Greetings, fellow city builders and thank you for tuning to another series of Cities: Skylines Dev Diaries!

Over the next weeks we are delving into new Cities: Skylines expansion called Industries which was announced 11th of October. If you have not checked out the trailer yet you can just follow the link

Industrial areas are an important part of any city in terms of economy, environment and traffic. With Industries expansion you can now create Industry Areas of different sizes with the easy Industry Area tool. Once the area is painted it's time to choose a speciality – Forest, Farming, Ore or Oil. Your Industrial Areas will level up as they reach certain goals and requirements and unlock a wide selection of new buildings to further expand your area.

Your Industry Areas gather, import, export and refine resources for the use of various production plants all the way to the top – to manufacture the desired luxury products for profit. Can you create the ultimate production chain?

Industries DLC will also come with new cargo services and Warehouses to help fulfill all your industrial needs. You are now able to store your goods to help the flow of resources within your City. Post City Service will bring Post Vans and Post Trucks to your streets so your citizens can now rejoice in freshly delivered mail! As always, Industries expansion will also come with 5 new maps with plenty of resources, new policies and more to help your city flourish. We're also offering free content for everyone to enjoy and you can read more about them in the upcoming Dev Diaries.

Industries expansion will be available in stores 23rd of October. To help the wait stay tuned for more Dev Diaries where we dig deeper into new features.

 

[Beer Fiend]

I'm guessing the industry areas are going to be like the Park areas from Parklife?

 

[Ryath]

Can't wait!

 

[similan]

Is that a drilling platform?

 

[Metalpuritan]

That looks great. But dang it! I just got back into the game after a long hiatus, got my mods all set up for a good long run... And now this, which will break all my mods and cause me to lose momentum.

Can you please finish this game? Pretty please? I just want to play the game. Seriously, this city I was planning on building... I might as well stop, delete all of my mods and my save file and just wait until this releases and all the mods get updated. It could be another month or two, or even longer before I am able to play again. Is that what you want? Is that part of your design?

Oh, and my game isn't even heavily modded, still mostly vanilla. I feel terrible for the folks that mod their games out the wazoo... All that work, lost to nothingness.

What are up to now? 8 or 9 DLCs? Really? Come on. I can tell you this much, I won't be doing this again. I won't be buying any more games from you guys. This is all you get out of me, just Cities: Skylines. You have released so many DLCs that I cannot justify exploring the rest of your library, you have enough of my money. You went full EA Sims games on this one. Never go full EA sims games.

 

[Avanya]

Can you please finish this game? Pretty please? I just want to play the game. Seriously, this city I was planning on building... I might as well stop, delete all of my mods and my save file and just wait until this releases and all the mods get updated. It could be another month or two, or even longer before I am able to play again. Is that what you want? Is that part of your design?

Oh, and my game isn't even heavily modded, still mostly vanilla. I feel terrible for the folks that mod their games out the wazoo... All that work, lost to nothingness.

There's absolutely no need to abandon your city or remove all mods. Most mods get updated, all you need to do is wait for a bit when the patch hits. I'll do a post on here like I did last patch helping people who play modded transition and find which mods are broken, so you can get back to playing. If you want to make sure you can play your city avoid mods like 81 tiles, Network Extensions 2 (the one called Project is dead and shouldn't be used), More Train Tracks, Extra Train Station Tracks, One Way Train Tracks, Metro Overhaul Mod and Realtime. Those are the ones that can cause some serious issues, pretty much all other mods can be disabled without breaking the save (might have some chaos for a little, but that's about it).

 

[FreedomPei]

I am going to get it.

 

[Monkbel]

hi co_emmi,

thanks for posting this! I just pre-ordered Industries.

I'm curious, is the new patch going to have traffic AI improvements? For me, the biggest problem in C:S was always weird traffic - all drivers take unreasonable decisions. A lot of this is being fixed (or rather papered over / ductaped) by mods, but I would love to see core game improve on that.

 

[lrbaumard]

There's absolutely no need to abandon your city or remove all mods. Most mods get updated, all you need to do is wait for a bit when the patch hits. I'll do a post on here like I did last patch helping people who play modded transition and find which mods are broken, so you can get back to playing. If you want to make sure you can play your city avoid mods like 81 tiles, Network Extensions 2 (the one called Project is dead and shouldn't be used), More Train Tracks, Extra Train Station Tracks, One Way Train Tracks, Metro Overhaul Mod and Realtime. Those are the ones that can cause some serious issues, pretty much all other mods can be disabled without breaking the save (might have some chaos for a little, but that's about it).

Why the hell would someone want them to stop creating with this game
what a bizarre request

 

[Avanya]

I'm curious, is the new patch going to have traffic AI improvements? For me, the biggest problem in C:S was always weird traffic - all drivers take unreasonable decisions. A lot of this is being fixed (or rather papered over / ductaped) by mods, but I would love to see core game improve on that.

Don't expect it. They've said over and over that it can't be done with the current minimum system requirements. All they've been able to do is let emergency vehicles overtake if there's lanes for them do to so. If your CPU can handle it you can use Traffic Manager President Edition which helps give you more tools to control traffic (and can improve the AI). The problem is a smarter AI means more calculations for the CPU. So we really shouldn't expect anything more done to the AI.

 

[Torakka]

With Industries expansion you can now create Industry Areas of different sizes with the easy Industry Area tool. Once the area is painted it's time to choose a speciality – Forest, Farming, Ore or Oil.

Is this some new system that is going to replace the current Forest, Farming, Ore and Oil district specialisations?

 

[muttonnoir]

This expansion should please a large section of the fan base. Folks have been asking for a deeper industrial simulation so hopefully this will scratch that itch (or at least provide some relief- there will be the usual naysayers! and the "I'm never happy" gang- hovering over their keyboards in anticipation)

 

[MarkJohnson]

It's about damn time! The industry has always had a complex system in place, it just wasn't being taken advantage of. It's nice to see it finally done. Definitely pre-ordering.

 

[Beer Fiend]

I would like to take this opportunity to petition for a crime related DLC with riots.

Tee hee.

 

[Avanya]

Is this some new system that is going to replace the current Forest, Farming, Ore and Oil district specialisations?

I imagine that's up to us. I think you can more or less replace the original specialisations fully with the new stuff or have a mix of them. Not sure about general goods from the generic industry - that might not have a replacement.

 

[Aoderic]

I'm Looking forward to having real working farms.

 

[mobbertroses]

This sounds cool! Does this mean the education requirements for farming and forestry will be tweaked at higher levels? I've had to largely abandon both in the present version because they don't scale well with a fully educated labor pool.

 

[MarkJohnson]

This sounds cool! Does this mean the education requirements for farming and forestry will be tweaked at higher levels? I've had to largely abandon both in the present version because they don't scale well with a fully educated labor pool.

Sorry to go OT, but I wanted to let you know, it's not the education pool that is the problem, it is the workforce pool that is the problem.

For example:

Your unemployment drops below 5% and you get shortage of workers. The thing is, workers take the best jobs they can, so they take specialized jobs last, so they are the one who always complain. But it's not a complaint of education, it's a complaint or workforce.

Raise unemplotment over 5% at all times. I aim for 10% as unemployment fluctuates a lot, so having it at 10% it is less likely to fall below 5% when you aren't paying full attention.

If unemployment falls below 4%, then you have to build more residential, then you have to wait for cims to grow up before they are eligible for work, and this can lead to lengthy worker shortages and building going abandoned from lack of workers. (not lack of uneducated worker. That doesn't exist)

 

[mobbertroses]

Oh, I'm aware of (and very comfortable with) manipulating unemployment rates to stabilize development and force cims into lower-education jobs. As a matter of fact, one of my main uses for farming/forestry in my current city is to handle the surge in workers in the period between post-birthwave YA entering the job market and post-deathwave A leaving it, as it can currently be abandoned and restarted without consequence as the need for those jobs ebbs and flows.

But in a well-designed mature city, birth/death/labor waves should be smooth, and there should there be no need for disposable places of employment. Likewise, UE is just a relation of YA/A to C/I/O, so even if you're playing full R with structural UE, it's possible to run 5-10% no matter what sort of jobs you've created. So farming/forestry winds up becoming at best equal to the other types of industry, and when UE fluctuates it instantly becomes a clear weakness unless you're worried about ground pollution. And I know people freak out about pollution (or about seeing it simulated in video games, at least), but again, if the city's designed well that shouldn't be a concern outside of the start of the game.

Knowing all this, if I see a forest or farming resource on the map, I know it makes more sense from an economic perspective to either develop it as generic industry or zone it R/C and get that production from an equivalent industrial zone elsewhere. And outside of the start of the game, that's true in every situation I would face (barring a city where generic exports are out of control, which is generally not a realistic scenario). So it would be nice to have a reason to use these specializations aside from pure aesthetics. And if there has to be a trade-off for the lack of pollution, let's have it be in goods produced, which are more closely tied to pollution than employment by the logic of the game.

Also I know the game isn't real-life, but I think this is definitely grounded in reality. Sure, there are a lot of farms who scrape the bottom of the labor pool to find their employees, but there are also a lot of educated people who go into farming as well. There are major agricultural programs at every university in the midwestern U.S., accounting for between a tenth and a sixth of all students. And if you look at who's actually doing most of the farming within urban city limits, it's almost universally people with at least a high school education if not a bachelor's degree.

 

[ShaneMEL]

Looking at the pictures, farms will now look like farms and forestry will have better looking buildings. My main gripe with the game as it currently is the manual tweaking you have to do for somewhat realistic farms, so what i'm seeing is a huge improvement. Look forward to seeing all the other ideas and how they play out in your cities, though adding more trucks and postal services could cause even worse traffic jams.