Introduction
Let's cut to the chase, because you don't need me to tell you that CS has bigger maps, a massively better modding community and much more control over transport. In fact before I even continue I will spoil from this review that I do prefer Cities Skylines over SimCity. But, there are issues with Cities Skylines that we should not ignore.
History
Let's take a quick history lesson. A couple of years back, Colossal Order released Cities in Motion 2. It was deemed too complicated and not very fun, but it still appealed to the hardcore gamers. Moving to 2015, we now have Cities Skylines. For this game, the developers decided to simplify the transport management part of the game in order to make it more accessible. Most importantly, they also did this to make it more fun. Ultimately, they succeeded; we now have a very addictive and still in depth transport simulation.
Unfortunately, they got a little carried away with this process. Instead of just simplifying what was overly complicated from the last game, they also decided to simplify the management of your cities from the other SimCity games. The result: imagine playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but every so often between placing new rail junctions or adding new bus routes you have to destroy a load of abandoned buildings because you ignored an annoying bird telling you to build a new clinic or fire station.
Main Point
With mods in Cities Skylines you can make bulldozing automatic, and you can also disable the chirper. However, this creates a new problem: you do not know when these problems will occur, and you'll have to deal with large abandoned areas.
Another issue is this: The district tool with its policies does not have much effect. The transport related policies like "Ban Heavy Traffic" do work well, but non-transport related seem to cancel themselves out. For example, if your citizens are getting upset because garbage is not getting collected, you can enact a pet ban to reduce the garbage production. However, this also reduces happiness, and so the effect is cancelled out! This is the same with many of the policies, where they either cancel themselves out or they make such a small difference that they are not worth it.
So instead, your goal is to replicate an existing building every time a resident tells you to do so. The problem is that unlike SimCity where services would only get busy during the day, in Cities Skylines due to the nature of the simulation being constant, it means that the rate of use constantly rises. This results in every time you building a new area of the city, you have to build a new landfill, clinic, high school, elementary school, police station, fire station and cemetery. It gets very repetitive, whereas at least in SimCity the modules make this less repetitive. I also noticed that whilst my hospitals had plenty of capacity, there was no way of me adding more ambulances to reach further away houses that weren't getting coverage unless I added a new clinic (and making the overcapacity even higher). I could have increased the budget, but it's a little confusing what the budget does. The budget is also global, so it would be a waste of money for services that don't need it.
Overall, Cities Skylines has a very fleshed out transport system but a tedious, and empty city management system. While SimCity has "less", it also has more. CS has reskins of the industrial zones for its specializations that "slightly" affect your city (see the tooltips for the much repeated word "slightly"), as well as broken tourism and quite basic services; whereas, SC has fleshed out every system with the exception of transport! How frustrating for us players!
Ultimately CS is more fun than SC because of the freedom, but when you really think about it CS is like a wide, thin ocean, compared to SimCity's very deep pond.
Edit
A lot of people have presumed that I am angry at the game, yet I said that I am still enjoying it (mostly due to the transport simulation) and my main complaint was the simplification of the city services.
To those saying I shouldn't disable chirper, a lot of people have done so because it is annoying. Saying that, I found a great mod that shows you all of the data in a little window, can't remember what it's called but it has every single health, crime (ect.) meter on it! It has been so helpful and allowed me to enjoy the game even more.
Let's cut to the chase, because you don't need me to tell you that CS has bigger maps, a massively better modding community and much more control over transport. In fact before I even continue I will spoil from this review that I do prefer Cities Skylines over SimCity. But, there are issues with Cities Skylines that we should not ignore.
History
Let's take a quick history lesson. A couple of years back, Colossal Order released Cities in Motion 2. It was deemed too complicated and not very fun, but it still appealed to the hardcore gamers. Moving to 2015, we now have Cities Skylines. For this game, the developers decided to simplify the transport management part of the game in order to make it more accessible. Most importantly, they also did this to make it more fun. Ultimately, they succeeded; we now have a very addictive and still in depth transport simulation.
Unfortunately, they got a little carried away with this process. Instead of just simplifying what was overly complicated from the last game, they also decided to simplify the management of your cities from the other SimCity games. The result: imagine playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but every so often between placing new rail junctions or adding new bus routes you have to destroy a load of abandoned buildings because you ignored an annoying bird telling you to build a new clinic or fire station.
Main Point
With mods in Cities Skylines you can make bulldozing automatic, and you can also disable the chirper. However, this creates a new problem: you do not know when these problems will occur, and you'll have to deal with large abandoned areas.
Another issue is this: The district tool with its policies does not have much effect. The transport related policies like "Ban Heavy Traffic" do work well, but non-transport related seem to cancel themselves out. For example, if your citizens are getting upset because garbage is not getting collected, you can enact a pet ban to reduce the garbage production. However, this also reduces happiness, and so the effect is cancelled out! This is the same with many of the policies, where they either cancel themselves out or they make such a small difference that they are not worth it.
So instead, your goal is to replicate an existing building every time a resident tells you to do so. The problem is that unlike SimCity where services would only get busy during the day, in Cities Skylines due to the nature of the simulation being constant, it means that the rate of use constantly rises. This results in every time you building a new area of the city, you have to build a new landfill, clinic, high school, elementary school, police station, fire station and cemetery. It gets very repetitive, whereas at least in SimCity the modules make this less repetitive. I also noticed that whilst my hospitals had plenty of capacity, there was no way of me adding more ambulances to reach further away houses that weren't getting coverage unless I added a new clinic (and making the overcapacity even higher). I could have increased the budget, but it's a little confusing what the budget does. The budget is also global, so it would be a waste of money for services that don't need it.
Overall, Cities Skylines has a very fleshed out transport system but a tedious, and empty city management system. While SimCity has "less", it also has more. CS has reskins of the industrial zones for its specializations that "slightly" affect your city (see the tooltips for the much repeated word "slightly"), as well as broken tourism and quite basic services; whereas, SC has fleshed out every system with the exception of transport! How frustrating for us players!
Ultimately CS is more fun than SC because of the freedom, but when you really think about it CS is like a wide, thin ocean, compared to SimCity's very deep pond.
Edit
A lot of people have presumed that I am angry at the game, yet I said that I am still enjoying it (mostly due to the transport simulation) and my main complaint was the simplification of the city services.
To those saying I shouldn't disable chirper, a lot of people have done so because it is annoying. Saying that, I found a great mod that shows you all of the data in a little window, can't remember what it's called but it has every single health, crime (ect.) meter on it! It has been so helpful and allowed me to enjoy the game even more.
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