Give me a cookie!

[Sotrax]

There are few days I don't think about the fun I had with Cities in Motion 2 and I think about the missed opportunities and the design flaws this game had (like every line has to start and to end in a depot .. wtf) and with every shooting star I see I wish to get a bigger, better, Burge... eh improved version of this game. Easy to start with, hard to master. With lot's of unnecessary micromanagement which is not urgent to use but possible for the hardcore player. With open modding right from the start so that the workshop will explode. There still is a need for transport simulations and with the right game design choices I think this could satisfy the players needs like Cities Skylines does it for the city building genre.

My heart is bleeding seeing this former very active community is being literally dead. There is noone supporting the threads anymore, mods and bug reports get ignored and this forum feels a little bit like Prypjat. Former beautiful now it's a restricted area, sometimes life shows up but in the end everyone just leaves again.

I hope CO is planning something big in the background and I hope some souls of their now way bigger development studio are working to get the radiation away to bring back life and joy in the future.
I really wish that. For me, for CO, and for every transport simulation enthusiast out there.

 

[Synthtronic]

I'm totally agree with you.
I hope CO will make Cim3 next time.

 

[Norfolk_Chris]

Don't hold your breath! Do you really believe there will be a CIM3?
Nice dream

 

[Sotrax]

Don't hold your breath! Do you really believe there will be a CIM3?
Nice dream

Well, I have to accept that this doesn't seem to be the realistic possibility. But my favourite band once sang in one of their songs -

Hope is more than a postponed disappointment.

 

[kellergeist79]

You're absolutely right Sotrax! CIM 2 would have become good, just when some bugs would have been removed with slightly changes on the AI. I still like playing it, it has a specific feeling which I like. And it has the killer feature in my opinion: time tables. No game has it! Every developer of anykind transport sims keeps on telling that "no one wants timetables", "it's a game" and I think this is completely wrong. You just have to make it work and easy to use. Most developers think nowadays that people don't play games, the games should play itself and the user should just watch it... You see it clearly on numberous titles missing micromanagement stuff. There is nothing wrong with micromanagment when the game mechanics are good, and where you micromanage stuff once and they work like intended, so you perhaps just tweak things. Back to timetables in CIM2: the way the inferface works is fine. But some bugs prevent you from setting it up and tweaking it later, you keep on tweaking it to work around the bugs: vehicles wait at stop 1 for the departure, not for the next departure but for the one following. The vehicle for the next departure is behind (!), so people get angry, then two vehicles go on tour. Such stuff makes players mad, and even cause stop playing the game when the network becomes more complex. Not to mention the stupid AI where the CIMs not take the first vehicle going to their direction but waiting for a specific line, even if other lines are also going the same way. I think this things could have been sorted out and debugged at least in the first year the game was on the market and the stuff was reported again and again. Things got even worse with some patches as some problems were completely ignored. I remember when the feature came in where you could change the time scale. Nice thing, but then you also have to scale the time the system calculates for the route between two stops. This messes everything up.

Now the time would be perfect for a CIM 3, but only if things would have been done right. They have with C:S an engine which would be a good basis, as everything is there what you would need, even mod support. They have an editor to build cities, they have assets, a working network, day/night cicle and so on. It just would have to be pollished to the needs of a CIM3.

Taliking about Skylines: you just have to look at the huge amount of mods existing for C:S improving the public transport. This also shows that there is a market for a game like CIM3, but I'm not sure if CO is aware of that.

 

[Steve B.]

This also shows that there is a market for a game like CIM3, but I'm not sure if CO is aware of that.

This is the only part of your post that I'm not sure is true. Search as I might, I cannot find any sales records for the game and I tend to think that it is a small niche game. The original CiM was very different; it was easy to learn and a 'fun to play' game. CiM2, however, is complicated what with timetables, laborious laying out of lines, and no real story line to guide the player other than random objectives. It's very much a sandbox game for transport nerds, among whom I count myself. I'm afraid that I have to agree with @Norfolk_Chris; we'll never see a CiM3. But maybe, just maybe, if enough of us PM @co_martsu we'll get the improvements she 'sorta-kinda' promised us before we were abandoned. CO is a bigger team now and perhaps it's possible to allocate one person to give us the non-functioning train and airport terminals that would improve the game. Would it take so much of a dev's time?

 

[co_martsu]

The team at Colossal Order is fully focusing on Cities: Skylines and unfortunately this means that we are not working on CIM3 on the background. As dear as CIM series is to us it's simply not financially viable at the moment compared to C:S. I still feel bad we didn't get the chance to continue the development of CIM2 as discussed, but we have had to move on from it. I personally would love to work on CIM3, with the team and the knowledge we have gathered over the years it would be amazing. However unfortunately it's not possible for Colossal at the moment

 

[kellergeist79]

You could also think about a CIM-like DLC for C:S. Not one like "Mass Transport" have been, but one like the transport DLC people hoped when it was announced. The funcionality is already there, some things from CIM could be implemented there. In scenario mode it would be like a CIM 3 when it's done right. I mean stuff like adding a timing to the cities where people go to work and school mostly at mornings, creating rush hours, and yes, of course time tables, many more vehicles (ok, modders have nice ones already;-D) and some more ecomic stuff that you would have to care about your fleet and chose with care which vehicles you use. For that I would pay 25 bucks without thinking twice.

@Steve:
I think as I stated the point with the timetables was that they did not work, so it was hard for people to understand what's going on. Of course the UI could have been better, but it wasn't bad. The key is to develop a system which works out of the box without having to go into deep, but with the possibility to tweek it to our own needs. Going even deeper could then be left to the modders. And some stuff works with mods in C:S already, just look at the "rush hour" mod in combination with IPT2 or TLM. Whats only missing is "real" timetables with a usable interface and vehicle management with economic stuff like buyung and maintaning, and I think this is at the moment because of some limitation of the game core, like the missing real day/night time progress.

 

[Norfolk_Chris]

The team at Colossal Order is fully focusing on Cities: Skylines and unfortunately this means that we are not working on CIM3 on the background. As dear as CIM series is to us it's simply not financially viable at the moment compared to C:S. I still feel bad we didn't get the chance to continue the development of CIM2 as discussed, but we have had to move on from it. I personally would love to work on CIM3, with the team and the knowledge we have gathered over the years it would be amazing. However unfortunately it's not possible for Colossal at the moment

Would it be too much to ask that you at least repair the CIM2 workshop? It has not been working for ages. Many people still enjoy playing the game and the facility to exchange custom maps is important to them. I don't think it would require a huge amount of work for one of your team. It will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Sotrax]

I still would really really like a cookie!

 

[Norfolk_Chris]

At last they have repaired the workshop!
And now Sweet FX is now working again.

 

[Sotrax]

No cookies yet.