The Journey to Launch - Mini Documentary about the Release and Future of Cities: Skylines II

[Skeksis25]

My major problem with the failsafes and the amount of money being handed out is that in these sort of games, one of the biggest things I enjoy is unlocking and then plopping down new buildings, while also factoring in the "Should I?" part. I want to have to work towards that. I want it to feel great that I unlocked the police station, but also still want to have to evaluate and plan to make sure dropping one, let alone many, is the right thing to do. That my city will be able to support the costs. I want to feel like I'm starting from scratch and my decisions and designs are what's helping my city thrive and allowing me to build newer and more expensive buildings to maintain the balance between keeping my citizens happy and profit. With the failsafes and subsidies, that feeling barely exists. I don't feel like I earned the right to place down parks and a public bus system because I have designed my city well enough to support that. The money consideration is a non issue because of the subsidies and rank up rewards. It becomes a case of of course you are going to plop down everything that has been unlocked. And thus gives the game a very city painter feeling.

Maybe this should be implemented in a different, mode like a challenge mode if you are worried about turning off the people who just want a relaxing experience. Although I would have thought Unlock All and Unlimited Money being available in the base game is the option for those people. I feel you guys need to allow the players to fail rather than trying to hold our hands and be parents to us or something. If we have planned and designed a bad city, let it fall to ruin. Let it lead to a game over screen. Allow us to be fired as mayors rather than the game going, "There there, its ok. Here's some magic to let you keep going". Respect the players more. Have a little more faith that the players will take that as a challenge to do better and try again rather than throw a tantrum and quit playing.

 

[ClemiMD]

@ClemiMD
Yes, you misunderstanding something.

Yeah... sure...

Thanks to @co_avanya for her clarification on this.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

Cities: Skylines could be rough for new players, especially those new to the genre.

And this is how it should be IMHO. I don't think CS2 should be less difficult than 1 in that regard. I suspect this might be where a lot of dissatisfaction lies.

 

[vvilku]

I believe we can see a lot of 'problems-at-the-source' thanks to this insightful post:

So let's talk a little about the simulation and the failsafes. While we aim for the game to be grounded in realism, we are creating a game, not a 100% accurate simulation. This means we simplify certain things and need to take shortcuts to make sure the game is both fun (which is super subjective of course) and performs well (we're not there yet, but we'll keep working on improvements until we get there).

So far, so good - that's the idea.

For example, when a citizen is born, they are a "child" which covers them until they reach "teenager." No "babies" or "toddlers" to specify the different stages of "childhood." Covering all life stages might be more realistic, but the added complexity wouldn't necessarily translate to more fun, just more information for your CPU to process.

And the example is good.

Failsafes are important to make sure the game is fun and to avoid frustrating situations you can't solve

Really makes sense...

They're there to ensure you can recover from mistakes and that the simulation continues to function. If playing the game is like walking on a line suspended between two buildings, then failsafes are the netting below to catch you if you fall.

And there we go... No. That's not what failsafes are for. That's why we play a game, where we can start from scratch. That's why a game should lead to a fail so that we can learn what we did wrong. For that of course it would nee to be more transparent and provide accurate & consistent data (which it doesn't, but that's a different story).

Cities: Skylines has failsafes too. An example is vehicles despawning, which can happen in both games. In Cities: Skylines getting stuck in traffic too long triggers a despawn - the game determines that the vehicle cannot reach its destination, and it despawns to start again.

And that was fine.

In Cities: Skylines II that doesn't happen as the smarter AI allows them to try different routes or make u-turns to go back if the road is for example blocked by an accident.

Wishful thinking, practice doesn't prove that.

But if they're completely unable to find a route, they'll still despawn - like if you're redoing a part of the city and there are suddenly no roads leading to where they need to go. I want to make it clear that failsafes are not there to take away challenges or stop you from failing.

But this is exactly what they do. Subsidies, lackluster economy, irrelevant warning, city growing with no connections, etc, etc. make the simulation run AGAINST the players' decisions. Even deliberate attempt to ruin a city doesn't work. Using the comparison with two buildings and a rope: the failsafe aren't a net right now. They are a solid-steel mesh tube arond the rope so even if I try to jump off of it, I can't.

They're there to make sure the city doesn't fall apart to where you can't do anything to save it.

Two topics come to mind when we're talking about failsafes: Government subsidies and what happens when cities aren't connected. Government subsidies aren't really a failsafe but a way to bring money into the economic simulation and help you get started in the early game.

Which is exactly the proof of it having the opposed effect: I don't KNOw how the economy works, because I see no causality, no results of my action or inaction.

If you find they take away any challenge, then we'd need to look at the balance and determine if they're too helpful or if we need some kind of difficulty tuning for them for players who want more of a challenge.

There's unlimited money in the game already. Another idea would be to actually have the subsidies as the option. OR maybe make a working economy and make players' decisions meaningful - for example: I can set the taxes on commercial to 30%, yet they still want to open new stores in town, so what's the point at all?

Now let's talk about what probably started the whole discussion of failsafes: What happens when your city isn't connected to the outside world or to itself? Here we definitely fell into the trap of playing the game as it was designed, and we didn't account for players creating cities that weren't connected. Real cities don't exist in a vacuum so why would yours?

Oh please... Why would our city exist in a vacuum? Just look around the map. Look at the game design.

You say the cities are not in a vacuum, yet I need a railway depot to accept national trains on my single station? Why can't I have a Scottish Highlands village with one station, 4 pubs, a butcher and fields all around (either for sheep or for golf)? Don't trains arrive to small villages and boost the growth this way? I'm surprised I don't need a shipyard to have a port or a fully-fledged aviation industry quarter to have an airport...

Or another example - I need to build a university in a 20k pop town to encourage high-rise demand because it's student-only driven, yet my residents can't study "abroad". I need a fully-blown hospital for the people to stop complaining about poor healthcare, as if every 15k village in the world had one.

The cities in the game even start in an absurd information/data vacuum: we found a village and we can't see a fertile land / ore from the start? Then why even bother settling there??? We plan the districts just to realise later that we build industry on the only piece of fertile land. And from that you can't recover. Where are your failsafes when actually needed? For some wild reason you left the vacuum where it doesn't make any sens.

And on top of that - cities indeed don't exist in a vacuum, so why on earth is it near-impossible to build proper suburbs and rural areas? Why can't I start with 2-3 villages that share some infrastructure (pipes, electricity) and grow organically towards each other? Why is the landscape around the city so barren, as if it's build on a huge football field? rather than in an actual landscape? 3 or 4 ground textures + 2 or 3 volumetric, paintable forests to put outside the buildable area used creatively would make such a difference in the map design... Instead we get... volumetric clouds. In a game that's mostly top-down. That's like implementing a sky in chess.

We have since made changes to how citizens can reserve homes and when they count as citizens, but when these experiments were done, citizens would reserve a home when it was built. They'd then be "moving in" and count as citizens. In a city connected to the outside world, they'd travel to their homes and start their lives, but without that connection, they'd never arrive while still "taking part" in your city. We've improved the pathfinding so they now can't move into homes if they can't get there, which means they won't be a part of your population.

Awesome! That's the type of news (both in terms of the development direction and the technical detail needed).

We want to continue to hear about situations you may run into where your city should fail, if not immediately, then in the long run, but for some reason isn't. We always do our best to anticipate how you might play the game, but realistically, we'll end up like this little video as you come up with things we just didn't expect (and then we'll ask ourselves why we didn't think of that xD).

Well, you gave the game to Josh from Let's Game It Out, so you KNOW what can go wrong

That was a long one, which I hope answered some of your questions. Keep sharing your feedback and thoughts, it's really great to see, and even if answers take a wall of text or a dev diary, we appreciate you sharing and asking. ^^

That sort of dicsussion and transparency is what is long, long due. It would have been much more bearable to live through the disaster of the launch if we had a communication like this, rather than 'the game might not be for you' thrown at the face of people who spent about a decade in C:S1

 

[pjpe]

I can answer a few questions already:

No, but naturally, companies will try to limit their import/export and turn to products or customers locally. This is because transporting costs more the further they need to go. Heavier or larger goods like stone also cost more compared to lighter and smaller goods like pharmaceuticals. You can reduce importing/exporting by producing raw materials locally and taxing products that produce a huge surplus. Companies already try to balance their production and taxes can help encourage them to produce more or less of something. Lastly, the less convenient it is to import/export (long routes, no cargo trains, harbors, or airports), the less likely they are to do so.


I'm not sure how technical information you're looking for, but in short, government subsidies are both a money source (which keeps the economy flowing and balances out the money sinks) and a helping hand to start-up cities. The sum is calculated based on the size of your city and your income. The more established your city gets, the less money the government provides you with. Let me know how technical you'd like us to get and I'll see what we can do. ^^

Alright, but like, what's the point?

What effect does that have on me while I'm playing the game? How would we know about that if a developer hadn't posted it in a random thread in this forum? Does the game surface this information in-game at any point?

But more importantly: does this change anything for us while playing? Can we use that information to our advantage while building our cities? To me it all seems kinda useless, like it's a neat simulation going on under there with industrial goods and commercial buildings and stuff, but once I reach like 30k people or so and start getting offices I start making more money than I know what to do with it. Even if I had money issues and needed to pay more attention to those details, what can I do about them? All we can do in game is build roads, zone, build a small handful of signature buildings that just do like "+5% efficiency for oil!", and build a cargo hub -- if that wasn't also bugged and likely to cause more problems.

All this stuff seems to exist in the game but I don't understand how we, the players, are supposed to interact with or care about it. As far as I can tell, we can't directly affect it, nor do we have good information on what's happening with it.

I think that's a big source of frustration people have been finding with this game, as much as new stuff appears to be added (and is bugged and hard to tell if its working and badly designed, or just broken), it doesn't change the core gameplay loop at all. The game is still all about traffic management, laying down roads, zoning res/com/ind, and plopping a few service buildings to keep happiness up. So what's the point of these features in The Simulation if they don't change how the players play the game?

 

[DanielR80]

You say the cities are not in a vacuum, yet I need a railway depot to accept national trains on my single station? Why can't I have a Scottish Highlands village with one station, 4 pubs, a butcher and fields all around (either for sheep or for golf)? Don't trains arrive to small villages and boost the growth this way? I'm surprised I don't need a shipyard to have a port or a fully-fledged aviation industry quarter to have an airport...

Good point... Everything else can be imported from off the map, but not trains for some reason

Well, you gave the game to Josh from Let's Game It Out, so you KNOW what can go wrong

Josh is famous for breaking games... He should have been more helpful than all of their external QA company, too bad he focused on building a strange road...

 

[Licenturion]

No, but naturally, companies will try to limit their import/export and turn to products or customers locally. This is because transporting costs more the further they need to go. Heavier or larger goods like stone also cost more compared to lighter and smaller goods like pharmaceuticals. You can reduce importing/exporting by producing raw materials locally and taxing products that produce a huge surplus. Companies already try to balance their production and taxes can help encourage them to produce more or less of something. Lastly, the less convenient it is to import/export (long routes, no cargo trains, harbors, or airports), the less likely they are to do so.

This makes sense. However it would be a good thing that such information is also added to one of the tutorial pop-ups when you start building cargo hubs. With a 'More info...' label that gets you to more details of these systems in the help pages.

What I would like to see though, is the what the 'global market' price is of good in the other cities. Only if you know those you can directly influence cargo, import/export with taxing or expanding/downsizing. Without this information it all feels very abstract and hard to manipulate or 'compete' with the other goods and service providers from elsewhere.

 

[ThomasK_7]

Someone (CO_avanya) copied text from the developer diary, but the simulation currently doesn't seem to be working as intended in this regard.

If the simulation worked as described in the developer diaries, there would be almost no complaints from players.

 

[TripleAgent]

Seriously though why is having the option to turn off subsidies so difficult? I assume that there's a formula to add a certain amount to your income, is it really that much of an ask to give us an option to disable that money being added and let us fail? If you can't fail, it's not a city manager, it's a city painter.

I don't see the point of having the subsidies for an "easy" mode when unlimited money mode already exists. The issue isn't the lack of a "hard mode", the issue is that "normal" mode is "very easy."

 

[Nerevatar]

Thank you for taking the time to type this out. Concise feedback like this is really great and very much appreciated.


Our goal is a management game with a lot of creative freedom. With Cities: Skylines II we created a deeper simulation and it's important to us, that the added depth doesn't make the game harder or less inviting to new players. Cities: Skylines could be rough for new players, especially those new to the genre. I'll admit that it took me a few cities and tips from other players before I turned a profit in the original game. Getting the balance "just right" is always hard since what constitutes a "fun challenge" is very subjective and bound to vary a LOT. This is why feedback matters so much to us. It tells us if we reached the point we aimed for, what some players find too hard and what others find too easy. While it isn't something we're currently working on, I'd love to see more discussions about what a "hard mode" would look like/which areas of the game you all would like to see more challenges - I assume that for you specifically, the city's economy should provide a challenge.

So let's talk a little about the simulation and the failsafes. While we aim for the game to be grounded in realism, we are creating a game, not a 100% accurate simulation. This means we simplify certain things and need to take shortcuts to make sure the game is both fun (which is super subjective of course) and performs well (we're not there yet, but we'll keep working on improvements until we get there). For example, when a citizen is born, they are a "child" which covers them until they reach "teenager." No "babies" or "toddlers" to specify the different stages of "childhood." Covering all life stages might be more realistic, but the added complexity wouldn't necessarily translate to more fun, just more information for your CPU to process.

Failsafes are important to make sure the game is fun and to avoid frustrating situations you can't solve They're there to ensure you can recover from mistakes and that the simulation continues to function. If playing the game is like walking on a line suspended between two buildings, then failsafes are the netting below to catch you if you fall. Cities: Skylines has failsafes too. An example is vehicles despawning, which can happen in both games. In Cities: Skylines getting stuck in traffic too long triggers a despawn - the game determines that the vehicle cannot reach its destination, and it despawns to start again. In Cities: Skylines II that doesn't happen as the smarter AI allows them to try different routes or make u-turns to go back if the road is for example blocked by an accident. But if they're completely unable to find a route, they'll still despawn - like if you're redoing a part of the city and there are suddenly no roads leading to where they need to go. I want to make it clear that failsafes are not there to take away challenges or stop you from failing. They're there to make sure the city doesn't fall apart to where you can't do anything to save it.

Two topics come to mind when we're talking about failsafes: Government subsidies and what happens when cities aren't connected. Government subsidies aren't really a failsafe but a way to bring money into the economic simulation and help you get started in the early game. If you find they take away any challenge, then we'd need to look at the balance and determine if they're too helpful or if we need some kind of difficulty tuning for them for players who want more of a challenge.

Now let's talk about what probably started the whole discussion of failsafes: What happens when your city isn't connected to the outside world or to itself? Here we definitely fell into the trap of playing the game as it was designed, and we didn't account for players creating cities that weren't connected. Real cities don't exist in a vacuum so why would yours? Well, to reduce variables as you're seeing what the simulation is doing. When you zone residential citizens will reserve homes and move into the city, at which point they count as citizens and can also get hired by companies in your city. If there's no way to enter the city, they won't ever reach their homes or jobs. I can absolutely understand that seeing companies function in a vacuum makes it feel like things aren't working or are "faked" - and makes you question how everything else works. I'll try and cover things briefly as this reply is long enough as it is.

Realistically, employees should be at work for work to happen (at least for businesses where working from home doesn't make sense). But as we discussed, we often need to simplify things for the game. Citizens travel your city in real time but the day passes much faster. Having every employee travel to work, to shops, find leisure, and go home, just isn't feasible, and the game running in real 24 hours would make for very slow progress. So companies don't need all workers to be at work every day to function. Some citizens travel to work/school, some to shops, some go to the park or restaurant, and some just spend the day at home. Larger cities still have more people traveling and more traffic to deal with - well, at least when the city is connected.

We have since made changes to how citizens can reserve homes and when they count as citizens, but when these experiments were done, citizens would reserve a home when it was built. They'd then be "moving in" and count as citizens. In a city connected to the outside world, they'd travel to their homes and start their lives, but without that connection, they'd never arrive while still "taking part" in your city. We've improved the pathfinding so they now can't move into homes if they can't get there, which means they won't be a part of your population.

We want to continue to hear about situations you may run into where your city should fail, if not immediately, then in the long run, but for some reason isn't. We always do our best to anticipate how you might play the game, but realistically, we'll end up like this little video as you come up with things we just didn't expect (and then we'll ask ourselves why we didn't think of that xD).

That was a long one, which I hope answered some of your questions. Keep sharing your feedback and thoughts, it's really great to see, and even if answers take a wall of text or a dev diary, we appreciate you sharing and asking. ^^

First of, thank you for the long response. Yes yes it's your job, but human decency still exists.

I get that failsafes should definitely be part of the design, even if it has almost become a taboo to say so. The examples of failsafes you list are, in my opinion, very reasonable for both providing a fun and performant game. My grief with the failsafes are that they are too generous. To continue your metaphor with the rope walking: Instead of having a safety net always under you, garaunteeing your success at all times, then increase the size of the rope slightly and only have a net under the first part of the rope. Or said in game-terms: create a (optional) "tutorial" part with plenty failsafes for the first X months, and then tapper them off, and try to reduce the areas where the game present you with problems you can't solve - as you put it yourself.

Before going into some concrete things about failsafes, I also want to say that I think you walk a very fine line with these parts of the game vision:

Failsafes are important to make sure the game is fun and to avoid frustrating situations you can't solve They're there to ensure you can recover from mistakes and that the simulation continues to function.

I want to make it clear that failsafes are not there to take away challenges or stop you from failing. They're there to make sure the city doesn't fall apart to where you can't do anything to save it.

So failsafes should ensure I can recover from mistakes, yet still allowing me to fail. Is this even needed? And if so, is this really a balance you want to find right now? It seems razor thin and very time consuming. Maybe instead focus the failsafes on '... the simulation continues to function ...'-part and handling weird edge cases and maybe start-up issues in an un-established town - at least until you got more breathing room in your backlog to hand.

I don't have the full list of implemented failsafes, or even the definition you internally use for a failsafe (like, do you consider not having 100% of all people come into the office as a failsafe? I consider it as a necessary simplification of the simulation) so it is a somewhat difficult discussion to have, but I'll try. Some tests seems to suggest that some parts of the econemy of the city, such as goods, are under some sort of failsafe. If true, is that really necessary for your stated goal for the failsafes? I believe some think of "failsafes" as other cities providing services and goods to your city. Can't handle your own garbage/mail/input goods? No problem, your neighbor got you. While that does make sense from a simulation and realism standpoint, maybe it should come with some sort of cost to provide a gameplay angle. Like sure, you can have the rest of the country handle your trash for you, but it will cost you on your city budget, since you are now paying for some other cities drivers to come handle your trash, which is a larger running cost then doing it yourself since they are selling you are service and have to travel longer. On the upside it avoids the upstart cost, which should be considerable. And now you turned what some consider a "bad failsafe" into a feature.

For the Government subsidies, it just seems to combine with the unlock reward to provide unending money. In the early days people on streams/videos said that balancing the budget is hard and money is tight, yet the millions kept flowing in, only decreasing for short periods of time when the small town invest in huge expenses. My concrete suggestions for this would simply be to remove the unlock money (the reward is the actual item being unlocked afterall) and toning down the subsidies. And maybe instead of having some formula of providing subsidies just start with a flat amount, or have it be a set amount transfered each month for X months. This would also make it a lot clearer for the player what they have to work with, instead of it being a nebulous value on you budget sheet which just makes you stay afloat. Also, I personally like the idea of making it a special Government Loan with favourable interest rate. I get that you need some starting money, to get everything going, but currently it seems to elimenate the "early game".

And finally, I am very happy to hear that you aim for a management game. I'll keep an eye on the game and hope to soon sink many hours into it when that part of the game has received some attention. I believe the game will be great and I look forward to hopefully become a long-time supporter.

My major problem with the failsafes and the amount of money being handed out is that in these sort of games, one of the biggest things I enjoy is unlocking and then plopping down new buildings, while also factoring in the "Should I?" part. I want to have to work towards that. I want it to feel great that I unlocked the police station, but also still want to have to evaluate and plan to make sure dropping one, let alone many, is the right thing to do. That my city will be able to support the costs. I want to feel like I'm starting from scratch and my decisions and designs are what's helping my city thrive and allowing me to build newer and more expensive buildings to maintain the balance between keeping my citizens happy and profit. With the failsafes and subsidies, that feeling barely exists. I don't feel like I earned the right to place down parks and a public bus system because I have designed my city well enough to support that. The money consideration is a non issue because of the subsidies and rank up rewards. It becomes a case of of course you are going to plop down everything that has been unlocked. And thus gives the game a very city painter feeling.

Very well put, couldn't agree more.

 

[tycoonmike8784]

Imperator had the Punic wars DLC, with mechanics which was given out for free, others on this thread have suggested partial refunds (like what Creative Assembly apparently did for Pharoah by lowering the price). See here:

https://www.totalwar.com/blog/total-war-pharaoh-faq-dec-2023/

Put bluntly: This is not Steams fault. It can be done and has been done, they just won’t do it. They have a roadmap for new DLCs; make one of them free (not including radio stations) as an apology, or update to make some free and add in what they will be doing over the year like what Vic 3 is doing? I hope this action would be the first step to actual reconciliation and recovery of trust, rather than meaningless words done after the window has closed.

I defer to you on Killing Floor 2, since I have no knowledge of the game, and I will never claim to have the know how . I do feel however if they lower the price for an early access game, people would accommodate and understand more. Prison Architect has done it before which did Early Access really well: I was on it from the beginning to the end with that one.

I’ll refer to u on my earlier quote regarding the simulation, because it sums up my thoughts in response to ur simulation argument more succinctly than I can manage. To put it simply: I am glad as u say u have helped participated in debunking some of the lies, but just because the simulation isn’t completely broken but bugged out, doesnt mean that it’s not infuriating to play. As I keep pointing out, these failsafes (not talked about at all best as I can tell in the dev diaries) and the confusion behind industrial goods etc are utterly ruining the immersion for me to play. The playerbase also seems to agree, although it would be interesting to see if fixing the performance issues can get the system requirements down, which might lead to the playerbase recovering.

Re YouTubers: I actually watched them before pre-release since I was hyped by them. All of them were very coy about the performance issues (which was immediately noted, I have 0 complaints about performance because that was super transparent before release) but literally no one talked about the failsafes, safeguards or seem to play test in detail the actual simulation on how it was working, before during or even after release. This is partly the reason why it took people like us to demand answers in forums and for you to debunk areas made. None of the major content creators has ever done one since release when they could, and hoping all this will be sweeped under the carpet. Even more disappointingly, closed beta modders and Content creators on YouTube/reddit who I previously really respected were outright rude to people who were genuinely inquiring about how to get modding stuff working since there is no Steam Workshop, or to people whether rightly or wrongly were worried about performance issues when these creators have RTX 4090s claiming they have no issues.

And I'm glad that both games put out free content like that but, and I cannot stress this enough, you are not entitled to free content because you are dissatisfied with the game. Would it be a great way to drum up support? Absolutely, and I will be the first to say that it should probably happen. But we don't get to pretend like it is something that is owed to us, which, yes, that has been the tone throughout all of these conversations. The game is broken and, to prove you mean what you say, give us something for free. That's not how this works, nor is how it ever worked in the industry.

And, as is so often the way, the point has been missed here. Yes, features being bugged out does not mean the game isn't infuriating to play. I have never once said that someone's frustration is invalid by virtue of obtuse game mechanics or even the known bugs and if that's been your takeaway I truly am sorry that I have not been able to adequately get my point across. However, you do not get to have your cake and eat it too. Some of the most prominent threads on here and elsewhere regarding broken or bugged mechanics were created by people trying to convince us the entire game is a scam because of said bugs and broken mechanics.

Yes, you're right: my disproving these bugs and showing how some of these mechanics work is not proof that the game isn't infuriating for those expecting those mechanics to work. By the same token: your frustration at the game does not make the game fundamentally broken. It means you are frustrated at the game, nothing more. The problem is that people represent that frustration at the game as evidence that the game is broken and that CO are con-artists because of it. If it stopped at a venting of frustration I'd be right there with you but that is not where it stops. It stops at accusations of fraud and malfeasance that, frankly, are just getting tired.

I'll also note, regarding YouTubers... I find it rather odd that you claim that YouTubers weren't frank about the performance issues when you have people like City Planner Plays putting out a video such as the one he did prior to the launch explaining performance across a decent subsection of hardware. And, frankly, I find it baffling that people don't understand that content creators, as part of their stated jobs, don't typically have high end rigs that, you know, can actually play the games. How is that news? How are people unable to understand that Biffa or CPP's stated performance may not be representative of their performance? You use them to get an idea of how a game could run, not use them as your one to one benchmark unless you happen to have built exactly their rig.

Not to mention... failsafes were mentioned in the written and visual. You can see the monetary awards here, in Dev Diary 10, and the subsidies are talked about in the Behind the Scenes #3. We talked about this before, I'll note, and I'll make the same concession here: things like teleporting traffic and the goods stockpiles at spawn would have been nice to know, but if those are our smoking guns in this conversation? If that's what flips someone from liking the game to not liking the game... then frankly, I don't know if there's anything they could do to convince them to like it.

 

[pablomarti354]

I'll admit that it took me a few cities and tips from other players before I turned a profit in the original game.

Call me crazy, but I think that’s the point of a management game that actually presents some level of challenge.

 

[Dushess]

And I'm glad that both games put out free content like that but, and I cannot stress this enough, you are not entitled to free content because you are dissatisfied with the game.

We paid full price, and uhm... actually expect enough quality in just at least next day. That's final product. Not early, not beta, not demo. It marketed as ready, next-gen level game. Now please look at this section - https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/cities-skylines-2-bug-reports.1162/

and more about failsafes, If you even didn't start to build a connections, just marked up some areas - base mechanics can't work at all. Nobody goes to build homes and shops, nobody lives in the brand new block. There is no public access. But we can see the block begins to function, they even going to work, warehouses and shops magically have goods to operate. Remember, we still don't have any outside road. That is not how such things can work. (it had been called fake simulation here in the forum once)

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

And I'm glad that both games put out free content like that but, and I cannot stress this enough, you are not entitled to free content because you are dissatisfied with the game. Would it be a great way to drum up support? Absolutely, and I will be the first to say that it should probably happen. But we don't get to pretend like it is something that is owed to us, which, yes, that has been the tone throughout all of these conversations. The game is broken and, to prove you mean what you say, give us something for free. That's not how this works, nor is how it ever worked in the industry.

I’m suggesting that as a course of action, since it was CO themselves that said actions take place over words and they want to build back trust in the community. To suggest that I am entitled to a refund is wrong; I’m suggesting that if they really want to get back the community trust, this is how to do so, not meaningless words or videos. I was also responding to you mentioning there is nothing CO can do; that’s incorrect they absolutely can, and I believe like you that it should be done to help rebuild trust.

I’m not sure u read my post correctly. As I raise constantly re YouTubers in the comment you replied to, performance issues was not the issue I was worried about, because as u say, CPP raised it in plenty of detail and we were warned by CO that it will not fit the requirements. That’s on myself if I was to be only upset on that. Rather, as I pointed out, no one has done even now an in depth economic analysis of the game, if the simulation is working as intended and if it’s realistic. The rudeness I specify was when before and during release people were asking about if it affected my machines and some creators rudely pushed them aside when people said they were having performance issues, stating they were fine in their rig and they didn’t have a clue what people were complaining about performance. Couple with my bad experiences asking modders legitimate questions about CS2’s alternative modding platforms and how do they work, I just dont think that is the way to go about things.

I can agree with you wrt to the mentality. I read here recently that Developers should only be going on holiday for only 2 weeks instead of 3. This is very frustrating and wrong, because it really derails from the focus and developers are human beings and need their holidays, not slaves to serve a community. The argument is that all this could have been resolved if the game could be after the holidays when there is time to fix it in a quicker manner, but that’s not the developers fault, rather the CEOs and Paradox higher ups for pushing them out.

I have no issues with subsidies or the rewards systems so I have no clue why ur bringing it up; it makes a lot of sense to have them because you can expand your game without forcing yourself to wait for a budget to be balanced theoretically like SC4. It might need to be retuned or have an option to turn it off, but imo I like the system. And yes though the traffic simulation and magical good transportation may be trivial for others and you, under the hood economic calculations for me matters me a lot because it’s part of why I loved the original game which I spent hundreds of hours on, and to me it’s the skeleton of any agent based simulation like this. I had hoped that the sequel would take inspiration from the popular TMPE mods and others and expand on it into the game or some form, and with the marketing campaign labelling as a feature complete, most realistic simulation ever, it seemed that it might be the case. The post above by vvilku about failsafes sums up my feelings on it far more than my limited brain can type out.

Bad on me I suppose for believing them, but I’m just stating what I thought it might be. I still want the CS2 they advertised and promoted because it seemed perfect for me not the one we have: imo there is a big discrepancy. I’m not sure if that qualifies me for “I’ll never be persuaded”.

 

[CapnBludd]

And this is how it should be IMHO. I don't think CS2 should be less difficult than 1 in that regard. I suspect this might be where a lot of dissatisfaction lies.

Yes, it's one of my big problems with the game. Unlimited money and unlock everything are already there to allow people to get a feel for the game.

 

[CapnBludd]

Oh please... Why would our city exist in a vacuum? Just look around the map. Look at the game design.

You say the cities are not in a vacuum, yet I need a railway depot to accept national trains on my single station? Why can't I have a Scottish Highlands village with one station, 4 pubs, a butcher and fields all around (either for sheep or for golf)? Don't trains arrive to small villages and boost the growth this way? I'm surprised I don't need a shipyard to have a port or a fully-fledged aviation industry quarter to have an airport...

Those trains never stop. Nothing that you see Fly, sail, or roll by on the tracks will stop at anything you build. There are no intercity buses that want to bring folks to your city. Nothing happens unless you make a route. I miss the old way of making a station and trains to stop and bring people, putting in an airport and planes coming in, building a port and ships coming in all on their own.

 

[homerCCCP]

I think nobody claims that the game at the moment is not too easy. However, it does not mean that all mechanics that help making it easier are unjustified. It means they need to be improved in terms of balance.
And concerning the so called "failsaves". Really important to distinguish between the financial balance and the rest of the game.

I expect from a city builder to provide an economical challenge. Most of the city builders limited this to finances which was fine. If certain "fail saves" (In CS:2 it is the subsidies) remove this challenge, they need to be reworked or even remove, agree with that.

Considering a total fail of the city, a true "gameover" (More than the typical city builder thing where you run out of money and need to adjust finances or in the worst case could save your town with a cheat, no I mean a big gameover) is not what I expect from a city builder. In the end it is a builder and not a city survivor.
Renaming hundreds of streets, creating a great city, where everybody is happy and then learning it is void in a big explosion (exeggaration here) because I went to the toilet would make me stop playing the game. This is also not what we have seen in other city builders, except maybe the death waves in CS:1 and catastrophe events.

Such complex simulations can run
out of bounds quickly (Think of the famous bridge that collapsed in a resonance catastrophy) and in the end due to complexity you will not know why and it is certainly not the players fault. So you need certain mechanics to kick the simulation back where it should be.
Think starting ressources for a company, the most hated "fail save" mechanic.
Without this certain placements of buildings would lead them to not receive their good in time which would make them be abandoned, then a new company appears not getting it goods again in time and that in endless repetitions.
That is a simulation running out of bounds due to its own limitations: In thus case in game time is very compressed, while transport take real time to reach a certain place. You will always need some sort of compromises / workarounds to resolve this. Again: That does not mean that balance is in the good place right now, but it is totally justified that certain systems are existing. Personally, concerning the starting ressources for companies, I could not care less (In the end companies will fail if not properly connected, just that it takes longer), as I don't build a disconnected town. And in the end people complain these companies have starting ressources without being connected, but do not complain the building are being built in the first place without being connected, well.... (On the other hand this might be a solution: Just avoid houses being built without being connected to the outside, btw different mechanic but still a "failsave")

Anyway, I don't want to judge on other players experience. We certainly need mod tools where players can experiment with mechanics, remove them and risk instability. However, from CO I expect in the first place that their simulation runs stable. AGAIN: I think nobody claims it is already where it should be and there is still a long way to go.

 

[mackau]

No inhouse QA.

Sigh.

 

[ClemiMD]

The company where I work doesn't have its own QA either. Apart from the fact that below a certain company size it makes perfect economic sense to have payroll, marketing, quality management or accounting handled externally, an external QA has the advantage that it is not blinded by the company's routine.

 

[helpingiskind]

I greatly appreciate all the hard work from the staff at CO and Paradox as well as anyone who worked on the game to make the next best city-building simulation game. Seeing what the game looked like during the early development stage, I think the game that we are given is a great one. I hope that Colossal Order will get back the trust that they may have lost during the hard release of Cities: Skylines II and that more people can like this game even more in the future!