I really hope the SC features, like better education system, are targeted by DLCs in future. We need such actual features instead of gimmicks like "musical concerts".
And yeah, it shouldn't be overly complex, but still complex and customizable enough like SC13 education system is.
It's not overly interesting as you basically must build a university, or your commercial zones will end up in a constant level-up/abandon cycle. A city without university is a no go.
Indeed. As I said in my original post - Cities Skylines suffers from a bad design issue. Instead of adding something as a "benefit" based feature like Simcity, it uses "fixed requirement" approach like Caesar 3. You
cannot build a small town or a village in this game and hope to run it, simply because it always requires you to build all the structures, which is completely unrealistic and arbitrary.
The reason I called it a Caesar 3 approach because this is like in Caesar 3, where houses wouldn't evolve one bit unless you built what they required in the vicinity. And then immediately devolve if they lost it and the people start leaving. But even that isn't as extreme as this game.
So for example:
- If I don't build a university, shops are abandoned simply because they need that one arbitrary university-educated employee.
- If I don't build police station, instead of getting unhappy and dealing with crime, citizens just instantly flee.
- If I don't build garbage dumps within a minute of unlocking them at a few hundred population, instead of dealing with increasing trash and dropping land values, citizens just instantly flee.
- If I don't build a graveyard within a minute of unlocking them, citizens flee once dead bodies aren't picked up. I could understand sewage system, but deathcare feels a bit forcibly implemented in the game, since it doesn't relate to city building/management much.
By the time I have built all the infrastructure necessary to actually prevent my dumb snowflake cims from fleeing for no reason, it is no longer a village or even a town. It is a luxurious city. I have to keep a population in tens of thousands and build a big city to sustain it all through taxes.
In SC4 I could build a very large town without building any public building other than a fire station or two. Sure the RCI would stop growing and people might eventually riot, but you could keep people placated with lots of farmlands. It didn't
force me to "build everything or else everyone leaves" like this game arbitrarily does.