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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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I hope you can get around to the free XP on loading bug. That being said, keep up the good work!
This is not a high priority ticket at the moment I'm afraid.
Any update on high rents for low density housing?
High rents for low density housing is related to the land value and the team is looking into it, seems like there's something off causing problems on other zones types as well. We are looking into it and after this issue is fixed it will likely resolve quite a few bugs. Unfortunately it also means more work and investigation is required to fix it so I thank you for your patience!
During the holidays, will we get a different CO of the Week, where you will discuss about Tampere and the culture there? Festive holiday seasons and foods there would be a nice break for CO of the Week.
We plan to be out of the office for 3 weeks and I personally will take all necessary actions to avoid the internet (isolated cabin in the woods maybe). However I'm sure @co_avanya has something planned for the social media channels. Maybe we can ask a collaboration with Visit Tampere :D
I hope that means what I think it means! :)
:D
Are there plans to optimise or change the behaviour of the pathfinding?
While I enjoy the freedom now it's a lot more chaotic. And I don't even talk about all the illegal turning, but also how the path is calculated and how far (or near) they'll change lanes and stuff like that. Car's almost never change lanes at intersections now but it's common here that a road is splitting up, two lanes coming and then four lanes at the next intersection. At the moment it's not possible to picture that in the game.

(Red would be the way to go but cars will only take the green path)
View attachment 1059018
There are quite a few options to build different types of intersections so the pathfinding might not behave optimally in all cases. To this specific one I don't have an answer but the team is fixing issues as they get reports.
I don't think dogs are a priority. Why are you focusing on that? Better to fix the problems with economy as we are getting high profits which makes the game boring. 100k citizens and more than 25 million profit per month? And that wasting a lot of resources on non-necesary buildings. Roving those it makes probably more than 40 million.
Why are roads, rails and any other transport lines so cheap to build? Tunnels and bridges should be very expensive, they aren't. Terraforming is free?
Thanks for the feedback. Dogs are an easy topic to discuss, because most people love animals. It's something lighthearted and fun to bring to the text and it actually also causes issues in the city so it needs to be fixed. It doesn't mean we'd only work on saving the stray pups. I apologize if my tone feels too casual. I can assure you we're taking the work we do very seriously.
 
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The game can be for all kind of players.

I hope in the future you could release some hard mode with no failsafes so that everyone is happy and both casual and hardcore players can have the city builder of their dreams.
i agree that especially the economic simulation isnt hard enough for me but i am probably also more experienced than the averager player. Sure they could add some difficulty options but i understand if their first focus at and after release is on making the game enjoyable for the average, casual new player rather than experienced veterans.

A new player having their 100k pop city grinding into bankcrupcy after 50h of gameplay is a heartbreaking loss of progress that might result in them never trying a new city or picking up the game again.

And in a game like this, its easier for experienced players to adjust the difficulty of the simulation with modding to their own preferences i think.
 
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Hello Mariina, it takes a lot of resilience, dedication and passion to keep bringing these Word of the Week posts, actively read our comments and interact with us, especially in this negative environment. We might not say it enough but we truly appreciate your direct communication with us despite the risks you're taking as a CEO.

And on that note, I will unfortunately have to contribute with some "negativity" as well because, unless we misinterpreted your previous statement, "When it comes to the gameplay and simulation we set goals for the game and we have reached those goals.", this is deeply concerning. I don't mean it as an offense, but I genuinely think that you have no idea how problematic the very core gameplay elements are, which cannot even be classified as bugs. In fact, what I'm about to say will probably shock many. Please try yourself the following (patch 1.0.15f1):

1. Start a new city
2. Provide ONLY electricty, water and sewage.
3. Build ONLY residential, commercial and industrial.
4. That's literraly it. Very high profit. Average happiness 70%. Some buildings will even reach level 5. Others will also get over 100% efficieny. It just works.
*Bonus points for using gravel roads only (to have virtually zero parking spots and bad traffic to see how all of this has no negative impact).

Everything else simply doesn't seem to matter. Parks, public transport, schools, hospitals, parking lots, taxes, policies, logistics, universities, police, loans, telecom, tourism, mail, attractions, traffic etc. are nothing but decorative happiness & efficiency bonus/malus that are just not needed to keep the city going. Sure, without them growth will be slower, a lot of warning icons will pop up but they can be ignored since happiness and profitability will remain high anyway. Not even road layout seems to matter because vehicles will just despawn and teleport to destination if traffic gets slightly menacing.
This whole game can be boiled down to essentially 4 factors: water, electricity, sewage and employment. This is the peak management challenge of the entire game. As long as you have these 4 elements the city is objectively infallible. Cims and and businesses seem to be hard coded to keep moving into your city no matter what. This is not even easy mode for the casual player, this is God mode. If you let the simulation run for a really long time, maybe at some point the city will probably collapse, but by then so much profit has been accumulated that it's like playing with unlimited money. Were these really the achieved set goals when it comes to gameplay and simulation?

Again, I vehemently encourage you and the rest of the dev team to play the game following the instructions provided above, and after that, please let us know if you further confirm that the gameplay was really intended to be so abnormally unchallenging. Failsafes, railguards, poor game design/balancing or whatever the causes are, seem to be so invasive that are almost completely suppressing any resemblance of deep simulation. Hopefully this will help you understand why we often (sometimes unfairly) read terms like city painter, fake economy and fake simulation all over Reddit posts, Youtube, Steam reviews, this forum and elsewhere. Now that the bad reviews related to bugs and performance are slowly fading away, a new storm of negative reviews about how superficial, shallow, bland and devoid of any challenge the current gameplay and management system of this game is will arise.

I know that there is a lot of work to do but I truly hope that what we're seeing now, even with all the known bugs fixed, is not going to be the final gameplay and simulation. Thank you for taking your time reading this and take care!
I think the fastest way to fix this is to put a limit on external connexion. Each city you connect, should have a limit on MW they could receive. Difficulty mode could be base on this parameter : easy mode come with a high limit on water and electricity importation but hard mode come with a low limit on importation. That way you don't touch a game mechanic that I consider a good one but you block a bad way to make money.
 
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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 patch. I will give the game a spin again during my vacation.

Happy holidays!
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.
 
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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 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?
 
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Is there any chance we'll receive either more information presented to the player re: goods and service flows or a release of information about how the game functions? We have people doing deep dives in the code to try and figure out what drives rents or why certain businesses are consistently low on customers - it would be really helpful to be able to have more clarity on these issues directly from the developers
 
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Is there any chance we'll receive either more information presented to the player re: goods and service flows or a release of information about how the game functions? We have people doing deep dives in the code to try and figure out what drives rents or why certain businesses are consistently low on customers - it would be really helpful to be able to have more clarity on these issues directly from the developers
I'll give a more general answer to this as I don't currently have the most up to date information on the specific topics you mention. First we must see that there are no bugs interfering with the simulation and make sure the balance is correct. Then there's the question of how the information is displayed to the player. It seems we have work to do on that front as players are struggling to understand the cause and effect of some systems. We're going through bug reports and feedback to ensure we tackle the issues needing attention.
 
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Thanks for the update - but all in all I am somewhat disappointed with the focus of the bug fixes. These are currently for my personal game experience (which are so frustrating, that I stoped playing until improvements come in ):

- the current garbage system (that just 1% of the available trucks are moving out while mid and high density has piles of trash)

- or the issues with the working of the pathfinding (illegal turns or late lane changes)
 
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Just a question when will we have news about console release? Any updates on that or wait until next weeks word of the week?
I don’t have a pc just Xbox series x and always wanted to play cities skylines 2.
 
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Thank you for a feedback that despite the critique toward the game your message is not actually negative but rather helpful! We've already been looking into the feedback about the balance and simulation challenge. While I don't have any definitive answers right now, these are most certainly aspects of the game we will address in the future after the more pressing issues interfering with the simulation are fixed.
This makes me very happy because it's probably my biggest issue at the moment, a big balance pass will do absolute wonders!
 
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The latest patch indeed fixed a lot of things for me. The whole economy behaves better and I already had a noticable performance improvement which i immediatly wasted by turning all graphics to maximum. :-D Thanks to all the Team!

Ragarding the never ending discussion on "fake" and "Hard Mode":

I totally understand that this is not a hardcore simulation and casual players should manage to play it. But I must agree with @F-22Raptor that it is way to simple. I just did a fresh city this weekend and after almost 2 days noticed that I had never built any trashyard. Nobody cared, I didn't pay for the neighbors to pick it up.

Actually I have the feeling that its impossible to make my citizens unhappy, while their happiness should be my main task, shouldn't it? Just give them a little hospital, some internet and a small playground and they will never complain except for high rent. And almost every business runs at more than 100% efficiency because of "employee happiness".

So do we need a hardcore simulation? NO. But do we need at least a little challange: Absolutely!
 
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Great update as always. As far as apologizing for what you said, I'm not sure if you needed to. Anyone that thought this process, the process of designing a new and approved version of an uber popular game was going to be easy, must have been daydreaming. I'm personally, excited and very grateful for the fact that Colossal Order decided to create a new Cities Skylines game. I think we all have to remember a few months back, before we knew there would be a new Skylines game, we would have been happy with anything Cities Skylines, but Colossal Order took it to another level, and I'm very excited and graceful that they did. Keep up the great work Mariina, and Colossal Order, and Happy Holidays.
 
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Please make the game more challenging. Remove the government subsidies and balance the game better.
In my opinion, government subsidies are a very interesting feature. They provide a kind of support when the city is somehow financially inefficient. I wouldn't remove it. 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 :)
 
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