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The latest Cities: Skylines expansion Green Cities was announced last week in Gamescom 2017. The new expansion is all about making your city greener and it comes with loads of different options for the city services, policies and specializations to make your city’s carbon footprint smaller.

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Gamescom 2017

Gamescom is a trade fair for video games held annually in Cologne, Germany, with over 350,000 guests across the full event this year. It is used by many video game developers to show off their upcoming games and the same goes with Paradox Interactive. The Green Cities was one of the expansions announced at Gamescom 2017 and I was representing Colossal Order at the event.

During my stay at Gamescom we did a bunch of demos of Green Cities for journalists from various news outlets together with Sandra from Paradox. We also did a few live streams where we introduced the key features of the expansion and explained how the changes in the expansion affect the gameplay.

In this series of Dev Diary posts we will tell you, what the most significant changes and additions are, but first, let’s have a look at the trailer.



Cities: Skylines - Green Cities

So, what Green Cities is all about? Sure it’s about adding options to the game that allow you to make your city environmentally friendly and control pollution better, but it’s more than just asset swaps or cosmetic changes. We wanted to change the gameplay in a way that building a greener city also changes the zoning dynamic, so that it offers the player meaningful agency when the new specializations, service buildings and policies are used. The Green Cities expansion includes 14 new city service buildings, 3 new distric specializations, 4 new policies, 3 new scenarios, 3 new maps and over 200 new building models and a 100 new assets.

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We’ll go into details in the upcoming Dev Diary posts, but to give you a general idea of how things have changed I’ll give you a few examples.

New Specializations. The new Commercial Specialization, Organic and Local Produce allows your city to work with less industrial areas as the local businesses produce some of their products on their own. This reduces the need to produce and import goods to the Commercial Zones with this Specialization. The new Residential Specialization, Self-Sufficient Buildings, consume less electricity and produce less garbage. This reduces the stress on Electricity and Garbage city services. On the other hand they also produce less tax income, so you need to have your city’s economy in good shape before wide use of the Self-Sufficient Buildings is a viable option.

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New Options for Energy Production. We have added three new renewable energy sources that add to the previous options. The new options add variety, but they also offer more advanced means of energy production with an increased energy output in comparison to the original options.

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Noise Pollution Overhaul. With the new electric cars and biofuel busses we decided to make a big overhaul to the whole noise pollution system. As previously the noise pollution was largely based on the different road types – i.e. the bigger the road, the more it produced noise pollution – now we have a separate noise pollution value for each vehicle type. Obviously electric cars and biofuel vehicles produce less noise pollution. So, with this change it’s really relevant now where the traffic is and what kind of vehicles there are on the roads.

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That’s all for now! As said, we will delve deeper into details in our upcoming Dev Diary posts. Let us know what you would like to know more about next.


Cheers,

Miska
 
Will the existing "Recycling" policy be affected?
Will it stack if you use the "Recycling" policy on "Self Sufficient Buildings"?
 
Noise Pollution Overhaul. With the new electric cars and biofuel busses we decided to make a big overhaul to the whole noise pollution system. As previously the noise pollution was largely based on the different road types – i.e. the bigger the road, the more it produced noise pollution – now we have a separate noise pollution value for each vehicle type. Obviously electric cars and biofuel vehicles produce less noise pollution. So, with this change it’s really relevant now where the traffic is and what kind of vehicles there are on the roads.
This sounds interesting! Does it extend fully to public transport and service vehicles as well? So trams and cable cars are (naturally) very quiet but if you live right by a police or fire station you should expect to be disturbed by sirens at any time of the day or night. Are there separate policy options to differentiate between city controlled and resident/business owned vehicles (e.g. able to mandate electric buses and garbage trucks city wide, but only zone-specific restrictions for electric private cars/trucks)?

Also wondering if living on the coast (or canal) with a ferry service or on the flight path for the airport will have a noise penalty (other than those properties immediately adjacent the terminals) - big marine engines and aeroplanes are noisy things!
 
The new Commercial Specialization, Organic and Local Produce allows your city to work with less industrial areas as the local businesses produce some of their products on their own.

Does this mean that commerces will produce Goods? :confused:

The logic would have been that the industries (at least farming, forest and generic) could be labeled organic (Organic Produce) and that the commerces only get supplies in these industries (Local purchasing)...
But it's true that agriculture doesn't already pollute in C:S!
 
Well, some policys would be nice for distritcs (no honking allowed, no cargo on weekends) but I would prefer something what feels that I really did something great like:
- terraforming has an influence (natural noise barriers)
- planting trees
- extra ploppable noise barriers with maintenance costs and electricity
- section control noise reduction with speed limits on roads
- soundproofing for buildings e.g. upgrades for stadion, landmarks, unique buildings, and soundproofing policy for districts (increases health, reduces noise pollution, reduces tax)
- ban planes and helicopters policy
- noiese barriers for railroads
- trolley buses instead normal buses
 
Some great suggestions guys but past experience should tell us not to expect anything of great depth or sophistication from the new DLC- most likely another half baked idea and missed opportunity that will frustrate many! Wait for the modders to get to work...again
 
past experience should tell us not to expect anything of great depth or sophistication from the new DLC

Might be true, because there won't be air pollution in the game with this DLC which would totally fit.
It's also a pitty no zoneable parks are coming, or medium densitiy zones.
I wish there will be something in the future, that extends existing features and mechanices in the game, e.g. weather and heating.
Or office zone overhaul, because everybody knows, it won't produce much traffic, and REAL RCI demands. Somebody demonstrated in the past you can fully ignore demands, and hell yeah - that's really a pity that some mechanics feel a bit casual.
You don't have to watch budget, slow and steady progression is the key.
Sometimes I miss some random events - weather temperatur changes where I am forced to change budget and I get the feeling that changing budget has an impact, and I got some kind of interaction with the citizens - they need a school and if not built population decreases, because lot's of families have to move away.
Some kind of random events, which are based on demand. Atm it's just chirps which you can dismiss. I'd like this system a bit more agressiv, if it's not happening, citizens are protesting, moving out, crime increase, you loose money, something that really hurts but not game breaking.

When I saw the announce of this DLC I initially thought nice - new buildings an assets, but I'd really hope existing mechanices get an overhaul.
If noise pollution is not more than just some policies, still traffic based this would be a casual DLC.
New zones with leveling is good, but without a different demand system, that forces me to zone in dependence of other free zones there is no need for new zones if the game doesn't encourage or reward me for doing so.
I mean: Atm as sonn you can zone office zones, there is no need for industry, simply build schools, and you don't have to build a single industry zone. The RCI demand needs working - existing game mechanics with more depth. I am not into another additional disitrict specialization where you can use just any district specialization without even thinking what you are doing. I'd like the game to force me to think about planning. It's not the same as increasing difficulty where simply everything is just more expensive. That would be a casual way, that I am not looking for.
 
Well, some policys would be nice for distritcs (no honking allowed, no cargo on weekends) but I would prefer something what feels that I really did something great like:
- terraforming has an influence (natural noise barriers)
- planting trees
- extra ploppable noise barriers with maintenance costs and electricity
- section control noise reduction with speed limits on roads
- soundproofing for buildings e.g. upgrades for stadion, landmarks, unique buildings, and soundproofing policy for districts (increases health, reduces noise pollution, reduces tax)
- ban planes and helicopters policy
- noiese barriers for railroads
- trolley buses instead normal buses
I'm glad that I'm not only one voting for trolleybuses. Types of barriers are nice idea.
 
For what it's worth, I am not against trolleybuses, I just don't really see the need as they are so similar to existing things in the game. What would it really bring to the game?
 
- terraforming has an influence (natural noise barriers)
- planting trees
- extra ploppable noise barriers with maintenance costs and electricity
- section control noise reduction with speed limits on roads
- soundproofing for buildings e.g. upgrades for stadion, landmarks, unique buildings, and soundproofing policy for districts (increases health, reduces noise pollution, reduces tax)
- ban planes and helicopters policy
- noiese barriers for railroads
- trolley buses instead normal buses

In favor of most of these. Terraforming and planted trees would be my favourites, though I wonder how computationally expensive that could be. I'm no coder, so I really don't know. If it is something that could be computed once and only updated if more trees or terraforming changes it, maybe it would not be too bad. Would be desirable.