on my wallet waiting for the big news that the economy simulation is fully functional without any tricks and failsaves and offers a challenging management aspect.

The same here. I hope they correct the bug (money is always earned, even in red numbers).
Then we will see where we are with this economic simulation.

 

[avguy2]

I'm sitting on my wallet waiting for the big news that the economy simulation is fully functional without any tricks and failsaves and offers a challenging management aspect.

What people don't seem to get is how MUCH they still have to get done. This isn't a matter of weeks. Forget about fundamental changes to the game systems! As long as many systems are still buggy or WIP proper balancing is impossible. I think it's safe to say that we won't be seeing a functional economy simulation before Q3 2024.