Cities Skylines Multiplayer

[Magnuus]

I belive that multiplayer would be amazing! It may be hard to add to this game, but maybe in a new version down the road. Not the way that it was done in SC5, but like a co-op in the same city. You can buy your own tiles where you will be the mayor, and you can give access other players you trust.

What do you think about a online co-op option?

 

[spindash_st]

I'd be rather skeptical. Co-op is a really though task, particularly with casual gamers.
What would happen if another player stop playing?

I've tried real-time strategy game Rise of Nations in co-op. It was a mess. It's difficult to agree in real life, imagine in a videogame. GUI should be completelly redesigned.

I find more appealing the idea of multiple independent cities connected in some ways, not necesarilly by roads, but maybe by markets. Some world markets for our goods and resources, price fluctuations, a simple financial markets where cities (players) could lend money. And above all, the possibility of visiting another player's city.

But inside each city, each player is God.

Besides, in this approach you don't necessarily need huge servers. Each citiy is executed in each player's computer, only markets are executed in Paradox's servers (or independent servers?).

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

I don't see it as being particularly practical. It is a long and slow game. (I have been playing my current city since the start of February.)

 

[Anpere]

Opinion on Multiplayer:

I do not see how this could be interesting unless they added a Economic, Diplomacy, and Scoreboard. Question is, how would you win a game against another Mayor, Governor, etc.
Amount of Currency, Happiness (Citizens), Market?

Opinion on Cooperative:

I wouldn't mind being able to share a land plot with a friend, that would actually be interesting. But, I foresee some issues.

 

[Magnuus]

I don't know exaclty how the multiplayer part should be, but i want to play this game with friends, and share my city. I also think it would give a new aspect if some decisions where taken away from me, and I had to adapt to it. (Of course you would be able to contro every decision as befor in single player mode) I really liked the idea from SC2013 when you could send police-patrols and other services to help in other cities, and that pollution would affect the environment in both cities.

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

I like the thought of multiplayer sometimes. I just don't think it is practical.

1. Takes time/money for developer. There needs to be a big demand to justify it, and I don't think it is there. Ever look at the Steam Achievements? Less than 1 in 10 players have had 9 squares. Experience Rain = 38.6%. It rains all the time! Unless all these other folks are waiting for multiplayer, I don't think there are too many willing to put the time in to play a long game.

2. Lots of people are not interested. Even myself, and I think it could be interesting sometimes, am not really interested in it. I'm not saying there is no interest, just that there doesn\t seem to be much.

3. If I had it, I think it would be hard to arrange times to play it with others. It's not the sort of game to play for only an hour in my opinion. I honestly don't think I would get much use out of it. It takes quite a lot of time to build a big/nice city.

 

[KeiserWiliem]

I'd love Multiplayer but I think it's impossible with the game as it is now.
Imagine syncing thousands of Vehicles and Citizen in a City with like 500K Citizens.

Also Mods would be difficult.
I play with more than 1000 Workshop objects, it would take days to make a collection with all of them.

If they ever make Cities:Skylines 2 that could be a nice feature.
Their concept with the areas you unlock while playing makes Multiplayer not impossible and not that hard to manage.
(Imagine a small zone between two areas where both players can build.)
But I think they had to simulate a lot of things differently.
They also needed a checksum system like the Paradox Games to enable mods (the game is unless without mods), to enable some mods to be installed without having everyone else needing them (like LUTs or interface Mods).

 

[spindash_st]

1. Takes time/money for developer. There needs to be a big demand to justify it

We probably have no idea how much demand are for a multiplayer CS. The most selling games are multiplayer. Multiplayer could expand the current gamers' base of CS. It's possible that demand will appear with a "proper" multiplayer.

3. If I had it, I think it would be hard to arrange times to play it with others.

Thoroughly agree. That's why I think a "proper" multiplayer approach would be a "soft" multiplayer.

A "soft" multiplayer would imply that just only some parts of the game (probably parts that are currently being controlled by mathematical functions) would be in charge of humans. Like market prices, interest rates, international traffic, services bid/offer, etc. The goal would be to give the game just a human touch, a small piece of human interaction while you're playing almost as usual.

" None on their deathbed ever said 'I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer' "
Dani Bunten Berry (from: Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan)

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

We probably have no idea how much demand are for a multiplayer CS.

I have no idea how much actual demand there is. Certainly not based on this forum. While there are those for and those against it on here, the people on here are a tiny part of all the C:S players, and likely not a representative part of the whole either. The only information that is available to me that I can use to make any sort of reasonable guess is that thus far, CO has not made nor made mention of a multiplayer mode.

I think many people imagine how great it would be. I can imagine it, and it's pretty awesome. However I don't think that imagination would match up that well with reality.

When I think of reality, I think of things like:
1. I spent 2 hours on my city, and now I can't work on it because my buddy isn't available. He's available next week, but I'm not.
2. Dude, stop putting your sewers upstream from my water pumps!
3. What do you mean it desynced and our last save was three hours ago!!?
4. Stop buying all the squares around me.
5. Actual conversation: "Should we connect our cities now?". "No." Then and hour of silence. "How about now?"
6. What do you mean you are building a wall around your city and you expect me to pay for it??

 

[Radltruhe]

The only information that is available to me that I can use to make any sort of reasonable guess is that thus far, CO has not made nor made mention of a multiplayer mode

When ND was revealed there was a stream with Karoliina and Mariina and a guy from Paradox who produces many streams (sorry, don't remember his name) where they were asked several questions. One was about multiplayer and they said there is definitely no effort to put ressources to multiplayer. That was in 2016, think it was in september/october. And I don't think this has changed.

 

[Radltruhe]

Just searched for the stream - the multiplayer part starts at 13:38

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/84281999

 

[MonsieurViinze]

When ND was revealed there was a stream with Karoliina and Mariina and a guy from Paradox who produces many streams (sorry, don't remember his name) where they were asked several questions. One was about multiplayer and they said there is definitely no effort to put ressources to multiplayer. That was in 2016, think it was in september/october. And I don't think this has changed.

Cities XL, in 2009, tried to put a multiplayer feature in the game, for building some monuments, exchanges per example. But this proved only expensive and useless, provoking the bankrupt of the editor and the end of the online. Remember, there is very few people interested in city building, in fact even the majority of mayors does not give a shit, look at Paris !

 

[Jaysmallz]

I feel they have awhile to go before an online option.

 

[paulkingtiger]

I'd be happy if it was just CS like we have now but with multiple people building, like you have with Factorio. Quite a few of my mates play CS and it would be great if we could build a city together. Sure you could get idiots griefing, but I see this more as a thing 2-4 friends play together, rather than open multiplayer.

 

[Kristian295]

I'd be happy if it was just CS like we have now but with multiple people building, like you have with Factorio. Quite a few of my mates play CS and it would be great if we could build a city together. Sure you could get idiots griefing, but I see this more as a thing 2-4 friends play together, rather than open multiplayer.

I agree with this. It doesn't even has to be an open online multiplayer. Compare it to the multiplayer feature in Cities in Motion 2. There were two modes:

• Building together in one party.
• Be competitors of each other.

As you would only play with friends, I do not really see the problem of "griefing".

 

[Topher_2112]

me and my brother have tried the steaming feature on steam so both pc's shows the game. we took turns on playing the game, I found it enjoyable than playing alone. So i would vote on a lan co-op mode than a bunch of multiplayer features and no on open online multiplayer. reason being as multiplayer features has been done and failed. so again I'd like a lan co-op mode.

 

[Steve B.]

Something like this was done soon after the game was released. It fell apart because of RL problems but with a group of friends it should be able to work. Here's a link to the thread.

 

[MarkJohnson]

Multiplayer was very popular is SimCity 2013. It had issues, but it attracted a lot of people. Most just wanted to chat, others wanted advice of building cities, while others just wanted a bigger building experience.

So there is definitely a large demand for it. It is just how to implement it. Time is the biggest issues along with getting everyone on at the same time every day.

Although, once experienced, you could build a fairly complete city in a few hours. or just build self contained cities so you don't need to rely on other people's cities.

I don't see it coming to this game. You really need to build it from the ground up as multiplayer.

 

[CandiumQ]

There's already a functional multiplayer mod for CS that's being worked on. Definately worth a try. Runs peer to peer without any need to run things like Hamachi (unless your ISP is poor). It's pretty good if you keep mods to a minimum and the devs are actively working on getting everything syncing nicely citiesskylinesmultiplayer (dot) com

 

[SPECTREtm]

The only way for Multiplayer to work with CS is to massively decrease the scope of the game. Hard pass here.