Please don't hate me, just expressing my opinion.
Cities: Skylines – 1 Year review
TL;DR: Great eye-candy improvements, but fix traffic already CO. Multi-lane avenues with one lane being used, 90° lane crossing, cims never use alternate paths, teleporting and time scale issues.
Colossal Order's “Cities: Skylines” was the first City Simulator that really managed to take the spotlight of simulations from the long running series SimCity, and with reason. Instead of a mathematical simulation with unrealistic areas and regions, C:S simulates traffic as it is on the simulated city, causing realistic traffic, which then creates realistic city issues, like services not reaching areas due to heavy traffic. Services don't have an area-of-effect, but instead a distance-of-effect, pretty much how far they are willing to go (on your roads), with the obvious consequence that while they might be “covering” a certain region, if traffic blocks up, they are rendered useless.
But the game is not without criticism. The ease of play past the initial growth, the totally crazy vehicle behaviour in some areas (using only one lane on a multi-lane avenue, or making 90° lane changes that cause unrealistic buildup), and the lack of a proper A.I on your “cims” path-finding (like choosing alternate, less congested paths if necessary, or out of spite), or even how the game seems to just skip some city services focusing mostly on traffic (Fire-fighting specialist buildings, Crime-fighting specialist buildings, libraries, proper water treatment or recycling, and so on – but you will find plenty of train and bus alternate buildings, or more recently, trams), get one wondering what changed in one year of active development by CO, since they are focusing on free updates and improvements, as well some paid extra content, instead of going for a sequel.
After-dark introduced some night life (even though the nigth cicle is totally broken traffic-wise), tourism and leisure specializations and mostly eye-candy, but let's face it, tourism is broken (unique touristic buildings upkeep is insanely higher than the touristic income, so why bother plopping hotels and waste perfectly good commercial space for less money?) and leisure areas just add noise pollution to no benefic (in fact, you even have a policy to make it worse and stop tax income from them. Why would you do that is beyond me, they are not useful in any way to be stimulated, and you want “leisure” far from home). Bicycles, bus and taxis lanes, that are useless and reduce the actual value of the roads. Well, they are pretty, eye-candy again.
Snowfall added … snow. More traffic INCREASING options like snow and snow plows, the trams that are clearly eye-candy, and eye candy. Little in the sense of gameplay, lots of eye-candy again.
Don't take me wrong, I love the game looking good, makes us want to build pretty cities and all, but when you have your pretty city failing because elephants ...
So, some improvements were made, but I can't stop to wonder if CO is focusing too much in aesthetics and eye candy, rather than addressing the multiple elephants in the room: Traffic, then traffic.
A new massive but mostly eye candy (and useless) bus terminal was added, and aesthetic changes and improvements to landscaping, road height steps and tunnels were added. The elephant, however, keeps standing right in the middle of the room, and even the most experienced and resilient modders have a hard time trying to kill it, or so much hide it. Vehicles still make 90° lane changes on the exact same spot, multi-lane avenues are rendered almost useless by the lane “bug”, trains are big and expensive but seldom used, and services still either ignore problems altogether, or make completely hilarious choices, like a Fire Truck being sent from the other side of town to put out a fire just next to another Fire station – only to see that building burn out while the traffic stops said fire truck.
So, what would really make C:S remove the elephant in the room and allow more people to enjoy the multiple eye-candy improvements of the recent paths and DLC? The community might have nitpicking choices, but overall, the most glaring issues that must be addressed are obvious:
1. Vehicles must start using all lanes. The “bug” seems obviously caused by vehicles sticking to the side they wish to turn in 3 miles and never leaving it, despite all other 3 lanes being free. Multiple solutions, some clever ones already in mods, can reduce or even remove this issue, but CO keeps a blind eye to this game-breaking “bug”. What is even funnier is how sometimes vehicles will choose the opposite lane (say, the right most) until making a 90° lane change across all lanes towards to turn.
2. The mentioned 90° lane change, which again cause perfectly free avenues or highways to block up because vehicles literally block the path on all lanes while making unreal lane changes. To make it worst, they all change lanes on the exact same spot. Maybe two bugs in one, but a simple randomization on the lane change location, and preventing multiple-lane crossing (causing the 90° bug) would certainly go a long way to reducing this eye-sore.
3. All “cims” choose the fastest path between A and B, ignoring traffic. On a game so focused on simulating real traffic, that is naive at most. Residents of any city know alternate paths for their daily routes and will try different routes to try and avoid traffic. A simple secundary script that calculate the fastest path between the same A and B considering traffic (the game already have traffic intensity values on road, so this should be trivial) would greatly improve realism and gameplay, by having vehicles choosing alternate routes that, despite being longer, are faster given traffic. Sure, not everyone does that, but multiple realistic solutions could address that: a random change of choosing the fastest rather than closest, and improved chances of being “smart” based on education of said “cim” and you have a awesome game dynamic. Again, not hard to implement, but ignored nonetheless by CO.
4. Unrealistic car traffic is something that some people miss, but it is there: Most car traffic is generated by “cims” moving from their home (or straight from work) to leisure or commerce. That is fine, sure, but apparently, “cims” will teleport from home to work, specially if said work are Offices. An example is a city I made to test several theories where a 100k population district were adjacent to a commercial district, and a office district. Mind, the only three districts in town. Traffic between the residential and the commercial district was insane as expected, but you would be hard pressed to find any road with traffic other than “green” between or inside the Office district. Even mass transit, which I purposefully made ridiculously small on the Office district, was neglected. How are all those people going to/from those Offices?
5. Mismatching time scales. This might not be on the mind of most players, but it plays an important factor on traffic: The game basically moves at insanely fast pace, with a “day” on normal speed whiskin away in a few seconds. But traffic? Traffic is real time. The consequence is hilarious: some vehicles will take MONTHS to reach their destination. For sake of exemplification, I followed a hearse from a crematory to fetch a dead body and back: took it 45 days to reach the destination and back (on mild traffic). While this might be nitpicking, consider that the game offers a night and day cicle that doesn't follow neither of these time constrains, and you have 3 different time scales. To make it worse, you can choose your budget according to night or day, which makes no sense at all with vehicles taking several game months to reach their destination, a couple of night and day cicles, and 10 real (traffic) minutes. The solution is so easy there is a perfect mod adressing it called “rush hour”, but again, CO never so much mentioned trying to fix it.
6. Lack of meaningful policies. In all updates, most new policies are pretty much adding salt to the eye-candy: no bikes on the sidewalk? Really? Encourage bicycle use? Shouldn't be that default? You should encourage that by adding bicycle lanes and paths. But real policies that would add to the game are mostly ignored. “Restrict services to local district” would be a must for most people, fixing the “Fire truck going all the way to the other side of town”. The “schools out” policy should actually work instead of being just a tick on the screen (“cims” still teleport to schools on the other way of town even if they live in a district not connected to it and with “schools out” selected), “industry modernization” should be a thing, with most industries today switching form uneducated workers to more automation management educated workers, allowing educated and well educated cims to accept working on industries, at the obvious cost of better pay and, therefore, less taxes for you. Useful policies for town could fill a text, but most of the ones added are eye candy or useless, like the leisure focused ones which basically do nothing, or avoiding high traffic … mayors should avoid trucks moving inside residential areas with planning, not a policy.
7. No traffic signal or intersection micromanagement. On a game focused so much in traffic, the fact the game will take on for itself to add traffic signals on intersections that clearly don't need them (or you don't want them) is a bug on itself, turning access points nearly immediately choke points. It is not like you don't have an option, use highways and onramps … in mid town. Maybe not. Again, mods do that, why can't CO do something as simple as that? A intersection options where you can choose which directions have a traffic line would be a simple UI for a complex problem … but no, we can't. Let that important “Y” merge that none-in-real-life have traffic lights … have traffic lights. Instant traffic.
But instead of seeing these actually simple implementations, we get trams, water canals, casinos and snow. All of that still locked by easy-to-fix traffic issues and weird policies.
C:S might have raised the bar for realistic city simulation, but totally ignoring small simple details like policies and annoying bugs is not how I envision a game under “active development” going. I wish the next update focus on actual bug fixing (not flickering textures or localization issues, but actual game play bugs like traffic, teleporting and the policies that don't work), but what do I know, CO seems highly focused on eye candy.
Annex – how to fix mentioned bug.
1. Vehicles using multiple lanes are not hard to fix, some mods do a decent job at that. It is ok that vehicles will slowly move to the lane closest to where they wish to turn, but there is no reason for that to mean ONE lane. The simplest solution, if it have a traffic light on the turn, is for the vehicle to be able to stay on how many lanes the turn offer: Is the turn into a 2 lane road? So said vehicle can stay on the 2 lanes closes to it. Is it a turn into a 4 lane road? So the vehicle can stay on 4 lanes. If it doesn't have a traffic light, the current solution might apply, but maybe not force the vehicle to get to the final lane 3 miles away from the turn.
2. There are two obvious causes for the 90° lane change: one, the obvious … the game let it happen. Two, because the lane changing “spot” (it that a thing in real world? no) is fixed. Somewhere between the vehicle entered the road and where it wishes to turn, probably mid-way, there is the ghost “spot” where it will “choose” to change lanes. Add 20 vehicles to that, and you have 20 vehicles trying to change lane on the same spot. Solution? Vehicles should be able to choose when to change lane at a random position between A and B, there, fixed. 4 lane changes? Limit only one lane at a time. Here, 4 lane avenue and vehicle entered the left-most lane and wishes to make a right turn? First lane-change somewhere between 0 (immediately after entering avenus) and Distance/3 (2 lane changes remain), second lane change somewhere between 0 (first lane change) and Distance/2 (1 lane change remaining), third somewhere between 0 (second lane change) and Distance (no more lane changes, so it is ok to lane change at the turn. Fixed. Add the number of lane changes required from “all” (as in current game) to “not necessarily all” from Fix #1, and you have completely fixed both.
3. The function to path-find A to B using fastest route is there. Should be trivial to make another one (or with a parameter for considering or not traffic) and then weight each road used by traffic. There, you have now the best path considering traffic. Now, if the difference is significant (threshold for this pending, but let's say 25% difference), unneducated cims have a 10% chance of choosing the alternate route. Add some 20% points for each step on education, so educated cims have a 30% chance, well educated 50% and highly educated 70% chance of using the alternate. Furthermore, let's add a policy to help them shall we? “Radio traffic report policy”, costs you some, increases further 20% on the chance of choosing the best route. Fixed AND added meaningful policy. You can even add a new building on police tab called “Station with Helipad” which enable said policy (want eye candy? Chopters take off and circle areas of high traffic. Awesome)
4. I don't really know why “cims” teleport to their work but not their leisure but I am pretty sure it is just “disabled” somewhere in the code. Anyway, I don't know how the bug happens so I can't tell how to fix it, but it is important, since we currently can basically leave Office district with no mass transit or traffic worries. Alas, Offices should also require some cargo from Industry/Commerce/Inter-city, after all, those toners and coffee are not replenishing itself magically from their desks.
5. Three words for the fix: “Rush Hour mod”
6. I am sure with some half an hour thought we can come with useful policies, and most importantly, fix the ones that don't actually work, but fixing the services going far instead of the nearest available should not even be a policy, should be common sense.
7. Some mods do this, but the easiest solution is for intersections be selectable and generate a pop-screen menu where you can add/remove traffic signals. Just detect how many roads are connectting on the intersection (3? 4? 5? 6?), make a pretty tactical display (+ for 4, * for 6, no need to complicate, but would be even better if it came with a top image from the actual intersection instead of tactical display) and on each road that have incoming traffic, you can toggle on/off the signal. Done.
Cities: Skylines – 1 Year review
TL;DR: Great eye-candy improvements, but fix traffic already CO. Multi-lane avenues with one lane being used, 90° lane crossing, cims never use alternate paths, teleporting and time scale issues.
Colossal Order's “Cities: Skylines” was the first City Simulator that really managed to take the spotlight of simulations from the long running series SimCity, and with reason. Instead of a mathematical simulation with unrealistic areas and regions, C:S simulates traffic as it is on the simulated city, causing realistic traffic, which then creates realistic city issues, like services not reaching areas due to heavy traffic. Services don't have an area-of-effect, but instead a distance-of-effect, pretty much how far they are willing to go (on your roads), with the obvious consequence that while they might be “covering” a certain region, if traffic blocks up, they are rendered useless.
But the game is not without criticism. The ease of play past the initial growth, the totally crazy vehicle behaviour in some areas (using only one lane on a multi-lane avenue, or making 90° lane changes that cause unrealistic buildup), and the lack of a proper A.I on your “cims” path-finding (like choosing alternate, less congested paths if necessary, or out of spite), or even how the game seems to just skip some city services focusing mostly on traffic (Fire-fighting specialist buildings, Crime-fighting specialist buildings, libraries, proper water treatment or recycling, and so on – but you will find plenty of train and bus alternate buildings, or more recently, trams), get one wondering what changed in one year of active development by CO, since they are focusing on free updates and improvements, as well some paid extra content, instead of going for a sequel.
After-dark introduced some night life (even though the nigth cicle is totally broken traffic-wise), tourism and leisure specializations and mostly eye-candy, but let's face it, tourism is broken (unique touristic buildings upkeep is insanely higher than the touristic income, so why bother plopping hotels and waste perfectly good commercial space for less money?) and leisure areas just add noise pollution to no benefic (in fact, you even have a policy to make it worse and stop tax income from them. Why would you do that is beyond me, they are not useful in any way to be stimulated, and you want “leisure” far from home). Bicycles, bus and taxis lanes, that are useless and reduce the actual value of the roads. Well, they are pretty, eye-candy again.
Snowfall added … snow. More traffic INCREASING options like snow and snow plows, the trams that are clearly eye-candy, and eye candy. Little in the sense of gameplay, lots of eye-candy again.
Don't take me wrong, I love the game looking good, makes us want to build pretty cities and all, but when you have your pretty city failing because elephants ...
So, some improvements were made, but I can't stop to wonder if CO is focusing too much in aesthetics and eye candy, rather than addressing the multiple elephants in the room: Traffic, then traffic.
A new massive but mostly eye candy (and useless) bus terminal was added, and aesthetic changes and improvements to landscaping, road height steps and tunnels were added. The elephant, however, keeps standing right in the middle of the room, and even the most experienced and resilient modders have a hard time trying to kill it, or so much hide it. Vehicles still make 90° lane changes on the exact same spot, multi-lane avenues are rendered almost useless by the lane “bug”, trains are big and expensive but seldom used, and services still either ignore problems altogether, or make completely hilarious choices, like a Fire Truck being sent from the other side of town to put out a fire just next to another Fire station – only to see that building burn out while the traffic stops said fire truck.
So, what would really make C:S remove the elephant in the room and allow more people to enjoy the multiple eye-candy improvements of the recent paths and DLC? The community might have nitpicking choices, but overall, the most glaring issues that must be addressed are obvious:
1. Vehicles must start using all lanes. The “bug” seems obviously caused by vehicles sticking to the side they wish to turn in 3 miles and never leaving it, despite all other 3 lanes being free. Multiple solutions, some clever ones already in mods, can reduce or even remove this issue, but CO keeps a blind eye to this game-breaking “bug”. What is even funnier is how sometimes vehicles will choose the opposite lane (say, the right most) until making a 90° lane change across all lanes towards to turn.
2. The mentioned 90° lane change, which again cause perfectly free avenues or highways to block up because vehicles literally block the path on all lanes while making unreal lane changes. To make it worst, they all change lanes on the exact same spot. Maybe two bugs in one, but a simple randomization on the lane change location, and preventing multiple-lane crossing (causing the 90° bug) would certainly go a long way to reducing this eye-sore.
3. All “cims” choose the fastest path between A and B, ignoring traffic. On a game so focused on simulating real traffic, that is naive at most. Residents of any city know alternate paths for their daily routes and will try different routes to try and avoid traffic. A simple secundary script that calculate the fastest path between the same A and B considering traffic (the game already have traffic intensity values on road, so this should be trivial) would greatly improve realism and gameplay, by having vehicles choosing alternate routes that, despite being longer, are faster given traffic. Sure, not everyone does that, but multiple realistic solutions could address that: a random change of choosing the fastest rather than closest, and improved chances of being “smart” based on education of said “cim” and you have a awesome game dynamic. Again, not hard to implement, but ignored nonetheless by CO.
4. Unrealistic car traffic is something that some people miss, but it is there: Most car traffic is generated by “cims” moving from their home (or straight from work) to leisure or commerce. That is fine, sure, but apparently, “cims” will teleport from home to work, specially if said work are Offices. An example is a city I made to test several theories where a 100k population district were adjacent to a commercial district, and a office district. Mind, the only three districts in town. Traffic between the residential and the commercial district was insane as expected, but you would be hard pressed to find any road with traffic other than “green” between or inside the Office district. Even mass transit, which I purposefully made ridiculously small on the Office district, was neglected. How are all those people going to/from those Offices?
5. Mismatching time scales. This might not be on the mind of most players, but it plays an important factor on traffic: The game basically moves at insanely fast pace, with a “day” on normal speed whiskin away in a few seconds. But traffic? Traffic is real time. The consequence is hilarious: some vehicles will take MONTHS to reach their destination. For sake of exemplification, I followed a hearse from a crematory to fetch a dead body and back: took it 45 days to reach the destination and back (on mild traffic). While this might be nitpicking, consider that the game offers a night and day cicle that doesn't follow neither of these time constrains, and you have 3 different time scales. To make it worse, you can choose your budget according to night or day, which makes no sense at all with vehicles taking several game months to reach their destination, a couple of night and day cicles, and 10 real (traffic) minutes. The solution is so easy there is a perfect mod adressing it called “rush hour”, but again, CO never so much mentioned trying to fix it.
6. Lack of meaningful policies. In all updates, most new policies are pretty much adding salt to the eye-candy: no bikes on the sidewalk? Really? Encourage bicycle use? Shouldn't be that default? You should encourage that by adding bicycle lanes and paths. But real policies that would add to the game are mostly ignored. “Restrict services to local district” would be a must for most people, fixing the “Fire truck going all the way to the other side of town”. The “schools out” policy should actually work instead of being just a tick on the screen (“cims” still teleport to schools on the other way of town even if they live in a district not connected to it and with “schools out” selected), “industry modernization” should be a thing, with most industries today switching form uneducated workers to more automation management educated workers, allowing educated and well educated cims to accept working on industries, at the obvious cost of better pay and, therefore, less taxes for you. Useful policies for town could fill a text, but most of the ones added are eye candy or useless, like the leisure focused ones which basically do nothing, or avoiding high traffic … mayors should avoid trucks moving inside residential areas with planning, not a policy.
7. No traffic signal or intersection micromanagement. On a game focused so much in traffic, the fact the game will take on for itself to add traffic signals on intersections that clearly don't need them (or you don't want them) is a bug on itself, turning access points nearly immediately choke points. It is not like you don't have an option, use highways and onramps … in mid town. Maybe not. Again, mods do that, why can't CO do something as simple as that? A intersection options where you can choose which directions have a traffic line would be a simple UI for a complex problem … but no, we can't. Let that important “Y” merge that none-in-real-life have traffic lights … have traffic lights. Instant traffic.
But instead of seeing these actually simple implementations, we get trams, water canals, casinos and snow. All of that still locked by easy-to-fix traffic issues and weird policies.
C:S might have raised the bar for realistic city simulation, but totally ignoring small simple details like policies and annoying bugs is not how I envision a game under “active development” going. I wish the next update focus on actual bug fixing (not flickering textures or localization issues, but actual game play bugs like traffic, teleporting and the policies that don't work), but what do I know, CO seems highly focused on eye candy.
Annex – how to fix mentioned bug.
1. Vehicles using multiple lanes are not hard to fix, some mods do a decent job at that. It is ok that vehicles will slowly move to the lane closest to where they wish to turn, but there is no reason for that to mean ONE lane. The simplest solution, if it have a traffic light on the turn, is for the vehicle to be able to stay on how many lanes the turn offer: Is the turn into a 2 lane road? So said vehicle can stay on the 2 lanes closes to it. Is it a turn into a 4 lane road? So the vehicle can stay on 4 lanes. If it doesn't have a traffic light, the current solution might apply, but maybe not force the vehicle to get to the final lane 3 miles away from the turn.
2. There are two obvious causes for the 90° lane change: one, the obvious … the game let it happen. Two, because the lane changing “spot” (it that a thing in real world? no) is fixed. Somewhere between the vehicle entered the road and where it wishes to turn, probably mid-way, there is the ghost “spot” where it will “choose” to change lanes. Add 20 vehicles to that, and you have 20 vehicles trying to change lane on the same spot. Solution? Vehicles should be able to choose when to change lane at a random position between A and B, there, fixed. 4 lane changes? Limit only one lane at a time. Here, 4 lane avenue and vehicle entered the left-most lane and wishes to make a right turn? First lane-change somewhere between 0 (immediately after entering avenus) and Distance/3 (2 lane changes remain), second lane change somewhere between 0 (first lane change) and Distance/2 (1 lane change remaining), third somewhere between 0 (second lane change) and Distance (no more lane changes, so it is ok to lane change at the turn. Fixed. Add the number of lane changes required from “all” (as in current game) to “not necessarily all” from Fix #1, and you have completely fixed both.
3. The function to path-find A to B using fastest route is there. Should be trivial to make another one (or with a parameter for considering or not traffic) and then weight each road used by traffic. There, you have now the best path considering traffic. Now, if the difference is significant (threshold for this pending, but let's say 25% difference), unneducated cims have a 10% chance of choosing the alternate route. Add some 20% points for each step on education, so educated cims have a 30% chance, well educated 50% and highly educated 70% chance of using the alternate. Furthermore, let's add a policy to help them shall we? “Radio traffic report policy”, costs you some, increases further 20% on the chance of choosing the best route. Fixed AND added meaningful policy. You can even add a new building on police tab called “Station with Helipad” which enable said policy (want eye candy? Chopters take off and circle areas of high traffic. Awesome)
4. I don't really know why “cims” teleport to their work but not their leisure but I am pretty sure it is just “disabled” somewhere in the code. Anyway, I don't know how the bug happens so I can't tell how to fix it, but it is important, since we currently can basically leave Office district with no mass transit or traffic worries. Alas, Offices should also require some cargo from Industry/Commerce/Inter-city, after all, those toners and coffee are not replenishing itself magically from their desks.
5. Three words for the fix: “Rush Hour mod”
6. I am sure with some half an hour thought we can come with useful policies, and most importantly, fix the ones that don't actually work, but fixing the services going far instead of the nearest available should not even be a policy, should be common sense.
7. Some mods do this, but the easiest solution is for intersections be selectable and generate a pop-screen menu where you can add/remove traffic signals. Just detect how many roads are connectting on the intersection (3? 4? 5? 6?), make a pretty tactical display (+ for 4, * for 6, no need to complicate, but would be even better if it came with a top image from the actual intersection instead of tactical display) and on each road that have incoming traffic, you can toggle on/off the signal. Done.
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