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Hiramas

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Feb 23, 2011
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I will rework this post after the patch, stay tuned

Greetings everyone,

a few people had the idea to try to collect all the wishes and suggestions into an organized list and I decided to try it. I hope you support this endeavor and reply with your suggestions and wishes.

Let's try to agree on a few rules:
- Please only post your suggestion in this thread, I think we should keep this thread clean and move the discussion about the suggestions to their respective threads.
- If your suggestion has it's own discussion already, post the link and I will add it to the list.
- Please try to sort your suggestion into one of the existing categories or suggest a new category for the list.
- I would like suggestions about the best way to permanently collect support for the various suggestions and wishes.

Edit: There is also this Idea Box page, if that is the preferred way to gather ideas for the community, I suggest to use it: http://citiesskylines.ideascale.com/

Categories

Basic Simulation


UI, Sound and Game Mechanics


Tech and Engine


Modding and STEAM Workshop

  • Traffic Simulation in the Asset Editor
  • Road modding
  • Better Workshop organization
  • Asset Manager filters and organization
  • Pictures of modded buildings in the game
  • Left-hand driving in the asset editor

Zoned Buildings - Types and Styles

Residential


Commercial

  • -
  • -
  • -

Industry

  • Area effects for specialized industry ( e.g. fields, oil pumps)
  • ^ Bigger industry buildings in the specialized industry (e.g. fields, oil pumps)
  • Longer, more interesting production chains
  • High-Tech industry specialization

Offices

  • -
  • -
  • -

Functional Buildings

  • Modular, extendable Buildings
  • -
  • -

Water


Power

  • -
  • -
  • -

Health- and Deathcare

  • -
  • -
  • -

Education


Police and Fire

  • -
  • -
  • -

Garbage

  • Zoneable or Extendable Landfills
  • "Greener" way to get rid of garbage.
  • -

Parks and Decoration


Districts and district policies


Roads, Roadtypes and related things


Mass Transit


Busses

  • Bus lanes
  • Long range bus stations for tourists
  • -

Trains

  • Larger train stations
  • Train stations with multiple connections (bus, metro)
  • Elevated Stations
  • Different types of elevated structures (steel, concrete, brick)
  • Underground tracks and stations
  • Traintrack soundwalls

Metro

  • Overground/Elevated Metro including stations
  • Different types of elevated structures (steel, concrete, brick)
  • -

Airport


Harbor

  • Bigger harbors
  • Modular harbors
  • Harbor waterfront [CONSIDERED]
  • -

Other concepts

 
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Have not found, but anyway:
Allow multiple companies at single building. Describing it more precisely than previous user. Limit gonna be predefined for class or calculated from asset size.
Just because even in vanilla you have 5 floors shop spawned somewhere in right zoned area and realizing it is just one shoe trading spot. for the whole 5 floors! No matter what is attached, pizzery sign, sushi-shop adv panel, many other props, there is nothing but this shoe joint.
We may just have building itself and included list of occupied parts (each is company), if something is closed - small notification or no effect, but if more than 60% of the list is abandoned -> icon and state to trigger.
Just on screenshot, 5 floors building, one company with 5 workers. That's related to simulation mechanics, but there is might be 5-7 companies as well. And actually seems better just have a field in Asset editor to specify manually. Just how funny that green house looks on 2nd screenshot. 3 small floors can fit 4 households (half of 1st is also a garage), phew, i'm magician now.
 

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The Natural Gas pipe would be a really useful addition to the snow DLC too. That would give you three options for heating; Hot water pipes, electricity and NG. Did not know I wanted that, but I do. NG can also be used as an alternative fuel source for the hot water facilities. I love the idea of a new pipe delivery system for energy to cut down on truck traffic to facilities that run on hydrocarbons.

If we get this I would also love to see an "upgrade" option on the coal power plants. Coal plants should remain an earlier unlock and still be far cheaper to build initially. The upgrade should be more cost effective than building a new gas plant if you already have a coal plant, but it should also not really change the production values of the structure since all you are doing is changing the fuel source, not the turbines.
Good idea. Natural gas power plants in future updates although there are some buildings like this in the steam workshop.
 
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2/27
I also think that the TV Station High tech Building should no be a Unique Building, the city I live in has 5 major local TV stations, one being a PBS Station.
In my opinion the TV station should have a helipad, spawn news vans and have a news helicopter depot.
 
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This may have been mentioned before, but I wasn't going to read all the posts on the thread to find it.

Stop making me put down a token road at the start of the game just to unlock the one-way streets. Seriously, this is annoying, Why are the one-way roads locked like that? Are the devs really that afraid newbies will be too "confused" by the one way roads?
 
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Have not found, but anyway:
Allow multiple companies at single building. Describing it more precisely than previous user. Limit gonna be predefined for class or calculated from asset size.
Just because even in vanilla you have 5 floors shop spawned somewhere in right zoned area and realizing it is just one shoe trading spot. for the whole 5 floors! No matter what is attached, pizzery sign, sushi-shop adv panel, many other props, there is nothing but this shoe joint.
We may just have building itself and included list of occupied parts (each is company), if something is closed - small notification or no effect, but if more than 80% of the list is abandoned -> icon and state to trigger.
Just on screenshot, 5 floors building, one company with 5 workers. That's related to simulation mechanics, but there is might be 5-7 companies as well. And actually seems better just have a field in Asset editor to specify manually. Just how funny that green house looks on 2nd screenshot. 3 small floors can fit 4 households (half of 1st is also a garage), phew, i'm magician now.
Could also have a generic name "Small office block" Or "High End Retail stores"
 
I have to start by saying that city builders have come a long way; I remember the days when we thought it was cool to have diagonal streets on an otherwise totally square isometric game. Cities is the best city builder that has been made in terms of actually building things. There were of course some simulation aspects that were better in other games like SimCity 4, but the building mechanics in that are garbage compared to Skylines and even with the NAM and FlexFly it was almost impossibly to built anything I was proud of. I do have a list of things that should be included in Skylines or in a sequel if they were to make one:

1. Mixed use zoning

This is pretty standard but this is the biggest one since this is crucial to the planning of any city in Europe, Asia, and North or South America these days. Every city is putting up buildings with residential or office or both in the high rise portion and commercial of whatever sort in the bottom floor or two. This would change the way traffic works as it would make it more efficient and it would also be much more efficient from a land use standpoint. It would also make for a much more realistic city.

2. Medium Density

This is also a pretty standard one and also a very important one because again everywhere in the world you see this sort of building. Usually 3-5 stories high often again with mixed use zoning. This is becoming popular where I live as they will put a 3 or 4 story building with retail on the first floor and usually offices or residential on the other 3 floors with parking in the basement. They build these on lots that used to be lower density commercial but have become outdated. This is the sort of building that the game is really missing because don’t want a building dedicated to only one use and I also don’t always want it to be fully suburban (doesn’t really exist but I’ll get to that later) but also not a downtown highrise.

3. Proper suburban zoning

As far as this goes residential is almost all the way there. Being from North America I am accustomed to seeing fences between most (not all) suburban residential lots. What is lack is the idea of a suburban shopping centre or shopping mall that has a surface parking lot and a super market and strip malls and of course a McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Tim Horton’s if you’re in Canadian suburban hell. Sure you can make this with the workshop but often times it’s not fully functional, at least not in terms of parking. This crucial aspect in building a North American themed city, but obviously these exist in Europe too so I feel like the game should include this.

4. Parking

Parking is not a heavily touched on concept in this game, it exists, but not in any sort of depth. What I would like to see are functional parking lots or structures where people drive their car and park there and walk to where ever they were headed whether that be an office or a train. You should also be able to decide where you charge for parking and how much with the optimal price being based on property value, zoning, and density, but that’s maybe too in depth.

5. Intersection building mechanics

This has been my biggest gripe with this game because the terrain simulation is very good, but the roads are not designed to handle it. When in intersection of any sort between two different types of road happens it should not have to be forced to be perfect flat making awkward slopes and unrealistic grades. This is especially an issue for rail and highways where in real there are strict limits on the steepness of grade that can be built. With the terrain some of the included maps have, it’s sometimes almost impossible to make something semi realistic.

The other issue with intersections is that no matter what type of road or how you do it you get a full intersection. There should be the capability for slip lanes and in-out single direction access intersections on divided roads (this was one place where SimCity 4 was excellent). Not all intersections should result in a crosswalk as generally in real we won’t have one where the type of road switches like we do in game. I hate when I add a turn lane or go from divided to undivided and it forces a pointless crosswalk there. On the other hand sometimes I wish I could just have a random middle of the road crosswalk and I can’t.

6. Industry zoning is too dense

The industry zones are too dense as the industrial buildings which generally are manufacturing do not take up much land even though real life factories and industry take up a lot of land. This is one of the problems with industry in real. Again parking lots would also realistic here. The worst for this is agriculture as it doesn’t actually use land as it would be used in any rural area in the world. The industry DLC is good for what it does and you can piece together a farm that looks pretty good, but it is way over-productive. In real industry also doesn’t nearly create as much traffic as it does in the game.

7. Trains

I will break this up into the public transit rail and full on heavy regional rail.

The public transit rail is pretty good with the addition of a few mods such as the one that allows for elevated and surface metro trains. Whats lacking is the tram because often times tram systems use LRT equipment and in some portions of a line will operate as such. Where I live we have two routes of LRT that go through the city, but in downtown they operate as a streetcar. The tram only operates as a street car and you can’t make an LRT system. With mods it gets close, but you still have to make a loop line unlike the heavy rail options where you can loop or make a traditional line.

On the other hand, the larger scale rail is fundamentally broken and almost unusable. The passenger trains work OK, but it sends too many trains in and out of the region if it is being used for inter-city travel. The problem is every time a train leaves the region it has to unload at an invisible platform at the edge of the map and this takes time. What should happen is the train should just leave without having to stop and unload and the people on board should just be stored in some other way. The freight trains are even worse because they are far too frequent and are obviously not big enough. One way bidirectional rail lines should also exist as long distance rail functions very different than roads. The train yard/station simulation should be more in depth. DLC?

8. Traffic AI

Now this is probably one of the most touched on subjects when anyone is discussing this game because it is so broken, but as we all know the problem is that it is broken because it has to be. Obviously a dynamic lane selecting AI would’ve been very challenging to optimize and may not have worked at all on computers even like mine so that’s too much to ask for at this point. What should be done is that the AI should make the minimum number of lane changes possible as this would make lane management easier. On a highway it should select lanes based on how many exits it will pass before reaching the one it will use. This is the only way I can think of to fix traffic without making it lag out even worse. The route calculation should be handled differently as the AI often takes the slow and small roads just because the distance is slightly shorter. Speed limits should have more impact on what route is used.

9. Road building slopes

If it weren’t for MoveIt this would be a much bigger issue. Building tunnels through a mountain or under a body of water or even under a hill that don’t do crazy things is impossible. This is because the game selects a certain depth below ground or height above for that matter and uses that throughout the whole span of road. It should make straight slopes naturally.

10. Natural gas utility

I’m not sure about Europe but in North America this is standard everywhere just like water and it would be fun to have. Not crucial though.

12. Realistic landfills

This would be a first for a city builder but it would be fun to have a landfill that is one huge area that could be covered and later repurposed.

13. Power grid

Ok most of my ideas here are geeky and pointless but it would be fun to have a power grid with substations and different types of power lines. That would be more of a boring engineering simulation though. I feel however like the power lines could be improved a bit as they can be very awkward to connect power grids.

14. Junction angles/merging

This applies to both roads and rail. It should slow shallow angle junctions like this. This isn’t a big deal because MoveIt can mostly fix this

15. Shipping ports

This one is pretty obvious such that it could be more in depth and the path finding logic is very inflexible. There also should be an option to allow ferries with cars unless I’m out to lunch and there is. Fishing should also be a natural resource. DLC?

16. Parks

When pathways are put in empty unused land it should count towards park space and leisure measurement. Not all parks are so organized as to have gates, require utilities, and charge admission.

17. Transit ridership

I don’t get why but no matter how much transit I put, whether or not I follow correct hierarchy, or whether or not it is free the ridership isn’t as high as it should be. I am not sure why this is the case. Maybe I’m missing something.

There are some other small things that I would love to see, much of which are already probably implemented through the workshop:

-Streets lined with huge trees, not just happy little trees
-Much steeper grass slopes
-Stairs for pathways
-Proper beaches
-Boulevards without parking
-Less limitations on prop placement (trees)
-Retaining walls
-Footpath tunnels
-More diversity in naming of Cims
-Better hearses
-Far more outside connections
-Lower bridge clearance requirements
-Pedestrian bridges that can connect to buildings
-Option for no gravel on the side of highways
-Easy way to seamlessly join one way roads to boulevards.
-Diesel powered trains/tracks
-Very tall high rises
-City policy that simply just discourages cars (to force increase in transit ridership)
-Right turns on red lights should be implemented into the base game
-CHAIN LINK FENCE NETWORK!

If anyone actually wasted all of their time reading this, thank you! Please point out anywhere I am wrong or missed something as I’d love to know!
Every one of these. For the traffic AI, I think something like "minimal turns" could help. I'm no computer programmer so I don't know how resource heavy that is, but I think IRL, most people avoid making turns when possible. Imagine a highway with two off ramps. The first is the slightly closer to and even the slightly faster way to get to the destination, but it requires many turns on city streets, while the second exit puts you right off on the street you need. I think a lot of people take the second one, especially trucks. If this could be implemented in game, I think it will keep so many heavy trucks and other traffic off small streets and on the highways. There should also be a "short cut" algorithm as some people do take the shortest route or like to avoid highways, so this is also realistic. Maybe 5% of the Cims will do that.

I also agree with the industrial traffic too. Have they even been to an industrial zone? They are usually ghost towns. Maybe one truck of finished goods comes out a day. A truck can hold a lot of stuff. Perhaps there can be a subset of industrial (or warehouse) zones that are distribution centers that will gather the goods from factories and send them to commercial zones. This building would have more traffic (but even a large distribution center doesn't have traffic jams for miles).
 
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My 2 cents for suggestions for the next DLC or for the next version of the game:-

Disasters:-

1) Since there are nuclear power plants there could be a nuclear meltdown/explosion of the plant if the plant is not designed/built/maintained properly. Radiation froma an accident in any neighbouring cities can also cause disaster

2) A biological disaster (eg. Covid-19 pandemic or anthrax etc.) in the city or coming from surrounding cities

3) Financial recession disaster i.e., when the economy drops sharply

4) A chemical disaster caused by accidental explosion of chemical weapons


Miscellaneous:-

Buildings & policies to handle the above disasters and to have more control over the city economy

A policy to increase production of certain or all components in case of war in any neighbouring country etc.
 
I’m a console only player, my suggestions,

Ability to terraform a map and save it in a custom map slot to use later on without milestones unlocked.

A tool for painting oil/ore/fertile land anywhere on the map. Maybe in terraform mode.

Option to choose your starting tile, not just the same one always.

When painting districts, have an option to paint ONLY on the road so You can draw your outline and it’s easier to paint neat districts.
 
Increase the game limits to 9 times that it has currently so it can be used to build medium cities( 25 tiles), large cities (81 tiles). Do you agree it is a good idea?
Actually 81 tiles is medium-large city. Just large gonna fit like on 85+ percents. Megapolis will not completely.
But this is very sharp theme. It is possible by the engine, but 1. to rewrite quarter of the entire code, and 2. declared system requirements will be trashed very violently.
But for this one all tiles opened for simulation engine would be very good.
 
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Other than the game obviously being brought more up to date in terms of graphics, how smoothly the traffic moves, etc, here's a few things I'd like to see implimented;

1) VASTLY IMPROVED TRAINS.
Seriously, the way they did trains in Cities Skylines is an absolute joke compared to other games that include building train tracks and managing trains.
I highly reccommend Paradox take inspiration from a game called Transport Fever (look it up...I can't post links, apparently they're spam or something) for how to do trains (and how to do some other aspects of public transport management too)

2) MAKE WHAT THE TRAFFIC MANAGER MOD DOES PART OF THE VANILLA BASE GAME.
C'mon...being able to choose whether or not to have traffic lights at an intersection? Changing road markings arrows to control which way the traffic can go at any intersection? BEING ABLE TO CHOOSE WHAT TRAFFIC IS ALLOWED AND NOT ALLOWED ON A ROAD-BY-ROAD BASIS?!? DISALLOWING PARKING ON ROADS?!?!? This mod is an absolute godsend and an absolute must-have as a vanilla feature.

3) PLANNING MODE.
I would love the ability to draw out plans of what I want to build. Drawing roads and other infrastructure in planning mode will have a "ghost" version of the road / infrastructure appear instead, and it doesn't cost a penny. If it could be implimented that the game can give you info on costs and income from the ghost infrastructure to help the player know what they can and can't afford yet that would be great, too.

4) A SNAP TO GUIDELINES QUICK TOGGLE BUTTON
Let's have it so you can press or hold down a button on your keyboard to quickly switch between whether you wanna snap to guidelines of existing roads or not.

5) A MOTHER. FLIPPIN. UNDO. BUTTON.
Just Ctrl-Z anything you've built while paused for a full refund of cost. But once you unpause what you've built, it's in permenantly and will cost money to bulldoze.

6) MOTHER. FLIPPIN. MEDIUM. DENSITY.
Seriously, why was this not included? Also, why is there no different densities for industrial?

7) MORE TILES
I'm in agreement with the suggestion of more tiles for bigger cities

That's pretty much all I got.
 
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What I would LOVE to see is some sort of option to expand zoning farther than the default 4 squares out from roadside--like an option to pull it out to take up an entire grid even if that grid is huge, and then have things like large back yards or back parking lots automatically populate that large zone space. Buildings and parking lots larger than 4x4 auto-generating in those areas, I know its a large ask but it would be AMAZING. Rebuilding real-life cities is kind of a pain in the ass when you need to go looking for a Rico or prop any time something exists further in the grid than 4 blocks in. Real life zoning takes entire areas up, including tons of acreage, so I think that should be a logical update, albeit it a tall order. Also, a shopping center built-in creation approach, maybe something similar to Park Life and Campus life, but shopping life. Shopping Malls are far too common to have been neglected from DLC this long.
 
Perhaps hire the guys/buy out their work at City Skylines Multiplayer mod? It works, fundamentally. Just needs some heavy lifting done in terms of developing an API so other mods can also get their effects synced!
 
Regarding Transport: Syncronized transport lines would be really useful! If you have two lines sharing a section of track, it would be really good to have them syncronized in a way, so that the distance between all vehicles on the shared section is balanced.
Example: You have 2 lines, both running at a 5 minute headway. In the shared section that results in a 2,5 Minute headway.

At the moment this is not possible, because the trains on one branch take longer than on the other. This results in trains from one branch getting closer to the other trains, even with unbunching turned on.
 
I don't know it is already a topic somewhere but I would love a VR mode.
Especially with PSVR2 on the horizon, I could only imagine how mind-boggling it must feel. Building your "tiny" city, just to zoom in to really appreciate the size of it all. The controls would need heavy adapting, but especially in comparison to playing with a controller, this could be a huge improvement.
Perhaps this is still a pipedream for City: Skylines 3, because it's not technically feasible yet. I'm hoping at least that it will come to VR at some point.