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After After Dark
- Thread starter Sotrax
- Start date
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NATO countersWe at Colossal will be focusing on making more stuff for Cities: Skylines. Free and paid updates, things we wanted to have in the game but didn't have a chance to yet. I bet there's one thing we all agree the game needs, can you guess what that is?This is definitely something that has been asked for a lot, a new feature... Do you need more hints?
?!It's a great game. Only thing I really miss is some interaction with off-map neighbouring cities, like selling electricity, paying them to take your garbage in the early-game, etc.Cities in Motion <3, I love that game. My personal wish is to make a sequel at some point, but Cities: Skylines turned out to be such a hit we definitely will put all effort on it for the time being. And Stable Manager, you just wait. One day it will happen. So we will definitely make a new game at some point, but now the focus is on after After Dark, haha. The next game is not going to be CIM3, though, nor the Stable Manager
I would really want well-implemented seasons, too. Weather (with things like slippery roads that reduced driving speed), longer/shorter days, what have you. Oh, and snow.
Trams will be great, though.
Really shows that it's from the guys that made Cities in Motion, doesn't it
. (I like the public transit system in CS, just for the record)
Just to get it out of my brain, am going to add my 2p-eth to what could come afterwards/what I'd like to see:
1. (Odd one this) - Road/bus stop naming. Skylines is BRILLIANT. The ability to design and create is wonderful (the "Play God" aspect is an irrelevance to me) and I'd just love to be able to give my roads names. Districts are named, if anything to give the city a structure, and I'd love to be able to give roads that same opportunity, for additional structure. The same goes for bus stops. I build "European" cities rather than all-planned modern ones, so divisions, structures etc would be great.
1b. Prioritising of roads. The Traffic++ helped here a BIT but it wrecked bus creation (for me, don't know about others). It would be neat, like with the naming, to be able to paint on priorities, rather than need different road sizes. If a road is given the, shall we say, "A-grade priority", traffic would use it before looking for alternatives. Good for ring roads and by-passes. Then "B-grade priorities" could be distributors to various areas, etc etc. Thus cities could again be structured, with through-routes clearly marked AND used.
2. Trams - Everyone's asking for this. And so am I. Again, my European-style cities are clamouring for them. Watching the little dinging trams zip around CiM1 was a joy.
3. Ferries - My current city is two sides of a big estuary (the Norderhaven map which I originally only downloaded to test...) with a big settlement on each side. Ferries would help to alleviate the congestion.
4. Above-ground metro. OK, I'm sure a modder is working on this, but it would be cool too...
5. Weather would be great and atmospheric.
6. (This one occurred to me last night) When a section of a city is finished, then it's kinda finished. Would it not be a neat idea for roads to deteriorate like they do in real life? That way, it would be necessary to keep checking areas and updating the roads. Traffic could get ever slower on bad roads until it stops. This would add to the management of the city rather than just keeping building and looking after rubbish and dead people...
As I say, Skylines is wonderful. I sit for hours of an evening building, tweaking, creating eye-candy historic towns and cities (more historic unique buildings please....!!!!), reworking railway lines, road systems...CO is just superb!
1. (Odd one this) - Road/bus stop naming. Skylines is BRILLIANT. The ability to design and create is wonderful (the "Play God" aspect is an irrelevance to me) and I'd just love to be able to give my roads names. Districts are named, if anything to give the city a structure, and I'd love to be able to give roads that same opportunity, for additional structure. The same goes for bus stops. I build "European" cities rather than all-planned modern ones, so divisions, structures etc would be great.
1b. Prioritising of roads. The Traffic++ helped here a BIT but it wrecked bus creation (for me, don't know about others). It would be neat, like with the naming, to be able to paint on priorities, rather than need different road sizes. If a road is given the, shall we say, "A-grade priority", traffic would use it before looking for alternatives. Good for ring roads and by-passes. Then "B-grade priorities" could be distributors to various areas, etc etc. Thus cities could again be structured, with through-routes clearly marked AND used.
2. Trams - Everyone's asking for this. And so am I. Again, my European-style cities are clamouring for them. Watching the little dinging trams zip around CiM1 was a joy.
3. Ferries - My current city is two sides of a big estuary (the Norderhaven map which I originally only downloaded to test...) with a big settlement on each side. Ferries would help to alleviate the congestion.
4. Above-ground metro. OK, I'm sure a modder is working on this, but it would be cool too...
5. Weather would be great and atmospheric.
6. (This one occurred to me last night) When a section of a city is finished, then it's kinda finished. Would it not be a neat idea for roads to deteriorate like they do in real life? That way, it would be necessary to keep checking areas and updating the roads. Traffic could get ever slower on bad roads until it stops. This would add to the management of the city rather than just keeping building and looking after rubbish and dead people...
As I say, Skylines is wonderful. I sit for hours of an evening building, tweaking, creating eye-candy historic towns and cities (more historic unique buildings please....!!!!), reworking railway lines, road systems...CO is just superb!
I would agree with all of that. Whilst I didn't like SC13 I think it did have some interesting ideas, just poorly implemented. I liked the production chains, and the modular buildings, would like to see these ideas implemented in C:SL.
I also agree with comments about the specializations in C:SL where I'd rather see them as zones instead of districts, would allow for more flexibility. I would prefer to be able to zone in a more mixed fashion with commercial, office, leisure all next to each other, it would be more realistic to have these types of buildings mixed up rather than a whole district of nothing but leisure. More zone types.
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Not sure I like this idea. It's essentially just making the player redo things purely for the sake of having them redo things? It'd be even worse than when you're trying to keep your city neat and manually go around demolishing abandoned/burnt out buildings! Besides, shouldn't road maintenance come out of a budget line somewhere? Pretty sure that was how it worked in SimCity (and if you cut the budget for roads the road condition deteriorated and congestion/travel time worsened).
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Agree. Maybe if road budget was too low, roads would start to deteriorate and need repair, like in the original Sim City, but them constantly degrading? Nah.
At most, maybe players could be required to have like a "roadworks base" somewhere that would dispatch road workers when a section of road needed upgrade, maybe even blocking off one or more lanes as they did so so that you perhaps needed to find alternatives to avoid jams. That'd actually be pretty cool.
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What the game really needs is a variable zoning system... not the rigid 4x4 that greatly limits creativity
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Here's my thoughts:
1) Rail and Highways: I don't care if I can build the stations. I would like to be able to construct a rail route much more quickly without unlocking everything from the start. It should be, at the least, when you start, so you can at least get the Rail > Metro > Bus/Taxi thing going on early in your planning which means you don't have to bisect a bunch of high-value built-up land from the start. The same goes for highways. It doesn't make sense from a planning perspective. In SC you had to wait for it to be invented. That doesn't apply here. Building a rail network, even without stations, should allow for a much smoother transition into pods of smaller towns or huge city, district-by-district transportation.
2) Make money matter: It really doesn't. It's almost an afterthought after you break 10K population. Really. It's too easy in a lot of ways. Add some additional challenge here. Which also plays into my next point:
3) Add more building level control of the budget and have the radii actually reflect the true area of impact. Rush Hour did this really well: One high school may need the ability to accommodate 2000 students. Another may only need to cater to 250. This needs to have a slider for these buildings. This should apply to all service buildings.
4) Traffic Pollution: This is a big one. This needs added. It is hugely important to the realism level of the game. Right now, there's no drawback for eschewing all mass transit and simply building tunnel networks to bypass all that overhead and expedite rides. There also needs to be an option for Heavy Transport only on certain routes. Potential congestion charges and tolls should be rolled into the game. As well as "green initiatives" like electric car initiatives that require you to waste land on charging stations to support the infrastructure (part of the tradeoff.)
5) Tourism, the Airport, the Passenger Harbor, and Unique Buildings: Simply put, this has no correlation to the size of your city. Las Vegas, is, for all intents and purposes, not a very large city. Yet, it regularly hosts events that will quadruple the size of its population. I read about some "agent limit" or something that seems to detract from this since the AI goes haywire or something. But this should be a long-term goal. Then to go a step further, allow for special events (games at the stadium, big trade shows at the Expo Center) that will be tied to an attractiveness index that opens up what you can book. Now this is really in depth, but it really should have been what After Dark should have included. This really opens up a great metagame that these massive influxes will really put your transport system to the test. Get creative with each of your unique buildings, then add this stuff to the asset creator. Tourism needs a good hard look taken at it overall.
6) Parking Garages: Parking Garages need to be baseline and function similarly to schools or police departments, facilitating a larger or smaller area based upon funding.
7) Passenger Train Stations and Schools: In addition to building level control of range of function via building-budget sliders, these need multiple sizes. Elementary schools and passenger train stations need small, medium, and large sizes. High Schools, may need medium and large. Large Passenger Rail Stations need to facilitate multiple incoming and outgoing rail lines, just like in every major city everywhere. Additionally, there needs to be an underground option for this. Penn Station in NYC comes to mind.
8) Media: TV Stations, News, Radio, potentially Internet: These need to be facilitated. There's dedication via tax incentives everywhere to allow for this type of development. The game should allow for this via Commercial Specializations. And I'd wager that Retail should have its own specialization, as well. It's somewhat humorous that I start a new town and I end up without a Supermarket due to the randomness of development. What are they eating? Dirt?
9) Rail Line designation and, to a point, Design: Rail Only/Passenger only. This could probably be done relatively easily. Rail also isn't one way. A train may come in on a rail, then go out on the same rail, which hurts the detail of what rail is. The switch can be down the line. We need to have the ability to add the switches. It should not be automatic. The Metro is a train, too. It should likewise offer that. Additionally, allow for higher speed rail. HST's, potentially Mag-Levs, would be amazing!
10) Idiocy does not equal Industry: This sucks. It really does. High-tech industry is tied to high-end engineering, who are some of the most educated people on Earth. Even Miners, Oil, Farmers, and timber can involve the super-highly-educated. This really needs some work. Additionally, you need larger models for Timber and Farming especially. A farm should have the ability to stretch out to massive sizes and provide tons of produce. If you really want to get nuts, designate Organic and Non-Organic areas which increase sales prices, but lower production.
11) Open Space, Forests, and Natural Beauty: This isn't factored anywhere but Land Value. Put in a Ranger Station or Camp Ground. Put in a District tool for reserved Natural Parks or something like that then add Mount Rushmore and other such Natural Monuments.
12) Preference: Cim preference in where they work or live cannot be controlled. They will on a whim, work 4 tiles from where they live with somebody commuting the exact opposite direction FOR THE SAME EXACT COMPANY. The AI needs some work in this regard. It yields tons of unneeded traffic and commuting.
13) Police: Police are far too efficient. There's no crime. They need tuned down.
14) Time: If it took me a week to get home from work, I probably wouldn't work there. The time system is really weird. 7 days of sun, 7 days of night. I don't really get it.
15) Arcologies: Now I personally can find these insane, but simultaneously, it could be a means of saving land and consolidating your property and getting around that agent limit. City-in-a-building could theoretically reduce the loads on the framework to avoid any and all issues that may be limiting the introduction of a more robust tourism system.
Which I'll hold off from there. Like I said, I love the game, but having hit my first city at 250K Cims, it's really a shame that I can ignore everything and just zone ad nauseum providing services where needed, providing cross-town tunnels or bridges, and ignoring all mass transit, since the overhead associated with unique buildings, tourism, and mass transit is simply overshadowed by oversizing your road network. I think there's a lot of things this game does well. It's gorgeous, the base game is spectacular, and the ideas are sound, but while Rush Hour had its own bugs and problems, this game simply falls short in a way of many of its features. It needs a bit more depth.
1) Rail and Highways: I don't care if I can build the stations. I would like to be able to construct a rail route much more quickly without unlocking everything from the start. It should be, at the least, when you start, so you can at least get the Rail > Metro > Bus/Taxi thing going on early in your planning which means you don't have to bisect a bunch of high-value built-up land from the start. The same goes for highways. It doesn't make sense from a planning perspective. In SC you had to wait for it to be invented. That doesn't apply here. Building a rail network, even without stations, should allow for a much smoother transition into pods of smaller towns or huge city, district-by-district transportation.
2) Make money matter: It really doesn't. It's almost an afterthought after you break 10K population. Really. It's too easy in a lot of ways. Add some additional challenge here. Which also plays into my next point:
3) Add more building level control of the budget and have the radii actually reflect the true area of impact. Rush Hour did this really well: One high school may need the ability to accommodate 2000 students. Another may only need to cater to 250. This needs to have a slider for these buildings. This should apply to all service buildings.
4) Traffic Pollution: This is a big one. This needs added. It is hugely important to the realism level of the game. Right now, there's no drawback for eschewing all mass transit and simply building tunnel networks to bypass all that overhead and expedite rides. There also needs to be an option for Heavy Transport only on certain routes. Potential congestion charges and tolls should be rolled into the game. As well as "green initiatives" like electric car initiatives that require you to waste land on charging stations to support the infrastructure (part of the tradeoff.)
5) Tourism, the Airport, the Passenger Harbor, and Unique Buildings: Simply put, this has no correlation to the size of your city. Las Vegas, is, for all intents and purposes, not a very large city. Yet, it regularly hosts events that will quadruple the size of its population. I read about some "agent limit" or something that seems to detract from this since the AI goes haywire or something. But this should be a long-term goal. Then to go a step further, allow for special events (games at the stadium, big trade shows at the Expo Center) that will be tied to an attractiveness index that opens up what you can book. Now this is really in depth, but it really should have been what After Dark should have included. This really opens up a great metagame that these massive influxes will really put your transport system to the test. Get creative with each of your unique buildings, then add this stuff to the asset creator. Tourism needs a good hard look taken at it overall.
6) Parking Garages: Parking Garages need to be baseline and function similarly to schools or police departments, facilitating a larger or smaller area based upon funding.
7) Passenger Train Stations and Schools: In addition to building level control of range of function via building-budget sliders, these need multiple sizes. Elementary schools and passenger train stations need small, medium, and large sizes. High Schools, may need medium and large. Large Passenger Rail Stations need to facilitate multiple incoming and outgoing rail lines, just like in every major city everywhere. Additionally, there needs to be an underground option for this. Penn Station in NYC comes to mind.
8) Media: TV Stations, News, Radio, potentially Internet: These need to be facilitated. There's dedication via tax incentives everywhere to allow for this type of development. The game should allow for this via Commercial Specializations. And I'd wager that Retail should have its own specialization, as well. It's somewhat humorous that I start a new town and I end up without a Supermarket due to the randomness of development. What are they eating? Dirt?
9) Rail Line designation and, to a point, Design: Rail Only/Passenger only. This could probably be done relatively easily. Rail also isn't one way. A train may come in on a rail, then go out on the same rail, which hurts the detail of what rail is. The switch can be down the line. We need to have the ability to add the switches. It should not be automatic. The Metro is a train, too. It should likewise offer that. Additionally, allow for higher speed rail. HST's, potentially Mag-Levs, would be amazing!
10) Idiocy does not equal Industry: This sucks. It really does. High-tech industry is tied to high-end engineering, who are some of the most educated people on Earth. Even Miners, Oil, Farmers, and timber can involve the super-highly-educated. This really needs some work. Additionally, you need larger models for Timber and Farming especially. A farm should have the ability to stretch out to massive sizes and provide tons of produce. If you really want to get nuts, designate Organic and Non-Organic areas which increase sales prices, but lower production.
11) Open Space, Forests, and Natural Beauty: This isn't factored anywhere but Land Value. Put in a Ranger Station or Camp Ground. Put in a District tool for reserved Natural Parks or something like that then add Mount Rushmore and other such Natural Monuments.
12) Preference: Cim preference in where they work or live cannot be controlled. They will on a whim, work 4 tiles from where they live with somebody commuting the exact opposite direction FOR THE SAME EXACT COMPANY. The AI needs some work in this regard. It yields tons of unneeded traffic and commuting.
13) Police: Police are far too efficient. There's no crime. They need tuned down.
14) Time: If it took me a week to get home from work, I probably wouldn't work there. The time system is really weird. 7 days of sun, 7 days of night. I don't really get it.
15) Arcologies: Now I personally can find these insane, but simultaneously, it could be a means of saving land and consolidating your property and getting around that agent limit. City-in-a-building could theoretically reduce the loads on the framework to avoid any and all issues that may be limiting the introduction of a more robust tourism system.
Which I'll hold off from there. Like I said, I love the game, but having hit my first city at 250K Cims, it's really a shame that I can ignore everything and just zone ad nauseum providing services where needed, providing cross-town tunnels or bridges, and ignoring all mass transit, since the overhead associated with unique buildings, tourism, and mass transit is simply overshadowed by oversizing your road network. I think there's a lot of things this game does well. It's gorgeous, the base game is spectacular, and the ideas are sound, but while Rush Hour had its own bugs and problems, this game simply falls short in a way of many of its features. It needs a bit more depth.
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If we get trams and weather / seasons in one DLC then I think I'm going to uncontrollably wee.
I wonder when we will start to hear something about what's upcoming...
- 3
Wow @GreppiPorpoise you listed a lot. I agree with you on everything, and would love to see them in the game, but I also love the game it is now. Hopefully we can work towards this, but it will take a while.
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The thing is that Rush Hour had a lot of this. But it also had TONS of bugs. Certain things just didn't function correctly ever. I didn't play SC4, as the reviews are awful. Cities: Skylines obviously has a much stronger backbone and the graphics are absolutely stunning. But if you are going to build a city simulator, there has to be depth that takes things into complete perspective. And when I say backbone, I mean there's a lot of potential, but the depth needs, uh, deepened.
Tourism as a meta game is huge. Let's say you get your city zoned perfectly, it's just the way you want it. Offers should come in for things like trade shows (I think of Vegas) where the town is fueled by things like CES. Where you have to establish a mass transit system that can withstand huge events and have enough hotels zoned while having a working city.
If offers for these events came in based on certain parameters being reached, and more unique buildings were unlocked (like, say, an absolutely massive convention center) that opened up potential to host even larger events, the game would gain a very large amount of depth. Even going a step further, this influx could then open up things like higher tech industrial buildings that could potentially open up ultra-high-end commercial which couldm in turn, open up larger and more populous residential, culminating in Arcologies which then help with the agent limit since the single building would simply have statistics like "population, GDP, tourists in, tourists out."
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The new TAM aka Traffic Addon Mod v.1.0 should be quite ready in a month. I dunno but it seems like this is only interesting thing to wait, since no word what's coming officially to the game.
Stop the development now! We can't possibly do that to anyone, it sounds terrible
I wonder when we will start to hear something about what's upcoming...
Sometime next year maybe? Colossal is going on a Christmas vacation in a couple of weeks and we will be out until mid January. Not that I don't love making games, but the team and I really deserve a small break
We are taking our time with the expansions so it's very cool to keep an eye on what the modders are up to!
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